They freeze while I stoop down, trying to find tire tracks in the dark. Holly says, “What are you doing?”
“I thought maybe there'd be some tire tracks, but I can't see anything! I wish we had a flashlight.”
Dot says, “Your bike's got a light. Too bad we can't just ride it in place.”
I say, “Hey, that's it!” So I get Dot and Marissa to hold the back wheel off the ground while I grab a pedal and crank. As soon as it's going fast enough for the light to come on, we pivot the bike on its front wheel and scour the ground for tracks.
And what do we find? Just a bunch of footprints that the four of us had made.
Marissa croaks, “Sammy! Haven't we done this long enough? There's nothing to see!”
We stop and plop, and Holly says, “Well, if there was anything there, we messed it up walking on it.”
Dot says, “I don't know why we're even doing this. I thought you guys wanted to go see Lucinda.”
Everyone agrees that she's right. So we park our bikes inside, then close up the sections of fence, wrapping the leather over the post. Then we make our way toward the cabin, and as we pass by the toolshed, the smell of smoke becomes overwhelming. Nauseating.
Then, at the same time, we all stop and stare. The area is flooded with light glaring from the side of a fire truck, and poking through the ashes like a tombstone is the fireplace, charred and dripping water. And except for the fireplace, the cabin is gone. Completely gone.
There are a few firemen in rubber boots and hard hats talking to each other as they inspect an area off to the side with their flashlights. We stand there a moment, stunned, then Marissa says, “That was it?”
Holly and I nod, but we don't say a word. And I'm feeling completely choked up about the whole thing, even though I'm telling myself that I'm being stupid. I mean, how long had I known Lucinda? Less than a day. And Moustache Mary was interesting, but she wasn't my ancestor. And the cabin? Well, really—it was just a shack.
So I'm standing there, trying to force the tears back into their ducts, when I get goosed.
That's right, goosed.
And I'm not talking just a little nudge in the behind, either. I'm talking full-on goosed. I squawk, and as I'm spinning around I see that what I've been goosed by is a pig. A big, black, bow-wrapped pig.
Penny's bow is half untied and looking pretty droopy, and no one would argue that she could use a bath in something besides mud. She snorts at me and then nudges me with her snout again, only this time she's polite enough to only offend my thigh.
With all the snorting and squawking we were doing, the firemen couldn't help but notice us. Two of them shine flashlights across the ruins at us, and even at that distance they're blinding. One of them calls, “We don't need any looky-loos here, girls. You'd better move along.”
Then Dallas shows up. And if Holly thought he smelled before, he must've been completely ripe now. He was covered in soot, his shirt was torn and streaked with black, and his hair was dusted with ashes.
The firemen drop their lights and call to Dallas, “How's your grandmother holding up?”
Dallas seems dazed for a minute, looking at the rubble.
“She's not my—” Then he stops himself and says, “The doctors are with her.”
One fireman asks, “She's not your grandmother?”
Dallas just keeps staring at the rubble.
The fireman takes a few steps closer and cocks his head a bit. “Then why'd you risk life and limb trying to put this fire out?”
Dallas closes his eyes and lets out a deep sigh. “Lucinda's been better to me than my own family. And this cabin meant the world to her.” He looks the fireman straight in the eye and says, “So now what?”
“We've got the coals turned and the site's cool; it shouldn't be too much longer.”
Dallas just nods. And when the fireman goes back to his group, I can't help it. I call, “That's it?” I take a few steps forward. “That's all you're going to do?”
Penny follows right beside me like a dog at heel, and then Marissa, Dot, and Holly come forward, too. I call over to the firefighters, “Aren't you going to investigate? I mean, the house didn't spontaneously combust. It got help. It got a lot of help!”
One of the firemen gives a little shrug and says, “Now, you don't know that.”
“You think it started all by itself ?”
