“So you’re here for a noble cause. Well done, Susanna. Garrett, what—”
“I stole a lipstick,” Olivia interrupted.
I swiveled my head toward her, but she was looking down again, picking at her sandwich.
“What?” I said, genuinely shocked. Olivia Anne Willingham, shoplifter? I just . . . could not see that.
She kept tearing off little bits of the crust of her PB&J, her face as pink as the bow holding back her hair today. “It was dumb, I know.”
Then she raised her head, nodding at Garrett. “Sorry, your turn.”
I wanted to ask her more about the lipstick. How had a girl who freaked out every time me and Emma even thought about breaking a rule—
Oh.
Emma.
But before I could blurt out my suspicions, Garrett was talking. “Borrowed someone’s skateboard.”
“Borrowed?” Susanna asked, raising an eyebrow in a way that really impressed me. I’d never been able to do just one.
Garrett pushed his hair out of his face. “I was going to bring it back, promise.”
I looked over at Wesley.
“What about you?” I asked, even though I didn’t really expect an answer. He’d probably just shrug or something.
But then he said, in a surprisingly deep voice, “Nothing better to do.”
We all took that in, and finally, I shook my head and said, “Okay, cool, so Wes is clearly the weirdest among us.”
He grinned at that, because he was the weirdest among us, and then, almost as one, the five of us turned to look at the two other boys, Michael and Dalton.
“What do we think they did?” I asked, and Susanna narrowed her eyes.
“Michael goes to my school,” she said, “and I think he probably got in a fight or something. He does that a lot. The other one, who knows?”
“Various Jerkery,” I said, remembering how mean he’d been about Olivia’s journal, and the others all laughed.
Lunch was nearly over by then, and we all started picking up our trash and heading back inside.
As we did, I hung back near Liv, and only when the others had walked off did I ask, “So it was Emma, right?”
Olivia turned to me, her eyes wide, and I was glad she didn’t pretend not to know what I was talking about.
“Emma took the lipstick, and you took the fall?” I went on, and after a second, she shook her head.
“I know,” she said, and she sounded so . . . sad. “It was dumb.”
“Not dumb,” I said, and I kind of wanted to put an arm around her shoulders or something, but I didn’t. “Just . . . being a good sister.”
Liv looked at me for a long time, a little wrinkle between her eyebrows, and I could tell she was trying to decide if I was being serious or not.
So then I did put an arm around her shoulders, steering her to face Michael and Dalton just as Dalton tried to flip his water bottle into the big trash can Mrs. Freely had set up outside.
The bottle flipped all right, but it hit the edge of the trash can, splashing water back onto Dalton, who spluttered and said a word that would’ve gotten him in big trouble if Mrs. Freely had heard him.
“See that?” I told Liv. “That is dumb.”
She made a sort of choking sound that turned into a laugh, and as we walked back into the house, I kept my arm around her.
RubyToozday: I’ve been thinking!
OliviaAnneWillingham: Dangerous.
RubyToozday: RUDE.
RubyToozday: About the house. All the stuff we’ve seen so far, the music box in that weird little closet, the pictures, the shadows, it all has to fit together somehow, right?
RubyToozday: Unless you think the house is just FULL OF GHOSTS.
OliviaAnneWillingham: No, I was thinking that, too. It means something, right?
OliviaAnneWillingham: Maybe the twins? Those little girls in the picture?
OliviaAnneWillingham: The music box was in that picture. We saw their dresses in that closet.
RubyToozday: And twins are creepy.
RubyToozday: No offense.
OliviaAnneWillingham: None taken. They were with Lucy in that picture, right?
OliviaAnneWillingham: They must’ve been her sisters.
OliviaAnneWillingham: But everyone says Lucy and Felix didn’t have family.
RubyToozday: And why would Lucy’s little sisters be haunting a place where they didn’t even live?
RubyToozday: Ghosts are weird, man.
OliviaAnneWillingham: You’re weird.
