Boys Rock! (11 page)

C
opies of the
Hatford Herald were
neatly stacked by the window of Oldakers’ Bookstore, all four pages of it, stapled together.

It was exciting to see the newspaper there on the window shelf between the
Buckman Bugle
and the
New York Times
. Beth took a picture of it, and Mike Oldaker let Peter stand at the door for a while, handing a copy to each customer who left the store. Both Mrs. Malloy and Mrs. Hatford asked for extra copies to send to relatives.

There was an editorial by Eddie saying that the newspaper was a summer reading project for students entering the seventh grade and would be about some of the historic happenings in Buckman. Then she named both her sisters as well as herself and all the Hatford boys as being on the newspaper staff.

The rest of the first page was an early map of Buck-man, before many of the new developments and streets had been built. It showed every spot where there had been a swinging bridge crossing the river, and pointed out some of the buildings downtown—Ethel’s Bakery, Oldakers’ Bookstore, a cobbler’s shop, and the old Royale Theater, now called the Cinema.

The second page of the paper had an article by Eddie on the swinging bridges, and Jake’s write-up of an old college football game. There was a comic strip by Josh on the ways people used to keep cool before air-conditioning, as well as a boxed news item at the bottom of the page:

“Oh, Eddie, that’s perfect!” Caroline said. “That’ll fix their wagon!” The downside was that Eddie wouldn’t let her write an article about herself as an aspiring actress, now that this piece had appeared in a rival paper, but a little publicity was better than no publicity at all.

Caroline’s story about Bessie and Tessie Crane took up the whole third page. She had neglected to get a
photo of the two sisters for her article, but she put in almost every word of what she had been told—how bossy Tessie had been, how jealous of her sister, how they got along well in public but fought like cats and dogs at home. Caroline was glad that the elderly woman had said at least
some
good things about her sister, but they weren’t much. It would certainly make for juicy reading, Eddie had said, laughing, when they printed it up. She had chosen a good title for it too:

This would probably get the most attention of all, Caroline thought smugly. Everyone liked to read gossip, and one sister’s saying that their relationship was not what it seemed would be the talk of the town.

With Coach Malloy home for the weekend, Mrs. Malloy invited the Hatford family over for dinner that evening to celebrate the first issue of the
Hatford Herald
.

“It’s a beautiful day, and I thought I would set up two tables under the beech tree and we could eat outside,” she said.

“Sounds like a good idea,” said her husband.

At six o’clock, the Hatfords came across the footbridge below, all six of them, in shorts and T-shirts, bringing along some folding chairs and a caramel cake.

“Nice of you to have us over!” Mr. Hatford said, helping himself to the pickled beets. “Best day for a picnic we’ve had all summer. I sure hate the thought of your leaving Buckman, George.”

“Well, it’s seventy percent certain we’re going back,
but we’ve really enjoyed our stay here,” Coach Malloy said. “There will be a lot to miss.”

“Wonderful cake, Ellen,” said Mrs. Malloy.

“My mother’s recipe,” Mrs. Hatford said.

When the meal was over and Wally had eaten two pieces of cake, he and Caroline lay on their backs on the other side of the beech tree, looking up into the leaves. Wally was watching a caterpillar dangling from a thin strand of silk, blowing back and forth in the evening breeze.

For her part, Caroline was trying her best to be Wally for the moment—to see the world through his eyes.

“Guess how much a rope of spider’s silk, one inch thick, would hold,” Wally was saying to her.

“I don’t know,” said Caroline.

“Seventy-four tons,” said Wally. “I read it in a science book.”

“No kidding,” said Caroline.

“And you know what else?” said Wally. “It would be three times as strong as a one-inch rope made of iron.”

“Amazing,” said Caroline. What was even more amazing was that Wally Hatford could be perfectly happy—would be
happiest
, in fact—if he could just spend the whole summer quietly studying stuff like this: spiderwebs and anthills. That he was most miserable when he had to get up in front of people and perform.

How strange and interesting it was that she was just the opposite. If Caroline did not have people watching
her and applauding, if she was not the center of attention, she felt she would shrivel up. How wonderful that there were people who loved to perform and people who loved to watch.

She was squinting now as she studied the caterpillar, because her booklet on auras said that all living things had an energy force around them, even something as small as a caterpillar. She wondered what color a caterpillar’s energy force would be. Yellow, she imagined. Maybe she did see a little something around it—sort of a mist, maybe.

What she heard, however, was the sound of a car grinding slowly up the driveway. Jake and Josh and Eddie and Beth stopped their croquet game up by the house, and everyone turned to see an ancient Oldsmo-bile moving at five miles per hour toward the clearing between the house and garage.

“Looks as though you have company,” Mr. Hatford said.

The car came to a stop, the door on the driver’s side opened, and a little old lady stepped out, leaning on her cane.

Caroline sat up. “Why, it’s Bessie Crane!” she said.

The elderly woman glared at Caroline. “It is
not
!” she said sharply, her voice carrying all the way across the lawn. “It’s
Tessie
, for your information, and your newspaper made it sound as though it was my sister talking about
me
!”

“What?” cried Caroline.

“Uh-oh,” Mr. Hatford said under his breath.

“You got our names mixed up!” the woman said indignantly, and she shook her cane at Caroline. “You’ve got me dead and in the ground, young lady, and Bessie saying all sorts of evil things about me. And you call yourself a reporter!”

Eddie gasped and hurried over.

“We are so sorry, ma’am,” she said. “It was a terrible mistake, and we’ll put a retraction in the next issue.”

