The Ghosts of Stone Hollow Read online

  “What did you see?”

  “I’m not sure,” Amy said. “But it was something—” She paused to think. The slight shivery movement that had flickered in the deep shade of the oak trees had grown a little each time she had told about it, and now she let it grow a little more. Letting stories grow a little bit past the absolute truth had been a temptation for as long as she could remember.

  “It was something kind of whitish,” she said, “with long floppy skinny arms, and eyes like dark holes, like in a skull, and it was swaying back and forth. But what did you see? What happened when you went in the house?”

  “It was just an old cabin, like a woodcutter’s hut. There was a wet moldy smell from all the rain that’s leaked in. There are three little rooms, two in front and a long narrow one across the back with a broken table and a rusted iron stove.”

  “But didn’t you see anything scary? Didn’t anything happen?”

  “No,” Jason said, but he looked uncertain. “Nothing actually happened. Not that you can explain about. But I felt—something. There’s a difference you can feel right away. That’s why I thought you might like to go there—”

  “I told you,” Amy said, “it’s haunted, and nobody goes there. Not even people who don’t believe in places being haunted. Nobody I know has been there. Not even people who aren’t afraid of anything, like Gordie Parks.”

  Weirdly, for no reason, Jason began to laugh, and Amy backed away in case he was getting ready to do something even crazier.

  “What are you laughing about?” she demanded.

  He stopped, then, and after a moment he said, “I was just laughing at what you said—about Gordie. I thought maybe it was a joke.”

  Amy backed farther. “I have to go now,” she said. “I promised my aunt I’d hurry right home from school.”

  She walked quickly, looking back now and then over her shoulder until the crazy boy was out of sight, and then she began to run.

  chapter two

  ON THAT DAY AMY ran all the way home because she was late, but on other days she ran for other reasons. It wasn’t just that she liked to run, because she really didn’t. There were always other reasons. Just a few days before, she had tried to explain it to her mother.

  Shaking her head and sighing as she bandaged Amy’s bloody knee, Helen Polonski had asked, “Why were you running? Why do you always run? Do you like having your poor knees all skinned up?”

  “No, Mama,” Amy had said. “I don’t like skinned knees. I don’t even like running really. I never used to run much before we came to Taylor Springs. But running is important in Taylor Springs. Everybody likes Betsey Rayburn just because she can beat everybody but Bert Miller at running.”

  Amy’s mother had pushed a strand of pale hair back from her face and smiled sadly. “And being liked by everybody is more important than having scars and infections and worrying your mother, and—”

  “No,” Amy had interrupted. “That’s not why I run—being liked, I mean. I run because—well, because sometimes I just have to. I don’t know why.”

  But today she knew why. She had promised Aunt Abigail she would be home early and instead she was very late. When she reached the Hunter farm, she flung open the garden gate, raced up the path between Aunt Abigail’s roses, and vaulted three steps at a time up the veranda stairs, landing lightly on her toes so no one would hear. But someone did hear, because just as she reached the door a voice said, “Amy,” and she started guiltily before she realized that it was only her father. He was sitting in his wheelchair on the north veranda.

  “Amy,” Daniel Polonski called, “what’s the big rush?” He took her hand and pulled her toward him, turning his dark whiskery cheek for a kiss. Around his eyes and forehead his skin had the purplish look that dark skin has when it fades from too little sunshine.

  “I’m late,” Amy said. “I promised Aunt Abigail I’d hurry home to help hoe the tomatoes.”

  “The tomatoes can wait a minute,” her father said. “Sit down and talk a minute. What’ve you been up to today?” He was grinning, raising one bushy black eyebrow, making his thin stubbly face look cheerfully devilish, like a playful pirate.

  Amy grinned back, tucking in her lips to make her dimple show. Her father liked dimples, and he liked to hear about things that made him laugh. Things like the system she had worked out for eating a licorice stick during arithmetic without anybody knowing, or the way she had hidden a puncture vine thorn in her hair, tucking it into the braid that Gordie Parks always yanked when he walked past her desk. Things like that made her father laugh and start telling about things he had done in school, and how he had been a holy terror when he was a boy, back in Chicago.