“No, I…” He shakes his head, then lets out a sigh. “We see this sort of thing pretty regularly on holidays. This is the third one tonight alone. Kids sneakin' off to have a smoke, fireworks lit in an unsuitable environment, Satanic groups with some ritual gone wrong. It's not uncommon. My guess is, given the remoteness of the site, and the nature of the original structure, that's what happened here tonight.”
“What do you mean, the nature of the original structure? That it was made out of wood?”
He picks up a spade that's leaning against the pumper truck and starts turning ashes over. “It was a shack. An old, abandoned shack.”
“Maybe it didn't look like much, but this was the home of Mary Rose Huntley. A pioneer. It wasn't just a shack! It was a historical monument.”
He stops flipping dirt and says, “A monument?”
“Well, it was important. To Lucinda, anyway.”
“I understand. And I'm sure they'll send someone out in the morning to investigate further if that's what she wants.”
Now while we've been arguing with the fire brigade, Dallas has been circling the ruins, holding the back of his neck, and kicking the ground from time to time. Like he's mad at the ashes.
When he gets back around to us, Holly asks him, “Can't you make them do something now?”
He keeps right on holding his neck, and his nostrils are flaring in and out as he breathes. “Oh, I want to, but what good would it do?”
Holly says, “What do you mean? You don't think some kids did this, do you?”
He looks at her like she's just interrupted a very complicated thought. “Investigating won't bring the cabin back. And frankly I don't think that this feud with the Murdocks will ever be over. Proving it was them would be like spitting into the wind.”
Holly says, “The Murdocks? You think it was the Murdocks?”
“Lucinda does, and after hearing their comment about her burning for visiting them, I think she's probably right.” He looks back at the rubble and says, “I'm going to go see how she's doing,” then hurries off toward the house.
As we're watching him go, Penny nudges me in the thigh, first gently, then hard. And when I look down to scold her, she looks right at me and does it again, only this time she adds a great big snort.
There's no doubt about it—she's telling me to get a move on. So I say to the others, “You want to go see how Lucinda's doing?”
Holly says, “Yes!” and the others shrug and say, “Sure.”
And as we head down the path to the main house, I look over my shoulder at the firemen turning the ashes of Mary's cabin. And it hits me that if the Murdocks really did burn the place down, no amount of turning coals is going to put that fire out. A little puff of wind would bring it right back to life.
Just as it had for over a hundred years.
NINE
They'd just given Lucinda a sedative when Kevin let us into the den. He said, “Try to keep it short. It's been a rough night,” but the gruffness of his voice was oddly soft. Like he was too tired to turn us away and too upset to really want us not to be there.
Lucinda looked tiny, like a little girl, wrapped in a blanket on the couch. Dallas was sort of perched on the edge beside her, saying, “Lucinda, I've been thinking… Maybe I can rebuild it for you. The fireplace is still intact and—”
“Don't you do that to her!” Kevin steps out of the shadows of the hallway and says, “This is hard enough without talk like that.”
Dallas stands up and whispers to Lucinda, “I'll come see you tomorrow.” Then he motions our way and says, “Your new friends are here,” and lea
ves the room.
Lucinda smiles at us, then puts out a hand, saying, “Come in, girls.”
We scoot in, and since her hand is still out, I take it. Her fingers feel cold and hard. Like I'm holding a bouquet of bones.
When I sit down where Dallas had been, she looks at me sadly and says, “Where's she going to go?”
I know she's talking about Mary, and I can't think of anything comforting to say.
Holly whispers, “Maybe she's free now.”
Lucinda looks at her. “Free…what a nice thought. Though I never considered the house to be her prison…” She squeezes my hand a little and says, “Would you bring me her diary? It's up in my room on the night table. Upstairs, last door on the left.”
I look around to make sure it's okay with Kevin, but he's gone, so I say, “Sure,” and head for the stairs.
The carpet on the steps is dirty and matted, and the flowered wallpaper has faded to a dusty yellow. And as I creak my way up the staircase, I feel like I'm surrounded by decay. Like I'm walking through the heart of a house that's dying.
