Ghosts Beneath Our Feet

by Betty Ren Wright

  But she needn’t have worried. Mrs. Blaine’s mind was on Jay. He’d left the house right after breakfast without a word.

  “He’s probably with his friend,” Katie said cautiously. “I think they were going somewhere today.”

  “What’s the friend like?” Mrs. Blaine studied Katie over her coffee cup.

  “His name’s Skip Poldeen. He lives across from Joan. I—I don’t know what he’s like. I hardly met him.”

  Her mother’s lips tightened. “I can tell a lot from the look on your face,” she said. “And I don’t like what I see there.”

  “Maybe they’re at Skip’s house.” Katie remembered her dream and pictured the motorcycle skidding up and down the rain-wet streets of Newquay. She glanced across the table at Uncle Frank, hoping for a distraction, but he was busy spitting watermelon seeds into his spoon. No help there.

  The front door slammed, and quick steps sounded on the stairs.

  “Jay?” her mother called.

  After a defiant pause, the footsteps started back down. Jay came into the kitchen. His hair was soaked, and his shirt clung to his shoulders. He looked excited and a little scared. The way I felt when I got home, Katie thought. Maybe he saw a ghost, too.

  “Where have you been?” Mrs. Blaine asked. “It worries me when you sneak away without a word.”

  “I didn’t sneak. I just went.” He was scared. Katie could hear it in his voice, see it in the way he kept glancing over his shoulder.

  “Go upstairs and change,” Mrs. Blaine said. “You’re absolutely drenched. And then I want to hear about this Skip Poldeen.”

  Jay shot Katie a look of pure dislike.

  “I have a right to know whom you’re spending your time with,” Mrs. Blaine insisted. “And I want to know where you go. I’m responsible for you, remember that.”

  Jay clenched his fists. “I can look after myself,” he said, his voice squeaking out of control. “You don’t have to be responsible for me. I’m not your kid!”

  “You are my kid. Your father and I—”

  “My father’s dead! He’s not part of this anymore—”

  “’Ere, ’ere!” Uncle Frank’s shout made them all jump. “You’re a saucy young feller, ain’t you? We don’t want such talk in this ’ouse, you ’ear? My boy Kenny never would have—”

  Jay ran out of the kitchen. Katie got up to go after him, but her mother put out a hand.

  “Let him be. He has to cool down.”

  “But he was crying, Mom! He doesn’t mean all that stuff—”

  “I said, let him go.” Mrs. Blaine looked close to tears herself. “I’ll talk to him later. You can clean up the lunch dishes, if you want to help. I’d like to lie down—”

  The ring of the telephone cut her short. Mrs. Blaine hurried into the hall to answer it. Katie wondered if it was Joan, inviting her to come down the hill for the afternoon. She’d gladly walk through the storm to get away from the house for a while.

  But when her mother returned, her face was white with shock. “That was the sheriff!” she exclaimed. “He wants to know if I have a son and if that son was home this morning.” Katie waited, her heart thumping. “Two boys were seen running away from a cottage out at Tuesday Lake. They had forced a window to get inside and had taken some food. They got away on a motorcycle.”

  “Poldeen,” Uncle Frank said. “Poldeen’s got a motorcycle.”

  Mrs. Blaine looked at Katie, who said nothing.

  “’E’ll come to no good, that Poldeen,” Uncle Frank predicted. “Needs a whuppin’, ’e does.”

  “Wh—what’s going to happen?” Katie felt sick.

  “I don’t know. The sheriff said he’d be up here later to talk to Jay.” Mrs. Blaine sat down with a thump, as if her legs would no longer support her. “I should talk to him myself, but what if he runs off again and makes things worse? I don’t know what to do. I just don’t.”

  “You could whup ’im,” Uncle Frank suggested. “I’d do it for ye, but ’e’s a mite big.” He stood up and stretched. “Time for my nap,” he yawned. “Old feller like me can’t take all this stirrin’ up.”

  “Oh, Uncle Frank, I’m sorry.”

  The old man waved a dismissing hand. Katie decided that he wasn’t as upset as he pretended to be. Maybe any kind of excitement was better than none at all. She remembered what Joan’s mother had said: The old tales make life more interesting for Gram.… She needs ’em.

