The Ghost Belonged to Me

by Richard Peck

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty- One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  There’s something odd about the old barn....

  “Why’s it so wet up here?” Blossom asked presently. The place did look damper than before. There was green slime and puddles. “It’s like swamp water, ” Blossom said and stopped exploring.

  “ALexander, let’s go right now. ”

  “What’s the hurry?” I didn’t know what to think.

  “Alexander, I’m begging you. Let’s go. ” She was looking past me, and that made me turn around.

  There on the floor behind me was a footprint. A perfect shape of a foot, including the toes—a girl’s probably. Black with water and green with slime. I whirled around to see if Blossom had her shoes and stockings on. She did.

  “Blends poignancy and humor in the best American tradition.”

  —The Horn Book

  “A light romp with engaging characters, plenty of laughs, and enough shivery moments to qualify as a mystery, too.”

  —School Library Journal, starred review

  “Tension is cleverly undercut by Peck’s ... talent for bringing out the laughable in people.” —Booklist, starred review

  BOOKS BY RICHARD PECK

  Are You in the House Alone?

  Blossom Culp and the Sleep of Death

  The Dreadful Future of Blossom Culp

  Father Figure

  The Ghost Belonged to Me

  Ghosts I Have Been

  The Great Interactive Dream Machine

  Lost in Cyberspace

  Representing Super Doll

  Through a Brief Darkness

  PUFFIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Putnam Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 27 Wrights Lane, London W8 5TZ, England Penguin Books Australia Ltd, Ringwood, Victoria, Australia

  Penguin Books Canada Ltd, 10 Alcom Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2

  Penguin Books (N.Z.) Ltd, 182-190 Wairau Road, Auckland 10, New Zealand

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

  First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press, 1975

  Published in Puffin Books, 1997

  Copyright © Richard Peck, 1975

  All rights reserved

  THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED THE VIKING EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

  Peck, Richard. The ghost belonged to me.

  Summary: In 1913 in the Midwest a quartet of characters share adventures from exploding steamboats to “exorcising” a ghost.

  [1. Ghost stories. 2. Middle West—Fiction] I. Title.

  PZ7.P338Gh [Fic] 74-34218

  eISBN : 978-1-101-14250-9

  http://us.penguingroup.com

  This book is dedicated to Dorothy Bush and Helen Bush in friendship

  Chapter One

  At one time there was a ghost out in the brick barn on the back of our place.

  There are several opinions that people hold regarding ghosts, and not one of them would clinch an argument. Some people will swallow the idea of ghosts in general but draw the line at any one ghost in particular. And there are people who will take to ghosts because they’re naturally morbid. Or because they’re in touch with earlier times, like my great-uncle, Miles Armsworth. Then there are some who claim they are reserving judgment on the entire subject until science has its say.

  Since I’m having my say now, I tell you we had a ghost and she haunted our barnloft. It was a girl ghost, and while unnerving, not hideous. And though she was not particularly welcome, she made herself very useful in the weird ways that ghosts operate. You probably wonder why a girl dead many years would take an interest in the activities of living strangers. But as I found out, ghosts have feelings too, and if they are not human, at least they once were.

  In a way, the ghost belonged to me. But she was a secret I could not keep, and so other people were drawn in. A boy is hard to believe, as the ghost herself once said. But whether they believed me or not, a number of people would have met a terrible end but for her intervention and mine.

  And when you come to consider it from all angles, the ghost even saved my sister Lucille from a fate worse than death. Today, she’s Mrs. Lowell Seaforth, one of the most respected young women in town, ask anybody.

  While I wasn’t ever snatched from death or dishonor myself, the ghost left her mark on me too. It all happened when I was no longer a child nor yet old enough to be anything else. I was getting long in the leg but was still short on experience. This is always a difficult age to sort out or live through. All I know for sure is that ever after the ghost, I was changed somewhat and possibly wiser.

  The whole story of this business starts a good while back, as stories will. It was a time when people were still talking about the marvels of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition World’s Fair of 1904 held down at St. Louis. At least my mother’s cousin, Mrs. Elvera Schumate, talked at length about it. She’d come to money sooner than the rest of us due to marrying the late Mr. Schumate. And where she wanted to go, she went.

  Visiting the World’s Fair gave her a lifetime of contemplation on mankind’s diversity, as she often says. There’s hardly a topic you can raise without reminding Cousin Elvera of a point of interest down at the fair.

  Because of the ghost, I happened to venture out into the world a good deal farther than St. Louis. But this hasn’t stilled Cousin Elvera’s voice on the subject of her own experiences which she gladly relates to anybody who’ll listen.

  “Attend my words, Alexander,” she’ll say, grabbing hold of my arm, “the world outside Bluff City is full of mysteries and wonders undreamed of in your limited experience.” There have also been some mysteries and wonders closer to home that confounded even Cousin Elvera, though I don’t know as she gives them much thought anymore.

