Boys Rock! (13 page)

Caroline went up to her room and lay facedown on her bed.
You have to get your facts straight
! Eddie had scolded her when she made the mistake about Tessie Crane.
Check and double-check
! Now it was Beth who would be in big trouble. She had listened to Caroline and written what she’d said, and it was all Caroline’s fault.

Sooner or later she was going to have to tell Eddie and Beth and the whole Hatford tribe that she had seen no ghost. After that, she’d have to explain it to everyone. If anyone could see her aura now, it would be black, black, black, she was sure.

At dinner that evening, all Caroline could think about was leaving town. “If we move back to Ohio, how soon can we leave?” she asked.

“We’re not leaving until we’ve given our tenants thirty days’ notice,” Mrs. Malloy said. “We rented out our house to another family, remember?”

“Then if Dad stays in Ohio by himself all during August, where will he live till we get our house back?” Caroline asked.

“He’ll rent an apartment for a month,” said her mother.

“Maybe I should go cook for him,” said Caroline.

“What?” said Mrs. Malloy.

“And do his laundry,” said Caroline.

Her sisters laughed. “Caroline, you’ve got two pairs of socks and some underwear on the bathroom floor that have been there for three days, not to mention your towel,” said Beth. “You don’t even take care of your own laundry.”

“Besides, you always wanted to be famous, didn’t you?” said Eddie. “When people read Beth’s article about the haunted house, they’ll want to talk to the person who saw the ghastly ghost of a girl in the window, and all sorts of people will be calling.”

“I won’t be famous,” said Caroline plaintively. “I’ll be
infamous
, Eddie!” Her chin began to tremble. “I’ve done a terrible and awful thing.”

Mrs. Malloy stopped eating. “
What
terrible and awful thing, Caroline?” And when Caroline didn’t answer, she said more sternly, “Caroline,
now
what have you done?”

“I thought I saw the ghost of a girl in the window, Mother, but it was only me. My reflection. I just realized.”

“How do you know it was you?” asked her mother.

“Because I just remembered she was wearing my necklace.”

“Oh, Caroline, for Pete’s sake!” said Eddie. “The paper’s already been printed. People are picking up copies at Oldakers’ this very minute!”

“I know! I know!” Caroline said miserably.

As though that weren’t enough to ruin their dinner, the phone rang just then. Wanting desperately to escape her sisters’ anger, Caroline pushed away from the table and ran to answer. It was Mr. Hatford.

“Caroline,” he said. “About that house over on Hazel Street, it belongs to the Parker family. They’re on a six-month trip to Europe, and I’ve been forwarding their mail. I don’t think they’re going to be very happy when they get back and discover that the
Hatford Herald
said their house is haunted.”

Nineteen
Bones!

M
aybe we should quit while we can,” Jake said sullenly as the four Hatford boys and the three Malloy girls gathered on the Hatfords’ front steps. “Beth, you know those neighbors who said they’d never seen anyone go in or out? Who never saw lights in the windows?”

“They
did
tell me that!” Beth insisted.

“Well, Dad says they’ve only lived there a month. Of course they’ve never seen anyone go in or out! Of
course
they never saw any lights in the windows! They never even knew the Parkers. They never knew they were in Europe.”

Beth moaned and sank down even lower on the step. Caroline saw Eddie close her eyes in dismay.

“Sometimes you need more than facts!” said Josh. “You have to use your head. Dad’s mad at us because
the sheriff feels he has to send out a car every so often to keep an eye on that house, now that we’ve announced to the world it’s been abandoned.”

“Buckman isn’t exactly the world,” Eddie put in.

“And anyone can see that with newspapers and leaves blowing all around the yard, no one’s there to take care of it,” Caroline said, trying to defend her sisters. “A burglar would have figured that out by now. He didn’t need to read it in our newspaper.”

“We’ll make up for it,” Eddie said quickly. “We’ll make the last issue of our newspaper so spectacular that everyone will forgive us for this and the Tessie-Bessie mix-up.”

“Yeah? What do you suggest?” said Josh.

Nobody had an answer. About all they had left for the final issue was the story of Sara Phillips’s aunt Irene and her quilts. Who would buy a newspaper just for that? Wally’s mind raced ahead to the creature in the Oldakers’ cellar. Mike Oldaker simply
had
to come through with that scoop. Wally had almost decided that if Mike hadn’t kept his promise by the time the third issue came out, he would write a story about the noises coming from the cellar, and
then
wouldn’t Mike Oldaker be sorry!

“Has anybody been murdered lately?” Wally asked softly.

The others turned, staring at him.

“I mean, has anybody been bitten or attacked, or are any pets missing?” Wally added.

“What are you talking about?” said Jake. “Even if
there were, we wouldn’t be the ones to report it. This is supposed to be historical. We’re not writing about what’s happening around here now. Everything we write has to be about old stuff.”

“I know!” said Peter brightly. “We could write about Grandpa!”

“What
about
Grandpa?” asked Wally

“
He
was old.”

