The room was round, not square, and very small. It had windows all around, a fuzzy rug on the floor, a small bookcase below one of the windows, and a rocking chair. The black cat that Kaz had seen earlier was curled up on the rocking chair. It looked up and meowed angrily at Kaz. Despite what Grandpop said about solid animals, Kaz had no doubt this cat could see him. And the cat clearly didn’t like what it saw.
“Oh, Thor,” Claire said as she bent to pick him up. “Don’t be mean. This is Kaz. He’s friendly.” Claire waved Thor’s paw at Kaz.
Kaz tried to smile at Thor, but he wasn’t sure he liked Thor any better than Thor liked him.
Thor meowed again, then leaped out of Claire’s grasp and padded away.
Kaz sighed. They’d searched the entire library, but they hadn’t found Finn. Maybe Claire was right. Maybe Finn really was gone. And maybe Beckett had somehow sneaked past them in the craft room. Beckett probably was the ghost those solid children had seen. He was the only other ghost in the library.
Wasn’t he?
There’s one place we haven’t looked for your brother,” Claire said as Kaz drifted over to the window and gazed into the Outside. It was getting dark out there.
Kaz turned. “Where?”
“Where Beckett went. Behind that bookcase in the back of the craft room,” Claire said. “I think there’s a secret room back there. I’ve seen Beckett go back there a lot. But like he told you before, I can’t get in there. There’s no door or anything.”
“You think Finn could be in there?” Kaz asked hopefully.
“I think you should go find out.”
Kaz agreed. But there was one problem. “I’m not very good at passing through walls,” he admitted.
“Oh,” Claire said. “Well, is your brother good at it?”
Kaz almost laughed. “Finn is good at everything.”
“Then all you have to do is stand or”—she glanced down at Kaz’s feet, which hovered a few inches off the ground—“float in front of the bookcase and call his name. If he hears you calling him, he’ll come out. Won’t he?”
“I don’t know,” Kaz said. “I’ve been calling him for an hour.”
“Maybe he hasn’t heard you,” Claire said. “Or . . . maybe he’s hiding from you. Like a game.”
Like hide-and-seek? Kaz thought. Finn loved hide-and-seek.
But this wasn’t a time for games.
Kaz and Finn’s haunt was gone. Mom, Pops, Grandmom, Grandpop, Little John, and Cosmo were all gone.
If Finn was here, he and Kaz had to stick together.
Kaz swam down the stairs . . . across the entryway . . . into the craft room . . . and all the way to the bookcase at the back of the room.
“Finn?” he called. “It’s me, Kaz. Are you back there, Finn?”
Kaz waited.
Finn did not appear.
“Finn?” Kaz said again. He turned his ear toward the bookcase and listened.
He didn’t hear anything.
Kaz stared at the bookcase. Passing through a wall was something almost every ghost could do. Even Little John could do it. There was no reason Kaz shouldn’t be able to do it, too.
He stuck out his finger and sloooowly moved it toward the bookcase.
No!
As much as he wanted to, he just couldn’t bring himself to step through that wall of books. Finn would have to come to him. If he was even back there.
The truth was, Finn could be anywhere. He could be hiding in some secret room behind the bookcase. He could be hiding someplace else in the library. Or he could be miles away from here.
The entryway seemed to be the exact center of the library, so Kaz swam back in there. Then he yelled as loud as he could so Finn would hear him no matter where he was. “NO GAMES, FINN! IF YOU’RE IN THIS LIBRARY, COME OUT! COME OUT RIGHT NOW!” He paused to take a breath, then added, “I HAVE TO TELL YOU WHAT HAPPENED TO OUR HAUNT! I HAVE TO TELL YOU ABOUT MOM, POPS, AND LITTLE JOHN! AND I HAVE TO TELL YOU ABOUT COSMO!”
Kaz waited.
And waited.
And waited some more.
Finn did not appear.
Kaz’s shoulders sagged.
Claire slowly walked over to him and tried to touch his shoulder, but her hand passed right through him.
