The Ghost Road

by Charis Cotter

  “Humph,” said Aunt Doll. “Older maybe.”

  “When are you going?” said Ruby.

  “As soon as I change out of this housedress. You go and pack up some of the muffins I made this morning.”

  Ruby dashed off and Aunt Doll followed. She turned back to me at the door.

  “Remember what I said about the nightmares, Ruth. I’m always here if you need me.” And she smiled kindly again and went down the hall.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  THE PAINTING

  After Aunt Doll left, I sat looking at the painting and thinking about my nightmare. The ship looked like the one in my dream: three masts, one broken, ragged sails. I got up and went over to look more closely at it. Nobody was visible on the deck, but I could just make out the name written along the side, Cathleen.

  Ruby bounced back into the room with two plates.

  “Aunt Doll said we could try her muffins,” she said, handing me one. I put it down on the bed.

  “Look at this picture,” I said to Ruby. “See the name?”

  “What name?” said Ruby, peering at it.

  “Cathleen. Right there,” I said, pointing to the name. It was faint, but clearly visible.

  “Cathleen? Are you kidding me, Ruth? That’s the name of the ship that brought the Finns from Ireland, the one that sank—”

  “I know,” I said. “This must be a picture of that ship.”

  “But there isn’t any name on the painting,” she said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Well, I’m not imagining it!” I said, poking at the name. “It’s right there. Are you putting me on or what, Ruby?”

  “I’m telling you, there’s no name there!”

  We were both getting riled.

  “Wait a minute,” said Ruby, her eyes widening. “You can see the name, really?”

  “I swear,” I replied, crossing my heart.

  “Whewww,” she said. “That is so freaky, Ruth. You can see it, but I can’t. You know what this means, don’t you?”

  My heart sank. I had a feeling I did.

  “It’s the Sight,” she said solemnly, and then ruined the effect by taking a huge bite out of her muffin.

  I looked back at the painting. The name was still there, clear as anything. A little shiver trickled down my back.

  “That’s the ship they came on,” I said slowly. “The Finns. And that’s the ship in my dream.”

  “Only it’s not a dream, is it?” said Ruby. “It’s a vision. You said you never had the Sight till you came here, but you told me you had that dream ever since you were a little girl.”

  “Can a vision come in a dream?”

  “Why not?” said Ruby, licking her fingers.

  I sat down beside her and took a bite out of my muffin. Smothered with butter and jam, it was even better than the one I’d had with my breakfast the day before. Partridgeberries. One more thing to love about Newfoundland.

  “What I can’t figure out,” said Ruby, still staring at the painting, “is why they have a spy hole behind the painting, but there’s no hole in the painting to look through.”

  “Maybe the painting came after,” I said slowly. “And the hole was to look into the nursery, not to look out.”

  “That makes more sense,” said Ruby. “If the mother and father were sleeping in here, they could look in on the baby without disturbing it by going around and opening the door.”

  “But why close the room off like that?”

  “Whoever hung this painting,” said Ruby, “must have known about the room. And they hung it here to cover up the spy hole.”

  “Who painted it?” I wondered. I stood up and looked in the right-hand corner, where the artist had signed his name.

  “Michael Finn,” I said. “Who was he?”

  “Search me,” said Ruby.

  Aunt Doll’s voice drifted up from downstairs.

  “I’m on my way. Don’t forget the mac and cheese!”

  “We won’t,” yelled Ruby.

  The front door slammed. We looked at each other.

  “Come on,” said Ruby. “We gotta look in the nursery again. Maybe the Finn Bible is hidden in there somewhere.”

  I was reluctant. “Aunt Doll said there might have been one, not that there was one. And we already looked. There’s nothing there.”

  “Come on!” said Ruby, pulling at my arm. “We gotta look. We might have missed something.” I followed her into the closet, through the rack of clothes to the middle.

  It was tricky to find the catch, even though we knew it was there. But I finally found it, and the door swung open silently, into blackness.

