“Okay. Bye.”
As soon as Allie hung up, she felt like calling back. She and Dub had always been so close they could practically read each other’s minds. Now all of a sudden they were acting ridiculous. She picked up the phone, then put it back in the cradle. If Dub wanted to go skating with Pam, fine.
She was going to the library.
Because of a ghost.
Maybe she was a crackpot, after all.
Ten
Later that evening, Allie was in her bedroom when Michael appeared at the door in his pajamas. He was clutching the Scorpion, his favorite Galactic Warriors action figure, and sucking his thumb. He looked at her, his eyes big and worried.
“What’s up, Mike?”
Slowly, he removed his thumb from his mouth and said in a low voice, “Did you call her?”
“Who?” Allie asked.
Michael looked about fearfully before saying, “You know.” When Allie shook her head, he whispered, “The Snapping Turtle.”
“Oh, Mikey, no. Come here.” Allie patted the bed beside her.
But Michael didn’t move. “You said.”
“Oh, Mike, I know, but I was only kidding, Squirt-Face. Honest. Come here.”
Michael took a few slow steps toward Allie, then stopped.
She got off the bed and went over to kneel in front of him. “Mikey, listen to me. I was just fooling around. The Snapping Turtle isn’t coming here. She doesn’t know where we live. And I didn’t call her, I promise. I don’t even know her phone number.”
Michael was still looking at her mistrustfully. She decided to try joking with him. “Besides, who ever heard of a turtle talking on the telephone?”
A little smile began at the corners of Michael’s mouth, then stopped. “ ’Cept she’s not really a turtle. She’s a mean, scary lady.”
“That’s right, Mike. She’s not a turtle. But she’s not really so mean and scary.” The last part wasn’t true, but Allie figured her fib was for a good cause. She decided to try changing the subject. “Hey, are you all ready for bed?”
Michael nodded.
“Teeth brushed?”
Another nod.
“Okay. Let’s go get in your bed, and you can tell me about the Warriors’ latest adventures. Last I remember, the good guys were fighting the bad guys at the fort, right?”
Michael’s eyes lit up. “Right!” He raced down the hallway to his room, beckoning Allie to follow him.
Silently blessing the creator of Galactic Warriors, Allie prepared to listen to another installment of the never-ending saga that spun from Michael’s imagination.
She tried hard to pay attention, but her mind was wandering. Suddenly, in the middle of a long, involved battle between Vulture-Breath and Greelior, Michael said, “Who’s that?”
Coming out of her reverie, Allie thought guiltily that Michael was quizzing her to see if she’d been listening. She was thinking how to fake an answer when Michael said matter-of-factly, “He’s gone now.”
He continued with the tale of the battle, and fifteen minutes later, he was sound asleep.
Allie went to her room to read. She tried to read, but it was no good. Thoughts of Dub and Pam and Mrs. Hobbs and her ghost kept running through her mind, making reading impossible.
Poor Michael had been afraid she would call Mrs. Hobbs. She shouldn’t have teased him, knowing the way his imagination worked. She had told him she didn’t know the woman’s phone number, which was true. But she could probably find out. And it couldn’t hurt to do so, she thought.
Paging through the phone book downstairs, she looked under the letter H. There were seven listings for Hobbs. Three had men’s names: Otis, Vincent, and Gerald. One was for Hobbs Tavern. Then there were three with initials: D.L., E.M., and P.
She dialed the number for D.L. and got a recorded message with the voice of a little kid. Definitely the wrong Hobbs. She tried E.M. The phone rang eight times, and she was about to hang up when a low, gravelly voice answered and said suspiciously, “Hello?”
It was the Snapping Turtle! Allie would have known that voice anywhere. Seconds passed, during which Allie tried to collect her thoughts and decide what to say.
“Who is this?” Mrs. Hobbs asked. Her voice was louder now, filled with anger.
Intimidated by Mrs. Hobbs’s irate tone, Allie didn’t answer.
“You!”
Allie froze.
Furious panting came from the other end of the line. “Why can’t you leave me alone?”
