by John Saul
“Already? But you’ve only had it two hours.”
“I know,” Michelle said. She shuffled her feet uncomfortably, wondering how to tell the teacher what had happened. Then she blurted the story out.
“It was supposed to be a joke. I mean, Sally told me that Susan Peterson likes Jeff Benson, and she thought it would be fun if we took the seats beside Jeff so Susan couldn’t sit next to him. And I went along with her.” Michelle seemed to be on the verge of tears as she continued. “I didn’t mean for Susan to be mad at me—I mean, I don’t even know her, and—and.…” Her voice trailed off helplessly.
“It’s all right,” Corinne told her gently. “I know how things like that can happen, particularly when everything is new and strange. Go on outside, and when you come back, I’ll change everybody’s seats.” She paused a moment, then: “Whom would you like to sit with?”
“Well—Sally, I guess. Or Jeff. They’re the only people I know.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Corinne promised. “Run along now—there’s only ten minutes left.”
Michelle, unsure whether she had done the right thing, walked slowly out to the schoolyard. In a group under a large maple, Sally Carstairs, Susan Peterson, and Jeff Benson seemed to be arguing about something. Feeling terribly self-conscious, Michelle approached the group, and wasn’t surprised when they stopped talking as she drew near. Sally smiled and called out to her, but Susan Peterson ignored her, quickly moving off in the opposite direction.
“Is Susan mad at me?” Michelle asked anxiously. Sally shrugged.
“So what if she is? She’ll get over it.” Then, before Michelle could say anything more about it, Sally changed the subject. “Isn’t Miss Hatcher neat? And wait till you see her boyfriend! He’s too dreamy for words.”
“Who is he?”
“Mr. Hartwick. He’s a psychologist,” Sally told her. “He’s only here once a week, but he lives in town. His daughter’s in the sixth grade. Her name’s Lisa, and she’s awful.”
Michelle didn’t hear the comment about Lisa; she was more interested in the father. She groaned, remembering the batteries of tests she and her classmates had been forced to endure each year in Boston. “Are we all going to have to take tests?”
“Nah,” Jeff replied. “Mr. Hartwick doesn’t do anything unless someone gets in trouble. Then they have to talk to him. Mom says you used to talk to the principal when you were in trouble. Now you talk to Mr. Hartwick. Mom says it was better when you talked to the principal, and got a licking.” He shrugged eloquently to let anyone who was interested know that the matter was of supreme indifference to him.
When the bell summoning them back to class rang a few minutes later, Michelle had all but forgotten her embarrassment, but it was quickly brought back to mind when Miss Hatcher held up a blank seating chart. There was a startled buzzing among the students, which Corinne quickly silenced.
“I’m going to try something new with this class,” she said smoothly. “As you know, I’ve always felt that seventh-graders were old enough to decide for themselves where they want to sit.” Michelle squirmed, sure that everyone was watching her, and that they knew whatever Miss Hatcher was about to do was her fault. “Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem fair to the last people into the room. So I’m going to pass out slips of paper, and I want you all to write down whom you’d like to sit next to. Maybe we can make everyone happy.”
Unable to resist, Michelle glanced over her shoulder. Susan Peterson had a smug smile on her face.
Corinne began passing out paper, and for the next few minutes the room was quiet. Corinne gathered up the papers and studied them briefly. Then she began working on her seating chart while the children whispered among themselves, predicting the results.
The rearranging began. When it was over, Michelle found herself seated between Sally and Jeff, with Susan on Jeff’s other side. Silently, Michelle sent a message of thanks to Miss Hatcher.
As the last bell sounded, Tim Hartwick stepped out of the office that was reserved for his use at the Paradise Point school. He leaned comfortably against the corridor wall and watched the children swirl past him in their rush to escape into the warm late-summer afternoon. It didn’t take him long to spot the face he had been looking for. Michelle Pendleton hurried down the hall with another girl, whom he recognized as Sally Carstairs, and glanced at him timidly as she passed. As she left the building, he could see her whispering to her friend.
