There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around (6 page)

But she would have been an old lady by then, I
thought. And she probably wasn't African American, unless there was something about our family nobody was telling me.

Granddad continued, "The house went to Rebekka, who stayed a spinster all her life. Toward the end, her brother, Jacob, and his wife—Eudora, I think it was—moved in with her."

"Did Jacob and Eudora have any kids?" I asked to get him back on track.

"Of course they did," Granddad said. "Where do you think we come from? But they were all grown up by the time Jacob and Eudora moved back to Rochester. The house went to the oldest, my father's brother—the black sheep of the family, my crazy uncle Josiah—when their parents died."

"Black sheep" made my heart skip a beat before I remembered that it meant somebody nobody wanted to admit being related to. "Josiah's the one who made the house into a tavern," I said, remembering this part.

Grandma must have abandoned the repotting and been sharing the phone with Granddad. Her voice chirped into the receiver, "And not a nice one."

Granddad repeated, as though Grandma's volume hadn't nearly punctured my eardrum, "Grandma says, 'And not a nice one.' He kept it going even during Prohibition. Gin and loose women."

I heard Grandma hiss at him that I was too young for him to be talking to me about loose women. "Did he have any kids?" I asked.

"Nope," Granddad said. "That's why the house came to me, in 1947."

Grandma called into the phone, "And what a mess it was."

"I thought you were repotting," Granddad scolded her. To me, he said, "And we, of course, only had boys: your father, your uncle Bob, and your uncle Steve. I suppose one of the tavern girls could have died. Those were pretty rough times.
What?
" That last was apparently directed to Grandma, who was scolding him in the background again.

None of this was any help.

"OK," I said. "Well, thanks a lot."

"Ted?" Grandma had obviously wrested the phone from Granddad. "What exactly is this school project?"

"Well, it's not really a school project," I started.

"Because," Grandma continued, "if you need to write about something interesting that happened in your house, you could write about the secret room."

A tingle of excitement started all over me, but I told myself it was probably nothing. "What secret room? You mean down in the basement?" There are several little rooms down there—root cellars, and places for shelves and shelves of canned food, needed in the days before refrigerators and easy shopping trips to the supermarket. I'd explored all of them before I was old enough to go to school.

But, "No," Grandma said. "This was a tiny room we found under the kitchen when we ripped up the kitchen floor—under the kitchen, but over the basement."

This was totally new to me.

Grandma went on. "We had no idea it was there, just an empty space, oh, maybe as big as the new powder room but not nearly as tall. And there wasn't even a trapdoor to get down there, though that was probably covered over when Josiah turned the place into a tavern. We wouldn't have found it except that we ripped up the subflooring when we put in the gas furnace. It got sealed back up again when we finished the floor."

"Was there..."—I swallowed hard—"anybody buried in there?"

Grandma laughed at me. "No," she said. "No bodies. The only thing we found was an old journal—Winifred's?" She and Granddad had a hasty discussion. "Winifred's or Rebekka's, we can't remember. We read it at the time, and I remember it had something to do with the Underground Railroad."

"
The Underground Railroad?
" I squeaked.

Grandma, who doesn't think any more highly of the New York State school system than Granddad does, figured I didn't know what she was talking about. "Harriet Tubman," she said. "Frederick Douglass. Runaway slaves."

"In our house?" I was impressed.
That has to be it,
I thought, getting a mental picture of Vicki's bad lady. A runaway slave who'd died and who held me and Vicki, as white kids, responsible. Well, maybe not. That left too many questions unanswered—like, How come she'd haunted Jackie and Vicki but not Zach and me? and What about all those years in between dying and now?—but at least it was a beginning. "You didn't put the journal back in the room when you sealed it up, did you?" I asked.

"No," Grandma said. "We put in some newspapers and magazines for somebody else to find, someday—"

"You also left my measuring tape in there," Granddad complained.

"You should have moved it when I told you to," Grandma snapped. "Now what did we do with the journal?"

