The Ghosts of Stone Hollow Read online

  Next to the desk was an ancient rosewood dresser with a marble top and next to it a clumsy old highboy with many glass-paned doors. Then came rocking chairs, bookcases, lamps, and whatnot cabinets and, all along one wall, a row of large boxes and old-fashioned dome-lidded trunks.

  From time to time Amy had been allowed to accompany her aunt or mother when they went into the storeroom to put something away or just to dust and clean. A few other times, she had spent hours there with her mother, going through some of the old trunks. Together they had looked at old china-headed dolls with kid leather bodies, tarnished silver spoons, and fancy baby dresses. In a box marked School Days, they had found dozens of old report cards, and fancy certificates awarded for Sunday School attendance, or Bible verses memorized, or good handwriting. Another trunk was almost entirely full of old photographs. There were hundreds of photographs, sorted into large envelopes, or neatly mounted in albums with puffy velvet covers. It took hours to look through all the photographs, because Amy’s mother knew a story to go with almost every one.

  One of the first pictures in the fanciest old album was a favorite of Amy’s. It was a wedding picture, the wedding of Amy’s grandfather and grandmother. Amy’s grandfather, with a darker beard and hair but otherwise looking much the same as he did in all his other pictures, was standing stiff and straight beside a chair in which his bride was sitting, dressed in a beautiful white dress with a long lacy veil.

  Looking at that picture always gave Amy an interesting feeling—a curious feeling, beautiful and exciting, but very sad. It was sad to look at someone so young and smiling, and know that the person had died so soon afterward, leaving two little girls without a mother. And what made it seem especially tragic, so tragic that Amy could get a tight feeling in her throat just thinking about it, was the fact that she had been so very beautiful—and that her name had been Amy. Looking at her picture made Amy wonder about things—things like being beautiful, and dying.

  Once when she had been in the storeroom alone, she had put the album down and, going over to the mirror on the rosewood dresser, she had pulled the back of her skirt up over her head like a veil and smiled, trying to make her face warm, blond, and glowing, like that other Amy’s had been when she had her picture taken for her wedding, on June the twenty-first, 1896, in Des Moines, Iowa.

  There were not many other pictures of Amy’s grandmother in the albums, and in the few there were, she looked much different from the way she did in the wedding picture. In one labeled Abigail 2 years, Helen 6 months, she was shown sitting in a rocking chair holding two babies on her lap. In that picture the other Amy’s blond hair was pulled back close to her head and her face looked blurred and faded.

  “There we are, Abigail and I, when we were just babies,” Amy’s mother had said when she showed Amy the picture. “Just look at those curls.”

  “Is that your mama?” Amy had asked.

  “Why, yes, of course.”

  “She looks so different from the way she looks in the other picture.”

  Amy’s mother had held the picture to the light and examined it carefully. “Yes, she does,” she said. “I suppose she wasn’t very well when the picture was taken. She was never very well after they came to Taylor Springs. She died when I was only six years old, you know. I don’t remember her much at all, but Abigail does. Abigail remembers her very well.”

  “Wasn’t it awful?” Amy asked. “Wasn’t it terrible to have your mama die when you were so little?”

  “Yes,” her mother said. “It was very sad. But I was so young at the time that I don’t think I really understood what had happened. I don’t remember much about how I felt at the time. And we were very fortunate to have such a wonderful father. Even though we had lost our mother, Abigail and I were never neglected for a moment. Our papa saw to that.”

  Amy’s mother usually spoke of her father as “our papa,” and she spoke of him a lot. Although he had died three years before Amy was born, she always felt as if she had known him. Through her mother’s stories, she had heard all about the Reverend Jeremiah Fairchild who had come to Taylor Springs in 1896 with his young wife, and who had built a church and guided the lives, not only of his own family, but of the whole community for thirty-seven years. He had been a very important man in Taylor Springs, and all of the picture albums in Aunt Abigail’s storeroom were full of pictures of him. In some of the pictures he was doing important things like dedicating the new schoolhouse or giving a talk at the Fourth of July picnic. And in all of the pictures he looked very much the same, tall and dignified with a face like the face of a statue, handsome and dignified and unsmiling.