  Back at the time of the ghost, electrified street cars were beginning to give Bluff City an up-to-date appearance. They hooked up with the interurban network and you could even cross the Mississippi River at various points. People said that if you kept switching from car to car you could travel all the way to New York City or Denver, whichever place you wanted to go to.

  My dad’s uncle, Miles Armsworth, who was a roamer, once rode clear to Wheeling, West Virginia, on the interurban in three days and a night. It took him five days back, though, and he said that was because he’d been misdirected and rode a day in the wrong direction. My mother said it was because he drank.

  There are trolleys passing day and night behind our barn. They go on to cross the trestle over Snake Creek near the end of the line. In seasonable weather, they run the open-sided cars, and you can hear the people talking as they glide behind the barn.

  You’d think that kind of continual buzz and clatter would send a ghost off looking for a more deathly type of place to haunt. But it didn’t.

  William Howard Taft of Cincinnati had just finished up being president of the United Stat
es. It was 1913, and I was turning thirteen years old. That’s the time I’m telling you about.

  There was a spunky streak in me that led to occasional trouble, nothing serious. It didn’t bother anybody much except my teacher, Miss Winkler, who by her own admission strives for “the habit of perfection.”

  She and I have had our run-ins, but I won’t call the roll of them since they don’t bear on this story. In fact, Miss Winkler was one of the last holdouts when it came to facing up to the actual existence of ghosts.

  She’d have been a lot more pleased with the both of us if she could have gotten me to knuckle down and apply myself to scholarship. “You could be one of the sharpest tacks in the carpet if you would only find yourself a direction, Alexander,” she’d say. But she never leaned on me to her full capacity for fear of locking horns with my mother.

  She did call in my dad one time for a private word. As much as I got out of him later was that she said though I had “the gift of a glib tongue,” I lacked the moral sense for preaching or leadership. And as my father, he’d be doing his duty if he aimed me toward a useful trade.

  Since my dad prefers useful trades himself to the line of work he’s in now, he agreed with her. So I went every Saturday for a while to The Apex Automotive Garage to learn the mechanic’s trade, which is the coming thing.

  Apex had converted from a livery stable when people started switching over to automobiles. A friend of mine, name of Bub Timmons, was learning the trade there too, so I enjoyed the work.

  There isn’t any knowing where this might have led except one day old man Leverett brought in his Haynes-Apperson with the brake band spewing out fabric and copper wire. He’d bought that Haynes-Apperson used in 1907, so it was past its prime anyway. It was one of those old-timey models with a whipsocket.

  Bub and I went to work and stripped the wheel down and commenced repacking it. But we ran short of brake lining and filled in with what we could find.

  The outcome of this was that on his way home old man Leverett set his brakes at the level crossing on the Ocean-to-Ocean Highway west of town. The brakes gave out on him, and the auto nosed up on the track just as the Wabash Railroad’s City of Joliet came highballing through.

  The locomotive caught it just behind the headlamps, and you could pick up Haynes-Apperson parts anywhere along the embankment for a mile. They found the front left wheel, and that led them to discover it was half packed with cotton wadding. And they found old man Leverett face up in the ditch already saying he’d take his mechanical business elsewhere and have a word with his friends too. So that was the end of my apprenticeship. Apex kept Bub Timmons on for some reason, though I don’t begrudge him a trade. He needs the work. But I was kind of at loose ends after my mechanical learning came to nothing. The next thing I was to learn about was girls.

  If it had been left up to me, I wouldn’t have started with Blossom Culp. It was her who started with me. Blossom and her folks live behind our place on the far side of the car tracks just about on a straight line with our barn. There’s a row of houses back there that people move in and out of. The row was built for the workers at the flour mill until they wouldn’t live there anymore. I didn’t know anything about the Culps at that time and had been looking straight through Blossom for two grades. I couldn’t even tell you when they first drifted into town.

  Oh, one time back around fifth grade Blossom offered to let me wear her spelling medals if I’d walk her home from school, but I wasn’t falling for that. She’s an exceptional speller, which always seems to surprise Miss Winkler.

  Blossom has big round button eyes, very dark and sharp, and wears black wool stockings right through the school year. Her legs are the skinniest I’ve seen. When my sister Lucille came to notice Blossom, she labeled her an “arachnid,” which is what they call spiders in the high-school biology class. That was a rude observation, but it’s true that Blossom does have a spidery look.

  I fell into her web during a fire drill at school. We have them once a month by law. I go to the Horace Mann School, which is a strictly modern structure. They have it fitted out with the last word in fire escapes.

  It’s a long sheet-metal tube that angles out of the second-floor cloakroom and down to a sandpile beside the foundation. It’s better than a playground slide because it echoes.

