A Perfect Storm

  The rain had stopped. The winds were still blowing but nowhere near as hard. Dark, puffy clouds zoomed across the sky like they’d been filmed with a time-lapse camera. Branches and leaves were all over the place.

  “I’m going to check the exterior for damage,” said my dad.

  “I’ll check the interior,” I said quickly, knowing this was my chance to seize the opportunity to look for Duggan upstairs.

  Lady Azura gave me a look. She knew what I was up to, of course.

  “I, for one, shall go have my nap,” she said in her queenlike voice. “This has been quite enough excitement for me for one day.”

  My dad gave her a flashlight to light her way through the still-dim kitchen. Then he headed outside to go inspect for any damage.

  I searched the house from top to bottom. I saw the spirit of the woman in the pink bedroom, and I saw grumpy Mr. Broadhurst walking back and forth in our sitting room on the second floor. I even saw Henry in the closet of my crafts room. He had a lot of questions about the storm and why it had been so dark and loud. I explained as best I could.

  I did not see Duggan.

  Chapter 8

  We got our power back the next morning, Monday, but on the news I learned that school would be closed through Wednesday. Lily got her power back around the same time as we did, but she told me that parts of Stellamar might be out for a while—particularly the parts nearest to the shore. I didn’t hear anything from Mason. I assumed his power was out and that he wasn’t able to text me because of the spotty cell phone service. I hoped he was okay. And that his house was okay. For all I knew, his family had ended up getting evacuated after all.

  My dad let me head over to Lily’s house on Monday afternoon, after he’d made sure there were no dangerous power lines down or anything. That’s how I learned about Mason’s school.

  Lily was related to every other person in Stellamar, or at least it seemed like it sometimes. She had a lot of relatives in the volunteer fire department and the local police departments, so as usual, I learned more from her than from the TV.

  “Harbor Isle Middle School had a lot of damage,” Lily told me. “A tree fell on the cafeteria roof! And a bunch of the ground-floor classrooms got flooded after the windows broke. So the school has to close, maybe for months, while they repair it.”

  My eyes widened.

  “I know, right? They’re going to move a bunch of the kids into the high school, but at least a hundred are going to have to get bused to schools in neighboring towns, at least through January. Including Stellamar.”

  Mason. Would Mason be allowed to come to our school?

  Lily read my mind. Not really. But kind of.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but you can stop thinking it,” she said. “My mom talked to Mason’s mom, and he’s going to Ocean Heights. Which makes his parents mad because Mason’s closest friends are getting sent here.”

  Oh well.

  “What about Calvin?” I asked. “Is he one of those friends?”

  Lily shook her head, an exasperated expression on her face. “I don’t know. I haven’t been able to find out. I couldn’t exactly ask my mom to ask Mason’s mom, because what if word got back to Calvin? He’d know it was me asking. I’m definitely keeping my fingers crossed. But I don’t even know his last name.”

  I kept pretty busy the next few days. My dad and I made big pots of spaghetti and delivered meals to several of our elderly neighbors who were without power.

  And I searched for Duggan, keeping my eyes peeled as my dad and I drove around town, looking for Duggan’s distinctive sailor hat. But he was nowhere to be found. The blue bedroom remained spirit free. On Tuesday I grabbed my camera and walked to Scoops in the hopes I might find him around there. The boardwalk was eerily quiet, with most of the shops still boarded up. I noticed that in one place the railing of the boardwalk had been completely torn away by the winds. My dad had told me that we had been really lucky, that the dunes on the beach had really held up and helped to protect the boardwalk and the neighborhoods closer to the shore in Stellamar, but I knew some other towns hadn’t been so lucky. Towns like Harbor Isle. I didn’t find Duggan, but I did get some pretty incredible pictures of the aftermath of the storm.

  On Tuesday night I finally heard from Mason. He told me his house was still out of power but otherwise had done okay. A big tree had come down but luckily hadn’t hit his house. But parts of his town were in really bad shape. He and his parents were staying with his grandparents for a few days until the power came back on at home, or until they figured something else out.

