The Ghost Road

by Charis Cotter

  “Oh,” I said, looking out the window. It was odd that my mother hadn’t told my father anything. Wasn’t he interested? Why wouldn’t she talk about her family?

  “Why wouldn’t your mother tell your dad about her brother and sister?” said Ruby, again, as if her thoughts were following along exactly the same path as my own. “Do you think something happened here she wanted to forget about?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, shaking my head. “We should ask Aunt Doll.”

  “It could be some family secret,” said Ruby, her eyes big. “Some deep dark family secret.”

  “Like what?” I asked, trying not to roll my eyes. Ruby was so dramatic.

  “I don’t know, but Aunt Doll always said it was strange that Meg never brought her baby or her husband home to meet the family. Aunt Doll’s feelings were hurt. She was sort of like their mother, you know, because she came back from St. John’s to look after them when their mother died.”

  “Their mother died?”

  “Yes, when they were twelve.”

  “Wow…” I said.

  “What?” Ruby came and sat down on the bed beside me. “Why are you looking so funny?”

  “I didn’t know they’d lost their mother too. I mean, they grew up without a mother, just like us.”

  Ruby looked out the window, screwing up her face.

  “Yeah. I never really thought about it.”

  “It’s sad,” I said.

  There was a silence. Ruby sighed.

  “It’s not really fair,” I said softly. “I’d give anything to have a mother. A real mother.”

  “Me too,” said Ruby, and slipped her hand into mine.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  PARTRIDGEBERRIES

  Ruby gave herself a little shake and stood up. “But what about the ghost?” she asked, not looking at me. She started prowling around the room. “Do you think it came in here?”

  I frowned. “I don’t know why. But I did have the impression that she came this way.”

  Ruby started opening the dresser drawers. “Nothing in here,” she said. “This is where my brothers sleep when they come, so I guess Aunt Doll leaves the dresser empty for their clothes.” She looked around. “There’s not much else in here.” She fell to her knees and lifted up the quilts to peer first under one bed, then under the other.

  “No ghosts,” she reported with a grin, getting to her feet and dusting off her jeans.

  “Ruby! Ruth!” It was Aunt Doll, calling from what seemed like a long way away. Ruby went to the door and yelled, “What?”

  “Breakfast! Sleepyheads…”

  “We’ll be right down,” hollered Ruby. She had a very loud voice.

  We went back into our room through the hall, got some clothes on and went down to breakfast.

  “Another rainy day,” said Aunt Doll cheerfully, dishing up some scrambled eggs for each of us. “You’ll be thinking badly of Newfoundland, Ruth. But it’s always like this in early July. I always tell visitors, don’t come till after July fifteenth if you want any chance of good weather. Try my partridgeberry muffins, Ruth. Last year’s berries, but they’re just fine frozen.”

  “What’s a partridgeberry?” I asked dubiously, turning the muffin around and around. It was speckled with reddish berries.

  “Ha ha ha—oomph,” choked Ruby, whose mouth was full of scrambled eggs. When she could talk, she gave a hoot. “You look so funny, Ruth. I can’t believe you don’t know what a partridgeberry is.”

  “Leave her be, Ruby,” said Aunt Doll. “They don’t have partridgeberries in Ontario. It’s something like a cranberry,” she said to me. “Except smaller and more sour.”

  “Oh,” I said, still eyeing the muffin uncertainly.

  “Put some butter on it and give it a try,” said Aunt Doll.

  I did. Ruby kept on laughing as she scarfed down her eggs. The muffin was delicious, with a sharp little squirt of flavor from the partridgeberries.

  “How come Meg never told Ruth’s father anything about her family?” asked Ruby, jumping right into the subject. “She doesn’t know anything about us. She didn’t know her mom had a twin sister, or a brother, and she didn’t know that their mother died when they were kids, and she doesn’t know what a partridgeberry is—”

  I poked her in the arm. “Come on, leave the partridgeberries out of it.”