  The bell went one day in early May, and we all let rip with a whoop. Miss Winkler twitched and said, “We’ll have order here. This may be the real thing!” She says that once a month.

  Blossom was just ahead of me when we trooped to the cloakroom, which I know now was not by chance. Miss Winkler threw open the little doors down by the baseboard. Then she spaced us as we went down, saying to every kid in turn, “Don’t yell and light running.”

  It’s my private opinion that in a real fire the tube would heat up like a stove flue, and I’d sooner take my chances on the stairs.

  Blossom flopped down and shot away. Miss Winkler had me by the arm to the count of three. Then she turned me loose, and down I went. You start slow and gather speed. From the top, the daylight at the bottom looks no bigger than a bright dime.

  That day I was skidding on my hands to enjoy a slower ride when I glanced down between my feet and saw the tube was all clogged up halfway along. It’s as dark as a pocket in that thing, but I knew it had to be Blossom Culp who was wedged sideways. Her petticoats were over her head. Both legs were up against the top, and she was clinging onto a welded seam with all her fingers. She came near to turning herself inside out, and I knew as soon as I saw her she’d jammed herself on purpose.

  I had all I could do to keep from hitting her square on with my hobnail boots. That would have marked her for life, so I went into a spin myself. And there we were, packed in at an angle and somebody up at the top waiting to start down.

  When I hit Blossom, I was all over her. I had my hands where I’d never handled a girl before, but my mind wasn’t on it.

  “Blossom,” I said, “you don’t know if you’re coming or going. Turn loose of that seam, or we’ll be backed up all the way to Winkler.”

  “Listen to me,” she said with her lips right up against my ear. “I have vital information for you alone. It has to do with forces that only you can comprehend.”

  “What is this?” I said. “Will you give way? This tube wasn’t built for a crowd.”

  “Promise!” Blossom breathed at me. “Promise you’ll walk me home from school because I have news of special benefit to you.”

  “Blossom—”

  “Promise, or I’ll set to screaming.”

  I promised Blossom. What else could I do, halfway across her with my head upside down and Miss Winkler hollering down the tube? Blossom went limp then, and down we skidded cheek by jowl and heads first. Just as we came to the dip at the end, Blossom reached out and grabbed me around the neck. And that’s the way we spilled out onto the sand pile, right at the feet of the principal, Miss Mae Spaulding.

  I tried to roll free but went the wrong way and did a turn right over Blossom, who then drew up her knees and did a quick kind of back flip and stood up like an acrobat. “Well, I’ve seen everything now,” said Miss Spaulding. “Cut and run, you two.” We did but not before I saw a grin spread across Miss Spaulding’s face that I don’t think I ever will get over.

  I could’ve boxed Blossom’s ears for that, but I walked her home that night instead. I didn’t owe her anything, and I didn’t think she had any secrets to impart. But I walked her home.

  Chapter Two

  I told Blossom to meet me two corners away from the school. A promise is a promise, but I wasn’t having anybody see me walk out of the schoolyard with a girl, any girl.

  As it turned out, our meeting place was right outside Nirider’s Notions store that does a penny candy business. Blossom was looking hard at Nirider’s window. But I walked right on by, brushing against her so she’d notice I was there, keeping my promise.

  She caught up with me and hit my stride. I walked along with
my head down, watching her petticoats switching along over her black spider legs and noticing there were buttons off her shoes. We walked as far as the Baptist Chapel without a word passed. But I could listen in on Blossom’s mind, gauging how far we were to home and getting ready to tell me some nonsense or other.

  “If you walk this fast, we’ll be home before you learn what I have to tell you,” she said.

  “This here is my regular pace,” I told her.

  “Well, slow it in your own best interests,” she said.

  How I had come to be nagged by Blossom Culp was uppermost in my mind. I slowed down.

  “My mama was born with a caul,” she said, starting thoughtful and quiet. “You know cauls?”

  “Maybe.” “A caul is a mystical veil over the face, like a damp sheet but transparent, and them born with it are born to second sight. Their eyes see through the darkness that blinds others.”

  “Cats see in the dark,” I offered. “And they don’t know you can’t. You can tread on a cat in the dark before he knows to move out of your path.”

  “Not that kind of dark,” Blossom said, very patient. “The kind of dark that clouds mankind’s mind. Dark of the spirit. My mama sees the Unseen.”

  I was beginning to remember something about Blossom Culp I hadn’t thought of for maybe a couple of years. When she first came to town, she let it be known around the school that at birth she’d been one-half of a pair of Siamese twins.

  To hear her tell it, they’d had to hack off the twin stuck on her side in order for her alone to live. A bunch of fourth-grade girls got fed up hearing this tale and set on her in the girls’ washroom one time. They jerked her shirtwaist up and her skirt down to see if they could see the scar from where her twin had been taken off. But she was just as smooth-sided as anybody. From then on none of the girls would have anything to do with her.