A Perfect Storm (7 page)

“Nay, I duh'nt know 'er,” he said at last.

My heart sank. “But—but I thought you had a message. From her. For me,” I said weakly. I willed myself to swallow the huge lump that had risen in my throat. Not to cry. Not now.

He shook his head, and for the first time I noticed a heavy gold earring in one of his ears. “Nah, I duh'nt know 'er,” he repeated. He looked from me to Lady Azura. “Must return to me ship, the
Phoebe
. She's at the docks. Beautiful, she is.”

Before I could think of anything else to say, he shimmered away and vanished.

I stared at Lady Azura. “Did you see him?”

She shook her head. “I could not see him. But I sensed his presence, and I could hear him quite well.”

“Well, what do you think is wrong? Was he lying to me? Or had he been lying before, about having a message from my mother?” Hot tears sprang to the corners of my eyes.

Lady Azura patted the table gently, indicating that I should sit back down. I sat.

“I believe he was telling the truth both times,” she said quietly.

That made no sense. I started to say something.

“I believe that this Duggan is a younger version of the spirit you met upstairs. Did he
look
younger?”

I reflected. “Well, yes. Definitely. But—”

“I believe he truly doesn't know who Natalie is—yet.”

I didn't understand. She could see by my face that I didn't.

“Some spirits who stay tied to the earth after they die go through cycles. They will relive various parts of their former lives. I believe that Duggan as a spirit does what the living Duggan did many years ago. He spends part of his time here, in the house, and part at the shipyard, and part at sea. We happened to conjure the younger man.”

“That's crazy,” I said. “Why would he do that?”

“Do you remember that my late husband Richard appears to me on Christmas?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Sometimes he appears as a young man, and sometimes he appears as he did later in his life. There are no hard-and-fast rules with spirits. They really get to do whatever they want.”

“Maybe we can try again. Maybe if we try to invite the old Duggan this time—”

She shook her head. “I'm afraid it doesn't work that way.”

“But how do you know?” I pressed. “I mean, can't we try at least?”

“Sara, please believe me that I know what I am talking about here. I have a lot of experience with this. As I said, my late husband, Richard, comes to me in various forms. Believe me when I tell you I have tried to send back the very young Richard when he appears, and trade him in, so to speak, for my favorite Richard, in his midfifties. But I cannot do so. And in the process I have managed to really confuse the spirit who is with me.”

I believed her, of course. And I could imagine that it would be pretty confusing for a spirit, who maybe didn't even grasp that he was a spirit in the first place, to be asked to leave and come back as himself thirty
years later. I swallowed my bitter disappointment and decided to head over to Lily's.

I told her everything, of course.

We were up in her room, packing boxes full of shoes that Lily and her mother had collected from the basement for a clothing drive. Buddy, the Randazzo family dog, lay sprawled on the floor among all the shoes, sound asleep and snoring contentedly. Lily sat on the floor next to him, one hand on his head, the other holding a pink sneaker in her hand. She looked at it thoughtfully. “I have an idea,” she said.

I looked up from my box and sat back on my heels. From the tone of her voice, it sounded like it might be a big idea. I waited expectantly.

“Why don't you and I try to conjure him with my spirit board?” she suggested.

I grimaced. “I don't know. The last two times I've tried to conjure spirits have been pretty disastrous.” I realized that in all the excitement of the storm, I hadn't yet told her about the crowd of spirits that had shown up after the session we'd had together with Lady Azura. So I filled her in on what had happened.

Lily wouldn't be dissuaded. “Well, this time it
wouldn't be just for the fun of it. We'd be very specifically calling to one spirit. Anyway, it's an idea. Think it over.”

I promised I would.

We spent the rest of our time home from school keeping busy with post-storm cleanup. I helped Lily's parents get their yard back in shape. There was a lot of un-prepping to do around Lily's house: We picked up all the sticks and branches that had blown down in the yard and packed up more boxes for the clothing drive. Lily and my dad and I also helped our neighbors pick up sticks and stuff in their yards. And I took more pictures.

I was actually happy when school resumed on Thursday morning.

