Oddest of All

  Usually people take a second to figure out the joke, then smile and nod. Sometimes they start to smile before I explain, because they’ve already figured it out. Despite his name, Mr. Smiley looked as if he had no idea what a joke was. He just stared at me and said “Nine” in a flat voice.

  Before I could think of what to say, an enormous clap of thunder shook the walls of the house.

  The lights went out.

  A terrifying screech ripped through the darkness.

  I shouted and reached for Chris. She was trying to grab me as well, and for a weird moment we sort of clawed at each other.

  “Shut up!” yelled Mr. Smiley.

  Was he yelling at us or whoever had made the screech? If the latter, it didn’t work, because the same voice shrieked, “Lights! Turn on the lights!”

  “Stupid bird,” muttered Mr. Smiley.

  “Bird?” I asked in a small voice.

  “It’s my parrot, Commander Cody,” he said in disgust. “He tends to get excited when the weather is rough.”

  At that moment the lights came back on.

  “Thank you!” squawked the bird.

  I felt a little safer. The bird was weird, but it was a normal kind of weird, if you know what I mean. Which was more than I could say for Benjamin Smiley. An air of deep sadness seemed to cling to him, and I felt that simply by knocking at his door we had done something incredibly intrusive.

  “Come along,” he said. “I’ll show you where you can sleep.”

  “Jeremiah!” squawked the bird, as we started up the stairway. “Go to Jeremiah!”

  We followed Mr. Smiley along a hallway where the pink and gray wallpaper had started to peel but was refusing to let go altogether. “You two can stay in here,” he said, opening the door to a room that smelled dank and musty. He waved his hand to the right. “The bathroom is down the hall.”

  He flipped a switch, turning on a single bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. The bed itself, covered with a worn, pink chenille spread, was old and sagging. Given the circumstances, it was one of the most beautiful things I had ever seen.

  “I’m glad we had already arranged for you to stay overnight with us,” my father said to Chris. “At least your parents won’t be worried about where you are.”

  “My parents always worry when I go someplace with Nine,” replied Chris.

  My father rolled his eyes. Turning to Mr. Smiley, he said, “I don’t mind sleeping on a couch. I feel terrible troubling you like this.”

  “No need for that,” said the old man gruffly. “You can use the room across the hall.”

  As soon as they were gone Chris closed the door and said, “This whole thing is fishier than Mrs. Paul’s kitchen. Something very weird is going on here.”

  “I agree. Only I can’t put my finger on anything specific. I mean, it’s a little odd for the old guy to be living out here all alone, but lots of people are sort of odd. It just feels like there’s something more . . .”

  “Didn’t you recognize what happened to us out there?” she asked. “It was just like the last story we heard, the one about the phantom hitchhiker.”

  I shivered. “I was thinking about that one just before we had the accident,” I admitted.

  You probably know the story. A man is driving down a country road late at night and picks up a young female hitchhiker. Later—after the girl has either gotten out of the car or vanished, sometimes after asking him to deliver a message—he stops and has to stay with some people along the road. The man either describes the hitchhiker to his hosts, or spots her picture on the mantelpiece. A terrible look comes over their faces, and they tell him that his passenger was their daughter, who had died in a horrible car crash many years earlier.

  I saw a couple of problems in matching that story up with what we had just experienced. For one thing, the woman we saw hadn’t been hitchhiking.

  Chris nodded when I pointed this out. “But remember, in the story it’s always a man traveling alone who spots the ghost. So maybe the fact that we were in the car kept her from trying to catch a ride.”

  “Also, we didn’t spot anyone’s picture on the mantel.”

  “No, but did you notice the look on Mr. Smiley’s face when your father said we had had an accident? I bet he’s heard that before!”

  “So what are you saying? That we’re trapped in the classic American ghost story?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying, except that there’s something weird going on around here.”

