Crandalls' Castle

by Betty Ren Wright

  I concentrated on the windows, which were really dirty. The windows in my great-grandmother’s apartment never had a chance to get dirty—she washed them every single Saturday. Once, when I could tell she was feeling sick, I offered to do them for her, and she let me. When I finished, they looked exactly the way they had when I started.

  Washing the Castle windows was a lot more satisfying. As I wiped away the dust, it was like lifting a curtain. The sky got bluer, and the grass across the street looked greener. I picked out Jake in the bunch of kids playing kickball in the street, and I could see chickadees fluttering around a feeder between two of the little houses.

  At least, I could for a while. Then the light began to change. Oh, I could still see the birds and the kids all right, but not as clearly. And the sky was gray blue, then all gray. The view began to fade as if the sun was setting—at ten o’clock in the morning.

  Charli said something, or maybe it was just a groan. I supposed she was seeing the same thing I was. “Storm’s coming,” I said, but I thought there had to be some other reason for the darkness. The trees weren’t blowing. The kids in the street didn’t stop playing to look up at the sky. The darkness came from inside the house, or inside our heads. It was as if a blanket had dropped over the Castle.

  I stepped backward and bumped into the bucket, sloshing water across the floor. If Charli heard, she didn’t even look in my direction. I could just make her out, standing like a statue in front of the window. I said, “Hey, are you okay?” I started toward her, and it was like walking through curtains of cobwebs. That, and the way she stood there, so still, scared me worse than the darkness.

  When I was almost next to her, she whispered, “Go away—go away!” It made me mad for a second or two, until I realized she wasn’t talking to me. She was talking to the window!

  Chapter Sixteen

  CHARLI

  Charli stared at the thing in the window. It was a dark, shifting shape, about her own height, partly hidden by swirls of fog. And it was coming closer. There was no face, but when the shape flattened itself against the glass, she could feel its rage. The washrag slipped from her fingers as she ran.

  Outside, the sun shone on Barker Street. The sky was a brilliant blue, without a trace of menacing gray. Charli darted through the ball game, ignoring the players, and kept going. She didn’t slow down until she reached the front door of her bright blue house.

  She pushed her key into the lock with trembling fingers and stumbled inside. No one was home, and the deadbolt on the door wasn’t enough to make her feel safe. She ran down the hall to the bathroom and locked that door behind her, too.

  Sunlight streamed through the window, filling the bathroom with warmth. She took deep breaths and looked around, grateful for familiar sights: her toothbrush in its rack, her mother’s silver comb, the big bottle of bubble bath they had bought on sale at the drugstore. Ray’s blue bathrobe hung behind the door.

  Surely that thing, whatever it had been, couldn’t follow her here. Still, the memory of the terrifying figure in the glass loomed so vividly in her head she thought she might be sick.

  How could Uncle Will imagine guests would want to stay in a haunted house? If they tried it once, they would never come back. And they would tell all their friends to stay away—she had to make him believe that. Maybe her mother and Ray could help her convince him.…

  No, not Ray. He hadn’t listened before, when she tried to describe what she and Dan had heard upstairs in the Castle. Why would he listen now? He’d get angry. He’d be disappointed in her. Just when things were beginning to get better between them!

  Think about that, she told herself. Think about the three afternoons this week when she and Ray had ridden their bikes to the lake as soon as he got home from work. The swimming lessons had turned out to be more fun than she’d expected. First she’d practiced floating on her back, not just for seconds but for long minutes, until she’d learned to relax and trust the water to hold her up. Then she started on a simple stroke, trying to move her arms and legs and lift her head out of the water in a steady rhythm.

  It was hard work, but gradually she had begun to enjoy herself. She was a big nothing in sports at school, but with Ray’s help swimming might be different. She could actually feel herself getting good at it. After the third lesson, Ray had told her she was a natural—a star pupil.

  So how could the star pupil say she believed in ghosts and had seen one and never wanted to go near Crandalls’ Castle again? For the first time she wondered about Sophia, who had been there when the ghost appeared. Had she seen it, too? If she had, maybe she would tell Ray. He might believe her.

