The Ghosts of Stone Hollow (12 page)

She pushed the basket into Amy’s hands and shoved her toward the house, and in a few minutes the Paulsens’ Model A had turned around and chugged off down the road.

So everyone was home, again, and no one even knew that Amy had been away except, of course, her father. Because she had not been there to help him back into his wheelchair, he had had to spend the whole afternoon in bed. Amy knew he must have been awake and ready to get up a long time before she got home, but he hadn’t said so. Someday when no one else was around, he might ask her where she had been that afternoon, but he would never mention it to anyone else. Amy knew that. So with that worry out of the way, she was free to concentrate on Jason and Stone Hollow.

At first she tried to figure it out logically and reasonably. She went over in her mind all the things she had seen and heard
for sure,
without allowing any imagining or exaggeration. But the more she tried to think about it that way, the more difficulty she had keeping it straight. It seemed almost impossible to keep the things that had happened for sure separate from the things that might have happened or that seemed about to happen.

Finally she didn’t even try. It was really much more interesting just to let it all drift through her mind, picking up all kinds of fascinating possibilities as it went along, until the whole thing grew into an unbelievably exciting and fantastical adventure. An adventure that Amy had shared with a person named Jason, who was surely something a lot more mysterious and extraordinary than just plain crazy.

During the next few days at school, Amy found herself spending even more time watching Jason and wondering about him. Compared to the way he was when they were in Stone Hollow, he seemed quite ordinary and commonplace in the classroom. Not that he wasn’t strange—there were still differences in the way he talked and dressed and acted. But these were unimportant differences that could be called “crazy” and forgotten about. The differences that didn’t show in the classroom were the ones that Amy had to find out more about.

For several days Amy stopped on the way home from school near the start of Bradley Lane and waited as long as she dared, but Jason never came. Finally she decided to tell him to meet her there. By watching carefully for a time when no one else was around, she finally managed a brief meeting in the hall.

“Jason,” she said, “I’ve got to talk to you. Meet me behind the eucalyptus trees at the turnoff after school today. Okay?”

“All right,” he said, smiling his quick, eager smile. “What do you want to do? I’ve been going—”

But Amy was already walking away. “I don’t want to do anything,” she said. “I won’t have time. I just have to talk to you.”

Although she ran most of the way, Jason was already there when she reached the clump of old trees that afternoon.

“How’d you get here so soon?” she demanded.

“I flew,” Jason said, “on the back of the North Wind.”

Amy put her hands on her hips and glared at him. “If you’re going to start talking like that, I might as well go on home. I came here to find out some things —some true things, not just a bunch of let’s pretend.”

Jason stared back. He wasn’t grinning, but something about his eyes made Amy wonder if he wasn’t thinking about it. “What kind of things did you want to find out about?” he asked.

“What I want to know is—the
truth!”
Amy said.

Jason’s eyes widened. “The truth?” he said. “I don’t know. I don’t know if I can tell you that.”

“Why not? Why can’t you tell me the truth?”

“Because I don’t know it. Maybe nobody does.”

“That’s silly. Everybody knows what’s true and what isn’t, unless—” She stopped, deciding against saying, “—unless they’re crazy.”

“Something that one person would say is true, someone else would say wasn’t,” Jason said.

“Then one of them is lying.”

“No,” Jason said. “It’s just that the truth is something you have to find out for yourself. Nobody can tell you what it is.”

“But what if you can’t find out for sure by yourself? What if you can’t decide?”

“What’s wrong with not deciding for sure?” Jason said.

“Ooh!” Amy said exasperatedly. “Jason Fitzmaurice, you’re driving me crazy. I didn’t come here to talk about—whatever it is we’re talking about. I came here to talk about Stone Hollow and what was happening and what made you act so strange and—”

Suddenly Amy hushed and, putting her finger to her lips, she ducked back behind the largest clump of trees. Jason followed her and, when they were safely hidden, they peered out toward the sound of voices that were approaching along the Old Road. It was Alice Harris and Marybeth Paulsen. Alice and Marybeth had told Amy that morning that they were going to come over to play real soon, but she hadn’t known they meant that very day.