  I looked around the room. It was oddly bare. The only furniture besides the bed and nightstand was a low dresser with two items on top of it: a small lamp and a big, old family Bible. I started to examine the Bible, but Chris called me to the closet instead. “Take a look at this!” she whispered.

  I went to stand beside her. The closet was filled with women’s clothes, all of them old-fashioned.

  Before I could think of what to say, we heard a knock at the door. Quickly, Chris closed the closet.

  “Who’s there?” I called.

  “It’s me,” said Mr. Smiley. “I brought you some towels.”

  It was an unexpected kindness, and I revised my opinion of him upward a couple of notches.

  We stripped and dried ourselves off, then climbed into the old bed. It creaked and groaned underneath us, and the worn springs tended to roll us toward the middle.

  “It’s going to be a long night,” muttered Chris after a few minutes of this.

  “It already has been,” I replied.

  Given the night’s excitement, I didn’t know if I would be able to sleep or not. But exhaustion can work wonders, and it wasn’t long before I nodded off.

  It wasn’t much longer before Chris woke me by nudging me in the ribs with her elbow. “Nine! Listen!”

  I listened.

  The little hairs on the back of my neck stood up.

  Somewhere below us a woman was crying.

  Question number one: Should we stay where we were or go investigate? The sensible thing, of course, was to stay put.

  Chris and I have never been accused of being sensible.

  Even so, I wasn’t sure we should go wandering around in Mr. Smiley’s house. “He seems like an awfully cranky old guy,” I whispered to Chris when we started to discuss the matter.

  “You’d be cranky, too, if you had some woman crying her eyes out downstairs every night.”

  “What makes you think it happens every night?”

  She shrugged. “Okay, once a month. Who knows? But if that’s a ghost—and I bet it is—then I also bet she does it on a regular basis.”

  “Maybe he doesn’t even hear it,” I replied. “I bet he takes out his hearing aid at night.”

  “And your father is so exhausted he’ll probably sleep right through it, too. Which means it’s up to us to see what’s wrong.”

  When I still hesitated, she hit me with the argument that I can never resist: “Look, Nine, not everyone can do what we do. We have a responsibility to help this ghost.”

  What could I say? Maybe this woman had been weeping down there every night for ages, waiting for someone to help her. Maybe fate had brought Chris and me here for that very purpose.

  “All right,” I sighed. “We’d better go take a look.”

  Question number two: Should we put on our clothes? They were still wet, and cold to boot. I was willing to wander around the house without permission, but I wasn’t willing to do so naked. At least, not until I started to pull on my jeans. Then I had second thoughts.

  “These are freezing!” I hissed.

  We briefly considered the clothes in the closet. However, we decided that since (a) they might actually belong to the ghost and (b) Mr. Smiley might catch us in them, we should leave them alone. In the end, we went for the blankets. Well, I got the blanket. Chris got the pink chenille bedspread. She wasn’t entirely happy about this, but we played “Rock, Paper, Scissors” for the blanket and I won, so there wasn’t much she could say.

 
“I feel silly,” I whispered as we stepped into the hall. My teeth were still chattering, even though I was much warmer now that I was wrapped in the blanket.

  “You feel silly!” hissed Chris. “I’m the one dressed in Donna Reed’s bedspread! Come on, we have to find that woman before she disappears. You never know how long a ghost is going to hang around.”

  With that, she grabbed my elbow and steered me toward the stairs.

  “I wish we had a flashlight,” I whispered.

  “Stop talking and listen,” replied Chris.

  The weeping was coming from right below us.

  Side by side, we headed down the stairwell.

  The ghost was in the living room. We knew she was a ghost because even though there was no light—not even moonlight, since the storm was still going on—we could see her clearly. She was glowing softly, as if illumined from within. We couldn’t see her face—it was buried in her hands. She was sitting on the couch, leaning away from us, her shoulders shaking as if she were sobbing.