His expression thoughtful, Tim went back into his office, picked up a folder, put it in his filing cabinet, then locked the office door behind him before proceeding down to Corinne Hatcher’s classroom.
“And so it begins,” he intoned. “Another year of young minds to mold, futures to shape …”
“Oh, stop it,” Corinne laughed. “Help me clean up, so we can get out of here.”
Tim started toward the front of the room, then stopped short as he saw the seating chart, still propped against the blackboard.
“What’s this?” he said, his voice faintly mocking. “A seating chart in the classroom of Corinne Hatcher, champion of freedom of choice? Another illusion shattered.”
Corinne sighed. “There was a problem today. We have a new student this year, and it looked as though she was about to get off on the wrong foot. So I tried to straighten out the situation before things got out of hand.” She gave him the details of what had happened that morning.
“I saw her just now,” he said when she was finished.
“Did you?” Corinne began stacking the papers on her desk, talking as she worked. “Pretty, isn’t she? And she seems to be bright, eager-to-please, and friendly, too. Not what you’d expect to be coming out of Boston these days.” Suddenly she frowned, and looked at Tim curiously. “What do you mean, you just saw her? How do you know what she looks like?”
“I found a folder on my desk this morning—Michelle Pendleton’s records. Want to take a look?”
“No way,” Corinne replied. “I try never to look at the records till there’s some reason to.”
She thought Tim would drop the subject, but he didn’t.
“She’s almost too good to be true,” he said. “Not a single black mark anywhere.”
Corinne wondered what he was getting at.
“Is that so strange? I can think of any number of students here who have spotless records.”
Tim nodded. “But this is Paradise Point, not Boston. It’s almost as though Michelle Pendleton has been living her life unaware of her surroundings.” He paused, then: “Did you know she’s adopted?”
Corinne closed her desk drawers. “Should I have?” What was he getting at?
“Not really. But she is. She knows it, too.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Somewhat. But what is definitely unusual is that apparently she’s never had any reaction to it at all. As far as her teachers could tell, she’s always accepted it as a simple fact of life.”
“Well, good for her,” Corinne said, her voice showing a trace of the annoyance she was beginning to feel. What on earth was Tim trying to get at? The answer came almost immediately.
“I think you should keep an eye on her,” Tim said. Before Corinne could protest, he forged ahead. “I’m not saying anything is going to happen. But there’s a difference between Paradise Point and Boston—as far as I know, Michelle is the only adoptive child you have here.”
“I see,” Corinne said slowly. Suddenly it was all becoming clear to her. “You mean the other children?”
“Exactly,” Tim said. “You know how kids can be when one of them is different from the rest. If they made up their minds to, they could make life miserable for Michelle.”
“I’d like to think they won’t,” Corinne said softly.
She knew what was in Tim’s mind. He was thinking of his own daughter, Lisa, eleven years old, but so different from Michelle Pendleton that comparison was nearly impossible.
Tim liked to believe that Lisa’s problems stemm
ed from the fact that she was “different” from her school friends: her mother had died five years earlier. In all charity, Corinne admitted that was partly true. The death of her mother had been hard on Lisa, even harder than it had been on Tim.
At six, she had been too young to understand what had happened. Until the end, she had refused to believe her mother was dying, and when at last the inevitable had happened, it had been almost too much for her.
She had blamed her father, and Tim, distressed, had begun to spoil her. Lisa, from a happy six-year-old, had grown into a sullen eleven-year-old, uncooperative, listless, a loner.
“Do you have to be home this afternoon?” Corinne asked carefully, hoping Tim wouldn’t follow the train of thought that had brought her to what seemed an irrelevant question.
Suddenly, as if Corinne’s thoughts had summoned her, Lisa came into the classroom. She glanced quickly at Corinne. Her face, which should have been pretty, was pinched into an expression of suspicion and hostility. Corinne made herself smile at Lisa, but Lisa’s dark eyes, nearly hidden under too long bangs, gave no hint of friendliness. She turned quickly to her father. When she spoke, her words sounded to Corinne more like an ultimatum than a request.
