“Pardon?” she asked, and I glanced around at my fellow campers. Olivia was hanging near the back of the group, pulling at the hem of her T-shirt, and all the boys were sort of grouped together except for Wesley, who hovered near my elbow. Susanna had her arms folded over her chest, one hip thrust out, clearly over it already.
This was our first morning of actual work, and we all had the little pink notebooks we’d been given for listing the stuff in the house. I had already written in mine, big letters across the top page that said, Stuff in a room that’s not one of the creepy ones. I was hoping that might act as a sort of charm to ensure I didn’t end up in the doll room, or that bedroom with the music box playing.
Mrs. Freely pointed to the hallway over to the left of the stairs. “There’s plumbing in the house, but this is the only bathroom that’s functional right now. If you need to use it, make sure you find me, Lee, or Leigh and let us know.”
“So we have to make an announcement if we need to pee?” I asked. “Because that could be embarrassing for some people. I obviously don’t have a problem with it, but I want to make sure my fellow campers—”
“You can come tell me privately if you need to,” Mrs. Freely cut in, and I frowned. Truth be told, I was wondering how long I could put off the part where we’d be sent out into the house to start cataloging things. Sometimes that worked in class, getting a teacher off the subject, pretending to be really interested in stories from her childhood or whatever, and oops, next thing you know, we’d run out of time to do all those math problems. I was really good at that in school, but apparently Mrs. Freely wasn’t so easily distracted.
Or maybe I just hadn’t found the right thing yet.
Mrs. Freely went on, “Susanna, Michael, and Dalton, you’ll take this front room down here. Olivia and Ruby, the servants’ passage upstairs has your name on it.”
Olivia and I glanced at each other, and she tugged at the end of her braid.
My hand shot up.
“Mrs. Freely?” I asked. “Olivia and I don’t actually work well together.”
Pressing her lips together, Mrs. Freely lowered the clipboard a bit. “Well, that’s the point of all this, Ruby, to learn to work well together. Now, Garrett, you—”
“But what if we fight?” I continued. “Like, a real brawl with hair pulling and scratching and someone puts it on YouTube, and then everyone is like, ‘Oh, yeah, Camp Chrysalis, that’s where those two girls fell out a window during a fight and became a viral sensation.’”
There was total silence following that, and for a moment, Mrs. Freely blinked at me while the other kids stared with wide eyes.
Finally, Mrs. Freely muttered something to herself that sounded like, “First week, it’s the first week.”
“Fine,” she said, louder and with that fixed smile back in place. “Garrett, you help Ruby in the hallway, and Olivia, you can take the ballroom upstairs. Would that work for everyone?”
I gave Mrs. Freely a thumbs-up. “You know it, girl.”
I waited for Mrs. Freely to say something about that, hoping it might be the distraction I was looking for, but she just went back to her clipboard. “And that leaves Wesley down here with me.”
Wesley didn’t seem all that happy, but he didn’t say anything because clearly he was a wuss.
“Now then!” Mrs. Freely said brightly. “Everyone ready?”
“As we’ll ever be!” I called back.
I followed Garrett toward the stairs. The day was already hot, and there was sweat behind my knees, which was a deeply icky feeling.
But I remembered the hallway from our little tour on Monday. There were a lot of tables with little knickknacks and some paintings, but it didn’t seem so bad.
Garrett didn’t seem so bad, either. He was about a head taller than me, and his hair was super blond, flopping over his forehead. He had freckles across his nose, and I liked the way his eyes were green and brown at the same time. I didn’t know Garrett all that well, since he was a year older than me, but I saw him around school, plus his family went to Grammy’s church. I’d seen him there on the Sundays I’d gone with her. That was one of our favorite things to do, actually. I’d spend the night on a Saturday, then Sunday, she’d take me to her church, and afterward, we’d go to the Chesterfield Inn for their lunch buffet.
“So what are you in for?” I joked as we made our way up the stairs.
He only smirked and shook his head, so I shrugged, tapping my pen on the front cover of my “logbook.”
“If you don’t tell me, I’m going to go ahead and assume murder,” I said, which made him chuckle, but he still didn’t give me an answer.
We stopped on the landing, facing a short hallway, and at the end of it, there was a door. It was made out of the same light wood as the floor, and there was a pretty stained glass window in the center. If there had been enough light back here, I bet it would have made colors on the walls and floor, but it was kind of dim, so the stained glass—which had to be expensive—seemed like a waste.
Garrett pressed on the door handle, and it opened, revealing a narrow hallway.
I frowned. “Why put a door in the middle of a hallway that leads to another hallway?”
It was Garrett’s turn to shrug. “Rich people,” he muttered, like that explained it all.
And hey, maybe it did. Maybe separating hallways with fancy doors was a fun thing to do if you were rich.
Or maybe this was a different kind of hallway. Mrs. Freely had called it “the servants’ passage.” And after all, the one we’d just walked through had been empty and, like, normal hall-ish. This one?
It was so crammed full of stuff that Garrett and I had to walk down it single file rather than side by side.
There were those same long tables and glass bells I’d seen in the front of the house. I crouched down to look at the nearest one, peering through the dusty glass at a taxidermy chipmunk perched on a fake branch.
