Footsteps on the Stairs: A Novel Page 7

  “No, I just want to sleep. I think it’s my stomach. Anyway, don’t worry about me. I’ll be all right. You take care of Chip for me, okay?”

  “Sure.” What else could I say?

  I made some hot cocoa for Chip and me, and we played a game of crazy eights. Then he said he was going to bed. “You’re going to leave me all alone on a night like this? What kind of a guy are you?” I complained.

  “You could come too.”

  “I’m not sleepy.”

  He sat back down like the good kid he is, but after he started dozing sitting up, I took pity on him. “You might as well go up to bed, Chip. I’ll be up soon.”

  He scooted off, glad to be released, and I concentrated on the jigsaw puzzle and tried to ignore the wind. It roared around outside and whistled and whinnied like a whole zoo was on the loose, and there I was trapped inside this weak, wooden cage. I gave myself a lecture about how I had to rein in my imagination. Wind is just moving air after all—noisy moving air, but nothing to be afraid of. It wasn’t a tornado or a hurricane, for heaven’s sake—as far as I knew—yet. As for the ghosts, they hadn’t been around since we visited the graveyard. If our thinking was right and we’d figured out who they were, they’d probably be too shy to appear. Sure they would. I started telling myself silly things like how, if they did show up, I’d stamp my foot and yell, “Scat, Irma and Renee,” and make them run and hide from me.

  Upstairs Anne and Chip were probably already asleep. I could creep up to my bed and feel safe near them anytime. Nobody said I had to sit here fooling with the dumb puzzle just to prove I wasn’t completely gutless.

  The electric light flickered and I nearly screamed. I swallowed hard instead. There were candles in the kitchen if I needed them. Rain splattered against the window, although it wasn’t really raining—the wind was just playing tricks. I started shivering and decided I could at least get a sweater. I didn’t want to disturb Anne, so I was heading to my mother’s room instead to borrow something of hers when the lights went out. I squealed, reversed direction and ran through the dark living room to the kitchen for the emergency candles. The lights came back on before I found matches. “Sweater,” I said to myself, kind of proud that I was so cool-headed.

  “Courage, men,” I announced. “Dodie will lead you to safety.” I strode back to the bedroom and then returned to my jigsaw puzzle, now warmed by Mother’s bedspread, which had been the only thing in her room I could find that fit me. Things were going better: the five-sided puzzle piece I’d been looking for off and on all evening appeared under my nose. Just then a familiar chill went down my spine. No mistaking what it was. They were behind me. The lights were still on. The wind moaned through the walls more quietly, but I didn’t dare turn around. Without looking, I stood up and stalked stiff as a Popsicle to the stairs. I put my hand on the round knob of the bottom post and revolved rigidly to face the steps. That put me in position to sneak a look out of the corner of my eye. She was walking toward me.

  I howled and bounded upstairs, whipped open the door of our bedroom, and threw myself at Anne, waking her up. I stuck my head under her pillow and whimpered.

  “Dodie, what’s wrong? What happened?”

  “She came at me.”

  “Who?”

  “The ghost.”

  “Really? You’re sure?”

  “Positive. I saw her clear as anything.” I poked my nose out from under the pillow so Anne could hear me and described what I had seen. “She was there—blowing, wind blowing her hair and her skirt—same ankle-strap shoes like the one with the high heel we saw under the bed. She must have another pair. Or maybe—I don’t know. Anyway, I saw her face—pretty, but where the eyes should be there’s just dark spaces, narrow empty slits, like.” I shuddered at my own description. “And she was like fog, like you said, like transparent. You could see through her.” I panted, waiting for Anne to say something.

  We listened. There went the footsteps on the stairs again. The same quiet padding, and then silence, and then a sudden rush up, and another, harder clatter of footsteps following. I squealed. Anne stood up.

  “Where are you going? Are you crazy?” I asked her.

  “They’re not going to hurt us.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They’re just girls.”