Amy sighed. Why did they have to pick a day when there was something much more important to attend to. Amy didn’t want to hurry home. For one thing, the last few times Alice and Marybeth had come over, they hadn’t wanted to do anything except sit around and talk about boys. Even on a day when there was nothing better to do, Amy wasn’t crazy about sitting around and talking about who Bert Miller liked and who he didn’t like. But she would have to hurry home now, whether she wanted to or not, because if Alice and Marybeth got there before she did, her mother would be sure to start worrying.

“Look,” she said, grabbing Jason by the arm. “I’ve got to go. But I’ve got to talk to you. You’ve got to meet me somewhere where we can talk.”

“All right,” Jason said. “Where?”

“I don’t know. I can’t meet you tomorrow. I promised Miss McMillan to stay after to help her clean cupboards. I’ll let you know when I think of a place.”

But a time and place were not easy to find. Finally, in desperation, Amy considered trying to talk to Jason at school. It might be all right, even if people saw them talking together. She had seen other people talking to Jason lately, now that everyone was a little more used to him. Jed Lewis and some of his friends had begun to let Jason eat lunch in their special place behind the backstop, and even Gordie was letting up, spreading his attention around to some of his old victims. A conversation with Jason, then, might not be quite so dangerous as it once would have been.

So she gave it a try—and immediately discovered that school was still not the place to bring up a topic like Stone Hollow with Jason Fitzmaurice. It was not the place because, once you got him started, it was too hard to get him stopped.

He was alone when Amy approached, sitting on the top step of the playground stairs; but she had no more than mentioned the words Stone Hollow when a bunch of fifth-grade girls came around the corner and started up the stairs. As the girls got nearer, Jason just went right on talking about how he’d been back to the Hollow twice since Amy had been, and how he thought they both should go again on the next Sunday. Amy tried to drown him out by loudly asking to borrow his history book; and when it became obvious that he wasn’t going to take the hint, she simply walked away and left him—still talking.

After that one nerve-racking try, Amy decided she’d have to depend on a meeting at the eucalyptus grove. The grove was dangerous because it was very close to the Old Road and really wasn’t large or thick enough to be a very good hiding place. But it would have to do. Not daring to take anymore chances with conversation, Amy wrote a note and, slipping into the cloakroom, she put it in Jason’s lunch box.

The note worked. When Amy approached the eucalyptus grove that afternoon on her way home from school, she checked up and down the road in both directions, and then veered quickly off the road and in among the trees. He was there all right, sitting on the ground, shaking rocks and dirt out of his shoe. He was grinning, and he didn’t stop grinning even after he saw Amy’s frown.

“You dope,” she said.

J
ASON DIDN’T STOP
grinning even after Amy called him a dope. Instead he finished fooling around with his shoes, and then stood up and scratched his head. “Dope?” he said. “What does that mean?”

“It means dumb,” Amy said. “Stupid. It means it was sure dumb to go on talking about us going to Stone Hollow in front of all those girls.”

“Girls?” Jason said. “I guess I didn’t notice them. What did you want to see me about?”

Amy sighed. “Don’t you
know?”
she said. “I’ve been trying to get a chance to talk to you ever since we went to the Hollow. I already told you what I wanted to know. Like, what were you staring at, up there by the Stone, when you wouldn’t talk to me?”

“Oh,” he said. “That. Well—” His eyes got their strange, inward, shut-away look. “The Stone,” he said after a while. He looked questioningly at Amy. “You saw it, too, didn’t you? I mean, you felt the power?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure,” she said. “I felt something. I felt scared, for one thing.”

‘Oh,” Jason said suddenly, as if he’d just remembered something. “Do you know if the Ranzonis were dark? I mean, did they have dark hair and eyes?”

“I don’t know,” Amy said impatiently, and then, with sudden suspicion, “Why?”

“Oh, I just wondered.” Jason stared thoughtfully at the ground; while all kinds of incredible ideas began to form in Amy’s mind. Then he said, “Did you ever hear the name of the little girl? The one who died?”

Wordlessly, Amy shook her head.

“Do you know if it could have been Lucia?”

“I don’t know. I guess it could have been. Why? What are you talking about? What do you know about them, besides what I told you?”

“About lockjaw,” Jason said. “It’s the same as tetanus, isn’t it? Do you know what causes it?”