  She stood up and looked at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her face was splotchy and her hair was limp with sweat. She felt hot but shivery at the same time.

  “I really am sick,” she told the mirror. “I’m too sick to work.”

  Being sick meant chicken soup and crackers in bed, instead of pork chops and mashed potatoes in the kitchen. It meant having your temperature taken and swallowing two oversized vitamin C capsules. It meant milk and buttered toast for breakfast instead of waffles with syrup, and, since she had finished all this week’s library books, it meant being stuck with nothing new to read.

  On the good side, it meant that her mother and Ray fussed over her, stopping at her bedroom door often to ask how she was feeling. It meant a whole plate of Aunt Lilly’s chocolate chip cookies, in case she began to recover. Being sick meant having Uncle Will sit on the edge of the bed and tell her funny stories. It even meant having Sophia come to visit. She and Lilly appeared the next afternoon with flowers from the Crandalls’ backyard and a dish of cinnamon-flavored custard.

  “I can’t stay,” Aunt Lilly said. “I left the boys out on your porch, because Gene has the sniffles. We don’t want to add a cold to your problems, dear.” She gave Charli a kiss on the top of her head and hurried out, leaving the two girls in an uncomfortable silence.

  “Sorry you’re sick,” Sophia said, finally. “You should have said something yesterday.”

  So that was how it was going to be. If she’d seen anything frightening at the Castle, she wasn’t going to say so.

  “I felt funny,” Charli mumbled. “You know, like I might faint. Everything was getting dark so I … Did you stay all morning? Did you see how dark it got?”

  Sophia ignored the last question. “I told Will you’d left, and he said I should go, too. The leak in the pipe is much worse than he thought, and he’s going to have to talk to a man at the hardware store about how to fix it. Or maybe get a plumber. He thinks all the pipes might have to be replaced.”

  “That’s awful!” Charli exclaimed. “That would cost a ton of money.” She thought of Uncle Will, trying to make her feel better last night and keeping this big worry to himself.

  “Will said to give you this,” Sophia said. “He said you wanted something to read.”

  Charli groaned. The book was the autobiography of William Herndon that Uncle Will had been carrying around in his truck.

  “I’d rather read about kings and queens and movie stars.” She hesitated, feeling childish again under Sophia’s cool gaze. “Have you read it?”

  Sophia shook her head. “Not yet. I forgot about it.”

  “You can have it first,” Charli offered, but Sophia was already starting for the door.

  “Maybe later,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m going to take care of the kids this afternoon while Lilly makes new curtains for the catchall room.”

  “You mean your bedroom,” Charli said, but Sophia had already gone.

  The book was called The Story of a Life. Couldn’t William Herndon have thought up a more exciting title? Charli thought, bored already. If he was smart enough to become governor, he should have been able to do better than that. Yawning, she opened the book to the first page.

  My life almost ended soon after it began.

  She sat up straighter, startled by this unexpected first sentence
.

  To the eyes of others, I must have seemed a most fortunate child, and in many ways I was. My father was wealthy, and we lived in the largest house in the town of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. But there was a dangerous situation in our household of which my parents were unaware. My mother’s younger sister Jennifer had moved in with them after she was left an orphan. She imagined herself in love with my father. He had courted her briefly before asking Dorothy, my mother, to marry him.

  The three lived together in outward peace for two years, without any indication that my aunt was jealous, bitterly resentful, and becoming increasingly unstable. She believed people gossiped about her and pitied her, and perhaps she was right. Small towns can be cruel. Perhaps she dreamed that one day my father would realize he had married the wrong sister. After I was born, however, that secret hope died. According to all accounts, my mother and father were happier and more in love than ever.

  When I was two years old, my parents invited friends for a Fourth of July picnic in our backyard, followed by fireworks. Nobody noticed Jennifer slip away as the fireworks began. I was upstairs asleep, but fortunately my mother decided to carry me outside to see the bright colors. When she reached the nursery, she saw an incredible sight. Jennifer was holding something—a pillow or a blanket—over my face. If my mother hadn’t arrived when she did, I would certainly have suffocated. Jennifer shrieked in rage and attacked my mother viciously. She never spoke a sane word again.

