Whispers From the Grave

by Leslie Rule

  “We won’t know until we tally the totals,” she explained. “It’s based on statistics. If a number comes up more often than average, that indicates a possible psychokinetic ability.”

  When she asked me to concentrate of fives, I decided to mentally keep track of how many fives I got. The first time down the shoot, the dice came up a pair of fives. And then a five and a three. And then two fives again. A four and a one. A five and a three. Two fours. Two fives. A five and a four.

  “I’m doing good, aren’t I?” I asked, excited.

  “I think so,” she said, her eyes shining as she entered the data into the computer.

  I concentrated harder, visualizing the five black dots on the cube of white. Tarynn pushed a button, speeding up the process, so the dice seemed constantly in motion. Tumbling, rattling, sliding down the shoot. Two fives. A five and a four. A five and a six. Two fives. Two fives. Two fives.

  “I’m doing it! I’m controlling the dice!” I cried. “I’ve got it, haven’t I? Psycho-whatever abilities!”

  “Psychokinetic abilities. PK for short.”

  Two fives. Two fives. A five and a six. A five and a one. Two fives. Two fives. Two fives.

  “This is incredible,” she whispered, her eyes lit in awe.

  Two fives. Two fives. A six and a three. Two fives. A five and a four. Two fives. Two fives. Two fives.

  “I can control things with my mind!” I said. “If I can make dice land on fives, I wonder what else I can do.”

  “Maybe you can make a paper clip disappear,” she said. “Like your sister did.” The instant the words escaped from her lips, Tarynn looked like she wanted to bite off her tongue.

  I stared at her in shock. Either she had me confused with someone else, or I had a sister no one had told me about.

  5

  If I have a sister, where is she? I wondered, my thoughts whirling. I sat in my window seat, watching the sunlight sparkle on the waves.

  It was late afternoon and my mind was crammed with all that had happened in the lab. My parents were out, and I was anxiously waiting for them so I could grill them about what Tarynn had said.

  My sister!

  I’d always wanted a sister. Someone to trade secrets with. Someone to laugh with, to talk to. Someone to trade clothes with. Someone I could be completely myself with and sometimes get mad at and it wouldn’t matter because we’d always make up because we were sisters.

  A sister would understand me. Sisters, after all, are alike. I wouldn’t feel like such an alien in my own family if I had a sister.

  I’d always felt cheated because my parents wouldn’t—or couldn’t—give me a sister.

  In fact, when I was little I had an imaginary sister I called Cassandra. I used to talk to her and have tea parties with her before I started school. She caused me a lot of trouble in the second grade.

  That was the year all my problems began. That’s when the strange things occurred that caused my teacher to label me a troublemaker and my classmates to label me “weird.”

  I still couldn’t explain what had happened. All I knew was that chaos had erupted around me in the classroom. Chairs fell over when no one but I was near enough to push them over. Books jumped off shelves. The trash can tipped over. An apple flew across the room and hit Bobbie Bloomingdale in the back of the head.

  I can’t explain it now, I thought. And I couldn’t explain it them. So I had blamed it on Cassandra.

  My imaginary sister.

  For a while I actually believed I’d wished Cassandra into existence. Someone had to move those things, didn’t they? So I decided Cassandra had thrown that apple at Bobbie. I hated him because he made fun of my freckles. Cassandra was simply sticking up for me.

  Ms. Marmalton didn’t believe me and sent me to the principal’s office. No one believed that Cassandra had started the trouble. But I stuck to my story.

  I remembered my mother’s flushed face and worried eyes as she sat with me in the principal’s office, crossing and uncrossing her legs. She’d stuck up for me, crisply informing the principal that “Jenna is a quiet child. She is not a troublemaker. Some other child must have thrown those things.”

  But afterward, when we were alone in the hallway, she had pulled me close and whispered in my ear, “Jenna, this must never happen again. Do you understand me? Never!”

  “But I didn’t do it! Cassandra did!”

  She’d smiled weakly, her eyes pleading. “However it happened—whoever did it—it must never happen again. This will be our secret. Don’t ever tell Dad or anyone else what occurred today.”

