Whispers From the Grave (6 page)

. “It’s a terrible way to go,” Mom said. “But he had a good long life. He was well over a hundred.”

“Yeah,” Kyle said, his green eyes glazed. “But I’ll never forget the sight of him falling. I can still hear him screaming.”

I walked him to the door after we agreed to save the boat ride for another day. We stood in the doorway, still numb from shock. His hand trembled as it closed over mine. His fingers felt icy. “I was on the stairs just below your house when I saw him fall,” he said. “Another minute, and I wouldn’t have seen it at all. I would have been at your house, and he would have lain there, until someone wandering along the beach found him.”

“If you hadn’t seen him fall,
I
might have found him,” I said. My stomach heaved at the thought.

“It was ugly. I’m glad you didn’t have to see it. His neck twisted like that and his eyes bulging—“

“Kyle,
please
!”
The image leapt into my mind, vivid and real.

“I’m sorry,” he apologized. “I can’t get it out of my head.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “It’s just so awful. He was a nice old man.”

After I said good-bye to Kyle, I found Mom lying down.

“Another migraine?” I asked sympathetically.

“Afraid so. Stress brings them on sometimes.” Her voice was a hoarse whisper. Apparently, Mr. Edwards’s accident had gotten to her too. “I’ll be okay if I lie down for a while.”

I needed to get my mind off Mr. Edwards, so I went to my room and pulled Rita’s diary out from where I’d stashed it under my mattress and began reading where I’d left off.

Dear Diary,

Ben and I made up! He said the girl on the beach didn’t mean anything to him. So I forgave him. It turns out he was jealous too. He thought I had something going with Shane! Of course, he was wrong. And I’m glad he was jealous. I hope it means he loves me.

I think Ben and I are meant to be together. The only problem is he drinks too much. Once he starts guzzling beer, he drinks till he passes out. And he
^’
s grouchy when he’s really drunk. I hope he doesn’t turn out to be like Mrs. Addison across the street. She drinks like a fish. (Do fish really drink?)

Her son, Greg, joined the army just to get away from her. I told him he’d have to get all his hair cut off and that he’d look dorky in a crew cut, but that didn’t stop him. He’s actually going to Vietnam!

His mom was yelling at him so much, he probably couldn’t think straight. Sometimes she’d yell at him in
the middle of the night. It woke me up a few times. If my mom called me names like that I’d die.

Of course, my parents do other things I hate. They made me take that job at the T.S. Factory in Seattle with those creeps in the white coats. T.S. is in this tall building about twenty stories high. It sticks up way above the other Seattle buildings and you can see it from the Space Needle. Ben and I went up in the Space Needle one Friday night and I was so dizzy I got sick to my stomach. That thing is about six hundred feet tall! You can look all over Seattle from the top.

Six hundred feet? She thought that was
high
?
I guess the Space Needle must have seemed tall to the people in the twentieth century. I pictured the Space Needle as it must have looked a hundred years before. If it was the tallest structure there, it would have stood out for miles around. Now it was a quaint relic, dwarfed by the surrounding buildings. I’d noticed it when my family had dinner at the top of the 3,000 foot tall Puget Tower across the street from it. As we ate, I looked down and commented on the strange shape of the Space Needle.

“There used to be an amusement park called Seattle Center surrounding the Space Needle,” Dad said. “My great-grandfather attended the World’s Fair there in 1962. His mother refused to go up in the Space Needle because she was afraid it would fall over. She didn’t think anything so tall could stay standing for long.”

We’d laughed at the irony of it. Now, I found myself thinking of how much things had changed since Rita’s time. There were no floating cities then or cures for cancer. People butchered live animals like cows, pigs, and chickens to eat instead of simulated meat. Cars ran on gasoline instead of solar power. There were no virtual reality computers or underwater homes.

As primitive as Rita’s time was, I was strangely drawn to it. What would it have been like to live back then? I eagerly began reading again, anxious to hear more about Rita’s life.

