The Ghosts of Stone Hollow Read online

  “I know. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I think I know now what makes it dangerous sometimes for some people. I think it’s if the person is trying to use the power of the Stone for something for himself if he tries to control it, or find out something for a particular reason.”

  “Hmm,” Amy said, narrowing her eyes. “I get it. There are some things that might be dangerous for you if I found out. Like if I found out that you’ve been telling me a lot of lies.”

  Jason sighed. He sat down against the tree and started picking the roll of bark to pieces and piling the pieces up in a little mound. Amy, with her hands on her hips, just stood there watching him.

  “Sit down,” he said finally. “I’ll try to explain.”

  “I couldn’t understand it myself at first,” he said after Amy sat down. “Remember how I told you that I thought the Indians killed the Italian man, but I didn’t see how they could, because when I saw the Indians it was as if we were separated by—something. As if the time loops were running side by side, but not really touching—so I couldn’t really reach them, and they couldn’t reach me. Do you remember?”

  Amy nodded. “I remember you said something like that.”

  “Well, I think I was right about that—if you are just looking. The Indians only came to the Hollow to look—to see visions. They weren’t trying to use the Stone for something they wanted to get for themselves. So it wasn’t dangerous for them. But the Italian man tried to control the power to get something, something the Indians had, and that made the time loops come together and touch. And there wasn’t any separation anymore, between him and the Indians, and between whatever it was that they had and he wanted. I think the same thing happened to the bootleggers, too.”

  “You mean that’s what killed them?” Amy asked.

  Jason nodded.

  “How?” Amy asked. “Who?”

  “I’m not sure who, but I think I know how. I think they were poisoned. I think they found out about the Stone, and they were trying to use it to get something they wanted, like the Italian man had done. And someone came back who didn’t want them there, in the Hollow. And whoever it was put something in the whiskey they were making, and when they tasted it they died.”

  “Do you think it was the Indians?” Amy asked.

  “I don’t think so. I guess it could have been. The Indians probably knew about poison herbs and roots. But I don’t think they did it. The bootleggers, two of them, stayed in the Hollow while they worked at the still, and they were living in the little house that the Italian man had built for his family. They lived in the house, and they kept all their supplies in the barn and sheds, and maybe there were things in the shed that the Italian man had left there. Things like poison that he had used to kill rats and coyotes. Maybe the Italian man didn’t like them being there in his house, and so—”

  Amy nodded. She could see how it could have been. She could see poor Mr. Ranzoni, a stern angry figure, dark and ghostly, dressed in heavy cotton work clothes, the kind the Basque shepherds wore when they came into town for supplies. She could see him standing under the oak trees near the grave of his little girl. It was night and very dark, and he was looking toward the house where lights showed in the windows. She watched him move closer until he could see two men seated by a table. All around the table on the floor were bottles, dozens and dozens of bottles full of dark liquid, and on the table several that were, partly empty. The two men were drinking, raising partly filled glasses as they leaned back in their chairs and—

  “Jason,” Amy said. “What did the bootleggers look like when you saw them?”

  “Well, one of them was short, with a bald head, and there was a tall one with brown hair and a big nose, and the other one—”

  “The other one?” Amy said. “There wasn’t any other one. Two of them was all there were.”

  Jason looked at her strangely for a moment before he answered. “No,” he said. “Two of them died, but there was another one who wasn’t there when they drank the poison. I think that one was Old Ike.”

  “Old Ike?” Amy breathed.

  Jason nodded. “He looked different, of course, but I’m sure it was Old Ike. I think he came to the Hollow first. He brought the other men there, and then after they moved in and built the still, he kept coming and bringing supplies until one time when he came back he found the other two dead. Then he went away and didn’t come back for a long time.”

  Amy was staring straight ahead of her. “He wore fancy clothes when he first came, my mother said, like a city man would wear, and he had money to gamble with.” She broke off and after a moment she turned to Jason. “I’ll bet he came to Taylor Springs to look for a nice safe place to build a still, and that’s why he went to work for my uncle. So people wouldn’t wonder about what he was doing here. And when he found a good place, he sent for his friends.”

