Charli pulled the tall kitchen stool up to the table and helped herself to a doughnut.
“I’ve just made the biggest decision of my life,” Uncle Will said grandly. “Our lives. You know the new water park that’s going to be built on the lake road next year?”
Charli nodded. Everyone in Mount Pleasant had heard about the water park.
“Well, there’s going to be a lot of people coming to town for vacations once that’s built,” Uncle Will went on. “And they’re going to need rooms to stay in. That’s where we come in. I’m grabbing the one perfect place in town to fix up for a bed-and-breakfast. It’s beautiful and it’s close to where the park will be, and we’re going to make a fortune with it!”
“A bed-and-breakfast?” Charli’s mother repeated. “You, Will?”
“All of us.” Uncle Will waved his arms. “I know Lilly has too much to do at home to be the housekeeper, but she’ll be able to help out once in a while, and we can always hire a couple of women from town to do the cleaning. What I was hoping, Rona,” he said to Charli’s mother, “is that you’ll be our hostess and cook. You’d like that—never having to wait on tables at the diner again. Am I right?” He leaned back, smiling expectantly.
They stared at him. “Where is this ‘perfect place,’ Will?” Ray asked slowly. “I know where the park’s going to be, but I can’t think of any house near it that could possibly become a bed-and-breakfast.”
“Yes, you can!” Uncle Will insisted. “Sure you can! You can see it from our backyard—about two blocks away as the crow flies.”
“I know,” Charli’s mom said, looking at Aunt Lilly. “It’s that place they call the Castle.”
Charli knew it, too. “But it’s haunted!” she exclaimed. “Everybody says it’s haunted.”
“Haunted by rats and termites,” Ray said sharply. “You’re not serious, Will. You can’t be talking about buying that old wreck.”
“Sure am,” Uncle Will said. “It’s not a wreck, folks, it’s a beautiful mansion. All it needs is a little fixing up—well, a lot of fixing up. And, Charli, if it’s haunted, so much the better. There’s people who’d pay good money to sleep in a genuine haunted house.”
Ray fired more questions at Uncle Will, but Charli hardly heard the answers. The Castle! She had walked past it a hundred times, always with a little shiver of excitement. It just had to be haunted! Once she’d even tried the locked front door, though she never would have gone inside alone. Now Uncle Will was going to own it, and he would probably be there most of the time, so she could go in whenever she wanted.
Her thoughts flew, imagining what it would be like. She might discover a real ghost and get her picture in the paper. Every kid in school would want to get inside to look around, but they would have to ask her first. It was her uncle’s house, so she would decide who could come in and who couldn’t.
“What do you think, Lilly?” Ray demanded suddenly. “You’re not going along with this, are you?”
Aunt Lilly laid a hand on Uncle Will’s arm. “I want what Will wants,” she said. “If he says it’ll work, I’m sure he’s right.”
“Ray just means we hope it’s a wise thing to do, Will,” Charli’s mother said anxiously. “It would be terrible to take money out of your savings and then lose it.”
“But I won’t lose it,” Uncle Will told them confidently. “You’ll see, Rona. This will be the best move I’ve ever made. I know the place looks pretty bad now, but I’m going to spend the summer fixing it up. Before you know it, people will be banging at the door, wanting to invest. Then there’ll be enough money to furnish the house in style.” He turned to Charli and said, “What do you think, young lady?”
“I think it’s great,” Charli said, careful not to look at Ray. “I’ll help you find out about the ghost. I love ghost stories!”
Everyone laughed at that except Ray.
“I can use your help, Charli,” Uncle Will assured her. “The pay won’t be much, but I’ll make it up to you later when the money starts rolling in.”
“Oh, you don’t have to pay me,” Charli said. “Maybe the new girl can help, too.”
“The new girl,” Uncle Will repeated, as if he’d already forgotten there was a new girl. “Oh, yes—Sophia. Sure, she might be glad to have a job. I’ll talk to her about it.”
