Greenglass House (15 page)

“The man had been familiar, Fenster said. As I recall, he gave my husband a long look, like he was trying to figure out if maybe it had been him out there. But Ben hadn't gone outside that night, certainly not anytime after midnight, which is when Fenster figured he'd been up. Then he ate another three helpings of pancakes, and that was the end of it. Until the next morning, when Fenster came down and announced that he knew who the man he'd seen was.

“It had happened again, and this time Fenster had gotten right up and gone to the window, and there was the young man again, still standing near the trees, still looking up at the house. Something made Fenster raise his hand in greeting, and the fellow raised his hand in response. It was that gesture that Fenster had recognized. ‘It was Doc Holystone,' Fenster told us.

“Everybody knows the Deacon and Morvengarde catalog company has always . . .
encouraged
the city to come down harder on the smugglers. Well, apparently, in the year before Doc Holystone's capture, Deacon and Morvengarde had put up Wanted posters around Nagspeake that showed Doc Holystone with one hand raised. Seems Fenster remembered those posters.”

Milo hadn't heard this story before, but he knew Fenster Plum, and he knew it wasn't from a Wanted poster that Fenster had recognized the famous smuggler. Milo knew for a fact that Fenster had actually
sailed
with Doc Holystone, but Mrs. Pine would hardly be likely to tell a bunch of strangers that.

“So of course, we pointed out that Doc Holystone had been dead—supposedly—for more than twenty years. Certainly he hadn't been seen in Nagspeake since the night he was said to have been captured. I may have suggested that Fenster had been dreaming—maybe the unfamiliar noises in the room were to blame, or maybe the strange drafts. But Fenster insisted he'd seen him. And what made him so sure?

“Well, it turned out there was more to the story that Fenster hadn't told us. On the third night, after he'd raised his hand to the young man in the trees, it had finally occurred to Fenster that the window had been open each night when he'd woken, and
he
hadn't been the one to open it.

“Outside that room there's a fire escape, and Fenster had climbed out onto it for a better look. As he came to his realization about the window, he'd turned to look around and had discovered that he wasn't alone on the fire escape. Leaning over the railing next to him was a small boy. The boy was waving too. It was the
boy
that the young man had been waving to. And it must have been the boy, Fenster explained to us, who had been opening the window so he could climb out to look for Doc Holystone. The noise of the sash going up was what had been waking Fenster each night.

“Now, I don't know if I'd have had the courage to do this, but Fenster, who was half asleep and who is a bit of an innocent anyhow, actually spoke to the boy. ‘Do you know who that is?' he asked. I don't know why he started with the man in the trees rather than asking the boy who he was or how he came to be in Fenster's room climbing out onto the fire escape—after all, there was no boy staying at the inn, and even if there had been, as you can see, guests here tend to get to know one another. Anyhow, he asked the boy if he knew who the man in the trees below was, and the boy nodded. And what he said, according to Fenster, was, ‘That's my father. We must wave at each other now, because we didn't get to say goodbye then.'

“‘And what is your father's name?' Fenster asked. ‘He looks familiar to me.' The boy smiled proudly and answered, ‘His name is Michael Whitcher, and this house used to be ours.' Then the boy waved again at the man in the trees, and the man waved back, and then the two of them disappeared, leaving Fenster alone on the fire escape.”

She paused once more, and this time the guests got it. “So Michael Whitcher was Doc Holystone?” Clem asked. “This house belonged to Doc Holystone?”

“Yup,” Mrs. Pine said with a smile. “And at least once, according to Fenster, the ghosts of Doc Holystone and his son returned to say goodbye to each other. It's the only time we've ever heard of a haunting here.”

“I like that story even better than the first one,” Meddy said.

 

Almost immediately after Mrs. Pine finished her story, the rain started.

It flung itself at the windows in shining sheets that were lit peculiarly by the reflection of lightning on the snow, and from somewhere on the other side of the hill came the battering-ram sounds of thunder.

The sudden storm seemed to signal the end of the evening's storytelling. The first clap of thunder shook the room, and on the heels of a ghost story—even if it was a relatively pleasant one—the noise put everyone right on edge.

“Milo, I'm going to run up and grab that camera for you,” Georgie announced, and disappeared up the stairs.

“Maybe I'll grab a sweater,” Mrs. Hereward commented, and she headed up too.

Another slicing flicker of lightning. Another crack of thunder. This time, the white-glass chandelier over the table flickered and went out. It was only dark for a heartbeat before the lights came back on, but that was enough. What if the power went out?

Milo glanced around the room and knew everyone else was having the same thought.

“At least the rain'll melt the snow,” Mrs. Caraway muttered. “Who needs more coffee?”

“Doubt it'll melt much,” Dr. Gowervine said as he rose to go smoke on the porch again. He pointed outside the window at the icicles that hung from the eaves. “Those aren't getting any smaller. The rain must be freezing.”

Mrs. Pine came to perch on the arm of Milo's chair, and he considered what his dad had said about the two of them feeling bad that they couldn't spend more time with him. He leaned his head against his mom's side as she put an arm around his shoulder.

“I think your storytelling idea was brilliant,” she said. “How'd I do?”

“Perfect,” Milo told her. “You were awesome. Have I heard that story before?”

“I think we must've told it to you at one point or another. Although I might've left out the part about the ghost boy, since that's the same fire escape that's outside your room. I might have thought it would freak you out.” She ruffled his hair. “But I'm sure I was just being an overprotective mom. I'm sure that kind of thing would
never
freak you out.” She tousled his hair again and stood up. “And hey, kiddo, is there anything special you'd like to do for Christmas Eve day after tomorrow? Special dinner, special cake, special anything? My means are limited by this weather, but if there's something that would salvage Christmas for you, we'll give it a try. I mean, we'll do the Yule log and sing carols and stuff, definitely, but other than that. Think about it, and let me know.”

