SIX
It's not like it was that far back to Dot's, and really, we probably wouldn't have taken a lift from Dallas if he hadn't insisted. But there we were, crammed onto the back of his motorcycle, me straddling big metal saddlebags, holding on to Holly, and Holly in the middle, hanging on to Dallas. It reminded me a lot of getting a ride from Marissa.
Dallas comes putting to a stop at the end of the Huntley driveway, and while he's waiting for a pickup truck to go rumbling by, he flicks away a few oak leaves that have wedged themselves between cables by the speedometer and says, “She's a neat old lady, isn't she?”
We both call, “Yeah,” and he calls back, “Too bad no one ever found that gold. Could've made all the difference.”
Holly says, “What gold?”
He checks us out in his rearview mirror, then rubs it clean with the sleeve of his shirt. “I thought she told you the story!”
“She didn't tell us about any gold!”
He pulls out onto the main road and shouts, “Maybe she's given up. When I first came on, she had me digging holes all over that property. There's some crazy riddle in Mary's diary about rocks and ridges and hidden treasure, but I sure haven't been able to help her out.”
I shout, “You've seen the diary?”
“What?”
I shout louder, “Have you seen the diary?”
“Oh, sure. Ask her. She'll show it to you.”
Now I've got a million questions colliding in my brain, but it's kind of hard to ask questions in a sixty-mile-anhour windstorm when you're hanging on for dear life. So I just hunker down, and before you know it, we're squeaking to a stop at Meadow Lane.
We peel ourselves off the bike and try to sound grateful when we say, “Thanks!” And I was planning to ask him some questions about the gold, but then I notice that Holly's looking kind of green. Besides, Dallas doesn't give me the chance. He flashes us a smile, calls, “See ya!” and then kicks up dust getting back on the road.
The second he's gone, Holly fans the air in front of her and makes a choking sound. “Oh my god.”
“What?”
“I need a bath. Oh, yuck!”
“What do you mean?”
She's still fanning air. “Didn't you smell that?”
“No…”
“Oh God, you are so lucky. I can't believe you couldn't smell him.”
“Dallas?”
“Yes, Dallas! That guy has the worst B.O. I have ever smelled, and believe me, I've been around some pretty rank people.”
I guess I was looking pretty surprised because Holly fans the air one last time, then heads down Meadow Lane, saying, “Next time you ride in the middle. Oh, pew!”
So much had happened since we'd left Dot's house that you'd think Holly and I would be jabbering about Moustache Mary and Lucinda and what Dallas had said about some stash of missing gold, but we weren't. We just walked along, doing some mental sorting. Then, when we get to the DeVrieses' porch, Holly asks, “Do you think they should've moved her?”
Right away, I know she's talking about Mary. “To the cemetery downtown?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I don't know.”
“Well, do you think she's still there?”
I look at Holly. “I guess it depends on whether or not you believe in ghosts.”
Dot throws the door open and says, “Why are you guys just standing there? Come on in!” She practically drags us in, then shuts the door behind us. “What took you so long? We were starting to think you got lost.”
Now this is not a question you can answer in one word, or even one sentence, so I guess it's a good thing Dot forgot she had asked it in the first place. She heads off, saying, “C'mon! We've got to set up the carriage house before it gets dark. Marissa's out there putting up the cots. Can you help me with these sleeping bags and pillows?” Then she loads us both down with flannel bedrolls and leads us outside.
Their carriage house is actually really neat. It's like a barn, only without hay or horse poop. Not that there isn't the potential to have fresh and processed hay— there are two stables with a loft over the top—but both are empty and the room smells more like bleach than organic oats.
Marissa sees us and says, “Oh, now you show up. I've pinched about every one of my fingers.”
Marissa's not what you'd call a mechanically minded individual, so I probably should've known better, but I flopped onto one of the cots and right away, snap! snap! I'm trapped in a tangle of springs and aluminum.
It might have only hurt, except the place that got hit the worst was my arm—right where I'd scraped it on the asphalt—so it killed.
