Boys Rock! (4 page)

“Uh … with,” Caroline said, and followed her inside.

It was obvious that the two sisters had lived together for a long time. The four walls of the living room were
covered with photographs of the two girls in high school, of the two girls in secretarial school, of vacations taken together and birthday celebrations in this very house.
Tessie and Bessie, San Francisco, June 1951
, someone had written in a corner of one of the photographs.
Bessie and Tessie, Christmas, 1973
.

“Oh! You’re looking at pictures of me and my sister,” Ms. Crane said, coming back into the room with the tea, the ice clinking softly in the glasses. She gave Caroline a wink as she handed her the tea. “Pretty, isn’t she?”

Caroline nodded and opened her notebook. A half hour later, she was still writing, and Ms. Crane was still talking.

“To tell the truth, she was a bit conceited,” Ms. Crane went on. “Stuck on herself, you know. She had a beautiful party dress, and I asked once if I could wear it, but she wouldn’t let me. Afraid I might be prettier in it than she was. Oh, and did she ever have a temper! I never told anyone before, but we used to fight like cats and dogs, and it was her who started it more often than not.”

She stopped while Caroline finished writing a sentence, then continued: “I know you should speak well of the dead, and don’t get me wrong—I loved my sister. But she was what she was, and she’d say the same of me. We had a lot of fun together, but she was a pill at times, and a nag as well, and grumpy as all get-out if she didn’t get her way. Because we lived together our whole lives, people must have thought we got along like two peas in a pod, but let me tell you, it’s hard sometimes to have
your own identity when you’ve always lived with your sister.”

Caroline was not about to ask Ms. Crane about ghosts here, because the house seemed creepy enough as it was, and the dead sister was all around them. So when the interview was over, she said simply, “Thank you for talking with me. I’m sorry for your loss.”

“Well, don’t be,” said Ms. Crane, “because I’m getting along just fine by myself, if anyone wants to know.”

As Caroline walked home, she decided she wouldn’t want to live her whole life with her sisters.
She
certainly intended to have an identity of
her
own, because
her
name would be in lights on Broadway:
Caroline Lenore Malloy
, and it would be Beth and Eddie in the audience, admiring
her
.

“I don’t think I’d want to live my whole life with you,” she said to Eddie when she got home. Eddie was in the dining room working on a layout for the first issue.

Eddie placed one hand on her heart. “Oh, what a blow, Caroline!” she said. “I’m grief-stricken.”

Caroline had started to tell her about Tessie and Bessie when they heard the clunk of the bike against the front steps and Beth burst through the front door.

“Eddie, do we have a name for our newspaper?” she panted.

“Not yet,” said Eddie. “Why?”

“Because there are posters all over town, and you know what they say?
The Hatford Herald, Coming July Sixteenth, Eddie Malloy, Editor in Chief
!”

Five
The Secret

E
ver since Wally’s trip to Oldakers’ Bookstore, he couldn’t get those noisy bones off his mind.

You can’t tell anyone, not even your brothers
, Mike Oldaker had said. And Wally had nodded. He had said okay. It was the secret as much as the bones that worried him.

If he could keep a secret, Mike had promised, he would give the story to the
Hatford Herald
even before he told it to the
Buckman Bugle
, the city newspaper.

This was
big
, Wally thought. This was a
scoop
! This was absolutely, positively
huge
! Fantastic! All he had to do was not tell anybody, not even his parents.

He had always liked Mike because he seemed like a man who understood sitting on a porch and counting raindrops. Sitting on the steps studying an anthill. Floating bottles down a river or even spitting in the
water from the footbridge. The kind of man who understood about lying in bed in the mornings trying to figure out where a spiderweb began.

But what was that scratching, scraping, clawing sound beneath the bookstore’s floorboards? And why didn’t Mike want anyone else to know? Was this about a murder? Wally wondered. Had the cellar been the scene of a crime, maybe, and somebody was down there covering up evidence? Or maybe those bones were alive! Maybe they were bones, all right, but they were covered by muscle and skin and hair! What if something, or someone, was being held prisoner down there? What if the bones got loose?

Okay, he said to himself, beginning to shiver. What did he really know about Mike Oldaker’s cellar?

The secret inside Wally Hatford was like a rock in his shoe. It was the first thing on his mind when he got up in the morning, the last thing he thought about before he went to sleep. The secret seemed to be growing bigger and bigger inside him, but he didn’t tell a soul.

He tried to think of happy things instead. Christmas.
Birthdays. Then he’d find himself thinking about that
scrape, scrape, claw, claw
sound underneath the floorboards in the bookstore. That store didn’t seem to be such a comforting place anymore. Wally’s own
house
didn’t seem so comforting. Even his grandfather’s portrait at the top of the stairs seemed to glower at him when he went to bed.