I shake off the creeps and hurry down the hallway to the last room on the left, but when I open the door, the room feels the same as the hall and stairs had. The wallpaper's peeling and the ceiling has dark spots from water damage, and there are two places where the carpet's been seamed with duct tape.
I pull back the lace curtain of one of the windows to see if I can spot the cabin, and the cloth feels brittle, like if I pressed too hard, it would crumble in my hand. The fire truck floodlights are gone, and I can't see much through the fog, so I move over to the other window and there's Dallas out on the driveway with Kevin, and it looks like they're arguing. I try pulling up the window a little so that maybe I can hear what they're saying, but the thing's swollen shut and won't budge.
Then Dallas puts his hands up, shakes his head, and walks off, so I let the curtain down and get busy looking for the diary.
It's on the nightstand, all right, and I would've picked it right up and run downstairs if this framed photo of Kevin hadn't distracted me. In the picture a much younger Kevin is standing beside a truck loaded with grapes, and his face is bursting with happiness. I stared at it for a minute and couldn't help wondering—how long had it been since the Huntleys had had a good harvest?
I made myself put the picture down and pick up the diary. The cover was dark brown leather and the pages were thick. Heavy parchment thick. And except for a few blotches here and there, the writing was beautiful— curvy and flowing—not at all the kind of penmanship I was expecting from Moustache Mary.
The first page read simply: Journal of Mary Rose Huntley. I turned the page and the journal began:
I wanted to read more, but made myself stop. I fanned through the diary once, listening to the pages crinkle against each other, then turned out the light and hurried back downstairs.
“Lucinda?” She was almost asleep when I sat down beside her on the couch. “Here you go. Here's the diary.”
She smiled at me and whispered, “Thank you.”
“I read the first page—I hope you don't mind.”
“Not at all.”
“It's…it's amazing. I didn't want to put it down.”
She put the book in the crook of her arm like a teddy bear. “You can borrow the copy, if you'd like.”
“The copy?”
“Kevin thinks this one should be zip-locked away somewhere. He made me a photocopy years ago. The words are all there, but I still prefer this one. Her spirit's in it.” She motions across the room with her eyes. “Go on. The copy's on the bookshelf, right over there. See it? By the Bible.”
Lucinda's words were slurring, and I could tell that she was fighting to keep her eyes open. So I found the copy of Mary's journal, and we whispered our good-byes, telling her again how sorry we were for what had happened. She nodded and then said, “Can you visit tomorrow? I'd like…,” but she fell asleep before she could finish.
We tiptoed out of there and found Kevin on the porch, brooding. The band of sweat around his hat seemed to have crept up another half inch, and even in the cool, foggy air, he looked sweaty and dusty from head to toe.
He takes one look at us and says, “She sleeping?” When we nod, he lets out a sigh. “Best thing for her.”
I held up the diary. “She said I could borrow this?”
“Go ahead,” he says, and dismisses us with a wave.
As we're going down the steps, I look back at him and ask, “So what are you going to do?”
He shakes his head. “I'll discuss that with her in the morning.”
Marissa tugs on my sleeve and whispers, “Let's go,” so we hurried through the darkness to get our bikes.
We steered clear of the ruins because even from a distance the place gave us the creeps. But when we neared the fence, I got shivers anyway because the fence wasn't closed the way we'd left it. It was gaping open.
Dot whispers what we were all thinking: “Someone's been through here!”
Marissa says, “Can we please just get out of here?” but then Dot grabs my arm and says, “Look!” and points in the direction of the ruins.
At first, I say, “What?” but then I see it, faintly, through the fog—not a beam of light, more just a glow. Marissa says, “What is that?” and Holly offers, “Maybe it's just someone with a flashlight out there.”
But the more we watch it, the less it looks like someone walking or searching with a flashlight, and the more it looks like something none of us want to say.
Holly says, “Oh, come on. It can't be.”
Marissa whispers, “Why not?” and Dot adds, “Yeah, why not?”
