The Ghost Wore Gray (7 page)

He pointed toward the hole in the wall with his flashlight. Everyone, including me, stepped forward to peek. To my surprise, I could see a tiny room inside. It was barely the size of a small closet. I could see a shelf and a small chair.

“What kind of a room is that?” asked Chris.

“I think I can answer that question,” said Isabella.

Everyone turned their attention from the hole in the wall to the pretty waitress. “Well, I'm not certain,” she said. “But it looks to me like the kind of room that would have been used on the Underground Railroad.”

“Of course!” cried my father. “That makes perfect sense.”

It may have made sense to him, but it didn't to me. I said so.

My father looked at me in astonishment. “What do they teach you in that school?” he asked.

“Well
ex-cuuu-se
me for not knowing everything!” I said.

The level of crankiness in this conversation was getting out of hand. So I was relieved when Isabella jumped in with some information.

“The Underground Railroad wasn't really a railroad,” she said. “It was a system for helping escaped slaves make it north to freedom.”

“Well, if they didn't go by train, how did they go?” asked Chris.

Isabella shrugged. “By foot, by mule, by boat—any way that would get them north. Sometimes they actually did travel by train, though usually that involved a lot of disguises and plotting.” She smiled. “One man actually had himself nailed into a crate and shipped to Boston. But most people needed places to hide and places to find food. Those were the stops on the Underground Railroad. And the people who led the slaves north, took them from stop to stop, were called conductors.”

Suddenly everything clicked into place. “You mean like Harriet Tubman?” I asked.

Isabella smiled. “That's right. Harriet Tubman is the most famous. But there were a lot of others. A very successful conductor named Samson Carter had his base of operations right around here.”

“I didn't know that!” exclaimed my father. “Samson Carter is one of my heroes.”

Now I didn't feel so stupid. We had read about Harriet Tubman's daring efforts to help runaway slaves last year in social studies. I had just forgotten about them for a while.

“But I don't understand why the Underground Railroad would need a stop in New York,” said Chris. “This wasn't a slave state.”

“That's true,” said Isabella. “But a national law called the Fugitive Slave Act said runaway slaves were the property of their owners, no matter where they were. So a black could make it all the way to New York, and still get sent back to slavery. Some slave owners offered big rewards for their slaves. There was always someone willing to turn a man in for the money on his head. Runaways weren't really safe until they made it to Canada.”

I shook my head. It all sounded pretty ugly. “How come you know all this stuff?” I said.

Isabella's eyes flashed. “Everyone should know it,” she said. “It's part of the blood history of this country.”

I thought she was going to pick up where my father had left off, and finish the lecture on being undereducated. But the moment passed. “Anyway,” she said softly, “I suppose I'm more interested than most people would be, since I come from slave blood myself.”

I looked at her in surprise.

“I'm one quarter black,” she said. “That makes me what they used to call a quadroon—plenty black enough to have been a slave myself.”

I swallowed uneasily.

Chris took over. “If there were rewards, why would the people who owned this place have helped runaways hide here?” she asked.

“Because some people think what's right is more important than what's profitable,” said Isabella. “More important than what's comfortable, too, since it was illegal to hide a runaway slave. Anyone who did it, black
or
white, was risking trouble with the law. They could face the kind of fines that would bankrupt them, or even be thrown in jail. But that didn't stop people who believed in freedom. They helped the runaways in spite of the law.”

I walked over to the hole my father had made and peered into the little room. It was about two feet wide and three feet long. I thought about the people who might have hidden there, the black women and men risking their lives to get to Canada so they could be free.

I thought about being closed up in there, in the dark. It was such a small space! I wondered how long people had to stay in there. I didn't think I could have done it.

“Why was it sealed up like that?” asked Chris, who had come over to stand beside me.

This time my father answered. “Since it was used as a place for people to hide, I would guess that the door itself was disguised, somehow made to blend in with the rest of the wall. Probably years after the room was last used, someone covered the door without even knowing it was here.” He turned to Baltimore. “I'd suggest that we restore the space to its original condition. It will make the Quackadoodle a little more special, give people something to tell their friends about after they've stayed here.”

Isabella's eyes flashed, and she started to say something. My father cut her off.

“Yes, I know. That sounds ‘commercial.' But it works two ways. At the same time that it brings in extra customers for Baltimore, it teaches people about something you think is pretty important.”

“I do not care important!” cried Dieter. “I care my kitchen! I don't want people tramping through here to look in a little hole while I am trying to cook!”

“Maybe we should talk about this later,” my father said to Baltimore.

The innkeeper nodded.

Dieter figured Dad was just trying to get around him and started to yell again.

I was trying to think of some way to keep everyone happy when I felt Chris grab my elbow. I turned and saw that she was looking through the hole. She yanked on my arm, indicating I should come and look, too. Something about the way she was standing, the way she held my elbow, let me know this was important.

I glanced around. The grown-ups were busy yelling at one another, so I squeezed up against Chris and peered into the opening.

The ghost was sitting there, looking back.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

And With a Crook of His Finger, He Beckoned Us On

Between the argument behind us and the ghost in front of us, I was finding it hard to think. I was sure he wanted something from us, but I didn't know what.

Finally I just decided to ask. “What do you want?” I whispered.

I didn't really think he could answer me. It was just that I didn't know what else to do.

To my surprise, Captain Gray stood up and pointed to the wall in front of him. But before I could see what he was pointing at, I heard Baltimore shout, “Watch out!”

An instant later I heard a loud crash.

I spun around in time to see the next plate go flying through the air. It hit the wall and spattered into hundreds of pieces. Another one followed it, and then another.