  Amy spent almost as much time looking at the pictures of her grandfather as she did the ones of her grandmother, but they gave her a very different feeling. While the pictures of her poor young grandmother Amy made her feel sad in a rather pleasant romantic way, the ones of her grandfather were somehow a little frightening. She didn’t know why, exactly, except that it seemed so impossible that such an important and determined-looking person would allow his plans to be interrupted by dying. There were times when, looking up from his pictures, Amy almost expected to see him standing in the door of the storeroom, wearing a long dark coat and a stern and dignified expression.

  When Amy reached the door of the storeroom, she stopped for a moment and listened carefully to be sure that no one was coming up the stairs. Aunt Abigail had never in so many words forbidden Amy to go to the room alone, probably because it never occurred to her that she would want to, but her mother had warned her about it. Aunt Abigail was very particular, she said, about everything being put back in exactly the right place. So, Amy reasoned, it wouldn’t matter as long as she put everything back in just the right place. Actually, she really knew she shouldn’t go there. It was just that she couldn’t seem to help it. She didn’t know what it was that made the storeroom so strangely irresistible, except that she had a mysterious feeling that somewhere in the crowded room was something, or perhaps a lot of things, that she needed to find out about.

  She had been in the storeroom many times without finding out anything very important, but that was not surprising since she didn’t know where to look, or even exactly what she was looking for. For a while she thought perhaps the desk, or one of the other pieces of old furniture, might have a secret drawer or compartment that would fly open if she found the hidden spring and reveal—a treasure, or perhaps an important secret document. At other times she felt the clue might be found in the bundles of old letters or postcards, or even in the pictures in one of the photograph albums.

  She had already discovered a small clue to some kind of mystery concerning one of the old photographs. One day, when she and her mother were looking through the albums, Aunt Abigail had appeared in the doorway just as Amy found a beautiful picture of two little girls dressed in fancy high-necked dresses, standing hand in hand on the front steps of the Taylor Springs church. The picture was labeled Abigail and Helen Fairchild—ages 8 and 6.

  “Look, Aunt Abigail,” Amy had said, bringing her the album. “Look at you and Mama. Look at the big hair ribbons and the beautiful dresses.”

  But Aunt Abigail had only glanced at the picture briefly, shaking her head and smiling a strange, almost angry smile. As she handed it back, she said something under her breath that sounded like, “Poor little puppets.” She walked away then, but when Amy had questioned her mother about it, she had learned very little.

  “Did she say that?” Amy’s mother had said. “Are you sure? I can’t imagine what she meant by that. I can’t imagine—” But then she sat for a long time fingering the edges of the album and looking at the picture of the two little girls who had been Abigail and Helen Fairchild. After a while she said, almost as if she were talking to herself, “Abigail was not a happy child. Sometimes I think she—” But then she looked at Amy and hushed suddenly and began to talk quickly about another picture—as if there were something secret about what she had started to say.


  There was something secret about what was, and wasn’t, said that day and, if there was a secret, it was obvious that Aunt Abigail had the answers. But Aunt Abigail, Amy had soon discovered, did not like to talk about her childhood. So the secret had remained a secret and became one more in the long list of things that Amy needed to find out about—one more answer that might be waiting right there among the hundreds of bits and pieces of the past that had waited through the years in Aunt Abigail’s storeroom.

  But on this particular evening as Amy tiptoed through the door of the storeroom, she was not so much interested in the contents of the room itself. As soon as she had carefully and noiselessly closed the door behind her, she made her way as directly as possible to a steamer trunk that sat below the window. Climbing up on the trunk, she rolled up the window shade, and there they were. Rising up into a pink-tinged sky, the Hills loomed high, and then higher, an endless labyrinth of crests and canyons, lonely, mysterious, and forbidding.