“Aaaah!” Kaz darted away. “Don’t do that!”
“What?” Claire asked. “What’d I do?”
“You made your hand pass through me. I don’t like that. It makes me feel funny.”
“Huh,” Claire said. “It just makes me feel cold.” She pulled out her book and wrote that down.
While she was writing, Kaz said, “I guess you were right earlier. Finn’s not here. Beckett must be the ghost all those . . . kids saw earlier.”
“Probably,” Claire said. She strolled over to the big plant where the kids had said they’d seen the ghost. “But you know what? I’ve never actually seen him glow. I didn’t see him today. And I didn’t see him any of those other days, either.”
“So . . . ?” Kaz wasn’t sure what she was getting at.
“So, I can’t prove that it was Beckett,” Claire said. “A good detective doesn’t stop until she has proof. Maybe you and I should keep working on this case until we can prove that Beckett is the library ghost.”
“Okay,” Kaz said with a shrug. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” Claire said. She stared at the wall behind the plant as though she might find the answer there. After a little while, she turned back to Kaz. “Detectives like my parents look for fingerprints and stuff when they want to know who did something. Do ghosts leave fingerprints?”
Kaz looked at his fingers. “I don’t think so.”
“What about other evidence?” Claire asked.
“What’s ‘evidence’?” Kaz asked.
“Stuff that links a suspect to a crime,” Claire replied. “Fingerprints. Footprints. Clothing fibers. DNA. This is where the ghost was last seen, so this is our crime scene. Beckett is our number one suspect. So if we could find something that belongs to him, then we could prove that he’s the library ghost.” She walked all around the plant.
“I don’t know,” Kaz said. “I don’t think ghosts have any of that stuff.”
Claire peered closely at each of the leaves. She picked one up and looked underneath it.
“Claire?” Grandma Karen entered the room. She carried a box of—Kaz wasn’t sure what all that stuff in the box was. “What are you doing?”
Claire gulped. “Nothing,” she said, backing away from the plant.
“It doesn’t look like nothing.” Grandma Karen shifted the box from one hip to the other. She glanced around like she didn’t want anyone to hear her. Then she leaned close to Claire and whispered, “Are you trying to find the library ghost?”
“Uh . . .” Claire looked at Kaz.
Kaz couldn’t stop staring at the pink streak in Claire’s grandma’s hair.
“Listen to me, Claire,” Grandma Karen said. “Ghosts like to be left alone. If you don’t bother them, they won’t bother you.”
“Stop teasing me, Grandma. I know you don’t believe in ghosts.”
“What makes you think I don’t believe in ghosts?” Grandma Karen asked.
Claire studied her grandma. “You mean you do believe in ghosts?”
“That’s a conversation for another day,” Grandma Karen said as she took Claire by the hand and steered her toward the stairs. “Right now, it’s closing time. Why don’t you go upstairs and get ready for bed? I’ll be up to tuck you in as soon as I’ve shut down all the computers, turned out the lights, and locked the door.”
“Fine,” Claire said with a heavy sigh.
Grandma Karen went into the nonfiction room.
“You heard my grandma,” Claire said to Kaz. “I have to go
to bed.”
“What’s ‘go to bed’?”
“It’s what we say when we go to sleep. Don’t ghosts sleep?”
“I don’t know. I don’t think so,” Kaz said. There was another word he didn’t know: sleep.
“Huh,” Claire said as she pulled out her book. “Ghosts . . . don’t . . . sleep,” she said as she wrote. “And . . . they . . . don’t . . . leave . . . fingerprints, either. I forgot to write that down earlier.”
Kaz wished he had some way to keep track of everything he was learning about solids.
“Will you still be here when I wake up in the morning?” Claire asked, stuffing her book back into her bag.
Kaz shrugged. “Probably,” he said. Where would he go? If he went anywhere, he’d have to go back into the Outside. And Kaz certainly didn’t want to do that.
“Good!” Claire smiled. “Then I’ll see you in the morning. We’ll continue our investigation then.” She trotted up the stairs.
