Ghosts of Rathburn Park (5 page)

A girl? Yeah, it was a girl, all right, but not like one he’d ever seen before. She had especially large eyes, for instance, and the colored part was extra big too so that they looked like an animal’s, a wild one, perhaps, like a deer or a wildcat. What she was wearing wasn’t like anything he’d seen before either. Except maybe in pictures.

The hat, for one thing. At least he guessed that was what the thing on her head was—an enormous velvety object, wide-brimmed and bulgy, covered with all kinds of shiny ribbons and feathery plumes and wrapped in a kind of veil that wound around her face and hung down over her shoulders. It did look something like the hats in pictures or movies about women way back in history, and even though it was so big and flat, it seemed to be attached to her head in some way so that it stayed put, even when the girl nodded angrily as she repeated, “You hear me? You’re going to get killed.”

Matt went on staring. The dress she was wearing looked old-fashioned too, with puffy sleeves and fancy frills at the neck and wrists, and a long ruffled skirt that came down to her feet.

Matt surprised himself by starting to grin. He couldn’t have said why, except that a girl about his own age, no matter how weird-looking, was so much less scary than what his crazy imagination had come up with. Whew, nothing but a girl, he thought, and his grin just naturally floated up on a sudden surge of relief.

But that didn’t seem to help the situation at all. The girl’s frown got even more ferocious. The next words she said came out in a kind of sizzle, as if she were straining them between her clenched teeth. “What are you doing here anyway? Don’t you know nobody’s supposed to come in here?”

Matt surprised himself again, this time with a quick, almost cool, answer.

“You first,” he said. “What are you doing here?”

She shook her head so hard that ribbons and plumes and veils swished around violently. The hat stayed firmly in place, but long strands of brown hair slid out from under it and dangled around her face. “That’s none of your business,” she said.

Matt went on grinning. He didn’t know why, except there was something about the girl’s total lack of cool that made him feel just the opposite. Kind of in control of the situation for once in his life. “Whose business is it, then?” he asked calmly.

She went on staring for a moment before she shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Why should it be my business to keep a dumb kid from getting himself killed?”

Suddenly feeling a little less cool, Matt asked, “A dumb kid? What dumb kid?”

“You,” she said, frowning in a way that squinted her wildcat eyes.

“You really think it’s that dangerous in…” He paused and looked around for what she might be talking about—a dangerous-looking animal, or a rattlesnake, perhaps. Or maybe an old man. A ragged and hairy and slightly transparent old man?

Nothing. Nothing except bushes and ferns and ivy and some large piles of rocks. “I don’t get it. What’s so dangerous?” he asked.

She nodded. “Look, I’ll show you.” Shoving past Matt, she stepped over a large rock, skirted a muddy pothole and stopped. Pushing aside a clump of fern, she looked back and said, “Here. Come look. But watch where you step.”

A moment later Matt found himself standing on the crumbling edge of a really deep pit. “Wow,” he said. “What’s that?”

“It’s a booby trap.” The girl’s voice was calmer now, but still sharp and stern.

“A trap?” Matt gulped. “A trap for what?”

No answer.

“Who—who made it?”

She shrugged. “The old man who used to live here, I guess. I think he used to keep it covered over with branches so that anybody who tried to sneak up on him wouldn’t know it was there until they fell through. His name was Old Tom.”

“Oh yeah,” Matt said eagerly. “I heard about him. I heard he used to live right here in the church.” He pointed. “I bet that’s where he lived. Right over there. That’s what I was going to check out when you…” He grinned. “When you saved my life. I just wanted to see it. I wasn’t going to take anything, or anything like that.”

The girl’s glare had gone up two or three notches. Matt shrugged. “I guess I’ll just have to go on imagining what it’s like. Right?” She went right on glaring, so he tried a different approach. “How did you find out about it?”

Her fierce frown cooled off a little as she said, “I know everything about this whole place.”

“You mean about the church?”

“No,” she said, “I mean about the whole burned-up town and all the rest of the Rathburn property.”

“Oh yeah?” Matt was sensing the kind of historical mystery he liked finding out about. “Why did they move the town and start calling it by a different name?”

