by Ann Walsh
The sun slipped behind a cloud, the temperature dropped. “Let’s go in,” Naomi said. “I don’t think there is much more for me to learn out here.” She strode towards Kelly’s home, but near the jailhouse she stopped, turned off the road, and went towards the old building. She bent her head under the low doorway, and stepped carefully across the threshold.
“Be careful,” called Alan hurrying after her. “I started to do some work on the floor. A few of those boards are ripped up, and some of them are just too old and rotten to take any weight.”
“Stay there, please. I shall take care.” The wiry grey head disappeared into the gloom inside the decrepit building.
Outside, everyone waited for what seemed like a long time. Alan kept peering anxiously into the doorway, concerned for the witch’s safety, but he didn’t enter the building. At last Naomi reappeared, blinking in the daylight, her hair even wilder than it had been. She looked pale, the pink spots on her cheeks now a much lighter shade than her sweater, and she reached gratefully for Alan’s offered arm.
“No one’s seen the ghost in there,” said Tommy.
“No. She doesn’t like it there.” Trisha’s voice, like Tommy’s, was unusually quiet.
Naomi agreed with the twins. “You’re right. She doesn’t like it in the jailhouse. There is no trace of her presence in that building. Yet there is pain, great pain, and grief and confusion. Almost insanity. And it is connected very strongly to her, your little ghost. I must go now and rest. Please forgive me.”
“But what are you going to do, what should we do, Naomi?” asked David.
“David, for now I must rest. Perhaps I shall understand more later.” She shook her head, as if shaking away an unhappy thought, and began to walk towards the commune. George hurried after her, taking her arm, and the two of them moved slowly away.
But then Naomi stopped, and turning back, called, “Mr. Crinchley, you have the answer you know. Only you don’t realize that you have that knowledge. It is buried somewhere deep in your private cave, and in order to find it you will have to invite others into that world of yours. But you, and only you, can help the little ghost.”
“Mr. Crinchley? What is she talking about?” Kelly’s voice rose sharply, angrily. “What do you know, and why won’t you tell us?”
All eyes turned to the old man, balanced precariously on the snow-covered edge of the road, his crutches propping him erect.
“Blast the woman!” he shouted. “She should mind her own business. Blast her anyway!”
Chapter 16
Ed Crinchley pushed through the group of people, his face tight, his crutches slamming into the road.
“Mr. Crinchley, we don’t want to interfere, but Naomi says you know the answer—or can find it. What does she mean?” Kelly followed the old man towards his home. “Please, Mr. Crinchley. You heard what Basil said. Soon Emily won’t be able to get back to the spirit world at all.”
“A man likes his privacy. That woman’s got no right telling you things about me.”
“But, Ed. . .” Alan stood beside his daughter, outside the Grinch’s home. “Naomi didn’t tell us anything about you. She just said you had some knowledge. . .”
“And ‘a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.’ Especially for those who ain’t got no business knowing it.”
“That’s a quote, Mr. Crinchley, from Pope, the poet. I didn’t know you knew any poetry.” Kelly was astonished.
“Look, ain’t nothing wrong with getting educated. Nothing wrong with not bragging about it to people, neither.” The old man had reached the foot of his own front stairs, and turned, glaring at Kelly and her father.
“You two going to help me up these blasted things, or you want me to crawl up?”
Alan took one of the crutches, and slipped his arm under the old man’s shoulder. “We’ll help you, Ed. You know we will. I wish you would help us, though.”
Without answering, Ed Crinchley pushed open his door, grabbed his crutch away from Alan, and hobbled inside, slamming the door behind him. The twins had followed, keeping a safe distance behind, but now they ran to Kelly and her father.
“Boy, is he grouchy.”
“He’s really being a Grinch today.”
“What’s the matter with him, Mr. Linden?”
“Yeah. He was snarly at the witch-lady.”
Alan sighed. “I don’t know what his problem is, kids. Oh, well, there’s nothing we can do about it, I guess.”
