Ghosts of Rathburn Park (8 page)

Matt started to ask why she didn’t use the big staircases since she was a Rathburn, but before he could finish the question she shushed him, pushed past him and opened another door.

This time the door led into another large room full of big, bulgy furniture upholstered in velvet and gold braid. Lamps with painted and tasseled shades and tall, gilded vases sat on marble tables, and large gold-framed pictures hung on the walls. At one end of the room was the longest grand piano he’d ever seen and, beside it, a big golden harp. At the other end a huge fireplace was surrounded by marble pillars and mirrors framed in gold.

“Wow,” Matt said.

“Shhh!” Amelia thumped him with her elbow.

“Wow,” he said again more softly. “Where are we now?”

“The music room. This is the music room.”

Matt felt almost breathless. “This is…This one I really like.” It wasn’t, like the great hall, too huge to even imagine as a place where people actually lived. He was turning in slow circles, trying to print a long-lasting mental picture in his brain, when his shoulder just barely touched a music stand. As the stand teetered, he grabbed for it and, of course, knocked it over.

When the heavy iron music stand fell with a loud metallic clatter, Amelia gasped. Quickly putting it back upright, she grabbed Matt’s arm and dragged him back the way they’d come. They were almost to the music room’s secret door when he began to hear a faraway sound. Someone was calling. Echoes of the calling voice seemed to come from every direction and it gradually became louder and clearer.

“Dolly,” the voice was calling. A woman’s voice, harsh and angry-sounding. And then, louder and nearer, “Dolly. Is that you?”

Opening the hidden door, Amelia stepped through, jerked Matt after her, shut it carefully behind them and hurried down the passage. Looking over her shoulder, she whispered, “Come on.” Her voice quivered with anger. “Hurry up, you klutz. You have to get out of here.”

A
S THEY MADE THEIR
way back down the servants’ passages and then on into the basement’s bewildering labyrinth, Amelia kept them moving quickly. Once or twice Matt tried to ask one of the questions that kept bubbling up in his mind, but she only shook her head and hurried on. Not until they were all the way back to the basement window with the missing pane did she stop and turn to face him. Her strange wildcat eyes were glittering again as she said, “Okay. Now what were you trying to say?” And then before he could think where to start, “But hurry! You have to get going.”

For a moment Matt was tongue-tied. There were so many questions he wanted to ask. And sure enough, when he finally decided, it was obviously the wrong choice. “Who’s Dolly?” he asked. Amelia’s stare froze into an icy scowl and, turning her back on him, she pushed open the window.

“Go on. Get out,” she said.

Matt hesitated. “Aren’t you coming?”

She shrugged. “Why should I? You know the way now.”

“But the swamp,” he protested. “I don’t know my way across the swamp.”

Amelia sighed and threw up her hands. “Well, you ought to,” she said. “It’s not that hard. Anyone can do it.”

Matt managed a rueful grin. “Anyone but Frankie?”

She started to smile and then swallowed it. “Yeah, anyone but klutzes like you and old Frankie. Well, come on then. I’ll go with you. But hurry.”

They were still crossing the Palace’s overgrown garden when Matt caught up with Amelia, grabbed the back of her dress and pulled her to a stop. “Why won’t you tell me about Dolly? Somebody was yelling
Dolly.
You must have heard it. I just wanted to know who she is.”

She shook her head, still glaring fiercely. “I don’t know anything about any Dolly,” she said. “You must have imagined it. Come on. We have to hurry.”

Matt was sure he hadn’t imagined it, and somehow Amelia’s angry reaction made him all the more sure it was something he needed to find out about. But for the time being, he changed the subject. His next questions were about how many servants the Rathburns had now and if they still used the servants’ hallways, but Amelia didn’t answer those questions either.

Matt went on asking questions without getting any answers until they reached the edge of the swamp. For a while after that the only question he could concentrate on was whether he was going to make it across, but as soon as he was back on dry land he began to try again.

Catching up with Amelia, he said, “Hey, who else lives in the Palace now, besides you? Who else is in your family?”

“Nobody,” she said. “Nobody else is exactly in my family.”

“Wow,” Matt said. “You mean you don’t have any sisters and brothers and like that?” Then, as Amelia trudged on silently, “What’s the matter with you? Why won’t you tell me anything?”

