Five Days of the Ghost (10 page)

I turned my back on Sammy Dee and dragged myself back to the rowboat. I pushed off from the beach, rowing with the waves till I got clear of the beach. Then I swung toward the house. As I hauled on the oars I was thinking. I was so mad I didn't feel tired anymore.

Late Monday Evening

I was lying on my waterbed, aching all over from my trip to the island, and frustrated because I hadn't had a chance to talk to Chief Copegog. I had taken a hot shower and changed into light cotton pajamas. It was about eleven o'clock and Minnie had been in the sack for half an hour.

I was reading
Anne of Green Gables
for the millionth time and I was at the part where Anne is floating down the river in the boat pretending she's Elaine, the Lily Maid, when I heard John and Noah clumping up the stairs. They went into John's room and put some music on. A few minutes later I heard them coming down the hall to my room.

Knock on the door. Even though I knew it was them, I jumped. Boy was I nervous.

“Yeah,” I shouted, not too friendly.

“It's us. Can we come in? We've got some news.”

Oh, no, I thought. News is one thing I don't need. I've had enough “news” to last me a hundred years. I had already decided not to tell them about visiting the island that night.

But what could I say? If I told them to buzz off they'd be hurt.

I hauled myself off the waterbed, pulled on my housecoat and unlocked the door.

“Okay, come on in,” I said, and went back to the bed.

John came in first, face shining like a little angel. His blue eyes sparkled the way they always do when he's turned on to something. His bands sparkled too, he was grinning so hard. He was still wearing his jogging shorts and tank top.

Noah looked pleased with himself too. His white T-shirt and black jeans were all wrinkled, as if he'd slept in them.

“We got it!” John announced like a guy on TV.

He and Noah were both carrying notebooks and Noah had a thick book that looked a million years old.

“Yeah,” he said. “You're gonna love this, Karen. We found out who killed—”

“Wait!” John shrieked. “Let's tell it in order.”

His voice sounded so silly I had to laugh. “John, can't this wait till—”

“No, no, you've got to hear this.” He stepped across the room and settled on the window ledge. Noah turned my desk chair around backwards and sat down, leaning forward against the chair back. The wedge of hair half covered his face.

“This is pretty hot stuff, Karen.” He smiled. “We worked hard, and now—”

“Let's start at the beginning,” John cut in.

“I know the beginning,” I said. “All I don't know—and I'm not sure I want to—is who murdered the lawyer guy.”

“Bond,” Noah said.

“Whatever. So, who was it? Gimme a name so I can go to bed.”

John looked hurt. “Aw, come on, Karen. What's the problem?”

Noah was looking straight into my eyes.

“Oh, nothing, I'm just tired. Go ahead, guys. Let's hear it.”

“Okay,” John said. “Tell her, Noah.”

Noah looked surprised, but only for a second.

“Okay. Remember Bond was sort of the town creep, skating along on the edge of the law all the time?”

“Yeah.”

“Built his house on land he cheated from an old lady client. Got his housekeeper's daughter pregnant. Probably got her into bed by promising to marry her. So she hanged herself, right? Then he had a record of getting hammered and beating up on the old guy who worked for him.”

Noah paused and scratched the ear with the cross hanging from it. I thought of Chief Copegog, the way he pulled his big earlobe sometimes.

“So,” John continued for Noah, dragging out his words, “somebody puts a blade through rich Mister Bond's hard, cold heart.”

He smiled, pleased with himself.

“Yeah, right,” I said. “His hard, cold heart. So who was it, the mother of the girl who hanged herself or the old man?”

“Guess again.”

Noah groaned.

“All right, I will,” I said, just to speed things up. “Um, let's see. The old man was beaten up a couple of times, isn't that what you guys told me before, Noah?”

“Right.”

“Okay, then it probably wasn't him this time. I mean, why would he? Unless you're going to tell me the maid was his long-lost niece or something. Or that he was in love with the poor girl.”

John shook his head.