  “So? They’re ghost girls. Who knows what they can do?”

  “They’re after something, but it isn’t us,” Anne said.

  “Well, fine. Let them keep looking and you stay here with Chip and me.”

  “If we just found out what they wanted, maybe we could help them find it, and then they could rest easy. Don’t you want them to stop running up the stairs?”

  “And through the living room and who knows where else.”

  “Is your mother home yet?”

  “No.”

  Anne sat there calmly thinking. I’d thought I was cool when I was downstairs. No way was I ever going to match Anne. All noises but the wind had stopped. No ghost sounds no matter how hard I listened, but I wasn’t satisfied.

  “Let’s tell your father he’s got to take us somewhere else to stay,” I said. “Or we could go home. If we go home, my friend Lonnie has a swimming pool we can use. We could have a party. Lots of my friends are around all summer.”

  “There’s nothing to be so scared about, Dodie, really. How can anything that isn’t even real—I mean, that you can’t even touch—hurt us? They don’t have any reason to want to hurt us anyway.”

  “Good. I’m glad you feel so safe. But she was coming straight for me, and I wasn’t about to stick around to find out what she had in mind to do when she got me.”

  “Where were you standing when you saw her?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Were you standing on the stairs?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Well, there you are. The stairs is where they always do their ghost thing, isn’t it?”

  I nodded in grudging agreement with her reasoning. “Okay, but even if she wasn’t coming after me, it was scary—believe me.”

  “Sure it was.”

  “You look okay now,” I noticed. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Sort of,” she said. She looked at me carefully and then confided, “Sometimes when I get upset, like about my parents, it makes me feel sick. I’m never sure whether I’m really sick or not.”

  “Why are you upset? I thought you wanted your father to go see your mother.”

  “I did. I do. It shows he still cares about us a little, at least.”

  “Anne, he didn’t divorce you.”

  “But why did he have to leave us? We were such a good family together. It just tears me up seeing him with your mother. I didn’t realize how awful it was going to make me feel. To be honest, I sort of thought I could do something to bring him back to my mother. She needs him so much. And Chip does too. We all need him.”

  “Your needing him doesn’t mean that he should have to be married to a woman he doesn’t love, Anne. That wouldn’t be fair.”

  “They acted like they loved each other. They acted like a perfectly normal couple.”

  “So maybe that was just it—they were putting on an act for your sake.” It struck me that when it came to people Anne wasn’t as mature as she seemed in other ways. She was only seeing her own point of view, not her father’s, and the idea that she could send him back to her mother when he had already married again—that really sounded childish to me.

  “The thing is,” Anne said, “I can’t believe he could prefer your mother to mine.”

  “Why? You don’t really know my mother very well. She’s a pretty high-powered lady, and good to look at besides.”

  “My mother’s pretty, too. In fact, they look a lot alike.”

  “No kidding! Well, why don’t you ask your father what he sees in my mother.”

  “What for? I’m sure he doesn’t see her the way I do.”

  “You probably aren’t seeing her too clearly eith
er, you know. I mean, you want to hate her because she has your father.”

  “Dodie, I see how mean she is to you. You don’t want to admit it, but she is.”

  “Here we go again! Now listen. I know she picks on me. I know that, but what can you expect? I’m just not what she’d like in a daughter and it bugs her, And I bug her on purpose a lot, too. You’re more the kind of kid she’d like to have. In fact, if you’d encourage her a little, she’d be crazy about you.”

  “But she’s your mother.”

  “Right, and when I get famous, she’ll be glad she’s my mother.”

  “Oh, Dodie, you sound about as old as Chip.”

  “So do you when you talk about getting Larry and your mother back together again.”

  “Why? He made a mistake. All he has to do is admit it and change back.”

  That got me mad. I mean, she was so smug about her wonderful mother, and mine’s got a sharp tongue, but she’s got good qualities too. “You know,” I said. “It could be your father is tired of having a wife who leans on him all the time. My mother raised me without any help from anybody. She’s strong enough to stand on her own two feet and pull her own weight. That’s something to admire.”