  I assumed she was the woman we had seen walking in the storm. I would also have assumed that she was the one we had heard weeping, except for one thing: The sound wasn’t coming from the ghost. It was coming from somewhere behind us. And since we had never heard a ghost before, I assumed whoever was making the sound must be a living person. Which left us with the next question: Should we stay and watch the ghost or go and tend to the living?

  Of course, we could have split up and done both, but under the circumstances, it wasn’t an idea that appealed to either of us.

  The weeping was so heartbreaking that after a moment I whispered to Chris, “I think we’d better go see about that. I bet it’s connected to the ghost somehow.”

  Taking my arm, she led the way. We moved carefully, trying not to make any noise. Even so, when I glanced over my shoulder, I saw that the ghost seemed to be fading.

  A moment later we reached an open doorway that led to the kitchen—something we realized only because a tiny bulb on the top of the stove provided enough light to make out the major shapes in the room.

  A woman sat at the table with her back to us. Her long hair covered her shoulders.

  At the sight of her, I felt my flesh begin to crawl. The way she was holding herself—face in hands, shoulders shaking as she wept—made her look uncannily like the ghost in the other room. Only this woman was clearly solid and alive.

  What was going on here?

  After a moment, Chris spoke up. “Can we help you?”

  The woman cried out in surprise and turned in our direction. At the same time she reached for a light switch on the wall.

  The lights came on.

  Despite my effort not to, I cried out in horror. The right side of the woman’s face was normal—beautiful even. But the left side was hideously scarred, as if something had pulled at it, tugging the flesh toward her neck. Her eye, her cheek, the side of her mouth all twisted down, and thick ridges of scar tissue marched across her cheek and forehead like mountains on one of those three-dimensional maps they have in museums.

  “Who are you?” she hissed. “What are you doing here?”

  Even as I was trying to find my voice, the woman was pulling her long hair over the side of her face, trying to mask the deformity. But the wet strands clung together, making bars down her face through which the scars still showed.

  That was when I realized she was soaking wet. Glancing down, I saw a little puddle forming around her on the floor—water dripping from her clothes.

  Was this the woman who had caused us to run off the road? It didn’t seem likely there would have been anyone else walking around in this weather, but our previous experiences had taught us that when a situation starts getting this weird you can’t take anything for granted. Still, she was the most likely candidate. And it had been so hard to see in the dark and the rain that we could easily have missed her scars.

  I wondered if she was dangerous.

  “Who are you?” she repeated.

  “My name is Nina Tanleven,” I stammered. “This is my friend, Chris Gurley. We had an accident up the road and couldn’t get help or a phone, so we’re staying here for the night.”

  The woman made a little gasp. She had a terribly pained expression on her face. Before she could say anything, we heard a squawk from the other room.

  “Don’t go! Don’t go!” cried Commander Cody.

  The woman closed her one good eye and sighed.

  Making a guess, I asked, “Is he talking to someone in particular?”

  “Not unless you believe in ghosts,” replied the woman.

  “We do,” said Chris. “In fact, we’re sort of known for that.”

  The woman gave us an odd look. I could see the idea taking form in her head. “Are you those two kids I read about in the paper? The ones who solved the mystery at the Grand Theater?” Her voice was strangely eager. Even so, I was starting to feel a little more comfortable with her.

  I nodded.

  She shook her head. “I can’t believe you ended up here.”

  “Why not?” asked Chris.

  “Because I need you so much,” she said, starting to cry again.

  Chris elbowed my ribs. “Told you,” she whispered.

  Ignoring her gloating, I went to the table and said quietly, “Mind if we sit down?”

  The woman shook her head.

  I pulled out a chair and slipped into it. Tugging the blanket around my shoulders, I realized how odd Chris and I must have looked to her when she saw us standing there. I waited for the woman to calm down a little. Then I put my hand on her arm and whispered, “Why do you need us?”

  “I have to tell my mother I’m sorry,” she moaned.

  “Was that your mother we saw in the living room?” asked Chris.

