by Diane Hoh
But he smiled at her. “I’m Avery McKendrick,” he said. “I had a telephone conversation with Mrs. Coates a few weeks ago about picking up my sister’s trunk. She said it would be okay.”
“McKendrick?” Jess echoed. McKendrick? As in … ?
“Giselle was my sister,” he said quietly.
“Oh, I’m … I’m sorry,” Jess stammered, “please come in.”
He stepped inside. “Thanks. I’d have been here sooner, but I was stationed in the Philippines. I just came back to the States last week. Is Mrs. Coates in?”
“No. No, she’s … she isn’t.” Jess searched for the right words. “You … you said you came for your sister’s trunk?”
Avery McKendrick nodded. “It’s in the cellar. There was a guy in overalls outside … dark hair? He volunteered to go find the trunk for me. I’m not sure we can manage it alone, though.” He smiled sadly. “My sister was a pack rat. She saved everything. The trunk probably weighs a ton.”
Jess would have gone in search of Ian to help with the trunk, but Milo, Jon, and Linda, books in hand, came hurrying down the stairs.
“Well, hey, Milo!” Avery said, extending a hand, “how are you? Never expected to find you here. So you decided to go to school, after all? That’s great!”
Jess stared as Milo, looking uncomfortable, shook Avery’s hand. “You two know each other?” she asked.
“Who is he?” Linda asked Jess in a near-whisper.
“He’s Giselle McKendrick’s brother,” Jess said clearly, adding, “Milo, I didn’t know you knew Giselle.”
“Really?” Linda breathed, giving Milo an inquiring look.
“Well, sure,” Giselle’s brother said. “Milo practically lived at our house when he was a kid. He went all through school with my sister. They walked home together every day until high school. Right, Milo?”
Ian arrived, and Jess sent him a confused glance. Milo had never said a word about knowing Giselle, much less that he had been a close friend of hers. Why had he kept it a secret?
“Like I said,” Avery continued, “I might need help with the trunk. Giselle never threw anything away. And it could have books in it.”
“She still has stuff here?” Jon asked, frowning. “After all this time?”
Avery nodded. “I’ve been away, and my dad was too ill to come get it. We arranged to have Mrs. Coates put all of Giselle’s stuff in a trunk and keep it for us until I could get here.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” Milo volunteered, and, handing his books to Linda, loped off toward the kitchen and its cellar door.
“I’m sorry about your sister,” Jess said as Giselle’s brother followed Milo.
Avery McKendrick turned around. “She didn’t commit suicide,” he said bluntly. “I don’t care what you heard, what they told you. She didn’t. Not Giselle. It’s true that she went through a bad time when our mother became terminally ill. But even on her worst days, Giselle was an optimist.” Shaking his head, he added, “My father never believed what they said about her death, and neither do I.” He sighed and added, “I just wanted you to know that.” Then he left to join Trucker and Milo in the basement.
But when Jess went into the kitchen, Trucker was standing at the refrigerator filling a glass with lemonade.
“I thought you were helping Milo,” she said.
“I was. He sent me up here to get some rope.”
Upset by her conversation with Avery McKendrick, Jess snapped, “We don’t keep the rope in the refrigerator.”
Trucker raised dark eyebrows. “That trunk is heavy. Hefting it made me thirsty, okay?”
Jess flushed. “I’m sorry, Trucker. I shouldn’t have bitten your head off. I just feel so sorry for Giselle’s family.”
Trucker nodded. “Yeah. Me, too.”
“Forgive me?”
“No problem. Don’t worry about it. I’d better get back down there. It’s going to take at least two people to haul that trunk out of here.”
“Avery’s down there, too.”
“Good. Three people is even better.”
The minute the car had pulled out of the driveway and onto the highway and Trucker had gone back to whatever he’d been working on, Jess turned to Milo. “You knew that girl?” she asked. “I can’t believe you never said so. That first night, when Ian told us what had happened to her, you never said a word!”
