The Haunting (15 page)

“Maybe it’s the ghost of one of those people
who stayed in the house at night and died of fright.”

“No,” I said. “Charlotte felt the evil. Remember? It happened the night her grandfather died.”

“Wait a minute,” Jolie told me. “I’m getting an idea.”

Just then Mom called me. “Hurry up, Jolie,” I said. “I’ve got to go.”

“Okay,” Jolie said. “Get Charlotte’s diary and go over it carefully. Write down every single thing she said about her grandfather and every single thing he said. Take a good look at it. There might be a clue.”

I got an idea of my own and added, “Or in what he didn’t say?”

“Both. Want me to come over and help you?”

“Sure,” I told her, beginning to feel hopeful for the first time. “After dinner. Okay?”

I ran down the stairs and into the kitchen. As I dropped into my chair at the table I said, “Mom, Jolie’s coming over tonight.”

“That’s nice,” Mom said.

Dad placed a bowl of rice and a bowl of shrimp stir-fry on the table.

“So would you give me Charlotte’s diary? We want to read it again, together.”

“Not on your life,” Mom answered. “I locked up that diary and put it away forever. You read it twice, and that was two times too many. If you read it again, both you and Jolie will have nightmares for a month. Forget the diary. Forget the so-called ghosts. Ghosts don’t exist.”

I knew, from the expression on Mom’s face, that
it wouldn’t do any good to argue. I ate dinner, not even thinking about what I was tasting, and tried to figure out what to do next.

When Jolie came, she immediately made for the
Favorite Tales of Edgar Allan Poe
, which lay on my bed. “Wow!” she said as she carefully picked up the small book and ran a finger over the corner that had been burned. “This was Charlotte’s.”

“I’ve been looking through the stories,” I explained, “trying to find a message.”

Jolie held the book up and gently shook it. She carefully pried up the loose endpapers and looked under them. “Nothing here,” she said. She put down the book and glanced around. “Where’s Charlotte’s diary?”

“Out of bounds. Mom’s got some weird idea that we’ll have nightmares.”

“But we have to see the diary again,” Jolie said. “It’s not like you can just get a copy at the library.”

I had picked up the book of Poe’s stories, but now I nearly dropped it. “There
is
a copy of what Charlotte wrote,” I said. “It’s on display in the Bogue City Historical Society’s museum.”

For a moment Jolie brightened, but then she made a face. “That’s a big help. How are you going to get to Bogue City to read it without your mom finding out?”

“I could visit Grandma in Baton Rouge,” I said. With a grin I pulled Jonathan’s father’s card out of the pocket of my shirt and waved it at Jolie.
“Then I’ll call Jonathan. He said he’d do anything he could to help me, and he’s old enough to drive.”

Jolie didn’t grin in return. She frowned. “Just don’t forget your gris-gris,” she warned. “When you get around that house, anything might happen. Look what you saw already.”

“Don’t try to scare me,” I said. “You’re supposed to be helping me get rid of a ghost.”

“Okay,” Jolie said. “Fill me in. What have you found out by reading the Poe stories?”

“That there are ten short stories in this book, but because of Poe’s writing style, with long paragraphs and lots of description, they’re hard to skim. I’m going to be up late trying to finish reading them.”

“Remember reading ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ last year in American lit?” Jolie asked. “It gave me shivers.”

I nodded. “Mrs. Weems said that most of Poe’s stories have some kind of surprise ending. They’d give anybody shivers.”

“You’ll have to read every one of the stories in Charlotte’s book,” Jolie said.

“I’ve already decided that,” I told her. “I thought if I could compare the plots I might see which story Placide Blevins had in mind as a message.”

“I’ll help you,” Jolie said. “Read off the names of the stories, and I’ll write them down. Tell me the plot of each story, but keep it short, like one sentence.”

I opened the book. “Let’s see. Where should I start?”

“I wish Charlotte hadn’t lost that bookmark,” Jolie said.

“I do, too, but it’s too late for wishing.” I turned to the title page. “ ‘The Gold Bug,’ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ‘The Oval Portrait,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Purloined Letter,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ and ‘The Pit and the Pendulum.’ ”

Jolie looked at the list. “Maybe the first letters of each word spell out a message.”

“Forget it. That’s a dumb old code we used in third grade. Are you ready to write?” I asked. “We can list the stories we’ve already read.”

“ ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ ” Jolie began. “Selfish prince hides in his castle with his friends to escape the plague that is killing everyone in his country, only at a ball the Red Death comes and kills the prince and his friends, too.”

I made a face. “How long are these sentences supposed to be?”

Jolie waited until she had finished writing. “Very funny. You try it with the next one.”

“ ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ ” I said. “Here goes. Neighbors hear screams and break into a locked room to find a woman missing and her murdered daughter stuffed up a chimney. A detective named C. Auguste Dupin—”

“That’s more than one sentence,” Jolie said.

“There was more than one murder. They found the woman’s body in the courtyard.”

“That doesn’t matter. We agreed, one sentence.”

“All right. After ‘stuffed up a chimney,’ write,
‘so a detective is called in who solves the crime by finding a broken nail that proves the murderer left the room through a window and he wasn’t a raving maniac because he—’ ”

“Stop,” Jolie said. “This is getting too long.”

“I don’t see how it fits anything at Graymoss anyway,” I told her.

“Don’t try to figure it out now. Let’s just write the sentences. Later on we can study them and see if anything fits. Next story.”

“ ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ ” I said. “I hated that story.” I took a deep breath and thought hard. “A man gets revenge on an acquaintance who insuited him by luring him to his wine cellar and walling him up inside it.”

Jolie finished writing and said, “Don’t forget ‘The Gold Bug.’ A man is invited to help a friend find the location of Captain Kidd’s buried treasure by dropping a gold bug through the eye of a skull nailed to a tree.”

“Okay. Write it,” I said. When she had finished I asked, “Any others?”

“No,” she said. “How about you?”

I shook my head. “I have to read the rest of them.”

“Then start reading,” Jolie said.

I picked one of the shortest stories to read: “The Oval Portrait.” It was only three pages so it didn’t take long. I rested the book on my lap and said, “A wounded man and his valet break into an empty chateau to spend the night, and there’s an oval portrait of a beautiful woman hanging on the wall, and the man reads what the woman’s husband
wrote, that he was an artist who ignored her for his art, and his neglect killed her.”

“That’s it?” Jolie asked.

When I nodded, she made a face of disgust, but wrote it anyway.

I felt a little guilty at my disloyalty to Charlotte, who had written in her diary that she enjoyed the stories, because Jolie and I didn’t.

I was halfway through “The Tell-Tale Heart” when Jolie’s mom called her to come home.

I took the notepad from her and said, “I’ll finish the stories tonight.”

“Let me know what you find out,” Jolie said. She hesitated at the door. “About your visit to your grandma’s—I hope you can go, but …” She suddenly hugged me. “Be awfully careful, Lia!”

After Jolie left I went looking for Mom and found her in the den. “Did you talk to Grandma?” I asked.

“Yes,” Mom answered.

“Is she all right? I mean, you know. When her mother died that’s the only time I’ve ever seen Grandma cry.”

“She’s all right. She just needs a little moral support,” Mom said. She gave me a careful look. “Lia, I know you’re enjoying your summer vacation with Jolie, but would you consider visiting your grandmother for a few days? We could drive you there tomorrow, and pick you up on Friday, when we meet the structural engineers at Graymoss.”

I realized my mouth was open. I couldn’t have
planned this any better. From Sunday to Friday I’d have almost five whole days to try to find the secret keeping the evil at Graymoss.

“I know sometimes you feel Grandma is a little hard to get along with,” Mom said, “so if you don’t want to visit her, I’ll understand.”

Mom was watching, waiting for my answer, so I quickly pulled my thoughts together and assured her, “I’d like to visit Grandma. I really would.”

Mom smiled and reached for the telephone. “Thanks, honey,” she said. “Grandma may not say so, but she’ll be glad you’re there, too. I’ll give her a call.”

I shot back up the stairs. Pack and read … don’t forget the gris-gris … Read and pack. I had things to do.

I filled my canvas bag with shorts and T-shirts and tucked in a waist pack with a small flashlight inside. I even added one dress—just in case Grandma decided she wanted to go to a restaurant. I wasn’t going to let myself in for another “young people nowdays don’t have the slightest idea of how to dress properly” lectures.

Down in the bottom of the bag, I hid the bag of gris-gris. I felt a strange, prickly feeling as I remembered Ava Phipps wondering how long the gris-gris’s power would work. Long enough, I hoped.

When I’d finished packing I returned to Poe’s stories. I made good time through the rest of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and wrote,

How is any of this horror stuff going to help me understand the evil in Graymoss?
I wondered. But I realized that the evil was a horror in itself, so maybe there was a connection I hadn’t discovered yet.

Mom tapped at my door and called, “Good night, Lia. Don’t stay up reading too late.” That was what she always said.

“I won’t,” I called back. That was what I always answered.

In a few moments the house was silent, and I kept reading and writing one-sentence plots. A little after midnight I finished—thank goodness. I read over what I’d just written.

The sentence was too long, but I shrugged. A lot went on in that horror story.

I stopped writing and studied that extra-long sentence. Jolie would have had something to say about that, but I couldn’t help it. I sat thinking about the story, which made me uncomfortable. There were so many scary descriptions of sounds and winds and footsteps and unearthly things, it reminded me of Graymoss at night.

I carefully went over the story descriptions, one by one, seeing if any of the others applied in even the smallest way to Graymoss.

I crossed out “The Gold Bug,” since there was no pirate treasure in Graymoss. “The Oval Portrait” didn’t fit because I hadn’t seen a portrait of anybody at all at Graymoss and Charlotte hadn’t mentioned one. “The Black Cat” didn’t help, because there had been no mention of the Blevinses owning a cat, so I crossed it out, too, along with “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Purloined Letter.” I didn’t see how “The Tell-Tale Heart”
would fit, or “The Masque of the Red Death.” They took place inside houses, but that was the only link.

That left “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

I waited for inspiration to strike, but it didn’t. My eyes hurt, my fingers ached, and I couldn’t stop yawning.

Disappointed that I hadn’t found some important key that would solve the problem, I put down the book, turned out the light, and slid down in bed, ready to sleep.

Only I didn’t sleep. Charlotte’s grandfather had tried to give her a message through Poe’s stories. She didn’t know what the message was, and neither did I. My mind was a jumble of hideous corpses who’d been throttled, and screaming cats that had been knifed, and locked doors that were thrown open, and bricked-up walls, and detached hearts that kept beating. How could any of this lead to the truth about Graymoss? Which story held the clue?