The day after Maisie put her foot down about me going to St. John’s was a Bookmobile day. I went out at lunchtime and handed in my books, then headed toward the back of the bus where there was a very small section on the supernatural. I had one particular book in mind, and luckily, it was there.
Are You Being Haunted? by Philomena Faraday. It was a slim little book, a companion to her novels. The Teasels did their best to order in books that I asked for. Faraday had a ghost series of about fifteen books, and I’d read most of them. As well as writing fiction, she was a student of ghost lore, and this book listed all the ways you could tell if you were being haunted.
I picked some other books and checked them out. Usually I would stop and have a little chat with the Teasels, about books and reading, but today my heart wasn’t in it. I mumbled something to them and went back into school.
When I was accelerated into grade eight, I was allowed to stay in the classroom after lunch to work on catching up with the rest of the class. Mrs. Matchim would often come in and do some work at her desk while I was there.
Today I sat flipping through the Faraday book, trying to concentrate on finding some hints about how to haunt Maisie, but I couldn’t focus.
Maisie had turned the tables and now she was giving me the cold shoulder. She had stayed in her studio for hours the night before, and I finally made myself a fried egg and toast for supper. Then I went to bed. I felt like I had hit a roadblock and I didn’t know what to do next. When Annie came back, we could carry on with haunting Maisie so she wouldn’t show the paintings, but even if that worked, how was I going to persuade her to let me move to St. John’s? Especially when she wasn’t talking to me.
“Claire?”
Mrs. Matchim was sitting at her desk, looking at me. I hadn’t even heard her come in.
“Are you all right?”
I guess I had been staring off into space. “Yes. I’m just—” I didn’t know what to say.
She got up and came to sit in the desk beside me. “I saw your mother in the store yesterday and I think I may have put my foot in it. I thought you would have discussed your plans with her by now.”
I shook my head. “No. But we did last night.”
I fell silent again.
“And?”
“And she said no. She doesn’t want me to go.”
Mrs. Matchim sighed. “I thought that might happen. It would be hard for your mother to be without you.”
“But she doesn’t pay any attention to me when I’m there!” I protested. “I don’t see why it’s such a big deal. She could come in to St. John’s on weekends.”
“You’re her only child,” said Mrs. Matchim. “Mothers want to be with their children. They can’t just let them go. Especially when they’re so young. When I was sixteen and left home to go to college, it nearly broke my mother’s heart. And I was older than you.”
I looked at her. Hard to imagine Mrs. Matchim ever being sixteen. Or having a mother.
“Would you talk to her? Tell her how important it is for me?”
“I can talk to her but I’m not sure how far I’ll get. If she’s decided that she doesn’t want you to go, I doubt if I’ll change her mind.”
“At least she’ll see it’s not just me, that another grown-up thinks it’s a good idea.”
“What about your grandmother? Could she talk to her?”
I shook my head. “Nan won’t go against Maisie. She never does. Maisie always gets what she wants.”
Mrs. Matchim stood up. “You can tell her to come in and talk to me tomorrow after school. I’ll do my best, Claire, but it really is your mother’s decision.”
Right. And Maisie had already made it. She didn’t want me going.
As I walked home that afternoon I mulled it over. What could I do to get her to let me go?
Something so awful she wouldn’t want me around anymore. Something that would make her want to get rid of me.
ANNIE
THE METRO LIBRARY was busy, with a steady stream of people loaded down with knapsacks passing through the turnstiles. I crowded into the little elevator to go to the fifth floor. It was all glass on one side, and it zoomed up from floor to floor. The whole center of the building was empty space, circled by white walls for each floor. The empty space got bigger and the floor space got smaller with each floor. I could see people sitting at tables, working or wandering through the aisles of books.
The fifth floor had the art section in one corner, overlooking a park. I went to a computer and looked up the online catalogue. I wrote the call number on a slip of scrap paper, found the right aisle and followed the numbers till I got to the Ks.
There it was. Maisie King: A Retrospective. I lifted it down. It was big and heavy. I glanced at the front cover. It was a stunning Newfoundland landscape with cliffs and water. I quickly looked away. I didn’t want any accidents.
There were a few big armchairs placed in front of the floor-to-ceiling windows. I chose one all by itself in a corner, then settled into the chair with the book on my lap. I closed my eyes for a moment. The book seemed to radiate heat. This was it. My way back to Claire.
I wanted to go right away. But I had to be careful which painting I chose. And I wanted to find out more about Maisie.
I opened my eyes. I could see the tops of the trees in the park, green leaves fluttering. A few birds darted to and fro.
I opened the book without looking at the cover and went right to the index.
“Annie” was right there under A, listing her portraits, Annie I, Annie II and Annie III. No Annie IV. I scanned down to the Cs. No Claire. I looked under the Ks. Annie and Maisie were there, and Alexander King and Ellen King, who must be Maisie’s parents. But no Claire.
What happened? Didn’t Maisie paint Claire? Shouldn’t she be mentioned, somewhere?