  It looked as if the Blaines were giving Uncle Frank plenty to think about.

  The thunderheads rolled away across the hills, and new ones took their place. The rain never stopped, a harsh downpour that threatened to drown the meadows around the house. Katie saw closed doors wherever she looked—Jay’s, her mother’s, Uncle Frank’s. She thought of telephoning Joan but decided against it. Joan disliked Jay; she wouldn’t understand why Katie felt sorry for him now.

  She ended up in the library. It was the smallest and, in this weather, the darkest room in the house, but she switched on a lamp next to a massive chair of wood and leather and began pulling books from the shelves. There were some adventure series published fifty or sixty years ago. A row of biographies, in very small print, filled one shelf, and old textbooks crowded several others. There were lots of travel books and atlases. Katie finally chose The Sinking of the Titanic. The book jacket said it was a true story about a terrible disaster at sea. The subject suited her mood.

  Two hours later she was completely lost in the terrible events of that long-ago night on the Atlantic. On the deck of the Titanic, John Jacob Astor was helping his wife into one of the last lifeboats, knowing they would never meet again on this earth. Katie’s eyes blurred with tears. How dreadful it all was! Her own troubles seemed small by comparison. She could picture the listing ship, hear the brave men of the ship’s orchestra playing “Nearer My God to Thee.…”

  A car door slammed. A moment later there was a tapping, hardly louder than the rain.

  Katie waited, hoping her mother would go to the door. When the tapping was repeated, she put her book aside and went down the hall. A tall figure waited on the other side of the screen. She opened the door for the visitor, who stamped his feet on the mat and mopped his face with a rumpled handkerchief.

  “Enough rain to sink a ship,” he said, making Katie wonder if he could read her mind. “I’m Sheriff Hesbruck. Mind if I come in?”

  Katie stepped back. “I’m Katie Blaine. You can sit in the parlor if you want to. I’ll call my mother.”

  “It’s your brother I want to talk to,” the sheriff said. He had a long, thin face, and eyes that studied her as if he intended to remember her forever. “That is, if Jay Blaine is your brother.”

  “My stepbrother. I’ll get him. He’s upstairs.”

  Was he going to arrest Jay? Her feet dragged as she climbed the stairs, and when she stood outside Jay’s door, her voice was a queer, choky whisper. “Jay. Come on out. The sheriff wants to see you.”

  Her mother’s door popped open as if she’d been waiting with her hand on the knob. Jay’s door opened more slowly. They both stood looking at her, while thunder crashed overhead.

  “What did you say?” Jay demanded. “Who wants to see me?”

  “The sheriff. The sheriff’s downstairs waiting.”

  Jay’s face darkened, and he moved back into the safety of his room. Katie wished she could help him. John Jacob Astor must have looked a little like that, she thought, when he realized the Titanic was going down.

  Chapter Nine

  “Now what’s going to happen?” The words had drummed through Katie’s head all the time Sheriff Hesbruck, Jay, and Mrs. Blaine talked in the parlor. Now the sheriff was gone, Jay was back upstairs, Uncle Frank was still napping, and Katie and her mother were alone in the library.

  “The sheriff let him off with a warning,” Mrs. Blaine said, her voice flat and weary. “They didn’t actually hurt the cottage, and the owner decided not to press charges. Jay says they went inside to get ou
t of the rain.”

  “Then is everything okay?”

  “No.” Mrs. Blaine sat up. “No, everything is definitely not okay. I have a fifteen-year-old stepson who defies me and h-hates me”—her voice trembled—“and I don’t know what to do about it. I know he misses his father terribly—so do I!—but there’s no way I can take Tom’s place. The four of us had such a short time before Tom died, that’s the trouble.” She shook her head at Katie’s expression. “I shouldn’t talk to you this way, hon—it’s not your problem.”

  “It is too my problem,” Katie protested. “We’re a family.”

  “Some family!” Mrs. Blaine stood up and patted Katie’s shoulder. “Oh, well, we’ll get by,” she said. “Don’t worry, Katherine Jane. Right?”

  “Right.” As if you could stop worrying when you wanted to.

