There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around (4 page)

"Lisa invited me over," I heard her tell Aunt Rose, just as she'd told her each of the two previous Sundays since we'd started this.

"You have to stay here and entertain your cousin Ted," Aunt Rose answered, her standard reply.

"But you let Vicki go next door and play with Susan," Jackie pointed out, yet again.

"That's different," Aunt Rose said. Ah, family tradition.

And Jackie came back stomping her feet and giving me looks that said, "Why don't you do the family a favor and drop dead?"

I'd just as soon watch basketball on TV with Uncle Bob, even though I'm not crazy about sports, except football when the Buffalo Bills are playing. Come to think of it, I'd just as soon go next door and play with the five-year-olds, but Aunt Rose thinks cousins should like each other.

"Don't just sit around moping," Aunt Rose said, as
she says every time. "Why don't you go to the front room and show Ted your new computer game?"

Jackie sighed—Jackie sighs a lot—but she didn't point out that the game was new at Christmas, three months ago. "Come on, you," she said to me like I was Cinnamon, their dog, and she expected me to heel. And, in fact, Cinnamon did follow, nearly knocking me down in her eagerness to get there first.

Jackie threw herself into the chair in front of the computer and tapped her fingers impatiently on the box of computer disks while I got the hard old piano bench. I noticed that today her fingernails were painted metallic blue with sparkles. Sometimes she uses black nail polish, and sometimes she has each nail a different color. That's the kind of girl Jackie is. She was wearing a black sweatshirt big enough to fit any two thirteen-year-olds, black jeans with holes in the knees, black boots that looked like something the Wicked Witch of the East would wear, a black ponytail holder, and earrings that were miniature dangling handcuffs.

"What do you want to play?" she asked in a bored voice. And then she sighed.

But I wasn't looking at the disks; I was looking at the world map that was tacked up on the wall over the desk. "Oh, shoot," I said.

Jackie's lip curled in disdain. "Chutes and Ladders?"

"'Shoot,'" I repeated. "As in, 'I was about to use the other word, but I changed my mind at the last minute
because I'm talking to a girl.'" And because if my mother even suspected I might use the other word, she'd blame the PG-rated movies I'd gone to and she'd tell me I could only see G movies from now until I left home for college.

Jackie rolled her eyes. "How immature." She sighed again.

"I just remembered my Social Studies Fair project," I explained. "It's due tomorrow, and I've still got to put it together."

"Surely you don't expect that I'm going to help you," she said.

"No," I said. "Jac."

She snarled at me.

I pushed the piano bench back. "I'm going to explain to your mother, then I'm going to borrow your bicycle and go back home to finish the project by myself. I figured you'd be willing to loan me your bicycle if it meant getting rid of me."

"No."

"Come on, Jac—"

"I didn't mean, 'No, you can't use the bike,'" she explained. "I meant, 'No, my mother's never going to let you go by yourself.'"

"I've ridden here and back before," I said. "It's only about forty minutes either way, and no real busy streets."

"Your mother brought you here because she didn't want you home alone."

"She brought me here because she didn't want Vicki home alone and she didn't want me home with Zach." Not that I would have gone back at night, or been willing to sleep there alone. But I figured Sunday afternoon was about as safe a time as there could be.

Jackie was shaking her head. "Mum's responsible for you," she said—she and her friends all call their mothers Mum, as though that's more sophisticated than Mom. Except when Jackie is mad at her mother. Then she calls her Brigadier General Mum, but never to her face. "She'd never let you go all that way on your own. She'd make me go with you."

"Well, why not?" I said. "That'd be better than sitting around here. You could borrow your friend Lisa's bike."

Jackie shook her head.

I figured she was still convinced I was trying to get her help with the project. "If we take Cinnamon along with us—"

Cinnamon recognized her name—it's the only word besides
food
that she does know—and she stood up and began to bark.

I started again, louder. "If we take Cinnamon along with us, then your mother won't make you take her for a walk later. And once we get there, I'll work on Luxembourg on my own. You can play on
our
computer—a whole new set of games."

"Quiet, Cinnamon," Jackie said. Then, to me, she said, "Nah."

