Ghosts of Rathburn Park (12 page)

Matt was home, establishing an alibi by standing around outside on the back porch. Standing around long enough so he could say, “Oh, I’ve been home for quite a while,” if anybody mentioned how late he was. He was still on the back porch when he began hearing voices.

The voices were Dad’s and Justin’s, and the subject was…Matt crept silently across the porch to the kitchen door. Right at first it was hard to catch the exact words, but the general tone was pretty easy to interpret. Dad and Justin were definitely having a really serious argument. But then, loud and clear, Justin said, “Yeah, I hear you, Dad. But the thing is, that’s a lie. All of it. Who told you that stuff?”

Frozen in his tracks, Matt couldn’t help listening—and trying to figure out whether things were getting better or worse. Worse, judging by the anger in Justin’s voice. Or maybe better? At least he was talking instead of refusing to say anything to anybody.

Putting his ear to the edge of the door, Matt heard Dad’s answer. “Some people told your mother originally and then—”

“Oh sure,” Justin interrupted. “Those club ladies, I bet. All those old women who hate people like Lance just because he doesn’t…” Justin hushed then as if he’d guessed someone was listening, so Matt scooted back to bang the door and walk noisily across the back porch. When he came into the kitchen Justin was on his way out of the room and he didn’t stop or look back when Matt said, “Oh, hi, Justin.”

Dad was standing by the sink with a glass of water in his hand. He smiled at Matt in a distant, disconnected way and went on looking toward where Justin had disappeared. After a minute or two, Matt went on through the kitchen toward the sound of another conversation.

This time the voices were Mom’s and Courtney’s, and they went right on talking when Matt came into the living room. The first thing Matt noticed was that Courtney had definitely stopped doing the Greek tragedy bit. Actually, Matt decided after checking her out again, she seemed to have changed the wailing mask for the grinning one.

“Well, we mustn’t get our hopes up.” Mom didn’t sound quite as overjoyed. “We’ve tried other treatment programs before without much success and…” She stopped when she saw Matt. “Matthew! Where on earth have you been? I’ve been worrying about you.”

“Oh, hi,” Matt said, so busy wondering if someone had come up with a cure for whatever was ailing Justin, he even forgot to use the “Oh, I’ve been home for quite a while” alibi. Instead, he only said, “What kind of treatment?”

“For allergies.” Courtney’s smile was cover-girl bright and shiny. “For my allergies.”

“Oh. Oh sure, your allergies.” He tried not to grin. He knew Courtney’s allergies weren’t funny, but he couldn’t help being pleased that, at the moment, the new allergy treatment seemed to have taken Mom’s mind off the time of day. The definitely-too-late time of day.

It wasn’t until evening when he was alone in his own room that Matt was able to get down to making sense of it all. Or at least start trying to. To make some sense out of what was going on in Rathburn Park as well as right there in the Hamilton family.

Sitting in his favorite spot on the window seat, he looked out at the twisted oak tree and the smooth sweep of lawn and waited for the soft, green silence to make his mind stop jittering from one thing to another and get down to business.

First of all, there was Red Sinclair’s ghost story to think about. A story about a ghostly girl wearing a long, old-fashioned dress and a big hat with a veil who had been haunting the graveyard and Rathburn Park.

Closing his eyes, he could bring back sharply and cleanly his first meeting with Amelia, when she had suddenly appeared behind him, dressed in a frilly, old-fashioned blouse and skirt and
a big, floppy hat tied on with a veil.
It was that memory that brought with it the alarming possibility that what Red Sinclair’s informants had actually seen was—Amelia. And even more disturbing, if they had seen Amelia, did it mean they only
thought
they’d seen a ghost? Or—and this was the weirdest possibility—could it mean that Amelia really was what they thought she was? It was a thought that made a strange tingle crawl up Matt’s backbone and right on up the back of his head.

He shook his head hard, thinking that was just plain crazy. Amelia couldn’t be a ghost. Not that he, Matt Hamilton, was any kind of authority on the subject, but everything he’d ever read or heard about ghosts made it clear that they tended to be pretty flimsy, unsubstantial characters. Like you could walk right through one and not feel a thing, except maybe a kind of hair-raising chill. Bringing to mind how Amelia had jerked him around by the back of his shirt, Matt knew for sure that, ghost or not, there wasn’t anything flimsy about Amelia.

