The Golden Ghost (3 page)

She glanced over her shoulder at the mill. Then she looked up and down the street.

Why was this house unlocked?

What—or who—was waiting inside?

Not a ghost, surely. Ghosts wouldn’t need to unlock doors. At least the ghosts you read about in stories wouldn’t.

Finally, standing on the empty porch on the empty street by herself grew more scary than being inside with Todd. So Delsie stepped through the doorway, too.

The house was … well, it was just a house. There was even a bit of furniture.

Nothing fancy, that was for sure. A sagging couch stood along one wall. It looked like a leftover from a garage sale. The “coffee table” in front of the couch was a piece of plywood with cement blocks for legs. Stuffing poked out of the arms of a big blue easy chair.

There was a small television set, the kind with rabbit ears on top. Delsie didn’t think those even worked anymore.

But then maybe ghosts didn’t need antennae to watch TV.

She shuddered. She had to stop all this ghost stuff.

And where was Todd, anyway?

Just as she asked herself the question, he appeared in the doorway of one of the side rooms, probably a bedroom.

“It’s almost like somebody really lives here,” she whispered. She hadn’t meant to whisper. It was the way her words came out.

“Yeah,” Todd said. He was whispering, too.

He didn’t pause, though. He moved on to the next room. Delsie followed. This was the kitchen. And if the first room had seemed odd, the kitchen was even stranger.

There was a single chair and a rickety table. The table was set. It was actually set
with a spoon and a bowl and a mug. The mug looked as though it had once had coffee in it. Brown sludge lined the bottom.

The bowl was crusty. Old oatmeal? Did ghosts eat oatmeal?

But she was being silly.

This wasn’t a ghost house. A real person lived here. And that was probably worse.

They had walked into a real person’s house. If they got caught, whoever lived here wasn’t going to be thinking about Goldilocks. He was going to be thinking about calling the police!

The same thought must have come to Todd at the same instant, because he said, “Come on,” exactly the way he had earlier. Only this time he was heading out the door.

Delsie followed.

At least she started to follow, but after a step or two, something stopped her. She had no idea what it was. Whatever it was bumped softly against her leg, held her in place.

It might have been Bug. It seemed as silky and soft as Bug. She automatically looked
down so she wouldn’t step on the little dog. How had he gotten here? Hadn’t they left him behind in Todd’s yard with the gate bolted?

But what she saw wasn’t Bug. It was … nothing.

Whatever had brushed against her had been much larger than Bug, anyway. It had reached nearly to the top of her thigh.

She looked around again. Again she saw nothing except a plain linoleum floor, old and stained and dirty. There was the chair and the table with the crusty bowl and the spoon and the mug. There was the sludge of leftover coffee in the bottom of the mug.

Delsie reached down and around her on every side, feeling for whatever had stopped her.

Nothing.

And yet she could have sworn that something had bumped into her.

“Come on, Delsie,” Todd called from the porch. “Are you nuts? Somebody lives here. Breaking and entering. That’s what they call it when you go into somebody’s house without permission.”

Delsie started for the door.

After a few steps, she stopped again. She knew Todd was right. They didn’t belong in here. But …

But what?

She didn’t know, except that it had been something. Something silky and just about thigh-high had bumped into her.

She looked around at the sagging couch, the plywood table, the out-of-date TV. Then she gave herself a shake and ran out the door.

Todd waited on the cracked sidewalk. He didn’t say anything when she reached him. He just started jogging toward their bikes.

She followed.

Delsie kept looking back, though. She couldn’t help it.

The big dog followed the children along the empty street
.

Her owner had gone off again. Sometimes she followed him when he left. Sometimes she didn’t. It didn’t seem to make much difference either way. He never saw her any longer
.

These children, though, were a different story. Especially the girl. The golden dog was almost certain the girl had seen her. Or at least she had come close to seeing her
.

That seeing—that near seeing—drew the big dog like a magnet
.

When the children rode off in the same direction her owner had gone earlier, she paused for a moment, considering. If she followed, if she at least went a short distance in that direction, she might find him
.

Her owner
.

Or the girl
.

Either one would do
.

Her plumed tail lifting, the golden dog set off after the bikes
.

inner at Delsie’s house was chicken salad. It was chicken salad with raisins in it. Delsie liked chicken salad well enough, but she hated raisins.

When she was a little kid, she’d tried to throw away a whole carton of raisins from the grocery storeroom. Her plan had been to haul them to the woods behind the store and hide them. She’d figured that if the store
ran out of raisins, her mother would have to quit putting them into everything.

Her dad had caught her halfway across the backyard, tugging on the heavy box. He’d thought it was funny. He’d called her the raisin thief.

Even now, when he looked at the pile of raisins on the edge of her plate, he said, “So what kind of a day has our raisin thief had?” His voice came out brightly cheerful, the way it always did when he tried to be funny.

“Fine,” Delsie said. She extracted another raisin. Then, before he could ask her something else, she asked, “Does anybody still live in the ghost hou—I mean, the old mill houses?”

Her mother frowned. “Nobody’s lived there for years,” she said. “Not since the mill shut down.”

“Why?” her father asked. He was suddenly serious, too. “You and Todd haven’t been poking around there, have you?”

“Oh … we just rode our bikes near there,” Delsie said. “And I got to wondering. That’s all.” She concentrated on another raisin that had attached itself to a piece of celery.

It wasn’t quite a lie.

“Well, you know you’re not—” her father started to say.

But just then the bell on the door downstairs jangled. That meant a customer had come into the store. Instead of finishing his sentence, Delsie’s father pushed his chair back from the table.

It was probably Miss Daley.

Most people avoided coming into the store during suppertime. They knew the family would be upstairs eating. But Miss Daley wasn’t most people. She seemed to pick suppertime nearly every day to run out of milk. Or she suddenly needed tea bags or a box of crackers, some little thing like that.

When Dad came back from waiting on her, he always reported on what she had bought.

Mom said Miss Daley came in then because she knew she could have Dad to herself … no other customers. No Mom, either.

Dad just laughed when Mom said that.

“Here’s our daily customer,” he said now. And he chuckled at his own joke even though he made it every time.

After he’d gone, Delsie began counting her raisins. She had gotten to twelve when her mother started in where her father had left off. “Delsie,” she said, “you and Todd aren’t—”

“No, of course not!” Delsie exclaimed. And to her relief, that was the end of the conversation.

When Delsie’s dad came back, her mom asked, “Was it Miss Daley?”

“No,” he replied. “It was an old man. I’ve
seen him once or twice before, but I don’t know who he is.”

Someone her dad didn’t know? Delsie was surprised. He usually knew everyone who came into the store.

“Bob Holtz told me he thought some old guy was camping out in one of the mill houses,” her dad added. “Homeless, I guess. Maybe he’s the one.”

A homeless man camping out in one of the mill houses!
Delsie pushed away from the table. She hurried to the windows at the front of the living room so she could look out at the street.

There he was, heading in the direction of the mill. The man had a thin ponytail of white hair hanging down his back. He wore overalls and, despite the heat, a long-sleeved flannel shirt.

Was he the one? Was it his house she and Todd had been in?

And what was that following him? She couldn’t quite make it out.