The Boys Return (5 page)

“Diary?” he asked innocently.

“The one about Annabelle. I'm dying to see it.”

“Oh. Yeah, I've got it, but I thought maybe we could help Eddie practice,” Tony said.

But Caroline and Eddie had gathered around too, and Caroline said, “We can do that later. I'd rather see the page.”

“We didn't mean to interrupt your practice, Eddie,” Steve said politely. “Man, that last hit was a home run for sure.”

“Just show us the page!” Eddie said impatiently.

“What page? What are you talking about?” asked Peter, worming his way into the middle of the circle.

Tony motioned toward the school. “Let's go sit on the steps and I'll tell you.”

The Malloy sisters and the Hatfords and the Bensons went over to the steps, where Tony pulled the yellowed paper out of his jacket pocket. He handled it gently, unfolding it slowly, and the paper made a dry, crackling sound. Little bits of paper crumbled in his hand.

“Look how
old
it is!” Caroline breathed.

“Okay. Two years ago,” Tony began, “an electrician was rewiring our house, and he had to take out a panel in the wall of my room—Caroline's room now—to get the wires through. And this is what I found when I looked inside. It looks like a page from a diary about a girl named Annabelle who lived in our house on Island Avenue, and who drowned in the river on March 22, 1867. It was written by her sister, Kathleen.” And then Tony began to read.

There was not a sound from anyone. Peter and Doug sat with their mouths hanging open. And when Tony got to the line, “… she will come again in the night for me, to take me with her,” Caroline gave a little shriek.

“So? That was a long time ago, Tony,” Eddie said.

“I know. That's what I try to tell myself. But to tell you the truth, I wasn't too sad to leave that house and move to Georgia.”

“Why?” asked Beth. “Are you trying to tell us you've seen Annabelle's ghost wandering the halls at night?”

“Yeah, Tony! We never saw any ghost!” said Steve, pretending to take the girls' side.

“Neither did we!” said Danny, going along with it.

“No, I didn't see anything either,” said Tony, his face serious. “I didn't even
know
about the page from the diary until two years ago. But all the time we lived in that house, I was waked up once a year by a—a tapping sound in the wall. I didn't think anything of it until I found that page from the diary and read about the sisters' tapping out rhythms of songs on the wall. And it was only last year I noticed that it happened on the same day every year. Last year, for the first time, I felt a chill in the room when the tapping began, as though someone was there with me. And then I felt … it felt like cold fingers stroking my forehead.”

Caroline whimpered.

“It comes the same day every year?” asked Beth. “What day is that?”

“March twenty-second,” Tony told her.

“March twenty-second?” Caroline cried in terror. “That's… that's…!”

“Tuesday!” they all said together.

Six
March Twenty-second

“
I
can't believe how nice they are!” Beth said when the girls went home later.

“I can't believe that the girl who wrote the diary slept in
my
room!” said Caroline.

“
I
can't believe it really happened,” said Eddie.

Beth turned on her suddenly. “Why are you always such a spoilsport? You always have to find fault with everything!”

Eddie was surprised at the outburst. “It's just that you and Caroline are ready to believe anything, even after the Bensons got in our rooms and marked up our wallpaper. I don't want you to be disappointed.”

“Well, I
like
believing in ghosts and things!” said Beth. “I
want
them to be true. It's a great, spooky story! Why
couldn't
it have happened?”

“Let's go in Caroline's room and see,” Eddie told her as they started up the stairs.

There was nothing much to see, of course, except the wall with the strip of china doll wallpaper. Every doll and every teddy bear had a big black mustache. Eddie started at one side of the doorway, and—putting the palms of her hands against the wall—walked slowly around the room, moving her arms up and down as though she were making snow angels. She was feeling for cracks or lumps or bumps beneath the wall-paper.

When she had gone all the way around the room and was nearing the doorway again, she suddenly stopped.

“I feel something,” she said.

Caroline and Beth hurried over, and Eddie ran one finger down the wall. “Right here,” she said.

Caroline felt where Eddie was pointing. There was a definite ridge beneath the wallpaper. As Caroline followed it with her fingers, she found she was tracing a square.

“Just like Tony said!” Beth told them. “It's right by the light switch. He said they removed a panel from the wall, and that's where he found the page from the diary, right behind it.”

Eddie almost looked convinced. “Well, I suppose it
could
have happened. It doesn't mean the house is haunted, though, just because Tony found a page out of a diary.”

“But what about the tapping sounds, Eddie? And
always on March twenty-second?” Caroline said. Suddenly she grabbed Beth's arm on one side of her and Eddie's on the other. “Sleep with me on Tuesday!” she begged.

“All right,” Eddie agreed. “And if we hear tapping…”At this point Eddie tapped three times on the wall. “… and footsteps…”Eddie stomped her feet three times.

“… and a voice saying, ‘I'll take you home again, Kathleen…,'” said Beth in her spookiest voice.

“…we'll say, ‘Kathleen's not here, but you can have Caroline!' ” finished Eddie. And all three burst out laughing.

The boys didn't show up at the baseball diamond at all on Monday, and on Tuesday it began to rain, so the girls didn't go either.

“I wonder what the guys are doing?” Eddie mused, looking bored as she sat by the window.

“I never thought I'd hear that coming from
you,
Eddie!” Beth told her. “The great Edith Ann, missing the
Hatfords
?”

The thing of it was, Caroline realized, the more the boys ignored them—politely, of course—the more her sisters wanted to see them.

“I didn't say I
missed
them. Especially not the Hatfords. I just wondered what they could be doing with the Bensons that's so much fun,” Eddie said.

“Probably sitting inside watching TV,” said Caroline.

