The Ghosts of Stone Hollow Read online

  She ran out quickly, before his smile had time to disappear.

  The schoolyard seemed to be empty, but Amy checked the driveway and the front steps to see if Gordie had posted any spies before she made her way to the swings. Waiting there, she saw the door to Miss McMillan’s room open. Jason came out, looked in her direction, and then ran toward the shed. Amy followed slowly, looking carefully around for any sign of spies or watchers. She was taking a risk. Not only Gordie, but also a lot of the others, would give her trouble if they found out. She didn’t really know why she was doing it. Except that she hated Gordie, and the new boy was so—helpless. She pictured him cowering behind the shed, waiting for her to come and tell him what to do.

  Only he wasn’t. When she reached the shed, he bounded out at her and said, “Advance and give the password.”

  Amy frowned. “Look. I told you, it’s no game. Gordie and some other guys are waiting for you somewhere along the road. But I know a way you may get past them. It’s kind of a long-cut down the riverbed and then up across the Paulsens’ orchard. It comes out halfway down Bradley Lane. You ought to be all right if you get that far without getting caught.”

  She started off fast not looking at him or speaking. It was strange; he didn’t seem grateful that she was helping him, or even too scared. It was as if he were just too dumb to realize what would have happened if she hadn’t. As if he didn’t realize, too, what would happen to her if anybody found out. Most of the kids wouldn’t hit her, the way Gordie might, but they had other ways of letting you know when you had done something you were not supposed to do. And one of those things was siding with a stranger against your friends. Amy walked quickly, looking back from time to time and frowning, so Jason wouldn’t try to walk beside her and talk. By the time they reached the riverbed, and were picking their way among the rocks between the cliff and the edge of the water, he had stopped trying to talk to her. He was walking several yards behind, and before long he began to act very strangely. Glancing back over her shoulder, Amy saw him walking on tiptoe, and then dropping to his knees from time to time and staring at the ground. She walked more slowly and at last stopped.

  “What were you doing?” she asked when he caught up.

  “Doing?” he said. “Oh, back there? That was an Indian. Sometimes I’m an Indian guide.”

  “Oh?” Thinking she understood, Amy nodded, relieved that that was all, but puzzled and amused that he didn’t seem at all embarrassed to admit it. It had been years since she had admitted to anyone about things like that, things she still did—like Gold Rush Pioneers or Camel Caravan. If she still played pretending games in the sixth grade she, at least, had enough sense not to let anyone know. “Oh,” she said again, making a teasing smile. “You were playing Indian. Do you play cowboy sometimes, too?”

  “It’s not playing, exactly.” Jason said. He sounded serious, not teased or angry, but thoughtful “Not playing. I really become an Indian, sometimes. It’s something a friend of mine in Greece taught me how to do.”

  Amy could only stare, bewildered and then angry. “You were playing!” she said. “Look! You don’t have to lie to me. I do it, too. All the time.” She hadn’t meant to tell, but it had slipped out because she was angry. He kept doing that—making her get angry and do things she hadn’t planned or meant to do.

  At least he didn’t tease back. He only looked interested and asked her how she did it. And somehow, there they were, walking along the riverbed, side by side, while Amy told him about the Pioneer game—how she usually played it, and how it was based on a book she read once about a girl whose father had gone west with the gold rush and had never been heard from since, and how the girl was on her way west with a pioneer train to see if she could find him.

  At a spot where the cliff was low, a narrow path led up from the riverbed to a part of the Paulsen ranch. They climbed the cliff together, still talking. It turned out that Jason had read a lot about the pioneers, too. He knew about the Jumping-Off Place and the Santa Fe Trail and the Donner party and even things that Amy wasn’t too sure about, like which Indian tribes were friendly and which were not. They were discussing whether horses or mules or oxen were best to pull covered wagons when they reached the top of the low hill on which the Paulsens’ orchard had been planted. From that vantage point, the part of the Old Road that curved west around the Paulsen land could be seen. At the end of the curve, the intersection of the Old Road and Bradley Lane were just visible.

