All the Lovely Bad Ones (18 page)

Suddenly, the
beep, beep, beep
of a truck backing up shattered the bird song. Corey and I dropped our books and ran to the front of the inn. With Grandmother watching from the porch, a flatbed truck maneuvered through a gap in the bushes bordering the poor-farm burial ground.

Tracy opened the screen door and poked her head out. She'd been back for a couple of days, but she was still a little jumpy. "What's that truck doing here?"

"It's bringing the headstone," Corey said. "For the burial ground."

Tracy looked at us, suddenly tense. "What burial ground?"

"Behind the barn," Grandmother said. "Corey and Travis discovered it. We thought we should memorialize the people laid to rest there."

Tracy closed the door and stared at us through the screen. "Does it have something to do with the ghosts?"

"It's just an old burial ground, Tracy," Grandmother said patiently. "The ghosts are gone now. I told you it was a hoax."

She bit her lip. "I'd better go make the beds," she said.

"Don't you want to see the men put up the stone?" I asked, thinking it might scare her and I could hold her hand or something.

"No," she said, "I have work to do."

Mrs. Brewster came up behind Tracy. "After you make the beds, please start the laundry. We're low on table linens."

"Yes, ma'am." Tracy disappeared, and Mrs. Brewster came outside to join us.

Followed by Mr. Brewster, we walked across the lawn to the burial ground. Unseen by the workmen, Caleb, Ira, and Seth waved to us from their favorite tree, and the shadow children flitted here and there among the graves.

It took the men a while to get the slab of marble off the truck and into place. The bad ones watched every move they made, coming so close to the men it's a wonder they weren't stepped on.

One of the man shivered. "This place gives me the creeps," he said. "Not that I believe in ghosts, but—" He broke off with a laugh.

"Tom, you been out in the sun too long," the other man said.

In the meantime, Seth picked a handful of daisies and dropped them by the stone.

The two men watched the flowers float down to earth. Neither one looked at the other. "Windy today," Tom said.

The shadow children gathered around the men and began tossing flowers and giggling. "Pinchy, pinchy," they whispered.

The man named Tom swatted his leg. "Mosquitoes," he muttered. "Fierce, too."

The other slapped his neck. "Worse than usual. Must be those new ones from Africa or someplace."

Corey and I covered our mouths to hide our grins.

When Grandmother got out her checkbook, the two men were already in the truck, revving the engine.

"Don't worry about that now, ma'am," Tom said. "We'll tell Mr. Greene to send the bill." And off they went, leaving a cloud of dust and the smell of gasoline behind.

"You rascals." Grandmother frowned up into the maple tree. "You scared those men off."

"It was purely an accident on my part," Seth said. "But that bunch"—he pointed at the shadow children—"they done it a-purpose."

Grandmother's frown vanished and she laughed. "Is the memorial satisfactory?"

Seth grinned. "Yes, ma'am, Granny. That's a mighty fine hunk of marble."

Grandmother looked at Caleb and Ira.

"We got what we wanted," Ira said, "all the names and dates and numbers. Everything spelled proper, too." His fingers brushed his and his family's names.

"I reckon we're at peace at last," Caleb added, with a sigh of pure contentment.

While the bad ones thanked us, the shadow children swarmed over the big stone, dappling it with patches of darkness, finding their names and the names of their friends and relatives. "Here I am—Samuel Greene!" one called out. "And here's my ma and pa and my two little brothers, all of us dead on the same day of typhus."

"And here's me—Edward Bellows—and my ma and pa, taken by the same wicked typhus."

"It was a hard life we lived," Seth said, "but it was over way too soon."

Mr. Brewster gazed at him. "We won't know what to do when you're gone. Martha and me been watching you for more than forty year now."

"Tell your ma the Brewsters kept their word to look after you, generation to generation," Mrs. Brewster said.

"Yes, Auntie." Seth suffered the woman to hug him. "I'll tell all you done, and they'll be right pleased."

