“Great,” Henry said. “I’ll look forward to that.”
“So that’s why we need the magnifying glass!” I told him.
“To check for mail from dead guys?”
“Exactly.”
Henry didn’t need to say anything else. I could tell from the look on his face that he thought the whole thing was a big fat fake. But he went into this endless explanation anyway, about how they must have done something to the negatives to play a trick on everyone. His dad is really interested in photography, so Henry gave me this huge, boring lecture about film and negatives and how light works.
“You’re missing the point,” I said. “These Coven Circle people are the ones who made the photos a long time ago in England. And they said the negatives never left the photographer’s hands.”
“Really?” Henry asked, in a way that made it clear that he did not, even for ten seconds, believe me.
“Yes,” I said.
“I thought you said it was Crewe Circle, which makes more sense, since a coven is a witch thing, not a ghost thing. You know that, right?”
I didn’t know that. But I certainly did not need Henry to tell me. “So what’s your point?” I asked.
“My point,” Henry said, “is I think you’ve got your facts wrong.”
We were standing in front of Henry’s house by then. It’s sort of embarrassing to admit this, but I got so involved in our conversation that I just never turned when we came to my street.
“Want to come in and ask my dad?” Henry said.
“Yeah,” I said, because I am not one to back down from a dare, which is clearly what this was. Even so, I had a sinking feeling that Henry would be gloating soon, and I was not looking forward to his I’m right again happy dance. Lucky for me, his dad had something to say, and it had nothing to do with photography or ghosts. He hit us with it as soon as we got through the front door.
“Your mom wants you to go over and rake Miss Leary’s leaves,” his dad said.
“My mom’s not even in the country,” Henry said. “Barbara Anne’s here, and Sophie said I could have her over.”
Now, this was both an outright lie and an unusually sassy answer coming from Henry. To understand it, you really have to know these things:
His mom was still in England studying English.
Henry hates it when his dad calls Sophie his mom, because she is only his stepmom.
Henry was trying to get out of his chores, as usual, by using me as an excuse.
I hate when he does that.
I guess number four, technically, is about me and not about Henry, but I count too, right?
“It won’t take long,” Henry’s dad said. “The two of you can do it together. You and, uh, what’s your name, kid?”
I smiled. Every time I’m over there, Henry’s dad does this same bad joke about how he’s forgotten my name. It’s sort of stupid but sort of sweet.
“Let’s go,” Henry said. He tossed down his books on the stairs, and we left.
That’s the thing about Henry. I love him, but sometimes he gives up so easily.
“Have fun!” Henry’s dad called from the couch.
* * *
—
I guess I was so focused on all the bickering that it hadn’t really sunk in. Where Henry and I were going. Miss Leary’s house. Halloween house. The one we had all run from screaming just a few nights before. When Henry saw the look on my face, he said, “It’s okay. Sophie knows her. She goes to our church.”
I must have looked as unconvinced as I felt, because he said, “She’s harmless, Barbara Anne. You saw her at the costume parade. Does she look like she has the strength to hurt anybody?”
“I couldn’t see anything,” I said. “She was all covered up with a blanket and dark glasses.”
“She’s an old lady! She’s got a problem with her eye.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said. “Thanks for reminding me. I can’t wait to see that!”
“You should go home,” Henry said. “If you’re going to act like a baby, go home.”
Well, that did it. Nobody was going to tell me when I had to leave. Except maybe my mom, or my dad, or my grandmother, or Sophie. But not a kid! So I helped Henry rake the lawn. Miss Leary’s helper lady, the one who pushes her wheelchair, brought us two rakes from the garage and a couple of giant garbage bags. The leaves were sort of wet and slimy, and it was hard work getting them all into two big piles.
“I wish they were dry,” Henry said. “We could jump in them. My mom and Alice and I used to do that at the old house.”
“You miss it, don’t you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” he said. But we both knew he was talking more about his mom than the house. I knew he got to talk to her on the phone sometimes, but I also knew that he must miss her a lot. And I didn’t know what to say to him about that. So I tried to distract him by throwing a handful of leaves at him.
“That’s disgusting,” Henry said. “It’s not snow, Barbara Anne!”
But I’d made him smile, and that was a good thing. And it helped me forget, for a minute, where we were, and how dark it was starting to get.
* * *
—
When the raking was finished, the debate began, between me and Henry. Because he started up the stairs to knock on the door.
“What are you doing?” I asked him. “We finished. We get to go now.”
“I’m letting them know,” Henry said.
“When they look out the window and see the big garbage bags instead of random leaves, they’ll know,” I said.
“What are you so afraid of?” Henry asked. “What do you think is in there, anyway?”
I didn’t know, but I had some guesses, and vampire bats were at the top of the list.
“Have you ever been in there before?” I asked him. I was working pretty hard to make sure my voice didn’t shake.