  The woman sat up so straight that I thought her chair was going to fall over. “You saw her?” she hissed, her one good eye widening in astonishment.

  I sighed, wishing Chris had waited a little bit longer before dropping that particular bombshell.

  Chris nodded, adding, “She was crying, too.”

  Tears welled up in the woman’s eyes again.

  “Don’t,” I said, tightening my grip on her arm. “Don’t cry. Just tell us what’s going on. Maybe we really can help.”

  And what if we can’t? asked a little voice in the back of my head. I tried my best to ignore it.

  The woman took a deep breath. Looking down at her hands, she whispered, “Twenty years ago this very night I killed my mother.”

  I felt my stomach twist. Were we sitting at the table with a homicidal maniac who might turn on us at any moment? I glanced around, hoping there were no butcher knives in easy reach.

  “How did you kill her?” asked Chris, who seemed to take this news more calmly than I did. Maybe that was because Chris’s mother was still around, whereas I hadn’t seen mine since the day she took off to “find her own life.” Mothers were less of an issue for her.

  The woman gave us a very sad smile. “I didn’t shoot her or anything like that. But I might as well have. I was supposed to go to a Halloween party with my boyfriend, Bud Hendricks. My mother didn’t want me to go. ‘Dolores, that boy is no good!’ she kept saying. ‘He’ll only bring you grief.’

  “We had a screaming battle. Finally she forbid me to leave the house. When Bud showed up, she turned him away at the door.”

  Dolores sighed. “Just after eleven o’clock I snuck out. I had managed to call Bud, and he was planning to meet me a mile up the road, so Mother wouldn’t know what I was up to. She found out anyway, of course; she was brilliant at that kind of thing. And she went out after me. Dad was working late at his office, and Mom’s car was in the shop, so she went on foot. That’s how worried she was about me.”

  Dolores shivered. “When Bud picked me up, I realized that he had been drinking—which was one of the things Mom objected to about him. We started back toward town. The storm that had been building up all day cut loose. Bud w
as driving too fast, not paying enough attention . . .”

  Dolores started to cry again, but after a moment she got hold of herself. “My mother was walking toward us through the rain. I saw her first. I screamed and grabbed the steering wheel. We swerved, but not enough. We hit my mother, then went rolling into the ditch and smashed against a tree. That’s when this happened,” she said, pulling back the hair that covered her terrible scars.

  Neither Chris nor I knew what to say. Finally I just touched her arm and whispered, “What happened next?”

  “I was in a coma for about a month,” Dolores whispered at last. “When I came out of it, my father told me that both Bud and my mother were dead. He looked half dead himself.” She turned away from us. “Dad never did recover from it all—though he took good care of me while I was recuperating.” She sighed. “Poor Dad. He couldn’t tell me about my face, just couldn’t bring himself to be the one to do it. One of the nurses had to hand me the mirror . . .”

  She choked on the memory. I watched her, glad that her telling the story had given me a chance to really study her face, and at the same time embarrassed that I wanted to study it. I felt sick in my stomach from the way it looked. What would it be like to go through life that way?

  Dolores ran her fingers over the scars. “I don’t mind them too much now,” she said, almost as if she had read my mind. “They feel like a fitting punishment. What I mind is what I did—that, and the fact that I was never able to tell my mother how sorry I was, never got to take back my last words to her.”

  “Your last words?” asked Chris.

  Dolores closed her eyes. “When we had our fight, I screamed that I hated her.” She put her fingers against her scarred cheek, and I could see that they were trembling. “‘I hate you!’ I screamed. ‘I hate you! I hate you!’ Then I ran upstairs and slammed the door to my room.” She paused, swallowed hard, then whispered, “Those were the last words I ever said to her.”

  I shivered. It wasn’t hard to see why Dolores wanted so much to say something to her mother. I know lots of kids who have told their parents they hated them, but none who had had the bad luck to have their parents die before they got to take the words back.