  She leaped to her feet, propelled by an explosion of excitement and curiosity. She just had to get home and see Old Ike. Not that she would ever in the world have the nerve to say anything to him, but she just had to see him—now that she knew. But then she remembered that he wouldn’t be there anyway. That he and Caesar were still on their way toward town. He and Caesar—

  “—and Caesar?” she said. “Was he one of them, too? Did Caesar belong to one of the bootleggers?”

  But then, before Jason could answer, she began to laugh—at herself, for being so stupid.

  “Boy,” she said. “Am I dumb. Caesar couldn’t have been living that long ago. Dogs don’t live that long.”

  But Jason didn’t laugh. “No,” he said. “Caesar didn’t belong to the bootleggers. I never saw a dog with the bootleggers. But Lucia had a dog.”

  “Lucia! The little Italian girl? That’s crazy. Jason Fitzmaurice, you know that’s crazy. That was a lot longer ago than the bootleggers. That was clear back when my mother was a very little girl. Caesar couldn’t have lived all that time.”

  “He didn’t,” Jason said. “How long has Old Ike had Caesar?”

  “I don’t know exactly, but it must be about ten years. Aunt Abigail said that Caesar must be almost as old as I am because he’s been here almost ten years, and nobody knew just how old he was when he came.”

  Jason nodded, but for some time he didn’t say anything more. When at last he spoke, he said, “Then it was about ten years ago that Old Ike went back to the Hollow, and something made the past come too close, so that Caesar came through—and he didn’t get back. So he just followed Old Ike.”

  Amy leaned against the tree trunk looking down the road in the direction Old Ike and Caesar had gone. Then she turned and stared in the other direction—toward the path that wound its way over the Hills and through the valleys until it came to Stone Hollow. At last she sighed and caught her breath, coming back to the eucalyptus grove and Jason, still sitting on the ground arranging little pieces of bark into a neat, rounded pile.

  “Look,” she said. “I’m going home now. But don’t forget about Sunday. Next Sunday we’re going to Stone Hollow no matter what.”

  chapter sixteen

  AT THE HUNTER FARM that evening, Amy went through the motions of a checker game with her father, which she quickly lost, and then dinner. But afterward, if anyone had asked her to describe how the game had gone, or even what she’d eaten for dinner, she wouldn’t have been able to say. With her mind so full of other things, she made foolish moves on the checkerboard, ate without tasting, and failed to notice that she was not the only one who was behaving in a somewhat peculiar manner. If she had not been so preoccupied, she might have wondered why no one seemed to notice that she was acting strangely.

  After dinner Aunt Abigail excused Amy from her usual job of drying dishes. “Your mother and I will do them,” she said. “We have some things to talk over.”

  Without even stopping to wonder what there might be to talk about that would be urgent enough to cause Aunt Abigail to change an established routine, Amy slipped outdoors into the darkening
twilight. She went first to the barn.

  The interior of the barn was a cavern of darkness, a warm living darkness full of the sounds and smells of living things. Cows chewed and belched, the mule stamped, and smaller things scurried and rustled along the walls. At Amy’s low whistle the scurryings stopped, the mule snorted, but there was no answering growl or even the thump of a wagging tail. Caesar had not yet gone to bed.

  Scouting around the barnyard, from milkshed to toolroom to granary, Amy saw no sign of either Caesar or Old Ike, and she was beginning to wonder if they had not yet returned from town, when she remembered that the cows had been in the barn. That meant Ike had let them in from the pasture to be milked and fed. So she went on looking.

  The twilight had faded, the moon had not yet risen, and the shadow of the Hills lay dark and heavy on the Hunter farm, when Amy rounded the corner of the barn and came suddenly upon a frightening scene. A flame flickering in a mound of darkness revealed first a shadow-distorted face and then a hunched figure. Amy almost screamed in terror before she realized what it was. The flame grew, the figure straightened and lengthened, and it became apparent that she had turned the corner just as Old Ike stooped to set fire to a pile of dead leaves and tree cuttings. Peering around the corner of the barn, she watched as the old man poked the fire with a pitchfork and then stepped back. A few feet behind him, the light from the growing fire revealed, near the ground, a pair of glowing eyes. Lying with his chin on his paws, Caesar was, as usual, observing his master from a safe distance.

