Shadow of a Life (36 page)

“
Please
don’t go missing. I just don’t think I was cut out for this
dangerous stuff.”

The evening dragged as we paced the
hotel room, anxious for what we were about to do. Finally, it was
time to get ready to go. Peter and I searched our suitcases along
with Sophia’s and Nick’s for the darkest clothing we could find.
The clouds that had been gathering earlier in the afternoon covered
the skies and threatened to release their rain. In my nervousness,
I yanked on the shoelace of my tennis shoe so hard it tore
off.

“
Dang it,” I cursed. “I’m
going to the lobby to see if they sell shoelaces in the little
store. I’ll be right back,” I yelled as I slammed our door behind
me.

There were a lot of people
roaming around the lobby and I suddenly became
self-conscious.
What if Nick and Sophia
lost track of the Goodwins? What if the Goodwins have other ghosts
working with them and they’re following us?
Any one of these people could be a ghost and I wouldn’t even
know it.
I closed my eyes and concentrated,
trying to see if I could sense anything.

“
Is everything okay? Can I
help you find anything?” I opened my eyes to find the clerk tapping
me on my shoulder.

“
Umm . . . shoelaces. I need
shoelaces,” I said, embarrassed.

“
We have some right over
here,” she said as she led me to a box in the back. I chose a pair
and paid for them before grabbing a couple of matchbooks with the
hotel’s logo out of a basket by the cash register on my way out. I
figured I needed a souvenir of our little adventure.

At nine o’clock, I called Sophia.
“We’re ready to leave. Are the Goodwins still in their
hotel?”

“
I hope so. They’re staying
in a place where all the doors open to the outside and we haven’t
seen any auras or people come out yet, but it’s hard to watch all
the doors at once.”

“
Good. We’ll try to hurry
and we’ll call you if we find something.”

“
I can’t wait until I have
my license. This sucks,” Peter said as we waited for yet another
cab to take us out to the beach.

“
I know. We’re so close, yet
so far away.” Peter and I both had birthdays in the fall and had
less than six months until we could get our permits. It couldn’t
come soon enough.

We gave instructions to our driver on
where we wanted to go. “Are you sure you want to go there in the
rain?” he asked in a thick accent.

“
We’re sure,” Peter
answered.

The driver muttered something under
his breath about stupid teenagers, but obediently drove us where we
asked. I can only imagine what he thought we were going to do
there. By the time we pulled into the beach access parking lot, the
skies had started to release their cargo and giant raindrops were
landing on the windshield. The driver didn’t say anything else to
us as we paid him and jumped out. Peter grabbed my hand and started
walking toward a rocky outcropping.

“
He thinks we’re up to
something,” I said, nodding toward the cab that slowly turned
around.

“
If he thinks we’re here to
do something, we might as well give him a show,” he said and pulled
me in for a hug.

“
Peter
.” I punched him in the chest.

“
I’m just kidding, Jamie.”
He laughed at me.

“
I know. I’m just
tense.”

“
Yeah, I can
tell.”

He grabbed my hand again and we
continued walking in the dark. As soon as the taillights of the cab
were out of sight we reversed our direction and headed back to the
road on which we’d just arrived. Making sure there were no cars in
sight we darted across the road. Following a barbed wire fence, we
stayed close to the highway until we got to the place where it
forked. At one point a car came toward us and we crouched down with
our hoods covering our faces. I felt like a criminal. I was about
to trespass on private property, so I guess I was.

At the fork, we left the main road and
I crawled through the fence to the field on the other side. My hair
got caught in some of the barbs on the way through and Peter had to
help me untangle it. I had to hold the barbs up for him since he
was a lot bigger, but he managed to shimmy through with only a
couple of scratches.

The rain had turned from an occasional
drip to a full downpour and the ground was getting slippery. I lost
my footing as we ran through a field and started to fall. Peter
caught me just before I hit the ground and held me up. Hand in hand
we made it to the first set of trees and stopped to get our
bearings. I put my hands on my knees, panting—partly from our dash
through the field and partly from anxiety. I desperately wanted to
turn on a flashlight, but that would be stupid. I didn’t know how
many homes were out there, but I could see a few lights off in the
distance. We didn’t want someone coming to investigate.

We continued running through the
trees, our clothes dripping wet and our feet sloshing until a
clearing came in to view. “Peter, I think that’s the old well
Sophia told us about,” I said.

We could see a crumbling rock
structure just past the line of trees, and beyond that the lights
of the new home that had been built on the Goodwin
property.

“
You’re right. It’s exactly
where Sophia told us it would be. Why do they still have so many
lights on over there at the house? It’s ten o’clock. I thought old
people went to bed early.”

“
With our luck, they’re
probably having a party tonight.”

We watched the house for a little
while to make sure no one was staring out any windows or on the
back porch or upstairs balcony before we quietly stepped out from
the trees and over to the well.

“
So much of Sophia and
Nick’s history surrounds this place,” I said as I ran my hands
along the top of it. I peered over the edge, but it was too dark to
see anything. An old wooden bucket was still attached to a rope
hanging from the top cover of the well. I wondered if it was the
same one Sophia would send down to retrieve water every morning
when she was alive.

“
Hey, Jamie, look at this. I
think the path to the old house is right here.” Peter had crouched
down and turned a flashlight on, aiming it at the ground with his
back toward the house to help block the light.

