The Ghost Sonata (25 page)

The tombstone was smaller and newer than many of the flat, greenish slabs that jutted from the ground throughout the churchyard. The inscription read:

 

 

“Hey, that bloke was about our age when he died.” Julian noticed the boy had died only four years ago.

A cloud overhead darkened the late-afternoon sunlight as they both stared at the grave.

“I wonder
how
he died,” Gilda mused.

“I know a way we could find out.”

“A séance?”

“Something like that . . . There's an old tradition in my village—a way to communicate with a person who's died and to raise their spirit from beyond.”

“Is this another one of your ghost stories?”

“No. All the kids know about it, but most of them are too scared to do it.”

“How about you?”

“I tried it once, ages ago.”

“And?”

“I admit nothing happened then, but you never know. Maybe it's different with a real psychic investigator.”

As Julian spoke, Gilda felt a chill, as if a draft of cold air had just wafted up from the grave itself. “Okay. How does it work?” For some reason, she found herself whispering.

“Well, you get a group of kids together and everyone holds hands and circles counterclockwise 'round the grave nine times. And each time you go 'round, you chant the dead person's name.”

Gilda reflected that this seemed exactly like the kind of wonderfully spooky but fundamentally
bad
idea that some kid might have in a horror movie—a movie in which everyone ends up getting killed.

“Can't hurt to try it.” Gilda tried to sound more nonchalant than she felt.

The two stood on opposite sides of the small tombstone, and Julian took Gilda's hands. Gilda sensed a warm, electric energy flowing between them. She was also intensely aware that rows of corpses and skeletons surrounded them, just beneath the ground. They began to circle around the boy's tombstone.

“Charles Drummond,” they said at the first circle, gazing into each other's eyes and giggling at the sense that what they were doing was at once very silly and somehow potentially very dangerous.

“Charles Drummond,” they repeated at the second circle.

Their circles grew faster, and Gilda began to feel dizzy. Julian's pitcher-eared face became distorted; the tombstones glimpsed in her peripheral vision looked lopsided; the earth and the sky seemed to be switching places. As they completed the ninth turn, Gilda felt so light-headed, she thought she might fall down on the ground, but instead, Julian pulled her toward him, and then something very strange was happening because his mouth was touching hers.

I'm kissing a boy
, Gilda told herself.
Omigod, I'm actually kissing a boy! My first kiss! In an English graveyard!

Technically, it wasn't Gilda's
very
first kiss; earlier in the year, she had been in a school play in which her character had been required to kiss a boy named Felix, but neither Gilda nor Felix had
wanted
to kiss each other in the scene. They had pressed their mouths together as briefly and reluctantly as possible, and Felix had even asked the director if the scene could be cut “just so nobody gets the idea we're a couple.”

Kissing Julian was different: there was nothing reluctant about it. In fact, he seemed to be trying to tear his lips from her face with a fierce suction.
Maybe we're not doing it right
, Gilda thought. She was aware of her shinbone pressing into the cold stone of the tombstone between them, and the drops of icy rain that had begun to fall.
It's not quite what I imagined
, Gilda had to admit. She had assumed that when you finally kissed a boy you actually
liked
, the experience would be akin to being launched into outer space or the first downward plunge on a roller coaster. Didn't the old movies and television programs show fireworks going off when people kissed? The truth boiled down to the reality of someone's mouth touching yours—someone else's lips, tongue, and saliva.
Maybe I'm analyzing it too much
, Gilda thought.

Almost without warning, the skies opened and the cold drizzle crescendoed into a heavy downpour.

Julian grabbed Gilda's hand and the two of them hurried toward the church. Relieved to discover that the heavy wooden doors were open, they walked into an eerie quiet.

32

The White Rose

 

Gilda and Julian entered a tiny, stark sanctuary filled with rows of wooden pews and oil lamps that hung from the ceiling. The only light came from a couple of small stained-glass windows.

Some pamphlets left near the door explained the significance of the treacle well and the “twelfth-century church built on ancient pagan worship grounds.”

Julian took Gilda's hand and began to pull her close again, but this time, Gilda resisted. “Not in a
church
.” She realized this sounded like the kind of prim statement her mother might make, but something about the silent spookiness of the twelfth-century church made her feel as if the two of them were being
watched.
Besides, something else bothered her—something about Julian.

“Tell me the truth, Julian,” she blurted impulsively. “Does your dad install toilets, or does he own hotels?”

Julian was startled by the unexpected question. He glanced at the door as if looking for a quick escape. “What, you and Jenny been gossiping about me?”

“Of course not. I actually heard your story about owning hotels from Jenny's mother.”

“Oh. Well, what did you tell
her
?”

“What do you think? I told her your father installs toilets.”

“That explains why she pestered me with about a million questions, then.” Julian sat down in one of the pews, looking dejected. “If you must know, neither one is true. My father is an estate agent. He sells houses.”

“So why lie about selling houses?”