  “But it’s all part of it,” insisted Ruby. “She doesn’t know anything about Newfoundland, and she’s grown up in Ontario like she has no family out here. How come?”

  Aunt Doll shook her head and sighed. “I don’t know. It was all very mysterious. I’ve had my theories over the years, but I’ve never found out for sure. Meg said she wanted to make a life there, and for the first couple of years, she said the baby was too small to travel and her husband was too busy, but those were just excuses. I knew that. But I couldn’t force her to come home, and I couldn’t get her to tell me what was really going on. And Molly was no better. Those two were always thick as thieves, and if they wanted to keep a secret, you had no hope of wringing it out of them. They were like that as children and just the same when they were grown.”

  She stood up. “Now go away and play. I want to do my numbers.” She plopped herself down in a big stuffed chair by the window and pulled a pink newspaper out of the magazine rack.

  “What numbers?” I asked, curious.

  Aunt Doll settled her glasses on her nose and opened the newspaper. “My stocks. I follow the market. I have quite a few investments, and I like to keep up. I get the papers from London and New York.”

  “Oh,” I said. It didn’t seem to fit, Aunt Doll and the stock market.

  She laughed at my expression. “And you thought I was just a pretty face! If you’d been listening instead of sleeping in the car the other day when I was telling you the story of my life, you would have heard all about my career in St. John’s.”

  “She worked for a hotshot lawyer,” said Ruby, tipping her chair back on two legs. “She had the best clothes, didn’t you, Aunt Doll?”

  “I did. I still have some of them up in your closet. It was the 1950s and I had big skirts, fancy suits, little sweaters…” She sighed. “And I learned everything there was to know about the stock market from Mr. Pigeon, who was the sharpest lawyer in St. John’s. And a businessman. He had investments all over the world…” Her voice trailed away and she had a faraway look in her eye.

  “She was in love with him,” sang out Ruby, and then her chair tipped over backward and she fell in a heap.

  “How many times have I told you not to do that?” said Aunt Doll. “And I wasn’t in love with him, you wretched child. I admired him. He taught me a lot. I knew almost as much as he did by the time I left. I had big plans.” She sighed again.

  “But you came back here to look after Meg and Molly, right? After their mother died?”

  Aunt Doll nodded. “Yes, after my poor sister Daphne died. It was so sudden. The children were orphans, because Bob had died when they were little, and then Daphne—they said it was a stroke, but she was only thirty-one and never sick a day in her life. So my father was here on his own with the two girls and Jack, who was fourteen…I had to come back. They all needed looking after. My other sisters and brothers had families of their own, off to St. John’s or Ontario. So I came. There was no one else.”

  “That must have been hard,” I said. “To leave St. John’s, and your job and your life there.”

  Aunt Doll gave a sniff. “I didn’t have time to miss anything. Jack was no trouble, but those two girls were a handful, and my father wasn’t much better. Couldn’t even cook an egg. But I never had children of my own, so in a way it was a blessing for me to have my sister’s girls to bring up. Poor Daphne,” she said with a shake of her head. She gave the newspaper a shake. “Now go on with you! Find something to do and leave me in peace.”

  I followed Ruby out of the room. She was hopping on one foot. She hopped across the hall, opened the door to the living room, and
hopped through. I hadn’t even been in there yet.

  “Poor Aunt Doll,” I said, going in after Ruby. “She must have really missed her sister.”

  “Yup,” said Ruby, hopping over to a large stuffed sofa covered in big pink-and-green flowers and plopping down on it. “Bad enough to lose a sister, but on top of that they were twins. That must have made it worse.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  THE PHOTOGRAPH

  “Twins?” I said, stopped in my tracks. “Aunt Doll and Daphne were twins?”

  Ruby nodded. “They weren’t identical, like Meg and Molly. Daphne was blonde, like the Finns, and Aunt Doll was dark, like the Duggans. But they were really close. Aunt Doll told me once it broke her heart in two when Daphne died.”

  I walked across to join her on the sofa.

