The Green Ghost (3 page)

Elsa nodded. Lillian took her sister’s hand as they started up the hill.

Mama was right. The day
had
turned cold. The sky had cleared and the woods lay in snowy silence. The snow squeaked beneath their boots.

Elsa broke away and ran up to a young
tree. It wasn’t a white pine, though. “Here’s one!” she cried. “Here’s our Christmas tree!”

Lillian shook her head. “The needles are too short,” she said.

Soon Elsa pointed to a long-needled one. But it had grown up close to another tree. One side was completely flat.

“No,” Lillian said. “Not that one.”

Next Elsa found one with a crooked trunk.

Lillian smiled. Her little sister seemed to have their father’s eye for beauty. Or perhaps she just felt sorry for the ugly ones.

“No,” Lillian said. “We’re looking for the most spectacular tree in the forest.”

Elsa stopped walking. “I didn’t know trees wore spectacles,” she said.

Lillian laughed. She shifted the small saw she carried and reached for her sister’s hand.
She could feel Elsa’s delicate bones through the mittens their mother had knit.

“Let’s go just a little bit farther,” Lillian said.

“Just a little bit farther,” Elsa agreed.

They trudged on.

K
aye bumped into the porch steps before she saw the house. There was her light! It poured through a window onto the porch. The wind and the snow had just been playing tricks to make it seem closer.

“Here!” she called to her parents. “We’re here!” She stumbled up the steps.

Her parents caught up with her on the
porch. “It’s a house!” her father cried. “How did you see it?”

“I saw the light,” she said. “I told you.”

They found the door together.

Dad knocked. They waited. He knocked again.

Wasn’t anyone home?

Kaye shivered. The wind seemed to blow right through her. There must be icicles hanging from her bones.

Dad took off his glove and knocked again with his bare knuckles.

A hand pulled back a curtain in the door’s window. A face appeared on the other side.

It wasn’t a lighted face, though. Just a face.

At last the door cracked open. A grandmotherly woman appeared in the crack.
Her hair stood in white corkscrews all over her head.

“My goodness!” she exclaimed. “Where did you folks come from?” She opened the door wider. “Come in! Come in! You must be frozen stiff!”

They all clumped in and stopped just inside the door. Kaye looked at her parents. They looked like snow people. She looked down at herself. She was a snow person, too.

Snow clung to her coat. It had burrowed inside her collar. It had sifted down inside her boots.

Her nose was numb. Her fingers and toes were, too. The warm kitchen air stung her cheeks.

Weren’t they lucky, though, that she had seen the light?

Kaye’s father told the woman about their car being in the ditch. He told her about the way the wind had bumped them off the road. “We’re going to need a tow,” he said.

“What a thing!” she cried. “And on such a night! Now, you folks just take off your coats. We’ll get you warm. Then we’ll see what we can do.”

She bustled around, taking their coats. “I’m Elsa,” she told them. She hung the coats on wooden pegs by the door. “That’s
what everybody around here calls me—just Elsa.”

She was short and round. Kaye’s own grandma was tall and skinny. But Elsa reminded Kaye of her grandma, anyway. Gran was cheerful in the same bustling way.

When Elsa smiled, her face bloomed into friendly wrinkles. She was clearly happy to have a strange family in her kitchen.

And they were certainly happy to be inside a warm house.

They were happy for the wild-rice-and-chicken soup Elsa warmed for them, too. And for the buttered toast she made to go with the soup. The toast filled the kitchen with a rich, nutty smell.

While they ate, Elsa talked. She told them about the farm. It had been in her family for generations, she said. She told
them how she and her brother, Isaac, had farmed it together. But Isaac had died, she said, and now the land was rented out.

She didn’t say she was lonely, but Kaye could tell she was.

She did say that it was surely an angel who had brought them to her on this stormy night.

When she said that, about the angel, Kaye thought about the face outside her car window. But no, that hadn’t been a face. It was just the light shining from the house. That had to be what it was.

When Elsa finally paused for breath, Dad mentioned their stuck car again.