  I didn’t want to tell anyone so I’d readily agreed to the secret. I didn’t want Cassandra to get into trouble.

  Of course, when I got older I knew there was no Cassandra. You don’t wish a person into existence. But the fact remains, objects flew around that room on their own. And objects can’t move by themselves—unless .. .

  Suddenly, my mind was reeling. Maybe those objects didn’t move on their own. Maybe I had moved them, the way I controlled the dice!

  Excited, I rushed to my computer. My fingers typed in a command, and my computer’s modem accessed the magazine files in Banbury Library. Within seconds my computer screen pulled up several articles on psychokinesis. After a moment of scanning I found what I was looking for:

  Sometimes PK abilities appear to erupt from an individual’s mind without that person’s awareness. Furniture is overturned. Objects are hurled about rooms, lights turn on and off, and pounding vibrates the walls. Some parapsychologists have attributed the disturbance to poltergeists—ghosts believed to haunt places where children or adolescents are present. But research indicates that the disruption may actually be caused by a child’s mind.

  Dazed, I leaned back in the chair. Could I really move things with my mind? A shiver slithered up my neck. It was a frightening thought.

  Yesterday I would have laughed off the possibility of mind over matter. But that was before I knew Twin-Star Labs was researching it. Researchers, like my father, were actually conducting experiments on it! And I knew they didn’t waste time on anything that didn't have a scientific basis.

  The scientists at Twin-Star Labs were logical and precise. I knew from watching my father work that they documented everything and rarely made mistakes. Was Tarynn mistaken about my having a sister? I didn’t think so. She’d heard it from someone, maybe even read it in a file. My file!

  It made me uneasy, thinking Twin-Star Labs had a file on me—on my family. Suddenly, the word “family” had a funny taste to it.

  “Family.” It tumbled off my tongue sounding inexplicably foreign. Family. You inherit things from your family. Things like hair color and height and nose shape.

  And psychokinetic ability.

  With a sudden, cold certainty, I knew the people I called “Mom” and “Dad” weren’t really my parents. Somewhere, I had another set of parents—my real parents. And living with them, was my sister.

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” Mom said. “Of course you’re not adopted!”

  I’d confronted her before she made it through the front door. She stood framed in the doorway, her plump arms wrapped around a lumpy bag of groceries. She shook her head, laughing.

  “Why don’t I look like you?” I demanded.

  “Genes are a funny thing, Jenna,” she said, thrusting the groceries into my arms. “Here, help me with these. I’ve got three other bags in the car.”

  I shoved the groceries onto the counter and followed Mom out to our solar-mobile. “I don’t look like Dad either!”

  “Thank God!” she said, laughing some more. Nervous laughter.

  “That’s not funny, Mom. If I was adopted, I wish you’d just admit it! I know I have a sister!”

  “Where did you hear that!” she said, sounding decidedly less amused.

  “Somebody let it slip at the lab today,” I explained. “She tried to act like it was a mistake—that she had me confused with someone else. But I knew she wa
s lying.”

  “You have a rich imagination, dear. I swear to you, you are not adopted, I gave birth to you! And I’ve got pictures of me looking like a barn to prove it.”

  “There are photos of you pregnant?” I asked as the wind seeped from my argument.

  “Of course! They’re on the computer with the rest of the family pictures. As soon as we put these groceries away, I’ll show you so you’ll stop this nonsense.”

  Mom was telling the truth. The photos were there in vivid color in our computer files. “See, that’s me nine months pregnant with you,” she said, gushing sentimentally as a picture of her in a polka-dot maternity dress appeared on the screen.

  A warm wave of relief flowed through me. Mom was right. Sometimes my imagination got the better of me.

  We sat before the computer, getting lost in the photos and family mementos. I’d always loved to draw, and sentimental Mom had saved all my artwork by programming it into the computer, even the silly scribblings from my preschool days!

