The Girl in the Locked Room: A Ghost Story

by Mary Downing Hahn

  Mr. Bailey and Ellis Dixon come out of the kitchen and into the hall. With guns in their hands, they force Papa and Mama into the parlor. They want money. Papa’s money.

  Lily knows the safe is hidden behind one of Papa’s paintings. Lily saw it once when Papa opened it to put in a box of money from crop sales. The men tell him to open the safe and give them the money. All of it.

  Maybe Papa will give them the money and the men will leave and all will be well.

  When Mama begins to cry, Lily creeps slowly and silently down the steps and tiptoes toward the parlor. While Mama weeps, Papa shouts at the men, and they shout back. The angry voices frighten Lily.

  Mama and Papa are in danger. Lily must save them, but how is she to do that? Suddenly she’s aware that someone or something is trying to tell her what to do. She looks around, but sees no one.

  Outside in the dark, a horse whinnies and a woman speaks softly.

  Lily knows she must get help, but she’s too scared to move. She hears a voice and sees two girls crouching in the hall. They cry, “Don’t let them see you, Lily! Go outside. Get Aunt Nellie! Change what happens!”

  She doesn’t know who they are or where they came from, but almost against her will she does what they tell her. Dashing out the back door, she calls to Aunt Nellie for help.

  When she sees Lily, Aunt Nellie drops the reins and runs toward her. “Lily, Lily!” she calls.

  Lily seizes Aunt Nellie’s hands. “Don’t let them hurt Mama and Papa! They have guns.”

  “Lord God Almighty!” Aunt Nellie cries. “He promised he’d not harm anyone.”

  Seizing Lily’s hand, Aunt Nellie runs toward the house, but before she reaches the door, Mr. Bailey steps outside.

  “What’s gotten into you?” he shouts at his wife. “Put the girl down and mind them horses like I told you.”

  He steps toward them, his face like the devil’s, ugly with anger and hate.

  Lily sees his revolver. Too angry to be afraid, she pulls away from Aunt Nellie and hurls herself at Mr. Bailey. She’ll make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone.

  The man grabs Lily and lifts her off her feet. He holds her under her arms as if she’s a dog. His breath smokes with whiskey and his eyes are wicked, like the eyes of the old bull Papa keeps in the pasture.

  Lily struggles, she kicks, she flails at him with her fists; she squirms and twists like a cat who doesn’t want to be held. If only she had claws, she’d scratch his eyes out.

  Her heart pounds with fear and rage, she can hardly breathe, but she’s never felt so strong. She, Lily, will save Mama and Papa.

  While Lily keeps Mr. Bailey busy, Aunt Nellie ducks around him and runs into the house.

  Mr. Bailey follows her. “Get back outside,” he shouts at his wife. “What happens in this house ain’t no business of yours.”

  Lily kicks him and strikes him with her fists, but he manages to hold her with one arm and keep his gun pointed at his wife. All three of them join Mama and Papa in the parlor. Ellis Dixon keeps his gun pointed at Mama and Papa, but he looks startled to see Lily.

  “What the devil’s going on?” he asks. “Where’d the girl come from?”

  At the same moment, Mama cries, “For the Lord’s sake, put my daughter down. Don’t hurt her!”

  Papa lunges toward Mr. Bailey. “Let Lily go!”

  Lily takes advantage of the confusion. She might not have claws, but she has teeth. With savage ferocity, she sinks them into the hand that holds the gun. She tastes blood.

  Taken by surprise, Mr. Bailey drops the gun and loosens his grip on Lily. With a burst of strength, she squirms free and runs to Mama just as Aunt Nellie picks up the pistol and points it at Mr. Bailey.

  Mama holds Lily so tightly she can hardly breathe. She kisses Lily’s hair, her face, her hands. She murmurs and sighs and starts to cry. “Oh, Lily, Lily, Lily,” she whispers.

  “Stop right now, Charlie,” Aunt Nellie says, “or I’ll shoot you dead. Don’t think I won’t. There ain’t a soul in this world who’d blame me.”

  Lily peeks across the room. Aunt Nellie is aiming the gun right at Mr. Bailey. She looks angry enough to pull the trigger.

  “Give me that gun, Nellie.” Mr. Bailey holds out his hand. “You won’t shoot me. You ain’t got the stomach for it.”

  Aunt Nellie keeps the gun aimed at him. “I’ll blow your head off. You been asking for it since the first time you hit me.”