Anyway, as I was saying about that witch, Mrs. Addison. I just hope she doesn’t start in on Chuck now that Greg’s gone. Chuck’s only nine, and he’s kind of a cute kid. He’s got a mop of blond hair and a freckled face. Sometimes when his mom locks him out, he comes into our house when we’re not home. (We never lock our door because we don’t have a key!) Chuck climbs everything. Mom couldn’t believe it when she came home from pottery class yesterday and found him on our roof. He’d climbed up the maple tree just like a little monkey. She thought he’d fall and was going to call the fire department to get him down, but he shinnied down the tree before she could pick up the phone.

She called Mrs. Addison and told her that Chuck could have broken his neck and that she should have a talk with him. But Mrs. Addison said he was a resilient kid and hadn’t broken anything yet!

Mom was shocked. Of course, Mom thinks she’s the perfect mother. Right now she seems more like a jailer than a mother! I’m still on restrictions. “Indefinitely,”
s
he said. Ben is allowed to call but not come over! The only time I can see him is at school.

Mom is a hypocrite just like everyone else in her generation. She has a glass of wine every night, and of course that’s fine because SHE does it. But just because I had a few beers that went down wrong
—
OKAY SO I GOT DRUNK! Just because I got a little drunk, she thinks she can ruin my life.

I miss my nightly walks on the beach, but at least I can see the sunset from my bedroom window. I’m sitting on my window seat and a sweet breeze is ruffling the curtains. The sun just went down and the sky is bright red. The water looks like strawberry pop. It’s so beautiful, I want to leap from the window and fly into the sky. I can imagine melting into the sunset and becoming those colors. I wouldn’t have to worry about anything anymore. I’d just blend with the sky and exist on the colors of the sunset.

“I know how you feel,” I said aloud. I closed the diary and leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the windowpane. The sun was setting and the sky was smeared in red.

It was an evening just like this Rita had written about.

It’s funny, but I almost felt she was my friend. I looked forward to reading her diary entries. Though I could have read the whole diary in one sitting, I found myself trying to make it last. I’d read just a page at a time. It was almost like having someone to talk to.

Rita was so familiar. It wasn’t because she looked like me. It was more the way she wrote. It was like she was
talking
to me.

She sat right
here,
I realized. She looked out this window through eyes like mine and watched a sunset like this one.

For a fleeting moment, I felt as if I
was
Rita. Sitting here on
her
window seat with
her
face watching
her
sunset.

I suddenly remembered what Suki had said about reincarnation. Was it possible? Could I be Rita, living her life all over again?

Don’t be silly!
For all I knew she could still be alive. I did some quick calculating. She’d be 117. A lot of people lived to be that old these days. A century ago, you were considered old if you lived to be ninety. But that was before cancer vaccinations and infallible artificial organs.

Excited, I turned on my computer and accessed the newspaper files at the Banbury Library. If Rita had died in Banbury, I’d find the obituary. If she was still alive, maybe I could look her up. It would be fun to see how her life had turned out.

As I scanned the computer files, I was interrupted by a rap on my bedroom door. It creaked opened, and Suki’s pale face peered in at me. “Hi. Your mom said I could come up. I heard about Mr. Edwards. Isn’t it awful?”

“Come on in,” I sighed. “Kyle saw him fall. He was on his way here.”

“Kyle really likes you,” she said generously. “I can tell by the way he was sitting so close to you today. You make a really cute couple.” A benign smile lit her face. She didn’t look at all jealous.

“Well, we’re not really a couple.”

“Has he kissed you yet?” she asked, perched on the edge of my bed, eager to lap up the details. She could never have Kyle, but apparently the vicarious thrill was good enough for her.

“You’ll be the first to know!” I laughed. “How far back do
The Banbury Times
files go?”

“Forever I guess. What are you looking for?”

“I want to see what happened to Rita Mills.”

“The girl with your face! She’s got to be dead by now. She’d be like a hundred years old.”

“One hundred seventeen,” I corrected her and typed in “Mills, Rita,” and pushed the search button. Within seconds, the computer had located an article and it filled my computer screen. It was the front page of
The Banbury Times
from 1970. My stomach lurched when I read the headline in tall black letters:
local girl’s boyfriend executed for her murder.

Benjamin Grand, 18, was executed Thursday for the murder of his girlfriend, 17-year-old Rita Mills. She was found dead of a head wound at Banbury Point last March.