“No,” Henry said, and he just kept going, closer and closer, toward the front door. Then he marched up the steps, so I had no choice. I ran after him and grabbed him by the waist and started to tug. Henry fell, and this is why we ended up in a heap on Miss Leary’s doorstep when she answered the bell.
* * *
—
I don’t really know what I pictured was behind the door of that house before I went there that day. But what I found surprised me. The house wasn’t dark and creepy inside; no bats, not a cobweb in sight. And yet, what happened there was more frightening than anything I could have imagined that Halloween night. It started with a game of checkers, which, I know, sounds harmless. Unless you know what happened next.
Constance Leary asked us in and took us to the living room, which seemed almost like a library. I was looking at all the books while Henry was trying to tell Constance—Miss Leary, I guess I should say—that we didn’t need any money for raking the lawn. Not that he’d actually stopped to ask me if I thought we should get paid. He just turned it down.
“Oh, no,” he said. “We were glad to do it.”
Well, now he was just flat-out fibbing. Who is ever glad to be standing in the cold stuffing wet, smelly leaves into a trash bag? I had gym shoes on, thin ones, and my feet were all wet! And Henry had been coughing so much I was kind of worried about him.
But I didn’t care if we got paid; I was just happy that her living room looked normal. Also, I was busy not looking at Miss Leary’s face when she talked. You know—because of the whole eye thing. Inside, she didn’t wear the dark glasses, so it was easier to see her face, her eyes. And one of them had this filmy, swirly pattern like a marble (even though your eye would be more like a hard-boiled egg, I guess). It was sort of fascinating but mostly gross to think about, and hard to look at too, so I turned toward the bookcases.
They lined the whole wall of the room. The
re was even another one just outside, in the hallway. I stepped out there to look at it. And that’s when the first weird thing happened. I was standing near the foot of a staircase, my head tilted, reading titles, when I heard a funny noise. I turned to look and saw a real marble bouncing down the wooden steps. It landed at my feet, and I picked it up. I was holding it, studying its blue and white twists, when it happened again. Two more. A green-and-yellow one—and another, larger and solid white. I picked them up and put them in my pocket.
Then I looked toward the living room, to see if I could say something to Miss Leary, but she and Henry were still talking. So instead, I went up the stairs. To see who was throwing the marbles. The stairs were creaky, and the hallway above was dark. Halfway up, I was already regretting my choice, but I had to know who was there.
“Hello?” I called out.
No answer. And the hallway, when I got there, was empty. Every room was dark. I walked back down the stairs sideways. I was not about to turn my back on whoever or whatever was up there.
* * *
—
When I got back to the living room, things turned even weirder. As I walked toward Miss Leary, I heard her say to Henry, “How about a game of checkers, Edgar?”
I stopped and stared at the two of them. Henry didn’t even seem to have noticed the name she had just used. Didn’t he hear her? What was going on here? I watched as the two of them set the board up together. They seemed to have forgotten all about me. It was like I was standing there all alone now in that cold, drafty room, and I had no idea what to do.
“It’s been so long since we played,” Constance said next. “Would you like to go first?”
“I always go first!” Henry said.
Everything about him had gotten strange. The way his voice sounded, the too-straight way he was sitting on the chair. Especially the way he was talking to her—as if…well, as if he were talking to me. As if they were friends. I couldn’t figure it out, but it made me shiver.
“Henry,” I said. “It’s getting late. We need to go!”
And then he looked at me, stared at me. But it was like he didn’t have any idea who I was, like Henry had never even seen me before in his life.
Winter was coming. The resorts had opened early, and some people were already going skiing on the weekends. The rest of us, though, didn’t have a prayer of seeing snow. Not in the city. At least, that’s what I thought, until one night when I was getting ready for bed, and I heard my dad say, “Looks like it’s starting to snow.” I ran out of the bathroom with my toothbrush hanging from my mouth to see for myself.
“Barbara Anne!” my mother yelled. But I ignored her and ran to the window to stand next to my dad and study the precipitation.
“What do you think, Bitsy?” he asked.
I was so excited I was willing to overlook his use of that horrible, babyish nickname. “Snow!” I said. “Definitely snow!”
It was hard to sleep that night. I had argued that I should be able to stay up for a little while longer to see if it was the real deal. You know, sticking snow. But my mom wasn’t having any of it. “Whatever it is, it will be there in the morning,” she said.
Now, if you’ve ever lived in Seattle, you know this is clearly not true. Measurable snow inside the city limits is a pretty big event—like a run-outside-right-away-and-roll-a-snowball situation. I think my dad would have caved, but my mom looked at him and said, “United front!” In case you don’t know, that’s a grown-ups-against-the-kids battle cry. It was over. I was sent to bed.
* * *
—
But in the morning, it was still there—a beautiful blanket of it that closed down school and everything. Yippee! My mom put Rachel in her snowsuit and pulled her around our yard on a little sled while I built a snowman. Then, later, while my mom was making tomato soup for lunch, Henry called and asked if I could meet him down by the lake.
