A Gust of Ghosts (12 page)

“Obviously, we have to get him out of here,” said Franny.

“Why?” Rolly asked. “He seems nice. I like him.”

“You would,” Franny said. “He breaks things, annoys people, and makes life unnecessarily complicated. You've clearly found your soul mate.”

“Excuse me,” said Travis. “I'm right here, you know.”

They turned to stare at Travis again.

“That's right, you are,” said Poppy, who was beginning to get an idea. It was, she thought, a very good idea. Potentially even a brilliant one.

Here was her chance to conduct a real investigation that resulted in real evidence, not just misty photos or murky sound recordings. She would prove the existence of ghosts, save her parents' grant, and earn her family's undying gratitude.

“How did you make such an amazing discovery before you even entered middle school?” an astonished Mrs. Farley would ask after Poppy's presentation. Then she would tell her nefarious nephew to extend the Malones' grant in perpetuity.

“Thank goodness for your logical and scientific mind,” her father would say, beaming with pride. “Without that, we would have been lost!”

“Don't tell the others,” her mother would add in a whisper, “but I do believe that you are the cleverest member of our family. The cleverest
by far
.”

Poppy would simply smile modestly. “All it took was a little logical thinking and deductive reasoning,” she would say as she accepted the Nobel Prize, the youngest person ever to win it....

This lovely daydream was interrupted by Franny, who was asking Travis questions by speaking extremely slowly and loudly.

“Do you have Unfinished Business?” she said. “Do you know that you've Passed On?”

He gave her a scornful look. “What do I look like, some kind of dimwit?”

Franny ignored this. “Is there a reason you can't rest? An unresolved issue that keeps you walking the earth?”

Travis tilted his head to one side, as if thinking this over. A fleeting expression crossed his face.

The corner of Travis's mouth turned up, ever so slightly, into a sly smile. His eyes narrowed into emerald green slits. Even his freckles somehow managed to look secretly delighted.

It was the look of a ghost that has just had an idea.

But what kind of idea, Poppy wondered, would make a ghost look like that?

“Oh, I get it. You want to help me resolve my issues so I'll Move On, right?” Travis stopped hovering in midair, letting his feet drop to the floor with a thump. He shoved his hands in his pockets and turned away from them, his head drooping, his shoulders slumped. “Well, if you don't want me around, I'll just head on back to the cemetery and you won't be bothered by me again.”

Poppy saw Travis give them a quick glance from the corner of his eye before adding, “Of course, that means you won't get the evidence you need for Mrs. Farley....”

He began to fade right before their eyes.

Poppy felt her stomach clench in panic. Her dreams of saving their grant (and of winning the Nobel Prize) seemed to fade along with him.

“No, wait!” Poppy, Franny, and Will yelled.

“Where are you
going
?” asked Rolly.

Travis still looked miffed, but he stopped fading.

Poppy asked, “How did you know about the grant and Mrs. Farley?”

“Like I said,” Travis replied. “I've been hanging around your house.”

Franny gasped. “You were eavesdropping?”

He shrugged. “What else is there for ghosts to do? I know that Rolly wants a dog and that your father won't get him one. I know that your parents might lose their grant and that if they do you might have to move. And I know that Poppy reads in bed with a flashlight when she's supposed to be asleep and Will drinks milk out of the carton when no one's looking and Franny—”

“You'd better stop right there,” said Franny in a dangerous voice. “If you know what's good for you.”

Travis chuckled. “My older sister was just like you,” he said reminiscently. “I could always make her mad, too.”

Franny opened her mouth as if to say something, and he hurried on. “Anyway, if you come out to the cemetery tomorrow, well”—he lifted one shoulder in a casual shrug—“maybe my friends and I can help you.”

He gave Rolly a sly glance. “One of my friends,” he added, “is a dog.”

Rolly's head swiveled toward Poppy. “Let's go,” he said. “I want to go right now.”

“Hold on, Rolly,” she said. “We can't head out to the cemetery in the middle of the night.” She gave Travis a considering look. “We might be able to make it tomorrow—”

“This is
so
not a good idea,” Franny murmured.

“Think about it, Franny,” Poppy said, without taking her eyes off Travis. “What if he could help us get evidence to show Mrs. Farley?”

“Wait a second.” Will looked at Travis. “Who are these ‘friends' you're talking about?”

“Come to the cemetery and find out,” said Travis. He paused, then added smoothly, “Unless you're afraid, of course.”

Will flushed. “I'm not afraid of anything!” He nodded at Poppy. “You're right. We should go.”

“Good.” As Travis grinned at him, the outline of his body flickered and his voice grew fainter. “I have to go … come tomorrow … don't forget....”

“We won't,” said Poppy. “We'll be there. I promise.”

She felt a thrill of excitement as she realized what she was saying. Tomorrow they would get the evidence they needed to save the grant and stay in their house! It would only take an hour or two to film Travis and any other ghosts he might be friends with. By suppertime, they would be safe.

But then, just as Travis flickered out of sight, she caught a glimpse of Travis's face. It wore the same sly expression she had seen earlier.

Poppy suddenly remembered the lecture that her parents insisted on giving them before every investigation.

“The number one rule of any paranormal investigation is this: Keep your guard up and stay alert
at all times
,” Mr. Malone would say.

“Your father's quite right,” Mrs. Malone would add. “Of course you know that vampires are masters of manipulation; I've warned you all about
that
often enough. But other creatures also have tricky ways of getting what they want. The Faerie, for example, are always incredibly charming, right up until the moment they steal your soul. Even boggarts can be beguiling when they put their minds to it.”

