The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed (16 page)

“Father hated you for helping him,” Ms. Bond said bitterly.

“Father didn't know Cornelius had saved my life,” wheezed Jimmy. “He wouldn't listen until it was too late.”

The police kept trying to ask Ms. Bond questions. At first Mr. Bassett wouldn't let her answer. But finally she snapped, “It doesn't matter now. They might as well know.”

Shrugging, Mr. Bassett sat back. I had the sense that he felt he had done his duty by counseling Ms. Bond to silence. Since he was her lawyer, he had to try to protect her. But that didn't mean he had to like what she had tried to do. If she wanted to brush him off now, that was fine with Mr. Bassett.

“After Alida died, Cornelius completely lost touch with reality,” said Carla. “It wasn't long before his wife, Amanda, fled to live with her sister. Four years later, when Cornelius became ill, she returned to care for him, bringing Phoebe with her.

“But Cornelius was dead before she arrived.

“Phoebe was three at the time. Her mother brought her into the house, and when the little girl saw the mural and the ropes still hanging in front of it, she began to scream. Amanda swept Phoebe out of the house and had the entire first floor papered over before she would bring the child back.”

“I did that for her,” interrupted Jimmy, tears streaming down his face. “It nearly killed me, but I covered his picture, and I promised I would never tell. It scared the little girl too much. Never did tell, either,” he added, sounding proud.

“Phoebe saw the painting only once,” continued Ms. Bond. “But the impact was so extreme that the memory never left her. She pushed the experience to the back of her mind, where it haunted her dreams. She used to have nightmares about ropes and pulleys, though she didn't know why. She told me about them, about how she would wake up in the middle of the night, trembling and covered with sweat, screaming, ‘The ropes, the ropes!' She was sure there was more. Only she could never remember what the rest of the nightmare was about.

“But I knew. Even though I had never seen it myself, I figured it out from her dreams. And I vowed I would own it someday—payment for what happened to my family.”

“Your family?” Norma asked. “Seems to me it was Phoebe's family that suffered.”

Ms. Bond snorted. “My father was a suicide. My brother became a bum, and my mother lived on the dole while she tried to raise me singlehandedly through the Depression. Is that enough to qualify for family problems?

“But I knew where there was something worth enough money to make up for all of it. Even though Jimmy never told, I figured it out. And all I had to do was buy this house. Only the witch wouldn't sell. She clung to this old place that was ten times as big as she needed, clung to it in the memory of her sainted father.”

Ms. Bond's eyes were blazing. She spat on the floor.

I thought about making some crack about civilized behavior, but realized that this was not the time. Sure, she had been going to blow me away a little while ago. But now I realized that I was watching a woman have a nervous breakdown right before my very eyes. It was, perhaps, the most frightening thing that happened in that long, frightening month.

“I went to school—
worked
my way through, without help from anyone. Made a name interpreting the work of Cornelius Fletcher. And kept looking for my chance to get the house. I had it all set finally. Phoebe was broke, ready to sell. If she died, the house would go to Byron, and he had agreed to sell it to me.”

Byron blushed. “Carla loaned me money to pay the hospital bills in return for a promise to sell,” he said. What a generous man; he had agreed to give up any inheritance he might have in order to help Phoebe.

“It would have been two triumphs in one stroke,” Ms. Bond continued. “Once I unveiled Fletcher's last work, I would have been able to write my own ticket in the art world. And the money! Oh, at last I would have the money I needed to live the way I deserved. A fortune! And it was all so close, until this brat opened her mouth.”

That's me—Big-Mouth of the Century.

But I didn't regret it. Even if things hadn't worked out entirely the way I would have liked, given what had happened in Phoebe's parlor before the police arrived, I couldn't feel entirely bad about them either.

Once Cornelius appeared, things had moved fast for a while. Ms. Bond, wrapped in at least a dozen layers of wallpaper, was out of the picture for the time being. But the action continued when Alida Fletcher appeared at the top of the stairs calling, “Daddy? Oh, Daddy, is that you?”

I had felt my eyes fill with tears as her tiny figure came drifting down the stairs.

“Oh, Daddy!” she whispered joyously.

A cry seemed to split the room, the sound of a great heart breaking, as Cornelius Fletcher stepped forward and held out his arms to the daughter he had been unable to save, the child who had waited over sixty years for him to keep his promise to come back for her.

“Poppa!” cried another voice—an old, weak voice.

I turned and saw Phoebe start up from her wheelchair. “Poppa!” she cried again.

Then she fell forward and lay still on the floor.

For a moment no one moved. Utter silence, deep and mysterious, filled the room.

Then a translucent form rose from Phoebe's still body. “
Poppa
,” she whispered again.

I blinked. Phoebe's ghost was a little girl. Then suddenly it was a grown woman, then an old lady, and just as suddenly a little girl again.

As the spirit of Phoebe Fletcher Watson floated across the parlor it continued to shift back and forth between all the people she had been through her long lifetime. But it was as a little girl that she reached out and took her father's hand. He drew her to him, and the three of them stood together—the mad artist, the child he had failed, and the child he had never met.

I trembled with emotion. I don't know what to call it: It wasn't sorrow or joy. It was simply more feeling than I could possibly hold.

Chris reached out and took my hand. I squeezed hard and hung on.

“Cornelius!” cried Jimmy Potter, his voice for an instant young with joy and recognition. “Cornelius!”

Cornelius Fletcher turned and nodded solemnly to the man he had twice saved, the man whose father had crippled him and cost him his child.