  I didn’t hear this story until I was in my teens, and even then my mother couldn’t tell it without crying. For nearly a year Jennifer was confined to a back bedroom, with nurses to care for her day and night. My mother said they could hear her sobbing for hours at a time, and, chillingly, she often begged to have the “dear baby” brought to her so she could hold it. When she died, it must have been a relief to everyone.

  “We didn’t dare let her near you,” my mother told me with tears in her eyes.

  Soon after Jennifer’s death, my parents, eager to escape painful memories, sold the house and moved to Appleton, where I grew up and they lived to celebrate their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary.

  Charli couldn’t eat the soup her mother brought in for supper, and she turned down Ray’s offer to drive into town for ice cream.

  “Maybe you should see the doctor,” Rona said anxiously. “It scares me when you turn down ice cream, Charli. What are we going to do with you?”

  “I’ll be okay,” Charli said.

  “Sure you will,” Ray agreed. “You’ll be fine.”

  She could tell by the way he looked at her that he had begun to suspect she wasn’t really sick. But he’s wrong, she thought miserably. If she’d been halfway pretending before, she wasn’t now. Her head throbbed and her stomach churned every time she thought about the madwoman who had tried to kill little William Herndon and had died in a back bedroom of the Castle.

  Chapter Seventeen

  SOPHIA’S JOURNAL

  Today started off well enough—very well, actually. The twins and Mickey and I went to the beach, which is something I wouldn’t have thought of doing a few weeks ago. I know the kids now, and they know me. Terry is the twin who thinks up exciting things to do, and Gene is the one who does them—and gets into trouble. If you keep Terry busy and safe, Gene will be okay. Today they decided to build a whole city of sand—houses and walls, even a park.

  Mickey and I gathered twigs to make trees in the park. Mickey is the best little kid in the world, always smiling and just thrilled when his brothers don’t shoo him away from what they’re doing. If I ever have a baby, I want him to be just like Mickey.

  When we went home about three-thirty, Charli was sitting on the Franzes’ front steps with Lilly. Lilly called, “Look! Charli’s feeling better! I made her come out to soak up some sun.” Then she pointed up at my bedroom windows so I would see the new curtains.

  I crossed the street, thinking I’d sit with them for a while, but I could feel Charli hoping I wouldn’t. So I plopped Mickey on the grass in front of them and left Terry and Gene to brag about all their good work at the beach.

  The curtains are beautiful. Lilly made them from a bedsheet and added wide blue ribbon tie-backs, the same shade as the blue in her mother’s quilt. I sat on the bed and admired them, and then I put on my running shoes. A good long run sounded like the right end to the day.

  I slipped out the back door and through the trees at the end of the yard, then along the field to the curve where Lincoln Street turns into a gravel road. There was no one else around as I started to run, and when I reached Barker Street, it was empty, too. Will’s truck and a plumber’s van were in front of the Castle, but the kids who usually hang out in the street weren’t there today.

  I ran one more block and then turned toward the lake road, where I’d walked with the boys earlier. The sun was bright, and the breeze off the lake was just starting to turn cool. I just about flew! It was perfect—that moment at the top of the roller coaster ride just before the car starts hurtling down.

  At the end of the beach there’s a sort of breakwater made of boulders and big chunks of concrete. I slowed down and looked out over the lake. It was ridged with tiny glittering ripples, and there was a row of sailboats bobbing along like toys. I sat on a rock, thinking about nothing except how lucky I was to be there. And then, so quickly I couldn’t believe it, the happy feeling began to fade. The lake was still there, and the sun and the boats, but I wasn’t. I was in St. Joseph’s Hospital in Madison. I saw green walls and the high, white bed, and I saw my great-grandmother lying gray-faced and still. She looked almost the way she’d looked the last time I saw her—but different, too. I closed my eyes and waited. When I opened them, I was back on the breakwater, with the lake and the sand and the sun. A gull landed a few feet away. He must have thought I’d stopped for lunch, because he walked stiff-legged in front of me, searching for crumbs.

