The Ghosts of Stone Hollow Read online

  When the old man limped past Amy on his way to the barn, Caesar pulled away and followed him. But he stopped twice to look back at Amy and flap his skinny tail.

  chapter three

  THAT EVENING AMY WAS still thinking about Stone Hollow. Although she had long ago questioned everyone who might know anything about it, she was suddenly tormented with an inescapable itch to find out more, to see if anybody had any scrap of information that she might somehow have missed about the mysterious hidden valley.

  The next person she had a chance to question was her father, during their regular before-dinner game of checkers. With her aunt and mother busy in the kitchen, she had a perfect opportunity, so she took it, even though her father was not a very good prospect, being almost a stranger to Taylor Springs.

  A stranger, Amy thought, looking at her father’s dark, sharp-edged face, shadowed now as he bent over the checkerboard. A stranger to Taylor Springs. It was odd, but that was what he seemed, even though he had lived there as long—a little longer, really—than Amy had herself. Yet Amy had always thought of herself as a Taylor Springs person. Even before she had ever been there, she had thought of herself as somehow belonging to Taylor Springs.

  “How much longer have you lived in Taylor Springs than I have, Daddy?” she asked.

  “Longer?” her father said. “Oh, you mean when I came here in ‘25 to work on the bridge and met your mother?”

  Amy nodded.

  “Well, let’s see. I started work around the first of April, but I stayed in Lambertville the first week or two and drove up every day, until I found a room in Taylor Springs. And your mother and I left town on the twenty-eighth of September. We were married in Reno that evening, and the next day we hit out for San Francisco. And that was the last I saw of the great little town of Taylor Springs ‘til we came back to live with your Aunt Abigail two years ago last May.”

  “Why did you and Mama go to Reno to get married?” Amy asked. “Why didn’t you get married right here in our own church?”

  “Well now, Amy Abigail,” her father said, “I think you know the answer to that question.”

  Even without the twisted grin and the tilted eyebrow, Amy would have known her father was being sarcastic. He never called her Amy Abigail except when he meant it to be sarcastic.

  “And if you don’t, you’d best ask your mother about it, or your Aunt Abigail. Your Aunt Abigail would be a good one to ask about that.”

  Of course Amy had already asked and, just as her father said, she did know the reason, more or less. She knew that her mother had been living on the Hunter farm with Aunt Abigail when she met and married Daniel Polonski, and that Aunt Abigail had not approved of the marriage. What Amy didn’t really know was why. Once at school, Shirley Anderson had told Amy that her mother said Helen Fairchild had run away to get married because her sister and her fiancé had had an awful fight. Amy had asked about that, too.

  “Fight?” Aunt Abigail had answered. “That Mary Anderson was born gossiping, and her daughter’s just like her. That’s the trouble with a place like Taylor Springs—nothing better to do with your time. When you hear malicious stories like that, you have to consider the source, Amy Abigail. Consider the source.”

  “Fight? Your auntie and me?” Amy’s father had laughed. “Why, in those days, Baby, I weighed in at two hundred pounds and could have licked my weight in wildcats. Wouldn’t have been a very fair match, would it, for me to fight with a lady? Not even your Aunt Abigail.”

  When Amy saw that he wasn’t going to be serious, she had tried her mother. What she asked her mother was, “Did Aunt Abigail and Daddy have an awful fight about you and him getting married, Mama? Is that why you went away to get married and never came back until Daddy broke his back and couldn’t work anymore so you had to come back and live with Aunt Abigail or else go on relief? That’s what Shirley Anderson says that her mother says.”

  Amy’s mother’s answer had been, “What, dear? Who said that? Why, I can’t imagine where she heard a thing like that. Your father and I went away because he had a job waiting for him in San Francisco, and we never came back until after he was hurt because he was so busy and working so hard. Your father always had to work so hard. He did such hard dangerous work. I was always so worried about him. Bridges are such dangerous things. Why even the little bridge to Lambertville where he was working when we first met—”

  “When we first met,” her mother said, and the answer about whether there had been a fight turned into a story that Amy had heard many times before. A story about the tall handsome young man who came to Taylor Springs, and how all the girls had admired him, but how he had only paid attention to Helen Fairchild, who was still blond and beautiful then, even though she was already a little older than most girls are when they marry, and who some of the younger girls already thought of as an old maid. And exactly what the handsome young man was doing when they first met, and what they said to each other, and what they said the next time they met, and on and on and on. Amy had always liked the story, but it didn’t really answer the question.

  “I have asked, Daddy,” Amy said. “I asked about why you went away to get married.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “Mama told me all about how handsome you were when you met, and Aunt Abigail said Mary Anderson was a born gossip.”

  They both laughed, and then Amy remembered the other question, the one she had intended to ask her father before it was time for dinner.

  “Daddy,” she said, “what kinds of things have you heard about Stone Hollow? I know you haven’t ever been there, but haven’t you heard people talking about it?”

  “Stone Hollow?” her father said, looking for a moment as if he didn’t even know what she was talking about. But then he remembered. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “You mean that place up in the Hills where some bootleggers had a still during Prohibition?”

