Ghosts of Rathburn Park

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  “Wow.” Matt was feeling amazed and shocked. Definitely shocked. “If people thought he’d started the fire, why did they just let him stay here in the church? Why didn’t he get put in jail?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because they couldn’t prove it. And after he’d lived here for so many years all by himself I guess they must have started feeling sorry for him. Some people in the town even had a tombstone made for his grave when he died.”

  Shaking his head in amazement, Matt went back to looking around the miserable little room. His eyes stopped at the trunk and he went back to look at it more closely. The padlock that held it shut looked newer and shinier than the trunk itself and, for that matter, newer than anything else in the whole room.

  He was kneeling down, running his fingers over the lock, when Amelia said, “Come on. You still haven’t seen the tombstone the town made for Old Tom. Let’s go!” Grabbing his shirt again, she pulled him to his feet.

  Suddenly Matt was tired of being jerked around. He felt like telling her so, and he probably would have if she hadn’t been pulling so hard on the back of his shirt that it was about to strangle him. By the time he got his breath and voice back she was out the door and there was nothing to do but follow.

  Unlike what remained of the old town of Rathburn, the graveyard seemed to be pretty well maintained. At least the grass seemed to have been mowed fairly recently, and there were wilted bouquets on some of the graves. When he asked Amelia why that was, she said, “Well, sure. That’s because the graveyard and the park belong to the town, and all the rest of it still belongs to the Rathburns. And they won’t…” She paused a moment and then went on, “And we won’t let anybody change anything. Not ever. Not anything. Rathburns want everything to be the way it always was. Get it?”

  Matt said he got it and went on following Amelia as she passed up all the well-tended plots and dropped to her knees in a weed-grown corner. Pushing the weeds away from a moss-covered slab of stone, she whispered, “Look.” She was pointing to the words that were carved into the stone. “See. It says here ‘Thomas A. McHenry. Born 1881. Died 1949.’ That’s him. That’s Old Tom.”

  A shiver crawled up the back of Matt’s neck. He guessed Amelia was right about who was buried there, but as far as he could tell, it was almost impossible to read the moss-covered letters. He was moving closer when his knee bumped something under a tangle of undergrowth. Pushing aside the weeds and vines, he uncovered what seemed to be a much smaller gravestone. “Hey,” he said. “Here’s another one. Who’s buried here?”

  Amelia crawled over to look. “I don’t know,” she said. “What does it say?”

  The smaller gravestone was chipped and stained and covered with greenish moss. There were parts of letters, but it was hard to tell what they had once said. As Matt scratched at the moss with his fingernails, he was beginning to imagine the person who was buried there. A child, perhaps, under such a small stone, or even a baby. A baby—Old Tom’s, perhaps? Another mystery, it seemed.

  Suddenly Amelia stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  Matt got to his feet slowly. “Where? Where are we going now?”

  No answer, but as Amelia led the way back across the parking lot Matt began to catch on. Began to think he knew where they were going—and also why. Sure enough, the “where” turned out to be the old church—and the “why” was…

  “I want to ride the bike again,” Amelia said. “Just for a few minutes.”

  “Well.” Matt was thinking about saying no, just to see what would happen, but then he had an interesting idea. “How about if we make a little deal?”

  Amelia’s “What kind of deal?” sounded suspicious.

  “You get to ride my bike if first off I get to ask you one question, and you have to promise to answer it. Okay?”

  That took some thinking about, some narrow-eyed, tight-lipped thinking. But at last she opened her eyes wide and nodded. So Matt looked into those wide eyes and asked again, “Who is Dolly?”

  No answer. At least none for so long that Matt was sure there wasn’t going to be one. But at last Amelia began to nod slowly and thoughtfully. “I told you,” she said. “There isn’t anyone named Dolly.” She stopped talking, thought for a moment, and then went on, “No person anyway. Dolly is just a ghost.”

  Matt had seen that kind of superinnocent look before and his experience had been that when Courtney, and other female types, opened their eyes especially wide they were usually trying to fool somebody. So while Amelia rode his bicycle around the parking lot, Matt could only wonder what she was trying to fool him about, and why.