  “We’ll need the flashlight,” said Ruby, and went back to our bedroom to get it. “It’s still working,” she said, giving it a little shake, and then shone it through the door. We bent down and went in, wedging the book in the door behind us.

  Ruby flashed the light around the room, illuminating the rough wood walls and the bare floorboards. And the trunk.

  We went over and knelt down beside it. The red paint was faded and worn away in places.

  “I wonder where this trunk came from,” said Ruby. “It sure looks old. Maybe it came from Slippers Cove.”

  “Maybe,” I said doubtfully. “But I don’t know when. It would have had to be before the flood. Everything was swept away.” I opened it. There was still a faint, sweet smell coming from the wildflowers and grass we’d left in the trunk. We’d left the book there too. Carefully I lifted them out and set them on the floor. Then, with Ruby holding the flashlight, I felt around the bottom of the trunk to see if there was any kind of catch for a secret compartment. We turned it upside down and examined the bottom.

  “It’s solid,” I said. “There’s nothing here.”

  “My mom said something in my letter about this room having secrets,” said Ruby. “What do you think she meant?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. But let’s search the room. Maybe there’s a loose floorboard or another secret panel in the wall.”

  We went over that little room inch by inch, but we didn’t come up with anything except a lot of dust and old spiderwebs.

  Ruby sat back on her heels. “It’s no use,” she said. “The Bible isn’t here.”

  “Where else could it be?” I asked.

  “I wonder…” said Ruth. “Maybe in Pop’s room. There’s a bunch of old books and stuff in there…”

  “Your dad’s room?” I was bewildered. “Why would he have it?”

  She stared at me and then started to laugh.

  “Not Dad, Pop. And not really my Pop, Molly’s Pop.”

  “What?”

  “That’s what we call our grandfathers here. Pop. Nan and Pop, get it?”

  “Well, how was I to know that?” She was still laughing.

  “What do you call your grandfather?”

  “I don’t have one. Or a grandmother. Except the witch. My dad’s parents died before he met my mom.”

  “Oh, right. Sorry,” said Ruby. “It’s just you look at me like I’m from another planet sometimes.”

  “You are,” I said. “The planet of Newfoundland.” This started her off laughing again. “But who was this guy? Aunt Doll’s dad?”

  “Our great-grandfather. Clarence Duggan. He was from Fossil’s Cove, a distant relation to the Buckle Duggans, and he married Lily,” said Ruby in her storytelling voice. “When Lily died, he brought up all the kids on his own. Aunt Doll says he was a very religious man and was best friends with the priest. They used to sit in his room and talk about the Bible for hours. But that was later, after all his children moved away except for Daphne, and he kept on living here with Daphne and her family. When Daphne died, Aunt Doll came back from St. John’s to look after the kids and Pop. Clarence.”

  I was getting confused again. “I forget what happened to Daphne’s husband? Why couldn’t he look after the kids?”

  “He died before Daphne did, when Molly and Meg were little. He was a fisherman and h
e was lost at sea.”

  “Oh, right. I remember now. Aunt Doll told me. But that’s so sad, to lose both their father and their mother. At least we had our fathers.”

  “Well, sort of,” said Ruby with a shrug.

  And then I remembered something the witch had told me about Ruby. In all the fuss about the vision and everything else I had completely forgotten.

  Ruby hadn’t had her father all the time. After her mother had died she’d lived here, with Aunt Doll, until Uncle George had married Wendy and brought Ruby to live in St. John’s with them. Why had she never told me that?

  CHAPTER FORTY

  THE SMARTEST DUGGAN

  “Ruby?” I said. “The witch told me something else. I forgot to tell you.”

  “What?”

  Suddenly I found it hard to say.

  “About when Molly died. That your dad…your dad left you here with Aunt Doll.”

  “Oh, that,” she said, and turned away to pick up the book and dried flowers. “So?”

  “She said you didn’t live with your dad again till he got married, and then he brought you to St. John’s.”