One night, Wally closed his eyes in the darkness and pulled the sheet up over his head. He tried to think of Christmas again, but his mind seemed to prefer Halloween. And then he was climbing down a ladder into a dark hole. Down … down … down … Colder, darker, spookier, creepier …

He found himself walking through a long dark tunnel, and there was a noise like hockey sticks clacking together. Up ahead he could see a far-off light, and with every step he took, the clacking sound grew louder.

Step by step … step by step …

Wally’s heart began to pound. His pulse beat a little faster. His lips felt dry, and his palms began to sweat.

And suddenly he was in the room with the light, and there was a bucket of bones in the middle of the floor. The bones were moving! All at once they rose up out of the bucket and into the air. The knee bone connected to the thighbone, the thighbone connected to the hip bone, the hip bone connected to the backbone, the backbone connected to the neck bone, and—

“Arrrrggggghhhhh!” Wally yelled as something touched his forehead.

“Wally!” said his dad. “Wake up. You’re having a bad dream.”

“Whooooh!” gasped Wally.

“Are you awake? You okay?” asked Mr. Hatford.

“Whoooaaaah!” Wally bellowed.

“Wally, open your eyes. Sit up. Drink some water,” said his dad.

Wally opened his eyes. He sat up. He was in his own room. There was a light on in the hall.

“You were yelling loudly enough to wake the dead,” said Mr. Hatford.

Dead
? “Whoooooh!” Wally yelped again.

This time Mr. Hatford shook his shoulder. “Do you want to sleep with Peter for the rest of the night?” he asked.

“No,” said Wally, his heart still racing.

“Count to five,” said his father.

“One, two, three, four, five,” said Wally.

“Where are you?”

“In the cellar,” said Wally.

“No, you are right here in your own room, and I’m waiting for you to really wake up so I can go back to bed,” said his dad.

“Good night,” said Wally. “I’m okay”

Mr. Hatford went back to his own room, and Wally lay as still as a stone until his pulse returned to normal. This secret was too big to keep. This secret was going to drive him nuts.

And then he had a thought. Mike Oldaker had said that as soon as they found out who the bones belonged
to, he’d tell Wally even before he called the
Buckman Bugle
.

If it had been a bad secret, an awful secret, Mike Oldaker would not have told Wally, and he certainly would not have been willing to tell the Buckman newspaper. Unless he was lying, of course.

Mike Oldaker had promised Wally a scoop, though, so for now, anyway, Wally was going to keep his mouth shut and see what happened.

Six
Psychic Energy

E
ddie was spitting bullets. She leaped up from the table, scattering pencils and papers all over the floor. How dare the boys name the newspaper the
Hatford Herald?

“I’m the editor in chief, and no one asked
me
!” she bellowed when Beth brought the news. “I never gave my okay!”

The posters were all around Buckman, Beth told her. The guys must have designed them on their computer, printed them up, and gone to every store downtown to put them in the shop windows.

“So what would you have named the paper?” Caroline asked, somewhat surprised at the uproar. What could you
expect
from a Hatford, after all?

“I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have
Hatford
in the title, you can be sure of that!” Eddie fumed. “The
Malloy Messenger
! The
Girls’ Dispatch!
The
Buckman Bulletin!
The
West Virginia Word! Anything
except the
Hatford Herald
. I wouldn’t name it anything that even
smelled
of a boy!”

Caroline tried to figure that one out. She wondered if the Hatfords had an aura that she couldn’t detect.

“Well, we can’t do anything about it now,” Beth said. “If you went around changing the posters, crossing out
Hatford Herald
and making it the
Malloy Messenger
or something, it would look like you’re not really in charge, Eddie. Or that if you were, no one was paying attention.”

Eddie growled in disgust.

“You’ll just have to go along with it,” Beth told her. “You’ll have to pretend it was your idea too.”

“What it means is we’ll have to watch those guys like hawks to see what else they’re up to,” said Eddie, pacing back and forth like a tiger in a cage. “Why didn’t
I
name the newspaper first? How could I have been so stupid?”

Caroline, however, was only half listening, because she saw the mail truck stop at the bottom of the driveway. She watched Mr. Hatford reach out and open the Malloys’ box, put some mail inside, and turn up the red metal flag to show that there was mail.

Instantly, she was out the door and down the steps and was running down the long driveway toward the road. Mr. Hatford gave a soft toot of his horn as he drove away. When Caroline opened the box and found the envelope she had been waiting for, addressed to
Caroline Lenore Malloy, she took it up to her room before her sisters could see it.

Eddie and Beth were all wrapped up in making the newspaper, their father was in Ohio seeing about taking his old job again, and their mother was preoccupied with the possibility of moving. No one else in the family could ever understand the youngest Malloy daughter—
her
—she was sure of it. And of course Caroline didn’t expect them to. No one else in the family wanted to go onstage, so this burden of being a misunderstood and unappreciated actress-in-the-making would be hers alone.