“Or that—hey, wait! I know! The old man and the housekeeper were really secretly man and wife and the maid was their
daughter
! So that's why he did it.”

Noah groaned again. “You ‘re making this sound like a soap.”

“
I'm
making it sound like a soap? Blame that on your research partner!” I pointed at John.

John ignored what I said. “So what's your guess, anyway?”

“The mother did it. Because Bond ruined her daughter's life and made her commit suicide.”

“That's what we thought,” Noah said.

John cut him off. “Until we really got into the records. That's when we found out about the Chippewa man.”

John was loving this. He had forgotten that he had asked Noah to be the storyteller. If I let him, he'd feed me bits of information the way you'd feed seeds to a canary and keep me going until I went out of my head.

“What Chippewa man? Look, guys, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but why not just tell me straight out. With no games and suspense.”

Noah nodded. He had his calm grown-up voice back. “She's right, man. Just lay it out for her.”

John shifted his position on the window ledge. I could see his back reflected in the window, along with my bed room, and I could see Noah sitting by my desk. John nodded, then ran his hand through his almost-blonde hair.

“Okay, here goes. We were all wrong. I mean, totally. Bond was murdered by a Native who got into the house one night, jabbed a knife into his cold”—John saw the scowl I pasted on my face—”okay, okay, his
heart
, and left him to bleed to death in the hall.”

He pointed to my door. “Right out there.”

My eyes followed his finger and a chill crept down my spine. I was glad the boys had shut the door on their way in.

John sat there saying nothing. I knew what I was supposed to say.

“Did they find out who did it?”

“Yeah,” Noah said in a low voice. “The newspaper reports said the chief of the Chippewas did it.”

“The thing is, Karen,” John added, “the chief's name was Copegog.”

An explosion went off in my head. I heard myself groan as I raised my hands to cover my face.
This is never gonna end
, I thought.

“We figure—”

I cut in on Noah. “I know what you figure.”

“It's gotta be him,” John said.

“Why does it have to be him?” I knew I was being stupid. Just like I knew what Noah was going to say before he said it.

“Remember I thought that when you opened the medicine bag you released a kind of power into the house and that's what triggered the poltergeist? Well, now we know. It's a real apparition. It's a ghost that's banging around here at night. We know whose ghost it is now. And we know who killed him. It must have been Chief Copegog, our friendly, cigar-smoking spirit. It was
his
medicine bag, and it brought out the ghost of the man
he
murdered.”

I didn't want to believe it. How could the lonely old man whose spirit I saw be a murderer? Then I remembered the eyes. They were black and fierce, and they punched right through you like those pointed metal things they use to jab holes through leather.

I didn't want to believe it, though. My mind said it was logical. It made sense. But my heart refused to accept it.

Then I had a flash.

“Wait a sec,” I said to John, “didn't you tell me that the new grave on Chiefs' Island was for a guy named Copegog? Isn't that the name you copied down?”

“Yeah, but—”

I turned to Noah. “And didn't you say he was the chief on the Reserve just before he died last week?”

“Sure. So what?”

“So this. There must have been
tons
of Chiefs over the years named Copegog. What's to our ghost is the one who stabbed Bond the Creep? Who probably had it coming anyway.”

Noah scrunched up his face and said, “Hmmmmm,” then scratched his ear again. “Good point.”

“Not so good,” John said. “Because our guy is about the right age.”

“How can you tell how old he is?” I said. Maybe this was going to work out, I thought.

But Noah smashed my hopes.

“Karen, remember what he said when I asked him how long it had been since he had a smoke?”

“Oh. Yeah, I get it. Wait! Maybe he had a brother who was chief too. That's possible.”

“Get real, Karen.” John sounded mad. I realized then that the two guys were probably almost as disappointed as I was. They wanted our ghost to be a friendly old Native too, with lots of exciting stories about hunting and battles and stuff. Now he was just a murderer.

“Put everything together—his age, the medicine bag, when the ghost appeared here—it
must
have been him.”

