Peeled (12 page)

“When?” I demanded.

“This morning.”

“So there wasn’t a murder?” Elizabeth asked.

“No.” Darrell laughed. “Piedmont is going to have to change his story.”

“He’s good at that, though,” T.R. said.

“Get
ready
,” Baker warned, walking in the door. “Piedmont’s invested a lot of ink in a murder. He’s going to hit back hard.”

Baker was right.
The Bee
came roaring into the newsstands.

The front-page article talked about how seeing a terrifying ghost could cause a heart attack in just about anybody. There was an “interview” with a cardiac specialist who said that he had seen several patients who’d had heart attacks due to paranormal sightings.

Madame Zobek’s column took up all of page three.

“I, myself,” she wrote, “have almost been propelled into shock by the things I have seen in the other world. It is only because of my experience and my ability to work with these dark forces that I am here with you today and able to offer my assistance. We must not look the other way, for there are those who do not understand the power of these close encounters. Clearly, the ghost of Clarence Ludlow is a dangerous presence…”

That sent Baker Polton into orbit, which isn’t easy in a closet-sized room. He threw
The Bee
on the floor and hollered, “What are we about at this paper?”

T.R., Lev, Tanisha, Elizabeth, and I looked to Darrell.

“News?” Darrell replied hopefully.

“For whom?” Baker yelled.

“Um, the high school?”

“Why?”

“Well, because…” Darrell’s eyes darted around the windowless office. “We’re in high school?”

“We’ve got a bozo who likes rubbing fear and lies in people’s faces. He’s the only media source in town except us. Who are we writing for?”

Elizabeth waved her hand emotionally. “The American people!”

Baker clasped his brow. “Let’s narrow that.”

Darrell stood. “We’re writing for the community.”

“And they deserve the facts,” Baker warned. “Don’t ever forget it.”

Late afternoon shadows crept across the Ludlow lawn. Several crows caw-cawed from a gnarled crab apple tree in the front yard. It had died long ago but still stood, leafless and hollow. In apple country, a dead, fruitless tree makes people nervous. We don’t want to look at a tree that can’t produce.

Everything we work for comes under one heading: being fruitful.

This house wasn’t producing much except fear.

A squirrel crawled across the iron fence, looked at the house, and ran the other way.

A strange assortment of stones, beer cans, and candles was piled on the Ludlow front porch.

A few cars drove slowly down the street with their windows up.

A woman in a long black dress stood by the Ludlow gate, swaying back and forth.

“Hi.”

I jumped.

“Sorry, Hildy.” It was Zack. He was wearing a brown turtleneck and jeans. He looked good. I’d asked him to meet me there.

“So,” he said, “what are we doing?”

“I’m trying to figure something out and I thought you could help me. I want to know how a scientist would prove or deny all the stories surrounding this house.”

He thought about that. “Well, like reporters, scientists ask questions. We call it scientific inquiry. So in this case the first question might be: Is there a ghost making the Ludlow house a dangerous place? If so, then how do we prove that?”

“Eyewitnesses…,” I mentioned.

“If they’re reliable and what they’ve seen can be proved.”

The swaying woman by the gate was singing now. She didn’t shout
reliable.

Pinky Sandusky and two old women walked up to us wearing red sweatshirts that read
ELDERS
AGAINST
EVIL
. I tried not to laugh.

“Keep talking, young man,” Pinky ordered.

Zack hid a smile. “People can say they’ve seen all kinds of things—sixteen planets, flying pigs, you name it. But the basis of science is that the universe has an order to it. Scientists try to find patterns that will answer questions and confirm or deny a theory.”

“And that means what for Farnsworth Road?” another of the Elders Against Evil demanded.

Zack folded his arms. “It means there needs to be further observation and documentation for any claim about a ghost to be taken seriously.”

“How do we get that?” Pinky demanded.

“I guess someone needs to watch the house day and night and record what they see,” Zack explained.

“That sounds like a big job,” Pinky observed.

“It would be, yes.”

“Not a job for a pushover,” Pinky added.

“A pushover couldn’t begin to handle this,” Zack agreed.

The Elders Against Evil folded their arms and nodded.

Suddenly, the sky went dark and a strong wind blew down the street. A dead tree branch from the Ludlow yard crashed to the ground.

The elders looked at each other. I grabbed Zack’s arm.

“That’s a pattern,” Pinky told him. “Branches falling. What do you call
that
?”

“Gravity,” Zack offered.

She considered that, then pointed to the pile of rocks and candles on the porch. “We’ve got some visitors making this property their shrine. We’ve got ghost hunters prowling the street; that Zobek woman floating around like she’s a tour guide.” Pinky turned to the elders. “Well, girls, we’ve been looking for a community project.”

“This beats the beans out of quilting,” another elder said.

Pinky shouted, “Are we going to take this street back or what?”