“But Dad, it’s peculiar. He knew what the word ‘wicca’ meant, and he quoted Pope just now. That’s not at all like Mr. Crinchley.” Kelly was as puzzled as the twins.
Joan and Basil stood by their car, ready to leave, Ben and Bob beside them. Clara Overton was quiet, standing alone, deep in thought, and David sat on the fence outside Kelly’s house. Everyone looked up as Kelly and her father returned, the twins in tow.
“I don’t know what Naomi thinks Ed knows about our little ghost,” said Alan, “but he certainly is upset about her saying anything about him.”
David jumped down from the fence and came to Kelly. “Hey,” he said. “Let’s forget about it for now. How about a walk while it’s not too cold. Come on, Kelly, no point in getting upset over the Grinch.”
A door slammed and a loud shout echoed down the road. “All right, blast it. Get over here and let’s start looking for that fool bit of information I don’t know I have.” Ed Crinchley stood on his front porch, calling to the group. “Come on,” he said. “I guess the old bear can open his cave to you, at least until we figure out what to do with the little critter.”
“Raincheck on that walk, Kelly,” said David. “Let’s go find out what’s in the Grinch’s cave.”
“Come on in,” said the old man, stepping back from the doorway as everyone arrived. “The place is a bit of a mess, but I’m not much on cleaning up.”
The house had a musty smell, overlaid with the peculiar, unpleasant odour of wine fermenting, and could have used a good cleaning. “In here, not the living room, here, in my study.” Ed Crinchley threw open a door part way down the narrow hallway, and went in. “I guess what that woman thinks I know has to be here somewhere in my research files,” he said.
“Files? Research?” Kelly felt a bit like Alice in Wonderland, with things getting ‘curiouser and curiouser’ all the time. Why would the Grinch bother with files?
The room was large, probably the original living room of the old farmhouse, and was lined on two sides by full bookcases. Against another wall stood a bank of four filing cabinets, and a corner held a stack of cardboard boxes, overflowing with yellowing papers. In the centre of the room was a table with an old typewriter, and beside it, neatly stacked, a thick pile of typed pages.
“Every blasted fool thinks he can be a writer,” grumbled the old man. “Got me my degree in history years ago, and been writing this fool book ever since.”
“You write books?”
“Like Stephen King?”
“Do they make movies of your books?”
“Do they have pictures in them?”
The twins seemed relatively unaffected by the Grinch’s announcement, but the adults stared at him in amazement. “You went to university?” asked Clara Overton.
“You’re writing a book?” said Bob, and Ben repeated the question.
“Mr. Crinchley, why on earth haven’t you told us? It’s almost as if you were ashamed of going to university, of having an education.” Kelly spoke for everyone.
“Taught in a big school once, back east. Didn’t like it. Came home here, after my father died, and thought I’d write a book about him; about the early days of Soda Creek and how his father came here in the eighteen-sixties. Then I kept on finding more and more stuff, people would give me things, old newspapers, books, family journals, pictures—and now I got too much information to put in one little book. These blasted filing cabinets, they eat things I put in them, and I never can find the right document when I need it.”
“An historian,”
said Joan. “You’re Soda Creek’s historian!”
“That explains why you know so much about the early days around here, Ed,” smiled Alan. “But Kelly is right, you know. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“Don’t want anyone to call me an intellectual. Bunch of wimps and snivelers. I like my life here, and I just sort of play at this research and history. Keep thinking that one day I might get that book finished. Then I don’t know what I’ll do with my time.”
“That’s what Naomi meant by you having a secret life, being in a ‘cave’,” said David. “And somewhere in all this information must be that ‘knowledge’ that will help us find out about the little ghost.”
“Guess so.” The old man looked around him vaguely. “It’s all Cariboo history, not just Soda Creek but the whole area, all those books and files. Maybe there is something in there, but I haven’t got a notion as to what it is, or where it would be.”
“Well,” said Alan thoughtfully, “what if we each take a book or some files and read everything in it? Maybe we’ll know what we’re looking for when we find it.”
“Go ahead, help yourselves, if you think it will do any good,” agreed the old man.
