Allie glanced at the clock. “Yes,” she said.
“Well, here’s the number.” The woman read off a number and Allie copied it on a notepad.
The telephone exchange was familiar; Allie recognized it as that of a nearby town. Good, she thought. It’s not a toll call. She dialed the number.
To her surprise, a man answered after two rings.
“Hello,” he said brusquely.
“Hello,” said Allie. “Is Raymond Gagney there, please?”
“Speaking.”
Allie felt a moment of panic. Gag-Me himself! The man who came so horribly alive in Lucy’s diary, the man who had killed her! Without thinking, Allie blurted, “I have the book you’re looking for.”
There was a pause. “Who is this?”
“I know what you did to Lucy,” Allie went on, unable to stop herself. “You’d better not sell the glen, or you’ll be sorry!” Quickly, she hung up, then stared at the phone in horror. What if it rang? Could Gag-Me trace the call? What if he had Caller ID? What in the world had she done?
She lifted the receiver again and dialed Dub’s number. When he answered, she told him all about the diary and about the call she had made to Raymond Gagney.
“You did what?” Dub shouted in her ear. “You called a murderer and said, ‘I know what you did’? Why didn’t you just say, ‘Please come kill me, too’? Are you crazy?”
“Geez, Dub,” said Allie, “take it easy.”
“Did you actually say, ‘You’ll be sorry’? Oooh, I bet that scared him, Al.”
“I never thought he’d answer the phone!” Allie wailed. “So I was sort of—unprepared.”
“I’ll say,” said Dub darkly. “You didn’t happen to say, ‘By the way, my name is Allie Nichols and I live at 67 Cumberland Road,’ did you?”
“Give me a break,” said Allie. “I’m not that stupid.” There was a silence. “Dub, you’re scaring me,” she said in a small voice.
“Well, I’m sorry, but I wish you’d called me before you got the brilliant idea of calling to threaten a known murderer.”
“He’s not a known murderer,” said Allie. “That’s the problem. We’re the only ones who know.”
“Didn’t you tell your parents?” asked Dub.
“I can’t,” Allie answered.
“Why not?”
“I showed them my journal the first night Lucy wrote in it,” Allie explained.
“So?”
“And when they saw the message, ‘I am L,’ they thought I wrote it myself and made up a story about how the words appeared. Then the next night I heard them talking. They were all worried that I’m a hopeless psychopathic liar or something. They were trying to decide if they should send me to a shrink.”
“You’re not supposed to call them that,” said Dub. “They’re psychiatrists.”
“No kidding, Dub,” said Allie in exasperation. “The point is, I don’t need one. I’m telling the truth. But they’ll never believe me. I mean, I can hardly believe it myself.”
“Maybe we should tell the police,” Dub said.
“I’ve thought about that,” said Allie. “Can’t you just picture the two of us at the police station explaining that a ghost has informed us that she was murdered?”
“Well, there’s the diary,” said Dub.
“I know, but it’s not really proof,” said Allie. “It ends with her saying she’s scared. We know what happened after that because Lucy—or her ghost—has practically told me! She made me have that dream where I saw her falling. She told me to look in the newspapers. She told me to search in the desk until I found the diary. She keeps giving me clues. She wanted me to figure out what happened to her. But who’s going to believe that?”
“I see what you mean, I guess,” said Dub.
Allie and Dub were both quiet for a minute while they thought about the odd happenings of the past three days. It was apparent that Lucy had chosen Allie to avenge her murder. She needed Allie’s help to bring Raymond Gagney to justice and stop him from developing the glen.
And Allie wasn’t going to let her down. But she had to figure out what to do.
Twenty
On her way to school the next day, Allie was dismayed to see a bulldozer poised at the edge of the meadow. She stopped and stared. It looked like a huge, menacing yellow creature, with a wide mouth made to scrape off the skin and dig deep into the guts of the earth, and treads designed to obliterate everything in their path. She shuddered, imagining the thing at work.
When she got to school, she groaned as she looked at the blackboard and saw the words: Pop Quiz—Math. She was exhausted. How could she possibly concentrate?