  “Yup.” Ruby put the book and the flowers in the trunk, closed it, and made a big deal about tying the green ribbon into a bow on the catch. “I wish he’d left me here,” she mumbled.

  “But why didn’t he keep you with him after your mother died?” I asked. “Like me and my dad? We got on okay.”

  Ruby shrugged, as if she didn’t care. “It’s different here. Women look after kids, mostly, not the men. And he would travel for work and he couldn’t be around all the time. He still visited me a lot, whenever he could. I got on okay with Aunt Doll. In fact, I got on fine. I loved it here. I had friends and I was going to start school, but then Dad and Wendy got married and I went to live with them. Pretty soon they had a baby, and then it was just babies all the time and…well, Wynken, Blynken and Nod took over.” She stood up. “At least I get to come back here in the summers.”

  “The witch said she wanted to look after you. She was really mad at your dad for leaving you with Aunt Doll instead of her.”

  Ruby shuddered. “Thank goodness he did. Can you imagine what I would be like if Nan brought me up?”

  “Little Witch Number Two,” I said.

  She laughed and stood up. “Let’s go look for the Bible in Pop’s room.”

  As I followed her out of the room into the closet, carefully latching the door behind me, I couldn’t help wondering about what she’d said. Or what she hadn’t said. It was almost like her dad didn’t want her after her mother died. And then when he took her back, she had to share him with Wendy and the babies. I thought of Dad and Awful Gwen. At least I had all that time with him, just him and me, before he got married.

  Ruby led me downstairs, through the living room to a door on the back wall beside the woodstove. I’d hardly noticed it before, thinking it was a closet. There was something about this part of the house, with its low ceilings and dark furniture, that distorted my idea of space. Upstairs I never suspected there was a hidden room, and here I thought the living room stretched the length of the house.

  Ruby opened the door and I stood behind her on the threshold. The room beyond was wreathed in shadows.

  “Why is it so dark?” I whispered.

  Ruby crossed the room and yanked open some curtains. The late afternoon light filtered in. A large wooden desk sat directly under the window, looking out into the yard at the back of the house.

  Ruby was opening more curtains on the right-hand side of the room, and more light poured in.

  “Aunt Doll says the light damages the furniture and paintings,” she said, surveying the room.

  The walls were nearly hidden by paintings above and bookcases below. Behind them I could see a dark flocked wallpaper. There was an old-fashioned sleigh bed under the other window and an armchair. A crucifix hung over the bed.

  “He must have been a great reader,” I said, looking at all the books.

  “According to Aunt Doll, he was the smartest Duggan ever born. She says he could have gone to university, but he was brought up to be a fisherman like his father before him. He never stopped reading.”

  I looked at an old kerosene lamp sitting on the desk.

  “No electricity?”

  “No. When the electricity came to Buckle in the 1950s, Daphne wanted to get it, but Pop didn’t trust it. Said it caused fires. There was a big family racket about it, and in the end Daphne got electricity for the other side of the house but none for this side. Clarence wouldn’t have it, and he didn’t die till a few years ago. Aunt Doll said not only was he the smartest Duggan, he was the stubbornest Duggan. By then I guess Aunt Doll must have got used to not having electricity on this side of the house. She says it saves money, so she never got it.”

  While Ruby was talking, I was scanning the shelves for the Bible. There were all kinds of books. A lot of them had leather covers, their titles etched in gold lettering on the spines. But he also had a lot of paperbacks, Penguins in green and white, orange and white. I found myself lingering over them, dying to take them off the shelves and flip through them.

  Ruby was pulling out the drawers of the desk and rifling through the contents. “How big is a family Bible?” she asked, pulling out one of the narrower drawers.

  “I don’t know.” I ran my fingers along a row of books and then looked at them. “No dust,” I said. “Don’t you think if Aunt Doll dusts in here she’d notice if the Bible was here?”

  Ruby’s voice was muffled. She had crawled under the desk. “It would have to be hidden away somewhere.”