  “Your mother has no feelings.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say. She has plenty of feelings. She just doesn’t show them all over the place.”

  “I don’t see why you defend her when she treats you so bad.”

  “Because I don’t really have anybody else,” I said—and it was so true that I sat there in shock with my mouth hanging open. Worse yet, Anne saw how shook I was and started apologizing all over me. I got furious with myself for letting go and with her for noticing.

  “At least I’m not scared of ghosts anymore,” I said to shut her up. “What’re we going to do about them?”

  “Our parents?”

  “No, Irma and Renee. There’s nothing we can do about our parents. They’re hopeless.”

  “You know,” Anne said thoughtfully, “Chip mentioned boxes in that crawl space. Do you think it would be wrong if we looked in them?”

  “You mean for clues?”

  “Well, suppose the stuff in them—”

  “Belonged to Irma and Renee!” I finished her thought. “Anne, you’re a genius. Let’s go look now.”

  “They’ll still be there in the morning.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “It’s awfully dark to go poking around in there now, Dodie.”

  That convinced me. “Okay, we’ll get up early and check them out then.”

  The wind was behaving itself reasonably well. No sounds of footsteps—only the normal creaks and rustles of the old cracked boards. I got in bed and closed my eyes and wondered what reason a ghost could have to haunt a rickety old house like this one. It would have to be something terrible or tragic or very, very strange. I couldn’t imagine what, but I kept myself busy speculating anyway. It was better than lying there feeling sorry for myself for being such a reject that even my own mother didn’t want me.

  Chapter 11

  Even before brushing our teeth the next morning, Anne and I hauled the three cardboard boxes out of the crawl space into Chip’s nearly empty bedroom. The first box was filled with family photographs—stiff-looking people from past centuries. One oval framed picture even showed a man standing in that old-fashioned pose with his hand on his seated wife’s shoulder. The ladies’ long dresses and the men’s high collars looked like the 1800’s to me. “I wonder if any of this stuff is from the Thomas family,” I said to myself because Anne wasn’t listening.

  “I’m going to see if Chip’s downstairs,” Anne said. “He wasn’t on his mattress when we got up this morning.”

  “Probably having breakfast already,” I said.

  After Anne left, I kept poking through the box, looking for a picture of our ghosts. No luck. The second box, which was tied with string, was full of ledger books with figures listed on page after page. Boring. The third carton was better. It held a small, locked metal box—also a diary and some letters. The letters were addressed to the Thomas sisters.

  “Anne!” I yelled. “Look what I found.” I ran to the top of the stairs and yelled again.

  She came out of the kitchen looking worried. “Dodie, I can’t find Chip in the house anywhere.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “And it’s ten o’clock. Where could he be?”

  “Well, we were up late talking. I bet he got up early and went for a walk. He’s probably outside nose to nose with a bug. Come up and look at these letters I found.”

  “Not until I find Chip.”

  “But Anne—Oh, all right. I’ll help you look.” I eased open the door to Mother’s bedroom, which Anne hadn’t tried. We hadn’t heard Mother come in, but she was there asleep. She must be really upset with Larry to stay out that late on her own. I hoped nothing was going to go wrong between Larry and her over Anne’s dumb mother.

  “Chip never goes off without telling me where he’s going, and he’s not around the house outside either,” Anne was complaining.

  My stomach growled for its breakfast, but I ignored it for once and told Anne, “Stop worrying. Chip’s not the kind of kid who gets into trouble. He’s probably squatting over a crab hole and didn’t hear you calling him.”

  We spent half an hour circling the house, getting farther and farther away, and even venturing into the marsh where we’d found the boat. Larry had advised us not to test it in deep water in case it was full of leaks. I was puzzled at where Chip could have gotten to, and by now Anne was frantic. She kept calling his name, yelling so loudly I expected Mother to wake up and complain about the noise any second.

