Ghosts of Rathburn Park

by Zilpha Keatley Snyder

  Feeling almost shriveled with embarrassment, Matt pictured himself trying to make Amelia understand how it had happened. “Well,” he imagined himself saying, “when I wrote the note, I hadn’t gone inside yet and I wasn’t planning to, but then I couldn’t find a good place to leave the note where you’d be sure to find it and so I kind of…”

  He couldn’t help wondering how far he’d be able to get with that explanation before Amelia would quit listening and start throwing punches. He was wincing, wondering where she’d hit him, when he began to hear something that turned embarrassment into fear. What he suddenly heard was a deep, raspy voice that seemed to be coming from—only a few feet away. Filtering out from among the tangle of vine-draped saplings in the nave of the church, it was saying, “All right, you stupid kid. Now you’re going to get it.”

  Matt was terrified. But even as he backed away, dragging his bicycle, stumbling over it and going down on one knee, he began to notice some changes in the weird voice. Some raspy squeaks that were beginning to make it sound more like the voice of—a kid. Maybe even the voice of a female kid.

  He had dropped the bike and was inching his way back down the trail when suddenly an absolutely amazing apparition appeared in the entryway. Framed in the archway, a short, bulky figure was stomping its feet and waving its arms in a threatening manner. Not tall, but broad-shouldered and thick-chested, the strange creature was dressed in a long dusty black coat and a tall black hat. There wasn’t much face showing below the hat, but what little there was was black too. At least streaked and smeared with black. Matt’s gasp at the suddenness of its appearance quickly turned into a snort of laughter.

  “All right, Amelia,” he managed to say. “You can knock it off. I know it’s you.”

  It was Amelia, all right, dressed in a huge black coat and a stovepipe hat, both of which looked like something from another century. For a moment longer she went on waving her arms and making strange noises, while Matt went on trying not to laugh. Finally she jerked the hat off her head and threw it down fiercely, and began to struggle out of the coat, while strands of hair straggled down around her ears and sooty rivers of sweat trickled down her blackened face.

  “Hot,” she was muttering. “Hot. I’m dying.”

  Matt watched in amazement while the coat was followed by several other layers of clothing, all of which seemed to be stuffed full of padding of various sorts. What seemed to be the ragged remains of towels and shawls and shirts and sweaters piled up around her, until she was finally down to a sleeveless white cotton shirt that hung to her knees. Wiping her face with both hands before she put them on her hips, she gave Matt a dangerous, three-alarm glare.

  Matt stepped quickly back out of reach before he struggled to erase his grin and started to ask, “What—why—” Then he settled for “Where in the world did you get all that stuff?” He stooped to pick up the tall hat. Turning it from side to side and gently dusting it off, he said, “Wow. I’ll bet this hat is a hundred years old at least.”

  Amelia breathed heavily a few more times before her frown began to relax. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “The attic is full of stuff like that.”

  “Really?” Matt said. Thinking about the kinds of things you might find in the attic of an ancient place like the Palace was pretty exciting. It wasn’t hard to imagine what it would be like to explore a huge room packed full of all that antique stuff, and the imagining was making him forget to worry about what Amelia might do next. Picking up the coat, he examined it carefully, running his fingers over the high collar, the braided trim and the soft satiny lining. “Wow,” he said again. “May I try it on?”

  Amelia shrugged angrily and the sizzle between her teeth gradually became words. “Help yourself,” she sizzled. “Go on. Put it on. The heat will kill you. I hope it does.”

  Matt put the coat on. It was hot, all right, and way too big. The man it had been made for must have had a huge barrel chest and long thick arms. “Doesn’t exactly fit, does it?” he said.

  “I know,” she said. “That’s why I had to have all that padding.”

  Matt took the coat off and folded it carefully while Amelia watched intently. When he’d finished folding he said, “Thanks,” and smiled, but she only went on glaring. Feeling embarrassed, he turned away, and then glanced back—at her dirty face. “And that”—he gestured—“on your face?”