“I’m going home with Alison Adams, and having dinner there. Is it all right?”
Tim frowned, but agreed to Lisa’s plans. A small smile of satisfaction on her face, Lisa left the room as quickly as she had come in. When she was gone, Tim looked rueful.
“Well, I guess I have the rest of the day,” he said. He had wanted to share the afternoon with his daughter, but there was no bitterness in his voice, only sadness and defeat. Then, reading Corinne’s expression of disapproval, he tried to make the best of it.
“At least she told me what she’s up to,” he said crookedly. He shook his head. “I’m a pretty good psychologist,” he went on, “but as a father, I ain’t so terrific, huh?”
Corinne decided to ignore the question. If it wasn’t for Lisa, and Lisa’s clear dislike of Corinne, she and Tim probably would have been married two years ago. But Lisa ran Tim and had managed, to her own delight, to become a sore spot between Corinne and Tim. “I bought some steaks,” she said brightly, linking an arm through Tim’s and steering him toward the door. “Just in case you could come over this evening. Come on, let’s get out of here.”
Together, they left the school building. As they emerged into the soft summer afternoon, Corinne breathed deeply of the warm, sweet air, and looked happily around at the spreading oaks and maples, their leaves still a vibrant green.
“I love it here,” she said. “I really do!”
“I love it here—I really do!” Michelle exclaimed, unknowingly echoing the words her teacher had just uttered. Beside her, Sally Carstairs and Jeff Benson exchanged a glance, and rolled their eyes up in disgust.
“It’s a tank town,” Jeff complained. “Nothing ever happens here.”
“Where would you rather live?” Michelle challenged him.
“Wood’s Hole,” Jeff announced without hesitation.
“Wood’s Hole?” Sally repeated. “What’s that?”
“I want to go to school there,” Jeff said placidly. “At the Institute of Oceanography.”
“How boring,” Sally said airily. “And it probably isn’t any different from the Point. I can hardly wait to get out of here.”
“You probably won’t,” Jeff teased. “You’ll probably die here, like everybody else.”
“No, I won’t,” Sally insisted. “You just wait. You’ll see.”
The three of them were walking along the bluff. As they drew near the Bensons’, Michelle asked Jeff if he wanted to come home with her.
Jeff glanced at his house and saw his mother standing at the door, watching him. Then he shifted his gaze, passing over the old cemetery, and coming to rest on the roof of the Pendleton house, just visible beyond the trees. He remembered everything his mother had ever told him about the cemetery and that house. “I don’t think so,” he decided. “I promised Mom I’d mow the lawn this afternoon.”
“Oh, come on,” Michelle urged him. “You never come over to my house.”
“I will,” Jeff said. “But not today. I—I just don’t have time.”
A glint of mischief came into Sally’s eyes. She nudged Michelle with her elbow.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, her voice carefully innocent. “Are you afraid of the cemetery?”
“No, I’m not afraid of the cemetery,” Jeff snapped. By now they were in front of his house, and he was about to start up the driveway. Sally stopped him with her next words, though she directed them to Michelle.
“There’s supposed to be a ghost in the cemetery. Jeff’s probably afraid of it.”
“A ghost? I never heard that,” Michelle said.
“It isn’t true, anyway,” Jeff told her. “I’ve lived here all my life, and if there was a ghost, I would have seen it. And I haven’t, so there isn’t any ghost.”
“You saying so doesn’t make it so,” Sally argued.
“And you saying there is a ghost doesn’t make it so, either,” Jeff shot back. “See you tomorrow.” He turned and started up the driveway, then waved back at Michelle when she called a good-bye to him. As he disappeared into his house, the two girls continued their walk, leaving the road at Sally’s urging, to follow the path along the edge of the bluff. Suddenly Sally stopped, grabbed Michelle with one arm, while she pointed with the other.
“There’s the graveyard! Let’s go in!”
Michelle looked over at the tiny cemetery choked with weeds. Until today, she had only glanced at it from the car.
