Ghost House Revenge (12 page)

The bus rolled, bumped, and skidded. It landed nose-first, its entire front crushing,
the steering wheel becoming one with the partition. Shards of glass flew like missiles,
striking the now-empty upholstered seats.

Though it happened in less than a minute, an eternity passed before the bus finally
skidded to a halt and toppled over on its side. Gina at last opened her eyes.

Percy’s unseeing eyes stared down at her, inches from her own face. Blood was spurting
from a wound that surrounded a shimmering piece of glass in his throat.

“GET HIM OFF OF ME!” she screamed, struggling frantically.

“Gina, you’re crushing me!” Alicen cried, the spell broken. She wriggled out from
under her friend, grateful that only her legs had been caught. Then she leaned against
the top of the bus, now its side, and stared down at Percy’s corpse.

“GET HIM OFF! GET HIM OFF!”

Jamie Hutchinson was the first to collect his senses. He pulled himself to his feet,
clutching the soft cushion of his seat. Rubbing his temple, where a painful bump was
growing larger, he walked ahead to see why Gina was screaming so. In the shock that
is the aftermath of a terrible accident, it didn’t register in his mind that his teacher
was dead. He only thought that Gina was being crushed as he wrapped his fingers around
Percy’s upper arms. Glass crunched beneath his feet as he pulled hard at the body,
to no avail. It was wedged in too tightly, and at thirteen, Jamie wasn’t very strong.

“Jamie, please,” Gina cried. “I can’t breathe.”

“I’m trying,” Jamie answered, desperate. He turned around. “Hey, somebody help me
up here!”

No one responded. They were too caught up in their own terror. Jamie saw one boy holding
his arm at an odd angle. A piece of raw bone jutted from a rising bruise at his elbow.
A girl with blond braids sat on the floor with the back of her hand to her nose, trying
to stop the flow of blood. Another girl was crying about her fingers, and a boy was
lying on the floor, his eyes closed, blood trickling from his forehead. Jamie turned
his head quickly away.

“Gina, push hard when I tell you,” he ordered. He tugged at Percy’s arms. “Now!”

Gina pushed with all her strength, and still the body did not move. A pounding noise
over her head made her look up. There she saw two policemen sawing away at one of
the window frames. One shouted through the small opening.

“Stay still, everyone! We’ll have you all out in a minute!”

The first cop sawed with all his might, trying to make an exit. The door itself was
useless, lost somewhere in the twisted front of the bus. He could barely make out
the steering wheel. He knew the bus driver could not have survived. Yet for some reason,
there was no sign of a body.

“Where the hell is the driver?”

“Beats me, Tim,” the other cop answered.

Gina had started crying again, fighting the pressure of Mr. Percy’s corpse. Tim looked
down at her as he sawed the metal window frame. Assuming the body on top of her was
the driver’s, he continued to work. At last the frame gave way, and he jumped down
into the bus. Walking carefully along the row of broken windows pressed flat against
the ground, he went to Gina and wrenched the body from her. Without a word, he hoisted
it up to the opening, where his partner dragged it out. Moments later, it was covered
with tarpaulin.

“Easy now,” Tim said, sliding his arm under Gina’s back. Behind him, two paramedics
climbed down into the bus to attend to the injured children.

As he helped Gina to her feet, Tim noticed the seat and realized something like a
miracle had just occurred. Three ugly triangles of glass poked out from the vinyl
seat, in exactly the place where Gina might have been sitting if the man’s body hadn’t
knocked her to the floor. He looked at her as he held his hand out to help Alicen.

“Are you hurt?”

“No,” Gina said softly, not sure of herself. She turned to Alicen, who stood staring
at the twisted frame of the partition. There was no expression on her face.

“How about you, honey?” Tim asked, squeezing her hand.

Alicen shook her head mutely. Now Tim led the two of them to the opening in the ceiling,
where they waited their turn to be lifted out of the bus. Once outside, the teen-agers
blinked at the flashing red lights and bright sunshine. Gina put her arms around Alicen
and stood watching as the others were helped out. She was shocked to see one of her
classmates, Tommy Jones, on a stretcher with his eyes closed. Someone had bandaged
his head.

