Before They Rode Horses

by Bonnie Bryant

  The Pines’ house was really nice and it was in a great place. They were down the street from a beautiful little lake that had a beach. We walked past the lake. I thought it would be nice to have our picnic on the beach, maybe go swimming afterward.

  “Oh, maybe,” said Madeleine, but I could tell that maybe meant “never.”

  “I can’t,” said Maggie. “I hate it when I get water in my ears.”

  I’m telling you, that’s what she said—like she’d never heard of hopping up and down on one foot, tilting her head to get the water out of her ears. So much for my bright idea of learning how to do a backwards somersault!

  It was like the two of them were two pieces of the same pie. If Madeleine didn’t want to go swimming, Maggie came up with the excuse—lame as it was. If I hadn’t been feeling left out before, I really started feeling left out then. It was as if they’d joined forces to make me feel bad. I would have felt totally bad if I hadn’t had a nice thought at that moment. I decided that Madeleine’s name wasn’t Mad-uh-line Pine, it was Mad-uh-lane Pain, and I decided to call her Mad-uh-lane for the rest of my visit.

  We kept on walking past the beach, and then there, next to the lake, was a really wonderful house. It was old, covered with shingles, and the windows were all boarded up.

  “What’s that?” I asked, wondering why anybody would cover the windows on such a neat, big old house.

  “That’s supposed to be haunted,” said Maggie. “At least that’s what some people say, but, of course, there’s no such thing as a haunted house.”

  I looked at it again. It was two stories with a big pointed roof on top. That had to mean it had a cavernous attic. There was gingerbread trim around the edge of the roof. The shutters that remained had little designs cut out of them, trees, hearts, things like that. It actually made me think of the witch’s cottage in Hänsel and Gretel.

  “I don’t know about that,” said Madeleine.

  “About what?” I asked.

  “About there being no such thing as a haunted house,” said Madeleine. “I’ve heard stories …” Then, if you can believe it, she actually nudged Maggie.

  “Oh, right, yeah,” said Maggie, suddenly changing her tune to suit her friend. “Lots of stories, like, uh …” Maggie couldn’t seem to come up with any on the spot. Madeleine supplied one.

  “They say that at night, when there’s a full moon, you can hear ghosts howling,” Madeleine said. “According to the local legend, it belonged to a mean old sea captain who went away to sea and didn’t come back for such a long time that his young wife thought he was dead and got remarried. When he came back and found she’d married someone else, he was furious and tried to kill her new husband. There was a gigantic fight and the new husband killed the sea captain. Then he and his wife lived in the house for the rest of their lives. But they had to live with the ghost of the sea captain. He never left them alone, and on the night of the full moon, everyone in town can hear the howling.”

  I’d been listening to ghost stories all my life, and I can tell you that Chad could have told a story ten times better than that on the spot. There were a million things wrong with it. In the first place, we were nowhere near the sea, and no self-respecting sea captain would have a house so far inland. For another thing, if you figure your house is haunted by the ghost of your first husband who was killed by your second husband, aren’t you going to go find somewhere else to live? And then, there are all the legal complications of a murder, like if it had occurred, wouldn’t the second husband have been punished?

  Well, never mind that it was a dumb story, I knew she’d just made it up to scare me, and although she might have gotten me to go on a tea party with dolls, I wasn’t ever going to let her scare me.

  “I’m not the least bit afraid of a silly old ghost,” I said.

  “That shows how much you know,” said Madeleine. “You should be afraid.”

  III

  THE TEA PARTY was another learning experience for me. In the first place, the blanket wasn’t really large enough for three girls and three dolls. It seemed to be large enough for two girls and three dolls, though, so I mostly ended up sitting on pine needles. Then, when Madeleine dropped her cookie on the ground, she pretended she’d actually been handing it to me, so it was officially my cookie, and I wasn’t too thrilled with the idea of eating a dirt-covered cookie.