Within a few minutes everyone had found a spot to work, and had selected something to read. Clara Overton organized things, setting up a system of recording what had been gone through, reassuring Ed Crinchley that everything would be put back exactly where it had been found. She located a box of old photographs for the twins to burrow through as their contribution to the search, then, once everyone had settled down to read, she left the house, returning later with a large platter of sandwiches.
Ben sat at the table, intrigued with files on agriculture, exclaiming to himself once in a while as he discovered something unusual; a plant he hadn’t suspected would grow in Soda Creek, the number of carrots produced to feed the busy town in its prime, the weight of the largest squash grown in the area seventy-five years ago. It seemed that then, as now, Soda Creek’s microclimate had produced some excellent crops.
Alan had chosen a thick pile of documents containing old bills and invoices for machinery parts and repairs, and descriptions of mining techniques in the early days. He, too, quickly became absorbed in what he was reading.
Bob chose a large armchair as his work area, the arms of the chair piled with books on weaving, quilting patterns and other crafts used by early settlers of the area.
Another drawer of a filing cabinet held writings about the first inhabitants of Soda Creek, the Shuswap Indians, and Joan read furiously, taking notes once in a while, her mind probably as much on current land claims as on the traditions and lifestyle of her ancestors. Basil had smiled and confessed that his eyes weren’t too good, so he sat crosslegged on the floor beside the twins, keeping a semblance of order to their rummagings through the photographs.
David and Kelly shared a box of unidentified material, finding catalogues, letters, receipts, wedding invitations and diaries. In one of the diaries Kelly lost herself, becoming caught up by the life of another girl in Soda Creek, but many years ago.
Mrs. Terpen arrived at the door around three in the afternoon, looking for the twins, worried, as they hadn’t shown up for lunch, an event almost unheard of. Reassured that the children had eaten, she left, taking a couple of thick folders with her and promising to go through everything in them. After she had gone, Kelly put down the diary she had been reading, and stood up, stretching. The others looked up, their faces expectant.
“I’m just stretching,” explained Kelly. “I haven’t found anything—or at least I don’t think I have. How can we know if we’ve found it if we don’t know what we’re looking for?”
“I understand exactly what you mean,” said her father. “This is fascinating to read, but I don’t know what good it will do. What on earth did Naomi think we’d find in this collection of Ed’s?”
“It’s rather overpowering, all this information,” said Clara Overton. “These old recipes I found are wonderful, but there is so much information here.”
“It will take us days to go through it all,” agreed Joan, “and then we might miss it anyway, because we don’t know what it is.”
The twins had been conscientious in their search through the box of photographs, but they, too, were becoming discouraged, and more than slightly bored. “It’s just a stupid old bunch of pictures,” said Tommy, pushing away the pile in front of him.
“Yeah. I thought it would be more exciting.”
“Does the witch-lady really think there’s a clue in all this old stuff?”
“Yeah. A real clue, like in mystery shows on T.V.”
“This is dumb. I’m going home.” Tommy stood up, and Trisha followed his lead, handing the pictures in her hand to Basil. But as she stood, a photograph which she had not noticed slipped from her lap. She bent to pick it up, saying as she did, “Boy, they sure wore funny clothes in those days.”
“Come on,” said her brother. “Let’s go ride the skidoo before supper.” But Trisha didn’t answer, just stared at the picture in her hand.
“What is it, Trisha?” asked Kelly, taking the old photograph from the child. “What is it?”
A man, a woman and a child, stiffly posed, looking awkward in what were probably their best clothes, stared up at Kelly from the picture. The woman sat on a chair with an elaborately carved back, the man held a top hat in the crook of his left arm, his right arm lying possessively on the woman’s shoulders. And standing between them with one hand on the woman’s lap, was a small girl in high-button boots, lacy pantaloons that peeked out from under her dress, and long ringlets, held back with a bow.
Trisha’s words echoed Kelly’s thought. “It’s her. It’s the little ghost girl!”
Chapter 17
Everyone crowded around Kelly who held the photograph in her hand. “Trisha’s right,” said Alan. “It is our little ghost.”
