“Oh. Hi,” said Josh. He sounded cocky. Confident.
“I just… just wanted to say that T-Tony was right!” Eddie went on. “About March twenty-second, I mean. The house is haunted.”
Caroline heard muffled voices at the other end of the line, and then a click as though someone was picking up another phone somewhere in the Hatford house. Caroline thought she could hear another person breathing.
“Why? What happened?” Josh said at last, and Caroline could almost see him smiling as he said it.
“Oh, it's just too scary,” Eddie continued. “Dad's at the college and Mom's at the faculty wives' meeting, and to tell the truth, we're a little bit scared to be here alone. Do you suppose you guys could come over for a little while?”
Now there were excited whispers at the other end of the line, Caroline was sure of it. Even a muffled laugh. Then Tony took over the phone.
“Eddie? This is Tony. What happened? Did you hear something, or what?”
“Yeah, but please come over till Mom gets back. Okay?” Eddie pleaded convincingly.
“Sure. We'll be right there,” Tony said, and hung up.
Caroline ran downstairs to her sisters. Eddie, Beth, and Caroline bent over double, laughing.
In no time at all, it seemed, they saw nine boys coming up the hill from the footbridge.
“Look at them,” said Beth. “They even brought reinforcements. They've got Peter and Doug with them.”
“Okay, now. Get ready. Wipe those smiles off your faces,” Eddie said.
The three girls went to the door, looking frightened. It was like being in a play with her sisters, Caroline decided. She wondered if she had ever had so much fun. Well, yes, she had. When they had first moved to Buckman, for example, and they knew the boys were spying on them—when Caroline pretended to be dead, and her sisters had carried her to the river and dumped her body in. Or the time the Hatford boys had locked her in their toolshed, and when they opened the door at last, Caroline had pretended to be rabid. Oh, the stage was where she belonged, most definitely!
The boys, Caroline could see, were trying hard not to smile. All except Peter and Doug, who didn't have to try at all because, to them, there was nothing to laugh about. Obviously, they didn't have a clue.
Beth pulled them quickly inside. “We're so glad you're here!” she said. “It's been so scary!”
Tony and Steve were even nicer than they'd been the day before. Everyone sat down in the living room, Peter and Doug with wide eyes, wanting to hear what had happened, and Danny and Bill looking strangest of all because they were trying so hard to keep straight faces. Their mouths kept twisting into grotesque shapes.
“Tell us what happened,” said Steve.
“Well,” Eddie began, her voice trembling just a little. Caroline was terribly impressed. She'd had no idea her sister was such a good actress. She was even a little envious. “Caroline was afraid to spend the night alone after what Tony told her, so Beth and I got in bed with her, just in case.”
Caroline saw Jake nudge Tony almost imperceptibly with his elbow.
Beth took up the story. “Everything was quiet until…oh… eleven o'clock. Maybe later. And then we heard it!”
“Heard what?” asked Tony. “Did you hear the tapping I told you about?”
“Yes! It was just like you said,” Eddie answered. “Sort of tap, tappity, tap, tap. It could have been the rhythm of a song.”
“It was Annabelle, I know it!” wailed Caroline. She saw Wally and Bill and Danny put their heads down so that no one could see their faces.
“And then,” Eddie went on, “it happened!”
The boys jerked to attention. “What happened?” asked Tony.
“We saw her, of course!” said Beth, wrapping her arms around her body as though to stop the shaking.
“Who?” asked Steve and Josh together.
“Annabelle! It had to be her,” said Eddie.
“Huh?” said Tony.
“Well, we don't know that for sure,” said Beth, “but it had the shape of a young girl, and the—”
“What did?” the boys cried together. “The pale blue light,” said Eddie. “It was coming right through the wall where the—”
“Wait a minute, wait a minute!” said Tony. “First you heard a tapping, and then…?”
Beth and Caroline nodded.
“But just before midnight,” Eddie went on, her eyes huge, “there was this light, this pale blue light.”