RubyToozday: RUDE AGAIN SOME MORE.
CHAPTER 20
RUBY
“I cannot believe we’re being entrusted with this,” I said that Monday, looking down at the paint buckets in front of us.
It’s not that I wasn’t excited about having something new to do, something that was not logging things in a notebook, but painting? Who gave a bunch of kids paint and said, “Go at it”?
I’d asked Mrs. Freely that, and she’d said this was a “base coat” and that professional painters would do the real work, and then, when I wondered out loud if maybe Mrs. Freely was just running out of stuff for us to do, she did that pressed lips/closed eyes thing again.
But now Garrett and I were in one of the second-floor bedrooms, three open cans of paint in front of us, staring at the blank walls.
“I don’t know, I think I might have some hidden artistic talent,” Garrett said, squatting down to dip his brush into the paint.
He rose back up, grinned at me, and gave the brush a little spin, and I guess that would’ve been cute if the paint hadn’t splattered him, me, and the wall in front of us.
“Awesome,” I muttered, looking at the splashes of Eggshell Sunlight on my bright pink shirt.
“Sorry,” he said, sheepish. Or as sheepish as Garrett got, I guess, since he added, “But it’s not like paint makes these shirts any uglier.”
“Sad, but true,” I answered, and then looked back at the wall. Would a coat of paint make it less horror-movie-set-looking? I was not convinced, but then, painting was a lot more fun than cleaning, so I was willing to give it a shot.
There was a bump from behind us, and we both turned to see Liv coming in, her own bucket of paint clutched in one hand, a paintbrush in the other. She was wearing her hair in a braid as usual, but there was a hot-pink ribbon twisted in it to match her shirt. A few weeks ago, that bright pink ribbon would have irritated me, but today, it made me smile and think that hey, at least she was making the best out of a terrible outfit.
“Do you think this is safe?” she asked, looking up at me and Garrett with a frown. “Letting us paint? This room doesn’t seem all that ventilated.”
Ah, there was the Olivia who irritated me. “They wouldn’t let us do it if it wasn’t safe,” I reasoned, dipping my brush into Garrett’s open can of paint. “Because illegal.”
“I feel like all of this probably violates some kind of child labor law,” Garrett said with a shrug. “But they made our parents sign a ton of paperwork before we even got here, so . . .”
He let that trail off, and Olivia and I looked at each other.
“Our parents wouldn’t let us do something that wasn’t safe,” she finally said in that “I am Olivia Anne Willingham, and my word is law” tone, and then she dipped her own brush into the paint and smoothed a solid stripe on the wall.
“Your faith is touching, Liv,” I told her, but I started painting, too, and for a while we worked quietly. It was actually kind of nice, not having to fill up the silence. I liked to talk—probably too much—maybe because the house was so quiet in the afternoons now that I was staying by myself and not with Grammy anymore. But then I remembered that Grammy and I had had this, too, the ability to sit in a room, her sketching, me reading or playing solitaire on her computer, neither of us
saying anything, but knowing the other was there. I’d always liked those afternoons of comfortable quiet, and it was really weird to find them again in this creepy house with Garrett McNamara and Olivia Willingham of all people.
Plus, painting was soothing, watching the pale greenish walls turn a warmer cream color. Looking at that, I was almost able to believe Live Oak House wasn’t so scary after all. That the shadows and shapes, the weird thing in the attic, all of that was just a quirk of the house or something. Like having termites, only in this case the termites were ghosts.
Or something.
Garrett stepped back from the painting, holding one arm out and pointing his thumb up like the wall in front of him was some great work of art.
I laughed at him, and even Liv looked over and smiled.
“Dork,” I said, and he sat down on the floor, smiling.
“You know, that color really makes this room seem less gross,” he said. “Maybe people will actually have parties and weddings and things here after all.”
I shrugged, swiping a stripe of paint across the plaster wall. “It would take a lot more than paint to make me party in here, but it doesn’t hurt.”