  At the dinner table that evening Jay barely spoke, and even Uncle Frank seemed withdrawn. Mrs. Blaine urged everyone to have a second piece of raspberry pie, and she chattered about the storm and about the rainbow that had arced over Newquay when the clouds finally blew away. Katie listened through Jay’s ears, and the words sounded empty, phony.

  As soon as the table was cleared, Jay went back to his room and switched on a tape. Katie waited until her mother stepped outside to get some air, and then she hurried upstairs. When there was no reply to her knock, she opened Jay’s door. The tape clicked off. He lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling.

  “I’m sorry about today,” Katie said.

  “Thanks.” Jay didn’t look at her. “Not your problem.”

  “Whatever happened, I bet it was that Skip Poldeen’s fault.”

  Jay swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. “Nothing happened,” he growled, “nothing important. And now I’m grounded for a whole week! And I’m not supposed to hang around with Skip anymore.”

  “I’m sorry,” Katie said again. “I didn’t tell Mom about him, except for his name.”

  “It doesn’t matter. The guy who owned the cottage recognized Skip, and someone else told the sheriff I was with him. We didn’t do any damage to the darned cottage—we were just trying to keep dry. Oh, and we opened a can of beans while we were waiting for the rain to stop. Big deal!”

  “You were on somebody else’s property.…”

  “I know all that. I know it!” Jay sounded desperate. “Everybody says ‘Enjoy yourself—have fun!’ But when I do—forget it.” His voice shook. “Your mother hates me.”

  Katie gasped. “She doesn’t! That’s an awful thing to say.”

  “Sure, she does. Why not? I’m nothing but trouble to her. She’s stuck with me, right?”

  “Wrong!” They stared at each other.

  “One of these days,” Jay continued unsteadily, “she’s going to get fed up and tell me to get lost. You’ll see. When she married my dad, I was just part of the package. Well, that’s okay. I don’t need anyone looking after me. I can just—”

  There were tears in his eyes. Katie looked away, not wanting to see. This must be Jay’s secret worry—the problem he’d hinted at that first night in Newquay. She longed to comfort him, but didn’t know what to say.

  She changed the subject. “Joan and I went to the mine shaft house this morning. It’s really a spooky place.”

  Jay cleared his throat. “So?”

  “So it’s really weird! When the wind blows a certain way, you can hear moaning and crying in the shaft. Joan says it’s supposed to be the spirits of the miners who died down there.”

  Jay leaned back on his elbows, looking exhausted. “You’re a goofy kid, you know that? Always hearing strange sounds! You’ve got a thing about underground ghosts.”

  “No, I haven’t,” Katie said. “But I did hear a noise in the backyard the other night, no matter what you think. The sounds in the shaft—well, that was just the wind, I know. There’s something else, though.” She hesitated, then plunged ahead. “Just as I was crawling out the window of the shaft house, I looked back and saw a girl watching me. She had long blond hair, and she put out her hand to me as if she wanted something.”

  “Another ghost, huh?”

  “I don’t know. Joan went back to look, but whatever-it-was was gone.”

  “It was probably one of the Newquay kids trying to scare the girl from the big city. You ought to write ghost stories—you’ve got the imagination for it.” He leaned forward, suddenly intent. “Does your mother know you were in that shaft house?”

  “No.”

  “Did she even ask where you went?”

  “She knew Joan and I were going exploring.”

  “But not to the shaft house. You didn’t tell her that. You didn’t tell her you broke into an old building with a hole in the floor a couple of thousand feet deep.”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Katie protested. “It wasn’t dangerous. There’s a big iron gate in front of the shaft. And we didn’t hurt anything.”

  Jay stood up and went to stare out the window. “The point is, she doesn’t cross-examine you every time you go out the door. You were on somebody else’s property as much as I was, but nobody hassled you about it. She doesn’t expect you to get in trouble. Why is it I can’t even turn around without getting yelled at?”

  Because you do get in trouble, Katie cried silently. And my mom never had a son before, and she’s afraid of messing up. But she knew there was some truth in what Jay said. Her mother did assume that Katie would behave herself, and that Jay wouldn’t.

  “You could try to show her she’s wrong,” Katie suggested timidly.