“I wanted to come over last night,” Charli said with a reproachful sigh, “but—I couldn’t. I wanted to say hello because I thought she’d be kind of scared, coming to a strange place all by herself. I wanted to make her feel better.”
Her mother groaned. “Don’t be such a drama queen, Charli,” she scolded. “Ray was right and you know it.”
“Sophia’s settling in just fine, dear,” Aunt Lilly said. “She was awfully tired last night and went to bed right away, but we’ll all get to know one another today. You come over whenever you want.”
Charli looked quickly at Ray. That’s how things are in this family, she wanted to tell him. We go back and forth across the street whenever we want to. But Ray clearly hadn’t been listening. He was leaning back in his chair and looking at Uncle Will, his lips pursed tightly as if he could just barely suppress an ocean-sized flood of disapproval.
Chapter Six
SOPHIA’S JOURNAL
What’s worse than two tornadoes? This is no joke, so don’t try to figure out the punch line. The answer is four-year-old twins. I’ve moved around a lot, and I thought I was ready for anything, but Gene and Terry Crandall are something special. Or else it just seems that way after the quiet of my great-grandmother’s apartment.
I woke up to giggling, and for a moment I didn’t know where I was. Then I saw my suitcases and I remembered everything that had happened yesterday. While I was sorting it out, the door opened slowly, and a small blond head appeared, then another. They must have been shoving each other, because suddenly both kids tumbled into the room. When I sat up and said hi, they scrambled to their feet and backed out, still giggling. They sounded like a whole herd of horses on the uncarpeted stairs.
I dressed in a hurry and brushed my hair, standing at the window while I braided it again. This room looks out on a street of pleasant old houses, all pretty much the same except for the bright blue one across the street. There’s a stop sign at one end of the block, and the other end changes to gravel and curves into open fields. Lincoln Street must be on the edge of town.
While I stood there the front door banged, and Dan Crandall came out. He walked fast with his shoulders sort of hunched, as if he was in a big hurry to get away.
The twin tornadoes were pelting each other with Cheerios when I got to the kitchen, but the grown-ups ignored them. Will was studying some papers next to his coffee cup, and Lilly sat with their baby on her lap. Will looked rumpled and Lilly looked contented, which, I think now, is the way they pretty much are all the time.
Will said good morning and so did I, and then he went right back to his papers. I was glad, because I didn’t want to talk to him—I couldn’t. Lilly chattered a mile a minute while I ate toast and drank orange juice.
“Your baby’s beautiful,” I said when she stopped for breath, and her face glowed. I’m sure lots of people have told her that, because he really is beautiful. His name is Michael, or Mickey, in honor of Will’s father, but he has Lilly’s blue eyes and blond hair. He smiled across the table at me every minute or so, and then went back to watching the twins as if they were putting on a great show just for him.
When I finished my toast, Lilly came around the table and put Mickey on my lap. “He takes to some people quicker than others,” she said. What I love about babies is that you don’t have to pretend with them. They don’t care if you’re weird, as long as they think you mean well, which I do. I mean well.
Holding Mickey was the nicest thing that had happened to me in a long time. It felt so good that I said sure when Lilly asked if I’d mind taking care of him for a few minutes. She and Will had to go across the street to talk to Will’s sister Ro
na. We could sit out in the backyard, she said, and the twins could play in the sandbox.
I realized then that Gene and Terry were part of the baby-sitting package. They must have been as surprised as I was, because the Cheerios stopped flying and they stared as if they were seeing me for the first time.
It wasn’t too bad at first. Lilly went out to the sandbox with us and got the twins settled, digging a hole for a lake.
I sat across from them and helped Mickey spoon sand into a pail. The yard is the kind I like—beds of bright flowers, and toys scattered everywhere. Birds sang in the trees at the end of the yard, and Mickey made little chuckly sounds every time he managed to get a few grains of sand into the pail. Gene and Terry poured water from a sprinkling can into their lake.
And then the peace ended. “The water won’t stay!” Gene yelled, as if it was his brother’s fault. “I’ll get the hose.”