  “He couldn’t have,” she whispered after a while. “He couldn’t have all by himself. Nobody is as brave as that.”

  chapter five

  HE CAME OUT of the clump of eucalyptus trees again the next morning when she was on her way to school. But although he appeared with startling suddenness from behind the tree trunks, Amy’s reaction was not so much fright as embarrassment. She was embarrassed because he might have noticed that she was acting strangely. Actually, she had been playing a game.

  It was a long way from the Hunter farm to Taylor Springs School, and Amy had thought up a lot of different ways to entertain herself along the way. All the games had something to do with traveling or making long journeys. There was Camel Caravan on the Sahara, Cattle Drive on the Santa Fe Trail, and even the Children’s Crusade. Today, though, it had been one of her favorites, Gold Rush Pioneers.

  Amy glared at Jason, thinking back quickly over what had just happened in the game. Since she came around the bend in the road, she had been crossing the desert, and she couldn’t remember doing anything more than cracking a whip and maybe staggering a little—as if walking in deep sand. But if Jason noticed either the whipping or staggering, he didn’t mention it.

  After he emerged suddenly, almost at her elbow, and before she had recovered from her embarrassment enough to think of a way to prevent it, he started walking beside her. Amy walked faster, and he hurried to keep up like a baby goose frantically following anything that moved because it might be its mother. She was trying to think of a way to tell him to go away, when he said, “I went there again last night.”

  “You went where?” she said, and then stopped dead. “Not to the Hollow. You didn’t go to the Hollow at night?”

  “Not exactly. Twilight. I left there before it was actually dark.”

  “Good heavens,” Amy said. “You really are crazy. Did anything happen?”

  He nodded. “The wind blew in circles,” he said. “And there were noises—voices maybe. There would have been more, I think, if I had stayed.”

  Amy shivered. Surely he was lying, but he lied so well—with only a thoughtful remembering expression—as if he were trying carefully to recall every detail correctly—and there was no sneaky watching for Amy’s reaction. She turned and walked on wondering.

  He walked beside her silently for a while before he said, “Are you going away soon?”

  She knew what he meant, but she pretended not to. “Going away? Where to? Why should I be going away?”

  “Away to live. You said you were visiting your aunt. Will you be going back to San Francisco when your father gets well?”

  “He won’t get well,” Amy said. “At least he won’t be able to walk again. But when the Depression is over, he’s going to get an office job where he can work sitting down, and we’ll go back then. But there are no jobs now even if he took the training. He’s tried and tried to get a job. He even paid a lawyer to try. The lawyer tried to make the company where my father got his back broken give him an office job. But they didn’t have a job either. But as soon as the Depression gets better, my father says he’ll study bookkeeping, and we’ll go back to San Francisco, except—”

  “Except what?”

  “Oh nothing. I was just going to say that my aunt doesn’t think my father will be able to get a job.” Then to change the subject, she asked, “How long are you going to stay?”

  “I don’t know. But it won’t be for very long. Just ‘til my father finishes his book.” He stopped suddenly and picked up a smooth, shiny stone. “Look at this,” he said. “It looks like a prayer stone.”

  “A what?”

  “A prayer stone. They’re usually found near sacred rivers. They have special powers.”

  “Powers? What kind of powers?”

  “Supernatural powers,” Jason said. He put the stone in his pocket.

  “Oh,” Amy said. “We don’t believe in stuff like that.”

  “You don’t?” Jason seemed surprised. “You mean you’ve never met a person who had supernatural powers?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “That’s strange,” Jason said. He trotted a ways to keep up with Amy’s fast walk. “Do you like it here?” he asked.