Then he took each daughter by the hand. Together they circled the room, slowly examining the great painting.

As I followed them with my eyes, they came to a place beside the door, and I realized that I had been wrong; Cornelius Fletcher's painting was
not
complete.

I remembered the despairing words of his final letter: “I cannot finish it.”

Here was the spot that had defeated him. This was the place where the battle broke, where the death and the pain disappeared. It was the place where the artist had stopped, because he had reached the scene he could not paint—the scene of ending, of peace, of satisfaction.

But now, at last, he was ready. Putting both hands forward, Cornelius Fletcher laid them on the wall.

A sob tore from him, a final cry of surrender, and completion and acceptance. The colors of solace flowed beneath his fingers, and the empty place on the wall was soon filled with the image of a peaceful woodland under a clear blue sky—the place of peace beyond the battle.

The Lost Masterpiece was finally finished.

From somewhere past Cornelius's sky I heard the sound of singing—voices soft at first, growing louder and more clear as they repeated the anthem of World War I, the promise we had made to a dying continent. Only now the words had a different meaning, a different promise.

“‘Over there,'” sang the voices. “‘Over there …'”

Taking his daughters' hands again, Cornelius Fletcher stepped toward his painting.

Wiping away my tears, I watched with joy as he led Phoebe and Alida to the place of peace he had finally been able to create.

As the artist and his daughters stepped into the painting, the colors began to fade. Within moments the vision of peace had disappeared, gone with Cornelius and his daughters.

But I know it's there, waiting beyond the battle.

The place of peace.

Over there.

A Personal History by Bruce Coville

I arrived in the world on May 16, 1950. Though I was born in the city of Syracuse, New York, I grew up as a country boy. This was because my family lived about twenty miles outside the city, and even three miles outside the little village of Phoenix, where I went to school from kindergarten through twelfth grade.

Our house was around the corner from my grandparents' dairy farm, where I spent a great deal of time playing when I was young, then helping with chores when I was older. Yep, I was a tractor-ridin', hay-bale-haulin', garden-weedin' kid.

I was also a reader.

It started with my parents, who read to me (which is the best way to make a reader)—a gift for which I am eternally grateful. In particular it was my father reading me
Tom Swift in the City of Gold
that turned me on to “big” books. I was particularly a fan of the Doctor Dolittle books, and I can remember getting up ahead of everyone else in the family so that I could huddle in a chair and read
The Voyages of Doctor Dolittle
.

I also read lots of things that people consider junk: Nancy Drew, the Hardy Boys, and zillions of comic books. In regard to the comics, I had a great deal going for me. My uncle ran a country store just up the road, and one of the things he sold was coverless comic books. (The covers had been stripped off and sent back to the publishers for credit. After that, the coverless books were sent to little country stores, where they were sold for a nickel apiece.) I was allowed to borrow them in stacks of thirty, read them, buy the ones I wanted to keep, and put the rest back in the bins for someone else to buy. It was heaven for a ten-year-old!

My only real regret from those years is the time I spent watching television, when I could have been reading instead. After all, the mind is a terrible thing to waste!

The first time I can remember thinking that I would like to be a writer came in sixth grade, when our teacher, Mrs. Crandall, gave us an extended period of time to write a long story. I had been doing poorly at writing all year long because we always had to write on a topic Mrs. Crandall chose. But this time, when I was free to write whatever I wanted, I loved doing it.

Of course, you think about doing many different things when you're a kid, but I kept coming back to the thought of being a writer. For a long time my dream job was to write for Marvel Comics.

I began working seriously at writing when I was seventeen and started what became my first novel. It was a terrible book, but I had a good time writing it and learned a great deal in the process.

In 1969, when I was nineteen, I married Katherine Dietz, who lived around the corner from me. Kathy was (and is) a wonderful artist, and we began trying to create books together, me writing and Kathy doing the art.

Like most people, I was not able to start selling my stories right away. So I had many other jobs along the way, including toymaker, gravedigger, cookware salesman, and assembly line worker. Eventually I became an elementary school teacher and worked with second and fourth graders, which I loved.

It was not until 1977 that Kathy and I sold our first work, a picture book called
The Foolish Giant
. We have done many books together since, including
Goblins in the Castle
,
Aliens Ate My Homework
, and
The World's Worst Fairy Godmother
, all novels for which Kathy provided illustrations.

Along the way we also managed to have three children: a son, Orion, born in 1970; a daughter, Cara, born in 1975; and another son, Adam, born in 1981. They are all grown and on their own now, leaving us to share the house with a varying assortment of cats.

A surprising side effect of becoming a successful writer was that I began to be called on to make presentations at schools and conferences. Though I had no intention of becoming a public speaker, I now spend a few months out of every year traveling to make speeches and have presented in almost every state, as well as such far-flung places as Brazil, China, Ethiopia, and Bangladesh.

Having discovered that I love performing and also that I love audiobooks, in 1990 I started my own audiobook company, Full Cast Audio, where we record books using multiple actors (sometimes as many as fifty in one book!) rather than a single voice artist. We have recorded over one hundred books, by such notable authors as Tamora Pierce, Shannon Hale, and James Howe. In addition to being the producer, I often direct and usually perform in the recordings.

So there you go. I consider myself a very lucky person. From the time I was young, I had a dream of becoming a writer. With a lot of hard work, that dream has come true, and I am blessed to be able to make my living doing something that I really love.