But that still left some other mysteries, like what had happened to the bicycle, for instance. In the few minutes it had taken him to run around the church and leave the note in Old Tom’s cabin, someone not too unsubstantial had managed to throw the locked bicycle two or three yards away from where he’d left it.

And then there was the Dolly question. The only thing Matt knew for certain about Dolly was that he was positive he had heard someone in the Palace calling her name. And when he’d asked Amelia about her, she had said, “Dolly is just a ghost.”

So if there was a ghost and her name was Dolly, where did she come from, and how did Amelia happen to know about her?

And then there was the bone. A clean-looking, frayed-at-the-edges bone that looked like…Well, what it definitely reminded Matt of was an old ham bone that Shadow used to carry around Mrs. McDougall’s backyard. A bone that looked like it had been chewed on for a long time. But the important questions for Matt were how long it had been lying there beside Old Tom’s cot, and why he hadn’t noticed it before.

The questions, all of them, kept parading through Matt’s mind, one after the other, and then as it got later and he got sleepier, began mixing together in a senseless jumble.

It was quite late when he woke up in the middle of a nightmare to find he’d forgotten to go to bed. Curled up in an uncomfortable position on the window seat, he woke up to find that his right arm had gone to sleep and his head was full of scenes from a nightmare. A vivid, Technicolor nightmare in which a purple pickup truck was stopping in front of the house and Justin was going out and climbing into it. Mom and Dad had been in the dream too, standing in the front yard in their pajamas shouting at Justin to come back. And as the truck drove away with Justin in it, Matt could see that there wasn’t anyone behind the wheel. The truck was driving itself.

O
N WEDNESDAY MATT’S BIKE
ride to Rathburn Park once again wasn’t hard to arrange. Mom had taken Courtney to see the new allergy doctor, Dad was having a meeting that would probably last most of the day, and right after Dad left, Justin disappeared too. Matt didn’t see him leave, but he hoped it hadn’t been in a purple pickup.

It was a hot July day. Almost as hot as summer in Six Palms. But as Matt pedaled toward the park, his mind wasn’t on the weather. Instead it kept doing a mental rerun of the part of the nightmare where Justin climbed into the cab of the truck and roared away into the night with nobody behind the wheel. But as soon as he turned in at the park, the pickup truck nightmare began to fade. As he parked and locked his bike in the narthex of the old church other worries began to take over. Living, wide-awake nightmares, for instance, like the one that brought to mind the P.S. he’d added to his note to Amelia. The one he’d jotted down in a hurry to say he hadn’t been inside Old Tom’s cabin. And which he’d wound up leaving right there
in the cabin
on top of the old trunk. How was he going to explain that?

Feeling almost shriveled with embarrassment, Matt pictured himself trying to make Amelia understand how it had happened. “Well,” he imagined himself saying, “when I wrote the note, I hadn’t gone inside yet and I wasn’t planning to, but then I couldn’t find a good place to leave the note where you’d be sure to find it and so I kind of…”

He couldn’t help wondering how far he’d be able to get with that explanation before Amelia would quit listening and start throwing punches. He was wincing, wondering where she’d hit him, when he began to hear something that turned embarrassment into fear. What he suddenly heard was a deep, raspy voice that seemed to be coming from—only a few feet away. Filtering out from among the tangle of vine-draped saplings in the nave of the church, it was saying, “All right, you stupid kid. Now you’re going to get it.”

Matt was terrified. But even as he backed away, dragging his bicycle, stumbling over it and going down on one knee, he began to notice some changes in the weird voice. Some raspy squeaks that were beginning to make it sound more like the voice of—a kid. Maybe even the voice of a female kid.

He had dropped the bike and was inching his way back down the trail when suddenly an absolutely amazing apparition appeared in the entryway. Framed in the archway, a short, bulky figure was stomping its feet and waving its arms in a threatening manner. Not tall, but broad-shouldered and thick-chested, the strange creature was dressed in a long dusty black coat and a tall black hat. There wasn’t much face showing below the hat, but what little there was was black too. At least streaked and smeared with black. Matt’s gasp at the suddenness of its appearance quickly turned into a snort of laughter.

