The Old Willis Place (12 page)

Georgie huddled beside me, listening intently to Lassie's struggle to survive her long journey from Scotland to England. He held his breath when she fell sick; he was angry when she was falsely blamed for killing sheep and almost shot, scared when she was captured by dogcatchers, and glad when she escaped.

At the end of chapter seventeen, "Lassie Comes over the Border," Georgie finally let me stop and rest my voice. Lassie was in England at last, safe for a while with a kindly old man and woman who planned to keep her forever.

"They won't, though," Georgie said as I closed the book. "Lassie's not home yet."

"No, she still has a way to go and a few more adventures before she's done."

Georgie lay back on his blankets and gazed out the shed door. It was dark now, and the moon had risen above the trees. It floated there, as big as an orange, dimming the stars but lighting the earth.

"How about us, Diana?" Georgie asked softly. "How far do we have to go before we're done?"

"I don't know." I stared across the silvery field at the black line of trees on the other side. A wind blew up. Branches creaked and swayed. Dried weeds rattled. Nero uncoiled from Georgie's side and stretched, his back arched like a Halloween cat's. He went to the door and peered out, ears pricked.

Georgie turned to me, his face fearful. "Nero hears something," he whispered.

"A mouse," I whispered. "That's all."

We both watched the cat. His body was tense; his tail lashed. He began a deep, vibrating growl.

The wind blew harder. All around us, trees and weeds and tangles of underbrush rustled and sighed and moved. A dry grapevine tapped against the wall. The tin roof rattled as something struck it. The shed's old timbers creaked. Dark clouds raced across the sky, veiling the moon and altering the shadows.

In the doorway, Nero hunkered down. His growl changed to a fierce song, its notes rising and falling along with the wind.

"It's not a mouse." Georgie clung to me. "It's Miss Lilian, she's come for us."

I shut my eyes and held him as tightly as I could. "No, it can't be her," I whispered into his hair. "It just can't."

But in my heart I knew he was right. Miss Lilian was out there in the dark, searching for Georgie and me, eager to punish us for the pranks we'd played on her.

Chapter 14

"Diana," a voice howled from the shadows, "Georgie, it's no use hiding. I'll find you wherever you are!"

The moon shot out from behind a cloud, and there she was in the field, brandishing a cane, her white hair blowing in the wind. Georgie and I stumbled to our feet.

I took my brother's hand. "Quick, out the back way!"

We plunged through a small door in the rear of the shed. With Nero racing ahead, we fled through the woods, tripping over roots and ducking branches. Brambles caught our hair and tore our clothing. But nothing stopped us or even slowed us down. We ran like rabbits fleeing a fox, like deer fleeing a hunter, like mice fleeing an owl, leaping, dodging, practically flying through the underbrush.

"Is she coming?" Georgie cried at one point.

"I don't know." The wind made so much noise we couldn't hear anything but branches thrashing over our heads.

We slid down the bank of the creek and into the ravine where we'd hidden Lissa's bike. It still lay there, rusty now, half submerged in water. We splashed past it and burrowed into a small cave, our favorite hideout. There in the darkness we crouched with Nero and listened. Miss Lilian's voice mingled with the wind's howls. Gradually her calls faded away into the night, and the wind died down.

Georgie cried with relief. I rocked him in my arms as I had for so many years. When his breathing quieted and he stopped sobbing, I lifted his face and looked into his eyes, as brown as a shady pond after rain. "She's gone," I said. "She didn't get us."

"But she'll be back," he said tearfully.

"Yes," I said slowly, "but we'll get away from her again. She'll never catch us."

"She did once," Georgie reminded me.

"We're smarter now." I crawled to the mouth of the cave and looked out. The night was still except for the distant rush of traffic on the highway. "She won't trap us again."

We slept in the cave that night. In the morning, I sneaked back to the shed and retrieved our belongings—our blankets and books, the flashlight, the penknife, and Alfie. Although I kept every sense alert for her presence, I didn't encounter a trace of Miss Lilian. Perhaps she couldn't leave her house in the daylight.

