by Larry Parr
Like I said, all my friends thought I was crazy, and Jason seemed mad at me for some reason—I’ll never understand boys, even if I live to be thirty—so I decided to spend my lunch hour on Friday in the school library, doing a little ghost research.
Libraries weren’t exactly as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon, or anything like that, but I have to admit I hadn’t really spent all that much time in our school library. When I walked in the librarian—I think her name is Mrs. Winslow—looked at me over the tops of her big, thick bifocal glasses. I got the impression she wasn’t very happy to see me. But then I quickly got the impression she wasn’t really glad to see any kids in the library.
Nevertheless I did my best to put a friendly smile on my face and walked up to her big built-in dark wooden desk. “Excuse me,” I said in my best library voice, “but do you have any books or magazine or newspaper articles on the Gruesome High ghost? I mean,” I quickly corrected myself, “the Grissom High ghost?”
The Librarian frowned and took off her glasses. “Young lady,” she said almost angrily, “there is no such thing as a ghost. Not at this school, not anywhere. Ghosts do not exist. Ghosts are figments of people’s imaginations.”
I did my best to keep the smile on my face and any attitude out of my voice. I took a deep breath through my nose and said: “I couldn’t agree with you more. But I’m doing a report on mass hysteria (thank you Mr. Greenwald!) and I need as much background on the ghost as I can get.” I suddenly had another idea. “If you know of any newspaper articles about sightings of the ghost those would be most helpful.”
The Librarian narrowed her eyes and looked at me as if to make sure I wasn’t pulling a prank on her or anything, then put her glasses back on, rummaged beneath her desk until she came up with a cardboard file box, then tilted her head back so she was looking through the bottom half of her glasses, and proceeded to quickly and expertly thumb through several hundred index cards. Finally she stopped, removed a card and looked at it more thoroughly.
“We don’t keep many newspapers here, this being just a small high school library and all, but I think we have a few copies of the Rossmore Daily Beacon from right around the time the school was first opened. We saved them as souvenirs more than anything. That was about ten years ago. The papers are in the back,” she said doubtfully. “It would take me a while to dig through them.”
This was exactly what I wanted! “Oh, could I look through them all?” I asked excitedly.
The librarian looked doubtful. She removed her glasses once more and tapped them uncertainly on the palm of her hand. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s really against school—”
“Please!” I said earnestly. “I promise I’ll be neat and I won’t hurt anything! I’ll put everything back exactly as I found it. I promise! Please!”
The librarian sighed and put her glasses back on. “Very well,” she said, lifting up a hinged wooden section of her desk so that I could step through. She turned and led me through a door behind the desk.
The door led to a dark and musty-smelling storage room. There were boxes and stacks of newspapers and magazines and books with broken spines and torn covers everywhere. The library itself was always so brightly-lit and neat and clean that this was a bit of a shock. It was as if I had just been let in on a quite-little secret.
And it was a dirty secret as well! Everything was covered with dust. Dust was everywhere. I could taste the dust with every breath I took. I started breathing through my nose. That helped a little.
The librarian must have read my face. “It is rather a mess back here,” she said somewhat apologetically, “but the school doesn’t have the budget to hire me an assistant. Oh, they have the budget to hire an assistant for the assistant football coach. But they don’t have the budget to hire even a part-time assistant for me! Libraries aren’t considered important for a school! I’ll never understand that!” she said. Then she took a breath and looked me in the eye. “What did you say your name was?” she asked suddenly.
“Patricia Hoyle,” I answered.
“And who did you say you were doing this report for?” she asked.
“I don’t think I did say,” I replied, stalling for time. “I’m doing it for Mr. Greenwald,” I said. I couldn’t help but smile. Using Mr. Greenwald was perfect! If she checked, he’d probably tell her I was doing the report for him.
After all, in a way, I was.
“Very well,” the Librarian said in a resigned voice. “The newspapers you’re looking for should be back there.” She pointed to a dark and dirty corner of the room. “Do be careful with them,” she said as she turned to leave. “Old newspapers can be very brittle. Oh, and do put everything back the way you found it,” she said as an afterthought. Then she closed the door and I was left all alone.
The first thing I did was sneeze!
Then I smiled and said a quiet “All right!” Actually I felt like jumping for joy! You see, I had realized something quite important in just the last few hours. The only way I was going to solve this mystery was to find the missing pieces of the puzzle. And the best way to do that would be to read about just everything that was going on in town around the time the ghost first made its appearance. I had to start making connections between things—and I had no way of knowing what those things might be until I looked through the papers and found them. You see, what I was looking for could be almost anything—and I would have no way of knowing if it was important or not until after I’d read it.
For example, what was the connection between the robbery of Thompson’s Coin & Jewelry and the twenty dollar gold piece that Mr. Bell found when he had the run-in with the ghost at the construction site? Why did Mayor Thompson get so upset when I asked him why he’d hired a known alcoholic to guard the construction site? And why was Ben Thompson spying on me and threatening me and my friends if we didn’t stop looking for the ghost? And why—well, I couldn’t think of all the other whys at the moment, but I knew there were a lot more of them.