Hank Emmons, manager of the construction crew, climbed down into the pit to survey
the damage. When he reached the bottom, he ran his fingers through his silver hair
and looked around in awe. The last of the group were being helped out of the bus.
Several of them were put on stretchers and carried to the ambulance waiting at the
top of the pit. As far as he could see, these were the only serious injuries.

“This is the kinda thing that makes you believe there’s a God,” he said to a policeman.

“How do you figure that?”

“Well, no one was killed,” Hank said. “And from the looks of that thing”—he indicated
the bus—“no kid should have lived. Yeah, God was looking out for these kids.”

“Not for the driver, though,” the cop said. “He was killed.”

Hank frowned. “I can’t say I’m sorry. I saw that bus coming down the road. Serves
the jerk right, speeding down a busy highway with all those kids.”

Within the next half hour, all the students had been brought to the top. As they waited
for another bus to take them home, they shared a soda and snacks with the construction
crew. The food somehow helped them forget the accident.

Gina had had enough time to realize she was all right and to calm down a little. Some
of her classmates had also relaxed and were talking together in excited groups. But
for the most part they stood silent, numbed by the experience and wanting nothing
but to see their mothers. Alicen was one of the silent ones.

Gina offered her a soda, but Alicen shook her head. “Why aren’t you afraid?”

“Because I’m all right,” Gina said. “Besides, a lot of worse things have happened
to me.”

Alicen nodded, knowing Gina was right but unable to share her strength. She felt a
terrible fear. Why, since they were all right? But that was just it. Something deep
inside Alicen made her feel they weren’t supposed to be all right, that something
was supposed to have happened and didn’t.

“I just want to go home,” Gina said.

“Me, too,” several of her friends who stood nearby agreed in unison.

“But we’ll probably have to go back to school and answer a lot of questions,” Jamie
said. Seeing a cop approaching, he said, “Starting right now.”

“All right,” Tim said. “I’d like to ask you some questions about your driver.”

All the children started to speak at once.

“One of you, I said,” Tim interrupted. He pointed to Jamie, who by his height seemed
to dominate the group.

“Tell me, son,” he said. “Did you get a good look at the driver? Did he seem to be
tired, or drunk, or—”

“I don’t know, exactly,” Jamie said, pushing a lock of red hair from his eyes. “I
was reading, so I just kinda glanced up at her.”

“Her?” Tim echoed. “The driver was a woman?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Have you seen her since the accident?”

All the teen-agers shook their heads.

“Percy made us all duck under our seats,” Jamie said. “After that, we didn’t see a
thing.”

“I heard a scream,” Beverly said. “But I sure wasn’t going to look.”

There was a silence, and then Gina asked, “What did happen to the driver?”

“I don’t know,” Tim said. “Can anyone tell me what she looked like?”

“I think she was wearing boots,” Doreen said. “But I was at the back of the bus.”

“Yeah, she was,” Jamie agreed. “I remember because I thought it was kinda weird.”

“Boots?” Tim said. “In May?”

Doreen and Jamie nodded. Tim could see sincerity in their faces and wondered if the
driver might have worn boots to make her foot heavier on the gas pedal. If that was
the case, then it probably meant she had planned the entire thing. Was it meant to
be a combined suicide-mass murder? Tim’s job now would be to find the body—or, judging
from the remains
of the bus, what was left of it. He thanked the group for their help, then went to
find his partner Rick.

He made his way through the clusters of police, construction workers, and students
until he found Rick at the edge of the pit, watching a tow truck haul the bus to the
surface. Before he could tell him what the children had said, Rick started talking.

“Look at that thing,” he said. “Smashed like a beer can. You know, if the driver hadn’t
been knocked from his seat like that, those two girls would have been killed? I have
it figured that when his body wedged between their seats, he acted as a sort of anchor
and kept them down on the floor. If they’d have been in that seat when the partition
broke—”

Tim cut him off. “Rick, Dwight Percy wasn’t the driver. The kids say it was a woman.”

“How can that be?” Rick demanded. “There isn’t another adult on that bus.”

“We couldn’t have missed her?”

“Impossible,” Rick said. “Miss a full-grown woman in that little package of metal?
No way Percy isn’t our driver. The kids are suffering from shock. Or else they’re
lying.”