“Great,” I muttered. “We got the Dead Animal Hall, I guess.”
Garrett snorted, putting his bucket down. According to our instructions from Mrs. Freely, we needed to make a list of everything on the tables. That hadn’t sounded that hard, really, but looking at all of it now, I wanted to sweep everything to the floor and say there hadn’t actually been any stuff back here.
Maybe Garrett felt the same way, because he stared at the tables for a second, putting his hands in his back pockets and sighing.
It was dim back here, and a good deal cooler than the rest of the house, with a tiny window set high up on the far wall that let in some light. The top half of the hallway was covered in dark green wallpaper with big, blooming pink roses all over it. The paper was only starting to peel up at the edges, but there was a thick layer of dust on the floor, and it was clear that no one had been back here in a long time.
“This is stupid,” Garrett murmured on a sigh, and I had to agree with him. Who cared about this stuff, anyway? It all looked like junk to me.
“You know, they call this the Hall of Heads,” Garrett said as he lifted a dusty glass bell off a stuffed bird and studied it.
Seeing as how he’d only said like five words so far today, that was a weird conversation starter. I echoed Garrett’s last words. “The Hall of Heads?”
“Uh-huh,” he said, tapping the taxidermy bird. It wobbled on its branch, looking like it might explode into a mass of dust and feathers if you breathed on it wrong, but I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t Garrett’s mom or Mrs. Freely, and if he wanted to make a mess, that was on him. “My brother and some of his friends tried to spend the night here right after the old man died,” he went on, “and ended up talking to this old guy the city hired to cut the grass. He said people who’ve worked here say they see a head floating toward them down this hall, over and over. It starts at one end, zooms down”—he lifted his arm, fingers still covered in du
st, making a sort of zooming motion, complete with a vrooooom! sound effect—“then starts all over again.”
I crossed my arms, looking at the far end of the hallway, past the tables with all their junk. In this particular spot, the hall was long enough and the one window was so shaded by the heavy trees outside that you couldn’t even see the far end all that well. It was kind of easy to imagine a head zooming out of that gloom, and while I didn’t spook that easy, I also didn’t like picturing it. I looked back over at Garrett with a frown.
“You should try not talking,” I told him. “Not talking might be a really good look on you.”
He shrugged in reply and pulled the logbook out of his back pocket. “Just thought you might want to know what we’re dealing with here,” he said as he jotted something down.
“Whose head?” I asked, taking out my own book and moving to the table on the other side of the hall. This one held a few clocks as well as a stack of books so old, I couldn’t even read the titles on their spines.
“Huh?” Garrett lifted his head, his blond hair falling over his eyes. He flicked it back with a quick jerk that was probably really appealing to some girls, but definitely didn’t make my stomach flutter or anything.
I want that officially on the record, by the way. I do not have a crush on Garrett McNamara.
Anyway.
“The head,” I said, and pointed back at the far end of the hall. “The vroom-vroom head. It has to belong to someone, right? Can’t have independent heads whooshing around. So whose head is it?”
Garrett looked at me with a V between his eyebrows, like he was trying to figure out if I was being serious or not. I stared at him, fists on my hips. “Dude,” I said. “I’m always serious when it comes to floating severed heads.”
He grinned at that, a sudden smile that lit up his face, and ugh, that was so annoying. I did not want to deal with a cute boy this summer.
Okay, anyway, he grinned in a totally normal way that didn’t do anything to his face at all except show his teeth, which are normal, okay-looking teeth. And then he said, “I don’t know. How many ghosts are supposed to be in this place, anyway?”
That was the first I’d heard of any ghosts, to be honest. Look, I’m not stupid, I could tell a place like Live Oak House would be haunted as heck. I’ve seen TV and watched movies. But I’d never really paid any attention to it or any of the stories about it since spooky stuff has never been my thing. And that music box thing had to just be a trick of . . . acoustics or something. Old houses were weird like that.
“No idea,” I said. “What are the stories?”
“I think someone died the first day they started building the house,” he replied. “Or that’s what my brother said. And something really bad happened to make that Wrexhall guy move here. Like, a fire, I think? He definitely didn’t have any family except for his wife, and she was really weird. Collecting the dolls, not wanting to go into town. Eventually they sent her off to some hospital in Nashville and she never came back. But there’s probably more,” he went on, moving down the table. I could see now that he was writing in his logbook Dead thing and Other dead thing.“There were stories about this place since forever, even before the old guy who lived here died. It only got worse after he was gone. Like, when my older brother and his friends dared each other to spend the night alone in here, it was . . . it was bad.”
That was interesting. “What happened?” I asked.
Garrett gave another one of those shrug/hair flick things. “The cops showed up, nearly arrested them for trespassing.”
“Oh,” I replied. That was hardly the spine-chilling tale of terror I’d been expecting, although I guess that had been scary in its own way.
We went back to listing things quietly for a while, and this is going to sound crazy, but as I made my lists and started making my way down the hall, I had pretty much forgotten about the head. I know, how does someone forget that there’s a story about a flying severed head coming from the very direction you’re headed toward?