And I knew that if I read through all these old newspapers I’d find at least some of the answers—and maybe a lot more questions as well. But that would be O.K., because every piece of information would put me one step closer to solving this baffling mystery.
There were three stacks of old, yellowing newspapers in the corner where the Librarian had pointed. Two of the stacks were covered with dust as if they hadn’t been touched in ten years. But the third stack, the one pushed furthest back into the corner, was practically clean! That meant someone else had been looking through these papers, and not too long ago!
Why hadn’t the librarian mentioned that to me? Knowing who else was interested in this ghost business could be valuable information! Of course, in all fairness I had to admit that I hadn’t asked her if anyone else had looked at the newspapers recently, and why should she just volunteer that information?
I was so curious I couldn’t wait to find out. I opened the door and stepped back into the library, behind the desk with the librarian (her name was Mrs. Winslow; I saw a small plaque with her name on it under the counter). Mrs. Winslow was busy with another student. I didn’t mind waiting a minute or two; the clean, fresh air of the library tasted good after the musty air of the storage room.
I took a deep breath and was just letting it out when I saw him!
Ben Thompson!
He was seated at a table near the librarian’s desk. He didn’t have any books or anything else in front of him. He was staring right at me with a mean-looking scowl on his face. He didn’t say anything or do anything. He just sat there. Glaring at me.
It gave me the shivers, but I did my best not to let him see that he was bothering me.
Why was he here? Obviously it wasn’t to use the library. I doubted he’d ever been in a library before in his life. No. He must have followed me in here. This was starting to get serious!
The more I thought about it, the more scary it became. This guy was really following me around. This
guy meant business! This wasn’t a joke or a game any more. This wasn’t just me being curious about a ghost any longer.
No. There was something a lot deeper, a lot more serious going on here!
How far was Ben Thompson prepared to go to keep me from digging any deeper into this ghost thing? Was he really prepared to hurt me—or my friends? I suddenly remembered he had threatened to hurt Jason if I didn’t stop poking my nose into things. Would he make good his threat?
Maybe I should just drop the whole thing. Was it really worth someone getting hurt?
Ben’s presence here meant the answer to that last question was probably “yes”. And if this ghost thing was that important, then there was no way I could drop it now!
No matter what, I was totally committed to unraveling the mystery of the Gruesome High ghost!
As Mrs. Winslow finished with the student she was helping, I turned my back on Ben Thompson and asked, “Has someone else been looking at the old newspapers recently?”
Mrs. Winslow looked slightly startled at the question, then said, “No one but me has been in that storage room for ages! No, I’m sure you’re the first person to look at those papers since we put them back there. And that was . . . . Well, almost ten years ago. Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason,” I said slowly. (I could feel Ben Thompson’s eyes burning a hole in the back of my head!). “It’s just that one of the old stacks of papers was clean. I thought maybe someone had looked at it recently.”
Mrs. Winslow frowned. “No. No one’s been back there but me, and I haven’t cleaned anything. How very odd.”
I suddenly put on a fake smile and tried to act bubbly. “Oh well!” I said, then I spun around quickly so I wouldn’t have to see Ben Thompson’s angry eyes again, and stepped back into the storage room, closing the door behind me.
Now it was time to get down to business! Ben Thompson’s presence only served to redouble my determination to get to the bottom of this mystery!
I decided the best place to start was with the clean stack of newspapers. I figured those must have the most information in them or someone wouldn’t have been going through them recently. But when I reached for them I noticed I wasn’t entirely alone in the room after all. There were also a few spiders and silverfish scuttling about. I hate spiders. And don’t think that hating spiders is a girl thing. I know lots of boys who don’t like spiders. Jason, for example.
Just thinking of Jason started getting me mad. I don’t know what’s wrong with him lately! It seems like everything I say, everything I do just makes him mad. And I was getting tired of it. I mean, I still like the guy, but maybe we’ve just been around each other too much for too long. Maybe it was time I started hanging out with some other guys. Maybe it was time I even dated someone else.
Hmmmm. But who? Who would I like to date?
I stopped myself, shook my head, and actually laughed out loud. This was hardly the time to be thinking about boys!
I turned back to the stacks of dusty, moldy-smelling newspapers. I closed my mouth tight and reached back to the furthest of the three stacks and picked up the top newspaper. It was almost entirely clean, free from dust. Just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, I ran my finger along the top of one of the other two stacks. I couldn’t even drag my finger completely across the top page before the accumulated dirt made it too difficult to drag without ripping the paper.
There was no question about it whatsoever; someone had been here recently, reading this very newspaper! I could only assume one thing: someone else was interested in the Gruesome High ghost!
I wasn’t sure exactly what that meant, but I just knew it was an important piece of information. But for the moment I decided to concentrate on what I came here for in the first place. To learn. To make connections. I laid the newspaper flat on top of a cardboard box under the main light in the room, and looked at it carefully for the first time. The date on the newspaper was July 23rd, ten years ago! I was barely five years old when this newspaper was printed! It’s sort of weird to think about all these things happening when you’re just a kid.