  Lily hopes that Aunt Nellie will shoot Mr. Bailey soon. If she won’t, Lily will grab the gun and kill him herself. Her fingers itch to pull the trigger. She hates him, she wants him dead, dead, dead. She must be the baddest girl in the world, but she doesn’t care.

  Ellis Dixon stands near Papa. His gun’s muzzle touches Papa’s head. He looks stunned, as if he’s forgotten why he’s in the parlor or what a gun is for.

  “What are you waiting for?” Mr. Bailey shouts. “Shoot her if you have to. Just get the gun, Ellis.”

  Lily can’t keep up with what happens next. First she hears a gunshot so loud it makes her ears ring. Next she sees Mr. Bailey fall to the floor. His head is bleeding. A red stain spreads across the carpet.

  Lily trembles and presses her face against Mama’s shoulder. Even though she’s just wished him dead, she doesn’t want to see his blood. Her fierceness melts away. She clings to Mama like a baby.

  Mama murmurs, “It’s all right, Lily. We’re safe now.”

  “Did she shoot him dead?” Lily whispers, afraid to look and see for herself.

  “Ellis shot him.” Papa drops to his knees beside Mr. Bailey and feels for a pulse. “I believe he’s dead.”

  Ellis Dixon moans and cries. “It’s your fault, Bennett. You grabbed my arm. I was aiming at that woman, but I shot Charlie instead.”

  Pushing Papa aside, he kneels beside Mr. Bailey. “Oh, Charlie, forgive me, I never meant to do it.”

  Lily lifts her head just in time to see Papa drag Ellis Dixon to a chair and tie his arms and feet with cords from the drapes.

  She expects Ellis Dixon to put up a fight, but he just sits there and lets Papa knot the rope good and tight. His face is as white as a dead man’s and he’s shaking all over.

  “Oh, Lord, what have I done?” he groans. “What have I done?”

  Aunt Nellie still has her husband’s gun. She’s sitting down now, so it’s cradled in her lap. “I never would have shot him,” she mutters. “He was right, I don’t have the stomach for such things. But Lord, I’m glad Dixon killed him. I won’t miss that man. No indeed.”

  Mr. Bailey lies on the floor where he fell. Mama covers him with one of her good linen tablecloths. Lily is sure his blood will never wash out of it.

  “Mama,” she whispers. “Mama, I was scared. I thought they’d kill us all.”

  “Oh, Lily, I was scared too.” Mama hugs her, and Papa embraces them both.

  “Thank the Lord, we’re all safe.” He sounds close to tears.

  “How long will Mr. Bailey be lying there? And how long will Ellis Dixon be tied to the chair?” Lily asks. She wants everything to be cleaned up. No reminders of what happened here.

  “I’ll fetch the sheriff tomorrow,” Papa says. “He’ll take Dixon to jail and remove Mr. Bailey’s body.”

  Papa turns to Mama. “Perhaps you should take Lily to bed,” he says. “This has been a terrible night for all of us.”

  Lily clings to Papa for a moment. “Don’t ever leave me,” she begs. She isn’t sure why, but she has a strange feeling he might have left her once.

  He kisses Lily’s tears away. “Don’t worry, dearest. I’ll never leave you.”

  “And neither will you, Mama?”

  “Never, never, never.” Mama gives Lily a kiss for each never.

  As Mama carries her up the stairs, Lily looks over the banister. For a moment she sees the same two girls looking up at her from the shadows. Or are they ghosts? When they wave to her, she waves back.

  “Who did you wave to?” Mama asks.


  Lily points at the girls, but they aren’t there anymore. She rests her head on Mama’s shoulder and closes her eyes. “Nobody,” she whispers.

  Mama lays Lily on her bed. Her favorite china doll sprawls on its face on the floor. Mama picks it up. “Oh, no. Her head is cracked. She must have fallen off the bed when I woke you.”

  Lily reaches for the doll. “Can you fix her?”

  “Papa’s very good at mending china. He’ll make her look almost as good as new.”

  Lily rocks the doll gently. “I was worried that you might throw her in the midden with the trash.”

  “Of course not. Whatever gave you that notion?”

  Lily has no idea where that notion came from. Mama wouldn’t throw her doll away. Yet she’s sure she saw the doll in the midden, bald and falling to pieces and ugly. She’s glad it’s not true. Papa will mend the cracks, and the doll will be almost as pretty as the day Grandmother Pettifer gave it to her.

