Miz D shook her finger. “Never underestimate the evil of envy. Think of the wars we fought just because some people wanted what other people had.”
They wanted what had been taken from them. That was natural. That was right. They shouldn’t be blamed. It wasn’t their fault. It wasn’t. It was those other people.
The wind whipped the branches of the hemlock back and forth. Like a father lashing out with his belt. Hate hate hate.
Miz D stared at the trees. “It must be a storm. We should go inside.”
A branch cracked. It dangled dangerously from the tree.
She turned toward the house and gasped. “Oh my. We can’t. Not in there.”
“Why not?” Hannah said.
Miz D pointed at the front door.
“Why not?” Hannah said again. “What are you looking at? What do you see?”
What did that teacher see? Her own resentment. Her own envy. Her own hate.
Miz D opened her mouth. She didn’t speak; she gasped for air. Her face turned red, and then white, as her large body crumpled to the ground.
Now that had never happened before.
People had run away screaming. People had staggered off gasping for breath. People had stood paralyzed. People had slowly backed away shaking their heads no. But nobody had collapsed on the ground like a big balloon that had suddenly lost its hot air.
The branches of the hemlock trees were still.
Was the teacher dead?
Her arm was stretched out on the grass next to the bag of celery sticks. Hannah stared at the arm. It didn’t twitch or wriggle. Sometimes not doing anything was the most frightening thing of all. Hannah put her hands over her eyes and screamed.
Everyone came running. Mrs. Zimmer held a piece of maroon cloth and a pair of scissors. Anna carried the cordless phone. So Georgia was there too, in a way, shouting, “Why is your sister screaming?” until Mrs. Zimmer took the phone away from Anna to call an ambulance.
“Hurry,” she told them.
Miz D was still breathing—just barely.
Hannah knelt next to her teacher. She was afraid to touch her. She tentatively untangled the earring caught in Miz D’s hair. She wanted to make something right. Even if it was a very small thing.
The siren got closer and closer until the ambulance stopped in the driveway. Two men in white uniforms jumped out. One put a mask over Miz D’s face to give her oxygen. The other listened to her heart. Somehow the men lifted Miz D onto a cot. They wheeled her into the back of the ambulance and shut the doors. Everyone watched the ambulance leave. They stared at the road through the hemlock trees for as long as they could still hear the siren.
Then there was silence.
“That was your teacher?” Mrs. Zimmer was worried that Hannah was in trouble at school.
Hannah nodded. Her mind swirled. She was very upset. She shouldn’t have been. Miz D wasn’t dead. The worst hadn’t happened to her.
“It’s my fault she came here. I wrote about the house. In the questionnaire.” Hannah hid her face in her mother’s shirt.
It wasn’t Hannah’s fault. Plenty of people came to the house on Hemlock Road because they wanted to see something dreadful. And Miz D had.
“She could have had a heart attack anywhere,” Mrs. Zimmer said.
Hannah shook her head. “She saw something. Right before she collapsed. I have to go to the hospital.”
“I know you’re worried about your teacher,” Mrs. Zimmer said.
“I have to ask her what she saw,” Hannah said.
“You told me her doctor wanted her to lose weight.” Anna picked up the bag of celery and showed it to Hannah.
“I have to know what we’re living with,” Hannah whispered.
Mrs. Zimmer hugged Hannah. She pushed her mother away. “You should want to know too. You should stop pretending there isn’t anything wrong.”
“There isn’t. Your teacher wasn’t well. So she had a heart attack.” Mrs. Zimmer struggled to keep calm. She thought Hannah was overreacting again. She worried that this was a more serious problem than she thought. “I’ll make tea. I’m sure we could all use a cup. Hannah? Anna? Tension tamer tea?”
Anna followed her mother.
Hannah stayed outside. She wanted to see what her teacher had seen.
She stood where Miz D had been standing. She looked where Miz D had been looking. She opened her eyes wide. She squinted. She saw how the shutter dangled from one hinge. She saw the red leaves of the chokeberry bush. She saw that horrible cat skulking along the porch.
