Ghosts Beneath Our Feet (11 page)

“I just meant to go out for a little while last night,” he said. “Sorry about that.”

Mrs. Blaine opened her mouth and closed it. “What happened to your jeans?” she asked, when she'd found her voice.

Jay looked down, as if puzzled by the question. “Oh, yeah,” he mumbled. “I chopped 'em off. Too hot.”

He started across the kitchen toward the hallway, and Mrs. Blaine jumped up. “We were worried to death!” she exclaimed. “I was sure you'd been in an accident.”

“I said I was sorry.” The reply was subdued. “I better clean up.”

“Not till you tell me where you've been all night,” Mrs. Blaine insisted. “I want to know.”

“Can't.” The single word was like a groan. Katie, her mother, and Uncle Frank stared after him as he left the kitchen. Mrs. Blaine sank back into her chair.

“Let it go for now,” Uncle Frank said. He was pale, as if his effort to be reassuring had exhausted him. “I'm goin' for a nap,” he said.

“Don't forget your pills,” Mrs. Blaine said automatically, her eyes still on the doorway where Jay had disappeared. “I'm sorry we've loaded our troubles on you, Uncle Frank.”

The old man made a dismissing gesture. He squinted down the hall. “Car comin' across the field,” he said. His footsteps dragged as he went to his bedroom.

Even before she followed her mother to the door, Katie guessed who their visitor would be. Sheriff Hesbruck's tall frame loomed dark against the morning sun. He nodded a greeting as Mrs. Blaine let him in.

“Your stepson home?”

“Yes—what's wrong?”

Here it comes
, Katie thought. The overwhelming relief she'd felt when Jay returned was dispelled. She heard again the words she'd hurled at him yesterday:
I actually wanted you for my brother, Jay Blaine.… That was the dumbest idea I ever had
. She'd told him she hated him, and last night he'd sneaked out and done something awful to prove he didn't care about her or anybody else.

“Want to talk to him about a fire over on the county line road,” the sheriff said. “Happened about midnight.”

“A fire!” Mrs. Blaine gasped. “Jay wouldn't—”

“I'm not saying he did anything, ma'am,” the sheriff said gently. “But it sure enough was arson—an old abandoned barn burned right down to the foundations.”

“But why do you want to talk to Jay?”

The sheriff shifted from one booted foot to the other. “Same story as last time I was here. Somebody on the county line road thinks they heard a motorcycle about the time the barn went up. I stopped at Poldeens'—Skip hasn't been home since yesterday afternoon. And your boy's a friend of Poldeen's.”

“Was anybody hurt in the fire?” Katie asked.

The sheriff looked up the stairs, as if he knew Jay was there and possibly listening. “Doesn't make any difference,” he said. “Happens nobody was hurt, but they could have been. Took the whole volunteer fire department to control the fire. And if it had gotten away from them, it could have burned thirty or more acres of crops. A summer's work for some good men.
They
would have been hurt plenty!” He moved toward the stairs. “I want to talk to your boy.”

“I'll call him,” Mrs. Blaine said in a low voice.

Katie felt as if she were suffocating, caught between the sheriff's accusing words and her mother's panic. Arson was a real crime—far more serious than breaking into a cottage and taking a can of beans. If Jay was guilty, he could go to jail! Katie slipped around the sheriff and went out on the front porch to think.

The sunlight and bird song seemed out of place, like happy music at a funeral. Katie considered going down the hill to pour out her troubles to Joan, but she didn't really want to tell anyone what the sheriff suspected. Anyway, it could still all be a mistake. The sound of a motorcycle in the night didn't mean that Skip Poldeen and Jay had started the fire. But why had Jay looked and sounded so strange if he hadn't done anything wrong? And if he wasn't with Skip, where had he been all night? Katie went down the steps and along the road, her head throbbing with painful questions, until she found herself in the leafy tunnel that led through the woods.

Here in the shadows it was warmer, and the air was heavy with the scent of pine. Katie thought about Jay, and about poor, sad May Nichols, and about Uncle Frank's son, Kenny, and about Uncle Frank himself, who had once been as unhappy as Jay was now. She thought about the bus ride north to Newquay and how she'd dreamed happy dreams of life in Newquay.
What a baby I was
! She put her head down on her knees and sighed.