A few minutes later, the main floor of the library went dark and Grandma Karen went upstairs, too.
Kaz was alone.
Kaz still didn’t understand what sleeping was. Obviously it was something that took a long, long, long time.
How long? he wondered as he floated around the upstairs turret room. Even though he’d just met Claire, he missed her.
He missed his family even more. Kaz peered into the Outside night. He wondered where Mom, Dad, Little John, and Cosmo were. Did they find their way to new haunts, or were some of them still blowing about in the Outside?
What about Finn? And Grandmom and Grandpop?
Would Kaz ever see any of them again?
Back at his haunt, nighttime was when the family told stories. But here in the library, without Claire for company, Kaz didn’t know what to do with himself during the dark hours of the night.
Kaz drifted down the hallway. He knew Claire was behind one of those closed doors. She’d said earlier that one of those rooms was hers, but he couldn’t remember which one.
He heard a strange rumbling from behind one of the doors. It sounded like . . . well, Kaz didn’t know what it sounded like. He’d never heard a sound like that before.
“Hello? Claire?” he said outside the door.
Claire didn’t answer.
Kaz heard a softer rumbling from behind the door across the hall. He swam over. “Claire?” he said again. “Are you in there? What’s that noise?”
Kaz sucked his body in and made himself as flat as he could. He dived down and tried to swim under the door, but the floor here was different than it had been at the old schoolhouse. It was fuzzy and thick, and it stretched all the way to the bottom of the door. Kaz couldn’t swim under this door.
He sighed.
Bored, he wafted down the dark hallway . . . across the—what did Claire call this room? The ‘living room’? . . . and down the stairs. When he reached the entryway, he noticed a light coming from the nonfiction room.
Didn’t Claire’s grandma “turn out the lights” when she went upstairs? Didn’t “turning out the lights” make the library dark?
Kaz wafted over and peered around the doorway. He saw a light shining in a corner of the room. That ghost man, Beckett, hovered near the light with a book in his hands. A solid book.
Kaz stared. It wasn’t easy for a ghost to hold on to a solid object. Kaz wondered how long Beckett had been doing it.
“Well, are you going to stay there in the doorway or are you going to come in?” Beckett asked as he reached out a ghostly hand to turn a page in the solid book.
Kaz was surprised that Beckett knew he was there. “How long have you been holding that book?” he asked as he swam into the room.
“About an hour,” Beckett replied. “My record is an hour and a half.”
“Wow.” Kaz was impressed.
Beckett sniffed. “Unfortunately, I can’t practice during the day with all those solids coming and going. It’s difficult to even read at a table during the day. That solid with the pink stripe in her hair keeps grabbing my books out from under me and putting them away.”
Kaz could see how that would be a problem.
Beckett set his book down on the table, then glided over to Kaz. “I don’t believe we’ve been properly introduced. I’m Beckett.” He tipped his hat.
“Kaz.”
“Well, Kaz. I was a little surprised you didn’t follow me back to my private haunt earlier. I don’t extend an invitation to every ghost I meet, you know. Imagine if word got out that there was a secret place no solid could ever get into. I’d be overrun! But you didn’t even want to join me.”
“It’s not that I didn’t want to,” Kaz said, lowering his eyes. “It’s just . . . well, I sort of don’t like to pass through walls.”
“You can’t pass through walls?” Beckett gaped at Kaz.
“I didn’t say I couldn’t,” Kaz said. “I said I don’t like to.”
“Hmm,” Beckett said. “So you’d rather spend time with that solid girl than pass through a wall.”
“Well . . . ,” Kaz said. Actually, he would rather spend time with Claire than pass through a wall.
“You don’t like solids much, do you?” Kaz said.
“Nope,” Beckett said, making no apologies. Kaz wasn’t surprised. It was probably how most ghosts felt.
“Is that why you’ve been glowing in the library?” Kaz asked. “Are you trying to scare the solids away?”
“What? I haven’t been glowing in the library,” Beckett said. “I haven’t glowed in twenty years. I don’t even know if I can still do it.”