Like I said, I was never all that interested in the spooky. As I wrote, I was mostly thinking about when I’d get to leave, how to turn this whole stupid day into a story for my friends on Xbox later. They’d like it, I thought, especially if I added the part about the Hall of Heads, and also maybe made it seem like the thing I’d done to end up in the situation was a lot cooler than anything involving glitter. Ooh, and maybe I could even build my own Hall of Heads in Minecraft! Turning this whole thing into a video game universe might actually be cool.
Maybe then this whole summer wouldn’t feel like such a waste.
CHAPTER 11
OLIVIA
I never minded cleaning my room when Mom asked me to. Taking care of my own space and all that. I’d even painted the walls pink, something Em never would’ve gone for. Anyway, the point is, it’s not the cleaning that I minded when Mrs. Freely sent me off with a pack of glass wipes and my little itemization notebook, pointing up the stairs and telling me I could “start in the ballroom.”
It was that I’d be doing it alone.
I got it. The house was big, she needed us to divide and conquer.
But if you’d ever been in Live Oak House, you’d understand why the idea of being all by myself in the ballroom upstairs had me feeling cold even on a hot day.
There were twenty-three rooms there. That’s what Mrs. Freely had said, and it seemed like a lot. What kind of rooms were they?
That was the thought that kept going through my head as I walked up the stairs to the ballroom. What if there were more rooms than anyone thought? Were there spaces hidden behind the walls? Secret doors you could open with the press of a hidden switch? I know the idea of those things would’ve thrilled Emma, but to me, it was just creepy. I’ve always liked knowing exactly where everything is.
Being able to expect things makes life a lot less stressful, I think.
The ballroom was off to the left of the grand staircase, and while I thought it was weird to put a ballroom upstairs, when I stopped on the landing and looked behind me, I suddenly understood why it had been built that way. The staircase swept down, widening as it got to the bottom, and I imagined how fancy dresses would’ve looked, the skirts brushing over the dark blue carpet lining the wooden stairs.
Then I remembered there had never been any balls in this house. No parties, no groups of people, no fancy dresses at all. Felix Wrexhall built this room because that’s what big houses were supposed to have back then, a ballroom. The only people who’d ever been in this one were him, his wife, and their son.
Weirdly enough, that made me kind of sad. This whole house was sad, really, like a birthday present that someone never got to open. All this pretty wrapping, all for nothing.
Thinking that didn’t make me feel any better as I held my plastic bucket in one hand and used the other to push open one of the big doors that led to the ballroom.
It was brighter inside than I’d imagined it would be, which definitely made me feel a little bit better. The windows faced the front of the house, and a big set of French doors led out onto a balcony. Overhead, there was what I guessed was a chandelier, but it was covered in a black plastic trash bag, dust making the bag almost look gray.
Ew.
Pushing my shoulders back, I walked farther into the room.
Downstairs, I could hear Mrs. Freely cheerfully ordering kids to different parts of the house, and I tried to tell myself I was lucky to get the ballroom. It was big, sure, but it only took a few minutes to note everything that was in the room—thirteen chairs covered with cloths, and the chandelier—and then all I had to do was clean the mirrors.
No big.
Sure, there were a lot of them. They lined the back wall, and I looked really small in them, a dozen Olivias in too-bright T-shirts. What would it have been like to come into this room as a guest, in one of those fancy ball gowns? F
or a second, I stood there looking at myself, and then I pulled out one side of my T-shirt with one hand, giving a wobbly curtsy. I laughed because I looked so stupid, but the sound seemed to echo in the big room. It felt dumb to be creeped out when I knew there were darker, spookier places in the house I could be instead—the idea of setting foot in that doll room made me shudder—but I was suddenly really mad at myself for saying I didn’t want to be on a team. Even if I wasn’t crazy about some of these other kids, it would’ve been better than being up here on my own.
“Bad call, Past Olivia,” I muttered to myself, then moved toward the mirrors, the package of glass wipes in my hand.
I frowned at the bright yellow daisy on the label. This was the organic stuff with no harsh chemicals, what my mom called “crunchy granola stuff.” I guess no one wanted kids breathing toxic fumes. That made sense. Unfortunately, the stuff didn’t work all that great.
I started to clean. Well, it felt less like cleaning and more like smearing smudges around, but it was the best I could do. I couldn’t even reach the top of the glass, and I wondered if I should go ask for a ladder or something. But if Mrs. Freely didn’t want us having real glass cleaner, there was no way she was letting us climb ladders.
And as I stared at the top of those mirrors lining the ballroom, clearly out of reach, I realized something really important: We weren’t actually here to get this place up to snuff or whatever it was Mrs. Freely had said. We couldn’t. It would take a team of professional cleaners to do that. We were just here to fill our days. To be punished because we’d been bad.
Except I hadn’t done anything bad, Em had, and suddenly it hit me how stupid and unfair this all was. This whole time, I’d been trying to tell myself that hey, at least I was spending my summer doing something productive. But no, this was a way to keep us out of trouble.
It was pointless.
I stood there staring at the mirror, and that feeling I’d had the first morning at the rec center came back again. The crying feeling.