Holly says, “Well, for one thing, a ghost wouldn't have to open this fence. A ghost would float right through it.”
“Yeah, and you know how things look weird in the fog,” I say. “And they sound weird, too.”
So we all agree that it can't be a ghost. But we don't all agree that we should go check out what it is. Marissa says, “Sammy, no!”
“Marissa, there are four of us. What could possibly happen?”
Holly says, “I'm game,” and Dot says, “Me, too,” but when we look at Marissa, she just stands there, doing the McKenze dance. So I say, “You can stay here and guard the bikes if you want…”
“By myself ?”
I shrug. “If you want.”
“Oh, all right,” she groans. “I'll come with you.”
So we sneak back toward the cabin, and while we're walking, we're whispering, “Do you see it?” “There it is!” “Look, it moved!” and stuff like that. Then, when we get to Showdown Rock, we hide behind it and just kind of hold our breath.
Now you've got to understand—whatever this is, I know it's not the ghost of Moustache Mary, Holly knows it's not the ghost of Moustache Mary, and so do Dot and Marissa. Well, at least Dot. But when you're standing in a place where someone's been shot dead and you're looking through the fog at something moving in the air, it's easy to become a believer.
And we're all completely petrified behind this rock when we hear a noise. A crunchy noise. A shuffly noise. A noise like someone—or something—walking through leaves.
Marissa whispers, “Do you hear that!?”
We all nod.
“What is that?”
Holly whispers, “It's not chains rattling, that's for sure.”
I say, “Shhh. It's getting closer.”
One look at Marissa and I know that, as much as she's trying to fight it, there's a scream working its way out of her body, and when it surfaces, houses all over Sisquane will be missing their windows. I cup my hand over her mouth and whisper, “Marissa, it's okay. Really, it's okay!”
But that sound is getting louder, and now, besides the crunch and shuffle, there's a low, guttural breathing sound. And it's not coming from miles away—it's right on the other side of Showdown Rock.
So we're all huddled up with our eyes as big as Frisbees, trying not to lose it, when what phantom be
ing appears from around the rock?
One very dark, very big…pig.
It could've been a mouse. At that point it didn't matter. We screamed. I choked on mine, but Marissa's went straight through flesh and bone, and Holly and Dot rounded out the sound with some really shrill harmonics.
Penny didn't care. She just wagged her curly little tail and nudged around my feet like she was hunting for truffles. And after we got over the fact that we'd been sniffed out by a pig, we looked back at the cabin and knew—the ghost was gone.
We stood behind Showdown Rock for another few minutes, waiting for it to reappear, but it never did. Finally, Marissa says, “Can we please go now?”
Penny keeps rooting around, sniffing and snorting her way back toward the ruins. I say, “Why don't we follow Penny?”
Marissa rolls her eyes. “Oh, great. Now we've got a pig for a tour guide.” Now it's not like Marissa to be sarcastic when she's scared. But she wasn't biting her nails or doing the McKenze dance, she was standing there with her hands on her hips.
So I laugh and say, “Boy, that scream did you a lot of good, didn't it?”
“What do you mean?”
I just laugh again and say, “Yeah, we've got a pig for a tour guide. Come on!”
Penny leads us over to the cabin, all right, and proceeds to nudge her nose through the ashes and chunks of timber while we circle the place. And it strikes me again how bad it smells and how small the place was. And all of a sudden I'm full of questions. Like, How do you raise a family in a place like this? How long did they live there? When did the other house get built? But mostly I kept coming back to: What's going to happen now? Would Kevin bulldoze the rest of it down? It did seem wrong. Very wrong. And what about Mary's old grave? Maybe her bones weren't there, but it did feel like her spirit still was.
And I found myself standing beside the ruins kind of overwhelmed by what had been. By the people who had built the place and lived their lives there. By the fact that they had done it day by day, with no electricity or running water, no trash collection or sewers, and all of a sudden I felt like a wimp, living at Grams' with a toilet and a refrigerator and a television.