I petted Cinnamon to calm her down, and she laid her head in my lap. "Why not?" I asked. "I promise I won't ask you to do a single thing."

Jackie shook her head again.

"Jac," I pleaded.

She looked up at me real quick, angry.

I should have called her Jaclyn,
I realized, at least while I was trying to talk her into something.

But she wasn't angry about that. "I don't like your house," she said.

"Well, excuse me," I started.

"Especially now," she continued, before I could think up just the right sarcastic comeback. She quickly glanced away again. "I heard your mother talking to my mother when she dropped you off this morning. She said Vicki's been talking to imaginary friends and having nightmares."

I nodded. "And?" I asked. If Jackie didn't know more than she'd said already, she would have been making the same dropped-on-her-head kind of comments Zach did.

"
And,
" Jackie said, "do these imaginary friends follow her to kindergarten or to her other friends' houses? Does she see them anywhere but at your house?"

I figured yesterday at the museum didn't count, since Vicki had been confused by the teacher's costume. "No." I looked at Jackie more carefully, and inspiration hit. "Have you seen them, too?"

Jackie nodded.

It was my turn to sigh. So this had been going on
longer than I thought. "When was the last time you and your parents were over?" I answered my own question. "At Grandma and Granddad's anniversary." We celebrate even though they live in Florida now—a big dinner and then a group phone call where we all try to grab the phone away from one another and shout messages over the voice of whoever actually does have the phone. "Let's see ... that was ... what?...three, four weeks—"

"No," Jackie said. "Before then."

Something about the way she said it was like cold spiders on the back of my neck. "When?"

Jackie paused to consider. "Eight years ago."

"
What?
"

"It was when I was five. That time when your mother slipped on the ice on your front stoop and broke her leg. Mum was staying over at your place taking care of you and Zach, and I was staying there, too."

That part I remembered, even though I'd been only three.

Jackie continued. "I kept seeing this little girl—and a woman. I never thought they were friends. I knew they were ghosts. And believe me, they scared the—They scared me. Especially the mother."

"The
mother?
" I interrupted. "The bad lady is Marella's mother? Vicki said Marella is afraid of the woman."

Jackie shrugged. "Under the right conditions,
I'm
afraid of
my
mother." She paused. "Well, I assumed
they were mother and child, but maybe I was just trying to simplify things. Neither of them ever said anything; I don't think they could talk. The little girl, she just kept making signs like she wanted to go outside to play. But the mother ... she'd come at me—real fast—and I could almost feel her pass through my body." Jackie shuddered. "And that angry, hateful look on her face..."

"And you didn't tell anybody?"
How dumb!
I thought.

Jackie smacked me on the arm, which I guess shows that my thought was written on my face. Or maybe it was just frustration, for she said, "Of course I told. I told both my parents. And they yelled at me. They said I was jealous of having to share Mum with you and Zach, and that I was making it up to get attention."

Was she doing that now? "What did they look like?" I asked.
I
had heard the hurried conversation between Mom and Aunt Rose, too, and I knew Mom hadn't gone into any detail at all.

"African American," Jackie said, without having to stop to think.

"Good guess," I acknowledged.

"They were dressed in old-fashioned clothes," she went on. Of course, if they were ghosts, they pretty much had to be.

"How old-fashioned? Bell-bottoms old-fashioned, or animal-skins-and-clubs old-fashioned?"

Jackie looked ready to smack me again. "
Little-House-on-the-Prairie
old-fashioned," she said.

And I figured that was close enough to suffragettes as to be the same thing. "Wow." I sat down on the piano bench. "And do you see them every time you come to our house?"

"No." Jackie shook her head for emphasis. "After a while, they went away. But—and you're an idiot if you never noticed—I've always tried to avoid going to your house just in case they come back. And if I
do
have to go there, I stick real close to..."—she hesitated, then went ahead and said it—"the grown-ups." She leaned back in her chair—I think, trying to judge my reaction. "Have you ever seen them?"

"No."

"Lucky you. But something's got them stirred up again."

"Yeah," I said.

Now, if I could only figure out what.