  It was only Old Ike tending a bonfire of trash and cuttings—after nightfall so that the dew would extinguish flying sparks and the darkness make them easier to spot. Amy had seen him do it before. But somehow the .reasonable explanation wasn’t enough to make the scene in front of her seem reasonable and unfrightening.

  Leaning on his pitchfork, the old man stared down into the flames, his thin body bent forward, his face hideously distorted by the flickering red light of the fire. Even old Caesar seemed transformed, his shape lean and wolfish, and his eyes growing redder and more fiery as the bonfire burned higher. If Amy had had any idea of questioning Old Ike about what Jason had said, if she had, even for a moment, thought of asking him if he had ever been a bootlegger, the idea was gone. Gone as completely and as irretrievably as the first wisp of smoke from the roaring bonfire. Slipping back around the corner, she ran toward the light that spilled in warm yellow rectangles from the windows of the farmhouse.

  A moment later Amy burst into the bright comforting warmth of her aunt’s kitchen, and immediately found herself in the midst of a scene as mysterious as the one she had just left, and only a little less frightening. Beside his empty wheelchair, her father was actually standing, propped against the kitchen wall and supported by Amy’s mother. He was talking on the telephone. It was the first time Amy had seen her father use the telephone since they had come to Taylor Springs. The only phone in Aunt Abigail’s house was an old-fashioned one. A shiny wooden box equipped with a mouthpiece and crank, it was attached to the kitchen wall at a height that made it impossible to reach from a wheelchair—and there had never been anyone in Taylor Springs with whom her father wanted to talk.

  “Yes, yes,” her father was saying. “Can you speak louder? I can’t hear you. They what?”

  “Who is it?” Amy asked Aunt Abigail, who was standing in the doorway. “Who is Daddy talking to?”

  “Shh!” her aunt said sharply. “Long distance.”

  “Could you repeat that, Mr. Scanlon?” her father was saying. “No, I heard. My God! I just can’t believe it. I start when? With pay? Mr. Scanlon, I just don’t know how to thank you. Thank you, Mr. Scanlon. Thanks a million. Yes, yes. I will. I sure will. Yes, good-bye. And Mr. Scanlon, thanks!”

  Hanging up the phone, he pushed himself recklessly away from the wall and dropped with a thud into his wheelchair, while Amy’s mother tried desperately to keep him from falling. The chair rocked, almost tipping over backward as Daniel Polonski grabbed his wife and pulled her off her feet and into the chair on top of him.

  “Whoopee!” he yelled. “He did it! That son of a gun did it.”

  “Daddy,” Amy said, “what is it? What’s happened?” But no one seemed to hear. Sitting in the wheelchair, with their arms around each other, Amy’s parents were staring at each other as if they had suddenly been stricken deaf and dumb. Then Amy felt hands on her shoulders, and looking back she saw Aunt Abigail standing behind her.

  “Well, Amy Abigail,” she said in a peculiar voice—briskly cheerful, and yet with a strange shakiness underneath—“well, my dear, I guess I needn’t have worried about your being trapped in Taylor Springs. It seems you’ll be leaving us very soon.”

  “Leaving?” Amy gasped. “Leaving Taylor Springs? When, Aunt Abigail? When?”

  “I don’t know,” Aunt Abigail said, nodding toward Amy’s father. “You heard as much as I did. But soon, I should think. Quite soon.”

  It turned out to be only too true. When Amy’s father finally took the time to explain, Amy discovered what had happened—and what had been happening for some time without her knowing anything about it.

  It seemed that a few weeks before, the old lawyer who had represented her father’s union had retired, and a new young energetic one had taken his place. Hearing about Daniel Polonski’s case, he had decided to reopen it; and that very morning a letter had arrived at the Hunter farm saying that there was to be a meeting that afternoon at which it would all be decided. It might go either way, the letter said. The company might accept its responsibility for the injury that had crippled Daniel Polonski, or it might refuse to do anything, as it had before.