  “Like it here? In Taylor Springs? Of course I like it here!” But even as she said it, a memory came of closed tight faces and turned backs. She had begun to forget how it was to be new at Taylor Springs School where everyone had known each other since they were babies and knew exactly what to do and what was expected. She had begun to forget how she had come with such high hopes—feeling as if she were coming home to the place where she belonged—and then found that she didn’t seem a part of things, without knowing why or what she could do about it. It had been a terrible and frightening time.

  But she had learned quickly. She had set herself to learn how to belong at Taylor Springs School, and she had been successful. But remembering how it had been made her feel frightened, and the fright quickly turned into anger. “Why shouldn’t I like it here?” she demanded.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so different—”

  “Different? I’m not either different. What do you mean I’m different?” But just then she noticed how close they were getting to the school grounds, so she didn’t wait for an answer. She was not about to walk into the schoolyard with this crazy Jason. In Taylor Springs girls walked to school alone or with other girls. And certainly not with a crazy new boy. She’d never hear the last of it, if she did that.

  Stopping in her tracks, she frowned at Jason fiercely and said, “Go on. Go on to school. I have to do something first.”

  But he only smiled his dumb gosling smile and said, “I’ll wait for you.”

  “No you won’t! I don’t want to walk with you. Now go on.”

  The smile went, and left his face limp and defenseless, as it had been after Gordie’s fist. He walked away leaving Amy wanting to call after him and tell him that it was only that girls didn’t walk to school with boys at Taylor Springs. She felt rotten and guilty, the way she did when she put off something her mother had asked her to do, until her mother, sighing sadly, did it herself. She hated the feeling, and because he had no right to make her feel that way, she yelled after him, “Don’t ever talk to me again.”

  No one called him Jason at school that day except Miss McMillan. Everyone else called him Sissy, because he still wouldn’t hit back when Gordie hit him. And Gordie hit him all the time. Gordie said he had a special reason because he had had to stay after school for swearing, and that was Jason’s fault. But Gordie didn’t really need any special reason. After he’d gotten even for the staying-after, he went on hitting Jason for no reason at all. He tripped him in the hall, banged into his desk and spilled his milk during lunch hour, and even stuck him with a pencil as he walked by him during class. Watching, Amy began to feel more and more angry—angry at Miss McMillan for not seeing anything, and at Gordie for being such an idiot bully, and most of all at Jason himself for being so sickening
ly helpless, like a wounded mouse in the clutches of a tormenting cat.

  By afternoon everyone was talking about what Gordie was going to do to the new boy after school. Gordie was telling everyone that he was going to wait in the bushes until the sissy came by on his way home from school. By three o’clock everyone in the room knew about it, except Miss McMillan and Jason himself.

  When the dismissal bell rang in Miss McMillan’s class, you cleaned up your desk and then raised your hand for the desk monitor to come around and inspect. If your desk was clean enough, you were dismissed. Watching Jason stacking a pile of books and papers on the corner of his desk so he could wipe it out with a paper towel, Amy suddenly wadded up a scrap of something and started with it to the wastepaper basket. On the way she brushed against Jason’s desk and shoved his things off onto the floor. Everyone who saw it grinned, knowing she’d done it on purpose. Then she went back to her desk and carefully arranged and rearranged her own books. By the time Jason had picked up his books and all the scattered pieces of paper, they were the only ones left in the room. Then Amy went to the cloakroom and stayed there, waiting.

  He came at last and seeing her he started to smile, but she grabbed his arm and whispered at him fiercely.

  “Stay here for a minute,” she hissed. “Then look out the door. I’ll be out by the swings. If I’m swinging, go back in and wait a while longer, but if I’m just standing there, come on out and run down and wait behind the janitor’s shed. Okay?”

  Jason stared blankly for just a moment before his face convulsed into his babyishly eager smile. “All right,” he said. “I’ll wait for your signal, and then I’ll advance to the next rendezvous.” And then as Amy turned to go, he whispered, “What are we playing?”

  “Playing?” Amy said. “We’re not playing anything. Gordie’s laying for you, that’s all.”