The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe the people were just kind of tired of the Rathburns—of working for Rathburns and living on Rathburn land.” She began to move back toward the front of the church. Looking over her shoulder, she said, “Come on. Follow me. And watch where you step.”

Back in the entryway, she looked briefly at Matt’s bicycle and then stopped and looked more carefully, running her white-gloved fingers over the gearshifts and bending to check out the wheels.

“Yours?” she asked.

He nodded and she nodded back thoughtfully. Then she said, “Could I ride it? Just for a few minutes.”

Matt grinned. “Like that?” he asked, making a gesture that went from the big floppy hat to the long, ruffled skirt.

“Sure. Why not?”

“Where do you want to go?”

“I don’t want to
go
anywhere. I just want to ride it around the parking lot.”

Matt looked at his watch. “Okay, I guess you can, but not for very long. I’ll have to lock it back up before I go to see the Palace.”

“The Palace? Why do you want to do that? Haven’t you seen it before? Don’t you live around here?”

Matt nodded. “I do now. But we just moved here. From Southern California. We lived in Southern California until a few days ago.”

“Oh, okay. I get it.” She thought for a moment before she said, “Look, I know how to get to the Palace. In fact I know a secret way to get there that’s a lot faster than the hill trail. If I can ride your bike for a little while, I’ll show you how to get there.”

That sounded pretty good to Matt. A little strange perhaps, but pretty good considering that trading a short bike ride for an experienced guide wouldn’t be too bad a deal for someone who seemed to have a special talent for getting lost. So he said okay.

What he was actually starting to say was “Well, okay but just for a few minutes because…” when he stopped, fascinated by what the girl was doing to her crazy hat. She poked and patted for a moment, pulled out a long, dangerous-looking pin, settled the hat more firmly in place, and stuck the pin back in.

“All right. I’m ready now,” she said. “Unlock it, please.”

Thinking, This I’ve got to see, Matt squatted down, twirled the numbers on the dial lock and took it off the wheel. Almost before he had time to get to his feet, the girl’s hands in their lacy white gloves were on the handlebars and she was pushing the bike down the path.

What Matt had said was “Just for a few minutes,” but a whole lot longer than a few minutes later, he was still waiting for the ride to be over. Sitting on a tree stump at the edge of the deserted parking lot, he watched the girl ride, and the hands of his wristwatch moved closer and closer to the time when he absolutely had to start for home.

The watching had been interesting at first. With her long skirt hitched up over the bar, revealing white stockings and fancy pointy-toed shoes, and her huge hat flopping wildly around her head and shoulders, she certainly didn’t look like any bike rider he’d ever watched before. And for a while, at least, she didn’t ride like one. She started out slow and wobbly, but after only a few minutes she was riding much better, as if she’d ridden before, but maybe a long time ago. Watching her pedaling madly around the parking lot in sharp figure eights with her feet in their shiny button shoes pumping up and down faster and faster and wisps of brown hair and white veiling flying out behind, Matt kind of enjoyed trying to deduce some facts about her. Facts like that she’d undoubtedly ridden before but not at all recently—and certainly not on a modern, up-to-date bicycle.

But there were a lot of other facts that were harder to deduce. Like why she was dressed in what was obviously a kind of costume, and how she happened to know about Old Tom’s booby trap. And why she knew a secret way to get to the Palace—if she really did. Matt checked his watch again and as the girl rode by he pointed at it and yelled, “Hey, we’d better get started.”

She nodded and waved and went on pedaling, and the next time he yelled, several minutes later, she did the same thing. By the time she finally got off the bike and pushed it over to where Matt was sitting, there was less than half an hour left before he definitely had to head for home.

The girl’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes looked strange, wide and even more like an animal’s, or something you might see in a fantasy movie. Turning quickly away from the wild-eyed stare, Matt grabbed the handlebars out of her hands. “Well, so much for seeing the Palace,” he said. “I’ve got to get home or I’ll be in trouble.”

