And then we stepped into the attic.
It was bigger than I’d expected, but then I was used to our little attic that mostly held only Christmas decorations and a few old toys that I hadn’t wanted to get rid of. But this? This place was half the size of my house, I was pretty sure, and compared to the rest of Live Oak House, it actually seemed sort of empty. There were a few trunks—one of which was covered in a pile of old coats—some big garbage bags full of things, and a few old, broken pieces of furniture.
“I guess everything worth keeping is down in the house,” I said, my voice sounding too loud in the quiet, dusty space.
“Maybe,” Olivia agreed. “So . . . now what?”
The attic was so massive that I wasn’t even sure where we should start. Or what I was looking for, to be honest. But the key had to mean something, right?
“It’s actually kind of nice up here,” Liv said, and I turned to see her walking toward the little circle window at the other end of the attic. I wondered who had spent so much time making that window for this space where no one would ever really see it. The panes were designed to look like the bloom of a flower, the glass in the center tinted a watery yellow, and when the sunlight hit it just right, it made prisms on the hardwood floors.
The attic was dusty and hot and dim, so I wasn’t sure I would go so far as to call it “pretty,” but I appreciated Liv’s enthusiasm. It was one of the things I was starting to like about Olivia, really, the way she could find something nice about nearly everything—even the attic of a haunted house.
There was no need for the flashlight after all, so I kept it in my pocket and walked over to Liv. From this high up, you could actually make out the outskirts of town. I could see the very top of the Baptist church’s bell tower, plus the long line of oaks that made up the main street through the historic center.
“You’re right,” I said, surprised. “This is nice. If I were a ghost, this is where I would stay. Take in the views, occasionally creep people out . . .”
Liv scrunched up her face at that, but at least she didn’t tell me not to mention ghosts. I figured that was progress.
“But let’s be real,” I told her, touching her elbow lightly. “This is like the least spooky place we’ve seen in the house so far. Maybe we should go—”
My words disappeared in the loud crack! of the attic door suddenly slamming closed.
“Oh, no, no, no,” I babbled, rushing forward, Olivia right behind me.
I had heard the heavy metallic thump of the key as it had fallen out of the door on the other side. Where I’d left it, like a total idiot.
“No, no, bad door, bad!” I continued, my fingers closing around the doorknob. It was icy cold against my hand, the kind of cold so sharp it nearly burns, and I released it with a cry. What the heck? But then I gritted my teeth and tugged again, still hoping in some little (and stupid, I guess) part of my heart that the door would just . . . give. Open.
But of course, it was shut—and locked—tight.
I kicked at the bottom of the door even though that was also stupid, but I didn’t want to say a bad word in front of Liv, despite all the bad words I had ever thought of currently bashing around in my brain.
“Maybe it’s stuck,” Liv offered, tugging at the doorknob herself. “And if we pull hard enough . . .”
She pulled with everything she had. I could see the strain in her arms as she leaned back away from the door, both hands wrapped around the knob. She pulled hard enough that for a second I worried she’d pop the knob right off, and then where would we be?
Stumbling away from the door, Liv grunted and wiped her hands on her shorts.
“So, not stuck,” she said, and I shook my head.
“Nope. Ghost-locked.”
Liv shot me a look. “Or an old door that got caught in a draft and accidentally locked,” she said, and I crossed my arms over my chest, looking down my nose at her.
“Liv,” I said. “Are you honestly still doing, ‘It was just some random noises! A trick of the light! Magical wind that magically locked a magical door!’”
She mimicked my pose. “Someone has to be the sensible one here, Ruby,” she said, “and it’s obviously never going to be you. You got us locked in the attic!”
“How is this my fault?” I asked, throwing up my hands. “I was over there with you by the window, so it’s not like I’m the one who slammed the door.”
“But we wouldn’t be up here if it weren’t for you,” Liv said, pointing a finger at me. Not even pointing, really, more like stabbing the air, and I did not appreciate that.