  Hurriedly Amy tried to think of something her father would laugh about, but she couldn’t think of anything. So she told him about Gordie and the new boy. She told him all about it except that she had done the tattling, because she knew that that was not the kind of thing he liked to hear. But she did say some things about Gordie Parks—what a stupid disgusting bully he was, and how much she hated him.

  “Well now, Baby,” her father said. “Don’t be too hard on poor old Gordie. I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting the gentleman, myself, but he sounds to me pretty much like an ordinary, red-blooded American boy. In my day a new kid had to expect a few lickings, unless he was pretty good with his fists, or else pretty damn lucky. I remember one time when I—”

  “Amy Abigail, I’ve been waiting for you for over an hour.” Aunt Abigail was standing on the path below the veranda, holding a hoe and dressed for gardening. “You’re very late,” she said.

  Amy knew how late she was, but her guilty start was not so much for her lateness as for the “damn” her father had just said. If Aunt Abigail had arrived below the veranda in time to hear the damn, she would probably mention it and there would be another discussion about cursing.

  “I’m coming, Aunt Abigail, right this minute. Just as soon as I change my clothes.” Amy lunged for the door and got away before they could trap her in the middle of a discussion. She never liked hearing their discussions, because Aunt Abigail always won.

  At one time, back in San Francisco, Amy’s father had been very good at discussions. Amy could remember hearing him tell about discussions he had had, and won, with his friends at work, or even in the middle of big union meetings with dozens of people listening. Amy could remember sitting in the kitchen of their apartment on Franklin Street and listening to her father tell about discussions he had won, and jokes he had told with funny foreign accents that made everyone laugh. But no one could do very well in an argument with Aunt Abigail. And even when Amy knew that Aunt Abigail was right—with the Reverend Dawson, and the Bible, and probably even God on her side—she always felt sorry when her father lost.

  But if there was a discussion that day it wasn’t a very long one; because Aunt Abigail was already in the tomato patch when Amy dashed out the back door, still hooking the straps of her overalls. Aunt Abigail in the vegetable garden was a sight that took getting used to. Abigail Hunter gardened because of the Depression and because during hard times everyone had to make sacrifices, and also because hard work never hurt anybody. But no one seeing her in the garden would ever make the mistake of thinking she really belonged there.

  Aunt Abigail had an old voile dress that she wore for gardening because it was cool and loose and didn’t bind, and the long, flowing sleeves protected her arms from the sun. She wore gloves, too, old dress gloves that came up almost to the elbow, and a huge old motoring hat that she tied down with a long chiffon scarf. Her glasses were the pinch-on kind, and they quivered on the bridge of her nose with every stroke of the hoe, or bounced on her bosom on their silver chain. Except for her bosom, which was large and pigeon-shaped, Aunt Abigail was long and narrow and elegant-looking and she always managed to look her most elegant when she hoed weeds in the vegetable garden.

  Luther Hunter, who had been Aunt Abigail’s husband until he passed away, had own
ed the biggest farm in Taylor Valley; and back in the good times before the Depression, there had been several hired hands who lived and worked on the Hunter place all year-round—and many more who came for a while during the summer and harvest time. But now with bad times making it impossible to make a profit, most of the Hunter land was leased to cattle ranchers, and Aunt Abigail kept for herself only as much as she and Old Ike could take care of.

  Old Ike, who had worked for the Hunters for a long, long time, was old and slow and nearly crippled in one leg, but he still milked the cows and tended the chickens and kept up the yard, so that the Hunter place always looked as neat and spruced up as ever, in spite of the hard times. Aunt Abigail insisted on that. But because hoeing was hard for Old Ike, she helped out in the vegetable garden.

  Amy slowed down to time her approach so she arrived at the garden just as Aunt Abigail reached the end of a row. Working side by side up the next two rows, they would be able to talk, and Amy had a particular subject in mind.

  But Aunt Abigail had something to say first. “Is this the way you hurry home, Miss?” she said.

  “I’m sorry, Aunt Abigail,” Amy said. “I was hurrying home ‘til a new boy who lives in the Bradley place asked me to help him find the nest of a baby bird he’d found.”

