Apparition (19 page)

I type his name into the search engine on my computer. The first thing that comes up is some girl’s Facebook pictures. One of those parties where everyone is pretty drunk and the girls all look like they’re competing for spots on some “bachelor” reality show. And in one of those pictures I recognize Kip sitting on a couch, a beer in his hand, smiling for the camera. Pressed up against him is a girl with long red hair and a tight yellow tank top with her lime green bra straps showing. Her eyes are also on the camera, her mouth open in a wide grin, her tongue lightly on her bottom lip, as if she’s threatening to nibble his ear. Or lick it. It must be from the summer, because she’s not dressed for the cold. Her name is Serena somebody. I wish I hadn’t looked. I’m such an idiot. I’ve got enough awful images crowding my head already.

I force myself to shift focus. Could it be that old Mrs. Ross is William McGrath’s sister? As I’m wondering about that, something comes back to me: that nightmare I had about being trapped in crossfire in a battlefield. The feeling of fear was overwhelming. That was the night after Kip and I went into the barn together. A chill passed through me just before Kip kissed me. Was that the ghost of a terrified young soldier, now trapped in the barn with Matthew and the others?

I
wake up Saturday morning to the screaming of a smoke alarm going off in the kitchen. Heart pounding, I pull on my bathrobe and run down to find the room filled with the smoky stench of burnt toast.

“Ethan!” I yell, and yank the toaster plug out of the socket. Then I throw open the kitchen door and grab the toaster with oven mitts, putting it outside on the back deck, where all of our cooking disasters end up. “Ethan!” I grab the cutting board and start fanning the smoke detector on the ceiling. I fan as hard as I can, and eventually the smoke alarm cuts out. “ETHAN—!”

“I’m right here.” He’s standing behind me in his pyjamas, blinking wildly, sounding defensive. “My toast!” he says, as if burning his toast was something
I
did.

“Your toast was on FIRE!” I yell at him, winded from fanning the smoky air. “There were actual flames. The curtains could have caught fire. The whole kitchen! You’re lucky Joyce isn’t here. That’s the third time you’ve set off the smoke alarm this month. What’s with you?”
As if I have to ask. Obviously he was playing some video game. He gets so caught up in whatever he’s doing that the house could burn down and he wouldn’t notice. “Don’t be such a stoner, Ethan. For chrissake, it’s not the nicest way for me to wake up in the morning.”

“Well, how did I know it was gonna get stuck? I just wanted some lousy toast. Jeez. There’s nothing to eat around here.” He says that like it’s the biggest injustice.

I’m about to yell some more, because I really don’t think he gets it, but instead I take a hard look at him and notice how miserable he seems.

“Okay, fine. I’ll make you a grilled cheese sandwich.” His face lights up. “Happy?” I ask, still slightly irritated.

“Happy!” he says. He starts to dance around in his bare feet, jabbing his hands in the air.

“Although there’s no reason you can’t make your own.”

“Yours are better,” he says, still dancing.

Joyce is working down at her friend Rita’s riding stable all day today, so I figure I should offer to help him with his big assignment. “Joyce says you’ve got a project due on Monday and you’ve barely started it. If you want, I could help you a little with the research. What’s it on?”

“I forget. Something.”

“Great, Ethan. Really great. Well, I’ll start your grilled cheese if you get the assignment sheet.”

He runs off upstairs to his room and I search the cupboards for the frying pan.

Actually, it’s already been a heavy week of research for me. Every evening I’ve spent about an hour searching the Internet for ways to prove the existence of ghosts. The fact that Kip doesn’t believe me bothers me a lot, and I’d love to be able to say,
See? I told you
. So I’ve been researching methods for capturing ghostly images and sounds
on video or audio recorders. The problem is that none of this stuff is super-convincing to skeptics. Even I have a hard time believing that most of the pictures on the Internet are really of ghosts. They don’t look like any ghosts I’ve seen.

Still, there are special cameras that pick up things you can’t see with the naked eye, and others that you just set up and leave on. I’d love to get hold of something like that and take it into the barn. At the very least, maybe it could pick up moving objects or sounds. Something I could shove in Kip’s face. What I wouldn’t give to hear him say,
Wow, you weren’t kidding
.

