Footsteps on the Stairs: A Novel Read online

  We listened while the house crackled and moaned and the rain slapped against the window. Even without more footsteps, I could feel tickles of fear go up my back. “Why can’t we let the kid move in with us for the night?”

  “Oh, okay, Chip,” Anne said irritably. “But I don’t see why you’re acting like such a baby here when you never do at home.”

  “Hey, you shouldn’t be calling him a baby just because you’re not scared. He’s just different from you, that’s all.”

  She looked at me and caught her lower lip in her teeth. I expected her to tell me to mind my own business, but she finally said, “You’re right. I’m sorry, Chip.”

  We played another half hour. The rain evened out to a steady downpour with fewer sound effects. When I wiped Chip out and he had to mortgage Park Place, he was too sleepy to care. Anne yawned delicately and said, “Let’s go move Chip’s mattress now.”

  Our room looked like a dormitory with Chip in it. “Just like camp,” I said happily, and promptly went to sleep.

  I woke up fast when Anne shook me roughly. “I hear them,” she whispered.

  “You do?” I sat up, holding my breath to hear better. Footsteps pressed slowly up toward us. Then a sudden rush, heavier and faster.

  “It sounds like there’s two of them,” Anne said.

  “Two of what?” I clutched my pillow as a shield.

  “Two of whatever. Let’s go look.”

  “Are you crazy? Whatever’s out there, I’m keeping my distance from it.”

  “All right then. I’ll go alone.”

  She was half my size, almost a year younger, and twice as brave. That pinched me. I hopped out of bed, still clutching my pillow, and fell in behind her. We hadn’t taken a step past our door when the sounds stopped. Not the wind and rain sounds—the footsteps.

  “Gone,” I said with relief. “Animals or ghosts, we’ll never catch sight of them, I bet. Right, Anne?” She stood still with her back toward me, facing the stairs. I touched her shoulder. “Anne?”

  “I think I saw something,” she whispered.

  “You’re kidding!” I didn’t believe her. It crossed my mind that she was paying me back for that ridiculous ghost-in-the-bathroom-window act that I’d pulled the day she and Chip arrived. Or maybe she still thought I’d turned the sailboat over on purpose. Or maybe she was jealous of how affectionate her father and I were to each other. But then she turned around and I saw her eyes. “What did you see?” I asked her.

  “Just something—fog—I don’t know.”

  “Oh, fog! Is that all! Let’s go back to bed.”

  “But it looked like the edge of a skirt and like there was a leg in it.”

  “Anne!” I gasped. How could she do this to me? “There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

  “No,” she agreed. “Then what did I see?”

  “How should I know?” I shot a glance at the dark stairs and shuddered. “Optical illusion?” I suggested feebly.

  “I’m going downstairs to look around.”

  “You wouldn’t!” I protested. “Okay, you’re brave, but are you some kind of nut to go running around in the dark chasing after ghosts who might even be there?”

  “Dodie, don’t worry. I’ll be right back.”

  “But what’s the sense? You’re not going to find anything.” I hoped.

  “There has to be an explanation for all this.”

  “Right. We’ll go back to bed and think about it.”

  “You don’t have to come with me.”

  “I don’t? No, I don’t. Why should I? It’s your funeral—I take that back. I never said that word.”

  “Dodie, stop babbling.”

  “Funeral!” I said. “It’s a bad luck word, especially in this situation.”

  She started off while I was still muttering. Reluctantly, I tottered downstairs behind her, still clinging tightly to my pillow, which was the only comfort left to me. My vital organs were all quivering in outrage at what I was doing. I couldn’t believe how brave I’d become. Dodie the heroine—or heroine’s helper anyway. At the bottom of the stairs we faced the outside door, which was closed, of course. To our left was Larry and Mother’s bedroom door, also closed. I trailed Anne through the living room.

  “Whatever is making the footsteps and disappearing doesn’t have too many places to hide,” Anne said. “I wonder if there are any holes in the baseboards that we could have missed.”