“Okay, Mom. I'll think about it.”

“Thanks, Milo.” She looked around the room. “Anybody need anything from the kitchen?”

“I'd take another piece of cake,” Clem called. “But I can get it.”

“No trouble,” Mrs. Pine said, and Clem, who'd already gotten to her feet, stopped abruptly. She dropped onto the hearth next to Milo's chair and leaned her elbows on her knees to wait. “Great idea, by the way.”

“Thanks. Do you think you can tell one tomorrow?”

“I'll try and think something up.” She looked thoughtfully at the stairs. “What's a
lansdegown,
Milo?”

Aha. He'd nearly forgotten about the odd exchange that had taken place between Clem and Georgie before Mrs. Hereward had started her tale. He sat up a bit straighter. “You mean, other than a funny name for a camera?”

The red-haired girl shrugged. “Most names mean something, or why would people give things the names they do? So what's
lansdegown
mean?”

“It sort of seemed like you might know what it means already,” Milo pointed out. “Didn't you say something earlier about maybe telling a story about it?”

“I was just giving Blue a hard time,” Clem said.

He gave her a dubious look. “That isn't how it sounded.”

She waved her hand dismissively. “So you've never heard the word before?”

“Nope.”

“You sure?”

First Georgie, now Clem. Why did either of them think he'd have a clue what some weird word meant? “Why don't you just ask Georgie?”

“I could, but I thought you might know something about it that she doesn't.” To this odd statement, Clem added a conspiratorial wink. “Anyway, if you think of anything—”

“Clem?” Milo thought about what Negret would do, and decided just to put the obvious question out there and see if it got him anywhere. “Georgie asked me the same question, you know: if I knew what
lansdegown
means. Why do either of you think I know anything about a strange word I've never heard before? Is it because you think it has something to do with the house?”

Another direct question, thrown down like a gauntlet. Clem opened her mouth, then hesitated.

“Because, you know,” Negret continued in his most reasonable tone, “maybe I would remember better if I knew more about it. I mean, if you told me what
you
know.”

Clem gave him a shrewd look as footsteps sounded on the staircase. One set, light and quick: Georgie was on her way back down. Clem glanced in the direction of the sounds, then winked again. “Ask me another time,” she said quietly. Then she got up quickly and headed for the kitchen to meet Mrs. Pine, who was on her way out with a slice of cake. By the time Georgie reached the main floor with her camera, Clem had settled herself at the dining room table and was chewing contentedly.

She kept on chewing as Georgie sat next to Negret and showed him the finished (
light-tight,
she said) cigar-box camera. Now and then he glanced at Clem out of the corner of his eye, but she didn't seem to be paying any special attention to them.

“Anyway, it's too dark now to try it out,” Georgie was saying, “but maybe tomorrow I'll put it somewhere bright and take off the bit of tape that's covering the aperture and we'll see what we see. It'll take a long time for an image to form, but maybe by tomorrow night I'll have a picture to share.”

Negret turned the camera over in his hands. Now he couldn't get the word
lansdegown
out of his head, but there was nothing about the object itself that gave any hints. It was just a thin wooden box wrapped up tightly with thick black fabric tape.

If he asked Georgie the same questions he'd just asked Clem, would she answer the same way? Would the answers change if he waited until Clem wasn't around? And then, out of nowhere, it occurred to him to wonder something equally interesting.
I was just giving Blue a hard time,
Clem had said. It had seemed strange then, and now Milo realized why.
Giving a hard time
was something you did to people you knew. So was giving someone a nickname, like
Blue.
But Clem and Georgie were strangers—or had been, until yesterday.

Unless for some reason they'd only been
pretending
to be strangers.

Interesting. He handed back the camera and smiled at Georgie. “Cool.”

“Negret.” Sirin climbed out from behind the tree and joined him, peering over the arm of his chair. She nodded at the stairs. Mrs. Hereward had at last returned to the main floor. She was wearing a sweater, and she carried a bag he vaguely remembered her holding while she was hollering at Dr. Gowervine just after they'd arrived at the inn.

“The bag,” Sirin whispered. “Look at the
bag.
”

Now that Mrs. Hereward had opened the drawstring at the top to begin pulling red yarn from it, he could see that the bag was cylindrical, and it had a flat bottom, so that it sat sturdily on the floor beside her feet. It was made from thick canvas that seemed somewhat at odds with the delicate decorative stitching that covered the side. He hadn't paid much attention to the embroidered image before because when Mrs. Hereward was yelling, it was hard to focus on anything else. But now . . . now he could see that it was a picture of a house—a bizarrely shaped hodgepodge of a house with green windows, set among dark pines.

Mrs. Hereward glanced up just then and caught him looking. Her face went redder than Clem's hair and she turned the bag quickly around so that the house was hidden from view. But that hardly mattered. On the other side was another image, one that Mrs. Hereward had no way of knowing he would recognize.

Picked out in gray-brown thread was a misshapen iron gate.

 

six

The storm melted away the snow that lined the branches of the trees, and then the temperature dropped bitterly. Dr. Gowervine had been right—it didn't look like the rain had done much to get rid of the snow on the ground. When Milo woke up the next morning, the day before Christmas Eve, the only changes he could see out his window were that the icicles were longer and the trees were mostly bare.