“Ildred?” Hannah whispered.
Ildred didn’t answer. It never did. It ignored others. It was selfish and cruel.
Still Hannah stared at the house, hoping to see what monstrosity had scared Miz D. Her heart pounded.
She had nothing to fear. No one in the house hated her.
Hannah gasped. What had she seen? There—in the dining room window. A woman with no head and no arms!
Then Hannah smiled at the dressmaker’s dummy. She remembered how she and Anna used to play with Beulah Buttons. When a game required an extra character, Beulah had been a teacher, a wizard, and a mermaid. Once Anna had made a head and arms for Beulah. Hannah thought how Anna always tried to fix things that were broken.
Suddenly Hannah very much wanted to see her sister. She ran up along the walk toward the house.
Wait.
Didn’t she know that Anna would only make her unhappy? Didn’t she know that Anna was probably on the phone, laughing about her with Georgia? Didn’t Hannah know who her true friend was?
Wait.
Hannah ran up the steps to the porch. Her feet clomped on the wood. She put her hand on the old brass knob. She didn’t turn it. She clung to it for dear life as she stood there, staring at the glass in the door.
Someone was inside, looking out.
Hannah didn’t collapse like Miz D. She inched away from the door. Unfortunately she forgot about the steps. She fell, tumbling all the way down to the yard. Then she lay there. She liked feeling the solid ground beneath her. In fact, she dug her fingers in the dirt. She was trying to hang on to the earth.
Why? So what if she had seen someone. That wasn’t a bad thing. Or was it? Who knew what had happened to a face, after nearly eighty years.
Mrs. Zimmer glanced out the living room window. When she saw her daughter on the ground, she hurried out of the house. “Hannah, are you all right?”
Anna came outside too. Together they helped Hannah sit up. Hannah stared at the front door with such a strange expression that Mrs. Zimmer asked, “Did you hit your head when you fell?”
“No.” Hannah was transfixed.
“Your elbow is scraped. I’ll get some ointment.” Mrs. Zimmer hugged Hannah and went inside.
“What happened?” Anna said.
“I saw something. Just like Miz D.”
“Oh, Hannah.” Anna sounded like a disappointed old grandmother.
“In the window. Right there.” Hannah stood up and pointed.
“I suppose you saw the green eyes.”
Hannah thought for a moment. “Yes. The eyes were green.”
“Your eyes are green. You saw your reflection. That’s all. I’ll prove it to you.” Anna stood beside Hannah. Now they were both staring at the glass.
The twins no longer looked identical. One had a rumpled shirt. Her hair hung limp. The other had a cute striped top. Her hair had three small braids that Georgia probably had given her that day at recess. However, the twins couldn’t see any of this because they couldn’t see their reflections.
“Well?” Hannah said.
“The light must be different now,” Anna said.
“I saw the face just a minute ago.”
“So? Maybe the light was different. Maybe clouds were in front of the sun.”
“Or maybe I did see the face.”
Why was Hannah arguing with Anna? Who cared if Anna believed her or not? Hannah had seen. So now Hannah must know
.
“Know,” Hannah said.
Had she understood? Had she?
Hannah came closer to the window again. Her breath fogged the glass.
“Know what?” Anna said.
“I mean, no, I didn’t see it,” Hannah said.
What? How could she doubt it now?
“You didn’t?” Anna said.
“It wasn’t the right face,” Hannah said.
What did she mean? It was the only face.
“You’re not making any sense,” Anna said.
“I didn’t see the one Miz D told me about,” Hannah said as she hurried inside.
She found her mother in the kitchen, rummaging through a box. Mrs. Zimmer held a package of birthday candles and a bottle of salad dressing.
“I can’t seem to find the first-aid kit,” Mrs. Zimmer said.
Hannah didn’t care about that. “Mom, I need to go to the library right now.”
Mrs. Zimmer dropped the things back in the box. “Now?”