  “We decided not to say anything to you until we knew how it turned out,” Amy’s father told her.

  Feeling strangely numb, Amy said, “But—but how did it turn out? I mean, I know you won. I just wondered when—when do we have to—I mean, when are we going to leave?”

  “Right away,” her father said. “I’m to start training—with pay, mind you—next week. For a job in the main supply office in the city. So we’ll be leaving this weekend.” He turned to Amy’s mother. “Think we can be ready in time to catch the Saturday morning milk train out of Lambertville?”

  “I—I think so,” Amy’s mother said. “I think we could be ready by then.”

  “But we can’t all leave right away, can we?” Amy asked. “I mean, we’ll have to find a house or apartment first, and pack all our stuff and things like that. That will take a long time, won’t it?”

  “No,” her mother said. “If your father starts work next week, he’ll need us there. We’ll just have to stay in a hotel for a few days while you and I house-hunt; and when we find a place, Aunt Abigail can have our things sent out.”

  “But—but school?” Amy said.

  “You can go to school tomorrow to pick up your things and say good-bye, but on Friday you might as well stay home and help pack. We’ll have to work fast to be ready by Saturday morning.”

  The talk went on, and Amy heard it, but somehow none of it really reached her. None of it managed to be more than sounds, sounds without meanings, that fluttered senselessly around the outside of her consciousness. Inside, there was room for only a few words that kept repeating themselves over and over.

  “We can get nearly everything crated before we go”—her father’s voice—”and you can get George Rayburn to take it to the express station in his truck. Find out how much he’ll take, and I’ll send money to cover it.”

  And then Aunt Abigail’s—“No need. George won’t take any pay. Country people don’t charge for helping their neighbors.”

  Then Amy’s mother said, “Abigail, I’ve been thinking—why don’t you sell the farm now? I know how you’ve wanted to get away, and how long you’ve sacrificed for other people. All those years when Luther was ill, and then the last two years for us. Why don’t you do what you’ve always wanted. It would be so nice to have you closer to us in San Francisco.”
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  “No. No, I couldn’t. That is, not right away at least. I—I’ve as good as promised to be on the school board next year and—there’s the church—I just don’t see how I could leave—just now, at least.”

  It was about then that Amy realized the words that had been repeating themselves in her head had somehow broken through into sound—and she had said them out loud. “But I can’t go before Sunday. I just can’t!”

  “Why not, dear?” her mother asked. “Why can’t you leave before Sunday?”

  “Because—” Amy’s mind felt frozen, stiff and useless. She stuttered, groping for an idea, “—because— won’t we have to say good-bye to everyone—to the Reverend Dawson and all the people at the church?”

  “I’ll call the Reverend and explain. And he and Aunt Abigail can say good-bye for us. I’m sure everyone will understand.”

  “What’s the matter, Baby?” her father said, holding out his hand to her. “Aren’t you glad your poor old father’s going to be of some use in the world again? Aren’t you glad we’re going to be able to pay our own way again?”

  “I’m glad about the job, Daddy,” Amy said quickly. But then, because she could still feel the stiffness in her voice and face, she said it again. It came out louder, but otherwise not much different. “I’m really glad about that!”

  She took her father’s hand and let herself be pulled toward him for a kiss. But her lips felt stiff, too, against his prickly cheek, and she pulled away as quickly as possible. As soon as she could get away, she ran up the stairs to her room.

  That night in bed, Amy lay awake for a long time staring into cold bright moonlight, and thinking the same useless thoughts over and over. Why did it have to happen right now? Why did they have to leave before Sunday, the one Sunday when she was going to find out for sure and certain about Jason and Stone Hollow? Because she would have found out for sure. There was no doubt about that. Even if she saw nothing new in the Hollow, there would have been other ways to find out what she had to know. If she could just have had Jason all by himself for another afternoon, she surely would have been able to find out about him.