  “There sure are a lot of twins in our family,” I said, looking around the room. It was big, with windows on two sides and floor-length curtains of the same flowery material as the sofa. There were two chairs to match the sofa, a rocking chair, a piano, two bookcases, and a round table in front of the window facing the road. A woodstove sat in the middle of the wall at the far end, with a doorway to one side.

  “Yes. Only girls though. And it’s usually been the Finn twins, blonde hair and blue eyes. Aunt Doll is the only one that didn’t fit.”

  “I like this room,” I said, getting up and walking over to the bookcase. “It’s pretty. Old-fashioned, but pretty.”

  “I do too,” said Ruby, coming and looking over my shoulder at the books. “Aunt Doll hardly ever comes in here. She spends all her time in the kitchen. She says her mother decorated this room to look like an English country house, and people in Buckle used to make fun of them, because I guess her mother was a bit of a snob. She was another twin. And she died young too. And her sister.”

  “What?” I said, turning to Ruby. “What’s with all these twins dying young? Didn’t any of them live to be old ladies?”

  Ruby shrugged her shoulders. “Well, Aunt Doll’s pretty old. At least fifty. But she’s not a Finn, like the rest of them were. I guess a lot of them did die…” Her voice trailed off as she looked at me.

  I counted on my fingers. “Our mothers. Their mother. Their grandmother and great-aunt. All twins. All died young.”

  “People died younger in the old days,” said Ruby. “They didn’t have good medical care back then.”

  “Aunt Doll said her sister died of a stroke. Good medical care wouldn’t help that. And our mothers died suddenly too.”

  “I never thought of it before,” said Ruby, frowning. “It was all a long time ago.”

  “We should ask Eldred about it,” I said, and pulled out a book with a familiar title. “Did you ever read this, Ruby?”

  “What is it?” said Ruby, bending over it.

  “The Princess and the Goblin,” I said. “It’s a really good fairy tale.”

  “I thought you didn’t like fairy tales,” said Ruby, pulling the book out of my hands to look at it.

  I made a face. “I don’t believe in them. But that doesn’t mean I don’t like them.”

  Ruby laughed. “You’re a fake, Ruth Windsor. I bet you’re probably just as big a believer as I am in ghosts and fairies. You just pretend to be all scientific and reasonable about everything. Hey, look! This was your mother’s book.” She put her finger on the signature on the flyleaf.

  I took the book back. Meg Duggan was written in neat schoolgirl handwriting along the top.

  “Wow,” I breathed, taking the book back to the couch and sitting down with it. I turned the pages slowly. They were soft and worn, as if the book had been read many times. “My mother must have loved this book as much as I do. I’ve never…never held anything that was hers before,” I said in a shaky voice. I could feel tears pricking behind my eyes.

  Ruby came and sat close beside me, laying her hand on my arm. I could feel the warmth from her body. “You were meant to find that book, Ruth. I think it was waiting for you. I’ve never picked it up, and I’ve been through a lot of these books. Some of them have my mother’s name in them too.”

  I turned another page. There was a photograph there, almost as if it were used as a bookmark. I picked it up.

  It was old and faded, a black-and-white picture of a big house. Ruby peered at it.

  “Hey!” she said. “That’s this house! It’s taken right outside here.” She pointed at the windows on the first floor. “Those are the living-room windows.” Then she pointed at the ones above. “And those are the bedrooms. That’s our room,” she said, pointing to the one on the right. “And that’s the boys’ room, where we were this morning,” she said, pointing to the one on the left.

  “What’s that one?” I said, pointing to a small round window in the middle. It almost looked like a porthole.

  Ruby leaned in closer. “Gee, I don’t know. I’ve never seen that before.” Then she turned to me, her eyes big.

  “The window!” we both said at the same time. I felt a shiver go up my back.

  “What the ghost said,” breathed Ruby. “Come on!”

  And she tore out of the room.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  MEASURING

  Ruby was in the hall stuffing her feet into rubber boots and hauling on a jacket. I grabbed the coat I’d been wearing the day before. There was another pair of rubber boots about my size so I slipped my feet into them and followed Ruby outside.