"Beats me," Granddad said.

"I think it's in the attic," Grandma told me. "We thought maybe one of our boys might want to bring it into school one day, so we left it out. I don't think any of them ever did, so it's nice that you will. I think it's in the attic."

If it was in the attic, I knew exactly where it had to
be: in a trunk full of stuff my mother had gathered together that was in the house before she and Dad got married. "Thank you, thank you, thank you," I said.

"You're welcome," Grandma said. "Good luck on your school project."

"It's not—" I started.

"Say good-bye, Floyd," she told Granddad.

"Bye-bye," Granddad said.

"Bye-bye," I answered.

I WASN'T EVEN THINKING
scary thoughts as I put my hand on the doorknob of the door to the attic stairs. I was thinking of the ghosts of Marella and her mother more as a puzzle that was about to be solved than as spooky business.

But then I put my hand on the doorknob.

There was a loud bang and the door shook, as though someone on the attic side had taken a flying leap off the top stair and crashed into the door.

I took a quick step back.

The doorknob moved and rattled.

I took another step back.

The big brass key—which nobody ever uses to lock the door and which is always in the lock because, my mother points out, if we ever took it out, we'd never find it again—the key wiggled, then flew out of the lock, landing near my feet.

On the other hand,
I told myself, as I quickly put more distance between the key and my feet,
this can probably wait until Zach or Mom or Dad gets home.

The fact that they didn't believe in ghosts wasn't important. I could tell them that I'd talked to Grandma about the journal and didn't want to mess around with their stuff.

Which didn't sound like me at all—I knew any one of them would demand to know what I was really up to.

Plus, it'd never work with Zach. He'd tell me to get the journal myself.

Which left Mom or Dad. Was it fair to send someone all unsuspecting up against a ghost who could pound doors and throw keys ? Yet, if I tried to warn them the ghost was up there, that would distract them while they yelled at me that there wasn't any such thing as a ghost.
Then
they'd tell me to get it myself.

Besides, the ghost obviously didn't want me up in the attic. Why not? I'd been up there Saturday afternoon looking for rope to show off the magic rope tricks I'd learned at the museum. Why had the ghost let me up then but not now? The only answer was that the ghost had been eavesdropping. She'd heard Grandma tell me about the journal, and she didn't want me seeing it.

Which meant I absolutely
had
to get it now because, if I waited for my parents, chances were the journal would end up in even worse shape than how I'd found my Luxembourg project.

I stood with my back against the hallway wall, watching the key just sitting there on the floor and feeling my heart rate slow down to about five beats per second or so.

All right,
I told myself, still just standing there.
All right.

I was looking for some excuse to stay just where I was, but nothing came to me.

All right.

I pushed myself away from the wall, and the key started to move. For a second I froze.

The ghost seemed to be having a difficult time—which was good. Which meant she wasn't as capable of handling solid objects as I had feared. Which I should have found reassuring.

But then slowly, steadily, the key started sliding across the rug, away from me. Toward the door. Toward the crack under the door. She'd locked the door, I realized, and now she was about to put the key beyond my reach.

I lunged, throwing myself on the key like one of the Buffalo Bills sacking somebody else's quarterback.

I thought I'd feel something at least semisolid, but there was nothing, not even the sense of cold I'd expected, like air released from a long-sealed coffin. For a second I wondered if I'd missed. I reached under myself, in the vicinity of my chest, which was where I estimated the key should be, and there it was.

Clutching the key tightly, just in case she tried to get it away from me, I sat up.

Nothing.

I'll just sit here for a couple hours and catch my breath,
I thought.

But if she wasn't here, she was probably up in the attic, searching for the journal.

So, against my better judgment, I got up, unlocked the door, then tucked the key into my pocket. Unless this ghost was a pickpocket, she wouldn't be locking me in.

I opened the door.

Something slammed it shut again, in my face.