  “You mean be a good boy and let her boss me around.” He turned to her with an angry smile. “I’ve got one friend in this stupid town, and now I’m not supposed to see him anymore. He’s the only person who isn’t half dead—”

  “Just because he rides a motorcycle!”

  “That’s part of it! I told you before—I hate this place. All I want is to go back to Milwaukee. But as long as I’m here, I’m going to have some fun, and nobody’s going to stop me. Not the sheriff and not her!”

  Katie wanted to slap him for that insulting her. “You’re so dumb you don’t know when people are trying to help you,” she snapped. “You make me sick!” She marched out of the room and across the hall, trembling with rage.

  Jay’s voice followed her. “You’re the one who’s sick. You’re psycho! I may be dumb, but at least I don’t see spooks around every corner and hear ’em under every rock.”

  Mrs. Blaine came upstairs an hour later. By that time Katie was in bed. She didn’t want to talk to her mother or to anyone else. She just wanted to be alone.

  She heard her mother go down the hall to her room, then to the bathroom, then return to Katie’s door. The knob turned, and Katie closed her eyes. After a moment the door clicked shut, and the footsteps retreated.

  As the house became still, all the sounds of the summer night crowded in. An owl hooted, and insects banged against the screen. Far off, an airplane droned. Boards creaked. Katie tried to get to sleep, but sleep wouldn’t come. Too much had happened today. The blond ghost-girl in the shaft house, the piercing eyes of the sheriff, Jay’s fierce scowl—she saw them all when she closed her eyes.

  Finally she gave up. The Sinking of the Titanic was down in the library; she might as well read if she couldn’t sleep. She slipped out of bed and found the flashlight her mother had stowed in her dresser drawer “for emergencies.” Then she opened the door and tiptoed into the hall.

  The flashlight made a narrow tunnel of light. She waited for a minute to make sure no one had heard her, and then she started toward the stairs. As she moved, there was a shushing sound behind her, and a sudden chill in the air. She whirled around, pointing the flashlight. There in the mirror at the end of the hall was the girl with the golden hair. As Katie stared; frozen, the girl took a hobbling step toward her and raised her hand.

  Chapter Ten

  The girl’s eyes were sad, yet full of purpose. Even though her mother and Jay were
only a few feet away, Katie felt as if she and the figure in the mirror were alone in the world. The girl’s lips moved, and Katie strained for a message she couldn’t hear. The words were important, but she couldn’t understand them. The pale hand lifted in a sweeping motion, and the girl shook her head. Katie moaned in frustration.

  “Katie!” Mrs. Blaine came out of her room. “What in the world are you doing? I thought you were sound asleep.”

  “I—I wanted to read for a while. My book is down in the library.” Katie lowered the beam of light; the mirror was empty now except for her own reflection and her mother’s.

  “Well, you’re heading in the wrong direction, dear heart. Hurry on down if you must, but please do be quiet. Uncle Frank needs his rest.”

  Katie did as she was told. When she returned the hall was empty. Shakily she directed the flashlight at the mirror. Nothing. She went into her bedroom and closed the door.

  Shadows retreated as she swung the flashlight in a slow circle, lingering longest on the mirror over the dresser. “I’m really sorry,” she whispered into the dark. “I tried to understand, but I couldn’t.”

  Now that she had time to think about what had happened, she felt more regret than fear. The ghost-girl had looked wistful, eager to communicate. Seeing her had been a shock, but as Katie climbed into bed, she found herself hoping the girl would appear again.

  I’ve seen a ghost, she thought, full of wonder. It doesn’t matter what Joan says or Jay says—or anybody. It really happened! I’ve seen her twice, and she wants to tell me something. I’m going to lie here all night and figure out what it is.

  It was the last thought she had until morning.

  When Katie went downstairs to breakfast, she half expected the others to notice a difference in her. Of course, no one would believe her if she told them about seeing the girl in the mirror—not her mother, fussing over Uncle Frank and coaxing him to drink all of his orange juice, and certainly not Jay, slumped in his chair, eyes down as usual. Katie didn’t care. Something mysterious had happened between her and the girl in the mirror. The ghost had a message to tell, and she’d chosen Katie to help her.