Thursday morning Principal Bowman called an all-school assembly to introduce the new kids from Harbor Isle. All twenty of them stood on the stage in a clump, and Mrs. Bowman introduced them one by one.

Mason was not among them.

“I don't see Calvin,” whispered Lily, who was sitting beside me. “I guess he's not going to be here.”

“Sorry, Lil,” I said.

Jody Jenner was there, though. The girl I'd met the week before at Scoops. There was a smattering of applause as Mrs. Bowman called out Jody's name, and she waved to the crowd like she was the president, a big smile on her pretty face.

Beside me, I could hear Lily grumbling under her breath.

“What's up?” I whispered to her.

“Nothing,” she whispered back. “I just don't trust her. Something tells me she's not as nice as everyone thinks she is.”

I shrugged. “Well, you've known her longer than I have. I'll—”

“Calvin Kennedy,” called Mrs. Bowman.

I felt Lily start. I grinned. Gave her a little elbow in the arm.

Calvin emerged from where he'd been standing in the back of the clump. I had to admit, he really was nice-looking. I could understand Lily's obsession. In a purely objective way, of course.

Mrs. Bowman called the last few kids' names and then explained that the Harbor Isle kids would be with us for the rest of the semester—most likely until the new year. And that we should welcome them, show them around, help them find their way to classes. I made a promise in my head to be as welcoming as I could.

I knew what it was like to be new. It wasn't that long ago that I was the new girl at Stellamar Middle School. I just couldn't help but feel let down that Mason wasn't one of the new kids.

I gave Lily another nudge with my elbow. She nudged back.

Well, at least Lily could focus on
her
crush.

At lunch, Miranda waved over Jody and her friend, Caroline, inviting them to come sit at our table. We all moved over to make room for them.

Caroline sat across the table, between Tamara and Marlee. Jody sat down between me and Lily. “I see the food here is as delicious as it is at Harbor Isle,” she said drily, poking at her lukewarm slice of pizza.

“Yeah, the kitchen got a four-star rating in the
New York Times
recently,” I said.

Jody laughed.

Was Lily right about her? I wondered. She seemed really nice.

“So is your dad really a famous TV director guy?” asked Avery eagerly.

Jody rolled her eyes. “I guess you would say so,” she said, taking a dainty sip of her chocolate milk. “But to me he's just a random dad, as embarrassing as the next dad.”

We all laughed at that. She seemed so normal.

“Hey, tell them about how you stayed in that
castle this summer, and your ghost story,” suggested Caroline.

“You stayed in a castle?” asked Miranda, her eyes round.

“With a
ghost
?” added Tamara.

I swallowed hard.

“Yeah,” said Jody. “We were visiting this guy who was in one of my dad's TV movies. John Fry.”

“Wait. You mean,
John Fry,
John Fry? The guy who stars in that new TV show?” asked Miranda.

“Oh. Yeah, I guess he has a show, too.”

We all knew the show, of course. It was a huge hit, a drama about a guy who has secret superpowers for fighting bad guys. John Fry was this twentysomething, super-gorgeous British movie star who was on the cover of every weekly magazine at the grocery checkout counter.

“Anyway,” Jody continued, “so John owns this huge, rambling castle in Scotland, with a moat and servants and everything, and supposedly there's a ghost that haunts it, the ghost of a young girl who threw herself off a parapet a few centuries ago.”

“Why?” asked Tamara, transfixed.

“I guess because she couldn't marry the guy she loved. Something like that.”

“And you
saw
her? The ghost, I mean?” asked Marlee.

“Well, maybe yes, maybe no,” said Jody. “I mean, I woke up in the middle of the night and was sure I saw a girl in a long white dress standing in my room. Then she vanished. And the next morning when I asked about it, John's wife told me that was the very room where the girl had once slept.”

This story seemed to impress everyone at the table. I wasn't sure what to say, so I kept quiet. Of course.

Unfortunately, Avery didn't.

“Well,
Sara
here has a great-grandmother who can see spirits,” she said. “And she's totally famous. Just last spring she helped catch a burglar. She was in the news and everything.”

Jody looked at me, and I saw a flicker of disapproval pass across her face. A second later, though, she was smiling again. Had I imagined it?