  Thirteen

  THE TITLE OF THE book was Timber City, Phoenix of the Northwest, and the author’s name was Oscar Harrington. It was only a dog-eared, discolored paperback, but when Matt asked for something about the history of the town the librarian knew just where to find it. The librarian, whose name was Mrs. Keeler, also remembered meeting Matt when he’d been in to sign up for a library card. “You’re new in town, aren’t you?” she said. And when he said he was, she said, “And you’re already reading up on the history of your new hometown. I think that’s wonderful.” She went on chatting then, asking him how he liked living in Timber City.

  That was when Matt started telling her that he’d already found out a lot of interesting things about the history of Timber City, and how he’d always been interested in historical people and places. But he’d hardly gotten started about the Alamo when she said she hoped he’d be very happy in his new home, and went back to working on the computer.

  It turned out that the book couldn’t be checked out except by adults, so Matt sat down at a table near Mrs. Keeler’s desk and started to read. When she seemed to be finished with the computer, he went back to tell her that Phoenix was actually the capital of Arizona, and he wondered why Mr. Oscar Harrington, the author, had called Timber City the Phoenix of the Northwest. That was when she told him a lot of interesting stuff about how the phoenix was a mythical bird that got burned up and then rose alive from its own ashes. Mrs. Keeler said that was what Timber City had done after the great fire and that Matt could find out all about it by reading the rest of Mr. Harrington’s book.

  Matt sat down again and went back to reading. The book started out with a lot of chapters about how the first Albert Rathburn had come to California during the gold rush and then moved north and used the gold he’d found to buy timberland. Matt skimmed over a lot of pages about how successful Mr. Rathburn had been and how the original town had grown up right around his lumber mill. There was, however, one sentence in that part of the book that really got his attention. And that was the one that said that Albert Rathburn had married Amelia Dutton in 1861.

  Amelia. Certainly not the bicycle rider, and not even the old lady he’d heard about who was almost one hundred years old and was still living in the Palace. It didn’t take much mathematical ability to figure out that any Amelia who got married in 1861 wasn’t in the Palace any longer. At least not living in it.

  Then there was a short chapter called “The Rathburn Palace.” It started out by explaining how people had started calling it the Palace because it was so much bigger than any house most of the local people had ever seen. After that there was a long section about the kinds of wood that had been used to build it, and all the workers who came from foreign countries to carve the wood and make things like statues and stained-glass windows.

  Matt skimmed over some of the details about the Palace, but he started reading more carefully when he came to a chapter about the fire. But all it said was that a fire had started on a very hot, windy day in 1928 and the entire town of Rathburn had burned down. And that was about all, except that the town was rebuilt a few miles away and its name was changed to Timber City.

  At the end of the book it said that the Rathburn family still owned the land where the old town had been, except for a few acres that they’d donated to the city for a graveyard and a public park. Th
ere wasn’t any mention of a man called Old Tom, or Thomas McHenry, either.

  Matt was disappointed. When Mrs. Keeler asked him how he’d liked the book he said it was okay, but…And when she asked, “But…?” he said, “There wasn’t anything in it about a person called Old Tom.”

  “Oh, you’ve heard about Old Tom already?” Mrs. Keeler was smiling. “Everyone seems to sooner or later. Everyone talks about Old Tom, but I guess he wasn’t the kind of person who gets written about by serious historians like Mr. Harrington.”

  “Everybody knows about him?” Matt asked.

  “Well, maybe not all the new people in town,” Mrs. Keeler said. “After all, he’s been dead for more than fifty years. But the old-timers certainly remember him. He was a foreman at the old Rathburn lumber mill, you know.”

  “Yes, I heard that,” Matt said. “And that some people blamed him for the fire. The one that burned down the whole town. Like they thought he started it or something. Why did they think he’d do something like that?”

  Mrs. Keeler had to go away then to check out some books, but when she returned she said that nobody really knew how the fire started, but a strike had been going on and there were a lot of hard feelings on both sides.

  “A strike?” Matt asked.

  “Yes, an argument between the Rathburns and the millworkers and lumberjacks. There was a man named Jansen who was a union organizer, and some people thought it was his fault the strike was happening, and then the fire started at his house. And because Tom McHenry worked for the Rathburns, there were rumors that the Rathburns had told him to set fire to Mr. Jansen’s house to make him leave town. But then, while the Jansen house was still burning, a terrible windstorm blew up and the fire spread and kept on spreading and eventually the whole town burned.”

  “Wow,” Matt said. “Do you think he did it? Old Tom, I mean? Did you think he was the kind of person who would do a thing like that?”

  Mrs. Keeler smiled. “I’m not quite old enough to remember much about Old Tom. He died when I was hardly more than a baby.” Her smile faded into a hazy, daydreamy expression. “I do remember Rover, though. I must have been almost your age when Rover died.”

  “Rover?” Matt didn’t have any idea what Mrs. Keeler was talking about, but right that very minute, the minute he heard the name Rover for the first time, he had a kind of premonition that he was about to find out something very important.

  “Yes. I guess you didn’t hear about Old Tom’s dog,” Mrs. Keeler was saying. “He lived for quite a few years after his master died. At the time everyone in town knew Rover. Lots of people fed him when he came into town, but after he ate he always disappeared.”

  “Wow,” Matt whispered as the shadowy beginnings of some weird ideas started forming in the corners of his mind. “He just disappeared?”

  Just about then an impatient-type man came up to the desk and Mrs. Keeler went off to help him look for a book. She was gone quite a long time and while she was away, Matt just stood there leaning on the desk and staring into space while he thought about dogs that disappeared. Like, for instance, the small, bushy-haired dog that rescued him from the forest and then—just disappeared.

  As soon as Mrs. Keeler came back, he started trying to ask about the dog, but other people kept interrupting. He was getting pretty impatient himself by the time he finally got her attention, and when he said, “Mrs. Keeler. How did the dog disappear?” she said, “Dear me, Matthew. Don’t shout.”

  So he said he was sorry, and after she finally had a chance to listen to his question Mrs. Keeler laughed and said, “I didn’t mean that he just disappeared into thin air. I only meant that he insisted on going back to wherever he’d been living. A lot of people felt sorry for him and would have given him a home, but he just wouldn’t stay. The rumor was that he went back to sleep on his master’s grave, but I knew some young men who said they’d gone to the graveyard to look and he wasn’t there.”

  Matt nodded. “He wasn’t there,” he repeated. “Not there on Old Tom’s grave, because he…”

  “Yes?” Mrs. Keeler asked.

  Matt shrugged. “I don’t know,” he mumbled, but he did have a pretty good idea. A mental picture, actually. An extremely clear and vivid picture of Rover sitting beside the cot in Old Tom’s cabin. Sitting there with his chin resting on the edge of an empty bed. The picture was amazingly clear and full of detail and for some reason thinking about it made his eyes get hot and gave him a tight feeling in his throat.

  Mrs. Keeler went off then to take care of a little girl who was checking out a lot of picture books and it wasn’t until quite a while later that Matt had a chance to ask, “But what finally happened to Rover?” Because of the tightness in his throat the words came out a little raspy. “Did he just die out there in Old Tom’s…wherever it was he went?”

  She shook her head slowly. “Let me think. It happened such a long time ago.” After a moment she went on, “I remember now. He died right here in town. One day he came into town as usual and lay down on the sidewalk and died. And a group of his special admirers took him out and buried him near his master’s grave. At the time it was quite a well-known local event.”

  Her eyes had gone hazy again as she continued on, “Oh yes, and some children took up a collection to buy a little tombstone for his grave. I’d almost forgotten about that.”

  Mrs. Keeler got busy then with other people and Matt went out, climbed on his bicycle and headed for home. He went on thinking and wondering about all of it—about Amelia and the Palace and Old Tom, and about the little gravestone next to where Old Tom was buried that must have been Rover’s. And most of all about the strangely clear and detailed mental picture that kept coming back every time he thought about what had happened to the dog named Rover after his master died.

  On Saturday after he finished his chores, Matt got permission to go for a ride before he was even certain just where he was going. What he really wanted to do was visit Old Tom’s cabin, but he knew that would be impossible on the weekend when Rathburn Park was sure to be full of ball games and picnickers. Not to mention the fact that he’d promised Amelia he wouldn’t go there by himself.

  So he wound up at the library again, which turned out to be wasted effort because Mrs. Keeler wasn’t there. On his way home he took a different route. One that went right past the Timber City middle school.

  The building itself looked a lot different from the middle school back in Six Palms. Ivy-covered wooden walls, for instance, instead of palm trees and adobe. But did that mean it would be any different for Matthew Hamilton? Would he still be the last one to get chosen for teams and classroom committees, for instance? And the first one to be chosen when the jocks were looking for someone to push around and make fun of?

  While he was standing there leaning on his bike, something, maybe the nice, cool summer weather as compared to summers in Six Palms, made him start imagining that maybe there would be some differences besides the weather. Differences like a few people who didn’t care whether a guy was a red-hot athlete—or not. For a moment he let himself go so far as to imagine a Timber City Matthew Hamilton who got elected to class offices, and who could talk to the most popular girls without getting twitchy and tongue-tied. He went on imagining the heroic new Matthew Hamilton for several minutes before he sighed and said, “Fat chance,” right out loud, got back on his bike and headed for home.

  As he pedaled toward home, he was still in the midst of some fairly gloomy thoughts about school when he passed the turn-off to Rathburn Park. Passed the road that led to the park and also to Old Tom’s cabin, and there it was again, the mysteriously sharp and clear image of a sad-faced dog sitting by an empty bed. And right then, pedaling along Birch Street, he suddenly remembered where he’d seen that picture before.

  Fourteen

  WHAT HIT MATT RIGHT between the eyes on his way home from the middle school that Saturday was a memory that explained the mental picture he’d been seeing every time he thought about Rover
and Old Tom. Instead of an imagined image, he’d actually been remembering a real picture, an oil painting in a beautiful gold frame that he’d seen somewhere…And then he knew. It had been in Mrs. McDougall’s house, back in Six Palms.

  Nearly every picture in Mrs. McDougall’s house had dogs in it. But this one was in an especially fancy frame and it showed a dog sitting beside an empty bed in a small, messy room. The dog’s chin was resting on the edge of the bed and its face was very sad. Mrs. McDougall said it was a copy of a famous painting of a dog grieving for its dead master.

  Remembering that painting was fascinating. So fascinating, in fact, that for several minutes Matt had a hard time keeping his mind on what he was doing, or even where he was going. He turned right instead of left on Woodland and then went right through the stop sign on Sierra Avenue without even seeing it. It didn’t quite cause an accident, but a big lumber truck really blasted him with its horn.

  So Saturday turned out to be a nothing sort of day, except for remembering Mrs. McDougall’s painting, and almost getting run over by a lumber truck. And then came Sunday and church. The Hamiltons went to church most Sundays, which, during the summer when there was no youth service, meant sitting through the whole thing, including the sermon. But on that particular Sunday, the only Hamilton kids present were Courtney and Matt himself. No Justin.

  Afterward, when Matt asked where Justin had been, Dad only shook his head and said Justin was at home. Then he patted Matt on the shoulder and said he’d tell him about it later. He was smiling when he said it, but there was something about the smile that didn’t look quite normal.

  Matt spent most of the afternoon in his own room writing a letter to Mrs. McDougall. He’d been meaning to write to her before to ask how she was, and how Shadow and the other dogs were doing, but remembering about the painting really got him started. Once he began to write, he got into telling about Rathburn and the man who lived in a shack in the ruins of an old church and how his dog, whose name was Rover, went on living there, all alone after his master died. He finished the letter by writing, “When I heard about Rover I started thinking about that picture in your front room. The one about the dog whose master was dead. I don’t know what Rover looked like, but I sort of imagine him looking like the dog in your painting.”