  I remembered how she’d exclaimed over my drawings—as only a mother could—and insisted on putting them on display, saying, “Jenna, you’ve got more talent in your little finger than I do in my whole body. I couldn’t draw water from a well!” It was a corny joke, but she always looked so proud of me that I forgave her for it.

  Our computer album held hundreds of photos of me.

  “You were a beautiful baby,” Mom sighed, as a “moving photo” of me in my first bathing suit flickered across the screen. She turned up the volume so we could hear the babyish giggling as a one-year-old me happily splashed in the wading pool, then jumped out and ran dripping across the yard.

  “Why didn’t you have more babies, Mom?”

  “I was forty when I met your father,” she said wistfully. “It was a little late to start a big family.”

  “So I definitely don’t have a sister?”

  A tolerant smile inched across her round face. “I think I would know if I had other children,” she said gently. “To the best of my recollection, I gave birth to only one.”

  “You’re always making jokes. Did you or didn’t you have another baby?”

  “I only had you.”

  “What about Dad? Did he have other children? Do I have a half sister somewhere?”

  “Your father has no other children.”

  Before I had a chance to quiz Mom about how I’d inherited my so-called psychokinetic abilities, the sudden shriek of a siren sent us running to the window. An ambulance whizzed past our house, lights whirling as it headed down our quiet street.

  “Oh, no!” Mom cried. “There’s been some kind of an accident!”

  I followed her out onto our wide front porch. Neighbors popped from their houses, craning their necks toward the ambulance, which had parked at the bottom of the hill where the road met the beach.

  “Do you know what happened, Ruby?” Mom called out to the gray-haired woman who lived to the right of us.

  “All I know is that somebody fell off Windy Cliff,” our neighbor yelled back. “Some kid saw him fall from a distance. He ran up the hill and asked me to call the ambulance.”

  “Poor soul!” Mom said, her eyes wandering to the cliff that loomed above us. Our small neighborhood of scattered old houses sat on Banbury Hill, which sloped down toward the north and then rose into a monstrously steep hill known as Windy Cliff. Twice as high as Banbury Hill, Windy Cliff jutted out to the west, hundreds of feet above the rocky beach.

  The cliff was too rugged to build on, but people liked to wander up there because of the view. It was hard to imagine anyone surviving a fall from Windy Cliff.

  The ambulance crew quickly unloaded a stretcher and headed down the beach. Several neighborhood kids sped down the road on their electric skates and swarmed around the ambulance, waiting to see what the crew would bring back.

  “Should we go down and see what happened?” I asked Mom.

  “Let’s wait here,” she said. “I don’t like to gawk at accidents. If there was something we could do to help, that would be one thing. The ambulance attendants have it under control. We’d just be in the way.”

  We watched from our porch, and a few minutes later the crew returned, carrying a stretcher. A large brown dog raced frantically around them, barking wildly.

  “That’s Jake!” I cried. “That’s Mr. Edwards’s dog! Oh, Mom! Do you think it’s Mr. Edwards?”

  “It must be,” she whispered. “Poor old man.”

  “I-I was just talking to him last night,” I said, as hot tears spilled down my cheeks. “I can’t believe it.”

  Most of our neighbors had gathered into a somber group on the edge of Ruby’s lawn. They shook their heads, voices dropped to a shocked murmur.

  The form on the stretcher lay very still. It was completely covered by a stark white sheet. If that was Mr. Edwards under that sheet, he was dead.

  6

  “I saw him fall,” Kyle told us, his voice shaking. “I parked my car at the boat ramp at View Point Park and walked down the beach. I was on my way to see you. I thought you might like to take a boat ride. I-I’d just come around the bend and I saw him falling through the air. He was screaming."

  “How awful!” Mom gasped.

  We were seated in the living room, on the lumpy antique couch Mom had reupholstered in “Victorian Ivy.” Kyle gulped the glass of water Mom had given him when she saw how pale he looked. “I ran up the hill and saw your neighbor,” he told us. “I yelled to her to call for help and then I ran back to the beach to see if I could do anything to help him. But he was dead.”

  “You did everything you could,” Mom said gently. “No one could survive a fall like that.”