Marissa comes running over and does the McKenze dance, trying to figure out how to untangle me. She pulls down one end, but it snaps back before I can get out. Dot rushes over to help her, and Holly pulls down the other end, and I roll out.
Marissa squats beside me and says, “Sammy, I'm so sorry! Are you all right? I guess I forgot to push the locks down on that one.”
I hold my arm and glare at her, so she says, “Sammy, I'm sorry. It was an accident. Sammy, stop it! What else do you want me to say?”
I mutter, “How about ‘Timber! ’?” then force up a little grin.
At first she doesn't get it, but when Dot and Holly laugh, she remembers my little adventure on her handlebars. She says, “Oh, Sammy. I'm so sorry!”
The throbbing in my arm's starting to go away a bit, so I stand up and say, “Yeah, right. I know what's really going on: Heather's hired you to kill me, hasn't she?”
Marissa's eyes pop wide open. “Sammy!”
“Why else would you catapult me through the air and feed me to a man-eating cot?”
She's looking really worried, like she's not sure if I'm kidding or not. So I grin and say, “Marissa, it's all right. I'm fine.”
“Are you sure?”
I hobble around like I've just come home from a war. “Oh, yeah. Never felt better.”
She throws a pillow at me. “Stop that!”
“Ooooo! Getting serious now. We've advanced to pillow warfare!” I hurl it back at her. “Well, take that, you turncoat!”
She throws it at me again but hits Holly instead, and pretty soon the four of us are flinging pillows and sleeping bags and just basically pounding on each other. Finally, I get a sleeping bag over Marissa's head and roll her around, and after a minute of struggling to break free, she cries, “Surrender! I surrender!”
So I set Marissa free from her flannel prison, and we're all sprawled out on the floor laughing when we hear someone snicker.
We look over at the door, and standing there are two boys, older than us, but not much. The taller one's got a paper bag choked in one hand. He says, “Wow. Nice party,” and the other chimes in with, “Yeah. Looks like one of Bep and Anneke's.”
Dot snaps, “If you can't be nice, just mind your own business, all right?”
They take that as an invitation to come in. The taller one asks, “So who are your friends?”
Dot scowls at him, but then mutters, “Holly, Marissa, Sammy, meet my brothers, Stan and Troy.”
We all make little waving motions while we size each other up, then Stan chokes down his paper sack a bit more and gives us a little scowl. “I can't believe you're actually gonna sleep out here. I guess you're braver than I thought, Dot. I sure wouldn't sleep out here. Not with”—he waves a hand through the air—“you know.”
Dot hesitates, then shakes her head. “What are you talking about?”
Stan looks at all of us like, Uh-oh, and heads for the door. “Uh…never mind. I'm sure you'll sleep fine.”
“Stan!” Dot grabs his sleeve. “Quit trying to spook us!”
His voice drops and he says to Dot, “Sorry. Forget I said anything. I didn't know you didn't know.”
Dot's face crinkles up. “About what?”
He looks her straight in the eye and whispers, “About what happened in here.”
“What happened in here?”
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“Some lady got trampled by a horse.” He looks up at the rafters. “Apparently she's still here.”
She lets go of his sleeve. “Oh, shut up! You're trying to tell us this place is haunted?”
“It's true. Ask anyone in the neighborhood.” He laughs. “Or just tell me about it in the morning.”
He and Troy head for the door, but you can tell Dot doesn't want him to leave yet. And you know she's dying to ask him more about the ghost, but she stops herself and instead she asks, “Uh…what's in the bag?”
He holds it up a bit. “Oh, this? Just some entertainment for tonight.”
“Like what kind of entertainment?”
He pulls out a string of firecrackers. “American entertainment.”
Troy grins and says, “We even got bottle rockets.”
“Dad's going to let you do that here?”
Stan scowls. “Are you kidding? We're on our way to Pioneer Village. Marko says the block parties over there get better every year.”
“What about sjoelbak? Aren't you going to play?”