Caroline took over again. “We all sat up together to see where it was coming from, and right out of the wall, where the old panel had been, came this blue light— first her head, then her body, her arms and legs…”
“But it was her voice that I'll never forget as long as I live,” cried Beth, covering her face with her hands.
“What did she say?” gasped Peter.
“It was more like a wail,” said Caroline.
“No, like a…a moan,” Beth said.
“No, it wasn't. It was a screech! An angry screech,” Eddie insisted. “And she kept saying the same thing over and over: ‘Oh-nee! Oh-nee!' ”
“Oh-nee?” asked Steve. “What was she? An Indian?” The boys tried to laugh but didn't succeed.
“It was hard to make out what she was. But if I had to guess, I'd say a young girl. I couldn't tell anything else. A young girl in pain,” said Eddie.
“But she…the light…just kept looking all around and wailing, as though we weren't even there,” said Caroline.
Beth took up the story. “We kept asking her, ‘What do you want? Maybe we can help you,' but all she said was, ‘Where is he? Where is he?' ”
“Then what?” asked Wally, his eyes unblinking, his lips so dry they stuck together.
“Then the light moved all around the room, like… like she was looking for something,” said Eddie.
“Or somebody,” said Caroline.
“And then… then she cried, ‘Oh-nee!' and disappeared,” said Beth.
“But this is the spooky part,” Eddie told them. “As soon as the blue light faded away, we turned on the light….”
“We were so scared!” Caroline shivered.
“And right where the blue light had been, we found this,” said Eddie. She held out her hands and unfolded her fingers. There lay a horseshoe key chain with several keys attached.
Tony's mouth fell open. “It's—it's mine,” he said.
The girls looked at him in mock horror.
“Yours?” said Caroline.
“She must have been saying ‘To-ny! To-ny!' ” said Wally softly.
The boys looked at each other, not quite believing, then at the girls.
And suddenly, from somewhere in the house, came a thunka… thunka… thunka… thunka….
“The ghost!” yelled Peter, and he dived behind the couch.
Eleven
What Next?
What were he and his brothers and friends doing over here? Wally wondered. Why did all their tricks on the girls seem to backfire? There probably was a girl named Annabelle who had once drowned in the Buckman River; there probably was a sister who had failed to save her and who lived in the Bensons' old house. So there probably was a ghost, too, and here it was, in that very house where the thunka, thunka, thunka came again.
“J-J-Jake,” he said, “maybe we should go home.”
“Don't leave us!” cried Caroline. “That was for real!”
“Caroline!” yelled Eddie.
“You mean this other stuff was all a joke?” asked Steve.
Thunka… thunka… thunka… came from the walls again, and then the sounds of soft footsteps coming around the side of the house.
Peter and Doug were both behind the sofa now.
Suddenly…knock, knock, knock.
Caroline felt as though she had risen three inches off her chair.
“Wh-who's going to answer?” asked Tony.
Knock, knock, knock, came the sound again.
Eddie slowly got up from th
e sofa. She moved noiselessly across the rug and out into the hallway. And finally, taking a deep breath, she grasped the doorknob and pulled open the door.
A deep voice said, “Malloy?” And as the Malloys and Hatfords and Bensons gathered behind her, Eddie found herself looking into the shadowed face of a man in a dark uniform and cap.
“Y-yes?” Eddie said.
“Upshur County Water and Sewer,” the man said. “Your dad called this morning about noise in the water pipes, and I just bled the air out of them at the meter. I think they'll be okay now. You can tell him.”
“Okay,” said Eddie, relief showing in her voice. She closed the door and turned to face the others.
“Of course! Air in the pipes. We knew that!” bragged Tony.
“We saw them do that once out in our yard,” said Steve.
“Well, if you knew that noise was just the utility company draining air from the pipes, why didn't you say so?” Eddie demanded. “You were just as scared as we were. And you thought you could scare us!”
“What do you mean?” asked Tony.