Allie had hardly slept all night, thinking about Raymond Gagney and how she could stop him from carrying out his plan. She’d stared wide-eyed into the darkness, hoping that Lucy’s ghost would come to her and tell her what to do. She’d gotten up four times to look in her journal to see if any helpful instructions had appeared. She’d squeezed her eyes shut, hoping to see Lucy’s face or hear Lucy’s voice. Nothing. It seemed as if Lucy had abandoned her.
Every time she began to feel that she might be drifting off to sleep, an image of Raymond Gagney would appear in her mind’s eye. She’d never seen the man, but Lucy’s vivid descriptions made him real to her.
He knew who she was. He knew where she lived. He was right outside her door. No, he had climbed up and was peering in her window. No, he was underneath the bed. Yes, he was waiting for her to sleep so he could put his hands around her neck as he had done to Lucy, to silence her forever.
Sleep had been impossible. But now that she was in school, she could hardly keep her eyes open. On the day of a math quiz. Terrific.
As always, it was difficult to tell who felt worse about the quiz, the kids or Mr. Henry. He passed out the pages apologetically and told them to begin. “Read each question carefully and do your best,” he said.
Allie read the first question. It was about two trains leaving a station at different times, traveling at different speeds. Which one would get from Point A to Point B first? Oh boy.
She read the question again, then drew a little picture of two trains on her scratch paper. She drew Point A and Point B. She stared at the little trains, willing them to chug to Point B so she could see which one would arrive first. They didn’t move.
This is ridiculous, she thought. I’ve got to wake up and think. I’ve got to be logical. She turned back to the problem with ferocious concentration. There was a formula for calculating the answer; she simply had to remember it.
Slowly, she worked her way down the page, carefully filling in answers with her pencil. Soon she came to a question that made her smile. Mr. Henry put one or two gag questions in every test, just for fun. This time the question was: Who is buried in Grant’s tomb? Allie grinned.
Who is buried in Lucy Stiles’s grave? The question came to her unbidden. Answer: No one. Lucy’s body was never found. Allie tried to remember what she had read in the newspaper accounts about the search. The police figured that Lucy fell from the cliff. Since her body wasn’t at the bottom of the glen where she fell, they assumed it had been carried downstream. That was logical.
Then, since it wasn’t anywhere along the creek’s banks, they calculated that it had been washed out into the lake by the high waters of early spring. Again, logical.
But, thought Allie excitedly, Lucy didn’t fall. She was pushed. By Raymond Gagney. And if he’d tried to strangle her first, the way he had in Allie’s dream, maybe he hadn’t wanted her body to be found. Maybe he had counted on the police figuring things out exactly the way they did.
Which meant that he must have done something with Lucy’s body. Allie thought about that, gazing fixedly into space, trying to picture the scene: A dark, rainy night. A murderer standing on a cliff, staring down at the body of his victim far below in a deep and isolated glen. Hoping her body would be swept away, then realizing the risk if the body was ever recovered.
What
would he do?
She felt someone’s eyes on her and looked up. Mr. Henry was gazing at her with a worried expression on his face. He pointed to his watch and mouthed the words, “Get to work.”
Reluctantly, Allie forced her thoughts back to the quiz. When Mr. Henry called for the papers to be handed forward, she had actually answered all the questions. She even thought she’d gotten most of them right.
Mr. Henry announced that since it was raining, with occasional bursts of thunder and lightning, they would postpone their field trip to Fossil Glen until the following day.
Joey Fratto raised his hand. “Did you see the sign at the glen?” he asked. “About building houses there?”
Mr. Henry looked disturbed. “Yes, I saw that,” he said, “and I find it puzzling. My understanding was that the owner, Mrs. Stiles, wanted to leave the glen as it is, for everyone to enjoy. I’m really surprised that she would allow this.” He shrugged. “But sometimes people have to do things they’d rather not do.”
“We could write her a letter,” said Dub, “and tell her we’ve been learning all about the glen and don’t think she should let it be ruined.”