“Really?” Kaz said.
Beckett shrugged. “Why would I even want to? It’s most distressing that that solid friend of yours can see us all the time. Why would I want to make myself visible to other solids?”
If Beckett wasn’t the library ghost, then who was?
Kaz couldn’t wait to tell Claire what he’d learned. Beckett wasn’t the library ghost.
Kaz swam up the stairs, across the living room, and down the hall to where those closed doors were. They were still shut. Claire must still be sleeping. Is she going to sleep all night? Kaz wondered.
While Kaz floated up and down the upstairs hallway, waiting for Claire to stop sleeping, he heard a noise. It sounded sort of like solid footsteps. Downstairs. Maybe even in the Outside.
But they were getting closer.
And closer.
Kaz floated over to the stairs to see what was going on.
The door to the Outside slooooowly started to open, and a shadow appeared on the entryway floor. The shadow grew larger . . . and larger . . . and larger . . . until the door opened all the way and Claire’s mom and dad walked in.
“I’m so tired,” Claire’s mom said, closing the door behind them.
“It’s been a long night,” Claire’s dad said with a yawn. He glanced toward the nonfiction room. “Looks like Mother left a light on again.” He walked into the room, and the light went out.
“Hey!” Kaz heard Beckett exclaim. “I was using that!”
But of course, Claire’s parents couldn’t hear him. Claire’s dad came back into the entryway, draped an arm over Claire’s mom’s shoulders, and together they tromped up the stairs.
They walked right past Kaz in the hallway.
Claire’s dad opened one of the closed doors, but Claire’s mom did not go inside. “I’ll be right in,” she said. “I want to check on Claire.”
Kaz followed Claire’s mom to the next closed door. The one where he had heard the softer rumbling sound. She opened the door, and Kaz floated in behind her.
Claire was lying on top of a strange box, but all he could see of her was her head. A big blanket covered the rest of her. Thor, the cat, lay curled up on top of the blanket next to her. He gazed at Kaz through narrow,
slitted eyes.
Kaz drifted closer and saw that Claire’s eyes were closed and the soft rumbling sound was coming from her nose. Was this what Claire meant by “sleeping”?
Fascinating, Kaz thought.
He watched Claire’s mom bend down and kiss Claire’s forehead. Just like his mom used to do to him.
But Claire didn’t even seem to know her mom was there. It was like her body was turned off.
Thor sat up and growled at Kaz.
Kaz flew backward.
“What’s the matter, Thor?” Claire’s mom whispered to the cat. “Do you see something out the window?” She turned and looked right through Kaz.
The cat leaped down from the bed and padded out of the room. Claire’s mom shrugged. Then she left, too, closing the door behind her.
Once again, Kaz was stuck in a room with Claire. But this time he didn’t mind. He felt less lonely when he was with Claire. And as soon as she stopped sleeping, he would tell her that he had proof that Beckett wasn’t the library ghost.
That’s not proof,” Claire said a couple of hours later. She had finally stopped sleeping, and Kaz had just told her all about his talk with Beckett.
Kaz didn’t understand. “Beckett told me he hasn’t been glowing in the library. He said he hasn’t glowed in twenty years. He isn’t even sure he can still do it. How is that not proof that Beckett isn’t the library ghost?”
“Because sometimes suspects lie,” Claire said.
Why would Beckett lie?
Later that morning, Claire’s grandma asked her to put books away. While Claire wheeled a cart of books from one room to another, Kaz wafted behind.
“Maybe there’s another ghost in this library,” he said as they crossed the entryway and went into the craft room. “One who isn’t Beckett. Or me. Or Finn.”
“Could be,” Claire said. She took a book off her cart and placed it on the shelf. “But I think I’d know if there was another ghost here.”
“I don’t know. This place is huge.” Kaz stretched his arms wide. “It’s almost as big as my old haunt. And you’re only one person. You can’t be everywhere at once. Another ghost could stay hidden from you if he or she really wanted to.”
The Haunted Library Page 3