“Ha!” said Beth. “‘I'll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,' my eye!”
“Huh?” said Steve.
“All that talk of a drowning in 1867, and somebody singing that song… the song wasn't even written till 1876. I checked,” said Eddie.
“And Annabelle's body was found near the road bridge, my foot!” said Caroline.
“It was!” said Tony.
“The road bridge wasn't even there in 1867,” said Eddie. “I checked that too. And this house wasn't here in 1867 either! Your story has more holes than Swiss cheese, Tony Benson!”
The boys started to grin. “But we had you going, didn't we?” laughed Steve, playfully swatting at her with a newspaper. “Sort of had you wired? Psyched? You were scared enough that you were all three squeezed into one little bed. You said so yourself.”
“And we had you going when I told you Annabelle had your horseshoe key chain,” said Eddie. “We found it in the basement.”
“You should have seen your face!” laughed Caroline.
“You should have seen yours when that man knocked at the door.”
“Yeah?” said Caroline. “It takes a lot to scare us!”
“I'll bet you would have been scared if you'd been with us outside your house the other night,” said Wally.
“Yeah,” said Jake, eager to be part of the conversation. “We were waiting for Tony to crawl back out of your basement—”
“Aha!” Beth said.
“—when the cougar came right up to us and brushed against me.”
“Really?” asked Eddie.
“Wow!” cried Peter and Doug.
“We barely got Tony out in time and ran like mad,” said Steve.
“Did it try to eat you?” asked Doug.
“I don't know what it was trying to do. Check us out, maybe,” said Josh. “The sheriff says you sure don't see many around here. Dad thinks maybe someone raised it as a cub and it got loose or something, because cougars usually stay off by themselves.”
Nobody spoke for a moment.
“Wouldn't it be something if we caught it?” said Steve.
“We already tried that,” Jake said quickly. “We set up a trap in our backyard, with bait and everything.”
“What happened?” asked Bill.
“We caught Caroline instead!” said Wally.
Everyone laughed, including Caroline.
“What were you using for a trap?” asked Steve.
“A big crate propped up on a stick,” said Josh.
Steve shook his head. “You need something bigger than that to catch a cougar! Why don't you try to trap it in our old garage?”
“Oh, sure!” said Eddie. “Dad's going to let you do that!”
“All you have to do is talk him into parking outside for a couple of nights,” Steve told her.
“Yeah? And how are you going to persuade the cougar to march into your garage and wait until we call the sheriff?” asked Jake, annoyed that Steve just seemed to be taking over.
“That's the hard part,” Steve admitted. “Wouldn't it be something, though, if we did catch it? We'd get our names in the paper and everything.”
“We'd get our picture in the paper, along with the cougar's!” said Caroline.
“Sure,” said Wally. “You could even pose with your arms around its neck, Caroline. Kiss it on the mouth if you want.” Bill and Danny laughed.
But Steve looked thoughtful. “What if…?”he began, and thought some more. “What if we were to leave the door of the garage open some night and put a chicken in there? And what if one of us was hiding up in the loft to pull the door shut when it happened?”
“Wait, wait, wait!” said Josh. “You're going to keep a live chicken waiting around in an open garage for—”
“A chicken from the store would probably do,” said Steve.
“Even if it worked, that cougar would bound into the garage, snatch up that chicken, and be gone before you could blink,” said Beth.
“Yeah, Steve,” said Jake.
“No, I've got it!” Steve said. “We buy this roasting hen, see. And then we get this really strong wire, and we fasten it tight to the chicken, so when the cougar tries to run off with it, he really has to work to get it free, and meanwhile…”
“Meanwhile the guy in the loft will probably have a heart attack,” said Josh, and the boys laughed. All but Wally.
He could see it coming. Everyone else would set up the trap and get stuff ready, but he'd get stuck being the guy in the loft. It always happened that way. His brothers seemed to be able to talk him into anything, and with the Bensons on his case too, he wouldn't have a chance.