“I think that’s the very outfit she wears when she visits us,” added Clara Overton. “A shame it’s not a colour photograph.’
“Let me see.” Ed Crinchley was trying to struggle to his feet from the armchair. Kelly took him the picture, and he stared at it dubiously. “I guess it’s her, all right,” he said. “But blast if I know where this picture came from. And who’s that with her? Her parents, I guess. I wonder what their names are.”
“Sara and Jonathan,” said Tommy, and as the adults stared at him in amazement he explained sulkily. “It says their names right on the back. No one’s let me see the picture yet.”
Ed Crinchley turned the picture around, held it for Tommy to see, and squinted at the writing on the back of it. Behind him, Kelly, too, looked down at the words.
“Emily,” said Kelly. “It is her name. It says, ‘Sara, Jonathan and Emily Hyde.’”
“Hyde. Hyde . . . something’s stuck in my mind about that name, but I can’t seem to unstick it.” Ed Crinchley was shaking his head, his brow creased in concentration. “Jonathan Hyde. Now what was it. . .” He squinted at the writing on the picture, his eyes narrowing as he thought.
Clara Overton spoke softly. “Sara Hyde must have been an unusual woman.” Everyone looked at her, surprised. “I mean,” said the teacher, “I mean, not many mothers would dress a child that age in a red dress. Maybe pink or blue or. . .” She stopped talking, and stared down at the picture again. Kelly noticed that Miss O.’s cheeks were flushed.
“You’re right, Clara,” said Bob. “It is a strong colour for a child, most unusual.”
“A strong mother, a strong child—and a strong, fighting spirit,” added Basil. “Yes, I begin to see why the ghost-child is so powerful.”
Everyone was quiet for a moment, intent on the photograph, until the twins became restless.
“Is that all?” asked Tommy.
“Isn’t there more writing on it?”
“Is that the clue?”
“And I found it, Tommy, all by myself! I found the clue.”
“It’s a stupid
clue,” answered Tommy. “I think it’s dumb. I’m going home.”
“Tommy’s mad because he didn’t find it,” giggled Trisha. “I’m going to go tell Mom how I found it.” The door slammed behind them as the twins left.
Alan took the photograph from Ed Crinchley’s hand, staring for a moment at the brownish portraits on the front, before turning it over and studying the back. “The names are faded,” he said, “and they were written in ink. See, there’s an ink spatter near Emily’s name. But there is something else written here, down near the bottom. Numbers? Yes, letters and numbers. ‘JH:4:27’, at least I think that’s what it says. It’s been written with a ballpoint pen, so it has to be modern.”
“Here. Give me that thing.” Ed Crinchley again reached for the picture. “That’s my writing,” he said quietly. “I must have written it.”
“Well, what does it mean?” asked Ben. “There’s got to be a reason why you wrote it.”
“Yes,” repeated Bob, “what does it mean, Ed?”
“That’s easy,” said Joan. “It’s obvious. JH—those are the initials for the father’s name, Jonathan Hyde.”
“Sure, that’s it,” said David. “It’s his initials.”
But Ed Crinchley sat silent, his head bowed. “No,” he said quietly, “no, I’m sure that’s not right.” He rubbed a hand across his forehead, and Kelly saw that he was pale, and that there was a beading of sweat on his face. Alan noticed it, too. He put a hand on the old man’s shoulder.
“Ed,” he said, “Ed, are you all right? What’s the matter?”
“Blast it, anyhow. This getting old sneaks up on a person.” Ed Crinchley handed the picture to Kelly and reached for his crutches. “Those numbers, letters—it’s some sort of a system I used to have, to do with filing and cross-referencing things. Haven’t used that system in years. How do you expect me to remember something like that?”
“He’s forgotten!” thought Kelly. “He’s forgotten what his code means.”
“You look tired, Ed,” said Alan, helping the older man to his feet. “It’s no wonder you can’t remember anything right now, with all this confusion around you and your ankle probably hurting as well. Why don’t we all take whatever we’re reading home, and do our research there, leave you alone to get some rest.”