Ghosts of Rathburn Park (11 page)

Under ordinary circumstances, Matt might have pedaled right over to say hello. He usually wasn’t all that shy around adults, not even fairly famous ones. And it wasn’t every day that he got to meet a column writer whose picture was in the local newspaper several times a week. But for some reason, maybe because he had been about to do something illegal, like disobeying a No Trespassing sign, he didn’t make the first move. He was starting to get back on his bike when Mr. Sinclair waved and called to him.

“Hey, kid,” he yelled, and then, “Are you Patrick?”

Matt walked his bike closer. “No,” he said. “My name’s Matthew Hamilton. I know who you are, though. I read your column.”

“You do? Good for you. Glad to meet you, Matthew Hamilton.” Red Sinclair shook Matt’s hand. “Even if you aren’t Patrick.”

Red Sinclair reached into his jeep for some photographer’s stuff before he went on. “Somebody named Patrick e-mailed me yesterday about—well, something he’d seen in the park last weekend. Sounded like an interesting story, so I thought I might check it out.”

“Here in Rathburn Park?” Matt asked.

Sinclair nodded. “Yep. Said he’d seen a ghost. And that he wasn’t the only one who saw it. Said he was with some friends and they all saw the same thing.”

Matt was very interested. “What did it look like?” he blurted out. “It wasn’t a dog, was it?”

Mr. Sinclair stopped adjusting his camera and grinned at Matt. “A ghost dog?” he asked. “That’s a new angle. Have you heard something about a ghost dog?”

Matt shook his head. “No, it just occurred to me. I mean, to wonder if there were dog ghosts. Do you think there are?”

Mr. Sinclair laughed. “Now, that’s a question I’ve never been asked before. But now that you come to mention it, I don’t see why it couldn’t happen. I’ve known some pretty supernatural canine citizens in my day. But in this case it definitely wasn’t a dog. According to my e-mail informant, it was a woman, or perhaps a girl. A girl dressed in a long white dress and wearing a hat with a heavy veil. He said he and his friends tried to follow her, but she ran away through the forest and then right out across the swamp and got away.”

Some kind of mental volcano in the back of Matt’s brain began erupting, spewing out a bunch of startling ideas. For a moment he was speechless, except for a silent voice inside his head that kept asking questions he didn’t dare ask out loud. A girl? In a big floppy hat with lots of ribbons and velvet flowers?

The newspaper columnist finished getting all kinds of equipment slung over his shoulders and stuffed into the pockets of his safari vest and cargo pants before he interrupted Matt’s train of thought. “Let’s see,” he said, pointing to the east. “The graveyard is over this way, isn’t it?”

“The graveyard? Yes. Over there.” Matt shook his head to clear away visions of a veiled and beribboned hat. “It’s over this way.” Pushing his bike, he led the way toward the graveyard. “Is that where the ghost was?”

“No. At least I’m not sure. The e-mail just said it was near the park. I probably wouldn’t have paid much attention except an old-timer friend of mine told me a similar story very recently. Told me he’d come out to put flowers on some graves and he saw a girl in a long dress.”

“Wow,” Matt said. “Your friend saw a girl in a long white dress in the graveyard?”

“Well, actually in this case my informant described it as blue. A pale, lacy blue. The dress, that is. But long, ankle-length, and he did mention a big hat and a veil. Sounded similar. That’s why I bit on this one. Two sources are always better than one. Don’t you agree, Mr. Hamilton?”

“Oh yes,” Matt said. “Two sources are better for historians, too.” He went on to say that he was planning to be a writer of history books. Red Sinclair seemed interested, but just as Matt was about to mention some of the historical periods he was especially interested in, Mr. Sinclair said he thought they ought to stop talking so as not to scare off the ghost if she happened to be nearby, and Matt had to agree that was probably a good idea.

For a while Matt only watched from just outside the fence while Mr. Sinclair tramped around looking at gravestones and taking notes. Matt couldn’t help being impressed. With all that camera equipment hanging around his neck and bulging the pockets of his safari vest, Red Sinclair certainly looked like a famous newspaper reporter. When he came back and sat down on the rail fence, Matt joined him, and for several minutes they just sat there quietly waiting—and wondering. Waiting to see if the ghost was going to show up and wondering—at least Matt was wondering—about a girl ghost who wore a big hat with a veil.