I turned to the introduction and scanned it. It talked more about Maisie’s paintings than her life, with only a passing mention of her parents and the bald statement, “Her daughter Annie died at the age of four. The Annie series is a tribute to her.”
It was like Claire never existed.
I started turning the pages, covering each painting with a piece of paper torn out of a school notebook, and reading the captions first. I wanted to choose which painting to go into.
All the paintings from the other book were there, and after the Fog I painting came one called Empty.
Empty 1978. Acrylic on canvas. This is an excellent example of King’s ability to establish a mood. The cozy chair by the window and the crumpled red blanket are in stark contrast to the endless horizon of the sea.
Red blanket? That sounded familiar. I snuck a look under the paper.
It was Claire’s room, with her big chair in front of the window. The red blanket that was wrapped around her the first night I saw her lay tumbled half on the chair and half on the floor. A tidy desk stood in the corner, and I could just see the corner of her iron bed frame with the blue-and-white quilt hanging down. The sunlight coming in the window cast a dappled pattern on the floorboards, overlaid with the elongated shadow from the window panes.
I looked a little closer to see how she got that effect, and then the shadow started to shimmer and the Metro Library tilted way up into the sky and I was falling through the window, through the tops of the trees and tumbling down onto the bare wood boards of Claire’s room at Crooked Head.
CLAIRE
WHEN I GOT home from school, Maisie wasn’t there. I went straight up to her studio and tried the door. It was locked. I guess she didn’t want me spying on her anymore.
I ducked into the closet in the hall and made my way through to the door into the Piercey side of the house. I went into the middle room and started looking for the Annie paintings.
I went through all the canvases in the room. The Annie paintings were gone. Maisie must have moved them into the studio. I sat on the bed and gazed blindly out the window.
She didn’t trust me with them. She was going to ke
ep them locked in the studio until she sent them away for the show. And I wouldn’t get to look at them again.
Even though I thought they were creepy, I’d been sneaking into the Piercey side of the lighthouse to look at the Annie paintings every few weeks.
They made me feel horrible. But I had to look at them. To see Annie again. Because whatever else I thought about Maisie and her art, she had somehow captured Annie’s spirit in those paintings. We learned in school that people used to be superstitious about taking photographs because they thought that the pictures robbed them of their souls. That’s what Maisie’s paintings of Annie were like. She had the very essence of Annie there in that paint on that canvas, like a butterfly pinned to a card.
Sitting in the cold, deserted side of the house looking at all those paintings of Annie, I felt like I was with her again. Even though it hurt to look at them, like I had a fishhook stuck down my throat. When I looked at those paintings, everything I felt about her death came rushing back and it was almost too much to bear. Annie’s spirit shone out—her playful, joyful spirit—but Sammy was always there. The gruesome black dog that led her to her death. And Annie’s impulsive I-don’t-care-about-anything-but-what-I-want attitude was there too, the thing in her that made her always get the biggest piece of chocolate cake, the thing that made her suck all the attention in the room to her, the thing that made her forget all the warnings about cars and run across the street to Sammy. Maisie saw it and she painted it into those pictures. And they made me feel awful.
Because I hated that part of Annie. I hated it when she was alive because it helped push me into the background. Nobody ever saw me when Annie was in the room, including Maisie and Nan. And then when she died, she still drew all the attention away from me. Because her death hung in the air between Maisie and me wherever we went. And it always would.
But I didn’t want the world to see any of that. Because then they’d all blame me even more for her death. They’d say I wanted her dead. I could see it now: all the fashionable people in the New York gallery standing in front of the Annie paintings and speculating about how she died.
“An accident?”
“Yes, she got hit by a car, running after that little black dog.”
“Oh, isn’t that dreadful! Poor little thing. What was she doing out on the street by herself?”
“Apparently her older sister was with her, but she wasn’t paying attention and let go of her hand.”
“Some people said the sister was jealous, because the little one got all the attention, and that’s why she was so careless.”
“You mean she did it on purpose? But that’s…”
“Murder, yes, she murdered her little sister.”
I stood up quickly to make it stop, and the voices faded into the screeching of seagulls outside the window. I looked out over the blue sea. The fog had lifted today and it was almost warm, except for a cool breeze from the east.
It was true, I was angry with Annie that day. I was furious. But I didn’t want her to die. And now, now that she had come back to me, I wasn’t angry at all. It seemed like all that selfishness had gone out of her. Also a lot of her spirit. She seemed a paler reflection of the Annie I knew. She wasn’t what I expected Annie to be like when she got to be my age. And she said she came from Toronto and had a life there.
A picture came into my mind. A picture of Annie, in a kitchen, sitting at a table drawing a salt and pepper shaker. I was cooking and I turned around and she smiled up at me. Then it dissolved.
I gave my head a little shake. I still had the remnants of headache that had been bothering me for days. I couldn’t think about where Annie came from or what kind of life she had now. I knew she was my Annie, and that was enough.