He looked at Allie, who shrugged and nodded. It couldn’t hurt. She hadn’t had any luck phoning Lucy’s mother, but perhaps Mr. Henry could help them track her down. Allie was willing to bet that Mrs. Stiles—or Mrs. Gagney, or whatever her name was now—didn’t know what Gag-Me was up to.
“That’s a good idea,” said Mr. Henry. “What do the rest of you think?”
“Yeah!”
“Good idea.”
“Let’s do it.”
“Okay,” said Mr. Henry. “Tomorrow during our field trip we’ll make a list of everything we see and all the reasons why we think the glen should be preserved.”
“Can you bring Hoover tomorrow?” Brad asked.
“Please,” begged Julie in a wheedling voice.
“Please,” chorused twenty-three other voices.
Mr. Henry smiled. His dog not only had been to school on many occasions but also had accompanied the class on several field trips, including one to a local apple farm, where she’d raced through the orchard and eaten the cores of everyone’s apples.
There had been one anxious moment when she had disappeared. When the class found her, she was happily rolling in a large, smelly mound of cow manure behind the barn. Even with all the windows of the bus open, the ride back to school was something none of them was likely to forget.
“Good idea,” said Mr. Henry. “I’m glad you thought of it. Hoover will be happy, too, I’m sure. But if I bring her, you’ll all have to help me keep an eye on her. I don’t think there’s any cow manure in the glen, but you never know what she’ll find to get into.”
“We’ll watch her,” Julie promised.
“All right,” said Mr. Henry. “Miss Hoover will join us. Now, since we won’t be going outside, let’s go back to the library and continue our research there. I want you to look for field guides that will help us identify the things we see in the glen tomorrow. Let’s go.”
Allie went straight to Mrs. Foster and asked if she could look again at the newspaper articles about the glen. Dub joined her as she began to reread each entry carefully.
“What are you looking for?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Allie answered. “A clue, maybe. Something I missed the first time. Or any mention of Gag-Me.”
“Yeah!” said Dub. “If the police were suspicious of him back then, they might believe us if we tell them our theory.”
“Maybe,” said Allie doubtfully. “If we leave out that we got our information from Lucy’s ghost.”
“But they have to pay attention to murder!”
“Murder? Ghosts?” said a scornful voice. Allie and Dub looked up to see Karen Laver standing behind them. “Don’t tell me Allie’s sucking you into her ridiculous stories now, Dub.”
“Nobody was talking to you, Karen,” said Dub.
“But I heard you,” answered Karen. “It says in the newspaper plain as day what happened to that girl Lucy Stiles: she fell. Somebody falls or gets hurt in the glen almost every year. But Allie has to turn everything into a big hairy deal.”
“Why don’t you go mind your own business,” said Dub.
“Gladly,” said Karen. “It’s bad enough that Mr. Henry has made Allie his little pet. I’m surprised that you’re falling for her stupid stories, too.” With a disdainful toss of her braid, she walked away.
Allie sat where she was, trying to sort out the confused rush of feelings Karen’s remarks had sent flooding through her. What was Karen talking about? She sounded—well, if Allie didn’t know better, she’d think Karen was jealous. Once again, Karen had managed to take Allie by surprise, attacking and then retreating before Allie had time to take in what Karen had said, and certainly before Allie had time to think of something to say back.
Looking at Dub, she shook her head in consternation. “I wish I knew why she hates me so much.”
“Forget it, Al,” said Dub. “It’s a game she plays. She doesn’t have anything better to do. But we have. So let’s keep looking.”
They went over every account of the disappearance of Lucy Stiles, but found nothing new and no evidence that Raymond Gagney had been a suspect.
“What now?” asked Dub.
“Well, we can hope that your idea about writing to Lucy’s mother might at least stop the bulldozers. But that won’t help us prove that Lucy was murdered.”
There had to be a way. Allie thought about what she had read and about all that had happened. She reminded herself that she wasn’t even twelve years old. But she was alive, she told herself, and strong, and pretty smart. And, for some reason, Lucy had chosen her.
She owed it to Lucy to see that Raymond Gagney didn’t get away with murder.