  “Shh!” Amy said. “Look.”

  Standing where a thick row of eucalyptus trees hid them from the road, three boys were in plain sight from the top of the orchard hill. They were peering out, occasionally, to see if anyone was coming up the road. It was funny—spying down on the spies, as they laid in wait. Amy couldn’t help laughing; and Jason laughed, too, so noisily that it scared Amy for a minute, for fear Gordie and his friends might hear.

  Two girls appeared then, walking along the road toward the crossroads. By squinting her eyes a little, Amy could see that it was Alice and Shirley—coming, no doubt, to see what happened when Gordie caught the new boy away from school. Alice and Shirley knew more—and talked more—about other people and their business than anyone else in Taylor Springs. Suddenly Amy could just imagine what they would say if they glanced up the hill and saw her there—way out in the orchard with the crazy new boy. She grabbed Jason’s arm and pulled him back out of sight.

  “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get out of here before they see us.”

  She didn’t feel like talking after that, so they walked in silence until they reached Bradley Lane, only a short way from where Jason lived.

  “Good-bye,” she said. “I have to go back now all the way, because if they see me coming out of Bradley Lane they’ll get suspicious. I’m going to be very late getting home, and I’ll probably get in trouble.”

  “Thank you,” he said, “for showing me the way. If you can come over on Saturday or Sunday, I’ll show you the way somewhere.”

  “Where?” Amy asked quickly.

  “Up there.” Jason motioned toward the Hills. “Up there where the old house is—in the stony valley.”

  “Stone Hollow?” Amy said angrily. “Look. I don’t want to go to Stone Hollow. I already know how to get there, but I’m not going to go there. Not ever. I’m not crazy.”

  She started home then. Back along the long-cut and all the long way home, her mind kept returning to Stone Hollow and what might, or might not, happen if she should decide to go there someday. As she walked down the Old Road, she kept looking up, over her left shoulder to where the Hills began, in a rolling tumble of foothills, piling upward into the steep slopes beyond.

  After a while she began, to run, and she did not stop until she reached the front gate at the Hunter farm.

  chapter six

  THERE WAS ONLY THE one church in Taylor Springs. There had been another once, a Catholic church, but it had burned down. Since that time a visiting priest held masses now and then in the Grange Hall for the Catholics of the valley—mostly Mexican or Basque families who worked on farms and ranches in the outlying areas. But when most of the people of Taylor Springs spoke of church, they meant the Fairchild Community Church, an old brown shingled structure on Grant Street, not far from the center of town.

  Everybody in Taylor Springs went to church. Some of them went more often than others, of course, but nearly everyone went at least now and then. Besides Grandpa Simmons, who wasn’t allowed anymore because he forgot where he was and talked out loud about embarrassing things, Amy knew of only two others who never went to church at all. One of them was Old Ike, Aunt Abigail’s hired man, and the other was Daniel Polonski, Amy’s father. Nobody knew why Old Ike didn’t go to church, but Amy’s father said he didn’t go because he felt the Polonski family put in plenty of church hours without him wheeling himself down the aisle every Sunday. He was referring to the fact that Amy’s mother went to church a lot—probably more than anyone else in the whole valley,
except perhaps the Reverend Dawson himself.

  On Sunday mornings Helen Polonski went to Sunday School and the worship service that followed, and then on Sunday evenings she went to the youth meeting as a sponsor and stayed on for the evening service. During the week she went to prayer meeting and Bible study and missionary sewing circle and twice to choir practice. Amy would probably have gone to everything, too, if it hadn’t been for Aunt Abigail.

  Abigail Hunter usually went to Sunday morning service, unless a noisy visiting revivalist was speaking, and she also went every Thursday afternoon to sew for the missionaries. But that was all. And she insisted that Sunday morning was enough time for Amy to spend in church. It was the one subject on which Amy’s aunt and father agreed. Not that they would have thought of it as an agreement—but the results were the same. Aunt Abigail said, “Too much church can be as bad as too little, Helen. Remember what happened to that pious Paulsen boy.” And Amy’s father said, “Stay home with me, Baby. We got enough saints in the family already.” But it was enough like an agreement to keep Amy from going to church as much as she might otherwise have had to.