No answer. It wasn’t until they were back to the park and almost across the baseball field that Amelia suddenly stopped, turned to face Matt and said, “Okay. Okay. You want to know everybody’s secrets. I’ll show you a real one. Wait till you see this. Come on.”

Matt’s first reaction was suspicion. Like, this particular secret would turn out to be just a way to get his mind off the kinds of questions Amelia didn’t want to answer. But after a moment he began to change his mind. What changed it was something about the expression on her face. A nervous, excited expression like she had just made an important decision.

Actually, the thought of a nervous Amelia made Matt a little uneasy. A part of his mind was telling him that when a person who went through quicksand and dark basements without batting an eye was about to do something that made her nervous, it might be something you ought to think twice about doing. But another part of his mind said, “Okay. Let’s go.”

Walking fast, like she wanted to get to wherever she was going before she had time to change her mind, Amelia led the way across the ball field and the parking lot, and then down the path that led to the old church. In the ruined entryway Matt’s bicycle was still leaning against the wall and Amelia stopped to stare at it. As he watched her run her hand across the handlebars, he couldn’t help remembering how hard it had been to get her off the bike when she rode it before. Making a show of looking at his watch, he started to say, “I don’t know if I have enough time for—”

“Oh shut up,” Amelia said. “When you see what I’m going to show you, you’ll forget all about what time it is. Come on.”

“Why? What? Where are we going?” Matt said, but she didn’t answer. Turning away, she pushed aside a heavy growth of fern, revealing what seemed to be the entrance to a hidden, tunnel-like path.

“Come on. Follow me,” she said as she ducked into the tunnel. She was soon out of sight. Matt took a deep breath and did as he was told.

Following the stone wall of the church, the path turned a sharp corner and went on until it reached what seemed to be another entrance. Under a smaller arched entryway the remains of an old wooden door hung crookedly on rusty hinges. The door creaked and groaned as Amelia pushed it open and led the way through heavy undergrowth to emerge inside the ruined church. It wasn’t until then that she waited long enough to allow Matt to catch up.

“Be careful,” she whispered as she moved forward. “Stay close to the wall. There’s another booby trap right out there.”

Matt followed, watching his feet as he sidled along the wall. When he looked up, it was just in time to see Amelia pushing open, and disappearing through, a smaller door made of rough unfinished wood. And following close behind her, Matt found himself in a place he’d never been, but which was so close to the way he’d imagined it, it almost seemed familiar.

Old Tom’s cabin was small and dimly lit. The wooden walls were unpainted, the roof was of rusty corrugated tin, and the only light came from two tiny windows. As Matt’s eyes adjusted to the faint light he was able to see that, just as he’d imagined it, some furniture was still there. At one end of the room stood a table made of rough unfinished wood, a bench and what seemed to be the rusty remains of a wood-burning stove. And on the other side, a rocking chair with a broken rocker sat near an iron bed frame. And that was all, except that near the bed there was a large, old-fashioned trunk with a dome lid. Matt sat down on the bench and looked around.

“Wow,” he said, almost under his breath. He felt strange in a way he couldn’t explain. The tightness in his throat and the warmth behind his eyes were almost like grief or pain, but they weren’t really either one. At least not his own grief or pain. He could only guess whose it really was, and why he was imagining it. Imagining the person who—

“Well, here it is,” Amelia interrupted his thoughts. She made a kind of “so what” gesture. “You wanted to see it so bad—so here you are. Satisfied?” Turning suddenly, she grabbed Matt by the front of his shirt. “But don’t you ever come in here without me. You hear?”

As usual Amelia’s wild woman act made Matt feel just the opposite of what she probably intended. “Hey, watch it! You’re going to tear my Alamo T-shirt,” he said, and then as she went on glaring, “Okay. Okay. I promise. I won’t come here by myself.”

She stared, narrow-eyed, for a moment longer before she nodded and turned him loose. “Okay. I guess I believe you.”

He looked around the tiny, lonely room. “But why not? What’s in here that you don’t want me to see?”

“Nothing,” she said quickly. “There’s nothing here I don’t want you to see. It’s just…” She paused a moment and then went on, “It’s his ghost that doesn’t want you snooping around. Old Tom’s ghost.”

