The Ghost's Grave (2 page)

“Open the doors!” she yelled. “Hurry!”

“What's wrong?” I reached behind me to open the door we'd just closed.

“There's a bat in here. Get it out! Out!”

I followed her gaze upward and saw a bat circling the ceiling fan.

While I ran from room to room, looking for outside doors to open, she grabbed a broom and chased the bat.

Mom had once told me, “Bats get a bad rap. People should encourage bats to stay, not chase them off.”

Aunt Ethel did not encourage her bat to stay.

Whoosh! Whoosh!
She swung the broom at the bat as it zigzagged above us.

Aunt Ethel's house has high ceilings, so her broom couldn't reach the bat, but she looped it overhead in figure eights anyway.

I opened the kitchen door and flipped a light switch, illuminating a patch of grass and a flower bed. “Maybe if we leave him alone, he'll fly out by himself,” I said.

“And maybe he won't.”

I couldn't argue with her logic.

“Mom says bats are good,” I told her. “They eat mosquitoes.”

“Well, this one should have eaten his mosquitoes outside,” Aunt Ethel said. “I don't want any bat landing in
my
hair.”

It seemed unlikely the bat would want to land in her hair, with her head bobbing up and down and twisting back and forth like a roller coaster as she watched him.

The bat flew around the living room; Aunt Ethel leaped on the sofa and waved the broom at him.

I knew that some people have irrational fears of harmless creatures. Mom freaks out when she sees a spider, and my best friend back in Vermont was scared of garter snakes. Apparently Aunt Ethel feared bats.

The bat swooped into the kitchen.

“That does it!” Aunt Ethel hollered. “I will not allow bat droppings in my kitchen.”

She flung the broom to the floor, ran upstairs to her bedroom, and returned with a shotgun.

I followed her to the kitchen, trying to talk sense into her. “If we turn off the lights in here and leave the porch lights on, he'll probably fly out one of the doors.”

She raised the gun, then swayed from side to side as she tried to keep the bat in the site.

“Aunt Ethel! No! You'll blow a hole in the house.”

BAM!!

I may never hear well again. The shot reverberated through the kitchen, out the front door, and probably all the way back to Minneapolis where, three short weeks earlier, I had been an average twelve-and-a-half-year-old boy, dreaming of playing on a summer baseball team and leading a normal life. Now I'd moved in with a lunatic.

When my ears quit ringing, I opened my eyes, which was the first I realized I had squeezed them shut. I didn't have to ask if Aunt Ethel had hit her mark. Blood spattered the front of the kitchen cabinets. The refrigerator looked as if it had the measles. Red dots covered the floor like confetti. How could one little bat contain so much fluid?

I didn't see a hole in the wall. I didn't see a dead bat, either. Had she only wounded him? Was he now flapping about in the living room, dripping blood on the furniture?

“Did you kill him?” I asked.

“Of course I killed him. Your auntie's a crack shot.” She closed the kitchen door that led outside,
removed her sweater, and poured herself a drink of water.

“Where is he?”

She pointed. “He fell on top of the cupboard. I'll have to get the ladder.”

While I dampened a paper towel and used it to mop bat blood from the stove burners, Aunt Ethel left with the gun and returned with a rickety yellow ladder. She took a plastic bag from a drawer—I assumed it would be a bat “body bag.” She climbed up the ladder until she could see the top of the cupboard.

“Hmm,” she said. She stepped to the countertop and peered at the back of the cupboard.

“Is it there?” I asked.

“The bat fell down behind the cupboard,” she said.

“What? How could it?”

“The cupboard doesn't hang straight. It's tight at the bottom but not at the top, so there's space between the back of the cupboard and the wall. The bat fell down in that space, and it's lodged back there.”

I eyeballed the cupboard from the side; she was right. The cupboard top stuck out from the wall about an inch. There wasn't room to reach down behind it. “How are we going to get the bat out of there?”

“We aren't.”

I gaped at the white-haired woman who stood on the kitchen counter. Her pink cotton dress was so wrinkled, I wondered if it doubled as her nightgown.

