Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (8 page)

“I totally freaked out. I was crying, and I think I might have passed out or something. Anyway, the next time I looked in the mirror, my face was back to normal.”

Gilda wondered how she would react if she ever had a similar experience. Would she be able to keep her wits about her and remember that she was a psychic investigator, or would she start crying? “Tiara,” she said, “if that happens again, you should try to ask Dolores’s ghost some questions.”

“I was in no state to ask questions.”

“Just tell her she’s scaring you, and then ask her what she wants.” Gilda hadn’t yet had an opportunity to use this technique
for speaking with a ghost, but she had read about it in her
Master Psychic’s Handbook
.

Tiara turned to head back to the school. “You seem pretty calm about all this stuff.” She sounded vaguely disappointed.

“It’s my business.” Gilda caught herself, remembering that she had intended to remain completely undercover.

“It’s your
business
?”

“I mean, I have an interest in ghosts and things like that, that’s all.”

“In that case, you should come over to my house sometime.”

“Your house is haunted?”

“Weird things have been happening to me lately, Gilda. If you’re interested in this stuff, you should come over to my house after school. You’ll see what I mean.”

At Tiara’s house, Gilda perched on a stool next to the gleaming counter of an enormous, immaculate kitchen. She watched as Tiara poured Diet Coke into two wineglasses and tore open a box of Oreo cookies.

Gilda felt smaller than usual inside the vast house—a house with a wide carport and neutral-colored rooms as shiny and spotless as elegant hotel suites. As she nibbled a cookie, Gilda concentrated on picking up a psychic vibration—some evidence of a phantom presence in the house—but she only sensed a cool emptiness and loneliness in her surroundings, as if all traces of warmth had been scrubbed away. The drone of a vacuum cleaner filled the silence, and Gilda glimpsed a grim-looking housekeeper sullenly pushing the machine across white carpeting in the next room.

Tiara’s face looked smudged and bruised with remnants of black lipstick and eyeliner. During the school day, she had torn out the hem on one side of her pink skirt and cut the material on the other side short enough to reveal the plaid boxer shorts she wore underneath. She had pinned several detention slips to the ragged, asymmetrical edge of her skirt: “Skirt length is WRONG!” and “This is UNACCEPTABLE!” Constantly in motion, Tiara bounced a knee nervously and tapped her chipped fingernails on the counter.

She looks out of place in her own house
, Gilda thought.

Tiara stuffed an entire cookie into her mouth and stood up very suddenly, as if she had just remembered something urgent. “Gotta pee,” she declared.

“Thanks for letting me know,” said Gilda.

“We don’t have a bathroom here, by the way—just an outhouse.”

“That’s what I figured,” said Gilda. “Watch out for butt splinters.”

Tiara stared at Gilda for a moment, as if trying to decide whether continued attempts to pull Gilda’s leg were worth the effort. Finally she turned on her heel and left the room.

A moment later, Tiara reappeared in the kitchen looking stricken, as if she had just realized that she was coming down with a bad case of stomach flu.

“What’s the matter?”

“I need to show you something.” Tiara picked up her glass of Diet Coke and left the room without another word.

With some trepidation, Gilda followed Tiara into a very beige living room with soaring ceilings. As she surveyed her surroundings,
she caught her breath. Something ghastly loomed over the fireplace.

“This is the kind of thing that keeps happening,” Tiara whispered.

Gilda gazed up at a larger-than-life oil painting of a haughty-looking woman who shared Tiara’s pale complexion and elfin features. It was difficult to see the portrait clearly because it was splattered with what appeared to be streams and clots of blood.

Gilda’s stomach turned.
I’ve never encountered anything like this before
, she thought. Was it possible that the ghost in Tiara’s house was the kind of violent, murderous spirit she had seen in horror movies? For some reason, the spotlessness of the room made the angry mess covering the painting especially disturbing.