Elsa nodded. “I can get one of my neighbors to bring a tractor and pull you out. That’s no trouble,” she said. “But I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Dad’s eyebrows went up.

“This storm is a bad one,” she explained. “And until it blows itself out, they won’t plow the roads. So even if somebody got you out, you’d be right back in the ditch again. Or worse.”

When she said “Or worse,” Mom and Dad looked at one another across the table. Kaye could tell they were thinking about what the “worse” might be.

“Now, I think you should call your family,” Elsa said. “Let them know you’re safe. Tell them you’ll be here with me until you can travel again. That’s going to take a bit of time. So tomorrow we’ll all have Christmas right here.”

Christmas!
Kaye hadn’t thought about Christmas once since the car had started spinning.

Christmas!
They were going to spend Christmas
here?

For the first time, she looked around. Really looked. The kitchen was plain and neat and bright.

A teakettle hummed softly on the stove. A red-and-white-checked cloth covered the table. The good smell of toast still hung in the air. Everything was friendly the way Elsa was friendly.

But still, they couldn’t have Christmas here!

It wasn’t just that Elsa wasn’t Kaye’s grandma. What about the gifts Gran bought all year long and stashed away in a closet waiting for Christmas? What about the ham? What about the pickle ornament?

What about the tree?

Kaye leapt from the table and moved
to look through the living room doorway.

She had been afraid Elsa wouldn’t have a tree at all. But there it stood in the corner of the living room. A Christmas tree. If it could be called a Christmas tree.

It was small and scraggly. It was more gray than green. And Kaye could tell, even from the doorway, that it didn’t have that good evergreen smell.

The next words popped out before she even knew she was going to say them.

“What an ugly tree!” she said.

“Kaye!” her mother cried. “That’s—”

But before Mom could say “rude,” Elsa interrupted. She laughed. She just tipped her head back and laughed and laughed.

“Never mind,” she said. “Kaye’s right! It’s a family tradition … an ugly tree for Christmas. They’re junipers. They grow out behind the barn.”

“I’m sorry,” Kaye said. “I didn’t mean—”

Though, of course, she
had
meant it. Even with the lights and the glass balls, it was just about the ugliest tree she had ever seen. And what kind of a family tradition was that, anyway … to have an ugly tree for Christmas?

Elsa waved her apology away. Still, Kaye was sorry she’d said it. She was especially sorry because Elsa didn’t fool her. Beneath the laughter, Kaye could see sadness in the old woman’s eyes.

But that was nothing compared to the sadness Kaye felt. She’d worried all year about what kind of tree Gran was going to have. Would she really have an artificial one? It would spoil Christmas if she did.

But nothing could spoil Christmas more than being stuck here with no gifts and no Gran and this dumb old juniper from behind the barn.

Nothing!

T
hey walked and walked. Lillian knew she should turn around, but she didn’t. As soon as she found the right tree, they would go back.

Elsa’s feet dragged. Lillian was getting tired, too. But her sister didn’t complain, so she kept going.

“We’ll find it very soon,” she promised.

“Soon,” Elsa agreed. But she sighed. She
lifted her tiny shoulders almost to her ears and let them fall again.

At last they broke out of a dense stand of trees into a clearing. And there it was—exactly what Lillian had been looking for.

It was the most beautiful tree she had ever seen! Even nicer than the one at church.

It was a white pine. The needles were long. Lillian could tell they were soft before she even touched them. The whole tree was a rich, deep green that shaded into silver. It was full and beautifully shaped, too. No other tree had crowded close or risen higher to cut off the sun.

“This is the one.” Lillian dropped Elsa’s hand. “This is the very one!”

Elsa tipped her head back and gazed up and up at the tree. “It’s so tall,” she said.

“I know,” Lillian said. “That’s what makes it so wonderful!”

Elsa said nothing more. She just plopped down in the snow to wait. And Lillian set to work. She had to take off a few of the lower limbs first. Once she could reach in easily, she began sawing at the trunk.