  My dad stayed home Monday and Tuesday, as his office had lost power, but he kept busy helping neighbors with repairs and stuff. Several times I thought of telling my dad about Duggan. But in the end, I didn’t. He knew about my powers, of course. But he still seemed uncomfortable talking openly about spirit stuff. And since this spirit stuff had to do with my mom, I was afraid of completely freaking him out.

  On Wednesday, Lady Azura found me staring out of the bay window toward the ocean.

  “Brooding over this message business with Duggan?” she asked me.

  I whirled around, feeling upset and thinking she didn’t believe me or take me seriously. But when I saw her face, I saw a look of genuine concern. And a lot of love.

  I shook my head. “I’ve searched the house twice,” I said, “even though I have no idea what I’m looking for. And I don’t know if he said he has a message my mother left me while she was alive, or if she sent me a message more recently, and even though I’ve looked and looked, I—”

  “Perhaps we can conjure him.”

  “—like, up in the attic,” I continued, because her words hadn’t registered. “And even—” Her words sank in. I gaped at her. “Wait. What did you say?”

  “I said perhaps we can conjure him.”

  “Duggan? Really? Can we?”

  She nodded. “I don’t see why not. We’ve certainly been all too successful summoning other spirits recently. There’s no reason we can’t try to summon him.”

  “Can we do it now?” I asked eagerly.

  She nodded. “Come. Follow me to my fortune-telling room.”

  I practically ran into her room after her. Helped her light candles. Pulled the shades. Arranged crystals. As fast as I could. And then we sat down across from each other, and I tried to clear my mind. To stop it from blocking anything out.

  We held hands across the table and closed our eyes.

  “Mr. Duggan,” said Lady Azura in her low, velvety voice, the one I had grown accustomed to hearing by now in her séance room. “Mr. Duggan. We invite you to visit us.”

  We waited. Waited some more. I opened one eye. I sensed nothing. It wasn’t going to work. I felt the despair take hold of me.

  And then I sensed something.

  I opened my eyes slowly. Looked around the room, into the dark, shadowy corners.

  There.

  A figure stood, a dark-gray silhouette against the pale daylight that was glowing faintly behind the drapery. The figure moved. Stepped out of the shadows and into the candlelit circle of our table.

  It was Duggan.

  But a very young Duggan.

  He wore the same blue coat, but it was new-looking and unsoiled, not yet threadbare near the shoulders and elbows. His face was clean-shaven, his jet-black hair just barely caught up in a small ponytail at the nape of his neck. On his head he wore a brown, three-pointed hat. Possibly the same one worn by his old self, but this one was new-looking, without scuffs or shiny spots where the suede had worn away.

  I stood up from my chair, so excited to see him that I let it crash backward to the floor. Lady Azura winced at the noise, but it didn’t seem to bother Duggan the spirit.

  “Thank you,” I said in a high-pitched voice. “For coming. Here, I mean. To see us.”

  He grunted, his heavy dark eyebrows turned downward.

  “So, Mr. Duggan,” I said, trying not to sound nervous. “Okay if I
ask you a question?”

  Lady Azura was allowing me to speak, to direct this conversation. I was grateful for that.

  He nodded. “Aye.”

  “I’m wondering. My name is Sara. My mother is—was—Natalie. I was just wondering if you knew her.”

  His dark eyes bored into mine. I waited, my breath caught in my throat, hardly daring to breathe.

  “Nay, I duh’nt know ’er,” he said at last.

  My heart sank. “But—but I thought you had a message. From her. For me,” I said weakly. I willed myself to swallow the huge lump that had risen in my throat. Not to cry. Not now.

  He shook his head, and for the first time I noticed a heavy gold earring in one of his ears. “Nah, I duh’nt know ’er,” he repeated. He looked from me to Lady Azura. “Must return to me ship, the Phoebe. She’s at the docks. Beautiful, she is.”

  Before I could think of anything else to say, he shimmered away and vanished.

  I stared at Lady Azura. “Did you see him?”