  She emerged, her hair sticking up. “No secret panels under there. That I can find, anyway. What about under the bed?” and she dived over there.

  I sat back on my heels and looked up at the paintings. There were seascapes and landscapes and a few portraits of solemn men and women sitting stiffly in wooden chairs. One of the seascapes looked familiar, and I stood up to read the artist’s name.

  Michael Finn. The painting was of a stormy sea crashing against a high cliff. There was a break halfway along the cliff, and a narrow band of water led into a barely glimpsed opening.

  Cliffs outside Slippers Cove was painted along the bottom of the picture.

  “Ruby,” I called. Something in my voice brought her out from under the bed and to my side in an instant. I pointed to the name of the painting.

  “Oh my,” she whispered and grabbed my hand, squeezing it hard.

  A play of light on the water beyond the entrance to the cove hinted that there was something magical and secret beyond the rocky opening.

  Ruby reached out and touched the artist’s name.

  “Michael Finn,” she said. “Who was he?”

  “Wait a minute,” I said. Something was tickling inside my brain. An idea. The secret cove. What had Eldred said? No one could find it from the land. No one could see it from the sea. But Michael Finn had painted it, teasing us with the promise of something behind the rocks. A secret. Behind the cliffs. Behind the painting? There was something behind the Michael Finn painting in our bedroom: the hidden room.

  Was there something behind this Michael Finn painting?

  I stretched out my arms and gently lifted the painting away from the wall.

  The flocked wallpaper framed the door of a small wooden cupboard, set into the wall.

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  THE BIBLE

  Ruby turned to look at me, her eyes wide. “How did you know it was there? Was it…” She lowered her voice dramatically. “The Sight?”

  “No, Ruby, I just used my brains. Look,” and I showed her the painting, which I’d laid carefully on the floor, leaning up against the bookcase. “The painting is of Slippers Cove, hidden behind those cliffs. I thought of the picture upstairs, where the room is hidden behind the picture, and then I thought, well, maybe there’s something hidden behind this picture too.”

  “Wow!” said Ruby. “You are smart! I never w
ould have thought of that. I wonder if it was Pop that hung both pictures, and he planned it that way. But why would he want to hide stuff?”

  “Shall we open it and find out?”

  Ruby reached out to the little cupboard door and then stopped. “You do the honors,” she said. “You found it.”

  I pulled open the door.

  A faint, musty smell of old books came drifting out. It was dark inside, and the dim light from the windows did little to illuminate it. I reached my hand in slowly, wishing I’d let Ruby do it. What if there was a rat in there? Or a mouse? I shivered involuntarily.

  Ruby noticed and laughed softly and said, “Don’t worry, Ruth, nothing’s going to bite you,” as if she’d read my mind.

  It wasn’t a very big space, and it was crowded. First I pulled out a large brown envelope. Next came a wooden box, about the size of a small box of chocolates. It had a strange design of interlocking silver lines on the top and the sides. I reached in once more and my hands closed on the soft leather covering of—a book. I pulled it out.

  It was a Bible. Not very big. I always thought of family Bibles as being the size of big, fat dictionaries, but this one was about the size of a paperback book, only twice as thick. It was tied with a green ribbon, very much like the one that tied the trunk closed upstairs. The cover was crumbling away and it looked like the ribbon was the only thing holding it together. The gilt along the edges of the pages was worn to a soft, shimmering gold.

  Ruby looked at me with shining eyes. “It’s got to be the Finn Bible,” she whispered. “Got to be.” She took it reverently from my hands and we went over to the desk where there was some light still coming in the window.

  Carefully she loosened the ribbon, and then the cover did come off. The first two pages were covered in spidery script. We stared at it.

  “Is it English?” said Ruby finally. The handwriting was so small and flowery, with elegant tops and tails to the letters, that at first it looked like another language.

  “I saw a magnifying glass in one of these drawers,” said Ruby, rummaging and then coming up with one. “Clarence must have needed it to read sometimes.” She held it over the first few lines of writing.