Garrett shrugged. “Nah, you could make it the whole theme of the wedding. Weddings have themes, right?”
Olivia laid down her own paintbrush, sitting on the floor, too, legs crossed. “What, ‘A Very Ghostly Wedding’ or something? ‘Haunted Honeymoon’?”
“‘Weird Wedding,’” Garrett and I said at almost the exact same time, and then we both laughed.
He shook his head. “This place really isn’t all that weird, though, you know? Just old and full of crap.”
I widened my eyes at that, and saw Liv make a similar face.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I definitely feel like some . . . things have gone on in here.”
Liv and I hadn’t told anyone about the attic or the music box, maybe because we didn’t want anyone to make fun of us, or maybe because it felt like something we didn’t want to get into.
Or maybe because it was ours.
“Like what?” he asked. “Spooky sounds, creepy dolls, lots of dead stuff?” He shrugged, his shoulders narrow underneath his bright pink T-shirt. “That’s the house. Besides, if there were any ghosts, they’d totally go after those weird kids from Greene County, right?”
He suddenly rapped his knuckles on the floor, the sound too loud. “Hey, ghosts!” he called, and I instinctively moved forward, waving my hands and shushing him.
“Do you want to be eaten?” I asked. “Ghost-eaten?”
Then I felt dumb because he laughed and knocked on the floor again. “If you eat kids, ghosts, you want the Greene County kids, okay?”
Garrett was still laughing when he leaned back, putting both hands behind him to brace himself. And then his laugh turned into a yelp as he suddenly shot to his feet, one elbow catching the open paint can near him, sending Eggshell Sunlight oozing out across the hardwood. I don’t think I’d ever seen anyone move that fast.
Well, I hadn’t until Olivia shot to her feet as paint spread near the bottom of her sneaker. One second, the three of us had been joking, and the next, we were all standing up, staring at each other. My heart was pounding, and when I looked back at Garrett, for a second I thought there must have been another can of paint near us or something, a red one, because fat red drops were dripping from his palm, leaving bright stains on his white Vans.
And then I realized he was bleeding.
“Omigosh,” I said in one big rush. “You cut yourself!”
Garrett looked back down at where he’d been sitting, frowning at the floor. “Y-yeah,” he said unsteadily, his gaze still scanning the spot where he’d been. “I guess I did.”
Olivia had already whipped one of the spare towels out of her equipment caddy and was handing it to him. “Is it bad?” she asked. “Should we go get Mrs. Freely?”
Garrett was a little pale, but he pressed the cloth to his palm and shook his head. “No, I don’t think it’s a big deal.”
Olivia was crouched down near where Garrett had been sitting. “If it was a nail, you need a tetanus shot,” she said, because if there was one thing Olivia could be counted on, it was to go worst-case scenario. “But I don’t see anything,” she went on, lightly running her hand over the floor. There were still some drops of blood on the dark wood, and she avoided those.
“It probably was a nail,” I said. “What else could it be?”
I glanced over at Garrett and saw that he had moved the towel and was staring at his palm and then, I swear, he actually swayed on his feet.
I stepped forward to take his hand. “Boys,” I muttered.
“It wasn’t a nail,” he said weakly, and I looked for myself at the wound just there at the meaty place on his palm at the base of his thumb.
And then I felt like I might start swaying.
Garrett was right. It wasn’t a scrape on his hand, or a neat hole from a nail.
It was a bite.
CHAPTER 21
OLIVIA
“Can a house give you rabies?”
I twisted in the seat to scowl at Ruby. We were all headed home early that day because of Garrett. Mrs. Freely had taken him to the hospital to get his bite checked out, afraid there was a rabid raccoon or something loose in the house. It didn’t matter how many times we told her we hadn’t seen anything, that Garrett had been sitting in the middle of the room, so it wasn’t like there was anywhere for an animal to hide, that we would’ve seen something if there had been. It couldn’t have even been hiding under the floorboards because that room had a solid concrete floor. No, it had just been the three of us, the only people—things, whatever—in the room.