  She shook her head. “I could not see him. But I sensed his presence, and I could hear him quite well.”

  “Well, what do you think is wrong? Was he lying to me? Or had he been lying before, about having a message from my mother?” Hot tears sprang to the corners of my eyes.

  Lady Azura patted the table gently, indicating that I should sit back down. I sat.

  “I believe he was telling the truth both times,” she said quietly.

  That made no sense. I started to say something.

  “I believe that this Duggan is a younger version of the spirit you met upstairs. Did he look younger?”

  I reflected. “Well, yes. Definitely. But—”

  “I believe he truly doesn’t know who Natalie is—yet.”

  I didn’t understand. She could see by my face that I didn’t.

  “Some spirits who stay tied to the earth after they die go through cycles. They will relive various parts of their former lives. I believe that Duggan as a spirit does what the living Duggan did many years ago. He spends part of his time here, in the house, and part at the shipyard, and part at sea. We happened to conjure the younger man.”

  “That’s crazy,” I said. “Why would he do that?”

  “Do you remember that my late husband Richard appears to me on Christmas?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Sometimes he appears as a young man, and sometimes he appears as he did later in his life. There are no hard-and-fast rules with spirits. They really get to do whatever they want.”

  “Maybe we can try again. Maybe if we try to invite the old Duggan this time—”

  She shook her head. “I’m afraid it doesn’t work that way.”

  “But how do you know?” I pressed. “I mean, can’t we try at least?”

  “Sara, please believe me that I know what I am talking about here. I have a lot of experience with this. As I said, my late husband, Richard, comes to me in various forms. Believe me when I tell you I have tried to send back the very young Richard when he appears, and trade him in, so to speak, for my favorite Richard, in his midfifties. But I cannot do so. And in the process I have managed to really confuse the spirit who is with me.”

  I believed her, of course. And I could imagine that it would be pretty confusing for a spirit, who maybe didn’t even grasp that he was a spirit in the first place, to be asked to leave and come back as himself thirty years later. I swallowed my bitter disappointment and decided to head over to Lily’s.

  I told her everything, of course.

  We were up in her room, packing boxes full of shoes that Lily and her mother had collected from the basement for a clothing drive. Buddy, the Randazzo family dog, lay sprawled on the floor among all the shoes, sound asleep and snoring contentedly. Lily sat on the floor next to him, one hand on his head, the other holding a pink sneaker in her hand. She looked at it thoughtfully. “I have an idea,” she said.

  I looked up from my box and sat back on my heels. From the tone of her voice, it sounded like it might be a big idea. I waited expectantly.

  “Why don’t you and I try to conjure him with my spirit board?” she suggested.

  I grimaced. “I don’t know. The last two times I’ve tried to conjure spirits have been pretty disastrous.” I realized that in all the excitement of the storm, I hadn’t yet told her about the crowd of spirits that had shown up after the session we’d had together with Lady Azura. So I filled her in on what had happened.

  Lily wouldn’t be dissuaded. “Well, this time it wouldn’t be just for the fun of it. We’d be very specifically calling to one spirit. Anyway, it’s an idea. Think it over.”

  I promised I would.

  We spent the rest of our time home from school keeping busy with post-storm cleanup. I helped Lily’s parents get their yard back in shape. There was a lot of un-prepping to do around Lily’s house: We picked up all the sticks and branches that had blown down in the yard and packed up more boxes for the clothing drive. Lily and my dad and I also helped our neighbors pick up sticks and stuff in their yards. And I took more pictures.

  I was actually happy when school resumed on Thursday morning.

  Chapter 9

  Thursday morning Principal Bowman called an all-school assembly to introduce the new kids from Harbor Isle. All twenty of them stood on the stage in a clump, and Mrs. Bowman introduced them one by one.

  Mason was not among them.

  “I don’t see Calvin,” whispered Lily, who was sitting beside me. “I guess he’s not going to be here.”

  “Sorry, Lil,” I said.