“This is the worst thing I’ve seen yet,” said Tiara, whose face looked ashen. “A couple weeks ago, there were broken eggs all over every mirror in the house. And then a few days ago, we found all my mom’s antique china shattered. But this is definitely the
worst
.”

Reminding herself that feeling grossed out was no excuse for shirking her psychic investigator duties, Gilda forced herself to move closer to the painting to view the evidence more closely. “I should take a sample of this stuff for testing,” she said, not knowing exactly what sort of testing she had in mind.

With shaking fingers, Gilda reached up to touch the edge of the painting and managed to remove a clump of something dried and red. She squinted closely at the substance in her hand and noticed something odd: the blood contained tiny seeds. She sniffed the substance and suddenly felt suspicious of Tiara. Was this simply an attention-seeking prank? “Tiara,
I’m pretty sure this is canned tomatoes,” she said accusingly.

“You mean it isn’t blood?”

“Don’t play dumb.”

“I’m not! All I know is, I walked into the room, looked up, and saw what
looks
like blood all over this painting. Even if it is tomatoes, the ghost must have put them there!”

“You swear you didn’t do this yourself?”

Clutching her wineglass between her ring finger and pinkie, Tiara traced an
X
across her pink shirt with her index finger. “I
didn’t
. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

Gilda reflected that there was something eerie about the phrase
cross my heart and hope to die
—a vow she and Wendy had used when they were much younger. Strangely, the words still seemed to have a magical persuasive power, and Gilda found herself wanting to believe Tiara. “Then it looks like you have a poltergeist.”

“It has to be the ghost from Mermaid Lake.”

“It
could
be the ghost from the lake, but did you or your parents have any special connection with Dolores Lambert—any reason she would be haunting your house?”

The sound of the vacuum stopped, and the girls were suddenly aware of a thick silence.

“All I know is that ever since I broke the rule and shouted into the lake, weird things have been happening.” Tiara fixed Gilda with a portentous stare. “
You
did the same thing, so you’ll see what I mean soon enough.”

Gilda did her best to ignore a twinge of anxiety caused by Tiara’s ominous tone. “We’ll need to do more research before we can be sure of the ghost’s identity.”

“What kind of research?”

Gilda thought for a moment. “Why don’t you show me where you first saw Dolores’s ghost in the mirror?”

Tiara’s room reminded Gilda of a cave. Dark curtains covered the windows, and the air was still and heavy. Gilda wondered what it would be like to wake up in the morning and find herself surrounded by such gloom.

“What’s the matter?” Tiara asked, turning on a series of lights with bulbs the size of small candle flames. “Never seen a room with black walls before?”

“Only in the homes of vampires,” Gilda joked.

Tiara stared at Gilda with a spooky intensity, as if trying to hypnotize her. “How do you know this
isn’t
the home of a vampire?”

“Because, for one thing, you’d have an unusually high tolerance for sunshine and crucifixes if you’re a vampire attending a Catholic girls’ school.”

Tiara’s mouth twitched as she suppressed an urge to giggle. “Well—don’t you wonder why my room is so
dark
!”

Gilda shrugged, feigning nonchalance. “Some people like it dark.” Secretly, she was very curious indeed.

Tiara sat down on her bed and gulped down the last bit of her soda. “My mom told me I could decorate my room any color I wanted, so I picked black because I thought it would be cool. I’ll never admit this to her, but sometimes it’s kind of depressing in here.”

“You should put some glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling,” Gilda suggested. “And maybe add a disco ball.”

“That sounds cheesy.”

Gilda breezed past Tiara toward an oblong, full-length mirror that perched on a pedestal. “Is this the mirror where you first saw the ghost?”

Tiara nodded.

In the dim light, the two girls peered into the mirror, gazing at the yellowed, shadowy features of their faces and the spiky silhouette of Tiara’s hair. Gilda couldn’t help but think that in the tomblike atmosphere of Tiara’s room, it seemed entirely plausible that if she stared into the mirror, she might see someone else’s face instead of her own reflection.

“Have you ever considered bleaching your hair?” Tiara whispered, instantly breaking the somber mood.