  “It’s charcoal,” she said. Using the tail of her shirt, she wiped her face hard, rearranging the black smears a little but not getting rid of much of it. “I wanted to make a fake beard. I thought maybe I could find an old wig or something to make into a beard, but I couldn’t find anything. So I drew it on with charcoal. It looked all right at first, but I probably sweated most of it off. I’ll bet you wouldn’t have recognized me if I’d been able to make a beard out of real hair.”

  Trying not to laugh, Matt nodded solemnly. “Maybe not,” he said. Noticing that Amelia’s frown was changing back to red alert, he edged away a little before he started to say, “Look, I’m sorry I—”

  “Sorry,” she practically shouted. “No you’re not. Not sorry enough, anyway. Not enough for doing exactly what you promised you wouldn’t do. And then writing a note that lied about it.”

  Matt nodded. “About the note,” he said. “The note and the P.S.” He waited a minute and then said it again. “About that P.S. If you’d just listen a minute, I could explain about the P.S.”

  “Oh yeah.” Amelia’s frown was fading again. “Okay, explain. This I got to hear.”

  So he did. It took a while to tell it all. How he’d given up on finding her and decided to leave a note, but then how, after he’d written it he couldn’t find a good place to leave it, where it would be safe, but where she’d be sure to see it. “So I just went on into the cabin for a minute, just for a minute, to put it where you’d be sure to find it.”

  It seemed to be working. Amelia’s face was unclenching a little. Still staring intently, she said, “Okay, okay. So you didn’t stay very long.”

  “Right, not even a minute.”

  “And you didn’t try to open the trunk?” Amelia was watching him closely, with narrowed eyes.

  Puzzled, Matt shook his head. “No, why would I do that? I just left the note there.”

  She nodded thoughtfully for a moment before she said, “And what did you call me?”

  He didn’t know what she was talking about, at least not at first. “What did I call you? When? When did I call you something?”

  “At the door of the church. The side door. Just before you left.”

  So she had been there after all. But where? Not in the cabin, he was sure of that. There just wasn’t any hiding place inside the cabin where someone, even someone as small as Amelia, could be out of sight.

  “So where were you?” he asked.

  “Wouldn’t you like to know? Maybe I was right there in the cabin only you couldn’t see me. Maybe I can be invisible when I want to be.”

  For a moment he was almost ready to believe…But then he grinned. Invisible or not, she couldn’t have been there in the cabin and then reached his bicycle before he did.

  “Yeah. As if,” he said. “And how about my bicycle? Didn’t you move my bike?”

  She grinned. Reaching out, she pretended to grab the handlebars of the bike. “Yeah. Want to see how I did it? I picked it up and threw it. Like this.” Spinning around, she acted out throwing a heavy object down the trail.

  Okay. So she’d heard him call and then she got to the front of the church before he did and… “Where were you—” he was starting to ask when she interrupted.

  “Never mind where I was. But I heard you, all right. I heard you call Amelia, and then you called me another name.”

  He remembered then. “Oh,” he said. “I wasn’t calling you. Not then. I was calling—Rover.” He shrugged, feeling a little embarrassed. “I don’t know why exactly, but sometimes I wonder if Rover is still around.”

  Amelia looked puzzled. “Rove
r. Who’s Rover?”

  Matt stared in amazement. “You mean you don’t know about Rover?”

  She shook her head slowly. Her voice had a sarcastic tone as she said, “No, I don’t know about Rover. So why don’t you tell me?”

  Matt thought for a moment before he said, “Well, okay, I will. I’ll tell you about Rover—if you’ll tell me about Dolly.”

  It took her a while to decide but finally, with her eyes still narrowed thoughtfully, she said, “Okay. I’ll tell you, but you go first. Tell me about Rover.”

  “Okay,” Matt said. “I will.”

  Nineteen

  MATT WAS PUZZLED. MRS. Keeler, the librarian, had said that everybody in town had known about Old Tom’s dog, so it did seem that the Rathburns would have known about him too. Of course, Amelia, this particular Amelia, wasn’t around when Old Tom was alive, but she’d heard about Old Tom, so someone in her family must have told her about him and how he’d lived in the church after the fire. So why not about Rover?