  I put my hand on the lamp switch, but Anne said, “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s no light when we hear the footsteps, right?”

  “Listen, Madame Sherlock, I’m not wandering around here in the dark. I hate the dark.”

  “But if you turn on the light, we’ll never find anything.”

  “We’re not going to find anything anyway,” I reassured myself by insisting. Anne tried all the windows in the living room. Most of them were stuck shut. It was so dark outside, you couldn’t even see where the sky ended and the earth began—just translucent strings of rain coming down.

  “I’m hungry,” I complained.

  “So go eat something.”

  “You coming to the kitchen too?”

  She frowned disapprovingly but walked into the kitchen with me. I snapped on the light. The only decent room in the whole house is the kitchen. I think it’s the refrigerator that comforts me. Feeling better already, I made myself a salami, cream cheese, and pickle sandwich with mayonnaise and mustard. “Want some?” I offered Anne.

  She was chewing on a fingernail, looking puzzled.

  “No, thanks.” She sat down at the table across from me. “I’m sure I saw the corner of a dress and a leg.”

  “Maybe Mother came out of her bedroom for something.”

  “But it was like fog. You could almost see through it. And does your mother wear high-heeled slippers? I’m sure the shoe had a heel on it, and the skirt was like knee length.”

  “Must have been fog or an optical illusion,” I said, nervously stuffing more sandwich than I could chew comfortably into my mouth. When I had finally finished swallowing, I said, “Sometimes fog can take funny shapes like clouds can.” I was making it up. I didn’t have any experience of fog doing anything but looking thick and gray.

  “Tomorrow we ought to tell them.”

  “Who?”

  “Dad and your mother.”

  “That we’re seeing ghosts? They’ll just laugh at us.

  “I’ll describe what I saw. I didn’t say it was a ghost, did I?”

  “Don’t you want something to eat?” Fear had revved up my appetite.

  “No, thanks,” she said.

  “Well, I’m starved.” I mixed some instant chocolate into a glass of milk and took a handful of cookies. Fortunately Anne paid no attention to the way I was stuffing myself.

  “I guess we might as well go back up to bed,” she said.

  “Just wait till I finish. Don’t go without me,” I begged. No way did I want to be left alone downstairs.

  Back in our bedroom, I flopped down on my bed and replaced the pillow under my head where it belonged, glad to be safe again. It was Anne who saw that Chip was not on his mattress.

  “Chip!” Anne screamed, and slapped her hand over her mouth to cover the noise.

  She looked around wildly, then ran out of our bedroom and across the hall to Chip’s room. I know because I was right at her heels. No Chip in there. Against my better judgment, I got down on my hands and knees and checked under his bed. I know where I’d hide if I was scared. Nothing under there but an old shoe and a furry coat of dust.

  “Chip!” Anne yelled. This time she wasn’t worrying about the noise. “Could he have gone downstairs and outside while we were in the kitchen?”

  “What for? It’s raining out, and he’s afraid of the dark—like me.” We both looked at the closet at the same time. In our bedroom we had an iron bar across one end of the room under the eaves for hanging clothes, but Chip’s room had this closet. A
nne, of course, was the one to open it. All we saw inside was a lot of wire hangers.

  “Where can he be?” Anne moaned.

  Immediately I started having visions of ghosts kidnapping Chip and dragging him out into the marsh to drown him there. I was all ready to start moaning too when a faint whimper from nowhere made us both jump. I clutched at Anne, who started banging on the inside wall of the closet. It turned out to have a door that opened onto a storage space. Chip was crouched there with his hands over his ears and his eyes squeezed shut. He opened his eyes, looked at us, and said, “Why’d you go off and leave me? I told you I was scared to sleep alone.”

  “But what are you doing in here?” Anne asked.

  “Hiding.”

  “From what?”

  “I don’t know. You weren’t there, so I got up and hid.”

  “In here?” I asked, staring into the blackness of the crawl space in total disbelief.

  “We were downstairs,” Anne explained.

  “Oh.”

  “I didn’t know there was a door at the back of your closet,” Anne said. “What’s in here?”