“I don’t know,” she said, peering uneasily at the overgrown graves.
“Oh, come on,” Sally urged. “Let’s go in.” She started toward a place where the low picket fence surrounding the cemetery had collapsed to the ground.
Michelle started to follow her, then stopped. “Maybe we shouldn’t.”
“Why not? Maybe we’ll see the ghost!”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” Michelle said. “But it just seems like we ought to leave it alone. Who’s buried there, anyway?”
“Lots of people. Mostly Uncle Joe’s family. All the Carsons are buried out here. Except the last ones—they’re buried in town. Come on—the gravestones are neat.”
“Not now.” Michelle cast around in her mind for some way to distract Sally. She wasn’t sure why, but the graveyard frightened her. “I’m hungry. Let’s go to my house and get something to eat. Then maybe later we can come back here.”
Sally seemed reluctant to give up the expedition, but at Michelle’s insistence, she gave in. The two girls continued along the path for a while, in an uneasy silence that Michelle finally broke.
“Is there really supposed to be a ghost?”
“I’m not sure,” Sally replied. “Some people say there is, and some people say there isn’t.”
“Who’s the ghost supposed to be?”
“A girl who lived here a long time ago.”
“What happened to her? Why is she still here?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think anybody knows. Nobody’s even sure if she’s really here or not.”
“Have you ever seen her?”
“No,” Sally said, with a hesitation so slight that Michelle wasn’t certain she’d even heard it.
A few minutes later the two girls slammed through the back door into the immense kitchen, where June was kneading a loaf of bread. “You two hungry?” she asked.
“Uh-huh.”
“There’re cookies in the jar, and milk’s in the refrigerator. Wash your hands first, though. Both of you.” June turned back to her dough, ignoring the look of exasperation that passed between Michelle and Sally at the reminder of the childhood they were becoming eager to leave behind. Yet neither of them considered the possibility of ignoring the order. In a moment, June heard the tap running in the kitchen sink.
“We’ll be up in my room,” Michelle
said as she poured two glasses of milk and heaped a plate with cookies.
“Just don’t get crumbs all over everything,” June said placidly, knowing they were again rolling their eyes at each other.
“Is your mother like that, too?” Michelle asked as they went upstairs.
“Worse,” Sally said. “Mine still makes me eat in the kitchen.”
“What can you do?” Michelle sighed, not expecting an answer. She led Sally into her room and closed the door. Sally threw herself on the bed.
“I love this house,” she exclaimed. “And this room, and the furniture, and—” Her voice stopped suddenly as her eyes fell on the doll that lay on the window seat.
“What’s that?” she breathed. “Is it new? How come I haven’t seen it before?”
“It was right there last time you were here,” Michelle replied. Sally got up and went across the room.
“Michelle, it looks ancient!”
“It is, I guess,” Michelle agreed. “I found it in the closet when we moved in. It was up on a shelf, way at the back.”
Sally picked up the doll, examining it carefully.
“She’s beautiful,” she said softly. “What’s her name?”
“Amanda.”
Sally’s eyes widened, and she stared at Michelle.
“Amanda? Why did you name her that?”
“I don’t know. I just wanted an old-fashioned name, and Amanda sort of—well, came to me, I guess.”
“That’s weird,” Sally said. She could feel goose bumps forming on her skin. “That’s the name of the ghost.”
“What?” Michelle asked. It didn’t make sense.
“That’s the name of the ghost,” Sally repeated. “It’s on one of the gravestones. Come on, I’ll show you.”
CHAPTER 5
Sally led the way as the girls left the path and started toward the collapsing fence around the cemetery.
It was a tiny plot, no more than fifty feet square, and the graves had a forgotten look to them. Many of the headstones had been pushed over, or fallen, and most of those still upright had an unstable appearance, as if they were only waiting for a good storm to give up their lonely vigils over the dead. A lightning-scarred oak tree, long dead, stood skeletally in the center of the plot, its branches reaching forlornly toward the sky. It was a grim place, and Michelle was hesitant to enter.