  “Do you think he’s stuck in the marsh?” Anne asked me.

  “No way. It’s high tide, and the marsh is mostly water. There’s not enough sand left for him to be lost in. Hey, no!” I said when I realized what she was so wild-eyed about. “Chip’s too sensible to get himself drowned.”

  “Then where could he be? He wouldn’t have gone back up that road where the graveyard is, would he?”

  “What for?”

  “That first house—where nobody was home? Those kittens in the window.”

  “Of course. Now, why didn’t I think of that?” I said.

  “If he’s not there, we’ll have to tell your mother and the police. He wouldn’t go to the bay beach by himself. Oh, I hope he didn’t go poking around in the marsh.” She sounded just like a worried parent.

  Anne was walking so fast that I couldn’t keep up with her. I chugged along, perspiring and listening to my own heavy breathing. The day was fast becoming a scorcher—no wind but plenty of hot sun. Great beach weather, though. When we found Chip, we could take those letters and the diary to the beach and read them there. Suddenly a thought turned my perspiration cold. What if Chip’s disappearance had something to do with our ghosts? What if Anne was wrong that they couldn’t hurt us because they were dead and had no substance? Suppose he wasn’t just gone. Suppose he was taken! I blundered from the paved to the sand road, now as anxious as Anne.

  She wasn’t in sight by the time I panted up to the doorway of the old gray cottage with the blue shutters. I knocked on the screen door. Voices inside. One was Anne’s. Apparently, she’d overcome her shyness at approaching strangers for Chip’s sake. An elderly lady with short, straight white hair and a mouth sunk in wrinkles gave me a cheerful hello.

  “More company! Aren’t I the lucky one today. Come on in. Did you come to see the kittens too, or are you looking for the girl who’s come looking for her brother?”

  “Is he here?”

  “Been here most of the morning. He and the kittens get along famously.”

  “I’m Dodie,” I said, exhaling in relief.

  “Miss LaValle,” she said and shook hands with me.

  I followed her into a standard sprung-sofa-and-worn-rocking-chair living room. There Chip sat on the floor with one kitten perched on his head
and the other digging a hole in his lap. He looked happy. Anne was sitting on the edge of a chair leaning forward, obviously ill at ease.

  “Chip, you really had us scared,” I said.

  “You kept sleeping,” Chip said. “So I came to see the cats.”

  “We thought you might’ve drowned in the marsh,” I said. “We were searching there for you.”

  “I couldn’t get drowned in the marsh,” Chip said as if that was a stupid idea.

  “People have,” Miss LaValle pointed out. “It’s a tricky place, Chip.”

  “Have you lived here a long time, Miss LaValle?” I asked.

  “I’ve been summering here a long time. Though one of these days I hope to become a year-round resident—soon as I stop being useful in the city. I work in a settlement house in the city, though they don’t call it that anymore.”

  “Is this your house?”

  “Why, yes, this is my family home. My father built it seventy-odd years ago, and I grew up here.”

  “Perfect,” I said, and gave Anne a triumphant smile. “Did you know the Thomas family?”

  “Indeed I did. Knew them very well. We used to buy our clams from John Thomas. He only passed away a few years ago. Lived in his old wreck of a place by the marsh all by himself. I don’t know how he didn’t freeze in the winter. They didn’t have enough money to put in central heating. Used a wood stove for cooking until—”

  “His daughters are buried in that cemetery across the road,” I said, interrupting. “Did you know them?”

  “Irma and Renee? Yes, I knew them.” She nodded sadly. “Tragic, the way those girls drowned in the marsh. So young and such pretty girls, too.”

  “They drowned in the marsh?”

  “Oh, yes. I told you that can be a tricky place. They used to go fishing out the creek into the inlet, and sometimes the current runs very strong through there.”

  The chill that went through me was familiar, but what could I expect from acquaintance with ghosts? “I told you I didn’t like that marsh,” I said to Anne.