But what was even more weird was the headline! MAJOR DOWNTOWN ROBBERY! The article was all about the robbery of Thompson’s Jewelry store! Was I lucky, or what! The first paper I picked up and it was all about the robbery!
Everything was here. The half million dollars in gold coins and jewelry . . . even Mr. Greenwald’s father, police Sergeant Greenwald, was mentioned in the second paragraph! This was really exciting! It suddenly began to feel like the robbery just happened! I was beginning to feel as if I was living part of history!
I read the whole article. There was only one big piece of information that I didn’t already know. According to the article, the thief (or thieves) knew exactly what they were after; they just took the most valuable things, and things that could easily be sold and were hard to trace. The police said it looked like an inside job— and a trusted store employee, an August Wallenberg, was also missing!
When I read that I stopped reading and set the newspaper down. All my theories started to fall apart! I was suddenly very discouraged!
If this August Wallenberg stole the coins and jewels, then that meant Mr. Thompson didn’t rob his own store! That meant everything I thought about this case was out the window! Damn!
But if this Wallenberg character stole everything, then why did Mayor Thompson act so weird when I questioned him about hiring Mr. Bell to be the night watchman? And why was Ben Thompson spying on me and threatening me? And Mr. Greenwald said his father, who investigated the case, thought Mr. Thompson robbed his own store . . . .
This detective stuff was a lot harder than they made it look on TV! I’d just read one article and already I had more questions, but no more answers!
I tried to make myself as comfortable as I could. I could see I was going to be here a long time!
Chapter 16
A serious threat
I lost all track of time, and evidently the librarian forgot I was even in the storage room because by the time I stumbled out of the back room, my head pounding with the worst headache I’d ever had, my throat totally dry and parched and my eyes feeling as if someone had dumped a bucket of beach sand in each of them, it was 4:40 in the afternoon!
I’d missed all my classes after lunch and the library was closed!
I’d like to say that the library was all dark and spooky, but that’s not true. It was still bright and sunny outside, and there was plenty of light coming in the big, slightly-tinted library windows so nothing looked spooky or frightening in the least. Libraries were supposed to be quiet, so even the quiet part wasn’t that eerie.
I looked around quickly to make sure Ben Thompson wasn’t waiting for me, hiding behind one of the stacks. But that was stupid. I was starting to let my imagination get out of hand. If I let myself be scared of Ben all the time, then Ben had already won our little battle of wills, and I simply refused to let that clod win! I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. I was calm, I was in control—not Ben Thompson!
I did feel a little funny being some place I wasn’t supposed to be and I wasn’t sure how I was going to get out and lock up behind myself, but that turned out not to be a problem, either; all I had to do was push the little button on the door knob when I left and the door automatically locked behind me.
Fortunately no one saw me leave the library. Not that I was doing anything wrong—I wasn’t concerned that anyone would think I was—I just didn’t want to waste a moment’s time explaining things. I wanted to catch Mr. Greenwald before he left.
I had a few questions I wanted to ask him!
I didn’t think my headache could get any worse, but suddenly it did. My head hurt so much I had to stop walking. For a moment I was afraid I was going to throw up! So when I got to Mr. Greenwald’s class and the lights were off and the door was locked I was not in a good mood! Damn! I thought. Now I’ll have to wait all weekend to talk to him!
There was only one poss
ible thing that might save me. Maybe he was still in the parking lot. I knew what car he drove; I’d seen him get out of it in the teachers’ parking lot several times in the last year and a half. Maybe if I hurried . . . .
The fresh air and sunshine were finally starting to make my head feel better. Now it just felt as if it was the size of a basketball and there were only twenty bass drums pounding away in there. I was concentrating so much on my headache and trying to find Mr. Greenwald’s car that I actually bumped into Ben Thompson’s chest before I even saw him!
It took me half a second to focus my eyes and my mind on the fact that I was standing in the nearly-empty school parking lot, toe to toe with the biggest bully I knew, a bully who had already threatened to hurt me.
For a moment I think my mind stopped working completely. Staring up at Ben’s cruel face seemed unreal somehow, as if I was watching someone else look up at him. The moment he spoke I was snapped back to reality.
“What was ya doin’ in the library all day?” he asked. Without waiting for a reply he shoved my shoulder, almost causing me to drop my notebook. “I thought I told ya not to mess around in things don’t concern ya.” He shoved my shoulder again, harder this time. I stumbled backward several steps, just barely managing to stay on my feet.
I think I was more scared at this moment than I had ever been before in my whole life! Ben was a lot scarier than any ghost! He stepped up to me again quickly. The anger in his eyes was so intense I almost felt as if I could grab hold of it in my hands.
“I guess maybe you’re not as smart as everyone says ya are, are ya? I guess you need a little convincing!”
With that he shoved me hard, with both hands! Down I went! I landed hard, right on my butt! My right elbow hit the pavement hard. Sparks of bright light filled my head for a moment, and then were gone.
I was so frightened I didn’t really know how to feel; I had never been this scared before. I’d never been in a fight in my life. I’d been punched in the arm lots of times when I was a kid—but that was nothing like this!