Rules for Ghosting (11 page)

The Liberator had drifted away from the books and now hovered in front of an ornate standing lamp, and at first Dahlia thought the lamp had been turned on. But no: a gentle core of light was gathering inside Mrs. Tibbs, growing and filling her all the way up in bright white light.

“Mrs. Tibbs,” Dahlia breathed. “You're like some kind of star! It's so beautiful! Can I … can I do that too?”

“Of course,” said Mrs. Tibbs. “It's simply a matter of drawing on the hidden particles inside matter, and turning them around to display their unseen core.”

“Uh …” Dahlia hadn't caught any of that.

“Here,” said Mrs. Tibbs, grabbing Dahlia's hand in her own. It was warm as well as bright, and as their fingers connected, the yellow-white glow slid into Dahlia's hand and up her wrist. And she understood—she felt the particles of darkness all around her, saw the pinpricks of light at their core, and could see how to tease out the buried strains of light, pulling them all the way inside her until she too was glowing like a miniature furnace.

“I want to rocket through the sky like a shooting star!” she crowed. “But not right now. Thank you for teaching me this, Mrs. Tibbs—it's positively amazing.” In the light of their two glowing bodies, Dahlia turned all the way around and surveyed the library, sweeping her eyes over the shelves. Could there be something in here? Some clue to her past?

She hadn't spent much time in this room as a ghost, and her memories from early childhood didn't fit here at all. But something about the room still felt somehow familiar. Closing her eyes, Dahlia let her body tell her where to move, let herself drift back to a time when she had been floor-bound and needed to walk to get anywhere. She swept across the floor and when she opened her eyes she was standing in front of a small, friendly-looking bookshelf. Dusty, faded volumes cluttered the low shelf, and Dahlia's eyes passed over the titles:
Jack
and Jill. Pippi Longstocking. Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown
. She used to read these. These were her books. This was her shelf.

She crouched down and ran her fingers over the spines, but after the first thrill of excitement, she felt nothing. There were no tingles, no tug of energy. Not even a nasty-smell feeling, like she'd felt from that closed-up attic room. Nothing. Just dead pages, bits of her old life that had been left here to fall apart in dust and ruin.

Dahlia gathered herself up. “Let's go.”

But Mrs. Tibbs was on the other side of the room, drifting in a zigzag pattern along the far bookshelf wall. “Quite an interesting selection,” she observed. She waved energetically. “This whole wall here—nothing but medical books! Every topic you can imagine, but a good deal on depression, dementia, mental illness, and so on. I have to say, it's quite unusual to find such a dense collection in an average person's home. Perhaps there was a doctor in the family?”

Dahlia frowned. “I don't think so. My mother wasn't, anyway. And I don't think my father—I don't think—” Something jarred her. Her father? She had hardly thought of him for decades, though she wasn't exactly certain why. Now that it came to it, she could remember next to nothing about him. Just a flash of beard, light curly hair … and nothing else. Except—“He was not a doctor.” She knew that positively. “He did something with cars, or travel. That's all I can remember.”

Mrs. Tibbs turned away, and Dahlia sighed. “I'm afraid this is another dead end.” She moved toward the door, and
then let out a little cry. There on a small coffee table was a huge, black-leather-covered volume. It lay open with a thin red ribbon marking the page. Opaque dust lay heavily over the surface, but not nearly so much dust as Dahlia had seen on the far side of the room. This table and chair and this book had seen regular use—not recent, but not too long ago, either.

“She used to sit here sometimes and read. It's a Bible,” Dahlia said slowly, remembering. Then her eyes lit up. “A
family
Bible! I heard her say so. I know this.” Concentrating hard, she brushed a layer of dust off the open pages. The dust was light and came off easily, gusting up into the air and glinting in her body's glow like a cloud of late-afternoon fireflies. But try as Dahlia might, she couldn't get the pages to turn. They were stiff and crinkly and settled in place, and the combined effort of trying to make Contact while not ripping them clear out of the book tied her hands up in knots. Finally she groaned in frustration and flopped over onto the nearby armchair. And fell through it to the floor.

By the time she'd picked herself out of the upholstery, Mrs. Tibbs had flipped the book open to its title page. Dahlia came to hang over Mrs. Tibbs's shoulder as the older ghost turned several pages, coming at last to a carefully written family tree. It began in the mid-eighteen hundreds with Archibald Silverton, who married Margaret Lawrence. They had one daughter, Laura, who died in her teens, and two sons, both of whom married and carried on the Silverton name. The younger son had a daughter and died in middle age, along with his wife.
The elder son, Archibald Silverton, Jr., had two daughters and, very late in life, a young son.

The lists went on like this for a number of pages until the very last one, which bore only the words:

Reginald Silverton + Ernestine Clemments
Dahlia Silverton

None of these three names bore any dates—neither for birth nor death. But the ink on Dahlia's name was wavery, as though several small wet drops had splashed on it shortly after it was written. As though someone had sat in this very chair, perhaps, aching for a daughter who was no more.

“But I'm still here,” Dahlia whispered, and something inside tightened into a knot and squeezed. “I'm still here, and where have all the rest of you gone?” She stayed motionless for a few minutes, head lowered, chest heaving, until she felt a warm touch on her shoulders. She tilted her head and leaned in to Mrs. Tibbs's hug. Then she lifted her shoulders in determination. “Let's go,” she said quietly. “There's nothing more to see here.”

They were silent as they drifted up through the ceiling and emerged on the third floor. The thud of feet announced the Day family stampeding down for dinner—which, based on the tiny smell-bubbles expiring through the air, seemed like
an especially fragrant beef stew—and the two ghosts emerged in the portrait room. Except … it was a little different from the last time Dahlia had been here.