“Remember,” Mr. Malone would always finish up, “there's a reason people have always been afraid of the dark....”

B
y morning, Poppy's fears had vanished, as so many nighttime fears do. She bounded down the stairs to the kitchen, eager to head back out to the Shady Rest Cemetery and start gathering evidence that ghosts really exist, only to find that Mr. and Mrs. Malone's plans had shifted again.

“But we
have
to go back,” Poppy said.

“We barely started our investigation,” Will added.

Even Franny, somewhat unconvincingly, chimed in, saying, “I thought you wanted us to help.”

Mr. and Mrs. Malone exchanged puzzled glances.

“Well, of course we're glad to see this unexpected change in attitude,” said Mr. Malone. “But, as fate would have it, your mother and I have made other plans today.”

This met with a chorus of protest, which was only silenced by Mrs. Malone raising her hand.

“I'm sorry, but it's impossible,” she said. “Henry's aunt has invited us to dinner tonight.”

“So?” Will said. “We can go to the cemetery and be back in time for dinner.”

But Mrs. Malone shook her head firmly. “You three need to do some laundry so that you have halfway decent clothes to wear. And we really should take a dessert, which means your father will have to pick up something at the store. I certainly don't have time to make anything, since it will take me at least an hour getting Rolly bathed and dressed—”

“And I need to try enhancing the video on my computer so we can see the manifestation more clearly,” Mr. Malone said hastily, before any more chores were assigned to him. “We'll simply have to go to the cemetery tomorrow.”

“We've got to figure out a way to get to the cemetery on our own,” Poppy said as soon as she, Will, and Franny were alone together. “We'll wait until Mom's gone to the store and Dad's got his headphones on. We can go to Shady Rest and be back before they know we're gone.”

Unfortunately, the only way Poppy could get privacy to discuss this matter was by volunteering that she, Will, and Franny would do some weeding, an activity that allowed them to talk freely without being overheard by their parents or Rolly.

They quickly discovered, however, that the flowerbeds were choked with weeds. Poppy soon identified chickweed, bedstraw, and henbit (Will and Franny had not found this information as fascinating as she had), and doing manual labor in the hot sun had apparently revived bad memories for Will and Franny.

“Look, Travis isn't going anywhere, is he?” said Franny, who was kneeling by a flowerbed, a floppy straw hat on her head. “I mean, it's cool that we got to meet a ghost and everything, but we could go swimming at Barton Springs today and go back to the cemetery tomorrow. Or even next week.”

“Henry said the water at Barton Springs is always ice-cold,” Will said thoughtfully. “Even when the temperature is almost a hundred degrees.”

Poppy had introduced Will and Franny to Henry after Mr. Farley's visit the day before. They had spent an hour in Henry's tree house and learned many interesting things. (For example: Henry's parents traveled the world as part of their corporate jobs and were currently in Scotland en route to Istanbul; the mascot of the school that Poppy, Will, and Henry would attend in the fall was a Scottish terrier; the Maldonados down the street threw great block parties that often ended with someone throwing a watermelon off the roof of a house; Henry had learned archery at summer camp and could hit a bull's-eye at thirty yards; the Hendersons' dog was on the U.S. Postal Service Watch List for biting three different mail carriers; and, despite Henry's fervent hopes, nothing exciting ever happened in their neighborhood.)

One of the most interesting facts Henry had told them was that Barton Springs was one of the best places to swim in Austin. As they blinked sweat out of their eyes and squinted in the blazing sun, the idea of jumping into an icy cold pool began to sound much better than returning to a cemetery.

Even if that cemetery did have a real live ghost.

“Shh!” Poppy hissed as the screen door opened.

Mrs. Malone poked her head out. “How's everything going? Do you want some lemonade?”

“No, thanks, we're almost done,” Poppy called out, and was rewarded with black looks from Franny and Will.

“Splendid! I'll make BLTs for lunch,” said Mrs. Malone.

“Franny”—Poppy sat back on her heels—“why don't you want to go to the cemetery?”

“Because it's creepy!” said Franny. “Plus, we don't know anything about this ghost or his friends. We don't know what they want. We don't know what they might do to us—”

“Even as we speak,” Poppy said, “Mr. Farley could be giving our grant money to some woman who plays the harpsichord.
The harpsichord!
In the meantime,
we
have made contact with an actual ghost and have a chance to get evidence to prove it.” She turned to Will, who had stretched out on the grass. “You agree with me, don't you?”

“Oh yeah, sure,” he said drowsily. “Whatever you say.”

“Are you falling asleep?” Franny asked suspiciously.

He yawned. “No, of course not.”

“Wake
up
,” Franny said, kicking him. “Have you even been listening to all this?”

Will sat up, blinking and looking grumpy. “Unfortunately, yes.”

“I don't understand why we're even having this discussion,” Poppy said. “You guys met Travis, too!
You met a ghost
. It's obvious that we need to continue the investigation, pursue every lead, and gather all the evidence we can.”

Franny sighed. “You sound just like Dad. Once you get an idea in your head, you become obsessed.”

Poppy scowled. “That's not fair,” she said, yanking yet another weed out of the ground. “All great scientists have been single-minded in their pursuit of the truth.”

“You're probably right,” Will said. “But how are we going to get to the cemetery without Mom or Dad knowing?”

“I've got that figured out,” said Poppy. “We'll ride our bikes.”

Franny stared at her. “Are you crazy? It's miles away.”

“It only seemed that way because Dad got lost when we drove out there,” said Poppy. “I found a map online. We could bike there in half an hour, and we wouldn't even have to go on any busy streets.”