The Haunting (14 page)

Her nose wrinkled. “Like when you get called on in school and you lose your place? Or when you wait too long to run for the bathroom and you don’t make it?”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. But she didn’t seem to mind. “My name’s Lia. What’s yours?” I asked her.

“Demetria,” she said. “I’m nine years old, and I’m here with my brother and sister. How come you’re here? Did you get kicked out of your foster home?”

I shook my head, and Demetria said, “We did. But it wasn’t my fault. It was Robbie’s fault. He couldn’t take our foster mother yellin’ at Delia anymore, so he threw her best china platter on the floor and it broke. Our foster mother yelled some more and said that was the last straw and she didn’t want such bad kids in her house one more day. So Mrs. Lane came and got us and brought us here.” Demetria shook her head sadly. “We aren’t really bad kids,” she said. “Robbie just didn’t like all that yellin’. And Delia makes lots of mistakes, but not on purpose.”

“How old is Robbie?” I asked.

Demetria brightened. “He’s seven,” she said, “and Delia is four. Mrs. Lane said she was gonna try to keep us together. Do you have any brothers or sisters to keep together with?”

“No,” I said, “but I have a mother and father.”

For just an instant I could see a terrible longing in Demetria’s eyes. But she gave a shake of her head and stood up as tall as she could. “We had a mother and father once,” she said. “That counts for somethin’.”

“That counts for a lot,” I answered,

“Do you want to just sit here doin’ nothin’?” Demetria asked. “Or do you want to come and see my house?”

“What house?”

“C’mon. I’ll show you.”

Demetria held out a hand, so I got up and walked with her down a hallway to what looked like a kindergarten room. “This is where I built my playhouse,” she said, and she led me to one corner of the room behind an upright piano where some blocks were piled to make a low wall.

A small girl sat inside the enclosure, sucking her thumb. Her dress was stained and smelled of urine.

Demetria sighed and shook her head. “Delia, how come you didn’t go to the bathroom?” she asked.

Delia tugged her thumb out of her mouth with a pop. “Don’t know where it is,” she said, then thrust her thumb back like a cork in a bottle.

“You gotta show Delia things over and over again,” Demetria said in a low voice, as if she were one adult talking to another. “Our foster mother before last said Delia drove her right up the wall.”

Holding out her hands to Delia, Demetria said, “C’mon, Delia. I’ll take you to get cleaned up.”

As Demetria gathered her sister into her arms she gave me a desperate look. “Don’t you go away, Lia,” she said. “I haven’t showed you around yet.”

I found a roll of paper towels on a nearby cupboard and wiped up the puddle Delia had left. Then I went in search of the bathroom Delia couldn’t find, so that I could wash my hands.

Farther down the hallway was a door with a cow painted on it. I pushed it open, and a boy about ten years old called out, “Hey!” He limped out of the bathroom and stopped to face me.

“Whatcha doin’ in the boys’ bathroom?” he demanded.

“I didn’t know it was the boys’ bathroom,” I said. “I thought it was for girls. It has a cow on it.”

He snickered. “The cow’s on that door across the hall,” he said. This one’s a bull. You sure are dumb.”

I blushed again. “I wasn’t paying attention. It looked like a cow to me.”

I stepped back into the hallway so he could get past me. He seemed to be having a lot of trouble when he walked.

“Are you gonna work here?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “I just came to visit.”

His eyes lit up. “You gonna take a kid to adopt? Maybe you want me. I’m smart. I get good grades in school, and I know a lot of jokes.”

“I’m too young to adopt a child,” I told him. “I’m only fifteen.”

“Uh-oh,” he said. “They can’t keep you in a foster home either, huh? What did you do to get in trouble?”

This kid had a big mouth and he was a little bit of a smart aleck, but I couldn’t help liking him. “What’s your name?” I asked.

“Jimmy,” he said. “What’s yours?”

“Lia. And I didn’t get in trouble. I’m here with my parents on a visit.”

