“It’s hard to explain,” Julian said. “But I can show you.”
Blake looked at me, eyebrows raised. I glanced at Julian and saw how hard his eyes were pleading. I’d been pretty mad at him, and for good reason, but I’d also missed how excited he got about filming. I wanted to believe him.
“Lead the way, then,” I finally said.
Blake and I followed Julian back to the front porch. When we reached the porch steps, Julian gestured for me to go ahead. “I need you to unlock the door.”
I frowned. “Why don’t you do it?”
“That would be a bad idea.” He fiddled with the camera strap. “Probably best that it’s not me. Not yet.”
I took the steps slowly and studied the front door for a moment. I hadn’t felt spooked at all standing on the porch step while Blake filmed me talking about the house, but holding the copied key and working up the nerve to go inside was a different matter.
“This better not be a setup.”
“If it is, you’re dead meat,” Blake said.
“It’s not a setup,” Julian said evenly. “I can’t show you what I’m talking about if you don’t open the door.”
I put the key in the lock. It turned easily, and I pushed the door open without a problem. At first all I felt was chilly air. Musty like before, but also shivery with damp cold.
“Freaky.” Blake rubbed his arms. “I’m getting goose bumps.”
“Step inside,” Julian said.
I glared at him. “I’m not going back upstairs.”
“You don’t have to. Just take a few steps inside.”
With the first step, that familiar queasiness came over me—the wave of heat and cold. But I’d braced myself for this. I knew it was the dark feeling Grandma had felt all those years ago, as if anger and sorrow had twined together and festered for decades.
“I feel it, Julian.”
He walked past me toward the staircase. On the bottom step sat the doll, Bettina, but her head had come off and someone had set it on the step above. Looking at that head with its dead eyes staring back at me put a hollow ache in my stomach.
“The head broke off when Lily dropped it,” Julian said. “But that’s not what I wanted to show you.” He placed his hand on the banister and took the first step.
“I’m here,” he called out.
I half expected to hear a ghostly voice answer him, but at first there was only silence.
Then I heard a creaking. More than one creaking, actually. I listened hard—the noise was coming from both floors.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s the doors. They’re opening wide all over the house.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Blake said.
I wrapped my arms around my body. “I think we should go.”
“Just wait,” Julian said.
“I don’t like this,” I whispered.
There was a quiet pause. A perfect stillness fell over the house, and all I could hear was the blood rushing in my ears.
Then every door in the house slammed shut.
Blake jerked around to face me, panic in his eyes. “What is going on?”
Before I could answer, the chandelier above us began to sway. The fixture in Margaret Anne’s room had done the same thing, but this one was ten times bigger. And all that metalwork with pointy candles and dangling crystals made it so much heavier. Its chain was old, rusted, and the wiring looked frayed.
If that thing fell, it could kill someone.
“We’ve gotta get out of here.” Blake grabbed my arm and steered me toward the door.
I turned back to Julian, but he still hadn’t moved from the staircase. He stared at the fixture and slowly raised his camera.
There was a terrible sound of cracking plaster, and the light fixture pulled away from the ceiling. Pieces of molding broke off and crashed to the floor. The fixture was holding on by the electrical cord, which was shredding from the weight.
Blake pushed me toward the door just as the wire snapped and the entire fixture came crashing to the floor.
I shot through the doorway like a cannonball and took the steps two at a time, only turning when Julian slammed the door on his way out. None of us slowed down until Hilliard House was hidden by the trees. Blake was barely winded, but Julian and I were both doubled over.
“That…certainly…never happened before,” Julian gasped.
Blake stared at Julian through narrowed eyes. “I was sure that chandelier had crashed on your head. You better tell us exactly what happened last time you were in the house.”
Julian peered up at him. “Can I sit down…and catch my breath first?”
“Walk it off. You can talk as we go.”
Julian wiped his face on his sleeve, frowning at Blake all the while, and then fell into step beside me. Once he got his breathing under control, he stared straight ahead as he spoke. “The night Avery and I filmed, I felt something shove me against the wall, and my headlamp blew up. I mean, literally—the bulb exploded. And Lily said right before it happened she saw a man’s shadow in the mirror.”
Blake glanced at me. “But he told her to say stuff like that, right?”
“That wasn’t part of the script,” Julian said. “We made up the ghost of Margaret Anne—I admit that—but Lily says she saw that shadow in the mirror for real. She’s an actress, but she hardly ever improvises. Things got real in that bathroom, and when that happens, Lily doesn’t lie.”
Blake looked to me again for confirmation.
“He’s telling the truth about the shoving and the headlamp,” I said. “I don’t know about the rest.”
“Anyway…” Julian took a deep breath. “When I went back on my own, the doors slammed just like today. The light fixture started swinging, too, but I left pretty quickly. That must have weakened the chain, though.”
“Okay,” I said. “Maybe Grandma will believe the fixture fell on its own—you know, because it’s so old. She could knock a few hundred off the selling price, right?”
“But whoever’s buying it would be in danger,” Blake said. “Seriously, that house could kill someone.”