After dinner Beth suggested they go downtown and hang around Oldakers' Bookstore. Everyone liked to go there—sit and read and maybe buy a pop from the little café on one side of the store. If the boys weren't there, they surely would be at the drugstore.

“Stay together, now!” Mrs. Malloy called out as the girls left the house. “I'd feel better if you'd put Caroline between you, and I want you home before eight. In fact, I'd feel a whole lot better if the Hatfords and Bensons were with you. The more kids in a crowd, the better, till that cougar is caught.”

“Don't worry,” said Eddie. “I've got my hiking boots on. A cougar tries to get Caroline, I'll kick him in the teeth.”

They went down the road to the bridge and sure enough, when they were a block away from the bookstore, they saw the nine boys trooping inside.

“Let's act surprised to see them,” Beth cautioned. “We certainly don't want them to think we came
looking
for them.”

“We especially don't want them to think we
like
them!” said Eddie.

“But we
are
looking for them, and you
do
like them!” Caroline protested. “Why can't we just act real for a change?”

“Because that's part of the fun, and because we'd never hear the end of it,” said Eddie.

The girls walked casually into the bookstore, looking up, looking down, and looking sideways—anywhere
but straight ahead where the Hatfords and Bensons were gathered around the paperback rack, looking for new books by Jerry Spinelli.

Caroline played her part so well—she pretended to be absorbed in the picture books along one wall—that she stumbled over Wally's feet and went sprawling.

“Are you hurt?” called Mike Oldaker, coming around from behind the counter to help her to her feet.

But Caroline was only conscious of the fact that Danny Benson was helping her up. And right at that moment, Danny Benson seemed to be the most handsome, polite, strong, attractive, wonderful boy in the whole world.

“I'm perfectly fine,” she said once she was standing again.

“Well, well, we didn't know you were here!” Eddie said to Steve Benson. “The decorators!”

“Us?”
laughed Steve. “Your rooms, you mean? You're the ones who started it!”

But Beth only had eyes for Tony, and was smiling at him with so silly a grin that Eddie had to poke her several times to make her stop staring.

They went to the back of the store—the “tent,” they called it, because Mike Oldaker had put up a canopy and there were places to sit and read beneath it.

But Caroline didn't want to read. “We found it!” she told them.

“Found what?” asked Jake.

“The panel you were talking about, Tony!” Beth said hurriedly.

“I felt along the wall until I found a ridge under the wallpaper, and just like you said, there was the shape of a panel—about two feet square—under the light switch,” Eddie told them.

“That's where it was,” said Tony. “I was there when the electrician took it out. He propped it against the wall and went back outside to get more tools. I was just poking my head inside the wall, seeing what I could see—spiders and sawdust and stuff—and when I looked down, I saw that piece of paper. I haven't told anyone else except us.”

“Wow!” said Peter and Doug together.

Caroline laughed excitedly. “Well, just in case there
is
a ghost, just in case Annabelle
does
come looking for the sister who didn't save her, Eddie and Beth are going to sleep in my room with me tonight.”

“Good idea,” said Steve. “But I still think Tony may have been imagining things.”

“We'll see,” said Beth. “We'll just see!”

Caroline could hardly wait until bedtime, with Eddie on one side of her and Beth on the other, listening for Annabelle's footsteps in the night. Maybe she could use
this
for her school assignment. But better yet, if she ever became a good actress—if she ever saw
CAROLINE LENORE MALLOY
in lights on Broadway, and had to play the part of a woman terrified half out of
her mind by a ghost—then this would be a wonderful experience for her. She would at last know what real live terror felt like.

“We're going to sleep with Caroline,” Beth told their mother at ten that evening.

“In that small bed? It's not even big enough for two, much less three!” said Mrs. Malloy.

“We just want to see if we can do it,” Beth said. “We may go camping this summer, and we want to see if we could all fit in one small pup tent.”

“A tent, yes. At least you can't fall out of a tent,” said their mother. “But it's spring vacation. Do whatever you like.”

The girls made cinnamon toast and cocoa and carried it up to Caroline's bedroom. They sat on the bed, having their snack and looking through old comic books, then took turns painting each other's finger-nails and toenails. After that they recited all the poems they knew, and finally ended up singing songs in three-part harmony.

“Just like Annabelle and her sister used to do. They tapped out the rhythm on their walls,” said Eddie.

“Let's do it!” said Caroline.

“No!” said Beth. “We'd bring the ghost here in a minute!”

At last they lay down. They could hardly stop laughing because either Beth or Eddie always seemed to be falling off the edge of the bed. But finally they braced themselves against Caroline. First Beth
dropped off to sleep, then Eddie, leaving Caroline squeezed like a sardine in the middle.

The night ticked on. The room was very dark. It was still raining lightly outside. From far off, Caroline could hear the night sounds—a dog barking, a car going along the road—but mostly it was still. Dark and still, with only the sound of rain.

Her legs began to grow heavy, then her arms, and she started to feel as though she were floating. She didn't know what time it was, but she guessed about eleven. Maybe even midnight.

Her eyes closed against the dark and she felt warm and snug and protected with her sisters on either side of her.

Suddenly…
Tap, tappity, tap, tap.

Caroline's eyes opened, but she saw only blackness. Had she heard something or only imagined it?

Tap, tap… tappity-tap…tap, tap, tap.

Her heart beat so hard it hurt.

“B-B-Beth!” she whispered, but almost no sound came out.

Try to remember how it feels to be so scared!
she told herself, but it didn't work.

“Eddie!” she cried, giving her sister a nudge. “Listen!”

“Huh?” mumbled Eddie in a husky voice, and Caroline felt her rise up on one elbow.

“Hear it?” Caroline whispered.