“You got parents?” he asked, and there was such
longing on his face that I wanted to hug him. “I never had any—just an aunt and her boyfriend. After he kicked me down the stairs and the police took me to a hospital, I got sent to foster homes.”

“Why couldn’t you stay in the foster homes?” I asked.

“Sometimes I have bad nightmares, and I cry out, and it wakes people up so they don’t get their good night’s sleep.” He looked down at the tips of his shoes. “And in the daytime I need more help than other kids do.”

Then he looked up at me with a lopsided grin. “I forgot. You need help, too. You need help findin’ the right bathroom.” He pointed at the other door, the one with the cow painted on it. “There it is.”

He turned and limped down the hallway. It hurt to watch the terrible effort he was making. Tears blurred my eyes, so I shoved my way through the door and scrubbed my hands as hard as I could in the low washbasin.

The door opened, and Mom came in. “We were looking for you,” she said. She saw the tears on my cheeks and asked, “What’s wrong, honey?”

I grabbed a fistful of paper towels, trying to dry my face and hands at the same time. “Kids shouldn’t be hurt or have to live the way Jimmy lived, or Demetria, or Delia.”

I threw myself into a storm of words and tears about adults who kicked children down the stairs or yelled at little ones who made mistakes.

Mom waited until I had finished. Then she put her arms around me, smoothing back my hair and
murmuring soft, loving Mom things the way she did when I was younger. It felt good, and I thought for a minute that while I was growing older maybe she would have done more of this … if I’d let her.

Finally I stepped away. “I’m okay now. Thanks, Mom,” I said, and splashed cold water on my face.

She held out a hand. “Let’s find your father and Barbara. They were wondering where you’d disappeared to.”

As we walked out into the hall I asked, “Mom, doesn’t it hurt you to see kids like these?”

“It hurts more,” Mom said, “to walk away and leave them.”

I stopped and faced her. “You’d want to take somebody like the boy I met named Jimmy? He told me he has terrible nightmares and cries out at night.”

“I know Jimmy. He needs a series of operations on his right leg.” Mom nodded. “With someone to reassure him that he’s loved, Jimmy might stop having nightmares.”

“What about Delia? She doesn’t seem very smart and isn’t housebroken.”

“Potty trained,” Mom corrected, and smiled. “Delia really needs someone to care for her, doesn’t she?”

Arguments zipped and zinged around in my mind like stray arrows. “If you adopt a houseful of kids, it’s going to mean an awful lot of hard work,” I said.

“That’s right,” Mom said. “For all of us.”

Surprised, I countered, “And you’ll lose sleep.”

“We expect to.”

“And there’ll be a lot of noise and probably some arguments—even fistfights.”

“Of course.”

“Mom,” I complained, “you aren’t making this easy.”

“Nothing about our plan is going to be easy,” she said. “But the results are going to be worth’ while, and that’s what counts.”

I still didn’t like Mom and Dad’s idea about filling Graymoss with kids no one else would adopt. At the same time I didn’t like
not
liking it, or leaving Jimmy and Demetria and Delia without parents to take care of them. But I wanted my parents to myself and my quiet life to stay the same … didn’t I? “I think …,” I began, then groaned. “I don’t know what I think.”

Mom put an arm around my shoulders. “It takes time to sort things out,” she said. “Let’s say goodbye to some of the children and to Barbara.”

But before we left I had a question for Mrs. Lane. “What will happen to Delia and Robbie and Demetria? Will they be sent to another foster home?”

“There are none available at the moment, and because of Delia’s extra needs, there aren’t many foster parents who’d take her.”

“Then do they just keep living here?”

“We might try another foster home, but when children are rejected—well, it’s awfully hard on them. They’ll probably keep living here, or in other institutions, until they’re eighteen.”

Institutions?
I shuddered.

Demetria appeared, leading Delia by the hand. Delia was wearing clean shorts and a matching
blouse with nursery-rhyme figures on them. “Are you going now? Will you come back?” Delia asked me.