  Even at the worst, I never felt so unwelcome with my brothers as I did with Maggie and Madeleine. They were doing everything in the world but saying I should go away and leave them alone. If I’d been with my brothers, I would have thought nothing of punching or screaming, but this was different. I still wanted to find a way to make it be all right. That was when I told Maggie that Madeleine and I had decided I could sleep in a sleeping bag on the floor if she wanted to stay the night.

  That made them both very happy, but it didn’t make me feel one bit better.

  Finally the picnic ended and we went back home. I don’t remember much of what happened for the rest of the day, but I do know that when it was almost time to go to bed, my mother said she had something in her suitcase that I should get, so I should go with her into her room. I had no idea what she was talking about, but what she had for me was the best present in the world. It was her lap. She sat down in a chair and had me come over for a hug and a talk.

  “I don’t think this is turning out to be the visit you were expecting,” she said as she held me tightly.

  I couldn’t say anything because she was more right than she could possibly know.

  “I don’t think you and Madeleine really have very much in common, do you?” she asked.

  I just shook my head because I was afraid I might cry.

  Mom told me that she and Annie were having a wonderful visit and it meant everything in the world to her to have me there with her and she appreciated the fact that I was trying so hard to be friendly with Madeleine. She was very proud of me, and she was pretty sure that things would get better. Somehow I’d figure out how to enjoy my visit, and in any case I could be proud of myself for being such a wonderful girl. She didn’t actually say “precious,” but I think that’s what she meant.

  I was proud of her, too. Some mothers might ignore the fact that their friend has an obnoxious daughter. My mother knew it, and she wouldn’t call it any other way.

  We didn’t have a very long visit, but it was an important one. When we were done with our hug, I was ready to face a night with the obnoxious M girls. I was going to manage to keep my mother proud of me, and I was going to manage to help her have a good visit with Annie, no matter what it took.

  You can imagine that the sleepover wasn’t one tiny bit better than the rest of my visit had been so far. The one thing it had going for it was that Madeleine and Maggie ignored me totally, so I ignored them. While they talked about dolls, clothes, and the girls in their class, I read my book and then went to sleep. I don’t know how long they talked. None of it had anything to do with me.

  I don’t know what woke me up that night. I couldn’t see the clock, but I knew it was the middle of the night. Everybody was asleep. All the lights were out. Outside, I could hear night sounds, crickets, frogs on the lake, things like that. I stood up and looked out the window. Somehow, the summer night with its familiar sounds seemed much more friendly than the house. It was a dumb thing to do, I know, but I just had to get out of there before those two woke up and started talking about Sally Malone’s orthodonture.

  It was a warm night. All the doors were open so that whatever breeze there was could come through the screen doors. I let myself out and went for a midnight walk. I’d only been there less than a day. I didn’t know any place to walk except the way we’d gone past the beach and the old house to where we’d had our tea party. Naturally, that was where I walked. It took me longer at night. It was completely dark out, so it was hard to see where I was going. There were streetlights, but they were far apart. After about fifteen minutes, I was in front of the old house. I wa
s just standing there, minding my own business and admiring the house, when there was a bright flash of light, a loud crack of thunder, and all of a sudden it was pouring rain. Nothing gentle about it. It was a torrential downpour. I realized that I was standing in the middle of a dark street, in the middle of the night, in the middle of a rainstorm, wearing my pajamas. Not real bright, huh?

  I needed to get under cover, but even at eight years old I knew better than to hide under a tree in a thunderstorm. For one thing, the rain was coming down so hard that a tree wouldn’t have done me any good. For another thing, and probably more important, I knew that a tree was a dangerous place to get shelter in a thunderstorm. A tall tree attracts lightning. I didn’t really have a choice. I ran to the porch of the old house. Then, like it was an automatic thing, I pushed at the front door. It opened right away. I ran inside without thinking that the house probably belonged to somebody and that that somebody wasn’t me. As suddenly as I’d been in the rain, I was now out of it. That was all that mattered.