There was a loud clunk, followed by the dial tone. Allie stood with the phone to her ear, stunned. How had Mrs. Hobbs known who was calling? And why was she so enraged?
Allie shook her head and put the phone down. She was about to close the phone book, when she thought to check the address. It was 1228 Armstrong Street, just two and a half blocks away. Good thing Michael didn’t know that.
She called good night to her parents, washed up, and got into bed. As soon as she closed her eyes, he was there. She knew he wasn’t actually there, but she felt that she could reach out and touch his face. She wanted to touch his face: his melancholy expression made her long to comfort him. And then he smiled, and her heart twisted in a way she’d never known before.
“You’re special, Allie,” he said softly.
His words flowed through Allie like a warm current. Listening to him, she felt special.
“I know you’re someone I can count on.”
“I am.”
“Then you’ll help me?”
“I will,” Allie said. “I promise.”
His hand reached out, and she imagined its soft caress on her cheek. “She promised me, too, Allie,” he said sadly. “But she broke her promise.”
“I’m not like that,” Allie said.
“I know. But you won’t let Dub stop you, will you?”
Startled, Allie asked, “What do you mean?”
“He’s jealous of me. You know that, don’t you?”
Allie didn’t know what to make of this remark. Dub jealous? Of a ghost? It was crazy. “He won’t stop me,” she said firmly.
“I knew I was right to choose you.”
Allie kept her eyes shut tight, not wanting to lose his image, but already it was starting to waver and blur.
“Who are you?” she whispered as the face faded away entirely.
“I was John Walker. Until she ruined my life.”
Eleven
Even though she’d spent most of the night thinking about her ghost, John Walker, Allie was up early the next morning. Knowing his name made her feel somehow closer to him, and more determined than ever to find out his connection to Mrs. Hobbs.
She had already dressed and was in the kitchen, finishing her cereal, when her mother came downstairs in her nightgown. “Morning, Mom,” said Allie. “I’m about to go feed Hoover. Then I’m going to the library.”
“Goodness, Al,” her mother said sleepily. “You’re awfully gung-ho this morning.”
“Yup,” said Allie, eager to be off. “So I’ll see you later, okay?”
“Hang on, please. Give me a second to wake up and think. What time are you going to finish at the library?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, check in with your dad when you do, okay? He and Mike will be home until the lacrosse game at one. If you don’t finish up before then, why don’t you meet them over at the high school.”
“Okay.”
“Or you could come help me at the store,” her mother teased.
“Gee, thanks, Mom,” said Allie with a smile. “That makes even homework sound like fun.”
“What about lunch?” her mother asked, looking concerned.
Allie patted her pocket. “I’ve got money. If I get hungry, I can go to that little store across from the library and get a sandwich.”
“Okay, sweetie. Give me a kiss.”
Allie kissed her mother’s cheek and ran through the back door into the garage to get her bike and helmet.
At Mr. Henry’s house, she reached under the flowerpot for the key and let herself into the kitchen. “Hoover,” she called eagerly. “Come here, girl.”
From the other room she heard the click-click-click of toenails against the floor. Then Hoover’s big, shaggy, golden head appeared.
“Hi, Hoovey,” Allie crooned, sinking to her knees as she always did so that she could bury her face in the dog’s soft, warm fur. “Do you want to play first or eat first?”
But instead of bounding over for a hug, as usual, Hoover had come to an abrupt halt in the doorway. A low growl rumbled deep in her throat. Then she burst into a series of high, sharp barks and began backing away from Allie with small, nervous steps.
“Hoover, what’s the matter? It’s me,” Allie said.
Thinking that perhaps Hoover was upset by Mr. Henry’s absence or confused by her own sudden presence, Allie remained on her knees, trying to make herself as non-threatening as possible. She coaxed in a gentle voice, “Hey, Hoovey, it’s only me. I came to feed you, buddy. Would you like that? Want some food, Hoover? Hmmm?”