I hunkered down to her level. “Yes,” I said. “But I’ll come back to see you soon. I promise.”

As I stood up I saw Mom and Dad watching me. “That’s
all
I promise,” I told them.

We left the Barker Home for Children and drove back to Metairie in silence. I guessed we all had too much to think about. I kept picturing Jimmy, with his lopsided grin, and the loving way Demetria looked at her little sister, and I discovered that I really wanted them to come and live with Mom and Dad and me at Gray moss.

Just then Mom said, “I’m exhausted. I suppose it was all the conflict this morning.”

“Lie down for a while when we get home,” Dad said. “I’ll make dinner.”

“I’ll be all right,” Mom said. “A nap will help. We’ll be up awfully late tonight.”

I bolted upright in shock as I realized what Mom meant. “Mom!” I cried out. “You can’t go to Gray moss tonight.”

Mom twisted around to look at me. “All day long you’ve been after me to spend the night at Graymoss to prove to everyone that the house is not haunted. Now that I’ve agreed, you don’t want me to go. Why this sudden change of mind?”

I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t tell her that the evil would surround her and terrify her, making her realize she couldn’t create a home out of Graymoss. What would happen to Demetria and Delia and Robbie and Jimmy?

Ava Phipps had told me to find the cause of the
hauntings so that I could set the evil free. I’d try my best, but I had to have time.

I took a deep breath, looked right into Mom’s eyes, and said, “I was wrong. You don’t have to prove there are no ghosts to Mrs. Lord or Mr. Merle or anybody else in Bogue City. It’s
your
house, not theirs. I don’t think you should give in to them, Mom.”

“Lia has a good point,” Dad said.

Good old Dad. I was counting on him to back me up. He’d gladly drive Mom back to Graymoss if she wanted him to, but I was sure he was tired enough to want to skip another three- or four-hour round trip.

Mom turned around and settled back. “You’re right, Lia,” she said to me, although I could tell she was thinking things out loud to herself. “I don’t have to prove anything to anybody. Besides, I’m tired and hungry and my feet hurt.”

She laughed, and Dad laughed along with her.

But I didn’t laugh. I’d just given myself the job of getting rid of whoever was haunting Graymoss, and I didn’t know how I was going to do it.

W
hen we got home there were three messages from Grandma telling us that she’d returned to Baton Rouge earlier than she’d planned. She asked us to call her.

“After we’ve had something to eat,” Mom said. She went into the kitchen to help Dad make dinner, and I dashed upstairs to telephone Jolie. I laid
Favorite Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
next to me on the bed.

Jolie squeaked and gasped while I told her everything that had happened. I finally said, “That’s it. What should I do?”

“Call him,” Jolie said. “He told you to, and you said he was a hunk, so call him.”

Exasperated, I flopped back on the bed. “Jolie! I told you all about the people we met and what they said about the evil in Graymoss, and I told
you about the kids and how I changed my mind, even though I didn’t want to, and all you can tell me is ‘Call him’?”

There was silence for a minute. Then Jolie said, “What do you expect me to say? We’ve been best friends forever, Lia, and now you want to move away. We’ll never see each other.”

“It’s only a little over two hours’ drive,” I said. “We can get together often. You can come and spend the night.”

“No thanks!” she said quickly.

“It’ll be all right after the ghosts have left.” I propped myself up on one elbow and said, “Oh, Jolie, moving away from you will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, but if you could see those kids who’ll probably grow up without families …”

“Don’t tell me any more about them,” Jolie said. “Right now I don’t want to hear because I’m not through feeling hurt and unhappy and a little bit mad.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be. It’s not really your fault. Parents rule the world, and you would have moved to Graymoss whether you wanted to or not.”

“Only if we could get rid of the evil.”

The smell of onions and bell peppers frying wafted under my door and tickled my nose. My stomach rumbled, but I kept my mind on trying to solve the problem. “Mrs. Phipps didn’t think the evil came from the grandfather,” I said. “Nobody thinks so. He was a good guy, and this ghost is just plain nasty and evil.”