But then, it had to be an animal. Bites didn’t appear out of nowhere.
“The house didn’t bite him,” I told Ruby now, keeping my voice low. Everyone was talking about Garrett, of course, wondering if there was some kind of wild animal loose in the house, and if there was, didn’t that mean that we couldn’t clean there anymore? That couldn’t be safe. Maybe the rest of the summer would see us all singing “Kumbaya” in the rec center after all.
“Okay, but something did, and you and I both know it wasn’t an animal,” Ruby answered. The blue streak in her hair was tucked behind her ear, but she tugged at it now, pulling it in front of her eyes briefly before tucking it back into place. “It was something else, and I bet the hospital is gonna say so, too.”
I squirmed in my seat, looking out the window, watching the town roll by. I still felt jumpy and weird, like the adrenaline hadn’t worn off yet, plus blood always freaked me out. There hadn’t been much on Garrett’s hand, but there had been enough.
“He had just joked about the house eating people, and then he got bitten,” Ruby said.
“So the house has ears and teeth?” I asked, wrinkling my nose, and Ruby mimicked my expression.
“I don’t know,” she admitted, then glanced behind her at the other kids. Susanna had apparently sneaked her phone into her pocket today, because she was keeping it low and clearly texting people. Wesley was staring out the window, and the other two boys were asleep again. I was beginning to wonder if there was something wrong with all of them.
“Do you want to come to my house?” Ruby said suddenly.
I looked over at her, feeling my eyebrows slide up to my bangs.
“Your house?” I repeated. Outside, the town was sliding past, a blur of green trees and bright flowers, red mailbox flags raised, and white shutters.
Ruby made a face at me. “Yeah, my house. My domicile. Mi casa. The place in which I abode.”
My phone was wedged in my back pocket—I knew it was against the rules, but hey, what if there was an emergency?—and I squirmed on the seat to get it out. “Let me text my mom and ask if I can,” I said, and I thought Ruby actually looked a li
ttle surprised. Had she thought I’d say no?
Well, I couldn’t really blame her for that. I had thought I’d say no, to be honest. But today had been weird, and other than Garrett, there was no one but Ruby who knew about all that weird. It might be nice to talk it out rather than whispering in the van.
Mom’s reply came in fast, a quick Sure! followed by, Do you need me to come pick you up after?
I asked Ruby, but she shook her head. “My mom can drive you back. She gets off work at four today. Or you can ride back on my bike. It’s not that far.”
I remembered that back when Emma and Ruby had been friends, Ruby had been around a lot, especially in the summer. She must have ridden her bike over, but I’d never really noticed. I didn’t think she lived all that close, honestly, but then, Ruby’s mom seemed a lot less strict than mine.
We stopped at the rec center, the van pulling into its usual space, and I slid across the seat, trying to keep my sweaty legs from making an embarrassing sound on the leather. Ruby’s bike was locked up on the rack by the doors, and as we walked over to it, I noticed for the first time that it was a really nice bike. Bright green, thin tires, a line of multicolored beads on one spoke.
Ruby saw me looking and grinned. “The best, right? My grammy got it for me last year for Christmas.”
That wasn’t the first time Ruby had mentioned her grandmother. My own grandparents lived in Florida and California, and we didn’t see them all that much, but Ruby’s grandmother had lived here in town. I remembered her picking Ruby up from our house a few times. And then I remembered Ruby saying she’d hoped Emma might come back around to being her friend after her grandmother died, and I realized I didn’t really know what to say to her about all this. So I smiled and nodded at the bike. “I like the beads.”
Ruby turned back, briefly touching those beads with a finger before standing up, the bike lock on her hand, and gesturing for me to sit on the handlebars. “Come on,” she said. “It’s not far, and you can wear my helmet.”