“Let’s do it!” They clapped their hands like football players leaving a huddle and headed toward her house, real slow.

I watched the swaying woman get in her car and drive away. That left Zack and me alone.

Honestly, I wanted to leave, too. I’ve never been a fan of dark, encroaching shadows.

Finally Zack said, “Hildy, I need to tell you something.”

“What?”

He cleared his throat. “I’ve never said this to a girl before.”

I bit my lip, waiting.

“Well…” He looked down. “I’m not sure how to say
this.” He took a deep breath and announced, “I really like fighting evil with you.”

He went back to watching the house.

A few crows squawked from the dead tree.

“I like fighting evil with you, too,” I actually muttered.

Collectively, the staff of
The Core
was gagging at
The Bee
’s latest edition.

Zack had come into room 67B while we were looking at Tanisha’s spooky photo of three weird people getting out of a van in front of the Ludlow house—the van had
GHOST
CHASERS
painted on the side.

“Have any of you seen a ghost?” Zack asked us.

That didn’t seem like a question he’d ask, although trying to figure him out was a mystery.

“Because if all the ghost sightings are real,” he continued,
“don’t you think at least one of us would have seen one or known someone who did?”

“Up fifty percent means half the town would have seen one,” Lev challenged.

“The percentage makes it sound like that,” Zack agreed, “but you’ve got to ask, fifty percent up from what? If four people said they saw a ghost, a fifty-percent increase would mean only two more people saw one. That’s the trick. Fearmongers do it all the time.”

Lev was silent as Baker wrote
FEARMONGERS
on the whiteboard.

Elizabeth raised her hand. “What’s a monger?”

“One who sells something,” Baker offered. “A fishmonger sells fish. A fearmonger—”

“Sells fear,” Elizabeth whispered.

Baker circled
FEARMONGERS
. “This is a big thing to fight.”

“We need our own data,” Zack insisted.

Baker pointed at him. “Keep talking.”

“I think we need to test what they say.”

“Do you know how to do that?” Darrell asked him.

Hands in his pockets, Zack said, “Yeah.”

Darrell thought about that. “Look, Zack, would you like to work on the paper? We could really use someone like you.”

Zack shook his head. “I’m not a good writer.”

“Neither am I, but they let me write,” Elizabeth offered.

“You could be the research manager,” Baker suggested.

“I think I’d rather just help,” Zack muttered. He looked at me when he said it.

Darrell walked toward Zack and stuck out his hand. “It’s settled then. We need help. Welcome to
The Core.”

WHAT HAVE YOU SEEN?
PLEASE TAKE PART IN
A SPECIAL
CORE
SURVEY

Posters went up all over the school.
E-mail us, call us, stop us in the hall.
It wasn’t easy coming up with the questions. Zack said we had to ask ones that would give us direct answers.

“How,” Baker Polton asked, “can you tell if a source is reliable?”

Zack, Lev, T.R., Tanisha, Darrell, Elizabeth, and I looked at each other.

We were sitting in the back room at Minska’s, at the big round table, feeling like prisoners who had been set free. Baker had made an executive decision. We were having a few staff lunches off-site, away from
that room.

“It’s someone who’s trustworthy?” I offered.

Baker took a bite of his grilled panini sandwich. “But how do you know someone is trustworthy?”

I glanced at Lev, who was checking his phone messages, not paying attention.

“By what they do?” I asked.

T.R. added, “By what they say?”

Baker sat there chewing. “Are you with us, Radner, or would you like to leave?”

“Sorry.” Lev put his phone away.

“With any source, you have to ask yourself—would this person be making up a story to impress people?”

I went through my list in my head. Missy was the only questionable one.

“Now, how do you get your reliable sources to go on the record?”

Elizabeth raised her hand. “We say how important it is for responsible people to come forward during this time when there’s so much happening that could be false.”

Baker was impressed. “Very good. But what if that doesn’t work?”

No one answered.

Baker sipped his latte. “Always remember, people change. One day they might not talk, the next day they might. That’s why you keep going back, asking questions. I think a good approach could be to ask: What do you think of the article in
The Bee
? What do you wish people in town understood about what’s going on? If you get answers, your follow-up is what?”

“‘It would help the town if you’d go on the record,’” I said.

“Now you’re thinking.” He almost looked happy.

Baker walked over to the wall and studied a picture of Pope John Paul II addressing the crowds in Poland.

“I remember this day,” he told us. “I was just a kid. My mother’s family is half Polish. My grandmother told me the pope’s words sparked the revolution. You know what he said?” He read from the plaque. “‘The future of Poland will depend on how many people are mature enough to be nonconformists.’ Let me tell you something. The future of the world still rests on that.”

Minska stood in the doorway. “I was there when he
spoke. I’d never seen so many people—all of us hungry for change. My father told me, ‘Today our new history begins.’”

“This is quite a place you’ve got here,” Baker said.