“Can you drive me?”
Mrs. Zimmer thought of a hundred reasons why Hannah shouldn’t go.
Once upon a time, certain girls loved to visit the town library. It was the one place they could visit. Movies cost too much. But the library was free. Yes, free. Nobody had to pay one single nickel to walk up the wide steps, past the stone lions, and into the beautiful redbrick mansion. The Story of the Treasure Seekers had first been discovered at the library.
Maybe someone had donated a new copy? Maybe Hannah could find it and bring it to the house on Hemlock Road?
Hannah wasn’t thinking about that wonderful book. She was wondering about the soldier—the one Miz D had called the living ghost.
“Mom, it’s important. It’s for school.”
Mrs. Zimmer sighed. “Can’t you use the Internet?”
What kind of net?
Hannah raced upstairs and into her parents’ bedroom. She sat down at the desk and turned on the contraption they called the computer, even though no one ever used it for computing. She typed in the words Helton, Soldier, World War I. A long list appeared on the screen. Hannah sighed. She thought she would never find out anything this way. She was right.
Selena came home and let the door bang behind her. She spun Anna around and around the living room as she shouted, “I have to tell everybody!”
“What?” Anna said.
Mrs. Zimmer came to see what the commotion was about.
“He found me during lunch,” Selena said.
“Who? The janitor?” Anna couldn’t share her joke with Hannah. She wasn’t there.
“No. Marcus. I thought he was going to ask me to the movies. Only he didn’t.”
Mrs. Zimmer braced herself for more hysterics.
Selena did scream. “He asked me to the homecoming dance!” She abruptly stopped jumping and ominously held up a finger. “There’s one condition. We have to get rid of those disgusting bats.”
No!
“All right,” Mrs. Zimmer said. “I’d like to exterminate the whole house. I found more mouse poop in the kitchen.”
Where was Hannah? She could explain that the critters never did anything wrong. They never murdered anybody. What was Hannah doing? Why was she still upstairs staring at that screen?
The list was gone. Somehow or other she had found a picture of a newspaper article. It was the one on display at the Maplethorpe Library in the case with the guns and the helmet. That photo of the dreamy-eyed soldier had been taken before the war. Before he had been in the trenches. Before he had killed anyone.
HELTON’S HERO RETURNS TODAY
Blah blah blah.
A breeze blew in Hannah’s ear. A sleeve rose up from a shirt draped over a chair. The sheet billowed out from the unmade bed. Hannah didn’t notice any of this. She kept reading about how bravely Lieutenant Maplethorpe had fought. How he got separated from his unit. How weeks later he was found in a trench sitting next to three dead German soldiers. How he spent ten years in a hospital recovering from mysterious injuries the reporter refused to describe. And how, after that long convalescence, Lieutenant Maplethorpe had been taken to his family’s house on Hemlock Road.
When Hannah finished reading, she looked at the sleeve of the shirt and wondered if someone was there. “Did you come to this house?” Hannah whispered.
No, not this house.
She read the article again. It didn’t mention the address or anything else significant. It had been written ten whole years before the most important story began.
She pushed a button that somehow made the article appear on a piece of paper. She hid that paper in her underwear drawer.
Didn’t she realize Mr. Zimmer was calling a company called Pest Control Services? Didn’t she care that those people promised to get rid of all the bats one week from Friday? Didn’t she care that the bats only had eleven days and eleven nights left to live?
No, all she thought about was Lieutenant Maplethorpe. Oh, the poor brave soldier. Why wasn’t he resting in peace? What had Ildred done to him? When could Hannah go back in the closet to look for more clues? It was too infuriating to read her mind. Even Selena’s daydreams about Marcus were more interesting.
The next day Hannah brought a stack of books home from school. They were all about World War I.
Anna followed her into their room. “I have to talk to you.”
Hannah wasn’t listening to anybody or anything. She read how the assassination of the archduke caused all those countries to go to war.
Anna shut the book. “Georgia is having a makeover party.”
“So?” Hannah said.