Gradually, she became aware of a pungent smell, stronger than the pine fragrance, definitely disturbing. She followed the odor along the road, and when it became very strong she pushed her way through the underbrush. A dark blue bundle lay on the ground, partly hidden by a raspberry bush. It unrolled when she picked it up, and she found herself holding two long denim tubes. Blue-jean legs. The smell of gasoline filled her nostrils.

Katie froze, as if the denim scraps were snakes that might strike out at any moment. She heard the sheriff's car start up back at the house, and she held her breath as it came across the meadow and into the woods. She wanted to peek out to see if Jay was in the back seat, but she didn't dare. Long after the sound of the motor faded, she stood where she was, the heavy, sweetish fumes rising around her.

When at last she made her way back to the road, tears were running down her cheeks. At the turn in the road, she came face to face with Jay.

He stopped when he saw what she was holding. “I might have known it,” he said, sounding lost. “Well, you can really get even this time, kid. Just call up the sheriff and tell him the great girl detective and spook-hunter has solved his case!”

Chapter Fifteen

Katie looked down at the gasoline-soaked denim she was holding. The smell was very strong. Her stomach felt queasy.

“Why would you set fire to a barn?” she asked. “Why would
anybody
do that?”

“I didn't!” Jay snapped. “You won't believe it now, but that's the truth. I didn't have anything to do with the fire.”

“Then how—”

“I took a walk down to Poldeens' last night after the rest of you were in bed. Skip said he was going for a ride and I could come along if I wanted to. It was great! You don't know what it's like to ride a motorcycle. Nobody does, if they haven't tried it. You're out there between the road and the sky, and you smell the grass and feel the wind.…” He broke off, red-faced.

“So what happened?”

“We were just coasting along, and all of a sudden Skip turned onto a side road and pulled up in front of a barn. He took a can of gasoline out of the trunk on the back of the cycle, and he said we were going to have a bonfire. I thought he was kidding at first. Then I tried to stop him, but he told me to shut up. He said the barn was just an old wreck, but it had some hay stored in it and it would make a terrific fire. I tried to grab the can, and some of the gas splashed on my jeans. Skip lit a match”—Katie gasped—“and he said if I didn't back off I could be part of the bonfire, it was all the same to him.” Jay's color faded as he repeated the ugly words. “I thought we were friends, but … anyway, I got out of there fast. I looked back once and saw the fire, and after that I cut across fields because I knew the fire department would be coming. When I got back here, I chopped off the jeans with my knife because the gas smell was so strong.”

“You walked back?” Katie remembered the exhausted, insect-bitten face that had looked in at them through the screen door a couple of hours before. “How could you find your way in the dark?”

“I saw the shaft house at the top of the hill in the moonlight and just kept going.” Jay shrugged. “So that's it, and you might as well call the sheriff. I don't expect you to believe me, even though it's true.”

“I do believe you,” Katie said. Jay had lied to her in the past, but she was certain he was telling the truth this time. “Mom'll believe you, too. When you weren't in your room this morning, she felt really bad. She told Uncle Frank you were a good person, and she told the sheriff—” Katie thought of the sheriff's cold eyes as he started toward the stairs to look for Jay. “What did
you
tell him?”

“That I didn't set the fire. That I'm not going to rat on anybody else, so it's no use asking me questions.”

“Then what's going to happen?”

“Who knows? He's still looking for Skip.”

They started back toward the house. “Aren't you really going to tell him about the jeans?” Jay asked. “I wouldn't blame you, I guess. After yesterday.”

Katie rolled up the pieces of denim and threw them back into the woods. The last few hours had been so painful that she'd almost forgotten what had happened at the shaft house. “I guess I can take a joke,” she said slowly. “Or I could if Skip Poldeen wasn't in on it.”

“That's all it was—a joke. I mean, who believes in knackers—except old Mrs. Trelawny?”

“Not me,” Katie retorted. “Not Joan either. We just went back to the shaft house for the fun of it, and because—because—I don't believe in knackers, but I do believe in ghosts,” she said defiantly. “I have reasons.”

Jay scuffed his toes in the gravel and looked at Katie uneasily. “I saw her,” he said.

“Saw who?”

“The girl with the yellow hair. The one you said was in the shaft house the first time you went there. I saw her day before yesterday, after you kids ran away. That's what I wanted to tell you yesterday.”

Katie couldn't believe her ears. “You
saw
her?”

“In the corner next to the shaft. I was behind the ore car, and I balanced the tape recorder on the edge when I stood up. There was a noise behind me—sort of a sigh—and when I turned around, there she was.”

“Did she say anything?”

Jay snorted. “Do you think I stood around making conversation? I went through that window faster than you did. The tape player fell into the car, and I never even noticed it was gone till I got home.”

Suddenly Katie felt almost lighthearted. Jay had seen May Nichols! And he hadn't set the barn fire; he'd even tried to stop Skip Poldeen from starting it. The world wasn't quite as dismal as it had looked a few minutes ago.

Jay's next words cut sharply through her rising mood. “If I get out of this barn-burning mess, I'm leaving,” he said. “I've got it all figured out. I can call that social worker I saw last winter, and I'm pretty sure he'll find a place for me to stay in Milwaukee. A foster home. It'll only be till I'm out of school, and then I'll be on my own.”

“A foster home?” Katie repeated. “But you have a home.”

“That's your home. Not mine. I was dumped on you and your mother, that's all. What do you need me around for?”

Katie struggled to keep her voice steady. “We're a family,” she said. “We
are
, Jay. I know you heard what Mom was saying in the kitchen this morning. She loves you. She only gets mad because she's worried.”

“Well, when I leave, she won't have to worry anymore.” Jay kicked a stone and sent it skittering into the brush. Almost at once, a graceful brown shape moved out ahead of them. Liquid eyes studied them, and the white tail twitched. After a few seconds, a dappled fawn appeared and stood behind its mother.

Katie held her breath. “Oh, Jay, look,” she whispered. “Isn't that the most beautiful thing you've ever seen?”

“Neat,” Jay said, but he said it as if he was thinking about something else.

Katie bit her lip. Newquay had offered them its loveliest sight, and it wasn't enough. She had a strange, sad feeling that her stepbrother was already far away.

Once again, the old house seemed to be waiting for something. Katie remembered thinking that the first time she'd stepped inside the front door, and tonight the tension was greater than ever.

Jay had settled in the library with a science-fiction paperback he'd brought from home. Mrs. Blaine and Uncle Frank were on the front porch. Katie wandered from one room to another through air that was heavy with secrets. She stared long and hard into the mirror at the end of the upstairs hall, but May Nichols didn't appear. In the parlor and kitchen Katie knelt and put her ear to the floor, but heard nothing. Still, the feeling of impending danger persisted.

The telephone rang, and Mrs. Blaine hurried in from the porch to answer it. Jay listened from the library doorway.
Maybe that's it
, Katie thought.
We're all expecting the sheriff to call or come back. It's us, not the house, that's waiting
. But the caller was Joan, suggesting a hike to Tuesday Lake the next day. When Katie hung up, the ominous stillness settled in once more.

At nine o'clock Uncle Frank came inside, his step firmer than usual as he marched down the hall. He passed Katie, who was working on a jigsaw puzzle at the dining room table, and went to the library door.

“Got somethin' to say to you, boy,” he announced. “I 'ad a boy once, y'know.”

“I know.” Jay sounded startled; Uncle Frank seldom spoke to him directly.

“'E was a good boy, but not so lucky as you,” the old man went on. “Died young, 'e did—thirty years ago tomorrow. You think of that, boy. You got lots to be glad for—most of all just bein' alive. You remember that when you feel like the world's goin' against you, 'ear?”

“Okay.” Jay must have offered Uncle Frank the big leather chair. The old man shook his head and backed away. “'Ave to go to bed,” he muttered. “Tired. Seems like I'm always tired. Wanted to tell you that, though. You're not a bad young feller. I like 'avin' a boy around again.”

This time as Uncle Frank made his way back through the dining room, he laid a hand briefly on Katie's head. “Good night, missy.”