Taking a steadying breath and getting my foot ready, I opened the door again.

Nothing.

Or, at least, nothing I felt.

I reached up and tugged on the string that switches on the light over the stairs.

The light came on.

A second later it turned off.

I had taken only one step up. I turned back and tugged the string again, this time not letting go.

The light came on.

"There," I said out loud for the ghost to hear.

The lightbulb exploded.

This was getting worse and worse, but there was nothing I could do. I let go of the string and ran up the
stairs. The attic is one gigantic room, with two big round windows at the front and the back of the house and one short but wide one on the right-hand side, so I didn't really need the light, anyway.

Upstairs was cold and dusty. Clothes bags hung on racks, always there to hold clothes from whatever season it wasn't. Most of our outgrown clothes went to the Salvation Army, but there were boxes that held "special" clothes—the baptism gown all three of us had worn, my First Communion suit (Zach's had been loaned to Scott Bickham, our next-door neighbor, who'd moved away without returning it), souvenir T-shirts we'd gotten on various vacations—and the duffel bag containing Dad's stuff from his years in the Marine Reserves.

As I walked past the boxes of clothes, there was a crash behind me. I whirled around and saw that one of the boxes from the top of the pile had fallen to the floor.

Behind me—the direction I
had
been going—there was another thud. Again I turned. It was another box, this one from the section where Mom saved every single drawing and test and homework assignment from our years in school. (Someday, if we survived long enough, Luxembourg would be up here, too.)

Yet another box of clothes hit the floor. I forced myself not to turn around. "Enough nonsense," I said, not sounding nearly as stern as Ms. DiBella can manage.

There was a flapping noise at the side window, like
bat wings smacking frantically against the glass. That got me to look, even though I know bats don't move around in the daylight.

Nothing.

I was trying hard not to breathe like I was going into a panic, even though I was going into a panic.

There were old rolled-up rugs here, baby furniture we were holding onto just in case Uncle Steve ever settled down and started a family, boxes of decorations from Easter and Valentine's Day and Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that holiday that comes before Thanksgiving that I didn't even want to think about at this particular moment, and—

Something brushed against my ankle.

I shuddered but forced myself not to look.
Probably a spider,
I told myself,
and I'm not afraid of spiders.
Or a hairy dustbunny. Or...

It doesn't make any difference,
I told myself.
Just keep walking.

I walked past all the old lamps and chairs and general stuff that a family keeps, things that are too old-fashioned or too ugly to use but too good to throw away, until there, under the far window, I spied the trunk I had always thought looked like a treasure chest, the one that had held my grandparents' things when they had been young and just married and had honeymooned in Europe years and years and years ago.

Kneeling down in the dust in front of the trunk, I pushed up the lid.

And nearly lost my fingers as it slammed back down again.

"Knock it off, you," I said, my confidence inching upward since she seemed, after all, incapable of getting a good solid hold on me.

I opened the trunk again.

There were mostly books in there; Mom is physically incapable of getting rid of books. And these weren't even hers. There were schoolbooks from the 1960s with my father's and my uncles' names written in them; books with real exciting names, like
The Red Book of Fairy Tales
and
The Blue Book of Fairy Tales
; newspapers from when Alan Shepard became the first American man in space and from the day John Kennedy was shot; my grandparents' 1950 passports; a red leather book, which I thought might be what I was looking for but it turned out to be a sign-in book from the funeral parlor for my great-grandmother Caroline.

So far all I'd done was rummage through the trunk. What I needed to do was unpack it, take things out to get to the lower layers. I'd just decided that, when I realized what I was doing: While I used my right hand to sort through the mess, my left hand had been holding back a little book with a cracked black leather cover.

I opened the book. Lines and lines of handwritten words, close together but still somehow spidery. I turned one thick yellow page and the next, and there in the middle of the page, the names Rebekka and Jacob leaped out at me. The children of Theodore and Winifred
Beatson. One more page, and there at the top was the date May 5, 1851.