Twenty-One
After school, Allie waved goodbye to Dub, who was riding his bike to an appointment at the orthodontist’s office. Karen and Pam walked off together, pointedly ignoring Allie. Allie stood for a moment outside the building, thinking. Her mind wasn’t on Karen and Pam, however, but on Lucy.
Allie’s parents were both at work and Michael was at the baby-sitter’s, so there was no reason to go straight home. Dub was right: she had things to do. Resolutely, she pulled up the hood of her rain parka and headed over to Fossil Glen.
The day’s downpour had slowed to a cold, soggy drizzle as she walked across the meadow. The sky was such a low, dark gray that it felt much later than 3:30 in the afternoon. Wispy fog floated over the tall grass of the meadow and hovered above the deep ravine of the glen, obscuring the edge of the cliffs. Trees seemed to rise eerily out of the mist, only to disappear again in the murky dimness.
Allie wasn’t sure she should go to the glen, but she felt drawn to the scene of Lucy’s death. She held the vague hope that being at the very place where Lucy had plunged off the cliff would provide a clue or help her know what to do next. And, she admitted to herself, she hoped that Lucy would appear or speak to her again.
Allie stopped near the cliff’s edge, or at least what she sensed was the edge. The whole world seemed to be made of the same gray swirling mist. It made her feel oddly off-balance and unreal. She stood peering down. Occasional breaks in the fog allowed her glimpses of the rushing waters of Fossil Creek below.
This was the spot where Lucy had stood right before she fell. Allie pictured Lucy growing too warm in her blue sweatshirt, pulling it over her head, and setting it down on the path, along with the fossils she had found. What had happened next?
Suddenly it seemed to Allie that she was back in her horrible nightmare, the one in which she had felt hands tightening around her neck, the one in which she’d been falling and falling and falling. Once more, the tumbling girl became, not Allie, but Lucy.
Allie felt a strange, menacing presence nearby but couldn’t dispel the vision filling her brain. She cringed as the plunging figure reached the ground.
Then the scene
in her mind grew darker, as if evening had become true night. Someone was holding the dead girl by the arms, dragging her roughly upstream, grunting with the effort. Allie could make out only his shadowy figure and the sounds of his struggle, which was made more difficult by something he held in his hand.
A noise behind her broke the spell of her horrifying vision. She turned and peered through the mist. She could see no more than a few feet in any direction, except when the fog whirled in the wind and opened like a curtain, allowing her a momentary glimpse through the trees. She saw no one. But there was the sound once more; soft and furtive, like a muffled footstep. And again, closer this time.
The sensation of a menacing presence that she had felt in the dream was with her, only it was real now. Someone was on the cliff path with her.
For a moment she stood frozen, heart fluttering in her throat, eyes wide, trying desperately to see through the haze. She dreaded hearing the next step, but one part of her mind was waiting for it, so she could figure out where it was coming from and run the other way.
There. The snap of a twig and the faint swish of a branch snagging on cloth. Up the path to the right. Very close.
Why, she wondered wildly, would someone approach with such stealth and caution. Perhaps, she tried to tell herself, the person was lost in the fog, and frightened. Should she call out and announce herself?
“No.” It was the voice, Lucy’s voice. “Run. Fast.”
Panic-stricken now, Allie turned and fled down the narrow path to the left. She wanted only to escape, to put distance between herself and those creeping footsteps. Holding her hands out in front of her to help feel her way, she ran stumbling down the wet, slippery trail. Twigs snagged her jeans and whipped her face as she raced blindly forward, the sound of her own flight so loud in her ears that she had no idea whether or not she was being followed. She was far too frightened to stop and find out.
At last, she came to a place where the fog had lifted slightly and she could see the meadow open before her. The ghostly shapes of the school’s playground equipment appeared out of the murk. With her breath ripping raggedly from her throat, she ran toward the sliding board and the swing set and the jungle gym. Tears streamed from her eyes, so glad was she to see those familiar objects, looking safe and normal in their usual places.
The Ghost of Fossil Glen Page 8