He laughs. “Like I said, we're gonna have some American entertainment.”
They leave, and when Dot turns around, the look on her face is confused, almost sad.
Holly asks, “What's the matter?”
Dot sits down on a cot—which stays together just fine—and says, “We've always played sjoelbak. The whole family. And usually I wish Stan would just disappear 'cause he's such a pain in the neck, and he gets Troy acting all high and mighty, too. But now that he is going away…” She shakes her head. “I don't know. It's just weird.”
Holly tries to cheer her up with, “Well, it's not like there aren't going to be enough people…we're going to play, right?”
Marissa says, “Yeah. Where is this sjoelbak thing, anyway?”
Dot jumps to her feet. “Oh, that's right! We never did find it. Let's clean this place up and go check the basement.”
We pick everything up and tidy the cots, then follow Dot back toward the house.
The DeVrieses' basement wasn't through a skinny door and down some creaky stairs. Its entrance was outside, and the door was lying flat on the ground. Dot pulls up the door and we all stand around, looking down into this big black hole.
Marissa balks. “We're going down there?”
Dot laughs and says, “It's not spooky once I get the light on. Wait here if you want. I'll go down and turn it on.”
She disappears into the darkness, and after a minute the light comes on and she calls, “Come on down!”
So we file down the stairs, and the temperature drops with every step we take. The walls of the basement are plaster with big chunks missing, and the ceiling is only about seven feet high. There's a water heater, a furnace, and a bunch of pipes overhead, and then a group of pallets keeping boxes off the cement floor.
Holly says, “Wow, this is cool!”
Marissa rubs her arms and shivers. “Literally.”
Just then the basement ceiling creaks and we all look up. Dot says, “We're under the kitchen. That's Mom walking around up there.”
I say, “Listen! You can hear her talking!”
Dot says, “Yeah. There's a cupboard in the kitchen that has vents from the basement. In the old days they used the cupboard for storing potatoes and stuff you wanted to keep cool. Dad says he's going to board it over, but so far he hasn't.”
Marissa says, “Well, I'm freezing! Is that thing down here or not?”
Dot laughs and says, “Let me check back here.” She climbs behind the boxes and a minute later she calls, “Here it is!” and a six-foot plank of rosewood with a one-inch curb on three sides comes scooting over the boxes. “Can you reach this?”
Holly grabs one end and I grab the other, and when Dot reappears she yanks on the light chain and says, “Let's go.”
We hauled the sjoelbak up and out, and then Dot and I carried it like a stretcher into the house. We propped it against a wall near the dining room table and then wandered into the kitchen, where Dot's mom was draining water from a pan of boiled potatoes.
Dot says, “We found the sjoelbak, Mom.”
“Great, hon.” She puts the pan down. “Maybe you could set the table? Only for eight. The boys are spending the night at Marko's.” She takes one look at Marissa and says, “Do I need to turn the heat up?”
Marissa laughs and then chatters, “No, I think I'll just go get something warmer on.”
So while the rest of us work at putting blue-and-white dishes on a bright blue tablecloth in the middle of a half-blue room, Marissa runs out to the carriage house to get a sweater. And we've just set out little windmill salt shakers when Marissa comes stumbling back inside.
She's not wearing a sweater or a jacket, and she's still looking about as warm as an ice cube, only now her face has got about as much color, too. I say, “Marissa, are you all right?”
She nods, but her eyes are fixed straight ahead. Finally, she whispers, “But I think I want to go home.”
Mrs. DeVries comes over and eases her into a chair. “Are you sick?”
Marissa shakes her head.
“Then what is it? You look like you've seen a ghost.”
Marissa turns to Mrs. DeVries and whispers, “I don't know what else it could've been.”
SEVEN
Marissa looked like she'd seen a ghost all right, but I just couldn't buy it. I kneeled down next to her chair and said, “Marissa, there is no ghost. You just got spooked going out there by yourself.”
She snickers. That's all—just snickers. So I stand up and say, “Okay, so tell us what you saw.”