  Actually, Amy knew of one other subject on which her aunt and father agreed, and that was the town of Taylor Springs. According to Aunt Abigail, Taylor Springs was a typical backwoods town full of narrow-minded superstitions, and besides that it was a trap.

  “Yes, a trap, Amy Abigail,” she said. “Oh, it’s fine for some people, but it’s not the place for someone with energy and ability. I want you to promise me that you’ll get away from here as soon as you’re old enough to be on your own.”

  “But I like it here,” Amy had said. “And besides I’ll be leaving pretty soon anyway. Just as soon as Daddy gets an office job and—”

  “Well, perhaps. But don’t wait for that to happen. Don’t wait too long, the way I did.”

  It was plain that Aunt Abigail felt that she had been trapped in Taylor Springs. And although Amy’s father didn’t talk about it, Amy knew he felt the same way. But no one else that Amy knew felt that way about Taylor Springs. Just about everyone else agreed that Taylor Springs was a great place to live. And it was also pretty much agreed upon that you could tell how good a person was by the amount of time he spent in church. Sometimes Amy resolved to start going more often, but usually she only went when she had to, on Sunday mornings.

  It was during church on the Sunday morning after she had met Jason Fitzmaurice that Amy made an important decision. It was not the kind of decision one might expect to make in church, involving as it did deception and disobedience and perhaps some other sins as well. And it might not have happened at all if the Reverend Dawson hadn’t chosen that morning to preach one of his sermons on alcohol.

  As soon as he began on the text for the day—Proverbs 23:21: “For the drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty—” Amy knew most of what he was going to say in the next forty minutes. She knew because she had heard the Reverend’s alcohol sermons many times before, although she always tried very hard not to listen to them. She had tried various ways of not listening, and had discovered that to simply concentrate on not listening didn’t work at all. The best way not to listen she had found was to do what Aunt Abigail called “wool-gathering.”

  Wool-gathering was simply letting your mind get involved with a subject interesting and complicated enough to keep you from thinking about what you were supposed to be hearing. Amy did it quite a bit without even trying. One of her favorite subjects to wool-gather about was the Lilliputians. Since she had finished reading Gulliver’s Travels, she had invented her own colony of Lilliputians, who lived in various places around the Hunter farm, where she could protect and care for them and rescue them from all kinds of dangers. There were five families of them and she knew all about each of them, their names and ages and special characteristics.

  Thinking about the Lilliputians was usually interesting enough to hold Amy’s attention no matter what the circumstances, but the Reverend Dawson’s alcohol sermon made even the best wool-gathering difficult to maintain. The Reverend tended to become, not only very dramatic, but also very loud when he talked about the evils of drink, and words and phrases kept breaking through. Bits and pieces of terrible tragic stories about the victims of alcohol kept creeping through into Amy’s consciousness, and along with them, as she had known it would, came the memory of a long succession of brown paper bags.

  The paper bags were Old Ike’s. At least he brought them. He brought one with him every Thursday afternoon when he came to visit Amy’s father while her mother and aunt were away sewing for the missionaries. The paper bag always sat on the floor between Old Ike’s chair and her father’s wheelchair, and Ike always took it away with him when he left, but afterward Amy often had to help her father get out of his chair and onto the bed for a nap. At those times his breath smelled strange, sweet and yet bitter, and he sometimes said strange and unexpected things.

  The paper bags and hellfire and eternal damnation were winning out over the Lilliputians, when the preacher happened to say something about heathens, and that was what brought about Amy’s decision. The word “heathens” made Amy think of Jason, and from there she was soon thinking about Stone Hollow.