“I don’t know,” my mom said. “You need lunch, and Rachel needs a nap. I don’t think I’d have time to take you.”
“I’ll eat lunch. And you don’t have to take me. I can walk over by myself.”
“It’s a little far,” she said. And I had to pull the super-sad face that usually only works on my dad—or my grandmother if she’s in a really good mood.
My mom sighed. “Okay,” she said. “You win. But bundle up.”
* * *
—
She made me wear so many layers that I was doing this stiff-legged Frankenstein walk all the way to the park. But as soon as I spotted Henry near the playground, I stopped caring. Henry waved, and when I reached him, he told me that Zack and Renee were coming too.
“Since when are you and Zack friends?” I asked him.
Henry shrugged. “He’s not so bad,” he said. “And Renee didn’t get to go with us on Halloween, so I just thought—”
“Yeah,” I said. “Good idea.”
The world was so perfect covered in snow that I didn’t even mind if Henry and I didn’t have it all to ourselves.
* * *
—
At first, the four of us had so much fun that we lost all track of time. Zack was landing snowballs with deadly accuracy. They kept hitting right at my collar, slipping down my back, and making me scream. We were cold, wet, and happy, but the light was beginning to fade.
“We should go,” Renee said finally. “It’s getting late.”
“Afraid of the dark?” Zack asked.
“Well,” she said. “Stuff has happened here, you know. Once there was even a murder.”
“I’ve heard about that,” I said. “You can see her—the ghost girl—walking around the lake.”
“No,” Renee said. “You have to walk out toward the point to see her.”
“Why?” I asked.
“That’s her spot,” Renee said. “Ghosts have a spot. They don’t just show up anywhere.”
“So let’s go out there,” Zack said.
“I think it’s time to get going,” Henry said.
He had a point. It was getting dark, and a layer of mist stretched across the lake. But Zack was not convinced.
“Too scared?” Zack asked Henry. And for a minute, I could see a trace of the bully he had almost completely stopped being.
“Henry’s right,” Renee said. “I want to go too.”
“Not until we see the ghost!” Zack said. And then he started making all these low moaning noises that, to me, just sounded like he had a stomachache, but Renee was all creeped out.
“Stop it, Zack!” she yelled. “Maybe you think it’s just one big game, but I don’t. What’s the matter with you, anyway? Didn’t you ever know anyone who died?”
Renee ran away from us then—toward a bench, where she stopped and sat. We watched as she drew her knees up to her chest, folded her face into them, and began to sob.
“Oh, shoot!” Zack said. “I forgot.”
“Forgot about what?” I asked.
“About her mom,” Zack said. And he ran over to Renee.
Henry and I stared at each other. This was news to us. But then, Zack and Renee had both gone to the same school when they were younger, before they changed the districts. Maybe he knew a lot about Renee that we hadn’t discovered yet.
“Follow them,” Henry said. And so we ran to the bench, where the three of us stood in a circle around Renee. I offered her a Kleenex.
“Are you going to be okay?” Henry asked her.
“I’m freezing,” she said. “I want to go home.”
None of us could blame her. Zack and Henry and I lived close enough to walk, but Renee was supposed to call her dad. She started crying all over again when she saw there was no charge left on her phone. I would have helped her, of course, but I don’t have a cell phone yet. And I really should have one by now. I know third graders who have them. Thir
d graders! Anyway, we had to find a phone for Renee. So that’s why we went there—to Henry’s house. It was just so Renee would calm down. So she could call her dad for a ride.
* * *
—
When the four of us got to Henry’s, everybody was out. This would have been great news except that Henry couldn’t find his keys. He was afraid they had dropped out of his pocket—somewhere in the park—and were gone for good now. I suggested that we should keep walking to my house, but Zack didn’t want to give up on going inside. Maybe all that talk of ghosts had put him in the mood to see one. The rest of us, though, were less enthusiastic. I thought it was a terrible idea, mostly because if I’m going to do something stupid, I’d rather be following my own plan. At least that way, it’s easier to answer the “What were you thinking?” question that always comes later.
“I might have a paper clip,” Renee said. She was searching her pockets. “Does anybody know how to pick a lock?”
“With a paper clip?” I asked. “The only lock that’s going to work on is one of those tiny ones on the front of a diary. Not that I have any experience with that.”
And I don’t. Except for reading a short and boring section of my cousin Monica’s diary, which was her fault, really, because it wouldn’t have happened if she had paid attention to me instead of talking on the phone to her boyfriend while painting her toenails.
“Nope,” Renee announced. “All I’ve got is hand sanitizer. Tangerine.”
“Good to know,” I said. “Where is Henry?”
He had moved away from us, to the garage, and was running his hand along the window ledge. “I think Sophie taped an extra key here,” he said.
The Haunting of Henry Davis Page 8