  “About Rover,” he began. “I wonder why your family didn’t tell you about Rover.”

  “My family?”

  “The Rathburns. They must have known about Rover.”

  Amelia shrugged. “Oh yeah, the Rathburns. Maybe they did know about him. But they didn’t tell me. There’s not that many Rathburns left, you know.”

  “I know,” Matt said. Taking a deep breath, he paused, thinking about how to begin. “In fact, Mrs. Keeler told me—”

  Amelia put her finger to her lips: “Hush,” she said. “Listen.” And then Matt heard it too. A car’s motor and the crunch of tires on gravel. “Stay here. And be quiet.” She disappeared down the trail that led to the parking lot, but in just a moment she was back. “Come on,” she said. “We’d better go. It’s a car full of people.”

  “Why do we have to go?” Matt said. “They’re probably just going to the picnic grounds or the ballpark. They won’t come in here, will they?”

  “Maybe not,” Amelia said. “But sometimes people come up the path a little way to get a look at the church. Kids mostly. Usually they get scared and go back before they get this far. But we better move just in case.”

  “All right,” Matt said. “But my bicycle. What about my bike?” Amelia knew the answer to that, too. Pushing back a low-hanging tree limb, she quickly shoved the bike past a thick bush and into a cavelike cubbyhole in the underbrush.

  “Hey, this is a neat hideout,” Matt said, and then, wondering if this was where she’d been when he’d called to her and then to Rover, “Do you hide here sometimes?”

  “Yeah, sometimes. But I’ve got lots of better hiding places than this one.” Gathering up the stuff she’d used to pad the coat, she shoved it into Matt’s arms. “Put this stuff with the bike,” she said. “I’ll be right back.” She grabbed the old coat and hat and disappeared down her secret trail. After stashing the pile of padding in the underbrush, Matt returned to the narthex, and in a few minutes Amelia was back too.

  “Okay,” she whispered. “Let’s get out of here.” She led the way then, down another almost invisible path that angled away from the church and the parking lot. The trail twisted, turned, ducked under low-hanging branches and around huge, thorny blackberry barricades and finally stopped in a small clearing not far from the swamp. At the edge of the clearing the trunk of a fallen tree made a kind of bench. Scooting up onto the trunk, Amelia said, “Nobody ever comes here. It’s too close to the swamp.”

  Matt was impressed. Amelia did seem to have all kinds of mysterious information, at least about the Rathburn forest. Like Robin Hood had known all the secret places in Sherwood. All the hidden trails and hideouts and—

  “Okay.” Amelia’s sharp voice interrupted his thoughts. “Sit down and start talking. Tell me about this Rover person, and why you were calling him. What’s the rest of his name, and what made you think he might be somewhere around here?”

  Matt was grinning as he climbed up on the log. “Well,” he began, “in the first place he is…I mean he was a dog. Mrs. Keeler at the library was the one who told me about him. He was Old Tom’s dog.”

  “Old Tom’s dog?” She was obviously surprised, and very interested. It didn’t take Matt long to tell the whole story. How the dog named Rover had lived with Old Tom in the shack in the ruins of the church and how, when Tom died, the dog went on living there.

  “He went on living right there in Old Tom’s shack?” Amelia’s eyes were wide and unblinking.

  “He must have,” Matt said. “Mrs. Keeler said there was a story going around that he slept on his master’s grave, but when people went to look for him he was never there. He came into town every day and people would feed him, but he wouldn’t stay with anybody. He lived to be very old for a dog, I guess, and when he finally died, the people who lived in Timber City in those days buried him beside his master. Mrs. Keeler said she was a little kid at the time but she could remember when that happened. And they even made him a gravestone. You know, that little stone tablet right beside Old Tom’s grave. I think that must be the one.”

  “Oh yeah,” Amelia murmured, as if talking to herself. “I wondered about that gravestone.” A minute later she whispered, “Rover.” After that she didn’t say anything more for a long time and neither did Matt. Sitting side by side on the tree trunk, they were quiet for so long that when Amelia said, “Matt,” suddenly and sharply, he jumped—and almost fell off the log. “Matt,” she said, and then, more quietly, “What else do you know about him? About Rover?”