When I returned to the cave, Georgie was sitting at the entrance, braiding vines and leaves into his hair.

"For camouflage," he said. "You should do it, too."

I smoothed the long braid hanging over my shoulder. "I don't care to look like a savage."

"Suit yourself." Georgie finished his task and looked at me. "Do you think it's safe to leave the cave?"

"I didn't see a sign of her." I squatted down beside him. "Maybe she only comes out at night."

Georgie frowned. "I hope you're right."

I watched him poke at the dirt with a stick. "Do you ever have funny thoughts?" I asked him.

"Funny?"

"Odd," I said. "Odd thoughts."

"What do you mean?"

"Remember how the rules came into our heads and we knew them without anyone telling us what they were?"

Georgie kept his head down and scratched harder with the stick. He was writing his name, one of the few things he recalled from school. "Yes," he said slowly, "how could I forget?"

"Well, lately I've had a new thought. It came the same way. No one told me. All of a sudden it was in my head, like colors and smells and sounds, things that don't need words."

"It's about leaving, isn't it?" Georgie didn't look at me. He was adding finishing touches to his name—little curlicues on each letter.

"Do you have the same thought?"

"Yes," he said. "But we have to do something first."

I nodded. "Do you know what it is?"

With a gesture of impatience, he rubbed out his name. "I think it's got something to do with her."

"Miss Lilian?"

"Yes." He dropped his voice to a whisper. "And with our bodies. Our real ones."

I shivered. "Someone should bury them and say the right words so we can rest—"

"I know that." Georgie scowled, signaling he'd heard all he wanted to hear about our bodies and their burial.

We sat beside each other silently and watched the last leaves spin down from the trees. The creek was filled with those that had already fallen. Shades of red, yellow, and brown, different shapes and sizes. Some were caught in eddies, others lodged among the stones, and a few raced on the current on their way to a larger stream.

Georgie reached out over the water to prod a few leaves loose with his stick. He watched them sail around a bend and turned to me. "Will you read some more of
Lassie?
I want to know how it ends before we leave."

"We're coming to a sad part," I warned him.

"Just read," Georgie said. "I'm used to sad parts. And so are you."

I began at chapter eighteen, "The Noblest Gift—Freedom." Lassie had recovered her strength. Every afternoon just at the time school let out, she began pacing the floor of the little cottage. The old folks tried to make her happy. They treated her well, they fed her and petted her and loved her, but still she wanted to leave, she had to leave.

Georgie pressed against me. "Do they let Lassie go?"

I read on. The old woman opened the door. She and her husband followed Lassie to the road that ran by the cottage. They watched Lassie hesitate. They wanted to call her back, but they knew the dog had to leave. The old woman told Lassie it was all right. If she had to go, why, go she must.

Georgie breathed out a long sigh. We were glad Lassie was on her way but sorry for the old man and woman, left alone in their cottage, too sad to eat their evening meal.The old man offered to bring home another dog, a small one, but no dog could take Lassie's place. So he suggested a cat instead, "the bonniest little cat ye ever did see."

Georgie glanced at Nero sitting nearby, licking his paws and scrubbing his face. "I bet it was a big black cat just like Nero."

At my brother's urging, I kept reading until I finished. The story ended just as Georgie had hoped. After a few more struggles, Lassie made it home and met Joe at the school gate as she used to. This time Mr. Carraclough didn't make Joe return the dog to the duke. Instead, he nursed Lassie back to health. In the end, the duke hired Joe's father to run the kennel, he let Joe keep Lassie, and Lassie had puppies.

Georgie grinned. "I wish I could hear it all over again."

Chapter 15

Later that day, I walked to the trailer. It was too cold for Lissa to do her schoolwork at the picnic table, but I hung around for a while, hoping she'd come out. I liked Mr. Morrison, but I wasn't in the mood to pretend to be a normal girl.