He started for the side of the house, but I jumped up, clutching Mickey under one arm and grabbing for Gene with the other. “The hose won’t help,” I said. “Sand won’t hold water.”
He yelled, “It will, too!” and pulled so hard that I almost stumbled over a battered blue plastic dishpan lying in the grass. I let go of Gene and handed the dishpan to Terry.
“Use that for a lake,” I told him. “Then the water won’t leak out.”
“Want the hose!” Gene yelled louder than ever, but he came back to the sandbox. Soon both boys were digging to make the pan fit.
I wished the Crandalls would finish up their business across the street in a hurry.
“Make some hills around the lake,” I suggested.
“Don’t want hills,” Gene said. “We need an island.” He scooped up two handfuls of sand and dropped them into the dishpan, turning the water to mud. Terry roared and hit him, Mickey started to scream, and Gene threw more sand into the water.
I felt like screaming, too, but I said, “Hey, that’s a swamp. I bet it’s full of snakes and alligators.”
The twins stared into the dishpan.
“And crocodiles!” Gene said with a really bloodthirsty grin. He picked up a toy soldier and plunged it into the mud.
“That was pretty smart,” a voice said behind me. “I never know what to do when they all start yelling at once.”
A girl stood there watching me, her eyes full of questions behind dark-rimmed glasses. She said, “My name is Charli Belland. I live across the street—I’m the cousin.”
I said hi and told her my name, which I could tell she already knew.
“Charli has a new dad,” Gene said, still staring into the swamp. “Now she has a mom and dad like everybody else.”
I said, “That’s nice. You’re lucky.”
Charli’s face got pink. “I guess,” she said, talking fast. “Ray’s okay even if he’s sort of bossy. I wanted to come over to meet you last night, and my mother would have let me, but he said no. He said you had enough to get used to without me hanging around. Well, he didn’t say those words, but it’s what he meant.”
She waited for me to say I wish she’d come, but I was thinking that this Ray must be a nice guy.
“I was pretty tired,” I told her. “I went to bed right away.”
“Well, Aunt Lilly and Uncle Will are very easy to get used to,” she went on, as if she was settling an argument. “And so is Dan. He’s sort of like my big brother. The little kids get wild sometimes, but you won’t have to take care of them much when we start working.”
I interrupted before she could race on to another subject. “Working? Where?”
She looked surprised. “At the Castle. Didn’t Uncle Will tell you about the Castle this morning? He just told my mom and Ray and me. Dan is really mad about it, but I’m not. I think it’s great. We’ll have fun.”
I must have looked as mixed up as I felt, because she took a deep breath and started over. “The Castle’s a big old house on Barker Street. Uncle Will is buying it for a bed-and-breakfast place.” She pointed toward the tangle of trees and underbrush at the end of the yard. “Go through that little woods and look across the field, and you can see it yourself. Everybody says it’s haunted, and when we work there we can find out for sure. We can be ghostbusters.”
“No way!” I said, so sharply that the twins stopped tossing their little toy trucks in the swamp and Mickey looked up at me in surprise.
All kinds of alarms were going off in my head. Was this why Lilly and Will had invited me to stay with them? So I could work for them?
“What’s wrong?” Charli asked. “Don’t you want to help Uncle Will? It would just be for a couple of hours every day.”
“I don’t know anything about a job,” I told her. “I just got here, remember. And I don’t believe in ghosts. That’s childish.”
She looked as if I’d slapped her. Writing all this down, I can see how cranky I sounded. I didn’t want to be like that, but I wanted her to stop talking. I didn’t want to be a ghostbuster—I just wanted all of them to stop pretending to be my friend so I would do what they wanted me to do.
“There are too ghosts,” Charli said. “I have a whole book about ghosts right here in Wisconsin.”
Gene said, “Hey, are you guys fighting?”
I told him no, but when I looked back at Charli I saw that we were. Well, I didn’t care. She has everything—a mother and a father and a home of her own. She’s probably lived on this street all her life, and she’s never had to worry about a thing. She made me sick.