“You agreed we should come up here,” I shot back. “I was trying to help you.”
Liv made a scoffing sound, blowing out her breath and ruffling her bangs. “Some help,” she said. “You just—”
And then there was another sound from the opposite side of the attic, a sort of slithery thump that startled us both.
It was the trunk with all the coats on it. Those coats were now on the floor, and Liv and I glanced at each other.
“Another draft?” I asked her, and while she scowled at me, she didn’t say anything. So I walked over to the trunk and knelt down, grimacing as my bare knees met the gritty floor.
“What are you doing?” Olivia asked as I lifted the lid. It gave with a creak and a shower of rust flakes.
“What does it look like?” I asked her. “Clearly whatever led us up here wants us to look in the trunk.”
I waited for Olivia to say there was nothing up here, that this was all clearly some kind of joke being played on us, but instead, she crossed the attic and sat down next to me. “What’s in it?”
I reached inside, pulling out a swath of fabric. Once upon a time, it had probably been white, but age had turned it yellow, and there were holes all through it.
“Ick,” I muttered, tossing it aside, but Olivia caught it and gently laid it in her lap.
Under the fabric was another coat, this one heavy black wool, and under that, there were a bunch of old photographs.
“Rejects from the room downstairs?” I wondered, picking them up. There were all black-and-white, the edges wrinkled. The top one showed a family, Mom, Dad, daughter, and two babies all swaddled up, posed in front of a cabin.
Olivia tapped the babies. “I wonder if those are the twins from downstairs.”
“Probably,” I said, then turned the picture over.
The Wrexhall Family, 1890.
Flipping the picture back over, I studied the people in it. “That’s weird,” I said. “They all have dark hair.”
Olivia, whose own hair was nearly as blond as Felix Wrexhall’s in that portrait, was still staring at the photograph. “What does that have to do with anything?”
I moved to the next photograph in the stack. The twins again, younger than they were in the picture downstairs, but not babies anymore. Maybe about five, both sitting in front of a tree, two dolls lying on the blanket in front of them. Their older sister, the same dark-haired girl from the earlier picture, was leaning against the trunk. She looked familiar to me somehow, but I couldn’t quite place her.
“The blond hair,” I reminded Olivia, distracted by those dolls in the picture. Were they in the doll room downstairs? “Mrs. Freely said it was a Wrexhall family trait. These people don’t have it.”
Olivia leaned closer, her hair falling over her shoulders. “Maybe she was wrong? Felix and Matthew were the only Wrexhalls in this town. Maybe the ones before them had dark hair.”
“Maybe,” I said, but I kept looking at the pictures, thinking there was something I should be seeing, or something I was missing.
I turned this one over, and there, in pencil, was written, Lucy with Rebecca and Octavia, 1895.
“Lucy,” Olivia said. “That was Felix’s wife, right?”
Nodding, I looked closer at the
picture. Lucy was standing right behind the twins, a dark shape on the blanket near her foot.
“Is that the music box?” I asked Olivia, tapping at the picture. It was hard to tell—the box could’ve been anything, after all, but we’d found it in Lucy’s bedroom. Had it been hers or the twins’? And were they her sisters? They must’ve been.
“These pictures have to be important,” I said to Liv, moving on to the next one. This was just of a tree, but a really big one.
Not any tree, either. I was pretty sure I was looking at the same tree that was downstairs, the big one Felix Wrexhall had had planted in the house when he built it.
Liv’s fingers suddenly dug into my arm, and, irritated, I tried to shake her off.
“Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s the tree,” I said, but then she was standing up, tugging me so hard that I had no choice but to stand up, too.
I raised my head to see Olivia looking at something over my shoulder, her eyes wide.
“What?” I asked, and she raised one hand, pointing behind me.