I followed behind him,
stepping where he stepped as we did our best to follow the
overgrown ruts up the sloping land in the rain. A few minutes later
we found ourselves standing at the burned out shell of Sophia’s
former home. An overwhelming urge to cry suddenly came over me and
I had to grab onto a piece of the charred wood to keep my balance.
My chest burned and every part of my body screamed,
This is it.

“
Jamie? Are you okay?” Peter
asked.

“
Yeah, I think so. I feel
weird. I think it’s my connection to Nick and Sophia. I feel like
I’m on the right path and I’m being urged on.”

He didn’t say anything. It
was a strange feeling to try to describe and I’m sure the only
thing he understood was that he couldn’t understand. We walked
around the structure for a minute, trying to see if anything stood
out. Nothing did. The home was a complete loss and barely even
looked like a home. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought
it was nothing more than the remnants of a huge bonfire. With the
strange feeling still urging me on, I told Peter we needed to move
to the barn. From where we were we could only see the upper floor
of the new home and we watched as one by one the lights went
out.
Good—they’ve finally gone to
bed.

The rain slowed, but we were
already soaked through and both of us were shivering. Peter kept
his arm around my shoulder, trying to warm me up as we crossed to
the old barn. The lady of the house was right—it
had
collapsed in on
itself, but it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d imagined. Instead of a
pile of rubble, a dreadfully dilapidated building loomed in front
of us.

“
Nick and Sophia said there
were two entrances to the barn with a walkway between them and
stalls on either side,” I reminded Peter as we approached. “Nick
said we should go in the back entrance if possible.”

We circled around the building and
stared at the rotting wood. The doorway no longer existed. In its
place were giant pieces of wood, splintered like
matchsticks.

“
This doesn’t look safe. I
think you should stay out here while I go in,” Peter
volunteered.

“
No way. I’m going in, too.
I didn’t come all this way to just watch.”

“
You definitely aren’t as
much like Camille as I thought you were.”

“
Is that a bad
thing?”

“
Not at all. I like this
side of you.”

We examined the pile again and shook a
few of the bigger pieces of wood to see how sturdy they were.
Nothing moved and the jumble seemed to hold up. Peter climbed onto
the pile and jumped up and down a couple of times. Still
nothing.

“
Okay. Let’s do this.” He
reached down and pulled me up next to him.

A cracking sound in the
trees behind the barn stopped us. We both crouched down, not daring
to move. I don’t think I even breathed.
There it is again
. It sounded as if
someone were stepping on tiny twigs. My legs wobbled from crouching
on the pile of wood, and I was getting lightheaded from holding my
breath. Suddenly, a figure emerged from the trees.

CHAPTER 24

P
eter nudged me and tilted his head toward the figure that had
just stepped from the trees. “Do you see it?” he
whispered.

I nodded, terrified. “Who is
it?”

He snickered. “Jamie, it’s a
deer.”

I looked closer and sure enough, the
figure stood on four legs, looking our way with its ears alert and
listening. Peter tossed a stick to the ground and the deer bounded
away back into the trees.

“
I thought for sure it was
going to be Jeremiah,” I finally breathed.

“
I have a feeling that if
Jeremiah were to come, he’d be a lot quieter.”

“
Thanks, but that’s not
reassuring at all.”

“
It wasn’t supposed to
be.”

We continued to scramble up the pile
until we found an opening big enough for us to slip through. Peter
turned on his flashlight and shined it down into the hole. Debris
littered the floor below us, but for the most part it was open
space. The main part of the barn had been preserved when the walls
started to crumble.

“
Let me help you go down
first,” he said.

“
Okay.” I slid through the
hole on my stomach as far as I could and then Peter took both my
hands and lowered me down. I let go of him and dropped the last two
feet to the floor. The thud of my feet hitting the ground echoed
through the room. I flipped on my light and shined it around,
turning in every direction. A mouse scurried across the floor in
front of me and I shivered.

“
Is it clear?” Peter called
through the hole.

“
Yeah. Come
down.”

He dropped through the hole and landed
gracefully on his feet. For some reason I began to
laugh.

“
What’s so
funny?”

“
All of this. Last month I
was making plans to spend my summer at the library and now I’m
trespassing in an old barn, in a different state, while looking for
a treasure map. I keep expecting to wake up from a really long
dream.”

“
Would you rather be at the
library than doing this?”

I didn’t even have to think about it.
“Absolutely not.”

“
Nick said he put Jeremiah’s
pouch under a floorboard just outside the second stall from the
back on the right, correct?” Peter asked.

“
That’s how I remember
it.”

We both dropped to our knees and began
to brush dirt and debris away with our gloved hands. None of the
boards were the slightest bit loose.

“
Look at these nails,” Peter
said as he aimed the light close to the floor, “they’ve definitely
been added since the barn was built. They’re modern.”

My heart fell. “Do you think the whole
floor has been replaced? If so, whoever tore it out would have
found the pouch for sure.”

Peter slowly walked forward, still
bending down with his light close to the floor.

“
Look over here, Jamie. Do
you see the difference between the nails over there and the ones
here?”

I walked to him and crouched down.
“The nail heads are a different shape,” I said.

“
Exactly. I would bet money
that the ones over here are from the 1800s. I don’t think the floor
has been completely replaced. They probably just nailed down the
loose boards at some point.”

“
Is that something you
learned from your parents?”

He grinned. “Sometimes it pays to live
with a couple of archaeologists.”

We crawled back to the spot where we
thought the pouch should be and began to pull on the boards. It was
a tight fit and I could barely fit my fingers into the cracks
between the boards. I removed my gloves and pulled.