by Lois Ruby
Mom’s sigh shakes her whole face. “It’s a small world after all.”
Which reminds me of last summer when the four of us went to Disney World.
That’ll never happen again.
Two weeks after Aunt Amelia’s funeral, our house has a SOLD sign in the front yard. If it would do me any good to plant myself on the front steps and refuse to go, I would. But it’s hopeless. We’re packed, and our voices echo all over the empty house as the last of our things are loaded into a U-Haul tethered to our car.
Brian sits up front with Mom; I sulk in the backseat with Chester, our chocolate Lab, who seems really excited about all this change. He doesn’t have to leave his friends and go to a new school. I lean forward and practically shout in Mom’s ear, “Chester is the only one who’s happy about this move, Mom. I hope you know that.”
“You’ve been clear on that point,” Mom says, glaring at me in the rearview mirror.
It’s an endless two hundred miles to Cinder Creek. Mom’s run through all of the songs on the playlist she made for the drive, and the car’s filled with a stony silence. Too much time to think.
Cinder Creek, Colorado. Not even a real place. I was embarrassed to tell Evvie and Melissa that it’s just an abandoned coal-mining town north of the dinky city of Trinidad. It’s where all the coal-company bigwigs lived way back when. Aunt Amelia once told us that Mr. Thornewood owned a small coal mine that didn’t produce much coal, but he didn’t care, because he struck oil instead. She showed us a yellowed newspaper from 1929 with the headline THORNEWOOD TURNS KING COAL INTO BLACK GOLD.
So I guess he built that huge house just to show everybody he was stinking rich. The absolutely only good thing about this move is the promise of America’s Most Amazing.
My heart clenches as Mom pulls into the winding driveway that leads to our house and two others way up a hill. The minute the car doors open, Chester bounds out, Brian right behind him. Just Mom and me left in the sweltering car. The air-conditioning hasn’t worked since Dad left.
Wiping sweat off her forehead, she says, “It’s a nice house, isn’t it? We’ll be okay here, you’ll see. The change will be good for all of us. It’ll get us far away from …” Lately we’ve both talked a lot in unfinished sentences, and I know just what she means. Away from Dad, away from the other family.
I miss Dad like mad. In fact, mad says it all.
“You’ll start to feel at home in time,” Mom assures me as she jiggles the house keys.
“Never,” I snarl. I get out and slam the car door so hard that the window rattles.
THE FRONT DOOR MUST HAVE SWELLED OR warped in the heat. It creaks and scrapes across the floor inside, leaving a white swath in the wood.
Typical of chocolate Labs everywhere, Chester makes himself right at home. He trots into the dark front parlor and sniffs under the circle of couches.
“I’ll leave the door open,” Mom says, swatting giant flies away. “It smells a little musty.”
A little? Like a raccoon died in here a long time ago.
Brian runs to the stairs. “First pick of rooms.”
“No fair. I’m the oldest,” I mutter, but he’s already upstairs.
Mom tiptoes around, turning on lamps to brighten the gloom, plumping couch pillows, poking at ash in the fireplace. “Chester! Off the couch! I just love this gorgeous coffee table.” The huge round table sits in the middle of the three kidney-shaped, faded green velvet couches. “Don’t sit on the table like you did at home. Well, I mean, where we used to live. This is home now. The beveled glass top could easily break. Oh, and look at the giant tapestry hanging over there. What fantastic needlework detail in that fox-hunt scene. It makes me feel like we’re living in a castle.”
“It’s super ugly,” I grumble. So’s the awful portrait hanging over the fireplace. It’s a huge picture of a woman staring straight ahead, only she has a black net veil over her nose and mouth. She has broad shoulders, and her eyes are extra large, like someone just came up behind her and yelled “Boo!”
“It’s probably Mrs. Thornewood,” Mom observes. “I’m surprised the recent tenants didn’t take the portrait down. I’d take it down if I weren’t so skittish about heights.”
“If Dad were here …” Of course, I don’t complete that thought.
Blowing her bangs off her forehead, Mom says, “Try to put a little positive energy into this adventure, Shelby.”