“I probably won’t be here very long, anyway,” I told her. “As soon as my great-grandmother gets better, I’ll go back to Madison.”
It was a big relief when Lilly came around the side of the house. The twins raced to meet her and dragged her over to the sandbox so she could admire their swamp.
She said, “How nice that you girls are getting to know each other. You’ll have lots of good times this summer.” Then she said she was taking the three boys to town to buy shoes and we could come along if we wanted to.
Charli said, “I have to go home. I have stuff to do.” She hurried away without saying good-bye to anyone. I said I’d stay home, if that was okay with her.
“Of course, it’s okay,” she said. “You do whatever you want to. Will’s inside if you need anything.” She gathered up the boys and hustled them off into the house to wash the mud off their hands and faces and knees.
When they were gone I closed my eyes and took deep breaths. I did that a lot at my great-grandmother’s place. And I did it a lot those last weeks with the Wagners, when I knew they wanted me to leave but didn’t come right out and say it. Just breathe and stare at the inside of your eyelids and wait, until you don’t care anymore.
After a while I went down to the end of the yard. It wasn’t a real woods back there, just a band of trees and brush that extended across all the backyards on this side of the street. Someone had worn a narrow path through it and into a wide field of grass and thistles and wildflowers. There was a row of small houses on the other side of the field, and beyond them I could see a tall, peaked roof like a witch’s hat. Stretches of roof extended out on either side of it, and chimneys poked up here and there. The Castle.
It was funny looking, a joke of a house, but it made me uneasy just the same. If the Crandalls let me come to Mount Pleasant so I could work there, they made a mistake. I’m not going to do it, and nobody can make me. Not Will Crandall and not Lilly, and definitely not that spoiled kid from across the street.
Chapter Seven
CHARLI
Charli could hardly believe how much life had changed in the last few days. For one thing, her house seemed so crowded. Ray had come to dinner many times in the weeks and months before the wedding, and he had cut the grass and helped with other chores, but now he lived there. He and her mother talked and laughed until late at night, and the sound of his footsteps in the hall woke Charli each morning. By the time she got up, he had made coffee and poured orange juice and set the cereal boxes in a row on t
he table. Just as if he belongs here, she’d thought each morning, and then had to remind herself, He does, stupid!
Why was that so hard to get used to? And why did she feel as if Ray were constantly criticizing the way she looked and judging what she said? He wasn’t like that. He wasn’t mean. Yet whenever he teased her about watching too much television or eating too much ice cream, she felt hurt.
Once, she would have gone across the street to talk to Aunt Lilly about it, but not now. That part of her life had changed, too. Sophia Weyer was living in the Crandalls’ house now, helping Aunt Lilly in the kitchen or playing with the little boys. Charli couldn’t talk to Aunt Lilly about Ray with Sophia there listening, deciding what was childish and what wasn’t.
“There must be something you can do to keep yourself busy,” Ray had said this morning. “Call up a friend, Charli. Go for a bike ride.”
There was no one, Charli had told him, feeling more pitiful by the minute. Her best friend, Heather, was at camp, and her second-best friend, Carissa, was spending the summer with her grandmother in Green Bay.
“Then why not go over and help your aunt?” he suggested, sounding impatient. “Goodness knows she can use it.”
“She doesn’t need me. She has Sophia,” Charli mumbled and was immediately sorry. Ray sighed, picked up the newspaper, and ignored her until Rona was ready for work. Then they went off together, and Charli was left to spend another morning reading under the crab apple tree in the backyard until she fell asleep.
“Man, some people are lucky!” The voice was so close that she woke with a little scream. “What a life!” Dan said. “It must be great to lie around while everyone else is slaving.”
Charli scowled up at her cousin. He smelled like hamburgers even before he went to work, and today there were tight little worry lines in his forehead.
“I’m going to have a job pretty soon, too,” she retorted. “Uncle Will wants me to help him fix up the Castle. I’m resting so I’ll be ready.”
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