After several minutes, I gave up and knocked at the door. Maybe Mr. Morrison was busy in his room, writing his book.

But no, he opened the door and gave me a big smile. "Why, Diana," he said, "come in. You must be freezing in that thin blouse and skirt. And look at your feet. Where are your shoes?"

I hesitated on the threshold, heedless of the wind blowing through the open door. Oh, why did he and Lissa have to ask so many questions?

Before I could change my mind and run back to the woods, Mr. Morrison took my hand and drew me inside. "I promise not to give you any more chicken soup," he said with a laugh. "I didn't realize you were a vegetarian."

A vegetarian—he and Lissa had an amazing ability to come up with explanations for my odd behavior. I supposed the truth was too fantastic for them to guess.

Lissa came out of her bedroom and mumbled a greeting. She was pale. Anxious.

"Miss Grump got up on the wrong side of the bed this morning," Mr. Morrison told me, winking to show he was teasing Lissa. "She hasn't had one nice thing to say."

"I brought your book back." I handed
Lassie
to Lissa. "We finished it this morning. Thanks for letting us borrow it."

Lissa took the book as if it no longer interested her and laid it on a table beside the couch. I couldn't think of what I'd said or done to make her mad, but something was obviously bothering her.

"And
Clematis,
if you still want to read it." I laid the tattered book, its pages warped from the shed's dampness, beside
Lassie.
"It's a good story. With a happy ending."

"Thanks." Lissa opened it, releasing a slight odor of mildew. "I like the illustrations. They're so quaint."

Mr. Morrison leaned over to take a look. "'By Bertha and Ernest Cobb,'" he read. "Copyright 1917. That is an old book. Where did you find it?"

Inwardly I groaned at yet another question. "In a used-book store," I lied.

Mr. Morrison nodded and handed Lissa MacDuff's leash. "Why don't you two take MacDuff for a walk," he suggested. "You could both use some fresh air."

While Lissa snapped the leash to MacDuff's collar, Mr. Morrison turned to me. "That silly dog kept Lissa and me awake all night, barking his fool head off. I don't know what's gotten into him. All I heard was the wind, howling up a storm out there in the woods."

"It was really blowing hard." I made an effort to sound like an ordinary person talking about the weather, but I knew what MacDuff had heard. And so did Lissa. Miss Lilian must have wandered all over the farm in the dark and the cold, searching for Georgie and me.

Suddenly anxious to leave, Lissa grabbed her jacket from a hook near the door. "Do you want to borrow a sweatshirt, Diana?"

"For heaven's sake, yes," Mr. Morrison answered for me. "She must be freezing."

To satisfy them, I pulled Lissa's thick red sweatshirt over my head and followed her and MacDuff outside.

"Don't let Diana blow away in the wind," Mr. Morrison called to Lissa.

Lissa gave him one of those looks I'd given my father when he'd said something embarrassing. She didn't answer him or speak to me. I'd never seen her so quiet.

After we were out of Mr. Morrison's sight, Lissa turned to me anxiously. "It wasn't just the wind last night, was it?"

"No," I said.

Lissa drew in her breath. "She called your name and Georgie 's name. Even with my head under the covers, I could hear her."

"I told you she'd come after us," I said.

"But why?" Lissa asked, genuinely puzzled.

Instead of answering, I kept walking, head down, scuffing leaves out of my path. If only I could tell her the truth. She might believe me now. After all, she'd seen Miss Lilian. She'd heard her voice in the wind. She must realize ghosts exist.

"I was with you in the house," Lissa went on, her voice shaky. "She should be after you and me, not Georgie. He wasn't even there."

I looked at her. She was close to tears. "I couldn't sleep a wink last night," she said.

"She's not after you," I insisted. "She won't hurt you."

"I hate this place," Lissa went on as if she hadn't heard me. "I told Dad we have to leave, we can't stay here, but he won't listen to me. He acts like I'm a baby afraid of the dark."