“Crap.” I rubbed my eyes. “Why couldn’t you just leave it alone, Julian? You’ve made everything worse, and now I’m going to be in deep trouble with Grandma.”
Julian stopped walking to stare at me. “I made up some stuff, but I didn’t create that thing in the house. We just woke it up. Maybe we’re doing your grandma a favor.”
“But if you’d never tricked me in the first place, it might have stayed asleep!”
“How do you know that? You were the one having cozy chats with it years ago, Avery. I didn’t start this.”
“Don’t you dare put this on me.” Tears pricked my eyes. “You twisted it.”
“I just wanted to make a good film. One with real emotion. And I really thought it might help you face your fear. But every time I try something like that, I get in trouble.” Julian swallowed. “I didn’t mean to hurt anyone. Why is everyone so freaking sensitive?”
And with that he took off down the hill by himself.
Blake and I stood still for a long moment.
“Well, now what do we do?” Blake finally said.
I wiped my forehead on my sleeve. “I don’t know…run away and join the circus?”
“I’m not joining the circus. I didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Then…I guess we have to tell Grandma.”
“Correction—you have to tell her.”
I sighed. “Can’t you be there, too? I know it’s on me to explain everything, but I don’t think I can face her alone.”
He didn’t answer for a long time.
“Blake?”
“As long as you make it clear I had nothing to do with this…”
I nodded.
“I guess I can be there when you tell her.”
“Thanks.” I kind of wanted to hug him, but I knew he’d hate that. Plus he was really sweaty.
; “Should we head back?”
I shook my head. “I need to do some research first, and I don’t think Grandma’s encyclopedias are going to be much help.”
“What kind of research?”
“How much battery have you got left on your phone?”
He pulled it from his pocket and swiped the screen with his thumb. “A little less than fifty percent. But it’s too slow up here, Avery. We’d go crazy waiting for pages to load.”
“We’ll have to walk out to the highway, then. We’ll walk until you get enough bars or Gs or whatever you need. Grandma’s probably taking her nap, so now’s as good a time as any, right?”
Turned out we had to walk down the hill, past the cemetery, and all the way to the four-lane highway before Blake could get a decent signal. Once we’d settled ourselves on a grassy patch near the parking lot of Cee Cee’s Crafts and Curiosities, I pulled out my storyboard pages and flipped them over to take notes.
Blake looked at me expectantly. “So?”
“Type in what is a ghost,” I said.
“Don’t we kind of know that already?”
“Explain it to me, then, genius.”
“Well, when a person dies, sometimes they don’t die all the way, and then…wasn’t there some Bruce Willis movie about this?” He frowned. “All right, I got nothing. Just don’t hang over my shoulder while I type.”
I readied my pencil.
“It’s all obvious stuff,” he said after a moment, “like ‘an apparition of a dead person,’ or ‘the energy of a person who has died and is stuck between this plane of existence and the next.’ ”
I didn’t even bother to write that down. “Try why do ghosts haunt.”
Blake typed in the words with quick, reassuring clicks. “Hold on, it’s thinking.” After a pause his eyes widened. “Wow, there’s a lot of stuff for that. ‘Ghosts haunt because they have unfinished business.’ That’s pretty good. Or how about this: ‘Ghosts haunt places or people so they can seek justice for a wrong that happened to them before they died.’ ”
He read silently for a moment.
“What else?”
“Well, there’s totally obvious stuff, like ghosts not knowing they’re dead, or ghosts being improperly buried—do you think it’s that second one? What if the ghost is Joshua Hilliard, and he’s upset that he was buried apart from this wife and child?”
I shook my head. “His wife wanted it that way—that’s what Mom told me—and he must have agreed to it since she died long before him.”
He turned back to his phone. “Well, how about this: ‘Some ghosts return to reenact a crisis from their former lives, most often their death.’ That sounds like Margaret Anne. She had a miserable death, didn’t she?”
“Yeah, but I don’t think she’s the ghost.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Margaret Anne I spoke to when I was in the house. I think it was a grown-up.”
He looked up. “Really? You’ve remembered more?”
“Not exactly. I just know I wasn’t afraid when I was in the house back then. The fear of that house came after Grandma whipped me. And when Mom told me she used to visit Mr. Hilliard, and that he was nice to her, it sounded familiar to me.”
“You’re saying the ghost is Joshua Hilliard?”
“It makes a lot more sense than Margaret Anne.”
“But wait a minute,” Blake said. “If he was a nice old man to Mom, and a nice ghost to you, why would he be so angry now?”
“Type why do ghosts get angry.”
He spent a long time scrolling through the results. “There’s not a clear answer to that one. But there’s a page on the ‘psychology of ghosts.’ Hold on while I read through this.”
He read for so long I couldn’t help looking over his shoulder.
“Just give me a second,” he said. “Okay, it talks about jealous and fearful ghosts, but I don’t think that’s our problem. Wait, here’s a ‘melancholy ghost.’ ” He read silently again before nodding. “It says, ‘someone so overwhelmed by tragedy that they wander the physical realm, unable to move on because they are paralyzed by grief.’ ”
“That sounds right.”