He was also wondering how he could ask Mr. Sinclair some important questions without giving away a lot of secrets. Amelia’s secrets mostly, but some personal ones too. Questions that would require some embarrassing explanations, like, for instance, how he, Matthew Hamilton, happened to meet a girl in a big floppy hat with a veil, inside a ruined church on strictly “No Trespassing” private property.

After they’d been quiet for a while without anything happening, Mr. Sinclair said he’d have to go, but he gave Matt his card and said to keep in touch. “And if you meet up with anything ghostly, either human or canine, please let me know.”

Matt said he would.

A
FTER HE WATCHED RED
Sinclair’s old jeep disappear down the road, Matt pushed his bike back to the No Trespassing sign. There, at the beginning of the trail to the ruined church, he paused long enough to look around one more time just to be sure no one was watching. Nobody was. The coast was clear. Now that the jeep was gone, there was not a single car in the parking lot.

No one around. Not a living soul. Something about the not a
living soul
idea made a small shiver sneak up the back of his neck. He didn’t exactly know why. Having the whole park to himself was actually a lucky break. A little bit lonely, maybe, and even kind of unnatural, but lucky in that there wouldn’t be anyone around to point out the No Trespassing sign and mention that the ruins were on private property. Matt shivered again before he checked out the whole area one last time and pushed his bike around the No Trespassing sign and on down the narrow, overgrown path that led to the church.

Under the broken arch of the narthex he stopped again to park and lock his bike, and then to look and listen, to peer into the vine-draped jungle that filled the huge, roofless room, and to listen to that special breathless silence he’d noticed before in historic places, particularly deserted ones. A silence that was like the people who had passed that way long ago were holding their breath as they listened and watched. Thinking about all those invisible watchers was pretty interesting. Matt shivered. Under the circumstances, almost too interesting. Backing quickly out of the entryway, he ducked into Amelia’s secret pathway, which led around to the side entrance.

Arriving at the smaller entryway, Matt again peered into the large, roofless enclosure that had once been the main part of the church. From there, just as he remembered, one slanted wall of Old Tom’s cabin was in plain view, and not that far away.

Matt couldn’t help being tempted. On the one hand, he was sure he remembered how to get to the cabin door safely, by staying back against the church wall until he was almost there, to avoid the booby trap. On the other hand, he’d promised Amelia that he wouldn’t go into the cabin by himself. And besides the promise, there was the danger, according to Amelia, that the ghost of Old Tom would get him if he did.

With his back pressed against the stone wall, Matt went over what Amelia had said on the subject exactly as he remembered it, word for word. “Old Tom’s ghost would get you for sure if you came here by yourself,” she’d said. But of course Matt hadn’t believed it, at least not after he’d had a chance to think about it. To think and wonder why a ghost would bother to “get” a particular person and leave someone else alone. The whole thing, he decided, was pretty hard to swallow, particularly for a person who didn’t believe in ghosts to begin with.

So what was he going to do right now, right at this very moment? The thing was—for some strange reason he really wanted to see the cabin again. He didn’t know why or what he expected to find there. Amelia maybe? Amelia herself, sitting in Old Tom’s broken rocking chair. He could picture her clearly, sitting in the chair and rocking slowly back and forth. Amelia in a long white dress and a big floppy hat…

Suddenly, impulsively, Matt leaned forward and called her name. Called, softly at first, and then just a little more loudly. “Amelia. Are you in there?” No answer. No answer except maybe a deepening of the breathless silence. So he tried again, but still not very loudly. Somehow it didn’t seem right, or even possible, to shout in a church. Even a deserted one. Or maybe, especially in a deserted one.

He waited a while before he called one last time. Taking a deep breath, he cupped his hands around his mouth and called, but this time, not for Amelia. This time, without even deciding to, he opened his mouth and what came out was “Rover.”

“Rover.” The word echoed once, twice, faded away, and once again the listening silence deepened. Deepened, and lengthened until another sound seeped through. A faint murmur, or maybe a whimper, so slight and unreal that Matt wondered if it had come from his own throat.