Lissa sat down on a boulder at the edge of the field and began to cry. I huddled beside her, sorry she'd been drawn into Georgie's and my troubles. Indifferent to our worries, Mac-Duff followed his nose into the weeds, roaming in circles around us, happy to be outside smelling wonderful smells.

Glad for each other's company, Lissa and I pressed closer together. She shivered despite her warm jacket.

A thick white cloud cover hid the sky, and the air smelled of snow—the first of the year, earlier than usual. My father would have said Mother Goose was about to shake the feathers out of her pillows.

I gazed across the field toward the house. A gust of wind blew through the treetops, making a mournful sound. The air filled with flying leaves. A thought formed in my head, then another and another. They came from nowhere, just the way the rules had. Suddenly, I knew exactly what to say to Lissa. And, more importantly, what not to say.

"Do you remember telling me about those missing children?" I asked her.

She looked at me. She'd stopped crying, but her eyes were red and wet. "The ones Chelsea says haunt the farm?"

I nodded. "What if I told you what happened to them?

"Those children vanished a long, long time ago. How could you know anything about them?"

I leaned closer, forcing Lissa to meet my eyes. In a whisper, I told her the words I heard in my head. It was almost as if someone else was speaking—a ventriloquist, maybe, using my voice. "When we first came here, Georgie and I found an open window in the basement. We used to climb inside and explore the house. It was scary, just like it is now. Creepy. We played the piano, we went through the closets, we stole books and clothes."

"You said it was against the rules to go in the house," Lissa reminded me. "Weren't you scared your parents would find out?"

"In those days, our parents weren't as strict as they are now. We didn't have as many rules."

MacDuff interrupted me with a series of loud barks. He ran to Lissa and sat close to her, whimpering. We both looked across the field, to the trees and the house beyond. We saw nothing, but the dog's behavior made us uneasy.

Lissa bent over MacDuff and stroked his sides. "What's the matter, boy?" she whispered. "Do you see something?"

The dog rested his head on Lissa's knee and gazed at her in a way that made me think of Lassie. He thumped his tail and grinned, as if he'd merely been seeking affection.

I touched Lissa's arm to regain her attention. "One day Georgie talked me into exploring the cellar. We'd been afraid to go down there because it was so dark, but Georgie borrowed a big flashlight."

Lissa continued to pet MacDuff, but she was paying close attention to me.

"We found a door in a dark corner of the cellar. It was bolted shut," I whispered. "And when we opened it—"

Suddenly, Lissa drew back, alarmed by something in my voice. "No, I don't want to hear any more."

She covered her ears like Georgie used to, but I pulled her hands away and held them tight. Somebody had to know where Georgie and I were and who had put us there. Somebody had to see to our burial. Otherwise, we'd be prisoners on the farm forever. These were the new rules. I knew them just the way I'd known the old rules.

MacDuff looked at us uneasily, as if he didn't like the way I was holding Lissa's hands.

"We opened the door," I went on relentlessly, spinning the lie as I talked, speeding up the story. Since it was partly Lissa's fault that the old woman was loose, she might as well be the one to fix things. "Two children were huddled together on the floor. Dead."

I saw our bodies as they'd been when Georgie and I began our new lives. Like the empty shells of locusts left on tree trunks, they were no longer needed. But they had to be found, they had to be buried.

"Stop it, Diana," Lissa whispered. "You're scaring me."

"It's true. Miss Lilian locked the children in and left them there to die. No one knew about the room. No one ever found those children."

"No," Lissa sobbed. "No, that's horrible, no one would do something so cruel."

Once more she tried to free her hands. I held them tighter. MacDuff growled.

"She was crazy," I cried. "She hated us!"

"Us?" Lissa stared at me. "You said 'us.'"

"I mean Miss Lilian's ghost," I corrected myself. "She hates Georgie and me because we know she killed the children." My story told, I let go of her hands. MacDuff relaxed and rested his head once more on Lissa's knee.

"Those poor children," Lissa whispered. "Those poor, poor children. And their parents—they never knew what happened to them. Oh, Diana." She was crying again.