  “Yes,” Amy said, “and where an Italian family had a farm only something happened to them, and now everyone says it’s haunted and everything? Have you heard about it? Anything more, I mean?”

  “More than what?” her father said, grinning. “Seems to me you know quite a bit already. Seems to me, as a matter of fact, that nearly everything I know about the place is what you’ve told me. That is, except for—”

  “Except for what, Daddy?”

  “Well, now that I think about it, it does seem to me that Ike mentioned it a while back.”

  “Really? What did he say?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Nothing that made much sense. I just asked him what kind of hooch they made up there. Seemed to me that living so close, and liking a nip now and then as much as Ike does, that he would have given the local product at least a try.”

  “But what did he say?”

  “Not much. Just stared at me for a moment and then started saying No he didn’t know, and No he hadn’t tried it, and No he didn’t know anything about it. So I dropped it, but then after a minute he looked around as if he thought someone might be listening, and then he whispered something about how it could have been good stuff, the very best, and how they could have made a million if they hadn’t started playing with fire.”

  “Who, Daddy? Who was playing with fire?”

  “Can’t tell you. He wouldn’t say any more. When I tried to bring it up again, he just muttered something about ‘evil’ and walked off.”

  “What do you suppose he meant?”

  “Don’t know. Except everyone around here seems to think that that valley is haunted by some kind of evil spirits. Guess Old Ike believes it, too.”

  That was all her father could tell her, and that left only her mother to be questioned again. However, her mother was apt to be the best possibility. On most subjects that had to do with Taylor Springs, Helen Fairchild Polonski was a walking storehouse of information. It seemed almost certain that somewhere in the back of her memory, she was sure to have an almost forgotten bit of information about Stone Hollow. Amy’s chance
to find out came after dinner when Aunt Abigail left the dishes to Amy and her mother because President Roosevelt was talking on the radio. Aunt Abigail didn’t think much of President Roosevelt because he had voted against Prohibition, but she always liked to listen to him on the radio.

  “Mama,” Amy began, “Aunt Abigail and I were talking about the things that happened at Stone Hollow, but she didn’t remember very much. You always remember so much about everything that happened a long time ago, I was wondering if you remember any special things you heard about the Hollow. Like, why everybody is so sure it’s haunted. Do you remember anything special about that?”

  “Stone Hollow? Well, let me see.” Helen Polonski drifted away from the dishpan and came to rest on the edge of a kitchen chair. As she thought, she dried her hands over and over again on her apron. Her face always seemed to soften when she was remembering, blurring out the hard thin lines and webs of wrinkles. “The first thing I recall hearing talk about was the Ranzoni family,” she said. “That was when I was just a little girl. But it seems to me I remember hearing our papa say that people were afraid of the Hollow even before that. Something about the Indians. The Indians used to have meetings there, I think, some kind of heathen religious ceremonies. But that might have been just a rumor.”

  “Did you ever go up there, Mama?”

  “Oh no,” her mother said. “We weren’t allowed. And I would never have gone without Papa’s permission.” She reached up to push a wisp of pale hair away from her cheek, and her mouth curved into a faint smile. Amy knew the smile well. It went with Helen Polonski’s memories of her childhood, a childhood that Amy had heard so much about that sometimes it seemed more real than her own. Growing up in an apartment and on city streets, cool, fog-bound streets where the air tasted of ocean and faraway places, Amy had had a second childhood in a hot, golden valley in the Sierra foothills. Long before she had ever really seen it, Amy had played under its huge shade trees, visited the families in its old wooden houses, and walked in the shadow of its encircling hills.

  Long before Amy had ever met the children at Taylor Springs School whose names were Lewis, Harris, Parks, Paulsen and Rayburn, she knew a great many things about their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles. She knew who had been hardworking and God-fearing and churchgoing, and who, on the other hand, had been proud and worldly, or ignorant and lazy. She even knew about a few who had been “no better than they ought to-be” and even one or two who were “scandalous,” although she had never been able to find out exactly what they had done to get that way.

  Amy had loved hearing the stories. “Tell me about the hayride and Bertie Lewis,” she would ask her mother, or “tell me about the big flood.” And Helen Polonski would sit down at the kitchen table in their apartment on Franklin Street, and her face would get soft and blurry, and they would go back to the time when a hayride was almost turned into a tragedy by a reckless boy—or to the January when the river flooded and Amy’s grandfather, the Reverend Fairchild, worked all night in the rain to help save the belongings of some Mexican families who had built their shacks too near the river.

  Sometimes Amy still liked to hear the stories, even now that she, lived in Taylor Springs and found it strangely unlike her imaginings. But on this particular evening she was interested only in her mother’s memories about one particular thing.

  “But didn’t you ever get close to the Hollow?” she asked. “Didn’t you ever climb to the top of the ridge where the road starts down and you can see the house and what’s left of the sheds and barn?”

  “No, I didn’t. Some of the children did, I know. But Papa didn’t want us to go so far into the Hills. Of course, he didn’t believe all the stories about ghosts and hauntings, but he felt there were better things for us to do with our time. I do think that Abigail might have gone once, as far as the hilltop.”