“His ghost?”

She nodded sternly. “Yeah. Old Tom’s ghost would get you for sure if you came here by yourself.”

Matt got up off the bench and started walking around the room, stopping to look at the rusty stove, the broken rocking chair and then the trunk. The trunk was made of stamped metal and it was fastened shut by a padlocked latch. After a while he came back to where Amelia was standing and said, “But you come here by yourself. Why doesn’t he get you?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Except he must like me because…” Another pause. “Because he knows I don’t believe he was the one who started the fire.”

“You mean the fire that burned down the town?”

She nodded.

“Did some people believe he did it?”

“Sure,” she said. “Almost everybody did. Everybody except us Rathburns anyway. Old Tom was a foreman for the Rathburns and they said somebody else must have started the fire.”

“Wow.” Matt was feeling amazed and shocked. Definitely shocked. “If people thought he’d started the fire, why did they just let him stay here in the church? Why didn’t he get put in jail?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “I guess because they couldn’t prove it. And after he’d lived here for so many years all by himself I guess they must have started feeling sorry for him. Some people in the town even had a tombstone made for his grave when he died.”

Shaking his head in amazement, Matt went back to looking around the miserable little room. His eyes stopped at the trunk and he went back to look at it more closely. The padlock that held it shut looked newer and shinier than the trunk itself and, for that matter, newer than anything else in the whole room.

He was kneeling down, running his fingers over the lock, when Amelia said, “Come on. You still haven’t seen the tombstone the town made for Old Tom. Let’s go!” Grabbing his shirt again, she pulled him to his feet.

Suddenly Matt was tired of being jerked around. He felt like telling her so, and he probably would have if she hadn’t been pulling so hard on the back of his shirt that it was about to strangle him. By the time he got his breath and voice back she was out the door and there was nothing to do but follow.

Unlike what remained of the old town of Rathburn, the graveyard seemed to be pretty well maintained. At least the grass seemed to have been mowed fairly recently, and there were wilted bouquets on some of the graves. When he asked Amelia why that was, she said, “Well, sure. That’s because the graveyard and the park belong to the town, and all the rest of it still belongs to the Rathburns. And they won’t…” She paused a moment and then went on, “And we won’t let anybody change anything. Not ever. Not anything. Rathburns want everything to be the way it always was. Get it?”

Matt said he got it and went on following Amelia as she passed up all the well-tended plots and dropped to her knees in a weed-grown corner. Pushing the weeds away from a moss-covered slab of stone, she whispered, “Look.” She was pointing to the words that were carved into the stone. “See. It says here ‘Thomas A. McHenry. Born 1881. Died 1949.’ That’s him. That’s Old Tom.”

A shiver crawled up the back of Matt’s neck. He guessed Amelia was right about who was buried there, but as far as he could tell, it was almost impossible to read the moss-covered letters. He was moving closer when his knee bumped something under a tangle of undergrowth. Pushing aside the weeds and vines, he uncovered what seemed to be a much smaller gravestone. “Hey,” he said. “Here’s another one. Who’s buried here?”

Amelia crawled over to look. “I don’t know,” she said. “What does it say?”

The smaller gravestone was chipped and stained and covered with greenish moss. There were parts of letters, but it was hard to tell what they had once said. As Matt scratched at the moss with his fingernails, he was beginning to imagine the person who was buried there. A child, perhaps, under such a small stone, or even a baby. A baby—Old Tom’s, perhaps? Another mystery, it seemed.

Suddenly Amelia stood up. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s go.”

Matt got to his feet slowly. “Where? Where are we going now?”

No answer, but as Amelia led the way back across the parking lot Matt began to catch on. Began to think he knew where they were going—and also why. Sure enough, the “where” turned out to be the old church—and the “why” was…

“I want to ride the bike again,” Amelia said. “Just for a few minutes.”

“Well.” Matt was thinking about saying no, just to see what would happen, but then he had an interesting idea. “How about if we make a little deal?”

Amelia’s “What kind of deal?” sounded suspicious.

“You get to ride my bike if first off I get to ask you one question, and you have to promise to answer it. Okay?”