"Tell your father, Lissa. Make him believe you. Those children must be buried properly. They can't rest till they're in their graves."

"Is that why their ghosts are still here?"

"Yes." It was true. I knew it. Once our bodies were found and buried, Georgie and I would be free to go—wherever it was we were going.

Lissa slid off the rock. "Come with me. Help me tell Dad. He'll never believe me."

"No, I can't." I jumped down beside her, anxious to settle things, to start them moving. "You have to do it yourself."

Lissa hesitated. "But, Diana, he'll be mad, he'll know I went in the house, he'll—"

I gave her a push toward home. "Go," I cried. "Go right now. Run! And be sure and tell him who killed them."

The first flakes of snow had begun to fall, melting where they landed. MacDuff raced in circles, his mouth open in a lopsided grin, snapping at the flakes. Lissa called to him, her voice shrill.

I watched the two of them vanish into the woods. The old rules had changed, fragmented, broken into bits. Telling Lissa had been the right thing to do. I was sure of it.

But I'd changed everything for Georgie and me. The life we'd shared for so many years was about to end.

What would replace it?

T
HE
D
IARY OF
L
ISSA
M
ORRISON

Dear Dee Dee,

Last night the wind blew really hard and MacDujJstarted barking like he heard something outside. Dad said it was teenagers again, sneaking out here to drink beer, but oh, Dee Dee, I heard a voice calling Diana and Georgie. It's Miss Willis—her ghost, that is. Dad went out to chase the teenagers away. I told him not to. It wasn't teenagers, it was—but he left before I could say what it was. I stood in the open doorway, watching him, scared of what might happen. There was no car, no teenagers, just Miss Willis hollering in the dark. Dad came back inside,fussing about pranks, but he never once said he heard anyone calling.

Diana and Georgie are lucky to be leaving this horrible place. If only Dad and I could move away, too.

Today, I asked Diana why Miss Willis was after them. I'd asked her before, but she'd never really answered. This time she told me the truth. Those children who disappeared died in the cellar of the Willis house, and their bodies are still there. Miss Willis locked them in a secret room and left them there to die. Diana and Georgie
found the bodies. Diana thinks Miss Willis is after her because she knows who killed the children.

Diana spoke so calmly, but Ifelt like
I
might throw up or faint. How could something that horrible happen to two children? I wanted to cover my ears and run away, so Vd never have to see the farm again. Why did I drag poor Diana into that house? Why did she let me? She should've stopped me, she should've told me what was in the cellar. If Id known, I wouldn't even have sat on the terrace.

Diana said I had to tell Dad about the bodies, I had to make him believe me. The children must be buried properly. Otherwise, they'll never rest in peace.

So I ran home, just when the snow was starting, and I told Dad.

At first he didn't believe me. He said Diana must be pulling my leg. But I begged him to go to the cellar and see for himseff. Finally, he said, Okay, okay, but nothing will be there. This is ridiculous, and so on and so on and so on while I was crying and shaking and terrified.

Finally, he took his keys and a flashlight and left with MacDuff.

I was all alone. I wished Diana had come home with me like I'd asked her to. The wind was blowing and the snow was falling and now it was sticking, not melting like before. It was almost dark, and I was scared Miss Willis would hurt Dad. What if she locked him in the room with the children's bodies? I hadn't thought of that when he left.

So I put on my parka and my boots and gloves and hat and went out to look for him. The wind blew the snow in my face, cold enough to take my breath away. "Dad!"I called. "MacDuff!"

No one answered. I walked on, still jelling for Dad and Mac-

Oh, Dee Dee, when I was close enough to see the house, Miss Willis stepped out of the trees and stopped in front of me, blocking the way. She wore the same raggedy gray silk dress, and her hair blew, as white as snow itself.

"Diana!"she screamed at me."Diana, stop running from me!"

"I'm not Diana," I cried, but she reached for me as if she hadn't heard me. Her hands closed tight on my wrists, colder than the snow, stronger than steel.