“Sure,” Amy said. “You get it by getting germs in a place where you’ve hurt yourself. Especially if it’s deep like when you step on a nail. I know lots more about it, too. Like what happens to you after you get it, and everything. My mother knows all about things like that. When I stepped on a nail once, she made me soak my foot for two whole days in Epsom salts, so I wouldn’t get it. She told me all about it.”

Jason nodded. “A cut on the foot,” he said. “That’s what happened to Lucia.”

Amy put her hands on her hips. “Jason Fitzmaurice! What are you talking about? What have you found out about the Italians?”

Jason looked at Amy for a moment with a thoughtful deciding expression. Then he sat down on the ground. Amy craned her neck around the clump of trees to be sure no one was coming up the road before she sat down in front of him.

“Tell me!” she said firmly.

“She was just a baby,” Jason said, “when the family first came to the Hollow. They were very poor, and they hadn’t been here, in this country, for very long. They probably got the land in the Hollow cheap because no one else wanted it, because it was so hard to reach, and maybe for other reasons. At first they were very happy there. The father built the house and the other buildings, and dammed the creek. But then they began to be afraid.”

“Afraid?” Amy asked. “Who was? What were they afraid of?”

Jason shook his head. “I’m not sure. It was the man, just the man, at first. He was looking for something. He went to the grotto all the time, and the woman didn’t want him to. Then he began to dig deep holes in the ground as if he was digging for treasure.”

“Why?” Amy said. “What was he looking for?”

“I’m not sure. I think he thought the Indians had buried something very valuable. But the woman was afraid all the time. She wanted to leave the Hollow, but the man wouldn’t go. Then the woman went to the village. She put a shawl over her head, and she went to the village by herself, to see a priest. She left the little girl at home with her father. And while she was gone, the little girl cut her foot.”

“And they didn’t take her to the doctor,” Amy said. “My mother told me. She said no one in Taylor Springs even knew the child was sick until after she was dead.”

“Yes,” Jason said. “The mother wanted to take her to the doctor, but the father wouldn’t. When she was dead, the father buried her under the tree, and then he told his wife that he had not taken the little girl to the doctor because he knew it wouldn’t do any good. He said he knew that she was going to die because he had seen her grave. Before she was even sick, he had seen the grave, and he had known that Lucia was going to die. And then the woman went out and walked in the Hills crying and wouldn’t come back. And the man went on digging until he died, too.”

While Jason talked, Amy had begun to see exactly how it must have been. The woman crying—sitting at the table in the narrow lean-to kitchen. She could see how the woman’s head with its smooth dark hair rested on her arms on the table. Then the man came in and stood by the table. He had a shovel in his hands, and his face was stern and sad. He talked to the woman, and then she got up from the table and ran out of the room and into the Hills.

Amy realized that she had been staring blindly at Jason. Her eyes felt dry from not blinking. She nodded. “That’s awful,” she said. “That’s the awfullest—” But then another idea occurred to her. “The father,” she said. “What happened to him? What made him die?”

“I’m not positive,” Jason said. “But I think it was the Indians. I think the Indians killed him.”

“The Indians? You mean real Indians or—”

Jason thought for a while, shaking his head. “I didn’t see how it could have been the Indians at first,” he said. “Because when I’ve been there and there’ve been Indians, it’s as if they are there—but separate. It’s as if there’s something between. Not a solid thing, but a movement like a current, one you wouldn’t be able to cross over. It seemed as if you could be close but not touching. Not ever touching.”

There was a long pause in which Amy didn’t say anything. There didn’t seem to be anything that she could say. Finally Jason went on.

“But it was the Indians, though, who killed him. I—I saw them.”

“Saw them!” Amy stared at Jason aghast. But then a thought occurred to her. “Jason,” she said, in what she hoped was a calm and reasonable voice, “how do you mean
saw?
Do you mean that you kind of pictured it in your imagination? Because, if that’s what you mean—well, I do that too. All the time. I remember how, when we were in the Hollow the first time, I kind of pictured how they would look. The Italian family. I pictured the mother and the little girl in the kitchen and at the spring. It was as if I could see them just as plain as anything. Is that what you mean? Is that what you mean about
seeing
?”