Julian shrugged. “Don't you ever wish things were more interesting than they are?”

“Every now and then.”
More like all the time
, Gilda thought. She knew she and Julian had something in common because she often caught herself blurting half-truths in an attempt to liven up conversation or get out of a scrape. Hadn't she just presented herself as “Dame Gilda” to Professor Sabertash? Still, this tendency only made Gilda feel doubly annoyed whenever she discovered she was on the
receiving
end of a fib. “What
other
things did you make up?” Gilda persisted.

“None.”

“What about your story about seeing a ghost?”

“That
happened
, actually. The irony is that nobody believes the strangest
true
story I tell.”

“I guess I can relate to that,” said Gilda. She had noticed that her mother and some of her teachers seemed to prefer half-truths to the bizarre, but completely
true
experiences she encountered as a psychic investigator.

“Anyway,” Julian continued, “who knows why I made up that rot about my poor dad.”

Gilda sat down next to Julian in the pew. “Why
did
you?”

“Maybe because he doesn't want me to be here, doing this competition in the first place. Maybe he's right. I probably
shouldn't
be here.” Julian clutched the fingers of his left hand and began pulling his fingers back one by one, as if trying to stretch out his joints.

Gilda observed the ropy veins in Julian's hands. She felt surprised to hear self-doubt from someone who normally seemed so assured. “I think you should follow your dreams no matter what, Julian.”

“Spoken like a true American—optimistic and naïve.”

“What's the point of being pessimistic, thinking that nothing you hope for could ever really happen?”

“I'm not being pessimistic; I'm being
realistic.
I see how people's lives turn out. It's
never
exactly what they imagine or hope for.”

Gilda thought of the adults she knew. How many of them had actually ended up where they had once imagined they would be? Her mom had apparently always wanted to be a nurse, but she also complained that the job of working in a hospital was much more draining than she had expected. And what about her father? He had died before achieving his dream of becoming a writer. “I guess some people are just unlucky,” Gilda ventured. “But I get the feeling most people never really
go
for it enough.”

“And what is it, exactly, that
you're
going for?”

Gilda detected a sardonic note in Julian's voice—almost a tone of hostility. “I already told you,” she said. “I'm a psychic investigator.”

“Right. So when you're all grown up you'll go to work at the psychic investigator office and pay your bills with all the dosh you make from catching ghosts?”

“It's not about money.” Gilda had never actually thought of her investigative work in such practical terms. “It's more like something I do because I'm driven to do it,” she explained. “I almost can't
help
it.”

Julian nodded, watching her closely—almost hungrily.

“Besides, being a psychic investigator isn't my only career. I'll probably also write a couple best-selling novels and direct some Broadway hits to help support my investigative work and designer shopping sprees.”

“So—at the age of fourteen, you're a novelist, a theater director,
and
a psychic investigator.”

“Exactly.” Gilda enjoyed hearing the summary of her careers.

“And a page-turner.”

“Oh, right.”

“Would you also say you're a bit of a faffer?”

Gilda couldn't remember the specific meaning of the term
faffer
, but it had a flaccid, windy sound that she didn't like. Julian wore a patronizing expression she remembered seeing on her brother's face when he was teasing her in some way she couldn't quite figure out. “I'm not a faffer,” she said.

“But you faff about,” said Julian, grinning.

“I do
not
‘faff about.'”

“Are you sure?” Julian gazed at her with a combination of mischievous affection and something akin to malice. It clearly bothered him that Gilda pursued her far-fetched goals with such complete confidence.

“If a faffer is a multitalented person, then yes—I am one.”

“It's more like a person who dabbles—someone who does a little of this, a little of that, but doesn't really accomplish any one thing.”

“Who says I don't accomplish anything?”

“Don't get your knickers in a twist. I'm a bit of a faffer myself; my teacher always says so.”

“For your information, Julian, I was making great progress on an investigation until you showed up in this graveyard.”

“Don't get all in a pother. Back home, everyone gets teased all the time, so I guess it's just habit for me.”

“I've never been in a pother in my life!” Gilda stood up and headed for the door. “I should get back to my work instead of faffing about in this church with you.” Gilda thrust open the heavy church door. Looking out into a steady drizzle of rain, she glimpsed something in the graveyard that made her forget her argument with Julian. In fact, for a moment, she almost forgot to breathe.

A tall figure stood amid the tombstones wearing a hooded cape that dragged upon the ground. Carrying a black umbrella, the figure began to move at a strikingly smooth speed, almost appearing to float just above the wet grass.

Is that the ghost of Rosamund the Fair?
Gilda felt momentarily paralyzed.
But what about the black umbrella? Didn't Rosamund live too long ago for umbrellas?

Gilda came to her senses and ran into the rain, attempting to pursue the cloaked figure, but he or she disappeared into a grove of trees before Gilda could catch up.

As Gilda paused to catch her breath, something equally mysterious caught her attention: a single white rose that lay in the mud upon Charles Drummond's grave.

33