  There was a light switch on the wall. I flicked it and an old chandelier turned on. I don’t know why there was electricity in an abandoned house, but there was, and I’m not one to question good fortune. Ghosts or no, rain or no, I hadn’t been too thrilled with being in a big old house in the total dark.

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but what I found was a really nice old house. Sure it was beat up. Some of the wallpaper was torn and stained. There were posts missing from the banister. There was a broken chair in one corner and a pile of old newspapers by the fireplace. There was dust on everything, and cobwebs, too, but there was still something totally neat about it. When I thought about it later—like years later—I think I decided that what was mostly neat about it was that Madeleine wasn’t there. I smiled to myself and sat down on the pile of newspapers.

  Although some of the windows had boards crisscrossed over them, I could see around them to the outside. I could see that the rain was still coming down in buckets, and I could see when there was a giant flash of lightning, which was often. I didn’t actually have to see that, though, because every time there was lightning, the lights flickered and then there was a gigantic crash of thunder. It was totally eerie and totally cool. A big gust of wind came through, probably from one of the windows that was broken under the crisscrossed boards. There were curtains on the window, though, and they got picked up by the wind, sweeping into the room.

  It was a funny thing. As I sat there, in the dim light and the rain, I could almost believe that there was a ghost in the house. It was the kind of place a ghost might actually like to hang out. It certainly was a place I liked to hang out.

  Since the lights worked, I wondered if anything else did. I went to the kitchen sink and turned on the faucet. There was a tiny little dribble of very dirty water, but there was a great big groaning sound in the pipes. Overhead, I heard a creaking noise. The wind had to be blowing a door that was swinging on creaky hinges.

  It was perfect. The thought crossed my mind that I should go get all my stuff and move into the haunted house until it was time to go home. Mom could have her visit with Annie. Madeleine and Maggie could have their visit without me. And I could be where nobody would ever bother me.

  Oh, there might be a few pesky details like food and water and clean blankets to sleep on, but I’d find a way. Of course, I knew I couldn’t do that. I didn’t care what Madeleine thought, but I actually did care how my mother would feel. I started thinking about how much I wanted Mom to have a good visit and how I wanted to hurt Madeleine as much as she’d hurt me and I was sure there was no way I could do both things. But then there was another squeaking sound in the house—this time it was the cutest little mouse dashing across the floor—and I began to get the idea that I might actually have found a way to have my cake and eat it, too. In other words, a perfect plan was forming in my little warped brain.

  I had just a few small details to take care of before I went back to Madeleine’s house. There was no time to waste.

  IV

  YOU’D THINK THAT one doll tea party a week would be enough for anyone, but it seemed that Maggie and Madeleine couldn’t get their fill of doll tea parties. I guess it was some sort of tradition with them or, maybe and more likely, they both knew that it bored me and therefore it was definitely their choice activity. I didn’t mind. In fact, I’d been counting on it.

  Once again, we packed up everything, selected the dolls that Maggie and Madeleine wanted to play with, and waited for Mrs. Pine to make a picnic for us. This time my mom decided to help, and the next thing I knew one of the sets of finger sandwiches was none other than peanut butter and honey. She was being just wonderful.

  By this time, Mrs. Pine had figured out that things weren’t exactly going my way, and I think she was a little embarrassed about the way her daughter and Maggie were behaving toward me.

  “Perhaps you’d like to have your guest choose where you go on your picnic today,” she said to Madeleine.

  “Okay,” Madeleine agreed. “Maggie, where would you like to go?”

  I mean, she was really that obvious!

  “Now, Madeleine,” said Mrs. Pine. “Maggie can choose anytime. Why don’t you let Stevie choose?”

  “But Stevie doesn’t know where anything is around here,” said Madeleine.

  I wasn’t going to let the opportunity pass me by. “Well, maybe I don’t know where I do want to go, but I certainly know where I don’t want to go,” I said.