AFTER THAT CONVERSATION
with Jackie, I certainly didn't want to go back to the house, alone or—especially—with her. Since Mom would be picking Vicki and me up around five-thirty, there would be enough time for me to get my project pulled together in the evening if I put my mind to it.

Jackie even ran off a computer-generated map of Luxembourg for me, from an atlas program she has, so that I didn't have to use the
National Geographic
map—and it wouldn't be so obvious that I'd gotten all my information from one source. Then—a real stroke of luck—it turned out she'd had France for her project when she'd been in sixth grade, and France and Luxembourg have the same red, white, and blue stripes on their flags. Except Luxembourg's go from the red stripe at the top to the blue stripe on the bottom, and France's go from the blue stripe on the left to the red one on the
right. Jackie had a little French flag she'd gotten when she'd written to the French embassy for information, and she gave it to me to use tipped on its side in the middle of my display so I wouldn't have to draw one.

I was so grateful, as Vicki and I were leaving, I looked Jackie up and down and told her, "You know, Jac, you look like a demented undertaker," and she brightened up.

"Why, thank you, Ted," she said, and both our mothers rolled their eyes.

I wanted to tell Mom what Jackie had said about seeing ghosts in our house long before Vicki started, but I knew she'd explode if I said anything in front of Vicki. So I figured it could wait until the two of us were alone.

Instead, I got the hammer from Vicki's room while she and my mother were arguing about whether it was too late to go out and play in the backyard. I went down into the basement to nail my Luxembourg project together.

As soon as I turned on the light and looked down the stairs, I could tell that something was wrong. "Somebody's been messing with my project," I shouted.

In a much deeper voice, Zach rumbled, "Somebody's been messing with my project." Then he shifted to a tinny falsetto and repeated it again. "Somebody's been messing with my project and has broken it all to bits."

I gave him a dirty look to indicate that if it was him, he was one dead bear, then I ran downstairs.

The pictures, which I had so carefully set out on the piece of paneling, were scattered all over the place, some facedown on the dirt floor, quite a few crumpled as though they'd been stepped on. "Zach!" I hollered, tearing up the stairs with the hammer in my fist, which was—mostly—coincidence.

"Ted!" Mom caught me before I could launch myself at him, which was probably safer for me, after all. "What is your problem?"

"He messed up my project," I yelled.

Zach shook his head in dumb innocence. Well, dumb was normal. "I haven't touched it," he protested.

"Just look," I said, tugging on Mom's arm even though she was trying to get sandwiches together for supper.

She came with me, as did Zach and Vicki.

"Look at this," I said. "Just look at it. As of Friday night, this was all set up and ready to be nailed together."

"I didn't do it," Vicki said.

Zach had grabbed a slice of salami off the kitchen counter, and he shook his head while he swallowed before answering, "And it wasn't me, either." And when Mom gave him a hard look, he added, "Honest. I was at Dom's house all day yesterday and today. You dropped me off and picked me up both times."

"You could have come back," I said. "It's not that far."

"Yeah, right," Zach said. "Like I have nothing better to do."

"Stop bickering." Mom kneeled down and smoothed out the wrinkles from one of the pictures. "Nothing is ruined. It just has to be set up again. It was probably mice."

"Yeah," Zach added, "everybody knows mice don't like Social Studies."

Mom gave him a don't-mess-with-me look. "They were probably running back and forth over the wood and knocked the papers off."

"Yeah," I said, "then a team of them got together and flipped the wood over. I had the good side up."

"Maybe the cockroach did it," Zach said, nodding toward Vicki, "so that her little invisible friend wouldn't do it first."

"Don't call your little sister a cockroach," Mom said.

"No cockroach," Vicki echoed.

Mom finished, "And she wouldn't be strong enough to lift this, anyway. Ted, are you sure?..."

Yeah, I was sure which end I'd had up and that neither Vicki nor mice could have flipped the wood over. And it certainly didn't seem likely that Zach would have gone so far out of his way just to sabotage my homework. I sat down heavily on the bottom step. "I think," I said, "it may have been Vicki's bad lady. I—"