John slapped his leg, “And we gave him cigars!”

I didn't say anything. I didn't care anyway. I didn't.

“Well, I know what I think we should do to test this out,” Noah said, standing up. “We should set up our equipment tonight and wait for the ghost to show up in the hall.”

“Yeah, good idea,” said John. Then he looked straight at me. “Maybe we'll find out we're wrong, Karen. Maybe we won't get anything, like last time. But it's worth a try, isn't it?”

I nodded.

“So let's go to my room and assemble all the stuff.”

“Okay,” I said tiredly. After the guys left I walked over to the window and pulled the curtains shut, almost knocking the glass bowl that had held Chief Copegog's medicine bag onto the floor. I didn't look out the window as I pulled the drapes shut.

When I turned to go to John's room I noticed that my closet door was open a little.

Wait a minute, I thought. I knew that it had been closed and locked when I'd left for Chiefs' Island. Was it locked when I got home? I couldn't be sure. My mind had been on other things.

Who had been in there? John and Noah? It couldn't have been them. They'd left for the library before I'd left for the island. Unless—no, I wasn't even going to
think
about that. I put the little hook in the little eye, shot a quick look at the silent wind chimes, left the room, and closed the door behind me.

I mostly stood around sulking and thinking while John and Noah set up the equipment. I must admit that after a few minutes of watching them I began to get into it. For one thing they looked so dumb, like a couple of comedians, stumbling around and bumping into each other. Noah was fussing over the buttons on the machines and John the organizer wrote up a schedule for changing batteries. They were going to keep up the surveillance all night.

The video camera was perched on a tripod in the hall, pointed at my door.

“Anything that passes down the hall will be recorded.” Noah said.

I reminded him that the camera hadn't captured Chief Copegog but he ignored me. Boys always think girls don't know anything about machines.

At the top of the stairs they set up a little voice recorder, one of those ones that has the mike right inside. They put another one right outside my room.

“That's where all the action has been,” John reminded us. “So we got the video aimed there and we got sound there.”

John wanted to sprinkle talcum powder all over the floor so footprints would show up.

“You mean
preternatural
footprints,” I sneered.

“Oh, shut up, Karen.”

Noah and John argued about whether footprints would show up in white powder. Noah said in all the stuff he had read about ghosts, he'd never heard of that. I said Skinny Minnie would have a heart attack and foam at the mouth if she saw powder all over the hall and that she'd tell Mom and Dad and they would ask a lot of questions and unless the guys wanted to tell Mom and Dad that we thought we were ghostbusters we better not do it.

The guys agreed.

The next thing we argued about was that they wanted to wait in my room for Bond the Creep's ghost to show up.

“No chance,” I said. “I wanna go to bed.”

I was dead tired and I wanted to sleep. My body still ached all over from the rowing. Sitting around waiting with those guys would drive me nuts.

“You're gonna
sleep
?” John asked.

“I'm gonna try.”

So they set up shop, with their new batteries and their time schedules, in John's room. I went into my room and shut the door.

And locked it.

I checked the closet door again—locked. I went over to the big bay window, pulled the curtains open, and sat on the ledge, pressing my face against the glass. The moon was almost hidden by clouds and Chiefs' Island was almost invisible—just a dark blurry shape out there.

Sure hope it wasn't you who did it, Chief Copegog
, I said to myself.

I wondered if he was sitting on the gravestone waiting for me to bring him more cigars. Then I thought I could feel those fierce eyes on me, and I stood and shut the curtains.

I felt sad and afraid at the same time. Why couldn't things be simple so I could understand them?

I pulled off my housecoat and dropped it on the floor. I turned on the reading light over my bed, then I snapped off the overhead light. My room instantly became a dark cave with a little pool of yellow light where the waterbed was. I looked at the closed door. There was a thin line of light under it.

I sighed and climbed into bed. I didn't even try to read, just snuggled down deep and closed my eyes and waited for the ghost to start its show.

I didn't have long to wait.