  Jody Jenner was there, though. The girl I’d met the week before at Scoops. There was a smattering of applause as Mrs. Bowman called out Jody’s name, and she waved to the crowd like she was the president, a big smile on her pretty face.

  Beside me, I could hear Lily grumbling under her breath.

  “What’s up?” I whispered to her.

  “Nothing,” she whispered back. “I just don’t trust her. Something tells me she’s not as nice as everyone thinks she is.”

  I shrugged. “Well, you’ve known her longer than I have. I’ll—”

  “Calvin Kennedy,” called Mrs. Bowman.

  I felt Lily start. I grinned. Gave her a little elbow in the arm.

  Calvin emerged from where he’d been standing in the back of the clump. I had to admit, he really was nice-looking. I could understand Lily’s obsession. In a purely objective way, of course.

  Mrs. Bowman called the last few kids’ names and then explained that the Harbor Isle kids would be with us for the rest of the semester—most likely until the new year. And that we should welcome them, show them around, help them find their way to classes. I made a promise in my head to be as welcoming as I could.

  I knew what it was like to be new. It wasn’t that long ago that I was the new girl at Stellamar Middle School. I just couldn’t help but feel let down that Mason wasn’t one of the new kids.

  I gave Lily another nudge with my elbow. She nudged back.

  Well, at least Lily could focus on her crush.

  At lunch, Miranda waved over Jody and her friend, Caroline, inviting them to come sit at our table. We all moved over to make room for them.

  Caroline sat across the table, between Tamara and Marlee. Jody sat down between me and Lily. “I see the food here is as delicious as it is at Harbor Isle,” she said drily, poking at her lukewarm slice of pizza.

  “Yeah, the kitchen got a four-star rating in the New York Times recently,” I said.

  Jody laughed.

  Was Lily right about her? I wondered. She seemed really nice.

  “So is your dad really a famous TV director guy?” asked Avery eagerly.

  Jody rolled her eyes. “I guess you would say so,” she said, taking a dainty sip of her chocolate milk. “But to me he’s just a random dad, as embarrassing as the next dad.”

  We all laughed at that. She seemed so normal.

  “Hey, tell them about how you stayed in that
castle this summer, and your ghost story,” suggested Caroline.

  “You stayed in a castle?” asked Miranda, her eyes round.

  “With a ghost?” added Tamara.

  I swallowed hard.

  “Yeah,” said Jody. “We were visiting this guy who was in one of my dad’s TV movies. John Fry.”

  “Wait. You mean, John Fry, John Fry? The guy who stars in that new TV show?” asked Miranda.

  “Oh. Yeah, I guess he has a show, too.”

  We all knew the show, of course. It was a huge hit, a drama about a guy who has secret superpowers for fighting bad guys. John Fry was this twentysomething, super-gorgeous British movie star who was on the cover of every weekly magazine at the grocery checkout counter.

  “Anyway,” Jody continued, “so John owns this huge, rambling castle in Scotland, with a moat and servants and everything, and supposedly there’s a ghost that haunts it, the ghost of a young girl who threw herself off a parapet a few centuries ago.”

  “Why?” asked Tamara, transfixed.

  “I guess because she couldn’t marry the guy she loved. Something like that.”

  “And you saw her? The ghost, I mean?” asked Marlee.

  “Well, maybe yes, maybe no,” said Jody. “I mean, I woke up in the middle of the night and was sure I saw a girl in a long white dress standing in my room. Then she vanished. And the next morning when I asked about it, John’s wife told me that was the very room where the girl had once slept.”

  This story seemed to impress everyone at the table. I wasn’t sure what to say, so I kept quiet. Of course.

  Unfortunately, Avery didn’t.

  “Well, Sara here has a great-grandmother who can see spirits,” she said. “And she’s totally famous. Just last spring she helped catch a burglar. She was in the news and everything.”

  Jody looked at me, and I saw a flicker of disapproval pass across her face. A second later, though, she was smiling again. Had I imagined it?

  “Collins!” a voice boomed at me from across the cafeteria. I jerked my head up to look, although I realized who it was before I even saw him.