Brian comes barreling down the stairs. “My room’s got a desk with cubbyholes for Star Wars guys. Come see?”
I’m much more interested in that round table and what’s under the glass that rests about three inches over the wood part. It’s like a giant shadow box.
Mom wanders out of the room, and I hear her shout, “This kitchen is fabulous!” She’s opening and slamming cabinets and drawers. “So well designed!”
She’ll be in there awhile, kissing all the appliances, so I lift the glass top and blow dust off the pieces of dollhouse furniture that Aunt Amelia, or whoever, had randomly plunked down under there. The spindly little legs of three chairs huddle around a kitchen table that’s carved with lots of curlicues and covered in a blue-and-white-checkered cloth the size of a postage stamp. Nearby hulks an oven with a black stovepipe, and a pair of floor lamps with pink-fringed shades that seem to be guarding all these odd pieces. A four-poster bed draped in a gauzy mosquito net looks isolated off in a corner. A figure under the gauze draws my eyes, so I lift the netting; who wouldn’t? Lying on a yellowed flannel sheet is a doll the size of my thumb. Suddenly her eyes click open!
Brian jumps. “How’d she do that?”
“I jiggled the bed, that’s all.” Two tiny licorice circles look straight up at me. Then her eyelids drift closed, shutting me out and leaving me feeling curiously snubbed, like when Evvie and Melissa whisper secrets to each other.
Then the sun slides behind a cloud, and the room turns even gloomier. That tapestry nearly covers one wall in grim tones of brown and sickly green, soaking up what little light is left.
Brian’s standing in front of the portrait that seems to be Mrs. Thornewood. The frame is gaudy gold and black, as if somebody went postal with a carving knife. Brian’s sneaking peeks at it and fiddling with the tiny chess pieces. The set is on a small round table in front of the giant portrait.
“Chess set’s funky,” he reports, then suddenly bubbles over with words. “Look at it. The pieces are way small, and they don’t just slide on the table. They’ve got holes at the bottom so they fit onto pegs on the chessboard. Can’t move the board, either. It’s glued to the table.” Brian absently snaps pieces on and off the pegs while staring at the painting of Mrs. Thornewood. “How come half her face is covered with that black net stuff?” he asks. “It’s like a mask.”
I try to see it through his eyes, and that’s when I notice that it’s not a flat painting at all. It’s a picture made of paper cuttings. Some of it is deeper, and some of it sticks out farther. It’s three-dimensional.
“I dunno. Maybe she’s grotesque — three noses or black teeth, hairy warts, or she has a beard.”
Brian wrinkles his freckly nose at the portrait. “Or maybe she’s hiding something. Don’t you wish we could yank that mask down?”
“No way! Who wants to see warts with wiry hairs springing from them?”
“If you don’t put the glass down, Mom’s gonna catch you,” Brian teases.
Mr. Goody Two-Shoes is always looking for ways to get me in trouble, because he knows I’ll do the opposite of what he says, but at least he’s talking! And then I glance up at the hairy-wart lady and see that her eyes are really odd, since they’re the only thing we see of her face. In fact, her eyes seem to be following me. “Watch this, Brian.” When I shift to my left side, her eyes go that way. I squat down, and her eyes lower. It’s like they’re magnetized. “Maybe that’s one of the things America’s Most Amazing is interested in. It would be cool to have our house on TV.”
“Maybe,” Brian says doubt
fully. Sometimes I think my brother was born a stodgy old man. “How’d the artist do that? Make the eyes go wherever you go?”
“Who knows?”
“Creeps me out. Not looking at it ever again,” he mutters, but of course he can’t resist and he glances up at it out of the corner of his eye. “I’m sticking to chess.” Click, click, Brian snaps the pawns and rooks onto the pegs. “Hey, one’s missing. No fun playing when the queen’s gone.”
“Oh, who cares? I don’t want to play chess anyway.” Believe me, it drives me crazy when Brian beats me nine games out of ten, especially since Dad taught us both at the same time.
The whole room feels dark and forbidding now, creepy even with the stained-glass lamps throwing their tongue-pink glow. I quickly lay the glass top back on the table and give that strange doll one last glance. Her eyes have snapped open again, and they stay open no matter how much I shake the table. I’d swear she doesn’t want to be stuck inside there.