Milo hunched his thin shoulders in a noncommittal shrug. But as he turned to take off for campus, Ian put a hand on his arm. Linda and Jon watched with interest.
“Hey, what gives?” Ian said. “Jess is right. It was pretty weird having that girl’s brother talk to you like an old friend.”
Milo jerked free of Ian’s hand. “I don’t make a habit of telling my life story,” he said. “And I don’t remember anyone else telling theirs.”
“None of the rest of us,” Jess pointed out, “knew a girl who died in this house. But you knew her.”
“Not in high school, I didn’t.” Milo’s blue eyes behind the wire-framed glasses studied the gravel at his feet. “Her brother was gone by then, so he doesn’t know …” his voice trailed off. This time, when Milo began walking, Ian didn’t try to stop him. But he did grab Jess’s hand and follow Milo down the driveway. Linda and Jon came out of the house then and joined them.
“What happened in high school?” Ian asked Milo.
Milo continued walking. “Nothing. She was a big deal. I wasn’t. End of story.”
“And end of friendship?” Ian’s voice was kind.
Milo didn’t answer, but Jess had no trouble picturing what had happened. She’d seen it happen to other kids. Best friends in grade school and maybe middle school, sometimes even the first year of high school. Then one person found new friends, new interests, and left the old friend on the outside looking in … an awful place to be.
Giselle had been pretty and popular, a “big deal,” as Milo put it. And he hadn’t.
Sighing, Milo turned to face them, his mouth grim. “Look, this isn’t anybody’s business but mine, okay? Giselle and I were friends and then we weren’t, that’s all. I was never her boyfriend. Her boyfriend was some guy from out-of-town. I never met him. Now, can we just forget about this, okay?”
Because Jess felt sorry for him, she nodded. Taking their cue from her, the others did the same. “Old news, Milo,” Ian said. “Forgotten.”
Milo nodded and said in gruff voice, “Thanks. I mean it, thanks.”
But as he turned and resumed his walking, Jess knew she couldn’t forget the surprising revelation. Milo hadn’t even said how he felt about Giselle’s death. If they’d been that close, even if it had been a long time ago, he must have been upset by her suicide.
Yet he had shown no emotion of any kind when Ian had told that story during their get-acquainted party on the porch … and no emotion when he’d first seen Avery McKendrick standing in the hall waiting to collect Giselle’s things.
Weren’t poets supposed to be emotional?
Hurrying to class a while later, Jess wished that she could stay forever among the beautiful, red brick and stone buildings covered with ivy, and under the sheltering trees whose leaves were just starting to turn blazing yellows and purples and scarlets. She wished she could stay there forever and never have to return to Nightingale Hall, with all of its unanswered questions.
Chapter 11
IN SPITE OF JESS’S wish that she could linger on campus indefinitely, the day passed quickly. After attending a brief meeting of the Fall Ball planning committee at the Student Center, she reluctantly returned to Nightingale Hall.
No one else was home. The house was dim and eerily silent. No pipes groaned, no shutters banged, no wild wind shrieked. All three stories of brick sat in silence as if … as if the house was waiting for something to happen, Jess thought as she climbed the stairs.
She quickened her steps, eager for her own room, sunnier and brighter than the rest of the house.
But her anticipation died a quick de
ath when she reached the top of the stairs. Staring in dismay, she let out a soft “Oh.”
A trail of muddy footprints oozed straight down the middle of the hall. From one end to the other.
No, that wasn’t right. There was something weird …
Jess walked the length of the hallway, avoiding the mud, her eyes on the floor. The weird thing about the footprints, she realized, was that they began in the middle of the hall, some distance from where the hallway began. They didn’t start in a place that made sense, like at the threshold to one of the rooms, as if someone had entered the hallway wearing muddy shoes.
Frowning, she followed the prints to where they curved, suddenly, into … her room. The muddy footprints ended just inside her door. But when she searched the room with her eyes, she found no one there.
It was as if the person in mud-covered shoes had been dropped from the sky, walked to her room, and then had been snatched skyward again.
Well, that was ridiculous!