  She had always known, really, that Stone Hollow was one of those things that she would eventually have to learn more about. She had tried, certainly, but only by asking questions. By asking questions she had managed to pick up many bits and pieces of information—information that varied all the way from Old Ike’s curt and angry nod when she asked him if he had really helped to carry the bootleggers’ bodies down from the Hollow, clear to little Bobby Parks’s story about the man-eating cow. But now that it seemed certain she had learned all that was possible by asking questions, she was going to have to think about doing something more drastic—more drastic and more dangerous. And if she did something dangerous, it wouldn’t be the first time.

  There was, for example, the time that Alice Harris had told her something about how boys were really different from girls—besides things like having shorter hair and bigger muscles. Amy had known it wasn’t wise, but because she wanted to know so badly, she had risked asking her mother about it. She hadn’t really gotten into trouble that time, at least not trouble of the usual kind like punishment or scolding. But right afterward her mother had added a new part to the prayer she said with Amy every night, a part about keeping a clean mind and a pure spirit. Since then it had been hard to keep her mind on the rest of the prayer because of waiting for that part—and knowing how it would make her feel. It was strange how words like “clean” and “pure” could make you feel just the opposite. It was a feeling Amy hated almost more than a spanking. And what made it especially bad was that it was all for nothing, because she hadn’t found out anything more than what she already knew.

  Amy admitted to herself that morning that Stone Hollow would probably turn out to be one of the more dangerous things that she had to find out about. Dangerous, that is, if she did more than just ask questions. But, there seemed to be only one way left to find out about Stone Hollow and that was to go there. Going there had been in the back of her mind before, but going alone had seemed impossible, and she had known that none of her friends would go with her. Alice Harris, who was by far the most daring about things like that, had only been willing to go to the rim of the valley and look down. But now it was different. Now Amy knew someone who would go with her and who, as incredible as it seemed, had actually been there before.

  Not that she would have chosen Jason Fitzmaurice to go anywhere with if she’d had a choice. There would be a lot of problems. First there would be making sure, somehow, that he wouldn’t tell anyone about it afterward. Amy could just imagine what the kids at school would say if they found out. Then there would be the problem of making it clear to Jason that agreeing to go to the Hollow with him didn’t mean that they were friends, or that she would be willing to talk to him at school, or anywhere else where there were people around. And last, t
here was the fact that she would have to go without permission. Not that that was Jason’s fault, or at least not entirely. She knew perfectly well that she could never get permission to go to the Hollow with anyone—but to go with a boy, and a crazy boy at that, was just one more thing to hide—and then feel guilty about.

  But none of that seemed to matter, or at least not enough. Amy knew suddenly that she was going to go to Stone Hollow, and the thought filled her with an irresistible kind of terror. She was exploring the terror —sitting quietly in the pew next to Aunt Abigail, with her hands folded in her lap, but really caught up in a world of fearfully fascinating possibilities—when two words broke through and brought her back to reality with a terrible shock.

  The words were “STONE HOLLOW,” and they had been almost shouted from the pulpit by the Reverend Dawson. Amy’s eyes flew open to see the preacher staring sternly in her direction. For a terrible panic-stricken moment Amy was sure that God must have told Reverend Dawson what she was considering—to punish her for what she was thinking, and for not listening to the sermon. But as she sat, stunned and horrified, the preacher’s eyes turned away, and he went on speaking. His voice had sunk now to a tragic whisper, and he was saying something about “those two unfortunate sinners, whose awful deaths were just another sacrifice on the altar of Demon Rum.”

  Even then, it took a few moments for Amy to realize that the preacher had not been talking just to her, but had simply come to the part in his sermon where he mentioned the two bootleggers as a good example of what happened to people who drank. When she was finally sure, she felt terribly relieved and grateful. Grateful enough to force herself to put everything else out of her mind and to concentrate on what the Reverend Dawson was saying.

  The last part of the sermon was about a sinner burning in hell and reaching up and begging the angels for a drop of water. Reverend Dawson always lingered over that part of the sermon, describing the sinner and what was happening to him in great detail so that you could almost see what he looked like, even if you tried not to. Amy tried not to because she was afraid he might look familiar—that he might have a thin dark face, a handsome face, except for the purple shadows that came from pain and too little sunshine.