“Listen to this: ‘Melancholy ghosts can fill a room with an atmosphere of sadness or despair that profoundly affects the living.’ ”
“Grandma felt that. So did I, but only after we’d been filming in the house for a while. But do melancholy ghosts get angry?”
“Angry ghosts are their own category.” He scrolled some more. “This mostly talks about vengeful ghosts, but listen to this: ‘The angry ghost may exhibit poltergeist-like activity, such as hurling objects or physically attacking a person.’ ”
“Our ghost hasn’t really attacked anyone, though.”
“What do you call dropping a light fixture on a kid’s head?”
“But Julian said he was well out of the way…” I frowned. “You’re right. Julian was pushed against the wall and his headlamp exploded. You could call that an attack.”
“Angry ghost it is.” Blake scrolled through the rest of the text. “The only other thing this article says is that you can feed a ghost’s anger by sending negative emotions its way. Seems like Julian scaring you on purpose for a ghost movie about Joshua Hilliard’s beloved daughter would count for that.”
“How do we fix it?”
“I’m going to ask how to get rid of a ghost.”
“No! That’s too negative. Sounds like an exorcism or something. How about how do I help a ghost move on.”
Blake read for a long time after that, clicking link after link and shaking his head. “Some of these websites say to bring in a medium. One said we should send love to the spirit and pray to the archangel Michael, and this one says we need to smudge the house with burning sage.” He clicked the phone off. “This is all goofy stuff, and I’m running low on battery anyway.”
We walked back to the house in silence, but that didn’t bother me. I was already rehearsing what I’d say to Grandma. She hated Hilliard House and did not hold with the notion of ghosts, so I would have to explain things in the right order and with lots of evidence, just like my language arts teacher was always rattling on about.
It would’ve been a lot easier if I had access to Julian’s film footage. He must have filmed that swinging light fixture when he was there by himself, and Grandma would have to take notice of that. When we passed Hollyhock Cottage, I gave a quick glance at Julian’s window, but the curtains were closed. No way was I knocking on the door after his hissy fit.
Then it hit me. What if the Waynes left tomorrow? What if I never talked to Julian again? He’d tricked me, all right, but I’d turned right around and called him crazy. I’d said loud and clear—in front of his baby sister—that he should be locked up just like his mother. It had to be the meanest thing I’d ever said to anyone.
“Avery?”
I turned to Blake. “What?”
“Your face is all twisted and intense. What are you thinking?”
I sighed. “Well…”
I couldn’t tell him about Julian. It was too private, and my words had been too vicious. I didn’t want to speak them again, even if it was just to explain what happened.
“I…well, I’ve just been wondering what Joshua Hilliard’s ‘unfinished business’ might be,” I finally said. “Or how he might have been wronged when he was alive. Grandma says he wasn’t a Christianly man, and that everyone knew Margaret Anne died because of his neglect. But Mom says he was kind and that he would have done everything possible for Margaret Anne, right? And then there’s old Aileen Shelton. She clammed up and got all sad when we started talking about Joshua Hilliard and Margaret Anne’s death. I think there’s something going on with that.”
Blake chewed his lip for a moment. “Sounds plausible.”
“So…somehow we need to convince Mrs. Shelton to tell us the whole truth. If I can do that, maybe I’ll be ready to tell Grandma everything.
”
Grandma was shuffling around in her room when we got back to the house, so I knew she was just getting up from her afternoon nap. That gave me enough time. I jotted down all the things I needed to say on the pad of paper Grandma kept by the phone in the sewing room. Then I double-checked Aileen Shelton’s number and took the phone upstairs.
It rang four times before anyone picked up.
“Hello?” The voice on the other end was faint and raspy.
“Is this Mrs. Shelton? It’s Avery May.”
“Pardon?”
“Avery May Hilliard. Ava Hilliard’s granddaughter.”
“Oh.”
“Please don’t hang up. It’s about Hilliard House, Mrs. Shelton. There’s something wrong there.”
She cleared her throat. “What can you mean, child? No one’s lived in that house for decades.”
“No one that’s actually alive.”
There was a pause. “What did you say?”
“Nobody lives there, Mrs. Shelton.” I took a breath for courage. “But my brother and I have felt something. Someone.”
“I am too old for nonsense, child.”
She sure wasn’t making this easy on me. I took a deep breath and studied my notes for a second.
“Hello? Are you still there, young lady?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’m trying to tell you there’s a presence in the house, and it’s not happy. I’m pretty sure it’s old Joshua Hilliard.”
Silence.
“Mrs. Shelton?”
“I can’t decide if this is some piece of mischief you’re trying to pull on me.”
“No, ma’am. I don’t mean any mischief. My grandma would kill me for such a thing.”
Mrs. Shelton made a huffing sound.
“I’m calling because…well, I think you know a lot more about Joshua Hilliard than you told us. I promise I wouldn’t bug you if it wasn’t important. I just really need your help.”
“What do you expect me to do, child? I’m confined to my bed.”
“You don’t have to leave your bed, Mrs. Shelton. All I’m asking is for you to tell us the whole story.”
Another silence followed, but I just let it be. This was one of Mom’s litigator tricks—people hate silence, so if you let it go on long enough, they’ll fill it.
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