Ridiculous. Tiny dolls don’t want anything. But her eyes seem almost pleading.
How can something smaller than a Snickers bar make me feel so jumpy?
News flash: Like I told Mom, this house will never be home, and I don’t want to spend one more day here.
But what choice do I have? I’m stuck just like that doll inside the table.
THE LAST BOX IS OUT OF THE U-HAUL. MOM’S unpacking the kitchen and has cornered Brian into helping her line shelves. All I want to do is go soak in a tub of bubble bath, but first, here comes a girl up the front steps carrying a pie flat on the palm of her hand. I hope it’s apricot or rhubarb, just please, not coconut cream.
“I’m Mariah O’Donnell. That’s Ma-RYE-uh, not Maria,” the girl says, handing me the pie, which is as heavy as a bucket of nails. “My mother said to bring it; it’s what neighbors do. It’s beefsteak-and-kidney pie, an O’Donnell family specialty.”
Ugh! I try not to let my face sag with disappointment.
“Mother made me bring a pie for the last family, too. The one with that girl Emily. What’s your name?” she asks flatly, like she doesn’t care whether my name’s Shelby or Bongo.
“Shelby. My brother’s Brian. He’s nine. Are you and I in the same grade?” At least I’ll know someone in my new school.
“Mother homeschools me,” Mariah says, shifting from foot to foot.
Will there be nothing but disappointments here in Cinder Creek? She just stands there, barely blinking, then says, “It’s a tradition, bringing pies to this house. We did it for every one of the tenants. Grandmother Truva brought one for the first people here, the Thornewoods. They had a daughter called Sadie. Mean as a Tasmanian she-devil, that’s what Grandmother Truva said.”
Mariah-not-Maria sure isn’t the warm, fuzzy type, but I try to be nice. “Tell me about the last girl who lived here, Emily. Were you friends with her?”
“Are you kidding?” There’s an awkward pause that leaves me full of questions. “She’s about my age, same as Sadie, same as you. You’re twelvish? I’m eleven, but I’m big-boned.”
I’ll say. She’s practically a foot taller than I am, and her colorless nest of tight curls looks like it’s trying to escape from the wild knot on top of her head. It makes her look about six feet tall.
“Emily was loopy,” says Mariah, spinning her finger in little circles at the side of her head.
“You mean crazy?” Now I’m hooked. “What kind of crazy?”
“Mother says not to gossip.” Those are her words, but I can see that she’s dying to spill it all.
“It’s not gossip if it’s about the history of my house. It’s research.” The pie is getting heavier by the minute, and I’m holding it in both hands, wondering how many kidneys are in it, and whose.
“Okay, research. It’s about why they moved, the Smythes. So they could lock Emily up in a crazy ward in Denver. She heard voices, saw things that weren’t there. See? Nutso.”
Is nutso Emily the one who trapped that teeny doll under the glass? Because Emily saw and heard things that weren’t really happening? But that little doll did give me the creepy-crawlies with her staring eyes that snapped open and wouldn’t close, and I’m not a bit crazy. I guess I’d better find out a lot more about Emily Smythe.
“Which one of those is yours, Mariah?” I motion toward the two grim houses that huddle together up the hill.
She lets out an indignant puff. “We’re in the Keystone Duplexes a half mile up the road. No way we’d live here.”
Boy, that’s reassuring! “Do you know who does live in those two houses? I haven’t seen anyone coming or going.”
“Empty, both of ’em. Last tenants left just before you moved in. Only stayed about a week. Can’t help wondering what spooked ’em out so fast.”
“You mean we’re all alone out here?”
“You got it. There’s that rickety cottage behind your house, but I heard the old lady croaked.”
“That old lady was my great-aunt Amelia,” I snap.
“Sorry for your loss,” she says, not sounding a bit sorry. “Yeah, Old Man Thornewood built all three houses plus the cottage. When he died, he left the other two to some bank in Denver. They rent ’em out every year or two, but nobody stays long. Who wants to live in a drafty old house with ghosts and ghouls?”