“You're going to leave a dead bat behind the cupboard?”

“There's no way to fish it out, short of tearing the cupboard off the wall. The bat's dead, that's for sure, so we'll let it rest in peace behind the cupboard.”

“Won't it smell?”

“If it starts to smell, I'll deal with it then,” she said. She climbed down, put the ladder away, and started washing the refrigerator.

“Shouldn't we close the front door?” I said. “We wouldn't want another bat to come in.”

“I shut the door when I went after the ladder.”

I finished cleaning the stove and started wiping spots from the floor. I wanted to say,
Wouldn't it have been simpler to wait for the bat to leave?
Instead, I worked in silence.

The truth is, I felt sorry for the bat. It hadn't hurt us. It made one little mistake—flew down the chimney or something—and because of that one small error, it got blown to smithereens and left to rot behind the kitchen cupboard.

I remembered a bat book,
Stellaluna
, that my second-grade teacher had read to the class, and I
thought about Mom telling me bats are good. The more I replayed the incident, the more unhappy I felt. Through no fault of its own, the bat was in the wrong place.

Like me, I thought. Through no fault of my own, I was stuck with Aunt Ethel for the next two months. It was a stretch to even call her a relative. She's the great-aunt of my new stepfather, Steven, which makes her my Great-Great-Aunt Ethel, but that's too much of a mouthful. Besides, there wasn't anything great about her that I could see. Nothing great about where she lived, either.

I inquired about the area while we scrubbed the kitchen floor, and what I learned did not brighten my mood. The closest movie theater was eighteen miles away, in the town of Diamond Hill. So was a decent grocery store. As for renting a video, forget it. Even if there had been a video store nearby, which there wasn't, Aunt Ethel doesn't own a VCR or DVD player. She doesn't have a computer, either. No e-mail, no Internet.

“What about television?” I asked. “You
do
have a TV, don't you?” If I couldn't play baseball this summer, at least I could watch it.

“TV's a waste of time. My sister had one, but the programs were junk, so when she passed on, I donated
the TV to the Diamond Hill Hospital's thrift shop. Any news I need, I can hear on the radio. Most of it's so depressing, I'm better off not knowing.”

No TV. I felt fortunate to have electric lights and indoor plumbing.

The summer stretched before me, one blank calendar square after the next. I understood now why Mom had not objected when I brought my box of books, all my CDs, and my CD player. She and Steven must have known what a desolate place Carbon City is. They had given me glowing reports of the woods and the wildlife but had conveniently forgotten to mention no television and no movies.

“Oh, fleas and mosquitoes,” Aunt Ethel said as she picked up a cake plate that held a layer cake with chocolate frosting. “Your welcome cake is ruined.” As she dumped it in the garbage container under the sink, I saw that it said
WELCOME JOSH
in white frosting on top. “Did Steven tell you I'm the Cake Queen of Coal County?”

“No.” Steven had failed to tell me a lot of things.

“I bake cakes for special occasions. For years, I delivered them all over the county. Birthday cakes, wedding cakes, baby-shower cakes—you name it, I've baked a cake for it. Once I even made a “Happy Divorce” cake—half white with white frosting and
half chocolate with chocolate frosting. The couple split it right down the middle.”

She rinsed the cake plate. “My cakes paid off the mortgage on this house—paid for my truck, too. I don't deliver anymore, but my loyal customers still order from me and come to pick the cakes up.” She leaned toward me and whispered, “I'll tell you my secret: sour cream.”

I blinked at her.

“In the cakes,” she explained. “My secret ingredient that makes them so moist and tasty is sour cream.”

When we finished cleaning the kitchen, Aunt Ethel showed me around the house. The tour of the downstairs wasn't necessary because I had already run through every room, looking for doors to open. My bedroom was upstairs, next to Aunt Ethel's.

After I put my things in my room, it took me thirty seconds to unpack. I'd brought jeans, shorts, T-shirts, socks, underwear, pajamas, an extra pair of shoes, and two sweatshirts in case it got cool. I left my books in the box.