“Even if that worked, Steve, how would the guy in the loft get the door closed in time?” asked Josh.
“He'd have to do it from the window in the loft,” Steve said. “I mean, the minute the cougar got inside, he'd have to be able to lean out the window and turn the latch.”
“Are you nuts? That's a fifteen-foot drop,” said Wally.
Tony looked over at the girls. “You haven't changed the latch on the garage door, have you?”
“No,” said Beth.
The doors of the Bensons' garage were more like the doors of a barn. Above the large door was a window, in the loft. The door itself had two sections, each covering half the opening, and when they came together in the middle, a metal piece on one section fit over a latch on the other. When someone turned the latch sideways, the doors were fastened and couldn't rattle and bang in the wind.
“What a guy would need to do, see,” Steve continued, “is leave just half the garage door open, and the minute the cougar got inside, he could reach down with a fishing pole, push the other half of the door shut, flip the metal piece over the latch, then knock the latch sideways using the pole.”
“Yeah? Then what?” asked Wally.
“Then we call the sheriff and tell him you're trapped in the garage,” said Tony, grinning a little.
“Dad said if any of us sneaked out again at night, he'd ground us for a week,” said Wally. “Who's the lucky guy who gets to wait up in the loft for the cougar?”
“Who says it has to be a guy?” Eddie challenged him.
“Okay. It could be any one of us, except Peter or Dougie,” said Tony, and he immediately turned to the two young boys. “You guys aren't to say one word to anyone about this, understand? Not a word!”
“We won't!” said Peter. “What do you think we are? Babies?”
There was silence for a moment. In one way, each of them wanted the job, and in another way, no one wanted it.
“I've got it!” said Jake at last. “Let's put our names in a hat, mix them up, and have somebody draw. Whoever's name is drawn is the person who will spend the night in the loft and wait for the cougar.”
Beth got a piece of tablet paper and tore it into ten pieces, and all but Peter and Doug wrote their names on a piece. They folded them once
and dumped them in Eddie's baseball cap. Eddie bounced the slips of paper around a little, then held the cap above Peter's head and asked him to draw one.
Peter reached up. His fingers closed around a slip of paper, and he handed it to Eddie. She unfolded it and read the name aloud: “Wally.”
Twelve
Getting Ready
It was raining again on Thursday morning. Not a shower, not a thunderstorm. Just a steady cold rain from a steady gray sky.
“Perfect!” Eddie said to her sisters as they trooped downstairs to breakfast.
Even more perfect was that Mrs. Malloy was looking out the kitchen window saying, “Poor Mrs. Hatford! Imagine having nine boys cooped up inside your house on a day like this!”
Most of the houses in Buckman—near the college, anyway—were old and big, but they weren't big enough where it seemed to matter. A few had wraparound porches, but most had no family rooms, and rough play was not allowed in the parlors. The basement of a Victorian house was likely to be damp, with winter sleds and summer lawn furniture, rakes and shovels, and Christmas decorations all stored in its corners and along the walls. The old Benson house, where the Malloys were staying now, had a basement big enough for a Ping-Pong table but not much else.
Eddie went to the window and stood beside her mother. “Yeah, it's too bad, all right! And I invited the guys here today.”
“Oh, Eddie!” said her mother. “Not with all this rain! Even if they stay in the basement, they'll be tracking mud all over the place.”
“Well, it seemed the polite thing to do,” Eddie answered.
“We can't very well make them stay outside,” added Beth.
Mr. Malloy was checking the weather forecast in the newspaper. “Rain all week,” he said. “I guess that's a chance you take over spring vacation.”
Eddie gave Caroline her cue.
“I know!” Caroline said brightly. “Why couldn't we play in the garage? We could turn it into a clubhouse or something, just for the rest of the week, and all twelve of us could hang out there.”
Mrs. Malloy turned from the window and looked at her husband. “You know, that's not a bad idea. I'd rather have mud out there than on my rugs.”