“You’re telling me they’re haunted?”
Mariah shrugs. “Way back from the coal-mining days, last century. That’s what Grandmother Truva used to say before she left this world a few years ago.”
“Sorry for your loss,” I echo, in the same dull tone Mariah used.
“Nothin’ to be sorry about. Anyway, I don’t believe the haunted thing for a second. Course, I wouldn’t care to spend a dark, thunderous night in one of ’em, would you? Wind howling like a coyote?” We both look up the hill toward the pair of matching houses that seem to lean toward each other, with just a narrow walkway between them. All the windows are shuttered except one on the third floor of the house on the right, where a thin curtain billows out. Why is the window open if no one lives there?
“Anyway, electricity and heat’s turned off, so you’d freeze your innards if you stayed there. I like my innards warm. It’s been known to get thirty below out here, in wintertime.”
Suddenly I feel chilled as a sweeping breeze cools my sweaty body, and I realize that there’s not much out here to shelter us from the wind. “Want to come in? We’re not unpacked yet, and my room’s a holy mess.”
“Nope.”
What a peculiar girl. She doesn’t even make up an excuse. Just “Nope,” and she keeps standing there waiting for … what? Am I supposed to tip her for delivering the awful pie?
She scrapes her sneakers on the welcome mat a few times, then about-faces and starts down the stairs, muttering in her gravelly voice, “You sure know how to pick a neighborhood.”
“A SIX-BURNER STOVE!” MOM’S STILL WIGGING out on kitchen appliances. “A side-by-side freezer/fridge, and enough granite-slab counter space to do surgery.”
Wow, you could get your appendix out while you wait for a baked potato. Personally, I don’t care about kitchens. I’m moving right into the upstairs bathroom, since my own room is all red flocked wallpaper and a spindly, narrow bed with sagging springs that squeal every time you move an inch. Was this Emily Smythe’s bedroom?
It must have been Emily’s family who had the good sense to update the prehistoric bathrooms and kitchen in this creepy old house. Gram would have said they’re to die for. Every muscle in my whole body is achy from pushing furniture around and hauling boxes up the stairs, not to mention hefting that kidney pie, so I lock myself and Chester in the bathroom and fill up the huge triangular tub with hot water and about a quart of bubble bath. It nearly overflows when I sink into the water up to my shoulders and let my hands and feet float like they’re weightless ghosts riding the bubbles and gentle waves. I can just feel stings of anger seeping out of me into the warm water.
Chester’s chomping to jump into the tub
with me, but then it would overflow, and chocolate-brown dog hair would clog the fancy new plumbing, so I tell him, “Hang on, pup. I’ll take you out for a run later, okay?”
He whips his tail around, then coils onto the bath mat and snoozes patiently.
Not Brian. He’s banging on the bathroom door. “I gotta go. It’s an emergency!”
What a colossal pest. “There’s a bathroom downstairs, Brian. It’s the little room with the weird wallpaper that looks like old Sunday funnies. Oh, and it has a toilet. You can’t miss it.” Finally I hear his footsteps stomping down the creaky stairs, but in two minutes he’s back pounding on the door.
“Come on, Shelby. Mom says to take boxes up to the attic.”
“Go ahead,” I say lazily.
“Hunh-uh, not alone!”
“Okaaaay. Give me ten minutes, and we’ll do the attic thing.” Chester raises one ear in agreement that we’ll just keep the pest waiting a lot longer.
I’ve never lived in a house with an attic, and this one is the kind you have to move a rickety ladder up to, then slide the ceiling trapdoor aside and hoist yourself up onto the attic floor. Now I wish I hadn’t. It’s dark and smells like soured milk up here. I try to scramble to my feet till my head hits the ceiling. You’d have to be about the size of a shrunken Pygmy to stand up. That pink insulation fluff stuff sticks out between the wall slats. There’s a small round window like the porthole on a ship, which gives a circle of light to the big, dark space that spans the whole length of the second floor of the house. Somehow that little bit of sunshine makes everything seem spookier, lighting up dust motes that swirl, though there’s not a breath of a breeze. I think the air up here’s stood still for about a hundred years.