There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "Was there..."—I swallowed hard—"anybody buried in there?"

  Grandma laughed at me. "No," she said. "No bodies. The only thing we found was an old journal—Winifred's?" She and Granddad had a hasty discussion. "Winifred's or Rebekka's, we can't remember. We read it at the time, and I remember it had something to do with the Underground Railroad."

  "The Underground Railroad?" I squeaked.

  Grandma, who doesn't think any more highly of the New York State school system than Granddad does, figured I didn't know what she was talking about. "Harriet Tubman," she said. "Frederick Douglass. Runaway slaves."

  "In our house?" I was impressed. That has to be it, I thought, getting a mental picture of Vicki's bad lady. A runaway slave who'd died and who held me and Vicki, as white kids, responsible. Well, maybe not. That left too many questions unanswered—like, How come she'd haunted Jackie and Vicki but not Zach and me? and What about all those years in between dying and now?—but at least it was a beginning. "You didn't put the journal back in the room when you sealed it up, did you?" I asked.

  "No," Grandma said. "We put in some newspapers and magazines for somebody else to find, someday—"

  "You also left my measuring tape in there," Granddad complained.

  "You should have moved it when I told you to," Grandma snapped. "Now what did we do with the journal?"

  "Beats me," Granddad said.

  "I think it's in the attic," Grandma told me. "We thought maybe one of our boys might want to bring it into school one day, so we left it out. I don't think any of them ever did, so it's nice that you will. I think it's in the attic."

  If it was in the attic, I knew exactly where it had to be: in a trunk full of stuff my mother had gathered together that was in the house before she and Dad got married. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," I said.

  "You're welcome," Grandma said. "Good luck on your school project."

  "It's not—" I started.

  "Say good-bye, Floyd," she told Granddad.

  "Bye-bye," Granddad said.

  "Bye-bye," I answered.

  CHAPTER 10

  I Take a Trip to the Attic

  I WASN'T EVEN THINKING scary thoughts as I put my hand on the doorknob of the door to the attic stairs. I was thinking of the ghosts of Marella and her mother more as a puzzle that was about to be solved than as spooky business.

  But then I put my hand on the doorknob.

  There was a loud bang and the door shook, as though someone on the attic side had taken a flying leap off the top stair and crashed into the door.

  I took a quick step back.

  The doorknob moved and rattled.

  I took another step back.

  The big brass key—which nobody ever uses to lock the door and which is always in the lock because, my mother points out, if we ever took it out, we'd never find it again—the key wiggled, then flew out of the lock, landing near my feet.

  On the other hand, I told myself, as I quickly put more distance between the key and my feet, this can probably wait until Zach or Mom or Dad gets home.

  The fact that they didn't believe in ghosts wasn't important. I could tell them that I'd talked to Grandma about the journal and didn't want to mess around with their stuff.

  Which didn't sound like me at all—I knew any one of them would demand to know what I was really up to.

  Plus, it'd never work with Zach. He'd tell me to get the journal myself.

  Which left Mom or Dad. Was it fair to send someone all unsuspecting up against a ghost who could pound doors and throw keys ? Yet, if I tried to warn them the ghost was up there, that would distract them while they yelled at me that there wasn't any such thing as a ghost. Then they'd tell me to get it myself.

  Besides, the ghost obviously didn't want me up in the attic. Why not? I'd been up there Saturday afternoon looking for rope to show off the magic rope tricks I'd learned at the museum. Why had the ghost let me up then but not now? The only answer was that the ghost had been eavesdropping. She'd heard Grandma tell me about the journal, and she didn't want me seeing it.

  Which meant I absolutely had to get it now because, if I waited for my parents, chances were the journal would end up in even worse shape than how I'd found my Luxembourg project.

  I stood with my back against the hallway wall, watching the key just sitting there on the floor and feeling my heart rate slow down to about five beats per second or so.

  All right, I told myself, still just standing there. All right.

  I was looking for some excuse to stay just where I was, but nothing came to me.

  All right.

  I pushed myself away from the wall, and the key started to move. For a second I froze.

  The ghost seemed to be having a difficult time—which was good. Which meant she wasn't as capable of handling solid objects as I had feared. Which I should have found reassuring.

  But then slowly, steadily, the key started sliding across the rug, away from me. Toward the door. Toward the crack under the door. She'd locked the door, I realized, and now she was about to put the key beyond my reach.

  I lunged, throwing myself on the key like one of the Buffalo Bills sacking somebody else's quarterback.

  I thought I'd feel something at least semisolid, but there was nothing, not even the sense of cold I'd expected, like air released from a long-sealed coffin. For a second I wondered if I'd missed. I reached under myself, in the vicinity of my chest, which was where I estimated the key should be, and there it was.

  Clutching the key tightly, just in case she tried to get it away from me, I sat up.

  Nothing.

  I'll just sit here for a couple hours and catch my breath, I thought.

  But if she wasn't here, she was probably up in the attic, searching for the journal.

  So, against my better judgment, I got up, unlocked the door, then tucked the key into my pocket. Unless this ghost was a pickpocket, she wouldn't be locking me in.