Jess studied the oozed prints. Whoever had made such a disgusting mess could, she thought, have slipped out of the muddy shoes when he or she saw what was happening and guiltily carried the shoes back into their bedroom in stocking feet.
But if the shoes had been put on in one of the bedrooms, there would be telltale evidence leading from that room. And there wasn’t.
And even more disconcerting—why did the footprints lead to her room before they mysteriously stopped?
The front door slammed.
Jess ran to the top of the stairs and called, “Who is it? Ian, is that you?”
“No, it’s me, Linda.” Footsteps running up the stairs. “And I’m in a rush.” Linda came racing up the stairs, her cheeks flushed, her yellow-green hair windblown. “I’ve got a meet in two hours, and I’ve got four hours of history research to do. Yuck, what’s that?” She had reached the top of the stairs, and her mouth turned down in disgust as she surveyed the damage.
“Mud.”
“Well, I know it’s mud.” Linda eyed the trail of footprints. “What a mess! Where’d it come from? It hasn’t rained lately.”
“It’s probably always muddy down by the creek.” But Jess was trying to figure out how someone could come into the house with muddy shoes but deposit that mud only in the upstairs hall. How had they missed the stairs, and the front hall? “Linda, isn’t there something weird about these footprints?”
Linda carefully stepped around the mud. “Weird? Weird how?”
“Well, they start in the middle of the hallway.”
Linda shot Jess an exasperated look. “Jess, I really don’t have time for this. They’re just footprints, for pete’s sake. Someone slipped a pair of muddy shoes on out in the hall and took them off again when they saw what a mess they were making.”
“I thought of that. But then the prints would come from downstairs or out of one of the bedrooms, wouldn’t they?”
Linda groaned. “Do we have to make a major case out of this? Listen, Jess, I’ve got to get busy. I know I should help you clean this up, but I just can’t. Don’t be mad, okay? Get Trucker to help.” She hurried on down the hall and went into her room, closing the door.
This mess doesn’t make any sense, Jess thought as she began cleaning it up. She couldn’t walk away and leave it there.
But strangest of all, as she scrubbed, it looked like the footprints were fading on their own. The last half-dozen or so clumps of mud seemed to disappear by themselves.
Did mud fade when it dried?
Jess didn’t think so.
Strange.
Jess shook her head. Why was she worrying so much about a bunch of footprints? There simply must have been fewer footprints than she’d thought at first, that’s all.
When she had finished and the floor was shiny again, she went to her own room to study for a while and maybe take a nap.
Jess awoke with a start, her heart pounding fiercely. How long had she slept? Hours? And what had awakened her?
Faint noises from below told her she wasn’t alone in the house. But the noises weren’t loud enough to have awakened her. So what had?
Jess lifted her head, her eyes becoming accustomed to the darkness. Had a book fallen from the desk? Had a breeze blown shut her open closet door?
Jess peered into the darkness, exploring …
The desk was against the window with everything on it in place as she had left it. The closet door was still slightly ajar. It hadn’t slammed shut with a bang.
Then what … ?
Something moving on the wall opposite the foot of her bed caught her attention. Something … moving …
Jess gasped in horror and instinctively yanked the purple bedspread up to her chest in a protective motion. She sat perfectly still, her eyes making round O’s of disbelief as she stared in shocked silence.
The wall in front of her moved with the clear, unmistakable shadow of a body swinging back and forth from the light fixture.
Chapter 12
JESS’S EYES REMAINED GLUED to the shadow swinging on the wall opposite the foot of her bed.
The clear outline of long hair, thick and curly, swung out behind the shadowed figure.
Giselle … it had to be her. The girl Ian had told them about, the girl Milo knew, the dead sister of Avery McKendrick, the one who had hanged herself in Jess’s room.
Jess opened her mouth and screamed, a high, shrill sound that carried out of her room and into the hall.
Trucker, in the kitchen drinking a glass of milk, heard the sound and dropped the cardboard container. Thin, white liquid became a snowy river spreading across the faded linoleum.