“Oh, my lucky stars!” she exclaimed. The heirloom paintings still lined the walls, but all the end tables and decorative knickknacks had been pushed to one end. The other end was entirely filled by a giant blue-and-green-striped circus tent. It was half-collapsed but easily large enough, once assembled, to comfortably fit several adults. Crates of equipment and boxes of machinery cluttered the floor, and scattered here and there—actually placed in neat piles all along the center of the floor, Dahlia now saw—were dozens of small, hand-sized puppets. Circus performers. Of course. She'd seen Mr. Day hard at work, but hadn't realized this was the room he'd taken over. Nor that he had done it so completely. And colorfully.

“At least he's left the walls untouched,” Dahlia said, turning away from the colorful wreckage and waving her hand at the peevish-looking faces that lined the walls. “Well, here you have my relatives! Some of them, anyway.” There were twelve portraits down one side, eleven down the other, and the original Lord and Lady Silverton in a gilded place of honor at the non-circus end. Her mother's portrait was especially lovely, with Ernestine Silverton looking about eighteen years old and glowing with apple-cheeked health and beauty. For the first time it occurred to Dahlia to wonder why there was no portrait of her father in this room. Or of her, for that matter.
And at that moment she registered something she hadn't ever noticed before.

“Right here,” she whispered. There was one blank spot on the side of the wall that held just eleven portraits—one perfectly canvas-sized blank spot. The kind of place where a painting might have once hung and been removed, with nothing left in its place. “An empty spot, just like me.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she knew she couldn't handle another moment like the one she'd just had in the library. She squeezed her hands tightly, focusing all her energy on tamping down her emotion. She
would not cry
.

Under her foot, something squeaked.

Dahlia jumped. An evil little pink puppet face stared up at her, grinning a manic red-painted grin. Dahlia leaped three feet and fell halfway into a nearby portrait before she collected herself and let out a low groan. “The Days are taking over this house, Mrs. Tibbs, and all I've got to show for my clues are lists of names and a blank spot for a painting. Sometimes I think I'm going to be stuck in this house for good. Or until old Wiley gets me, anyway.” She wasn't usually so gloomy, but to search all day and find practically nothing—nothing but sad, lonely spots, and tear-stained family trees—made her feel lower than a fruit fly.

Just then, there was a scuffle at the door. “Speak of the devil,” muttered Mrs. Tibbs as Wiley burst in, nose aquiver, eyes darting from side to side.

“Come on, my pretties,” he crooned, like the ghosts might be lured over to him by the sweetness of his song.

Dahlia narrowed her eyes as her emotions did a quick
zing
, sharpening from sadness to white-hot anger to a deep sense of determination. Fruit fly, huh? Well, she still had some buzz left in her. “Let's skedaddle,” she said. “Maybe there's something to find in this old house and maybe there isn't, but I'm not going to give myself up to this joker.”

And with that she zipped off, Mrs. Tibbs trailing in her wake.

In the few days since the sunroom incident, Oliver had been puzzling over what to do about Rank Wiley. With Poppy's grudging help, Oliver had filled out the stupid Normalcy Questionnaire. There was nothing too strange on there—well, aside from the fact that a Normalcy Questionnaire even
existed
—but it came down to this: Mr. Rutabartle really,
really
wanted everything in Silverton Manor to be “normal.” He wanted the flowerbeds to look like normal flowerbeds. He wanted the children to run and skip and play like normal children.
Good luck with that
, Oliver thought, watching Joe and Junie zip past wearing giant brightly decorated paper bags, singing a nursery rhyme in pig latin.

Once the questionnaire was out of the way, Oliver had tried to corner his parents about Wiley, but they had proved even more resistant than expected. He'd managed to separate Mom from her to-do list three separate times, but each
attempted explanation left him feeling more foolish than the last. Mom's reactions went from long-suffering patience to exasperation to curt dismissal. Yesterday he'd finally managed to drag her over to confront Wiley, and had found the man taking apart a pipe in the downstairs bathroom.

“Making very good headway here, as you can see,” he'd stammered out with a big cheesy grin upon seeing Mom.

Oliver knew there had to be more to it—Wiley's Spectrometer was right there on the floor next to him. But Mom had just rolled her eyes and started listing online stores that sold coordinating bathroom sets. And Oliver had realized that he was on his own.

So now he was back to the original plan: shadow the ghosterminator, suss out all his cameras and whatever other secrets he might be hiding, and then figure out how to upset his evil shenanigans and send him running.

Or something like that.

Oliver peered around the corner and up the stairs. Above him, a board squeaked as Wiley moved along the upper landing. Oliver skidded out from his hiding spot and shot up the stairs on the ghosterminator's trail. He heard the opening of a door, and footsteps—and quite suddenly, his mother's voice, loud and businesslike.

“There you are again, Mr. Wiley. How are things coming along today with the maintenance and updates?”

Oliver ducked into an alcove and leaned one eye around the edge to see what was going on. Wiley stood halfway into
the portrait room, his arms full of ghosterminating equipment shoved guiltily behind him. Mom had her hands on her hips.

“Erm, yes,” Wiley said, a little too quickly but then making a good recovery. “The downstairs bathroom is just as good as new. For the rest, I've been working on, er, compiling a full assessment. I expect I'll soon have to make a trip into town to collect some materials—and, yes, this room seems already to be well taken care of. Overall, things are shaping up.”

Mom narrowed her eyes, and Oliver's heart leaped. At last! She was going to see Wiley was a useless junk collector and kick him right down the front steps. But then Mom seemed to relax. “Good, I'm glad to hear it. For now, though, I want you to set aside the assessment work. I've already got workers tending to the outside of the house. Mr. Rutabartle left specific instructions. I believe you said something about heating systems when you first arrived?”