“Okay, that is seriously not cool,” I told her, swatting at her hand. “Don’t do the ‘ooooooh, there’s something behiiiiind yoooouuu’ thing, when—”
Without saying a word, Liv grabbed my shoulders and slowly spun me to face the attic door.
CHAPTER 18
OLIVIA
Ruby and I stood there, frozen in place, watching the top of the attic door.
Earlier, when we’d come in, I’d noticed the little window on top of the door, remembering that it was called a transom, because my parents had had one put in over our front door a few years ago so we’d have more light at the front of the house. This window didn’t let in any light from the dim staircase outside, but there was something moving against it now, something darker than the gloom outside the attic.
It was more solid than I would’ve thought a shadow could be. And it was moving back and forth against the glass.
The glass that was at least nine feet above the floor.
And then I realized that, no, it wasn’t a shadow.
It was two shadows.
Ruby was breathing slowly next to me, in and out, and when I looked over, I could see little puffs coming from her lips. Earlier, the attic had been so hot, I hadn’t been sure how we could spend longer than five minutes in it, but now I was freezing, almost shivering with cold.
“You want to call that a trick of the light?” Ruby asked, and I shook my head slowly, my eyes still locked on . . . whatever it was.
There was no sound, and for some reason, that freaked me out the most. The shadows were sliding back and forth across the glass, pressing in in places, but totally noiseless. Back and forth, back and forth they went, like they were watching us, but also . . . taunting us or something.
I felt Ruby’s fingers squeeze mine, and I looked down. I hadn’t even realized we were holding hands, and I wasn’t sure which one of us had grabbed the other. In any case, I squeezed back.
The black spots at the window seemed to stretch, growing so that they covered the whole window, and I made a weird sound in the back of my throat, stepping back and tugging Ruby with me.
And then the shadows were gone.
The window was still dim—not much light in the hall—but those darker, blacker shadows had vanished. I let out a slow breath. “Well, that—” I started, and before I could finish, there was a slam as the door shot open so hard, it smacked into the wall, making me and Ruby both jump and shriek.
It was hot in the attic again, with that same dusty smell we’d noticed when we first came in, and no trace of the chill in the air we’d felt.
I expected Ruby to be excited or say something about sticking around for more proof, but instead, she raced for her plastic caddy, snatching it up off the floor so quickly that the bottles nearly fell out, and rushed back toward me, holding her free hand out, tugging me with her. “We’re getting out of here,” she said, almost breathless as she pulled me out of the attic, grabbing the key as we passed the door.
We were just clomping down the stairs back to the third floor when Mrs. Freely appeared on the landing. As soon as she saw us, she stopped, hands on her hips.
“What are you two doing?”
I’m not going to lie—I came close to spilling everything right then, I was so freaked out. It will sound stupid, but somewhere in my head, I was thinking that maybe telling a grown-up about the attic and what we saw would make it feel less scary. Because she would’ve said something reasonable about shadows and light or something, and while I wouldn’t have believed her at first, before long, I would have started accepting it, and by Friday, I’d probably be convinced I hadn’t seen anything scary at all.
But before I could say anything, Ruby blurted out, “We were familiarizing ourselves with the house, Mrs. Freely. You know, making sure we knew where everything was, but in a team, so we wouldn’t get lost.”
Mrs. Freely tilted her head, looking down at us. “I thought the two of you didn’t want to be a team,” she said. “That you couldn’t work together without fighting.”
Ruby had dropped my hand when we got to the bottom of the stairs, but now she took it again, giving me a smile that was way too bright and way too fake. “We’ve overcome our differences, Mrs. Freely,” she said sweetly. “Learned to work together like Camp Chrysalis wants.”
If Mrs. Freely hadn’t been staring at us, I would’ve rolled my eyes. For someone so good at lying when she wanted to be, Ruby was laying it on really thick right then.
But weirdly enough, it was working. Mrs. Freely seemed to relax a little, some of the tension leaving her shoulders.