“Go see for yourself if you don't believe me.”
So we all go traipsing outside, me up front like I know exactly what I'm not going to see, and Mrs. DeVries in the back, coaxing Marissa along. And when I push open the carriage house door, I don't see white or light or anything ghoulish—what I see is a mess. There are clothes hanging from the rafters, others flung around the floor, and one of the cots is jackknifed closed.
Marissa looks straight at me. “See? And you should've heard the sound!”
“What sound?”
“It was a…a ghost sound!”
Now maybe if I'd been out there in the middle of the night by myself, I would've been spooked, too. But I wasn't out there by myself, and it wasn't even finished getting dark yet, so it was easy to say, “Marissa…this wasn't done by a ghost! Stan and Troy probably did it to try and scare us.”
Dot walks around with her head back, looking up at the rafters. “But Stan and Troy left half an hour ago!”
“That doesn't mean they didn't come back…”
Off in the distance a bell is ringing. Mrs. DeVries says, “That's our phone. Are you girls going to be all right?”
We say sure, so off she goes, and the minute she's gone Dot says, “If Stan and Troy did this, I'm going to kill them.”
We start picking clothes up and pulling them down, and Marissa's just starting to get some color back in her face when we hear, Woooooooo…Wooooooooooooo!
Marissa gulps, “There! Do you hear that?”
Everybody freezes, and there it comes again, Woooooooo…Wooooooooooo! Marissa screams and runs out the door, then stands outside looking in at the rest of us, rooted like plants in a pot.
Dot whispers, “Where'd that come from?”
I point one direction, Holly points the other.
Dot looks at our arms shooting off in opposite directions and doesn't go anywhere. And we stand there for another minute, waiting for the sound to come again, and that's when I notice that the fog's coming in and it's gotten dark outside. Not pitch-black, but definitely dark.
Marissa whispers from the doorway, “Get out of there!”
Woooooo…Wooooooooo…comes the sound again, and then on top of that comes a moaning sound—like someone far away, in a lot of pain.
We uprooted, all right, and we might have just bolted into the house if Dot hadn't grabbed us outside t
he carriage house and said, “Wait!”
We stare at her. “For what?”
She looks me in the eye. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
“No.”
She turns to Holly. “Do you?”
Holly shrugs.
“Marissa?”
Marissa shifts into hyper-dance. “I do now!”
Dot shakes her head and says, “This is stupid. C'mon,” then turns around and marches back into the carriage house.
Now what am I supposed to do, let her go into the Ghost Zone by herself ? So I go charging after her, and the minute we're inside she points and says, “You look over there, I'll look over here.”
Dot goes off in the direction of a stack of cardboard boxes, and I scoot my way over to a column of wooden pallets. But before I've had the chance to look behind the pallets, I hear Dot snap, “Get out of there. Get out now!”
A giggle floats through the air like a string of bubbles, and then Dot's got her little sister by the arm, demanding, “Where's Anneke?”
Beppie giggles some more, then points across the room to the stack of pallets. I look behind it and sure enough, there's the other ghost, looking like Little Miss Mischief.
She scrambles out and ducks around me, then escapes with her sister out the door and into the night.
Dot shakes her head and says, “Those two drive me bonkers.” By now Holly and Marissa have come inside, so she says to the three of us, “Look, why don't you guys go back in the house. I'll clean this mess up.”
We all say, No, no, we'll help, and before you know it, we've got the place picked up and put back together. And we're just about to close the door when Mrs. DeVries appears, wiping her hands on a dish towel. “There's a boy on the phone who says he wants to talk to Marissa.”
“To me?” Marissa asks, pointing to herself. “Who is it?”
“He wouldn't say.” She rubs crusted dough off a thumbnail with the towel. “I'm sure he's the one who called while I was out here, but the first time I picked up the phone and said DeVries he just hung up.”
Marissa says, “I'm…I'm sorry about that,” and then shakes her head. “I wonder who it could be?”
I whisper, “Mikey?” because being rude is what Marissa's little brother does best.