But the fur was up on Hoover’s neck now, and she continued to alternate between deep growls and shrill, excited barks. Allie was completely bewildered. She tried for several minutes to settle Hoover down, and finally couldn’t stand it any longer. The poor dog became more and more distraught, and Allie couldn’t bear to watch her. Deeply puzzled and dismayed, she filled the water and food dishes, and after one last pleading attempt to get Hoover to play, she let herself out of the house.
Riding into town, she thought she remembered hearing somewhere that dogs were sensitive to supernatural beings. It might have been in a movie she’d seen. If that was true, Hoover could be reacting to the ghost of John Walker. Did that mean he was always hanging around her? No, that couldn’t be it. She’d spent a lot of time with Hoover when Lucy Stiles’s ghost was around, and the dog had been fine.
When she got to the library and tugged on the heavy wooden door, nothing happened. She tried again to open it, then looked up at the sign with the library’s hours: SATURDAY 9:00 A.M. TO 5:00 P.M.
She looked at her watch. Eight-fifteen. What a stupid morning this was turning out to be. Sighing with frustration, she sat down on the steps and watched the meager Saturday-morning traffic going by. Her thoughts spun in the same circles as they had the night before, with the added worry of Hoover’s odd behavior thrown in.
Meanwhile, what was she going to do for forty-five minutes?
Armstrong Street wasn’t far away. There wasn’t any reason why she couldn’t ride there on her bike and see if she could find number 1228. Maybe Mrs. Hobbs would be outside, and they could strike up a casual, friendly conversation about John Walker.
Yeah, right.
The only way she was going to find out about Mrs. Hobbs was the library. Which wasn’t open yet. In the meantime, she thought, it wouldn’t hurt to check out Mrs. Hobbs’s house.
The morning was quiet as Allie pedaled slowly along, checking house numbers. She didn’t often come down Armstrong Street, and she looked about curiously. A woman in a bathrobe came out to pick up the newspaper. A small black dog raced beside Allie’s bike, barking frantically for a while, before turning around and heading home.
What’s with all the dogs this morning? Allie wondered. She decided this one was merely performing its doggy duty to protect its territory.
As she reached the 1100’s, she noticed that the houses became smaller and closer together, and were often in need of paint or repair. Here and there she spotted a falling-down porch, a boarded-over window, a missing stair tread. Well-manicured flower beds and careful landscaping slowly gave way to weed-filled lawns and haphazard clumps of unpruned bushes and scraggly trees.
And then she was in front of number 1228. The yard was small and neatly kept, but it wasn’t the yard that claimed Allie’s attention. It was the house. It looked like two houses stuck together. The right side was perfectly normal. It was painted white, with black shutters at the curtained windows, and there was a little porch with a rocking chair by the door. The left side was a framework of scrap boards and plywood, covered by tarps and tattered plastic sheeting.
To Allie it looked decidedly strange, even spooky. She rode by slowly, trying to imagine the reason for the house’s queer appearance. People ran out of money for home-improvement projects, she knew that. Until recently the desk in her bedroom had been a piece of plywood held up by cinder blocks. Her parents had been saving for a long time to build a family room onto their house, and her mother wanted to remodel the old-fashioned kitchen someday, when they had the money.
Maybe Mrs. Hobbs had been saving to fix up her house, too. Maybe her promotion would help. Or maybe she liked it that way, although Allie had never heard of anyone deliberately finishing just one side of a house.
At any rate, Allie had wanted to see where Mrs. Hobbs lived, and now she had done it. She took one last look back and thought she saw the curtain in the upper right window slip back into place, as though someone had been looking out.
Shrugging off the chill that tiptoed down her spine, she pedaled back to the library. When the doors opened at nine, she was the first person inside. Mrs. Harris, the librarian, explained to Allie that old editions of the local newspapers were stored on microfilm. She showed Allie how to thread the spool of film into a machine that made the tiny print readable. Then she asked, “Now, what’s the date of the paper you need?”
Allie was dumbfounded. “I don’t know,” she replied. “What I want to do is read about fires. Serious fires where somebody might have died.”