  Amy knew the bird would be a good thing to mention. Aunt Abigail liked birds and had taught Amy a great deal about them.

  “We found the nest,” Amy said, “but it was in a hard place to reach, and it took a while to get the bird back in.”

  “Bradley place,” Aunt Abigail said, thoughtfully. She straightened up, pushing against her back with one hand as if to shove the bend out. “Hmmm,” she said. “Fitz-something or other. Doctor Fitz-something or other. Some kind of shirttail relatives of the Burtons. Heathens, according to your mother and the Reverend.”

  “Heathens?” Amy asked. “Who?”

  “That bunch in the Bradley place. Your mother heard all about them from the Reverend Dawson. He called to invite them to services, and this Doctor Fitz-whatever told the Reverend that his wife was a Buddhist and he was an agnostic, or some such nonsense. Man’s a writer, I hear.”

  “What’s a Buddhist and an agnostic?” Amy asked.

  “Heathens,” her aunt said, bending back to her hoeing. “What’s the child like?”

  “The boy?” Amy stopped hoeing to think how to describe him. “He’s strange-looking. I thought he was ugly at first, but he’s not really. Just different-looking, with big eyes like an animal’s and a bony kind of face. Alice says he’s just plain crazy, and he does act awful strange in some ways. He’s in my class, but he seems a lot younger—but in other ways he seems older. I don’t know. He’s hard to tell about, I guess.”

  Amy’s answer didn’t make much sense and she knew it, but it didn’t make a whole lot of difference since Aunt Abigail didn’t seem to be listening anyway. She’d gotten so far ahead while Amy puzzled over how to tell about Jason, that it took five minutes of furious hoeing to catch up. “How come they’re living in the Bradley place?” she asked when she got close enough to talk.

  “Well, the way I hear it,” Aunt Abigail didn’t stop hoeing this time, so her words came out punctuated with ladylike grunts at each stroke of the hoe. “This Mister or Doctor Fitzmaurice—I think they said—is a relative of old Mr. Burton. That’s what the story is, at least, although I must say that I, for one, certainly didn’t see any family likeness.”

  “You’ve seen them, then.”

  “I saw the man last Thursday at the market. Tall man, sharp-featured, with a little billy-goat beard like some kind of Bolshevik. Story is, he’s working on some kind of history book and he wanted a quiet place to write and a chance to get the boy out into the country. He heard about the Bradley place through the Burtons. Must be pretty run down, standing empty for so long.”

  The mention of run-down houses reminded Amy of what she had meant to ask. “About old houses,” she said, “I was wondering about the house in Stone Hollow. Tell me about it, Aunt Abigail. What happened there and why does everybody say it’s haunted?”

  “Haunted,” Aunt Abigail snorted. “I’ve never met a haunt in my life, and I don’t expect to. And you know as much about the Hollow as I do.”

  “Well, I know what the kids say, but they’ll say anything. Like that little Bobby Parks says a man-eating cow lives in the Hollow.”

  “A man-eating what?”

  Amy laughed. “A cow. He said he saw it. Coming up out of the Hollow with blood all over it where it had been eating people.”

  Aunt Abigail made a snorting noise. “I’ve been hearing stories about the Hollow all my life, but that’s the wildest one I’ve heard yet,” she said.

  “What are some of the other ones? The ones you’ve heard all your life.”

  “Now, you know I don’t hold with that kind of nonsense, Amy Abigail,” Aunt Abigail said. “Just as you said, you can hear anything if you’ve a mind to listen. ‘specially in a backwoods place like Taylor Springs. But there’s not a thing that can’t be explained without having to bring any hocus-pocus into it. There are perfectly reasonable causes behind everything that ever happened there. Even what happened to that poor Italian family is just what might have been expected.”

  “They were the ones that built the shack, weren’t they? Tell me about them, Aunt Abigail. What happened to the poor Italian family?”

  “Nobody knows exactly. Except they had a little girl die of the lockjaw and not long afterward the father died, too, in an accident. They say someone from the town went up and found the man dead, just outside the barn, and the woman was missing. They found her later wandering in the Hills, and sent her away to an asylum. They say she was as mad as a March Hare. Those that found her spread all sorts of wild tales about the things she said, but sensible people didn’t pay any attention. Downright sinful to frighten people with the ravings of a madwoman.”