  “Did she see the house? What did it look like then? Did it still have doors and windows?”

  Suddenly Amy’s mother looked at her sharply. “Have you been there?” she asked.

  “Oh no,” Amy said quickly. “Not all the way there. But I’ve been as far as the ridge. Remember that time last summer when Alice and I made a picnic lunch and went hiking? We were going up Bradley Lane and we just happened to notice where the road to the Hollow began, and we followed it, but only as far as the ridge. We started to eat our lunch right there on the ridge, only we didn’t because we saw something.”

  “Something?” her mother asked, leaning forward from where she was still sitting on the very edge of her chair. “What kind of something?”

  “Well, I don’t know for sure,” Amy said. It was the second time that day that she had told about the thing that had moved in the shadow of the oak tree near the shack, but this time she was more careful not to add any interesting details that might not have been there for sure. “It was whitish,” she said, “and it kind of swayed back and forth—”

  But, even so, her mother’s face tightened with concern.

  “Amy Abigail,” she said reproachfully, “are you remembering—”

  “Mama,” Amy said. “I’m not exaggerating. I’m not. We did see a white thing. You can ask Alice. We both saw it, and we both ran. We thought it was a ghost.”

  “A ghost,” her mother said. “That sounds like heathen talk. You know we don’t believe in ghosts, goblins, and nonsense like that.”

  “But we believe in spirits, don’t we?” Amy said. “Like in the Bible where Jesus made the evil spirits go into the herd of swine.”

  “Devils,” Helen Polonski nodded. “Devils, yes, but not misty, white things that rap on tables and float through doors. That kind of thing is just spiritualist—”

  Just then Aunt Abigail returned to the kitchen to fill her teacup, and Amy’s mother jumped up and hurried back to the dishpan.

  “Are spiritualist what, Mama?” Amy asked.

  “Nonsense,” her mother said. “Heathen spiritualist nonsense.”

  “Nonsense?” Aunt Abigail asked. “What’s nonsense?” She took a kettle that Amy was drying out of her hands and inspected the bottom. The shiny metal was smudged here and there with black sooty smears.

  “Oh, didn’t I remember to scour—” Amy’s mother began, as she reached for the kettle, but Aunt Abigail shouldered her aside and began to scrub furiously.

  “Here, let me. I’ll do it, Abigail,” Amy’s mother said, nervously trying to catch the drips that fell from her wet fingers.

  Amy handed the dish towel to her mother and backed away, watching and listening. Listening to all the talk about a small smudge on the bottom of a kettle, Amy was getting the feeling that her aunt and mother were really talking about something else—something different, and more important and more secret.

  She often got that feeling—that when grown-ups talked about lots of little unimportant things, they were really talking about secrets that were somehow connected to things that had happened a long time before. Sometimes Amy had the feeling that she was surrounded by secrets and the clues to secrets, and that it was really important that she find out more about them. But there weren’t many clues in the talk about the kettle bottom, so she kept on backing up until she was out of the room and partway up the back stairs.

  Halfway up she began to run, two steps at a time, and the last three in a mighty jump. Then down the hall, still running, but quietly so they wouldn’t hear her and say what they always said.

  “It’s so unladylike, Amy, and dangerous. Just look at your poor knees.”

  “Amy Abigail, how many times do I have to ask you not to run in the house. You’ll break something.”

  “Let her run, for God’s sake. Not much else she’s allowed to do.”

  Amy’s room in Aunt Abigail’s house was small with a sloping ceiling and cubbyholed dormer windows. She liked its smallness and the sleek polished shine of the floor and the high carved headboard of the old-fashioned bed. She liked the narrow windows that opened right into the branches of one of th
e enormous pepper trees, so that the whole room was full of cool green light and the sounds of wind and birds. She liked having the tree there, except when she would have liked to see past it, to the Old Road and beyond to where the Hills rose up against the sky.

  For a moment Amy stood at the window, staring out into a thick green curtain of leaves, and then she turned and tiptoed out of her room and down the hall.

  chapter four

  FROM THE HUNTERHOUSE, the view of the eastern hills was blocked by the row of pepper trees, except from one window in one upstairs room. And it was to that room that Amy was going, although it was a place that she was not supposed to visit by herself. It was known as the storeroom because, for many years, Aunt Abigail had used it for storing away all kinds of keepsakes, and things that she was not using at present but might need again someday. It was a lonely place, standing alone and untouched sometimes for weeks at a time, and it smelled slightly of dust and of something else more subtle and mysterious. It was a musty smell, sweet but sad, like the smell of decaying rose petals, and Amy thought of it as seeping up from bundles of old letters and from tissue-wrapped packets of things like baby dresses and wedding veils.

  The furniture that had been exiled to the storeroom was old and out of style. Some of it had once belonged to the Hunter family, but much of it had come from the Fairchild parsonage. There was a desk that had belonged to Amy’s grandmother, a lady’s desk, carved and ornamented, but too small to be useful to Aunt Abigail, who had farm records to keep and household business to take care of. Someday, Aunt Abigail said, the desk would be Amy’s.