  “Nothing. Just some boxes.”

  “I don’t see how you could hide in this dark place and not be scared when you’re scared to be alone in our bedroom,” I said.

  “I’ve been back here lots of times in the day.”

  “Anne,” I said, icing over at a sudden thought.

  “What?”

  “Under the bed.”

  “What’s under the bed, Dodie?”

  “A lady’s shoe with a heel.”

  She looked at me carefully. “It wouldn’t be the same one,” she said.

  “Maybe she’s looking for her shoe?”

  “That would be silly. A shoe wouldn’t be that important that a person would want to come back from the grave for it.” Anne got down on the floor and reached under the low wooden platform on which the mattress had been set. When she couldn’t reach the shoe from that side, she took one of the wire hangers and dragged it out from the other side. It was an old, cheap-looking woman’s shoe with a platform sole and high heel and an ankle strap.

  “How’d that get there?” Chip asked.

  “Somebody left it. Somebody who rented the cottage once, maybe,” Anne said. “Or somebody who lived here.” We exchanged glances.

  “Let’s tell Mother and Larry tomorrow.”

  “Today,” Anne said. “It’s got to be past midnight already.”

  We slept pretty late after our ghost hunt, but it was still raining when we got up the next morning.

  Chapter 6

  Larry wasn’t around, so Anne suggested I try my mother for adult input on our ghost. “Maybe you ought to tell her about it,” I said.

  “But you’re her daughter.”

  “She’ll take you more seriously than me.”

  “Why should she? She hardly knows me.”

  “And she knows me too well. She thinks I exaggerate everything.”

  “You do, sort of.”

  “Of course! It’s more interesting that way. It’s dull to be factual and logical and punctual and beautiful like Mother and you are.”

  “You’re right.”

  “I am?” I asked in amazement.

  “Of course,” she answered with a teasing light in her eyes.

  “Besides, Mother respects cool people and you’re cool, especially to her,” I said.

  Anne raised her eyebrow. “Dodie, I’d rather not deal with your mother any more than I have to.”

  “Why not?”

  She sighed deeply. “Just because.”

  “Just because what?”

  “Well, for one thing, she’s married to my father, and I really wish she wasn’t, because I’d rather my father was still married to my mother the way he should be. I mean, frankly, I don’t see what he sees in your mother. I think my mother’s nicer.”

  “But you’re not a man.”

  “Anyway, you talk to her, huh?”

  To improve my chances of impressing Mother, I dressed carefully. I wore Mother-approved jeans and a shirt—in other words, clothes she’d picked for me. Then I made sure my teeth were brushed and the breakfast dishes were washed and set to drain. There was no time to go on a diet.

  Mother was in the living room doing her exercises. She used to try to get me to do them with her, but I managed to keep collapsing and threatening her with hospital bills until she gave up on me. Poor Mother! I guess the only thing in her life that she can’t make turn out the way she wants it to is me.

  Anne and I interrupted her at sit-up number twelve. “Mother,” I began enthusiastically, “I’ve got something to tell you that you’re not going to believe!”

  “That’s the story—thirteen—of your life, Dodie—fourteen.”

  “I’m not making this dramatic on purpose, Mother. This is really happening.” It was hopeless. She always discounted what I told her by seventy-five percent. “Anne, maybe you better tell it.”

  “Tell the story yourself—nineteen—since you started it—twenty.” Mother could now talk and exercise at the same time without even panting. She was improving her stamina so she could keep up with Larry.

  “You haven’t, perchance, heard strange noises during the night, have you?” I probed delicately.

  “Perchance?—twenty-three—No, I haven’t, perchance—twenty-four—heard any noises.”

  “Well, we have. We keep hearing footsteps.”

  “You would.”

  “What do you mean, Mother? I told you, it isn’t just me.”

  She stopped and relaxed for a minute before she began leg raises. “Dodie, you have to turn everything into a big show. Just because this house is a little run-down, you let your imagination run wild.”

  “But I heard the footsteps too,” Anne said.