He didn’t try it again. Instead, he ducked into the bushy tunnel and scurried back to the main entrance—and his bicycle. Opening the bike’s canvas pannier, he took out a pencil and notebook, thought for a minute and then began to write.

Hi, Amelia. It’s Monday morning around eleven o’clock. I have to go home now, but I’ll try to be back tomorrow or maybe Wednesday around nine-thirty. Okay?

Matt

P.S. I didn’t go into the cabin
.

The next problem was where to leave the note. It had to be someplace where the wind wouldn’t blow it away and yet where Amelia would be likely to see it. Looking around the narthex, Matt found plenty of nooks and crannies where one could hide a note. But in this case, a hiding place wasn’t what he had in mind. The piece of paper needed to be where Amelia couldn’t possibly miss it.

Giving up on the narthex, Matt made his way back through the tunnel path to the side door, and then suddenly, thinking only about a place to leave the note, he began to inch his way on into the church itself.

He didn’t do it on purpose. It was more like he was following somebody, or something, that was leading the way. Holding the carefully folded note out in front of him, like a not-too-welcome guest at a fancy party might hold out his invitation, he sidled along the wall, skirted the crumbling edge of the booby trap pit, pushed open the cabin door on its rusty, creaking hinges and then there he was, inside the cabin—all by himself. Just where he’d promised he wouldn’t be. Inside the rough wooden walls and under the sagging roof where Old Tom had lived and died, and where his dog, Rover, had returned night after night to wait and watch for his dead master to return.

Matt’s throat thickened and his eyes began to burn as he looked at the rusty iron cot, the rickety old table, the broken rocking chair and the metal-banded trunk. Then he turned back again to stare at the cot until what he was actually seeing blurred into a scene in which a small, shaggy dog sat with his chin resting on the edge of an empty bed. Matt shook his head, blinked, and Mrs. McDougall’s painting faded away. He swallowed hard and shook his head again, forcing his mind back to the problem of the moment—the problem of where to leave the note.

He was still trying to decide where Amelia would be certain to see it when his eyes happened to light on—the trunk. A nice flat surface, safely out of the wind, and very noticeable. He could leave the note right there, on top of Old Tom’s trunk.

The note was in place, one edge of the paper tucked under a metal band, and Matt was getting to his feet when he noticed the bone. A large, old bone, chewed clean and dry, was lying right beside the iron cot. Surely he would have seen it when he was there before—if it had been there before.

Picking up the bone, Matt was examining it carefully, turning it back and forth in his hands, when he began to hear a faint whimpering murmur. Maybe a baby bird’s call, but maybe not. He froze, motionless, except for turning his head from side to side to catch even the faintest rustle.

What was it? The sound came again, faint and pleading. Matt was about to say, “It’s all right. I won’t take it,” when the whimper suddenly became a yelp, followed closely by a noise of an entirely different nature. This sound was loud and definite, a metallic clatter followed by a heavy thud.

Dropping the bone and jumping to his feet, Matt hurried out of the cabin, out of the church and onto the tunnel path, where he ran, stooping and dodging, back to where his bicycle was…gone!

Well, not entirely gone. The bike was there, but it wasn’t leaning against the narthex wall where he definitely had left it. A few feet down the trail, the bike was lying on its side. A bunch of pens and paper had spilled out of the pannier, there was a new dent in the hind fender and the front wheel was still slowly spinning.

T
HERE WAS A LOT
to think about. A lot of puzzling questions to be asked and answered, but not right away. At least not until he’d opened the lock, turning the dial with shaky fingers, put it away in the pannier, pushed the bike down the trail to the parking lot, jumped on and headed for home. And no answers even then, at least not while his mind was still busy warning him to watch for stop signs and lumber trucks and, at the same time, reminding him over and over again that he was seriously late.

Even after he was safely home, it was quite a while before he was able to arrive at any useful explanations of what had happened at the ruined church. The problem was that, from the moment he walked into his own house, there was too much other stuff to be considered. Stuff like whether Justin was still determined to go to the coast with Lance on Saturday night even if he didn’t have permission. And whether Courtney was still in mourning because the Hamilton family was about to self-destruct.