  I gasped as the icy rain and wind hit me in the face. It was driving in from the ocean and felt more like winter than summer. Ruby was disappearing around the corner of the house. Once I got behind the shelter of the house the wind was cut, but there were still sheets of rain. I peered up at the house, but I was too close to see it properly.

  Ruby grabbed my arm and pulled me across the lawn, to the edge of the property where an old rail fence separated the neatly cut lawn from a meadow.

  We looked back at the house. It looked more or less the same as it had in the photograph, with two windows on the first floor and two on the second. But there was no round window in the middle.

  The wind was stronger here, away from the house, and it cut through my jacket like a knife. I started to shiver.

  Ruby walked slowly toward the house, staring at it. I looked for any signs of a boarded-up window, but the clapboard went straight across. Ruby stood still for a moment, frowning. Then she said, “Tape measure,” and headed toward the barn.

  The barn was dark and full of shadows, with the patter of the rain loud on the roof. Ruby didn’t seem to need a light to find what she was looking for. She picked something up and came back to where I was standing, blinking in the doorway.

  “Tape measure,” she said again. “We need to measure those rooms. That window must be behind one of the walls.”

  We clattered in the back door and past the kitchen, where Aunt Doll didn’t even look up from behind the pink newspaper. We dumped our jackets and boots in the front hall, then headed up the stairs, along the hall and down the passage to our room. Ruby went into the boys’ room and looked carefully along the outside wall. It was smooth, with just the one rectangular window. Then we went into our room and examined the wall in there, but there was only the one window on that wall too: a rectangular one that matched the window in the boy’s room. There was no sign of the little round window in the photograph.

  “Right,” said Ruby. “Let’s measure the hall first.”

  My job was to hold the end of the measuring tape while Ruby paced out the length of the hall. She stopped at the window at the far end.

  “Thirty-two feet,” she called out. “Let go.”

  I did and the tape zipped along the hall and snapped back into its container. Ruby grinned.

  “Pretty cool, huh? I helped Eldred build a new chicken coop last summer. This tape is his pride and joy.” She ducked into the boys’ room.

  I held the tape again, this time in the corner of the room behind the door, while she walked slowly toward the clos
et on the opposite wall.

  “Twelve,” she said, and snapped the tape back.

  In our room I stood in front of the closet and she hauled the tape up over her bed to the other wall.

  “Twelve,” she said again, a slow smile lighting up her face.

  “But that’s only twenty-four,” I said. “Where’s the other eight feet?”

  “Precisely, my dear Watson,” she crowed. “Let’s measure the depth of the closet. From the inside.”

  This proved more difficult. I had to hold the end of the tape on our side of the closet while she pushed through the racks of clothes.

  Her voice from the other side was muffled, but triumphant. “Eight! Come on!”

  I scrambled through and she gave me the end to hold again while she first measured the length of the closet, then from the edge of the closet to the outer wall, climbing over one of the beds to get there.

  Her eyes were shining. “The closet is only three feet long inside, but it’s nine feet from there to the wall. So…?”

  I stared at her. “So, there’s space missing,” I said. “I need a piece of paper.”

  We went back to the bedroom and I tore out a page from my sketchbook. We sat on my bed and I quickly drew a rough floor plan of the second floor.

  “The closet is three by eight,” I said, drawing it in. “So that leaves a space six by eight, behind—”

  “Behind that wall,” breathed Ruby, looking at the wall opposite our bed, where the big dresser stood.

  * * *

  It was all very well to discover that there was a hidden room behind our bedroom wall, but there was no way to get into it. We managed to move the dresser out far enough to examine the wall behind it, but there was nothing. No secret doors. We moved the beds in the boys’ room and went over that wall too, but to no avail.

  The closet was a little more difficult to access. There were too many clothes in there, as well as a couple of cardboard boxes. We finally started hauling stuff out into the boys’ room, closing the door first so Aunt Doll wouldn’t notice if she happened to walk by. Soon the beds were piled with several long plastic clothes bags.