“Retraction, resmaction!” Tessie Crane scoffed. “The damage is done! Now folks think it was
me
who died, and some of them are even saying ‘Good riddance.’ ”

“Ms. Crane, please sit down and have some dessert with us,” Mrs. Malloy said, giving a quick, furious glance at Caroline. “Mrs. Hatford has baked the most delicious caramel cake, and you really must try it.”

Humphing and scowling, Ms. Crane turned to look at the seven-layer cake. “Caramel, eh?” she said, and shook her head; but then she studied it some more. “That’s no ready-made frosting, I can tell.”

“Indeed it’s not,” said Mrs. Hatford. “My mother wouldn’t have thought of doing such a thing!”

Immediately a folding chair was moved closer to the old woman, a saucer and fork were produced, and when Tessie Crane had sat down and placed her cane on the ground, Mrs. Malloy went back inside to get her a cup of tea.

“Oh, I do remember your sister,” Mr. Hatford said. “I used to deliver mail to that side of town, you know. I still remember how Bessie would meet me
at the door some days, and she’d say, ‘Tom, if you can’t bring me anything but bills, don’t bring me anything at all.’ ”

Everyone laughed then, even Ms. Crane.

“That was just like her too!” she said, taking a second bite of cake and letting the frosting roll around on her tongue. “She’d put those bills on
my
side of the desk, and guess who she expected to pay them!”

“If you’d loan us your favorite photograph, we’d like to put it in the next issue of the
Hatford Herald
with our apology for our mistake,” Eddie said.

“Hmmm,” said Ms. Crane, licking her fork to make sure she got every last bit of the sugary stuff. “I always did like that picture of me in my flowered dress. … Yes, I think I’ll loan you that one, and you can let your readers know that I’m very much alive indeed.” Then she turned to Mr. Hatford again:

“And Iremember your
father
!” she said. “He was an anthropologist there at the college, wasn’t he?”

“Yes, he was,” said Mr. Hatford. “It’s nice to know he’s remembered.”

Tessie Crane began to smile again. “Well, Bessie and I thought he was about the handsomest man in Buck-man, that’s why we remembered him. But of course he was already married to your mother.”

The grown-ups were talking memories now, and Caroline thought it was a good time to slip away. She wanted to put a copy of the first issue of the newspaper in her scrapbook. She wanted to admire her byline there on the third page, and never mind her mistake. It
was a shame that reporters couldn’t get their pictures on the page beside their stories.

She had scarcely reached the kitchen before Eddie followed her in. “How could you make such a dumb mistake, Caroline?” Eddie scolded. “We could get
sued
over mistakes like that!”

“Tessie … Bessie … they sound too much alike, Eddie!” Caroline said plaintively. “
She
certainly didn’t mind saying all those bad things about her sister!”

“Well, get your facts straight! That’s what newspapers are supposed to do! The next time you go on assignment, check and double-check. Don’t mess up!” Eddie told her.

Caroline saluted and clicked her heels together. “Yes,
sir
!” she barked, but nothing could ruin her pleasure in knowing that
her
story was probably going to be the best-read article in the whole paper.

Seventeen
In the Dark

T
he book that had bothered Wally at the start of July,
A Ghost’s Revenge
, was under his bed. He hadn’t known it was there until he got an overdue notice in the mail.

He should have taken the book back to the library right then, but he didn’t. He should never have opened the book again, but he did. The story he wanted so much to forget—the story about the ghostly presence that stayed behind to haunt—was so real that he could almost believe it.

It wasn’t the kind of story where a misty figure floats into your room at night and says “Boo!” It was the kind where things happened that couldn’t be explained. Sounds. Touch. Cold. Without the writer’s saying so, you just knew by the feeling of cold and dread that the ghost was in the room. Everything in Wally’s room seemed to move when he wasn’t looking.

“This is nuts,” Wally kept telling himself. “This never happened. It’s only a story. It’s all made up.” Nonetheless, those words—those simple black marks on white paper—turned his skin to gooseflesh.

So instead of taking A
Ghost’s Revenge
back to the library, Wally read it again to see if this time he could laugh about it. He couldn’t. In fact, it scared him more the second time around.

The part that bothered him most was when the man first knew the ghost was there. He had heard a scratching, scraping, clawing sound in his cellar.
Exactly
the kind of scratching, scraping, clawing sound that Wally had heard down at Oldakers’. If you didn’t have good ears, you might not have heard it at all. Wally Hatford had good ears.

The next night, the story went, the scratching, scraping, clawing sound came from the man’ first-floor library, and the night after that, it was on the stairs. The night after that, it was in the man’ bedroom, and then it was beside his bed. Wally knew that if he ever woke up in the night to hear a scratching, scraping, clawing sound in his closet, he’d probably die of a heart attack.

Twice he had called Mike Oldaker to remind him that there would be only two more issues of the
Hat-ford Herald
. There were only two more weeks for Wally to get the scoop that even the
Buckman Bugle
wouldn’t get till later. But both times Mike had told him, “Not yet, Wally, not yet.”

The more Wally thought about it, the more worried
he was that it was all a trick. The more he played over in his mind those sounds down in the cellar of Oldakers’ Bookstore, the more he worried it was a secret that shouldn’t be kept.

He had made up his mind, however. That night after dark, after the bookstore closed, he was going to stand outside and peer through the window. He was going to wait and see if anything came up out of the trapdoor in the hardwood floor, right there near the cashier’ counter. If a beast of some sort was down there, it had to be fed, didn’t it?
Someone
had to tend to it when no one was looking. And if it was a ghost, a trapdoor wouldn’t hold it in. Wally had to know. He wasn’t going to settle for being scared the rest of his life.