I’m putting the finishing touches on Ethan’s grilled cheese when he walks in with a badly crumpled piece of paper—his geography assignment. “That took a while,” I say. He says he had trouble finding it. The assignment is about aboriginal peoples living around the Great Lakes. He has to choose a particular location and write about their connection to the land there. There are five options, but Manitoulin Island is the one he wants to do.

“Remember when we visited?” he asks.

I do. That was the summer of Mom’s first operation. We took the big car ferry from Tobermory and stayed in two motel rooms—me with Mom, and Joyce with Jack and Ethan. We went for a hike because Mom wanted to see Dreamer’s Rock. That’s an ancient aboriginal site where for thousands of years teenage boys would go on vision quests. Off by themselves for days at a time without food, they’d go into a kind of trance and start dreaming, and in their dreams they’d see themselves as grown men and learn their destiny. Must be nice to get that kind of direction in life. But Dreamer’s Rock was hard to find, even with a map from the local band office. Mom was still recovering and was so tired that we kept having to stop and rest.

“You were only seven,” I say. “What do you remember?”

“Ice creams. From the store near the beach. And Mom bought me a thing to dig in the sand. A bulldozer thing. And I got a sunburn on my shoulders.”

“Yeah. I remember that too.” I watch him eat his grilled cheese sandwich. His eyes aren’t focused on anything in the kitchen. I can tell he’s back on Manitoulin Island.

“That place was full of ghosts,” he says, out of the blue.

It practically makes me jump. I have a flashback of a young man sitting under a tree by the water, looking like he’d been there for a thousand years.

“How do you know that?”

“Jack told me. He read it in a book or something. It used to be an Indian burial ground. That’s why Mom liked it there.”

I ask him what he means by that, and he says, “Nothing.” He says Mom just liked interesting things.

“Well, anyway, I’ll help you find some information on Manitoulin Island. You can use my computer.”

We’re just getting set up in my room when Morgan calls me for a chat. I leave Ethan at my desk and tell him to get started without me. “Just type ‘Manitoulin’ into the search engine and bookmark any sites that have good information.” Then I take the phone downstairs for privacy.

Morgan tells me everything that’s happened lately in the lives of everybody she knows. Like how Brittany went on a date with her brother’s friend who’s at Georgian College. Then she asks about Jack—she usually gets around to Jack. When is he coming home from the hospital? And does the doctor think he’ll make a complete recovery? Just before we finally hang up, she asks about Kip.

“What’s he up to these days?”

“Oh, not much. We hung out for a while yesterday.”

“Really? What did you do?” Somehow, visiting the cemetery on 18th Sideroad doesn’t sound right, so I tell her we went for a drive and a walk. Morgan seems so excited by that, you’d think it happened to her. “Really, girlfriend. You’d be an idiot to let that guy slip away.”

I hang up and just sit there, thinking about Kip and Matthew. They’re just so different from each other. Is it so evil to wish I could have them both? Then I remind myself that I can’t have either. Not in the real world, anyway. Finally I remember Ethan up in my room.

“So how’s it going?” I ask as I reach the bedroom door. Ethan jumps and I know I’ve caught him at something bad. “What are you looking at?” I demand. The pale image of a ghostly figure disappears as he hits keys in a guilty panic and closes the page he was looking at.

“Ethan, who said you could stick your nose in my stuff?” I’m angry, but mostly because I’m embarrassed. I’m the one who’s been caught red-handed with a folder full of bookmarked pages on ghosts. A folder I just labelled “Stuff.” Great. If he tells Joyce, I’m dead. “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to be researching your geography assignment, not spying on me. Is that your idea of doing homework?”

“Well, excuse me,” he says, blinking and twitching excitedly. “But it’s not my fault I accidentally opened your stupid files. And guess what? You’re in trouble if Joyce finds out what you’ve been looking at. Because she doesn’t like it when you talk about ghosts. Everybody knows that.”

“Everybody knows that?” Ethan’s favourite line. “Well, everybody doesn’t know much, then. And that was just some research for a friend. And it’s none of your business. I was about to delete those pages anyway.”

“Oh yeah? Well, what about special cameras for shooting ghosts? What was that for?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t ask. I was just doing someone a favour.” I gesture that I want him out of my chair. I want him out of the room, in fact. “So do you mind?”

He stomps past me, all agitated and indignant.