I had to get into Maisie’s studio. I scooted back through the cupboard and into Maisie’s room and started searching for the key. Maisie’s room was in its usual state of complete disorder, with her clothes piled up on a chair and the floor, her dresser a jumble of necklaces and scarves. I started at the bedside table.
There was a photograph of Annie in a pewter frame sitting beside her clock. Maisie had kept it by her bed ever since Annie died. It was taken that last summer, in our backyard in St. John’s, with Annie grinning up at the camera, a lilac bush in full bloom behind her. It caught at my heart, the way photos of Annie always did.
Suddenly there was a banging noise in my room next door, like the sound of someone tripping and falling. The photo slipped out of my hands, but I caught it before it crashed to the floor. I froze. Maisie? Home? In my room? I glanced out the window. No sign of the truck. Not Maisie then.
I tiptoed silently down the hall and peeked around the doorframe into my room. Annie was sitting on the floor with a dazed look in her eyes.
ANNIE
“ANNIE!” CRIED CLAIRE, running over to me and giving me a fierce hug. “You came back!”
“It’s getting harder each time,” I said, rubbing my knees. “More like falling.”
“Falling?”
“Yes. This time it was like falling off the roof of a building. I was in the library, and it felt like the whole building was turning upside down—”
Claire rubbed her forehead, as if she had a headache. “Well, never mind that. You’re here now. There’ve been some new developments.” She started rooting through her knapsack.
I stood up and went over to the chair and lightly touched the red blanket, which was hanging over the side, just like in the picture. I wondered when Maisie painted it. And why.
Claire came over and stood beside me.
“Where’s Maisie?” I asked.
“Out somewhere. She’s mad at me. She found out about me wanting to go to St. John’s for high school and she said no.”
“Really? But that’s what you end up—I mean…” I stopped myself. “I…uh…I thought she’d say yes.”
“ ‘Over my dead body’ were her exact words. So now we have to figure out a way to get her to say yes, as well as stopping her from showing the Annie paintings.”
“Wow. How are we going to do that?”
“I don’t know. I got this book about haunting at the Bookmobile today. It might give us some ideas.”
I sat down in the big chair. “Let’s have a look.”
Claire squeezed in beside me.
“A big chair for two to curl up in,” I murmured, without thinking, and Claire started to laugh. “You remember!”
“I…uh…”
“That’s what we always used to say when we sat together in a big chair. From The Friendly Giant. Your favorite TV show.”
And that was always what Mom said to me when I was small and we curled up together in a big chair. She told me about watching a TV show called The Friendly Giant when she was little. But I’d never seen it. It was one of the only things she ever told me about her childhood.
“One little chair for one of you and a bigger chair for two more to curl up in; for someone who likes to rock, a rocking chair,” said Claire and I together, and then we both started laughing.
“It’s just like old times, Annie,” said Claire happily.
“Yup,” I said. It was. But not the way she thought. I couldn’t tell her. I couldn’t break the spell. I had to just keep playing along and hope that somehow this was all going to work out and I’d have my mother back.
“So,” said Claire, starting to turn the pages of the book. “What have we got here? Mysterious knocking. We’ve done that. Cold spots. Don’t know how we’d manage that.”
“What are cold spots?” I asked. She was looking at a badly drawn picture of a man looking scared and surrounded by icicles. It looked like a pretty cheesy book.
“It’s really scary,” said Claire, who didn’t seem to notice how silly the book was. “It happens in a lot of ghost stories. A cold spot will suddenly form in your house, where there’s the presence of a ghost. It’s like they suck all the warmth out of the space they occupy.” She frowned and glanced at me for a moment, the
n turned back to the book.
“I don’t think we could fake that,” I said doubtfully.
“No,” she said, flipping through the book. “Footsteps. Laughing. Singing. Someone calling your name.”
“We could do some of those. I could do the footsteps, maybe when she’s downstairs.”
“And we could experiment to see if she can hear you. Or see you.”
We looked at each other for a moment.
“That’s the big one,” I said softly.
“Yes,” said Claire slowly. “If she can see you, then you should be able to change her mind. But we have to do it carefully. We don’t want to push her too far. Maisie is so dramatic. She might do something rash.”
“Like—?”
Claire frowned. “I’m not sure. I just never know what to expect from Maisie. She might go a bit crazy. Or decide that this is a great opportunity to paint another portrait of you as a ghost.”
I laughed.
Claire didn’t.
CLAIRE
I STARTED FLIPPING through the book again.
“Objects being out of place,” I read out. “Doors opening and closing. There are all kinds of ideas here. We could do it, Annie. And maybe I’ll leave this book somewhere she’ll notice it, like in the bathroom.”
“What happened the other night after I did the knocking? Did she think it was a ghost?”
I smiled. “She was freaked. She couldn’t figure it out. And I kept saying I didn’t hear anything, but I pointed out that mysterious knocking is a sure sign of a ghostly visitation.” Annie grinned. “I think it will work. We just have to take it slow.”
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