“So we’re invited,” Anna said.
“Me too?” Hannah said.
“Yes.” Anna was quite proud of persuading Georgia that it would be loads of fun to have Hannah there.
“It’s a sleepover. You’ll get to know her better. And her friends. Kyla from your class will be there,” Anna said.
Hannah thought how Kyla spent the day pretending to have a heart attack whenever she saw Hannah. The substitute teacher, Mr. Ogbert, couldn’t control the class like Miz D.
“And she’ll get to know you.” Anna took the books about World War I. She thought it had been bad enough when Hannah was a nerd. Now she was becoming a weirdo.
Hannah grabbed the books back. The sisters had a tug-of-war. Hannah won.
“Why do you want to read these?” Anna said.
“Why do you want me to go to Georgia’s party?”
“I want you to have fun. With me.” Anna didn’t say the rest of her thought. How she worried about Hannah and missed her—the way Hannah used to be.
Hannah was too busy planning to even try to understand Anna. If Anna was with Georgia, and the rest of her family left, then Hannah could go in Selena’s closet and search for more clues about what had happened to her soldier.
The week passed. The bats had only seven days left. And all Hannah had done was read her books about World War I. What did she learn? That war was senseless. People died for no good reason.
There weren’t any books written that could change that.
On Saturday, Anna went to Georgia’s. Hannah hardly said good-bye. The rest of the Zimmers were going shopping. They always thought they needed to buy something, when what they really wanted was to escape the house.
“Wouldn’t you like to come?” Mr. Zimmer felt sorry that Hannah was left out.
“It can’t be good for you to stay home alone.” Mrs. Zimmer thought that Hannah was still upset about her teacher.
Hannah smiled. She knew she wouldn’t be alone.
“You could help me pick out my dress for the dance,” Selena said.
“I have homework,” Hannah said.
The Zimmers got in the silver car. The hemlock branches waved them away.
Hurry, hurry.
This might be the last chance to tell Hannah she had to save the bats.
Listen.
“Hello? Are you there?”
&n
bsp; Of course. Didn’t she know it was impossible to leave?
“You are there.” She stood in the hall and looked toward the top of the window in the front door. That was where she thought Miz D had seen the soldier’s face. She saw nothing. She wished she could ask Miz D. Her teacher still wasn’t allowed any visitors.
“I’m going in the closet.”
No.
Hannah heard the word go. She climbed the stairs and entered Selena’s room. As usual, clothes were everywhere. As she reached up to undo the hook, a purple scarf floated in the air and covered her face.
“Don’t you want me to go in there?”
No.
“I understand,” she said. But she didn’t.
“Something very bad happened to you in there. Were you killed in there? Was it Ildred?” She whispered the last word.
She twisted the scarf nervously as she waited for an answer.
The attic.
“Trick? What kind of trick?”
Hannah was frustrated. She wasn’t the only one.
“I know you want to tell me something. I just don’t know what. I know. I’ll have a séance.”
She had read about one in a book. She thought she knew what to do. She cleared the clothes away from the closet. When she had a nice bare space, she carefully folded the scarf and put it in the center. She got the sheet of paper with the newspaper article and put it next to the scarf. She looked everywhere for candles. All she could find were the three on Selena’s dresser. One was a pair of red lips, one was a cupcake, and one was a big square yellow sponge with a face. It seemed to be wearing blue shorts.
She lit the candles and sat cross-legged next to the display. She held her hands with palms up and moaned in a low voice, “Lootennannt Maapullthorrp.”
When people speak to the dead, why do they make their voices sound like sick cows?
“I know you’re here. I feel your presence in this room. Speak to me, brave soldier.”
Was it brave to kill? A wind slid the paper under the dresser. Ha!
“Maybe you can’t speak. Can you thump?”
Well, why not? If she wanted thumps, let her have them. Maybe then she could understand. If only something in the attic could be pounded against the floor. The only things up there were the sleeping bats.
The Girl Behind the Glass Page 7