She thought Mrs. Harris gave her a searching look before asking, “Recently?”
“No,” said Allie. She racked her brain, trying to think of when the fire—if there had been a fire—might have taken place. “I guess I’d better go back twenty years or so,” she said, feeling daunted by the prospect of looking through so many old newspapers.
But Mrs. Harris was smiling. “You’re in luck,” she said. “Several years ago we got a grant to create an index for The Seneca Times. It will tell us the days when items about fires appeared. But it would help if you could be even more specific. Do you have any other details that might focus the search so you don’t have to look at every article about a fire?”
“I have a person’s name,” said Allie.
Mrs. Harris smiled. “Terrific. What is it?”
“Hobbs,” said Allie.
“Hmmm. That rings a faint bell. Let’s see . . .”
Using the index to find articles about fires that also mentioned the name Hobbs, Allie and Mrs. Harris worked quickly. They found several entries for Hobbs that weren’t about fires, and Allie said she wanted to see those articles as well. Soon she was seated at the microfilm reader browsing through old issues of The Seneca Times.
Some of the Hobbs articles were not about her Hobbs, but one, dated April 2, 1981, was an announcement of the March 30 marriage of Evelyn Murdoch and Clifford Hobbs. Allie realized she hadn’t known Mrs. Hobbs’s first name until now. The “E” in E. M. Hobbs was for Evelyn. It was such a pretty, feminine, normal name. Allie had trouble connecting it with the horrifying figure of Mrs. Hobbs.
Eagerly Allie read on. The wedding had been a private ceremony. No mention was made of ushers or bridesmaids or flowers, but there was a small, smudgy photograph of the newlyweds, and Allie studied it with fascination.
If she hadn’t seen the accompanying words in black and white, she’d never have believed that the pretty young woman smiling into the camera was the feared cafeteria lady known as the Snapping Turtle. In a lace-collared dress with pearl earrings and a pearl necklace, Evelyn Hobbs was the picture of a blissful bride. One hand held a bouquet; the other was nestled in the hand of her husband. Clifford, while not dashingly handsome, appeared kind and cheerful and solid, and he was beaming at the camera with the look of a man who couldn’t believe his good luck.
Allie spent a long time studying the phot
o, trying to reconcile that Mrs. Hobbs with the one she’d run from in terror the day before.
Finally, she moved on to the next article mentioning the name Evelyn Hobbs. In the October 2, 1981, edition of the paper, Allie came upon an announcement of the birth of Thomas Spencer Hobbs, son of Evelyn and Clifford Hobbs.
Her amazement then turned to horror as she read of the deaths of Clifford and Thomas Hobbs in a fire at their home at 1228 Armstrong Street on November 7, just a month after the baby’s birth. Also dead from smoke inhalation was a visitor, John Walker.
As she read the name John Walker, a jolt of what felt almost like electricity passed through Allie’s body. She had been right! John Walker, her ghost, had died in a fire. The same fire that had killed Mrs. Hobbs’s husband and son.
With a mounting feeling of dread, Allie traced the story as it unfolded over the days that followed. The fire was under investigation. First, the fire chief said that the circumstances surrounding its origin were “suspicious.” Upon further investigation, he announced that the fire had definitely been the work of an arsonist.
Mrs. Hobbs, mother and wife of two of the deceased, had been at a meeting of the women’s auxiliary of her church at the time of the fire. Upon returning to find her house in flames, she had entered the burning building in an attempt to save her husband and infant. After receiving severe burns and suffering from smoke inhalation, she was rescued by firefighters.
The police had not announced the names of any suspects. However, the old newspaper stated, Mrs. Hobbs was continuing to be questioned at her room in the Seneca Heights Hospital.
Her hands trembling, Allie raced through the microfilmed pages to the next day’s news. When she reached the first page of the November 9 edition, she eagerly began to scan it for an update of the fire investigation. Nothing on the first page . . . Nothing on the second . . . She was about to move to page 3 when the print began to dissolve.
The Ghost and Mrs. Hobbs Page 5