“Collins!” a voice boomed at me from across the cafeteria. I jerked my head up to look, although I realized who it was before I even saw him.

It was the spirit of a gym teacher, long since dead. He bothered me regularly at school, starting back on my very first day last year. I generally managed to avoid him. But today he seemed intent on talking to me. I realized with dread that he was striding through the crowded cafeteria, right in my direction.

I stood up quickly. “Got to go print something out in the library,” I mumbled, collecting my tray and my backpack and disentangling myself from the table. I noted the perplexed looks on the faces of some of my friends at the table, but better to let them think I was being weird and impulsive than having them see me in a close encounter with a loudmouthed spirit.

I made it to the side of the cafeteria, with a clear passage to the doorway, but he stepped in front of me, his barrel chest heaving, and stuck a chubby finger in my face.

“I got a job for you, Collins,” he said.

“Not now,” I said out of the side of my mouth, hoping no one was looking my way. I tried to move past him, but he blocked my way again.

“I need to give you something to bring to someone,” he said.

I knew what I had to do. I had to be firm with him.

“Listen,” I said, still out of the corner of my mouth, and trying to edge my way out with my back to the wall. “You can't approach me like this in front of—”

“Who exactly are you talking to?” said a voice over my shoulder.

I froze. Turned. It was Jody.

“Oh. I—ah-ha-ha!” I stammered. My mind had gone blank. But at least the spirit had vanished.

“We're supposed to memorize a passage from
Julius Caesar
,” I heard Lily say. She was there, just behind Jody. “You were just practicing your lines, right, Sar?”

I shot her a grateful look. “Yep. I was just memorizing a passage from
Julius Caesar
. Guess I shouldn't talk out loud like that, huh,” I said.

“Yeah, maybe not,” Jody replied. But then she smiled. “Hey, Sara,” she said in a really friendly voice. “It's Sara, right?”

I nodded.

“Listen, I was just telling the rest of the table something when you jumped up and left. We're organizing a fund-raiser. For the storm victims. It's going to be a joint event between Stellamar Middle and Harbor
Isle Middle. An auction. The PTA asked my parents to help with it, since my dad knows a bunch of celebrities and stuff. They want him to auction off a visit to his TV studio, maybe even a bit part in one of his upcoming episodes.” She said it really casually, like it was no big deal. “Anyway, do you want to come over to my house with a bunch of kids tomorrow night to help plan it?”

“Oh! Sure! That sounds great,” I said.

Lily winked at me. “Lots of kids are going to be there, probably even some kids who didn't get transferred to Stellamar. . . .”

Jody frowned when Lily said that. But only for a moment.

“When is the auction going to be?” I asked.

The bell rang, and suddenly there was noise and confusion as kids started moving toward the door for their next class.

“Gotta go! See you in English!” Lily said, and then she hustled off.

“To answer your question,” said Jody, “it's going to be a week from tomorrow.”

I stopped. “Oh no. That's the night I have to go
with my dad to a wedding. I promised him I'd be his date.”

“Oh, that's too bad,” said Jody quickly. “Well, then I guess there'd be no reason for you to come tomorrow night for the planning, if you can't be there for the auction. You'd just feel left out. Don't even worry about coming. Sorry!” she said, drawing out the word dramatically. “See you later!”

And she turned on her heel and hurried away, leaving me standing there with my mouth open.

Had she just gone from really friendly to really weird in about two seconds flat? And uninvited me to a really fun get-together tomorrow night? It seemed that she had.

I spent a glum Thursday evening at home that night, doing homework, thinking about the get-together I had been uninvited to that would be happening the next night, and dwelling on the unfair fact that Mason hadn't been one of the Harbor Isle kids transferred to my school. I thought about texting Lily to tell her what had happened with Jody moments after she'd walked away. But I didn't. Lily would probably not go either, out of loyalty to me. And I wanted her to go. Because Calvin would be there. It was a perfect opportunity for her to see him in a relaxed setting. And also, I didn't want to do anything to make things worse between Lily and Jody. I was beginning to think that maybe Lily's gut feeling about Jody was right—that she wasn't very nice after all—though I was really trying to keep an open mind.