  I opened the door.

  Something slammed it shut again, in my face.

  Taking a steadying breath and getting my foot ready, I opened the door again.

  Nothing.

  Or, at least, nothing I felt.

  I reached up and tugged on the string that switches on the light over the stairs.

  The light came on.

  A second later it turned off.

  I had taken only one step up. I turned back and tugged the string again, this time not letting go.

  The light came on.

  "There," I said out loud for the ghost to hear.

  The lightbulb exploded.

  This was getting worse and worse, but there was nothing I could do. I let go of the string and ran up the stairs. The attic is one gigantic room, with two big round windows at the front and the back of the house and one short but wide one on the right-hand side, so I didn't really need the light, anyway.

  Upstairs was cold and dusty. Clothes bags hung on racks, always there to hold clothes from whatever season it wasn't. Most of our outgrown clothes went to the Salvation Army, but there were boxes that held "special" clothes—the baptism gown all three of us had worn, my First Communion suit (Zach's had been loaned to Scott Bickham, our next-door neighbor, who'd moved away without returning it), souvenir T-shirts we'd gotten on various vacations—and the duffel bag containing Dad's stuff from his years in the Marine Reserves.

  As I walked past the boxes of clothes, there was a crash behind me. I whirled around and saw that one of the boxes from the top of the pile had fallen to the floor.

  Behind me—the direction I had been going—there was another thud. Again I turned. It was another box, this one from the section where Mom saved every single drawing and test and homework assignment from our years in school. (Someday, if we survived long enough, Luxembourg would be up here, too.)

  Yet another box of clothes hit the floor. I forced myself not to turn around. "Enough nonsense," I said, not sounding nearly as stern as Ms. DiBella can manage.

 
; There was a flapping noise at the side window, like bat wings smacking frantically against the glass. That got me to look, even though I know bats don't move around in the daylight.

  Nothing.

  I was trying hard not to breathe like I was going into a panic, even though I was going into a panic.

  There were old rolled-up rugs here, baby furniture we were holding onto just in case Uncle Steve ever settled down and started a family, boxes of decorations from Easter and Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that holiday that comes before Thanksgiving that I didn't even want to think about at this particular moment, and—

  Something brushed against my ankle.

  I shuddered but forced myself not to look. Probably a spider, I told myself, and I'm not afraid of spiders. Or a hairy dustbunny. Or...

  It doesn't make any difference, I told myself. Just keep walking.

  I walked past all the old lamps and chairs and general stuff that a family keeps, things that are too old-fashioned or too ugly to use but too good to throw away, until there, under the far window, I spied the trunk I had always thought looked like a treasure chest, the one that had held my grandparents' things when they had been young and just married and had honeymooned in Europe years and years and years ago.

  Kneeling down in the dust in front of the trunk, I pushed up the lid.

  And nearly lost my fingers as it slammed back down again.

  "Knock it off, you," I said, my confidence inching upward since she seemed, after all, incapable of getting a good solid hold on me.

  I opened the trunk again.

  There were mostly books in there; Mom is physically incapable of getting rid of books. And these weren't even hers. There were schoolbooks from the 1960s with my father's and my uncles' names written in them; books with real exciting names, like The Red Book of Fairy Tales and The Blue Book of Fairy Tales; newspapers from when Alan Shepard became the first American man in space and from the day John Kennedy was shot; my grandparents' 1950 passports; a red leather book, which I thought might be what I was looking for but it turned out to be a sign-in book from the funeral parlor for my great-grandmother Caroline.

  So far all I'd done was rummage through the trunk. What I needed to do was unpack it, take things out to get to the lower layers. I'd just decided that, when I realized what I was doing: While I used my right hand to sort through the mess, my left hand had been holding back a little book with a cracked black leather cover.

  I opened the book. Lines and lines of handwritten words, close together but still somehow spidery. I turned one thick yellow page and the next, and there in the middle of the page, the names Rebekka and Jacob leaped out at me. The children of Theodore and Winifred Beatson. One more page, and there at the top was the date May 5, 1851.

  I gave a sigh of relief.

  Behind me someone screamed.

  For a second I thought it was Vicki; it was a little girl's voice, there was no question. But Vicki wasn't there. Nobody was. The scream went on and on and on.

  And then, in the dust on the floor, I could see footprints. Two sets of footprints. One, little-kid-sized. The other, an adult. No feet, no shimmer of ghostly presence. No sound of scuffling. Just the visible footprints. And the scream. Angry and frightened and very young. "No," she cried, and I remembered Vicki saying, "She can talk if she has to, but it's hard." "No, Mamma. No! No! NO!"

  The adult was moving backward, apparently dragging the child away from me.

  I jumped to my feet. "Stop it!" I yelled. "Leave her alone! What are you doing?"

  I followed the footprints—much good that I could do. Five steps, six, seven.

  And then the scream cut off like someone had hit a mute button. There was no step number eight. The footprints stopped in the middle of the floor.

  I swiped at the empty space with Winifred's journal.

  Not that I would have felt anything, even if Marella and the bad lady were still there.