  “I’m not surprised,” Mother said. “Dodie is very persuasive. She always has been. This old house has lots of cracks where the wind gets in, and we’re right next to the marsh where it can really work us over.”

  “But Anne saw something,” I blurted out.

  “Did she really?” Mother looked at Anne past one upraised leg as if she wondered if she’d misjudged Anne, and said, “I hope Dodie’s imagination isn’t infectious.”

  “I saw part of a skirt and a leg disappearing around the bottom of the stairs. Only it wasn’t a real leg,” Anne said.

  “And then we found a shoe under Chip’s bed,” I put in.

  “I certainly don’t believe in ghosts,” Anne said. “That’s why we’re telling you about it. We thought you and my father could help us make sense of it.”

  Mother sighed and sat up. “Look, girls, there just isn’t another cottage big enough to house the five of us available this month. The real estate agent will notify us if anything does come up and we’ll move. Understand? Until then, why don’t you leave the light on in your room at night so you don’t get nervous.” She stood up and started doing knee bends. At the same time, we heard the stones grinding under the car wheels in the driveway. Our eyes met. “We’d do better with him,” was our unspoken agreement. Off we went through the kitchen and out the back door to the parking area.

  “Get the tail pipe fixed?” Anne asked Larry.

  “Yup, no problem. Here’s your mail, Dodie. I stopped at the post office while I was at it. Two postcards from Linda and Inez and a letter from that kid with the nasal voice. Not a bad haul. I guess your friends still love you.”

  I scanned the postcards while Anne began with, “Dad, we have to talk to you about something strange that’s—well, we just can’t explain it ourselves.”

  “What’s up?”

  “Promise not to laugh.”

  “Honey, do I ever laugh at you?”

  “You might this time. It’s really weird. Dodie and I have been hearing things at night.”

  “What things?”

  “Footsteps on the stairs.”

  He smiled. “Ghosts?”

  “We don’t belie
ve in ghosts.”

  “Glad to hear that. I don’t need a pair of hysterical girls on vacation.” Then he gave us the same routine about an old house being full of strange noises—“especially at night when everything’s quiet. What sounds to you like footsteps could be a loose shutter banging.”

  “The house doesn’t have shutters.”

  “Well, the walls creaking—wood does funny things when it ages. We’ve been through all this before.”

  “I saw something, Dad,” Anne persisted.

  “What?”

  “A leg and part of a skirt.”

  He chuckled. “When the rest of your ghostly lady materializes, you wake me up and I’ll come out and meet her. Okay?”

  “Dad, it’s not funny.”

  “Honey, you don’t expect me to take your ghost seriously, do you? Look, it hasn’t come after you with an ax or a knife or anything, has it?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, then my suggestion is, when you hear the ghostly footsteps, just stick your fingers in your ears and go back to sleep. Let the ghost mind its business and you mind yours.” He didn’t even try to hide his grin.

  Just as he was starting up the back steps to the kitchen, he turned to me and said, “Hey, Dodie, you’re not putting on some elaborate kind of performance for us again, are you?”

  I squealed with indignation.

  “Just asking,” he said.

  “Some reputation I have!” I complained to Anne. “Even Larry thinks I’m a clown.”

  “I don’t see how you stand it,” Anne said.

  This time I wasn’t reading her. “Stand what?”

  “The way she talks to you.”

  “Mother?”

  “She’s always putting you down.”

  Anne’s bluntness jolted me. Not that she was saying anything different from what I’d been complaining to friends about for years, but I never take myself too seriously. Hearing it from Anne made it serious—real enough to hurt. “It’s just Mother’s never understood how a successful woman like her could have spawned an oversized dodo bird like me,” I said.

  “Is that how you think of yourself?” Anne asked.

  “Of course not. I know I’m a gorgeous person—inside. Sometimes I look in the mirror and tell myself, ‘Listen, you gorgeous person, someday you’ll be famous and then she’ll be proud you’re her daughter.’ It’s just a matter of time.” I was talking big because I was embarrassed. I wanted Anne to get off the subject of my mother.