“All right, Amelia,” he managed to say. “You can knock it off. I know it’s you.”

It was Amelia, all right, dressed in a huge black coat and a stovepipe hat, both of which looked like something from another century. For a moment longer she went on waving her arms and making strange noises, while Matt went on trying not to laugh. Finally she jerked the hat off her head and threw it down fiercely, and began to struggle out of the coat, while strands of hair straggled down around her ears and sooty rivers of sweat trickled down her blackened face.

“Hot,” she was muttering.
“Hot.
I’m dying.”

Matt watched in amazement while the coat was followed by several other layers of clothing, all of which seemed to be stuffed full of padding of various sorts. What seemed to be the ragged remains of towels and shawls and shirts and sweaters piled up around her, until she was finally down to a sleeveless white cotton shirt that hung to her knees. Wiping her face with both hands before she put them on her hips, she gave Matt a dangerous, three-alarm glare.

Matt stepped quickly back out of reach before he struggled to erase his grin and started to ask, “What—why—” Then he settled for “Where in the world did you get all that stuff?” He stooped to pick up the tall hat. Turning it from side to side and gently dusting it off, he said, “Wow. I’ll bet this hat is a hundred years old at least.”

Amelia breathed heavily a few more times before her frown began to relax. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “The attic is full of stuff like that.”

“Really?” Matt said. Thinking about the kinds of things you might find in the attic of an ancient place like the Palace was pretty exciting. It wasn’t hard to imagine what it would be like to explore a huge room packed full of all that antique stuff, and the imagining was making him forget to worry about what Amelia might do next. Picking up the coat, he examined it carefully, running his fingers over the high collar, the braided trim and the soft satiny lining. “Wow,” he said again. “May I try it on?”

Amelia shrugged angrily and the sizzle between her teeth gradually became words. “Help yourself,” she sizzled. “Go on. Put it on. The heat will kill you. I hope it does.”

Matt put the coat on. It was hot, all right, and way too big. The man it had been made for must have had a huge barrel chest and long thick arms. “Doesn’t exactly fit, does it?” he said.

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I had to have all that padding.”

Matt took the coat off and folded it carefully while Amelia watched intently. When he’d finished folding he said, “Thanks,” and smiled, but she only went on glaring. Feeling embarrassed, he turned away, and then glanced back—at her dirty face. “And that”—he gestured—“on your face?”

“It’s charcoal,” she said. Using the tail of her shirt, she wiped her face hard, rearranging the black smears a little but not getting rid of much of it. “I wanted to make a fake beard. I thought maybe I could find an old wig or something to make into a beard, but I couldn’t find anything. So I drew it on with charcoal. It looked all right at first, but I probably sweated most of it off. I’ll bet you wouldn’t have recognized me if I’d been able to make a beard out of real hair.”

Trying not to laugh, Matt nodded solemnly. “Maybe not,” he said. Noticing that Amelia’s frown was changing back to red alert, he edged away a little before he started to say, “Look, I’m sorry I—”

“Sorry,” she practically shouted. “No you’re not. Not sorry enough, anyway. Not enough for doing exactly what you promised you wouldn’t do. And then writing a note that lied about it.”

Matt nodded. “About the note,” he said. “The note and the P.S.” He waited a minute and then said it again. “About that P.S. If you’d just listen a minute, I could explain about the P.S.”

“Oh yeah.” Amelia’s frown was fading again. “Okay, explain. This I got to hear.”

So he did. It took a while to tell it all. How he’d given up on finding her and decided to leave a note, but then how, after he’d written it he couldn’t find a good place to leave it, where it would be safe, but where she’d be sure to see it. “So I just went on into the cabin for a minute, just for a minute, to put it where you’d be sure to find it.”

It seemed to be working. Amelia’s face was unclenching a little. Still staring intently, she said, “Okay, okay. So you didn’t stay very long.”

“Right, not even a minute.”

“And you didn’t try to open the trunk?” Amelia was watching him closely, with narrowed eyes.

Puzzled, Matt shook his head. “No, why would I do that? I just left the note there.”

She nodded thoughtfully for a moment before she said, “And what did you call me?”

He didn’t know what she was talking about, at least not at first. “What did I call you? When? When did I call you something?”