  But somehow, I had the feeling they weren't.

  CHAPTER 11

  Great-Great-Grandmother Winifred Gets an Unexpected Visitor

  I HALF EXPECTED to find the attic door closed and barricaded, but it was open, just the way I'd left it. Going down the stairs, I clutched the handrail, just in case the ghost decided to trip me or give a little shove from behind. No sign of her.

  Downstairs looked totally normal, too. I settled myself onto the couch. The book smelled hot and dusty. My hands shook as I opened it to a random page, trusting that fate would direct me to the right passage.

  The words Marella, ghost, and dead did not leap out at me.

  I searched more closely.

  The script was so fancy, it was hard to read, and it went from the very top of the yellowed page to the very bottom and from margin to margin, with no space between lines. Also, Great-Great-Grandmother Winifred or her pen had had serious problems with blots. For a while I thought that Winifred was a really bad speller, but then I realized that what looked like long, tipping-over fs were really ss. Too bad they didn't have computers and printers back then, or, at least, typewriters. I struggled through the whole page, and all Winifred talked about was the weather (miserable) and how she was embroidering some hand towels for a charity bazaar at the church and how the woman who ran the bazaar—Leona something-or-other-that-I-couldn't-make-out—was a gossip with what Winifred called a "vicious tongue."

  I skipped ahead a few pages, thinking maybe somebody killed off this Leona woman. But apparently not.

  OK, so fate hadn't directed my hands to open the book at that particular spot. I leafed through the book, searching for when Vicki had first mentioned seeing Marella—mid-March—in case she had appeared because that day was the anniversary of her death. But I really didn't have much confidence in that idea. From 1851 to now wasn't a nice round number like one year, or one hundred years, or a thousand years: important numbers, significant anniversaries that might drag ghosts out of their graves.

  Still, I read over the entries from around that time, just in case. More talk about the weather, and a complaint that the material she had bought for Rebekka's new dress had faded already.

  Next I checked the date of Vicki's birthday, July 15, in case the ghosts were somehow tied to that, but there wasn't even an entry for that day; and the following day, Winifred just wrote—in especially illegible handwriting—that her rheumatism was so bad she could hardly move. That seemed to pretty well kill the ghosts-looking-at-the-calendar theory.

  So I started from the beginning.

  I didn't read every single passage, but I did at least skim every page.

  The journal started in November, 1850, which was long before Great-Uncle Josiah sold off the greater portion of the land to become a tavern owner rather than be a farmer. This was while the Erie Canal still ran through our backyard, before sections of it fell into disrepair and were rerouted years later. So a lot of Winifred's entries talked about canal traffic and day-to-day events on a farm, and about her husband, Theodore, and their children, Rebekka and Jacob. Winifred didn't write about politics or runaway slaves or cleaning secret rooms. And she would have written about it if she'd done it. She wrote about everything. There were lots of entries that said things like:

  Today I hung all the rugs on the line and beat them vigorously since this will probably be the last chance I shall have to do so before the weather becomes truly inclement. I noticed that the small braided rug from the parlor had a few broken stitches, so I promptly mended it lest someone catch a heel.

  I mean, Real Exciting Stuff.

  But then, suddenly, February 10, Winifred caught my attention:

  It is nine o'clock of the evening, and the children are asleep, and Theodore, if not asleep, is in bed also, and all is quiet, and still when I place my hand over my heart I can feel the rapid hammering of it against my ribs.

  Bitsy, who has always sought out the most inconvenient places to lay her eggs, has most recently been nesting in the barn loft. This morning, when I
went up there to look for eggs, I found a man, who had evidently entered our barn during the night and crawled into the straw for warmth. He was half covered with straw and all curled up tight in a ball so that, actually, my first impression was that it might be a child. At first I thought he must be dead, for he lay so still, and he was wearing nothing but rags despite the snow on the ground. I gave a cry of surprise and the man leaped to his feet, and that was when I saw that he was a full-grown man and a Negro, at that.

  The only thing that kept me from calling out for help immediately was that the baling fork was ready at hand, and I placed it between us.

  "Canada?" the man asked. He had so thick an accent and his speech was so slurred from cold and sleep that I did not truly understand until after he repeated himself, but still I heard the tone of hope in his voice. "Do this be Canada?" he asked.

  "No," I said, "this is our barn loft."

  The look of hope became one of fear, despite that he loomed two feet taller than me, or at least he would have except that he was hunched over trying to keep warm. Our frosty breaths hung in the air between us.

  He asked, "Abolitionist?"

  "No," I said, and he sank, exhausted and defeated, to the floor. He wrapped his arms around himself and let his gaze also fall to the floor, as though he was saying, "Take me. I am too tired to try anymore."

  I stood there in the barn loft thinking that he was a desperate fugitive and that I endangered my life not to call out to Theodore. Perhaps as soon as I turned my back he would lunge at me.

  But he did not look capable of lunging. He did not look capable of walking. He looked cold and starving and frightened.

  Still, I backed away from him rather than turning from him, and I kept the baling fork up for as long as I could till I reached the ladder going to the lower level.