  “Where?” Madeleine asked, as if she really meant it.

  “Anyplace but that haunted house. It’s scary!” I said. “I don’t ever want to go near there again. In fact, if we could go someplace that doesn’t even pass it, that would be fine by me!”

  Maggie and Madeleine looked at one another. I’d seen that look before. I’d seen Chad and Alex look at one another like that dozens of times. It always meant trouble for me.

  “I’d like to go back to the place where we had our tea yesterday,” said Maggie.

  “Okay,” Madeleine agreed.

  “But not past the haunted house,” I said.

  “There’s no other way,” said Maggie and Madeleine, practically at the same time.

  “Well, then I’m walking on the other side of the street,” I said.

  Madeleine smiled. Maggie smirked.

  We’d hardly gotten out of the house before the teasing began.

  “Stevie believes in ghosts!” said Madeleine.

  “Whooo-ooooo!” said Maggie. Can you imagine anybody making such a stupid noise, like that was going to frighten me?

  Then Madeleine started talking as if she had come directly from Transylvania: “Com eento dee haunted house! Meet dee spirits that invade it ahvry single night!”

  “Whooo-ooooo!” said Maggie again. She wasn’t long on imagination.

  “Oh, come on,” I begged. “Don’t make fun of me! I wouldn’t be frightened if you hadn’t told me about the old sea captain. I was looking at the house yesterday and I was just about sure I could see him through one of the windows!”

  “Whooo-ooooo!” said Maggie.

  “Oh, come on, let’s just have our tea party!” said Madeleine.

  So we headed back to the spot in the woods. I was careful to walk at the very far edge of the far side of the road when we passed the haunted house. In fact, I ran as we passed it.

  Madeleine stopped when we were just past the house. “Stevie, are you telling me you’re really afraid of that house?”

  “I guess so,” I said. “I don’t usually believe in those things, like I told you yesterday. But there’s something about that place that gives me the creeps. One hundred percent!”

  “Really?” Maggie asked. “You mean that you’d be afraid to go in there?”

  “One hundred percent!” I said.

  “Yesterday you said you didn’t believe in ghosts and you weren’t afraid.”

  “Well, that was before you told me that scary story,” I said. “Now I’d
hate more than anything in the world to go into that house.”

  “I dare you,” said Madeleine.

  I stopped in my tracks and just stared at her.

  “Double dare!” said Maggie.

  “No, don’t make me do it!” I said. I was so excited I’m sure I managed to make my face turn white.

  “Only fraidy-cats won’t go on a dare!” said Madeleine.

  “Whooo-ooooo!” said Maggie.

  “I’m not a fraidy-cat!” I said, but I tried as hard as I could to look like one.

  “Well, you are, too, if you won’t even touch the doorknob.”

  “Doorknob?” I asked. “Just touch it?”

  “Just touch it,” Maggie said.

  “You’ll come with me?”

  “That would show how brave we are, not how brave you are,” said Madeleine. “We’ll watch from here.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “What’s the big deal?” asked Madeleine. “The ghost is only on the inside. The doorknob is on the outside!”

  “Well, if I don’t have to go in …”

  “Triple dare!” said Maggie. That sealed it.

  “I’ll show you!” I said.

  “I’m sure you will,” smirked Madeleine. She was totally pleased with herself, and so was Maggie. They’d figured that touching the doorknob would be enough to melt me into a shivering mass of nerves, which, as we know perfectly well, is exactly what they were after.

  I ran. I don’t think I’ve ever run so fast in my entire life. I had to cross the road, cross the lawn, cross the porch, and get to the door. I grabbed for the doorknob, twisted it, and, just as it had the night before, the door slid open easily. I screamed loudly while I slipped into the darkness of the house and let the door slam behind me.

  In a second, I got to the front window and peered through a crack in the boards. There, on the other side of the street, were Madeleine and Maggie, totally engrossed in a fit of giggles. That, I sincerely hoped, would be the last laugh they had for some time.