  I slid off the rock and started to run back the way I’d come. All I could think of was that I had to get home to the Crandalls as fast as possible. I wanted their talk and their jokes and their crazy games to crowd out what I’d just seen. I wanted to hug Mickey and hear him laugh. I imagined the kitchen full of late-afternoon light and good smells, with Lilly at the stove and the baby in his high chair.

  I was concentrating so hard that I almost bumped into Charli halfway up the beach. She was at the edge of the road, just standing there, and when I got close enough I could see her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying.

  “Lilly sent me,” she said. “She wants you to come home right away.”

  “That’s what I’m doing,” I snapped. I really hated her right then—she doesn’t have a clue how lucky she is. “Why are you crying?” I said, mean as poison. “It’s not your great-grandmother who’s dead.”

  As soon as the words were out, I knew what I’d done, but it was too late. Her eyes got huge behind her glasses.

  “How’d you know?” she asked. “Somebody just called Lilly from Madison a few minutes ago. How’d you know?”

  I didn’t answer. I couldn’t. We stared at each other for what seemed like a long time, and finally she said, “Go ahead and run if you want to.”

  I ran, glad to get away. When I turned off the lake road I glanced back and she was still standing there, staring out at the water. Probably wondering whom she should tell first about weird Sophia.

  Chapter Eighteen

  SOPHIA’S JOURNAL

  Lilly was on the phone making plans when I got back to the house. She threw her arms around me and told me how sorry she was about my loss. Then she said she realized I’d want to go to the funeral, and I didn’t have to worry because she and I would go to Madison together.

  “Charli can come with us if she wants to,” she said. “It would do her good to get away for a day. I just talked to Mary Kramer down the street, and she’ll watch the boys while Dan is at work.”

  That was two days ago, and until we left this morning I kept trying to get up the nerv
e to tell her I didn’t want to go. What’s the point? My great-grandmother won’t know I’m there, and if she did know she wouldn’t care. I was just a stranger she’d had to look out for.

  In the end I didn’t say it, because Lilly is my ideal person. She’s kind and good and she loves everyone. If she knew what I’m like inside, she’d be shocked.

  The Franzes let us take their car so we wouldn’t have to take the bus to Madison. I hoped Charli would stay home, but no luck. When we went outside, there she was, sitting cross-legged in the backseat, waiting. I said hi, but I didn’t look at her. I was sure she was waiting for a chance to ask again how I knew my great-grandmother was dead before anyone told me.

  It’s a good thing Lilly likes to talk—I don’t think she even noticed how quiet her passengers were. She talked about the weather and Dan’s job and how hard Will was working at the Castle, and how the twins were growing so fast she’d have to buy them new clothes to start kindergarten. She didn’t mention the funeral once, so there were minutes at a time when I could pretend this was just a little holiday trip on a pretty summer day. Then I’d feel Charli’s eyes boring into the back of my head, and it stopped being a holiday.

  I’d never been to a funeral before, not even my mom’s. I guess whoever was taking care of me then decided I was too young. My great-grandmother’s service was in a big old funeral home that smelled of disinfectant. We sat in a row, Lilly and Charli and me, in front of the closed-up casket, while an organ played in another room and the funeral director read from the Bible and said some prayers. Lilly squeezed my hand and wiped her eyes once or twice, and I felt bad because I didn’t feel bad, if you know what I mean. I know my great-grandmother couldn’t help the way she was, but I can’t pretend I’ll miss her. Not even to satisfy Lilly.

  When the service was over, I turned around and there—sitting right behind us—was Rita, the social worker from St. Joseph’s Hospital. That scared me! Until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that my great-grandmother’s death would make a difference in whether I stayed or didn’t stay with the Crandalls. But when I saw Rita, I knew it made a big difference. Social workers have rules for everything. She had asked Lilly if I could stay in Mount Pleasant while my great-grandmother was in the hospital. Now that she’s dead, I’ll have to go back to Sacramento.