“So?” said Jake.

“And he liked to study old things,” said Peter.

Peter was right, Wally thought. Grandpa Hatford studied people of long ago. But
everybody
had a grandpa who did
something
. Why not write about
anybody’s
grandpa?

“Yeah. Right,” said Jake. “Okay, Peter. You and Wally write a story about Grandpa.”

“Hey! C’mon!” Wally protested.

“All you’ve done so far is take copy back and forth between our houses and carry newspapers down to Oldakers’,” said Josh. “It wouldn’t hurt you to write something.”

But Wally didn’t want to write. He liked to spell, but he didn’t especially like to write. “I’m not getting any credit toward summer reading!” he said.

“Well, do a good job with your story and we’ll put it on the front page,” said Jake.

Embarrassing, that’s what it was.

Grandpa was an anthropologist
, Wally wrote. He
had a cupboard full of pottery pieces and shells and stuff. He
could tell you a lot about people he had never met because they lived a long time ago, but he couldn’t tell you much about his neighbors.

That was about all Wally could think of to say, and he’d only gotten that far because that’s what he’d heard his dad say. Grandpa Hatford had died when Wally was five, so he didn’t remember much about him.

“Come
on
, Peter! Quit fooling around and help!” Wally said irritably as Peter ran his Matchbox cars along the window ledge, making a fearful racket when they crashed and fell to the floor.

Peter dutifully put the cars aside and walked over. “What do you want me to do?”

“Remember something about Grandpa. Any stories at all about him,” said Wally.

“I only remember his pictures!” said Peter. “He was tall and had a mustache.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“And he had big hands and big ears.”

“Yeah,” said Wally, remembering now. “And he always had an arrowhead or something in his pocket to show us.”

There were only two days left before the last issue of the
Hatford Heraldwould
be published. The
Old Times Tribune
, of course, came out with the story about how the “abandoned” house the
Hatford Herald
had written about wasn’t abandoned at all. Wally couldn’t wait till this whole project was over. Then he would have one full month left of summer to do whatever he wanted. It would
not
be anything to do with the Malloys. It would not
have anything to do with girls at all. It wouldn’t even have anything to do with his brothers. Maybe he would just crawl up in a tree and stay there. Study the leaves and the stars.

The following night after dinner, however, something happened. The phone rang, and because Wally was finishing up kitchen duty, he answered.

“Wally?” came a man’s voice. “This is Mike. Mike Oldaker. I want you to round up all the kids who are working on your newspaper, tell them you’ve got a big scoop, and come over to the bookstore right away.”

“
Now
?”

“As soon as you can get here. But don’t tell anyone else. Just come.” And Mike hung up.

Wally stood holding the phone in one hand, the dish towel in the other. Then he put down the towel and called the Malloys. Eddie answered.

“Big scoop. Top secret. Meet us at Oldakers’ as soon as you can get there,” he said, and hung up, just as Mike had done.

Wally ran upstairs, where Jake and Josh were typing up a story on their computer. “Big scoop!” he said breathlessly. “Top secret. Mike Oldaker called. He wants us to come to the bookstore right away and not tell anyone. He’ll give us a story for our newspaper!”

“Wow!” said Jake, leaping to his feet, his eyes wide.

The boys tore downstairs.

“We’re going to the bookstore, Mom,” Josh called.

“Are you taking Peter?” Mrs. Hatford called back.

“Yeah. C’mon, Peter,” said Wally, and all four boys charged out the door.

“What isit? What did he say?” asked Jake.

“I can’t tell you,” said Wally.

“What do you mean, you can’t tell us?” asked Josh.

“My lips are sealed,” said Wally.

“Oh, come on, Wally!” said Jake, punching his arm.

“You can torture me, pull out all my fingernails, but I still won’t tell,” Wally insisted, not mentioning, of course, that he didn’t know much more than they did. Except for those noises. And the light coming from under the trapdoor.

His heart pounded inside his chest. He hoped it wasn’t a trick. He imagined Mike Oldaker opening the trapdoor and a hand reaching out and grabbing Wally’s leg. He imagined the trapdoor opening and a huge life force sucking them down into a black hole.

But now they were racing down College Avenue. Now they were turning onto Main Street. Now they were running up the sidewalk to the bookstore, with its CLOSED sign on the door, the Malloy girls at their heels.

Mike was waiting for them inside. So was a man with glasses, and dirt on the knees of his pants.

“Hello,” said Mike, letting them in and locking the door behind them. Wally looked around uneasily. So did Caroline, her eyes huge.

“I want you to meet a friend of mine, Gordon Rawley, who’s working on his PhD from Morgan State University, where your grandfather, Wally, got his degree,” Mike said.

The big man named Gordon reached out and shook Wally’s hand while the others stared. The skin on Gordon’s hand was rough, Wally discovered. And the fingernails were dirty.

“It was something your grandfather wrote in
his
thesis that gave Gordon the idea that there might be the remains of an ancient settlement right here in Upshur County,” said Mike.