"When will you be leaving us?" Grandmother asked.

"We'll wait till dark," Caleb said.

"So the stars can guide us," Ira added.

All this time, my sister and I had just stood there, trying not to cry and failing miserably. "We'll miss you so much," Corey said.

"Why, we'll miss you, too," Caleb said. "You've been good friends to us. All of you—"

"Even Granny," Seth put in. "She weren't keen on us at the start, but she come round real good at the end."

Grandmother smiled and tried to hide her tears. "Well, it's been a strange experience for me, a person who didn't believe in ghosts and never expected to see any—let alone miss them when they left."

"Wasn't it Shakespeare who said, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy'?" Ira asked. Caleb nodded. "
Hamlet,
act one. Something else we memorized in our school days before we set foot in this cursed place."

"Little did we think then that we'd soon be ghosts ourselves," Ira said in his melancholy way, "haunting the place we died, looking for justice, just like Hamlet's father."

Seth clapped him on the back. "But we got justice at last, didn't we?"

"And we got rid of Miss Ada," Caleb said.

Seth grinned. "So you needn't be gloomy no more, Ira."

Ira smiled, but the sadness in his eyes was still there.

"Now," Caleb said, "it's time to take a last look at this place, boys."

Without inviting us to join them, the bad ones vanished, and we were left to admire the new stone and its sixty-seven names.

Late that night, long after the guests had gone to bed, we sat on the porch, waiting to say goodbye to the bad ones. When they finally showed up, they blended in with the shadow children, as if they'd lost the strength to become visible.

"Thank you once more for all you did for us," Caleb said.

Ira carefully placed an old pot in Grandmother's hands. "It's the money Mr. Jaggs aimed to steal from the poor farm."

Grandmother opened the pot. "Gold coins," she whispered.

"Two hundred and twenty five-dollar pieces," Ira said.

"You're rich, Granny!" Seth crowed.

Grandmother lifted a handful of coins and let them run through her fingers,
clinkety-clink.
"I'll see this goes to a good cause," she said. "Habitat for Humanity, maybe, or Oxfam."

"Surely you'll keep it for yourself," Seth said.

Grandmother smiled at him. "That wouldn't be right, Seth. This money was stolen from the poor, and it must go back to the poor."

"Granny's right." Ira put his arm around Seth.

Seth sighed. "Maybe you could keep just one for yourself—to remember us by."

Grandmother's smile widened. "Oh, I don't think there's any danger of my forgetting you."

They gathered around us then and said their goodbyes. The shadow children clung like cobwebs to our arms and legs, whispering and giggling.

Then, the lovely bad ones drifted away across the lawn like milkweed blown by the wind. They rose slowly into the sky, as if they were climbing stairs only they could see. Higher and higher they went, shrinking until they were no more than dots of light indistinguishable from the stars.

Long after they'd disappeared, we sat quietly and stared at the sky, trying to imagine where they had gone. Was it a long journey? Would they remember us when they got there?

With a sigh, Mr. Brewster got to his feet and reached down for his wife's hand. "Come on, old girl. Tomorrow's coming soon. You got breakfast to cook, and I got chores to do."

Grandmother put her arms around Corey's and my shoulders and hugged us close to her side. "It already seems like a dream."

"But it wasn't," I said.

"It was totally real," Corey agreed.

More real than we'd ever imagined the night Corey had run across the lawn in her ghost costume. We'd sure learned a lot about ghosts since then—maybe even more than was good for us.

Suddenly, Grandmother said, "Look!"

High above the earth, a shooting star streaked across the sky.

We gazed at each other, our faces solemn. No one said it, but I knew we were all thinking the same thing. The lovely bad ones were home at last.

Mary Downing Hahn, a former children's librarian, is the award-winning author of many popular ghost stories, including
Deep and Dark and Dangerous
and
The Old Willis Place.
An avid reader, traveler, and all-around arts lover, Ms. Hahn lives in Columbia, Maryland, with her two cats, Oscar and Rufus.