“Excuse me?” Gilda noted that Tiara’s habit of constantly switching from one topic or activity to another was not at all helpful for a psychic investigation.

“I just think it would look cool if we bleached a couple streaks in your hair.”

“I prefer wigs,” said Gilda, thinking that her mother would ground her for several weeks if she came home with bleached hair. “That way, I’m not stuck with a single look.”

“Nobody wears wigs.”

“By senior year, we’ll all be wearing wigs. They’re due for a comeback.” Gilda couldn’t understand why people who could afford high- quality wigs didn’t seize the opportunity to wear them more often. She herself owned several costume wigs that she sometimes used for disguises.

Tiara covered her short hair with her hands and scrutinized her face in the mirror. “How do you think I’d look with long, platinum-blond hair?”

“Fantastic, of course. Who
wouldn’t
look amazing with long platinum hair?”

Tiara grinned. “Wouldn’t it be awesome if we could go to school with different hair every day of the week?”

“There would be no such thing as a bad hair day.”

“Gilda,” said Tiara, impulsively grabbing Gilda by the shoulders, “we have to start this wig trend right away!”

“Okay. But what about the school uniform?”

Tiara swatted the air dismissively. “McCracken’s big secret is that she needs every bit of our money to keep her in pink fingernail polish. So as long as your parents are paying your sky-high tuition, believe me, there’s no way she’ll kick you out of school for wearing a wig. You might get a detention, but that’s about it.”

“Well, I’m on scholarship, so I guess I’m not adding much to Mrs. McCracken’s fingernail polish budget.”

“Oh.”

Gilda noticed that something in Tiara’s face changed. It was a momentary flinch, a tiny raising of the eyebrows, as if she now regarded Gilda in a different light and placed her in a new mental category—a category labeled “Girls on Scholarship.”

Gilda felt irritated to sense evidence of a secret snobbery lurking beneath Tiara’s rebellious exterior. She also realized Tiara was steering her psychic investigation off track. “Listen, Tiara, I have to be home soon, so do you want to try a seance or not?”

“How do we do it?”

Gilda thought for a moment. “It helps to have an object that has some personal connection with the spirit, and I usually use a Ouija board, too. We can try using this mirror, since this is where you saw the image of the ghost’s face.”

Gilda sat on the floor next to the mirror. “Now you sit across from me here and place your fingers on the mirror like this. The most important thing is to take the seance seriously, and to concentrate.”

Tiara sat down, carefully placing her empty wineglass on the floor.

“Now we both close our eyes and focus.”

The girls waited for a moment, listening to the silence of the house.

“We sense a troubled spirit here in this house,” said Gilda. “Oh, spirit, if you are here with us, please make your presence known.”

Gilda’s heart beat faster as she sensed the surface of the mirror vibrating beneath her fingers. Then, without warning, a shrill shriek exploded into a brittle cascade of shattering glass.

Gilda opened her eyes to find Tiara staring with a strangely enthralled expression at blood dripping from a gash on her finger. Both the mirror and Tiara’s wineglass were broken.

INVESTIGATION STATUS:

Clear evidence of a violent poltergeist in Tiara’s house. Tiara believes that she’s haunted by Dolores Lambert because she
shouted Dolores’s name on the bridge over Mermaid Lake. (By this logic, I should also be expecting a visit from Dolores’s ghost!)

There’s just one problem with the evidence: when we conducted the séance, I didn’t actually see Tiara’s glass pick itself off the floor and hurl itself at the mirror, so I suppose it’s possible that Tiara threw it, then just acted surprised. But what about the tomatoes splattered all over the painting of her mom? Tiara wouldn’t have had time to do that herself unless she did it in the morning, before she went to school. And wouldn’t someone in the house have noticed by the time she got home?

Wearing her pajamas, Gilda turned from her typewriter to her
Master Psychic’s Handbook
. She flipped through the dog-eared pages until she found a chapter on “Poltergeists”: