The Ghost of Gruesome High (9 page)

The Mayor didn’t bother to answer my question directly. He stomped to the door of his office and opened it. “Robert!” he yelled. “Please see these children out. And have my car brought around!” He gave the orders in a very firm voice, what I would call an angry voice. He then walked out of the office without looking back or saying another word to us.
 

The Mayor’s assistant walked into the room. “I think it’s time for you kids to be getting home,” he said. He didn’t say it unkindly. But it was obvious he wasn’t giving us any other options.

My friends didn’t say a word until we were in the elevator and the doors had closed. The moment the car started to move, everyone started talking at once. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, but phrases like “Are you nuts?” and “What the hell were you doing?” and “How could you be so rude?” were repeated more than once. I let them vent. By the time the elevator had reached the ground floor and we had walked out of the lobby and were back outside, they had finally exhausted themselves.

It was then that I spoke. “Don’t you guys get it yet?” I asked very calmly and matter-of-factly. “Mayor Thompson is a crook. And maybe worse!”

Chapter 15

Questions and more questions

My friends all thought I was crazy, and the more I tried to explain my theories, the crazier they thought I was—and the crazier I knew I was sounding.

I was still just making up too many details. They all sounded believable to me— at least when I said them in my head—but when I said them out loud they sounded fishy even to me.

Somehow I knew Mayor Thompson was mixed up in this ghost thing. Maybe he even was the ghost. I was just sure that everything was somehow connected to the robbery of Thompson’s Coin & Jewelry—but given that as a starting point, I had no trouble coming up with half a dozen different theories that fit all the pieces together. And none of them rang quite true, even to me.

The problem was, I decided, I just didn’t have enough pieces of the puzzle yet. I needed more solid information.
 

Like I said, all my friends thought I was crazy, and Jason seemed mad at me for some reason—I’ll never understand boys, even if I live to be thirty—so I decided to spend my lunch hour on Friday in the school library, doing a little ghost research.

Libraries weren’t exactly as unfamiliar to me as the dark side of the moon, or anything like that, but I have to admit I hadn’t really spent all that much time in our school library. When I walked in the librarian—I think her name is Mrs. Winslow—looked at me over the tops of her big, thick bifocal glasses. I got the impression she wasn’t very happy to see me. But then I quickly got the impression she wasn’t really glad to see any kids in the library.
 

Nevertheless I did my best to put a friendly smile on my face and walked up to her big built-in dark wooden desk. “Excuse me,” I said in my best library voice, “but do you have any books or magazine or newspaper articles on the Gruesome High ghost? I mean,” I quickly corrected myself, “the Grissom High ghost?”

The Librarian frowned and took off her glasses. “Young lady,” she said almost angrily, “there is no such thing as a ghost. Not at this school, not anywhere. Ghosts do not exist. Ghosts are figments of people’s imaginations.”

I did my best to keep the smile on my face and any attitude out of my voice. I took a deep breath through my nose and said: “I couldn’t agree with you more. But I’m doing a report on mass hysteria (thank you Mr. Greenwald!) and I need as much background on the ghost as I can get.” I suddenly had another idea. “If you know of any newspaper articles about sightings of the ghost those would be most helpful.”

The Librarian narrowed her eyes and looked at me as if to make sure I wasn’t pulling a prank on her or anything, then put her glasses back on, rummaged beneath her desk until she came up with a cardboard file box, then tilted her head back so she was looking through the bottom half of her glasses, and proceeded to quickly and expertly thumb through several hundred index cards. Finally she stopped, removed a card and looked at it more thoroughly.

“We don’t keep many newspapers here, this being just a small high school library and all, but I think we have a few copies of the
Rossmore Daily Beacon
from right around the time the school was first opened. We saved them as souvenirs more than anything. That was about ten years ago. The papers are in the back,” she said doubtfully. “It would take me a while to dig through them.”

This was exactly what I wanted! “Oh, could I look through them all?” I asked excitedly.
 

The librarian looked doubtful. She removed her glasses once more and tapped them uncertainly on the palm of her hand. “I don’t know,” she said. “It’s really against school—”

“Please!” I said earnestly. “I promise I’ll be neat and I won’t hurt anything! I’ll put everything back exactly as I found it. I promise! Please!”

The librarian sighed and put her glasses back on. “Very well,” she said, lifting up a hinged wooden section of her desk so that I could step through. She turned and led me through a door behind the desk.
 

The door led to a dark and musty-smelling storage room. There were boxes and stacks of newspapers and magazines and books with broken spines and torn covers everywhere. The library itself was always so brightly-lit and neat and clean that this was a bit of a shock. It was as if I had just been let in on a quite-little secret.

And it was a dirty secret as well! Everything was covered with dust. Dust was everywhere. I could taste the dust with every breath I took. I started breathing through my nose. That helped a little.

The librarian must have read my face. “It is rather a mess back here,” she said somewhat apologetically, “but the school doesn’t have the budget to hire me an assistant. Oh, they have the budget to hire an assistant for the assistant football coach. But they don’t have the budget to hire even a part-time assistant for me! Libraries aren’t considered important for a school! I’ll never understand that!” she said. Then she took a breath and looked me in the eye. “What did you say your name was?” she asked suddenly.

“Patricia Hoyle,” I answered.

“And who did you say you were doing this report for?” she asked.

“I don’t think I did say,” I replied, stalling for time. “I’m doing it for Mr. Greenwald,” I said. I couldn’t help but smile. Using Mr. Greenwald was perfect! If she checked, he’d probably tell her I was doing the report for him.

After all, in a way, I was.