“I don’t think they’re lying,” Tim said.

“There’s no one else on that bus,” Rick insisted.

Later, back at the school, the children still swore the driver had been a woman. And
out of fifty of them, not one remembered her face. Police Chief Bryan Davis asked
each individually. They had to know something. And yet they had no answers.

Bryan was surprised to see Gina VanBuren, remembering her from another incident long
ago. He asked about her father.

“He’s doing okay,” Gina said. “He doesn’t have casts on any more, and he’s learning
how to walk again.”

“That’s great,” Bryan said. “You send him my best, okay?”

“Perhaps we should allow them to leave,” an elderly nun suggested. “They need their
rest. You may return again tomorrow, when their minds are clear.”

“Good idea,” Bryan answered. “I’ll be back after lunch tomorrow.”

The children were relieved to hear they were going home. It had been two hours since
the accident, and most were still frightened and upset. Originally Bryan had wanted
to send
them home right away but then decided it was best to get information while the incident
was still fresh on their minds. Obviously that hadn’t worked. Now he stood in the
doorway, watching the children file outside. Their parents had been called, and a
number of cars were waiting. Beverly, Doreen, and Jamie, who had working mothers,
joined Gina and Alicen.

“Thank God you’re all right,” Melanie said, putting her arms around her daughter.
“I called several times wondering when I could take you home, but they made me wait
here. I’ve been frantic!”

“The police had to ask some questions,” Gina said.

“Couldn’t it have waited?” Melanie asked as she started the car. “You should have
all been sent home at once.”

“It wasn’t so bad,” Gina insisted.

Melanie turned to Alicen. “How about you?”

“I—I’m fine,” Alicen said. She fixed her eyes on the road ahead.

Poor kid
, Melanie thought
She must be taking this worse than any of them
.

“Hey, I have an idea,” she said aloud, in an effort to cheer everyone. “Why don’t
you let me treat you all to lunch?”

“That’s a great idea,” Jamie said.

“Yeah, neat!” cried Beverly.

“Can we go to Nino’s pizza place, mom?” Gina asked.

“Sure.”

After they had driven for a few minutes, Alicen felt her head growing heavy. She heard
a voice inside it, calling to her, commanding that she come home. She looked around,
but no one else heard it.

Suddenly she brought one leg up under her body, clutched her stomach, and started
to groan.

“Alicen, what’s wrong?” Melanie asked with concern.

“My stomach hurts,” Alicen wailed. “I want to go home!”

“Maybe you’re just hungry,” Doreen suggested.

“I want to go home!” Alicen insisted.

“Okay, honey,” Melanie cooed. “We’ll drop you off. It’s on the way, anyway.”

She reached behind Gina and touched Alicen’s cheek. It felt cool.

“Just lay back,” she said.

“I sure hope you’re okay, Alicen,” Jamie said.

Melanie turned the car around and headed toward the house. On the way, they passed
the boarded-up gray mansion
that had once belonged to the VanBuren’s only neighbor. Jamie leaned over the back
of Melanie’s seat and asked, “Who lives in that spooky old place?”

“No one now,” Melanie said. “But it used to belong to a very old woman named Helen
Jennings. She was eighty-four and died of a heart attack.”

“Geez,” Beverly said. “Eighty-four? That’s like a million years.”

Melanie laughed, and Jamie asked, “Is anything inside there?”

“No, it’s been empty for months,” Melanie said.

She sighed, remembering Helen Jennings, who had tried to help her family when they
were in trouble, during the months leading to Gary’s accident. Helen had been a little
eccentric, watching their house from her bedroom through a pair of binoculars. But
Helen had paid a price for helping them. She had died not of a heart attack, but of
a broken neck—murdered by the same intruder who had crippled Gary.

But Melanie didn’t want to think about that. She drove up to the front door of her
house and let Alicen out. The girl left them without saying goodbye or thanks. Melanie
watched her climb the porch steps with her head hung low, like a dog anticipating
a beating.

“Everything scares her,” Gina said.

“Maybe she really is sick,” Doreen said.

“She’ll be all right,” Melanie said.

A little voice inside her added,
I hope
.