Milo, his nose deep in a volume of poetry, jerked upright on his bed, tilting his head, waiting to see if the sound came again.
Linda, lost in a blissful dream about Milo, was rudely dragged awake by the scream.
Ian, reading at his desk by the window, jumped to his feet and raced to the door, long hair flying out behind him.
Jon had slipped out of the house earlier and was partying at a friend’s house.
Cath, exhausted from pulling the all-nighter to rewrite her missing paper, had, like Jess, decided to take a nap. Wrapped cocoonlike in a quilt, she slept blissfully on, hearing nothing.
Ian was the first to arrive in Jess’s room. He was followed quickly by Milo and Linda. They found Jess sitting up in bed, scrunched up against the headboard, her eyes squeezed tightly shut. They flew open when Ian arrived and flipped on the light switch.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, striding to her bedside.
Without answering, Jess opened her eyes and focused her gaze on the wall. There was nothing there. No swaying shadow. Only tiny sprigs of lilac on a background of white.
The trio gathered around her bed, all wanting to know why she had screamed.
The first thing she said was, “You turned on the light.”
Ian nodded. “Right. It was dark in here.”
“And it went away.”
He leaned over the bed. “What? What went away?”
“She did … Giselle.” Jess couldn’t stop shaking.
Linda grabbed the folded quilt from the foot of the bed and draped it around Jess’s shoulders. Then she sat down on the bed and asked, “You had a dream about that girl?”
Jess shook her head no. “It wasn’t a dream. I woke up and there she was, hanging … hanging….” Remembering, her breath caught in her throat and her words died.
Linda glanced up at Milo. “She was dreaming,” she said. “Ian,” she accused, “you never should have told her about that girl. How would you like to go to bed in a room where someone committed suicide? No wonder poor Jess had a nasty nightmare.”
“No, I … It wasn’t a nightmare! It was real. And maybe the scream I heard that first night was real, too.”
“Scream?” Ian asked. “What scream?”
“Someone screamed, the first night we were here. It woke me up. But no one else heard it, so I decided I’d been dreaming. Tha
t’s why I didn’t say anything about it. But now …”
No one said anything. But the three exchanged dubious glances.
“And you,” Linda scolded Milo, “you shouldn’t have made that dumb joke about the house being haunted.”
“You’re right,” he agreed, looking contrite. “I shouldn’t have. Sorry, Jess.”
“It wasn’t a dream,” Jess repeated. “Look, turn off the light. You’ll see for yourselves.”
No one moved.
“Turn it off!”
Shaking his head, Ian moved to the light switch. The room returned to total darkness.
Jess stared in disbelief at the bare wall. There was no shadow … there was nothing.
“I don’t see anything,” Ian said, and turned the light back on.
“It was there!” Jess cried, tears of frustration stinging her eyelids. “I saw it! She had long hair … she was hanging there …”
“Oh, Jess, don’t,” Linda said softly. “You’ll give us all nightmares. Listen, the best thing to do when you have a bad dream is get up and get really awake, right? That party starts in half an hour, anyway, and you’re still going, aren’t you? It’ll get your mind off your dream.”
Jess struggled with the idea that what she had seen was a dream. A dream? But …
No, they were right. How could it have been anything else but a dream? They all looked so concerned. She was upsetting everyone and making Ian and Milo feel guilty over—what? After all, she couldn’t really have seen that girl hanging in her room, could she? Not a girl who had died last spring. Not possible. So she hadn’t heard the scream, either. That, too, was not possible.
She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Get her mind off it, that was the answer. She had forgotten about the party, but it would be a perfect escape. “Of course I’m going,” she said firmly. “Sorry I got everyone all rattled. It was just so real …”
Linda looked relieved. “Great. You get dressed. Meet you downstairs. Should I wake Cath up? She’s napping, too. Her light isn’t on.”
“No, let her sleep.” Jess tossed the quilt aside and stood up. Her jeans looked okay, but her shirt was one giant wrinkle. “She probably wasn’t going to the party, anyway.”