I shut the door behind him and head over to the computer. I wonder how much he actually saw. I know I was gone a long time. Damn it! For the rest of the afternoon I stay in my room, reading and reviewing everything in my “Stuff” file folder, and deleting the bookmarks one by one. I know I can find them again easily enough if I want to, but for now it’s best not to have them around.

I wonder if Ethan will tell Joyce on me. I really don’t feel in the mood to help him with his project anymore. But while I’m deleting everything, I decide to give Morris a quick call. I want to tell him about a few of the sites I’ve visited on the Internet, and about the special cameras.

“I think we should check out a few of those things, to see if we can get some proof of the ghosts in the barn.”

“I’ll look into it, Amelia, but I don’t want you going back into the barn, remember?”

“Not even with you?”

He doesn’t answer.

When Joyce gets back from work, I catch sight of her through the front-door glass, struggling with a bunch of grocery bags and trying to open the door with one free finger. Ethan is preoccupied with yet another video game, so I run down the hall and pull the door open to give her a hand. I suppose Joyce has her hands full most of the time, in more ways than one. Most women in their sixties aren’t working almost full-time, supporting three teenagers and basically running the whole household. This probably isn’t what she wanted to do with her
life right now. I bet she’d rather be taking motorcycle trips through South America. Or at least relaxing and riding her horses.

As I’m helping her put the groceries away, I decide to bounce a question off her. Since she knows a lot of seniors in the county—she’s done some volunteer work in her day, and gives seniors special discounts on riding lessons every summer—I ask if she’s ever come across an elderly woman named Dorothy Ross. She’d be the last living descendant of the McGrath family, I explain, and it happens that they built the Telford farm. She looks at me twice when I say that but I just keep talking. Morris Dyson is doing some research on nineteenth-century farming families, I tell her, and Kip is helping out. I said I’d ask her for him, as a favour. But Joyce tells me the name doesn’t ring a bell.

Later, from up in my room, I can hear her talking to Ethan downstairs and I try to listen in. She asks him about his project, and he says he worked on it a little but he’s taking a break. That’s a lie. I’m pretty sure he’s been watching TV or playing video games all afternoon. But I don’t hear him tell her anything more than that. He’s going to flunk grade nine if he doesn’t smarten up.

Later I notice him from my window, walking across the backyard and out behind the paddock, sneaky-like, by himself. Joyce is in the kitchen, working at dinner, so I decide to see what he’s up to. I head downstairs, shove on my boots and throw on my jacket. The sky is full of dark clouds and it makes everything seem too dark for this time of day, even if we are getting close to the shortest day of the year. When I walk around the back of the paddock, I find him hunched over, his back to me.

“What are you doing?” He jumps, caught for the second time today. He’s in the middle of lighting a cigarette. Must be one of Joyce’s. He’s using an orange plastic lighter, also one of hers.

“What the hell?” I’m genuinely surprised. “I can’t believe you’re smoking. Are you stupid? Joyce is going to kill you.” I guess we are always talking like we could get killed by Joyce on any given day.

“So? None of your business.” He’s pretty upset that I caught him. He barely knows how to use the lighter, so I don’t think he’s been smoking for very long.

“Really? And where did you get that cigarette?”

He shoots me this sharp look, and for the first time ever I feel like he hates me. He doesn’t answer.

“Cigarettes aren’t good for your health,” I say, softening slightly.

He rolls his eyes, like I’m some kind of idiot. “Everybody knows that.”

“So do you want to get cancer? Like Mom?” I immediately feel guilty for putting it that way.

“So what if I do? What do you care?”

It really bothers me, the way he says that. It hurts. “God, what is your problem?” I don’t wait around for an answer. I turn and start walking away from him, but as I leave I toss some advice over my shoulder. “You’d better have breath mints on you, that’s all I can say.”

I realize that I’m not going to tell on him. And he’s probably not going to tell on me.

When I get back up to my bedroom, there’s an e-mail from Morris that makes me forget about my irritating little brother.

I’ve found Dorothy Ross, nee McGrath. She goes by the name Dee Ross. Phoned around to a few seniors’ homes and tracked her down at Williamsford Manor. Turns out Dee’s her nickname. Says she hasn’t been called Dorothy in sixty years! Small county, eh?