For a moment she just stood there like she was in some kind of trance, breathing hard and blinking her strange eyes. “Oh yeah? Are you sure?” she said at last. And when Matt said he was, she thought for a moment before she said, “Well, look. Could you come back, like maybe tomorrow, and I’ll show you the way then? It doesn’t take long the way I go.”

“Tomorrow?” At first Matt was pretty sure he couldn’t, but then he thought of a way that he might be able to manage it. “Well, maybe,” he said. “Around one o’clock. Could it be around one?”

She nodded. “Usually one o’clock is all right on weekdays. On weekdays there aren’t many people in the park until around dinnertime.” As she started off, Matt called after her, “Hey, my name’s Matt Hamilton. What’s yours?”

The girl stared at him for a moment, started to turn away, turned back and said, “Amelia.” She was looking in Matt’s direction but her eyes had gone cloudy and unfocused. “Amelia Eleanora Rathburn,” she announced in a strange, singsong voice. “My name is Amelia and I live in the Palace.”

F
OR SOME STRANGE REASON,
Matt didn’t tell anyone in the family about meeting the Rathburn girl. For once he had a really interesting story to tell, one that would be sure to get everybody’s attention without any embellishing, and he didn’t even bring it up during family sharing time. Family sharing was a few minutes right after dinner before anyone was allowed to leave the table, when everyone was supposed to take turns telling about their day. And embellishing was what Matt usually got accused of when it was his turn.

According to Justin, embellishment was just plain old lying, but it wasn’t really. To Matt’s way of thinking, it was just what you do when you have something to tell but not much, and you keep thinking of all the little extras that almost happened, and that would have made the whole thing a lot more exciting if they had. It wasn’t the same as lying because you weren’t trying to get out of trouble or fool anybody, or anything like that.

It was Mom who started calling it embellishing, and she agreed with Matt that it wasn’t quite the same as lying. But she also said he ought to stop doing it.

Dad had another name for it. He called it poetic license. Matt wasn’t too sure he knew what that meant, but the way Dad said it made it sound a little better than embellishing—and quite a bit better than lying.

But that night Matt had a story to tell that didn’t need to be the least bit embellished to interest everybody’s socks off, and what did he do? He didn’t even mention it. When it was his turn to tell about his day, all he said was that he rode his bike out to the park and back, and when Justin asked him what he did while he was there he only said, “Not much.”

Later that evening, sitting on the edge of his bed, halfway into his pajamas, he wondered why he hadn’t mentioned the ruined church with its dangerous booby trap, and the girl he had met there—and who she was. Or at least who she said she was.

Of course the main reason he didn’t was that if he had, he would have been told what to do about it. And most of all, what not to do about it. As in—not to ever go anywhere near that old church ever again. Which would certainly complicate things at one o’clock tomorrow, when the girl had said she would be there.

But there was more to it than that. There was another reason he hadn’t wanted to turn what had happened at the old church into a family sharing item. The other reason had to do with how mysterious the whole thing had been. He wasn’t sure why that made a difference except that, at the moment, it was his own personal mystery and he didn’t want anyone else to solve it. At least not yet.

It wasn’t until he’d figured out why he’d kept his mouth shut that he finished putting on his pajamas, got into bed and began to worry about something else. This time it was about his plan for one o’clock tomorrow, and whether it was going to work. It seemed like a pretty good possibility, but there was one part of it that was a little bit iffy.

Actually, the only uncertainty had to do with his father. The rest of the family were no problem. Both Justin and Courtney were going to be away all day on a trip to the beach with some other teenagers, and Mom was going to some kind of ladies’ lunch and card party that would probably last most of the afternoon. But that left Dad. It didn’t seem likely that Dad would keep Matt from riding his bike to the park, but with Dad you never knew.

Sure enough, it was during lunch, with no one at home except the two of them, that Dad started having what Justin called a Super-Parent Attack. By a Super-Parent Attack Justin meant what happened when Dad would suddenly get into finding out what his kids were doing and “who they really were.” It didn’t happen very often because Dad had so many important things on his mind—which Justin said was fine with him. Matt knew why Justin felt that way. There were a lot of times when Justin and his friends were doing things that definitely weren’t family sharing material.