  “What was he doing up on the cliff?” I wondered aloud. “Most people go up there for the view. But Mr. Edwards can’t—couldn’t—see.”

  “He was a little senile,” Mom reminded me. “A lot of things he did didn’t make sense.”

  “I know.” I sighed. “He thought he could see with his mind. He’d let Jake off his leash and walk by himself without a cane or anything. He must have walked right off the cliff!”

  . “It’s a terrible way to go,” Mom said. “But he had a good long life. He was well over a hundred.”

  “Yeah,” Kyle said, his green eyes glazed. “But I’ll never forget the sight of him falling. I can still hear him screaming.”

  I walked him to the door after we agreed to save the boat ride for another day. We stood in the doorway, still numb from shock. His hand trembled as it closed over mine. His fingers felt icy. “I was on the stairs just below your house when I saw him fall,” he said. “Another minute, and I wouldn’t have seen it at all. I would have been at your house, and he would have lain there, until someone wandering along the beach found him.”

  “If you hadn’t seen him fall, I might have found him,” I said. My stomach heaved at the thought.

  “It was ugly. I’m glad you didn’t have to see it. His neck twisted like that and his eyes bulging—“

  “Kyle, please!” The image leapt into my mind, vivid and real.

  “I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I can’t get it out of my head.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just so awful. He was a nice old man.”

  After I said good-bye to Kyle, I found Mom lying down.

  “Another migraine?” I asked sympathetically.

  “Afraid so. Stress brings them on sometimes.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. Apparently, Mr. Edwards’s accident had gotten to her too. “I’ll be okay if I lie down for a while.”

  I needed to get my mind off Mr. Edwards, so I went to my room and pulled Rita’s diary out from where I’d stashed it under my mattress and began reading where I’d left off.

  Dear Diary,

  Ben and I made up! He said the girl on the beach didn’t mean anything to him. So I forgave him. It turns out he was jealous too. He thought I had something going with Shane! Of course, he was wrong. And I’m glad he was jealous. I
hope it means he loves me.

  I think Ben and I are meant to be together. The only problem is he drinks too much. Once he starts guzzling beer, he drinks till he passes out. And he’s grouchy when he’s really drunk. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be like Mrs. Addison across the street. She drinks like a fish. (Do fish really drink?)

  Her son, Greg, joined the army just to get away from her. I told him he’d have to get all his hair cut off and that he’d look dorky in a crew cut, but that didn’t stop him. He’s actually going to Vietnam!

  His mom was yelling at him so much, he probably couldn’t think straight. Sometimes she’d yell at him in the middle of the night. It woke me up a few times. If my mom called me names like that I’d die.

  Of course, my parents do other things I hate. They made me take that job at the T.S. Factory in Seattle with those creeps in the white coats. T.S. is in this tall building about twenty stories high. It sticks up way above the other Seattle buildings and you can see it from the Space Needle. Ben and I went up in the Space Needle one Friday night and I was so dizzy I got sick to my stomach. That thing is about six hundred feet tall! You can look all over Seattle from the top.

  Six hundred feet? She thought that was high? I guess the Space Needle must have seemed tall to the people in the twentieth century. I pictured the Space Needle as it must have looked a hundred years before. If it was the tallest structure there, it would have stood out for miles around. Now it was a quaint relic, dwarfed by the surrounding buildings. I’d noticed it when my family had dinner at the top of the 3,000 foot tall Puget Tower across the street from it. As we ate, I looked down and commented on the strange shape of the Space Needle.

  “There used to be an amusement park called Seattle Center surrounding the Space Needle,” Dad said. “My great-grandfather attended the World’s Fair there in 1962. His mother refused to go up in the Space Needle because she was afraid it would fall over. She didn’t think anything so tall could stay standing for long.”

  We’d laughed at the irony of it. Now, I found myself thinking of how much things had changed since Rita’s time. There were no floating cities then or cures for cancer. People butchered live animals like cows, pigs, and chickens to eat instead of simulated meat. Cars ran on gasoline instead of solar power. There were no virtual reality computers or underwater homes.