“Very well,” the Librarian said in a resigned voice. “The newspapers you’re looking for should be back there.” She pointed to a dark and dirty corner of the room. “Do be careful with them,” she said as she turned to leave. “Old newspapers can be very brittle. Oh, and do put everything back the way you found it,” she said as an afterthought. Then she closed the door and I was left all alone.

The first thing I did was sneeze!

Then I smiled and said a quiet “All right!” Actually I felt like jumping for joy! You see, I had realized something quite important in just the last few hours. The only way I was going to solve this mystery was to find the missing pieces of the puzzle. And the best way to do that would be to read about just everything that was going on in town around the time the ghost first made its appearance. I had to start making connections between things—and I had no way of knowing what those things might be until I looked through the papers and found them. You see, what I was looking for could be almost anything—and I would have no way of knowing if it was important or not until after I’d read it.

For example, what was the connection between the robbery of Thompson’s Coin & Jewelry and the twenty dollar gold piece that Mr. Bell found when he had the run-in with the ghost at the construction site? Why did Mayor Thompson get so upset when I asked him why he’d hired a known alcoholic to guard the construction site? And why was Ben Thompson spying on me and threatening me and my friends if we didn’t stop looking for the ghost? And why—well, I couldn’t think of all the other whys at the moment, but I knew there were a lot more of them.
 

And I knew that if I read through all these old newspapers I’d find at least some of the answers—and maybe a lot more questions as well. But that would be O.K., because every piece of information would put me one step closer to solving this baffling mystery.

There were three stacks of old, yellowing newspapers in the corner where the Librarian had pointed. Two of the stacks were covered with dust as if they hadn’t been touched in ten years. But the third stack, the one pushed furthest back into the corner, was practically clean! That meant someone else had been looking through these papers, and not too long ago!
 

Why hadn’t the librarian mentioned that to me? Knowing who else was interested in this ghost business could be valuable information! Of course, in all fairness I had to admit that I hadn’t asked her if anyone else had looked at the newspapers recently, and why should she just volunteer that information?
 

I was so curious I couldn’t wait to find out. I opened the door and stepped back into the library, behind the desk with the librarian (her name was Mrs. Winslow; I saw a small plaque with her name on it under the counter). Mrs. Winslow was busy with another student. I didn’t mind waiting a minute or two; the clean, fresh air of the library tasted good after the musty air of the storage room.

I took a deep breath and was just letting it out when I saw him!
 

Ben Thompson!

He was seated at a table near the librarian’s desk. He didn’t have any books or anything else in front of him. He was staring right at me with a mean-looking scowl on his face. He didn’t say anything or do anything. He just sat there. Glaring at me.

It gave me the shivers, but I did my best not to let him see that he was bothering me.

Why was he here? Obviously it wasn’t to use the library. I doubted he’d ever been in a library before in his life. No. He must have followed me in here. This was starting to get serious!
 

The more I thought about it, the more scary it became. This guy was really following me around. This guy meant business! This wasn’t a joke or a game any more. This wasn’t just me being curious about a ghost any longer.

No. There was something a lot deeper, a lot more serious going on here!

How far was Ben Thompson prepared to go to keep me from digging any deeper into this ghost thing? Was he really prepared to hurt me—or my friends? I suddenly remembered he had threatened to hurt Jason if I didn’t stop poking my nose into things. Would he make good his threat?

Maybe I should just drop the whole thing. Was it really worth someone getting hurt?

Ben’s presence here meant the answer to that last question was probably “yes”. And if this ghost thing was that important, then there was no way I could drop it now!
 

No matter what, I was totally committed to unraveling the mystery of the Gruesome High ghost!

As Mrs. Winslow finished with the student she was helping, I turned my back on Ben Thompson and asked, “Has someone else been looking at the old newspapers recently?”

Mrs. Winslow looked slightly startled at the question, then said, “No one but me has been in that storage room for ages! No, I’m sure you’re the first person to look at those papers since we put them back there. And that was . . . . Well, almost ten years ago. Why do you ask?”

“Oh, no reason,” I said slowly. (I could feel Ben Thompson’s eyes burning a hole in the back of my head!). “It’s just that one of the old stacks of papers was clean. I thought maybe someone had looked at it recently.”

Mrs. Winslow frowned. “No. No one’s been back there but me, and I haven’t cleaned anything. How very odd.”

I suddenly put on a fake smile and tried to act bubbly. “Oh well!” I said, then I spun around quickly so I wouldn’t have to see Ben Thompson’s angry eyes again, and stepped back into the storage room, closing the door behind me.

Now it was time to get down to business! Ben Thompson’s presence only served to redouble my determination to get to the bottom of this mystery!

I decided the best place to start was with the clean stack of newspapers. I figured those must have the most information in them or someone wouldn’t have been going through them recently. But when I reached for them I noticed I wasn’t entirely alone in the room after all. There were also a few spiders and silverfish scuttling about. I hate spiders. And don’t think that hating spiders is a girl thing. I know lots of boys who don’t like spiders. Jason, for example.

Just thinking of Jason started getting me mad. I don’t know what’s wrong with him lately! It seems like everything I say, everything I do just makes him mad. And I was getting tired of it. I mean, I still like the guy, but maybe we’ve just been around each other too much for too long. Maybe it was time I started hanging out with some other guys. Maybe it was time I even dated someone else.

Hmmmm. But who? Who would I like to date?

I stopped myself, shook my head, and actually laughed out loud. This was hardly the time to be thinking about boys!

I turned back to the stacks of dusty, moldy-smelling newspapers. I closed my mouth tight and reached back to the furthest of the three stacks and picked up the top newspaper. It was almost entirely clean, free from dust. Just to make sure I wasn’t seeing things, I ran my finger along the top of one of the other two stacks. I couldn’t even drag my finger completely across the top page before the accumulated dirt made it too difficult to drag without ripping the paper.