  Matt shook his head. “Not much,” he was starting to say when, without even planning to, he began, “I think that after Old Tom died, Rover would just sit there on the floor of the cabin with his chin on the cot, like this…” Demonstrating, pretending to be a sad-eyed dog resting his chin on the edge of something, he felt his throat and eyes reacting like they always did when he thought about the picture in Mrs. McDougall’s living room of the sad-eyed dog grieving for his dead master.

  Amelia was watching with narrowed eyes. “How do you know he did that?” she said. “Did someone see him doing that?”

  “Oh—oh well,” Matt stammered, “not exactly. I just used to look at a picture like that. A picture…” And then Matt found himself not only telling Amelia about Mrs. McDougall and her dogs and the painting in her living room, but going right on to tell about the Fourth of July picnic and how the small shaggy dog had rescued him when he was lost in the woods. And how he’d had the feeling ever since that Rover was still around, kind of keeping an eye on things and maybe looking out for people he liked.

  Amelia listened to the whole thing without saying a word, and without reacting at all, except that her dark eyes went wide and unblinking. When he finally ran out of things to tell, she took a long slow breath and said, “Yeah, I think I did know about Rover after all. I mean, nobody ever told me about him before, but…” She paused and then went on, “I just knew. I mean I’ve heard him barking and…and I think I’ve seen him, too, like you said.” She was staring out toward the swamp with that faraway look in her eyes. “Yeah, I think I know about Rover.”

  Matt was puzzled. He wished he knew what to believe. What to believe about a lot of things. Like Rover—and Dolly. And Amelia herself. He really wished he knew just what to believe about Amelia.

  Suddenly remembering the rest of the bargain they’d made, he said, “Well, okay, it’s your turn now. It’s your turn to tell me about Dolly.”

  As Amelia turned to face him, her eyes slowly lost the far horizon look and began to narrow. “All right,” she said, “about Dolly. Dolly is…Well, she’s a ghost too, like Rover. Only she’s the ghost of a girl who used to live in the Palace a long time ago. Her real name was Amelia, like a lot of girls in the Rathburn family. Dolly was…” Another pause and then, “Dolly was just her nickname.” She nodded. “Yeah, Dolly was the nickname of the Amelia that’s in this big painting in the Palace.” Amelia paused and, smiling that strange, out-of-focus smile, she stared off
into the distance. At last she sighed and went on, “In the picture she’s wearing this old-fashioned lacy dress with a high collar…” She paused again and her hand went to her throat. “With a gold locket around her neck, and a big hat and…” Suddenly she was watching Matt carefully as she repeated, “A big hat sort of tied on with a veil.”

  Matt was definitely wondering again. “But we did hear someone calling her,” he said, “that day when you let me visit the Palace. Who was calling her?”

  Amelia frowned. “Someone was calling Dolly? I don’t remember hearing anything like that.”

  This time Matt was sure she was lying. Everything about that visit to the Palace was very clear in his memory. Everything, and particularly the voice calling Dolly.

  “Well, I did,” he said. “It went ‘Dolly.’ It was loud and angry sounding. Not much like a ghost.”

  Amelia slid down off the tree trunk. “Oh yeah. How do you know what a ghost sounds like? Anyway, I’ve told you about Dolly and now I want to go see Rover’s gravestone.”

  Twenty

  IT WAS GETTING PRETTY late by the time they started to go to the graveyard so Amelia could look at Rover’s grave. All the way there, taking a long and roundabout trail, Amelia was very quiet. “Hush” was all she would say when Matt tried to say something or ask a question. Pointing toward the ballpark, where they occasionally got a glimpse of a father giving his kids batting practice, Amelia would only shake her head and say, “Hush. You want them to hear us?”

  Matt didn’t think there was much danger, but he finally gave up trying to talk and followed Amelia silently along the winding pathway, over the graveyard’s rail fence and into the neglected, overgrown corner where Old Tom was buried. On her knees beside the larger gravestone, Amelia eagerly pushed away a thick tangle of ivy until the small stone marker was exposed to the light.