A jury found Grand guilty of battering Mills, causing her death. Prosecutors maintain he committed the murder in a drunken jealous rage.

A wave of nausea swept through me and I leapt from the chair and bolted to the hallway. I made it to the bathroom just in time to be sick. Afterward I splashed cold water on my face and stared at my reflection in the mirror. My face was gray.
My
face.
Her
face. I could picture that face bruised and lifeless, pressed against the sand.

How could he do that to her? She
loved
him!

Trembling, I went back to my room. Suki had turned off the computer. “I read it,” she said quietly. “It’s really sad. Maybe you better lie down for a while.”

I lay on my bed, and Suki covered me with the puff-square, pulling it up around my chin and patting my arm in a motherly fashion.

“How could he have
killed
her?” I said numbly.

“He was drunk.” Her brow furrowed in concern. “Maybe he didn’t know what he was doing.”

“He
murdered
her!” I spat. “Drunk or not! He murdered her in cold blood.”

“It was a long time ago,” she said softly.

“I want to be alone now.”

“I could make you some hot chocolate,” she offered hopefully.

I rolled away from her and buried my head under my pillow.

“It would make you feel better,” Suki prodded.

“No!” I said sharply. “I don’t want any hot chocolate. I want to be
alone.
”

“Well, I guess I’ll go then.” Her voice was flat.

A moment later, I peeked out from under the pillow. Suki was gone, her feelings bruised again. I suppose I could have been a little more tactful, but my mind was so full of awful things to sort out. Mr. Edwards’s accident. Rita’s murder.

Two tragedies on the same day!

Of course, Rita had died a century ago. But in my mind it had just happened. I felt I’d lost a friend. A friend and a neighbor.

Mr. Edwards was sweet, even if he was crazy.

Crazy.

Everyone said he was crazy because he rambled on about a murder. I sat up straight, knocking the puff-square from my legs in a flash of realization. He was telling the truth!

A girl
was
murdered on the beach.
Rita!
He was talking about
Rita! He wasn't crazy!

If Mr. Edwards wasn’t crazy, then why did he step off Windy Cliff?

7

When I finally slept, I dreamed of hands.
Angry hands.
Murderous
hands. They shoved Mr. Edwards hard from behind, sending his frail body sailing through the sky. When he crashed against the rocks, the hands brushed against each other as if to dust off any trace of murder.

Like a thick fog, the dream clung to my mind all day long. Vague wisps of a nightmare that refused to evaporate. I felt like I was wading through thick pea soup the rest of the weekend.

“You’re sure acting strange,” Suki said as we trudged uphill toward the school Monday morning. Banbury High was a mile from my house. Banbury Bay doesn’t have moving sidewalks like they do in Salem. When developers proposed installing them, the residents fought it. Tourism is big business in Banbury Bay because it’s a historical town. The people here want to keep the whole town looking old-fashioned for the tourists.

Walking to school usually cleared my mind, making it easier to concentrate on the teachers’ lectures. But this morning I didn’t think it was going to help.

“Mars to Jenna!” Suki shouted. She wore a tasteless bright orange sweater, stretched taut around her thick middle. “What’s with you today?”

“I’m just thinking,” I mumbled.

“What are you thinking about?”

“Mr. Edwards.”

“Yeah. Me too. Poor old man. Poor, crazy old man.”

“I’m not so sure he was crazy.”

“Why do you say that?” she asked, cocking her head and stumbling to a stop.

“He was right about the murder. He wasn’t making it up.”

“Oh. You mean Rita. I hadn’t thought about that. But he had to be crazy, Jenna. He committed suicide! That’s nuts!”

“I don’t think he stepped off the cliff on purpose.”

“I guess he could have fallen,” she conceded. “He couldn’t see. He might not have known he was at the edge of the cliff.”

“I don’t think he fell.”

“He didn’t fall? He didn’t jump? What did he do? Fly?”

“He could have been pushed.”

Suki’s mouth popped into a startled “O.” “Why would anyone want to kill an old man?”

“I don’t know. But I keep thinking it might have something to do with Rita’s murder. He was always talking about it. Maybe someone wanted to shut him up.”