“Are you hungry?” Aunt Ethel asked from the doorway. “Do you want a snack before you go to bed?”

The bat episode had taken away my appetite. “No, thanks,” I said. “I'm fine.”

“Good night, then. Help yourself if you get hungry in the night. I'll leave a night-light burning in the bathroom.”

After I got in bed, I tried to read for a while, but my brain couldn't concentrate. I turned off the light and lay there listening to the silence.

How am I going to survive this? I wondered. How can I spend the next eight weeks in the middle of nowhere with a crazy woman who drives down the middle of the road and shoots her gun in the kitchen?

A
s I stared into the dark, my thoughts drifted back three weeks to the day I found out I'd been selected for the summer baseball team. When I saw my name on the team list, I ran all the way home, eager to share my excitement. Mom might even quit fretting about being unemployed long enough to congratulate me.

I hadn't told Mom and Steven I was trying out because I didn't want to disappoint them if I didn't make it. I knew they were concerned because I had not yet made friends after two months in my new school. Well, they could quit worrying. All my buddies back in Vermont were guys I'd met playing on baseball or basketball teams, and I knew that would happen in Minneapolis, too.

I bounded up the front steps, tossed my backpack
on the hall table, and called, “I'm home!” To my surprise, both Mom and Steven answered. Why was Steven home so early? He never showed up until six-thirty or seven.

They sat at the kitchen table with maps and papers spread out in front of them. Steven, who works as an engineer for a road-building company, often travels for his job; I assumed the maps meant another business trip soon.

“Guess what!” I said. “I tried out for summer baseball, and I made the team!”

Mom looked stunned. “There's a school baseball team during summer vacation?” she asked.

I stood in my batting stance, with an imaginary bat on my shoulder, then swung at the imaginary ball. “It's only for kids going into seventh or eighth grade. Games start the first week of vacation, and we play three times a week through August.”

I expected applause. Instead, Mom looked at Steven, the hesitating kind of look that adults give each other when they know something that the kids don't know and are deciding how to tell it.

I was too psyched to wonder what the look meant or to quit talking. “My first practice is tomorrow,” I said. “I'll probably play right field.”

“Congratulations on making the team,” Steven
said, “but . . .” He looked at Mom, as if hoping she would finish the sentence.

“But what?” I sensed something was terribly wrong, though I couldn't imagine what.

“I'm sorry, Josh,” Mom said. “You can't be on the team.”

“Why not?”

“Steven's being sent to India for two months,” Mom said. “You won't be here this summer.”

“India!”

I felt as if a vacuum had been switched on somewhere deep inside me, sucking all the happiness out. I slumped onto a chair.

“Making this team is the best thing that's happened to me since I left Vermont,” I said. “You want me to participate in school activities; you want me to make friends here. Well, the summer baseball team is my chance to do that.”

“I didn't ask for this assignment,” Steven said, “and I wish it had come at a different time, but I have to take it. I'm the only engineer in my company who's qualified for this job.”

I looked at Mom. “Why do we have to go with him?” I asked. “Why can't we stay here?”

“Steven's boss has hired me as Steven's assistant for the summer,” Mom said. “I'll type up all the
reports, handle e-mail, and take care of the daily arrangements. It's a temporary job, but it will get my foot in the door and give me a local reference.”

“What about me?” I asked. “What am I supposed to do all day while the two of you build roads and type reports?”

“You're going to have a wonderful summer,” Mom said.

“In a hotel room in India? Don't count on it.”

“You aren't going to India with us,” Steven said. “You'll spend the summer in Washington State with my Aunt Ethel.”

“Your aunt!” I leaned toward Steven. “I don't even know her.”

“You'll like her. She has a big house out in the country—fifty acres, I think. There's a tree house in the woods and wild blackberries to pick. I used to visit her and Aunt Florence every summer when I was a kid.”

“I know you're disappointed about the baseball team,” Mom said, “and I'm sorry you can't be on it, but you'll have other years to play baseball. This is a once-in-a-lifetime chance for Steven and me.”

I looked at the pile of maps, lists, and books about India. “How long have you known about this?” I asked.