“Well, that is good,” she said slowly, looking at our joined hands. “But you know you’re not supposed to go above the second floor. This house is in good shape, structurally, but it’s always better to be safe than sorry.”
“Agreed,” Ruby said, finally letting go of my hand. “In fact, I think I’ll make that my first tattoo. Thanks, Mrs. Freely.”
Mrs. Freely did that thing she did a lot with Ruby, blinking and jerking her head back so that she suddenly had like four chins. Not for the first time, I wondered where Ruby had learned to talk to grown-ups like that. Like she was one of them. Was it something she could teach me, or had she just been born with it?
Finally, Mrs. Freely just shook her head, sighed, and said, “Well, good. And you both might want to remember that should there be any . . . incidents here at Camp Chrysalis, there will be consequences.”
I knew we had to get through the summer and “graduate” at the end, but this was the first time I’d heard about what might happen if we got in trouble at camp. Wasn’t camp punishment enough?
But then Mrs. Freely added, “I don’t like to bring it up unless I think I need to, because, of course, we want you all to be on your best behavior without any sort of . . . negativity hanging over you. But without a good report from me, other corrective measures might need to be taken. Detention at your school, other forms of community service . . .”
She trailed off, then smiled at both of us, patting our shoulders. “But it’s not going to come to that, is it, girls?”
Swallowing hard, I shook my head, visions of picking up trash in the park suddenly all I could see. “No, ma’am,” I said, even as I felt Ruby look over at me. “It’s not.”
CHAPTER 19
RUBY
It had taken a while for us to figure out our lunch spots, but it eventually ended up being those two boys from the county over—Dalton and Michael—sitting under the tree together while Garrett, Liv, Wesley, Susanna, and I all sat on the porch that Friday, eating our sandwiches and drinking the bad juice boxes. Since Olivia had told me that the fruit punch was where it was at, I’d made sure to grab one for all of us as soon as I could, sometimes before it was even time for lunch. That meant that the juice was usually kind of warm before we got to it, bu
t hey, at least it wasn’t gross.
Let the Greene County guys have the icky juice.
“I am so sick of dead birds,” Susanna said, tugging a corner of Swiss cheese off her sandwich and popping it in her mouth. “I’m running out of ways to list them.”
“Same,” Garrett said. “Well, not birds, but pictures. Still boring, though.”
Wesley didn’t say anything. To be honest, I’m not sure he knew how to talk, since we’d never heard him speak, but he gave a shrug that seemed to say that everything had been pretty dull for him, too.“Good point, Wes,” I said, and he grinned at me from underneath his curtain of hair.
I munched on my sandwich, a creation my mom made for me involving Nutella, bananas, and a sprinkling of wheat germ. So far, Liv and I hadn’t said anything to the others about the attic or the pictures, the shadows, any of it. Susanna knew about the music box, but since she hadn’t heard anything, she clearly thought we were making it all up. Plus, I wasn’t sure I wanted the others to know. It was kind of nice, having it just be me and Liv’s thing. Like the house had chosen us for some reason.
Which probably should’ve been creepy but, instead, felt kind of cool.
So, no, I wasn’t going to bring up the ghost stuff with the others. Instead, I tucked the rest of my sandwich back into my plastic bag, dusting my hands on my knees. “Okay,” I said. “I think it’s time we all fessed up to what we’re here for. I’ll go first. I’m Ruby Kaye, and I threw a bunch of glitter in the halls of a school. I know, I know. Totally a victimless crime.”
Susanna gave me a look. “Not for the janitor,” she reminded me, and I had to acknowledge that was a direct hit.
“Fair point. So why are you here?”
Sighing, Susanna sat up a little, linking her fingers on her knee. “I hit a kid with a lunch tray.”
Okay, that was impressive.
Garrett snorted. “Remind me never to make you mad.”
Susanna lifted one shoulder in a sort of elegant shrug. “He was being rude to a friend of mine, and we told him to stop. He didn’t stop, so. Lunch tray.”