  “But why did she go mad, Aunt Abigail?”

  “Who knows why a person goes mad. Not that it was to be wondered at, losing her husband and little girl so close together that way. With all that grief to bear, and being Italian to begin with, it would have been almost more of a wonder if she hadn’t gone crazy.” Aunt Abigail stopped again to straighten her back.

  “Do Italians go crazy easier than other people?” Amy asked.

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but they are a flighty bunch. Apt to fly off the handle about most anything. Catholics, you know. The whole bunch of them.”

  Amy had heard Aunt Abigail so many times on the subject of the Catholics that she was sure she already knew all the interesting facts by heart, so she tried to steer the conversation back to Stone Hollow.

  “But some other people died up in the Hills, too, didn’t they, Aunt Abigail?”

  Aunt Abigail shrugged. “Just a couple of bootleggers. They’d built a still up there to make whiskey.”

  “But what did they die of?”

  “Nobody knows for sure. Probably killed each other. Got drunk on some of their own whiskey and got into a fight about something. Nothing very mysterious about that.”

  Then, before Amy could try again for new information on Stone Hollow, Aunt Abigail switched the conversation back to the Catholics and refused to change. Amy wasn’t very interested, since she had heard it all so many times before, but at least this time her father wasn’t around to hear it. Daniel Polonski had been born a Catholic, and although he said he wasn’t much of anything anymore, he didn’t like to hear the things that Aunt Abigail always said about them. When her aunt and her father started discussing the Catholics, Amy usually tried to be someplace else.

  Aunt Abigail had gotten sidetracked off the Catholics and had started in on the Unitarians—who according to her were just as bad, only different—when the approach of Old Ike provided an interruption. Amy had noticed him coming across the farmyard for a long time before he arrived. He walked slowly, dragging his stiff left leg, and frowning more and more fiercely
the closer he came, until his thick gray eyebrows seemed to meet over his hooked beak of a nose. Following, as he always did, several yards behind, came Ike’s old gray dog, Caesar.

  “Miz Abigail,” Old Ike began, “think I better take the Jersey over to Rayburns’ today or tomorrow—” before Aunt Abigail interrupted him.

  “Amy Abigail,” she said, “run along for a minute. Run along and—” She glanced around looking for something to tell Amy to do. “—and cheer up that poor old dog. He looks about as happy as a cat in a mud puddle.”

  Amy was glad for a chance to play with old Caesar instead of hoeing tomatoes, although she would have liked to stay and listen. Not so much to hear about taking the Jersey cow to see Mr. Rayburn’s bull— she’d already found out all about that from Betsey Rayburn—but just because Old Ike himself was one of the things she needed to find out more about. There was something strange and mysterious about so many years of scowling silence, and Amy had something inside that made her have to find out about anything that seemed the least bit secret. For as long as she could remember, there had always been things that she just had to know about, and Old Ike was one of those things.

  She left, slowly looking back over her shoulder, until it became obvious that neither Old Ike nor Aunt Abigail was going to say anything until she was completely out of earshot.

  “Caesar,” Amy said plaintively, as she approached the old dog, “aren’t you even a little bit glad to see me?” As usual, he was pretending he wasn’t. His head was turned away, and he was trying to pretend that he was very interested in watching an old brown hen that was scratching in the dust near the woodshed. But he was really watching Amy out of the corner of his eye.

  Amy squatted down right in front of him and made her voice sad and trembly. “Don’t you like me just a tiny little bit?”

  He broke down then, as he always did, and pressed against her, licking her face with his warm wet tongue, and wagging his thin tail. She put her arms around him and hugged, and he stood very still with his eyes almost closed and made a croony noise deep in his throat. Once, when Amy’s mother had heard him do that, she had jerked Amy away from him in fright, not understanding that that growl had nothing to do with biting. But Amy understood. It was easy to see why a dog who’d belonged to Old Ike for years and years would understand growling better than anything else. And poor old Caesar was Ike’s dog, at least as much as he belonged to anybody.