“You want a messy kitchen?” cried Dieter. “I'll show you a messy kitchen!” He grabbed a fifth plate and flung it across the room. He didn't seem to be throwing them at anyone in particular. Even so, I was a little worried about what might happen if he ran out of plates and started on the knives.

Chris was feeling the same way. “Come on,” she said. “It's time to beat feet.”

“But the ghost—”

“He's gone,” said Chris. “He took off when the fireworks started.”

“But I can't leave my father with this maniac!”

“Your father's the one who started this. He ought to know better than to poke holes in crazy people's walls!”

I was about to answer when Gloria walked into the room. She took one look at what was going on, and put an end to it.

“Dieter, stop acting so silly.”

That was all she said. But her tone of voice probably would have brought a rampaging rhinoceros to a halt. Dieter stopped. I wasn't surprised.

She turned to Baltimore. “Why do you let him do that?” she asked.

Before he could answer, she turned and waved her hands at the rest of us. “Everybody out of here!” she said. “This man has work to do.”

Chris was right. It was time to beat feet.

Without saying a word, we headed for the little bridge. It had become our place to talk, much like the oak tree in the cemetery at home.

“Well, the ghost wants something from us,” said Chris, once we had settled ourselves against the railing. “That much is clear.”

I nodded. The question was, what did he want? “There are too many things that don't make sense here,” I said. “To begin with, why is an inn in New York State haunted by a ghost from South Carolina?”

Chris nodded. “And does the fact that this place used to be a stop on the Underground Railroad have anything to do with the ghost? I can't see how they are connected. But they have to be, somehow.”

“That's the problem with ghosts,” I said. “You can't just figure out what's going on. You've got to figure out what
went
on.”

“Speaking of goings on, what about the original plans for the inn? The ones stolen from your father's room? Do they fit into all this, or is that part of something else altogether?”

This was getting to be too much. I sat on the edge of the bridge and took off my shoes so I could dangle my toes in the water. I thought for a minute, then said, “As far as I'm concerned, the only person around here who's not a suspect is the ghost.”

Even that changed as the day went on. Not that we began to suspect the ghost of stealing the plans. But we ended up with more non-suspects. As Porter had predicted, several new people checked into the inn before evening.

Watching them come in, Chris and I decided we were glad the theft had happened on Wednesday, when there were fewer people around. It kept the possibilities down to a reasonable number.

The problem was, we couldn't figure out how to narrow the suspects down any further. By dinner we were as far from figuring things out as we had been when the day began.

Our second dinner at the Quackadoodle was very different from our first. In addition to the new people registered at the inn, others had come just for dinner, and the dining room was nearly half-full. That meant Baltimore and Gloria were tied up with the customers. Also, Arnie and Meg Coleman chose to sit by themselves that night.

That left only five of us from the previous night's party. Of course, Dad, Chris, and I could have eaten by ourselves, like the Colemans. But my father had already asked Mona if she would like to join us. Then Porter Markson wandered into the dining room, and we decided to ask him if he would like to sit with us, too.

I figured Chris and I should enjoy the company while we could. In another day or so my father would probably be asking us to eat by ourselves, so he could have a private dinner with Mona.

I was not amused by the idea.

Actually, I was very confused. I mean, there I was, peacefully feeling cranky and nasty toward Mona, when she went and offered to do this wonderful thing of helping me turn my diary into a book. Now I wasn't sure how I should feel about her.

I was trying to sort that out when I heard her ask my father about the little room he had found earlier in the day.

“To tell you the truth, it wasn't entirely accidental,” Dad said. He sounded a trifle smug. “When I went over the plans before they were stolen, I noticed that they didn't quite match the actual construction of the inn. So I thought there might be something there—although I wasn't expecting what I actually found.”

“What about the plans?” asked Porter. “Is anything being done about getting them back?”

Dad shrugged. “Baltimore said that as long as nothing of mine had been stolen, he would prefer not to call the police. He's afraid it would be bad publicity for the inn. I had mixed feelings about that. But by the time he was done describing how incompetent the local law was, I agreed to go along with him. They
were
his plans after all.”

Porter nodded. “I think Baltimore's right. He's having enough trouble getting people here now.”

That got the grown-ups into a discussion of public relations, which became very boring very fast. Chris and I excused ourselves. Normally my father might have asked me to stay at the table for a while. But with Mona there, he was perfectly willing to let me go.

I didn't really like leaving him alone with her, but Chris and I had made plans for the evening. The fact that we had Mona to keep my father out of our hair made things a lot easier.

“What time shall I set the alarm for?” I asked, when we got back to our room.

Chris thought for a moment. “Two o'clock,” she said. “By then even the night owls should be sound asleep.”

“Two o'clock it is,” I said, pulling out the little plunger on the back of the clock. I glanced at the face. It was quarter of eight. “I haven't been to sleep this early in years,” I said.

“Neither have I,” said Chris. “But then, it's been a long time since I got as little sleep as I did last night. And tonight's not going to be any better. So let's get some rest now. We'll need it if we're going to sneak back into the kitchen and figure out what Captain Gray wanted us to see.”

I nodded.

It seemed like only minutes later when the alarm went off. I opened my eyes and let out a little gasp. With that quick waking I hadn't had time to prepare myself for the sight of the ghost standing at the foot of my bed.

This time I didn't hesitate. “Chris!” I hissed. “Chris, wake up. He's here again.”

She sputtered a bit, and then lifted her head and began rubbing her eyes.

The ghost didn't even waver. I figured he must be getting used to us.

For a moment no one said anything. The two of us lay in our beds, looking at the ghost. He stood there looking back.