  She lies back on her pillow and clasps her mother’s hand. “I hope you aren’t cross with me for disobeying you.”

  Mama squeezes Lily’s hands. “If you hadn’t fetched Nellie, things might have gone very badly for us.” Mama lies down beside her. “Close your eyes and sleep now.”

  “Will you sing ‘Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair’?”

  “Of course I will.”

  Lily falls asleep listening to Mama’s soft voice. She’s safe now; she’s where she belongs.

  32

  Jules

  We’d watched the scene in the parlor as if it were the last act of a play seen in dim light through a dingy curtain. The actors were barely visible, their voices almost inaudible, and the plot was hard to follow, but it had the ending we’d hoped for.

  Now the play was over, and we were alone in the dark. Lily was gone. Oak Hill was in ruins again. Moonlight slanted through the windows of the old house and shone on piles of rubbish and the plywood subflooring and the skeletal wooden framework of the walls. Tools and extension cords, ladders and brooms, paper cups, empty paper bags, and soda cans lay where the workmen had left them.

  “Lily did it,” Maisie said. “She saved her parents and herself.”

  “I could never be as brave as she was.”

  “Me neither,” Maisie said. “I was worried at first, though, weren’t you?”

  “You mean when she just stood there like she was frozen or something?”

  “And we kept shouting and she couldn’t hear us. . . .”

  “It was like we were the ghosts instead of Lily.”

  We sat for a while and listened to the old house. Except for occasional creaks, it was silent. Empty. Lily wasn’t hiding in the room on the third floor. I’d never glimpse her at the window again, I’d never hear the horsemen. Their fates were settled.

  Maisie yawned and looked at her watch. “It’s after four a.m.”

  We brushed sawdust off our pajama pants and let ourselves into the addition. The Clue game lay on the table where we’d left it. Our ice-cream bowls sat in the sink, rinsed but not washed. The kitchen clock ticked, and the night-light cast a dim glow on the stove-top.

  Moonlight dappled the field behind the house, and the woods lay in darkness. Two deer, followed by a fawn, leaped through the tall weeds and vanished into the trees. On the Interstate, trucks rumbled.

  To everyone but Maisie and me, it was an ordinary night.

  33

  Jules

  The next morning, we slept so late that Mom checked to make sure we were breathing. “You girls would sleep all day if I let you.” Feeling groggy, we dressed and ate breakfast.

  Leaving Mom at work on her novel, we walked down to the willow tree.

  “Last night is so hard to believe,” Maisie said.

  I tossed a pebble into the stream and watched its rings spread across the water. “If you hadn’t been there, I’d think it was a dream.”

  “It seems that way now.” Maisie threw a pebble after mine. “Who’d ever believe something like that could actually happen?”

  A breeze rustled the leaves overhead. We squinted at the sun flashing down through the willow leaves, but this time nothing stirred in the branches. “She’s not there, is she?”

  “No.”

  I watched the Gerridae waltz across the water. Beneath them, minnows darted about, turning this way and that in unison. Birds sang, bees buzzed in the clover, and a rabbit studied us from the edge of a bramble patch. It was just like the day before, but because of Lily, everything had changed.

  Maisie sat beside me, making a chain of clover blossoms. “Was Lily really in our world?” I asked. “Or was she stuck between two worlds, neither in one or the other, until she disobeyed her mother and went downstairs to save her family?”

  Maisie frowned and ran a hand through her hair. “It’s just so complicated,” she finally said. “In one world, Lily and her parents die, but in another world, she and her parents live.”

  “Our world must be the world she died in,” I said softly. “That’s why Oak Hill is in ruins.”

  “If that’s true,” Maisie said, “the dolls we found in the midden will be where we left them.”

  Between the heat and the gnats circling my head, my brain felt as mushy as a watermelon. Suddenly I was too irritated to think about anything more complicated than one plus one. “I don’t know, Maisie. I don’t know, I just do not know!”

  “You needn’t shout,” Maisie said. “I’m not deaf, you know.” She stood up and started walking toward the house.

  Afraid she was mad at me, I ran after her. “Where are you going?”

  “To the midden,” Maisie said, “to see if the dolls are there.”

  Without another word we headed across the field and up the hill. Yesterday we’d left the doll and her small companions on the grass by the hole I’d dug. In the excitement of last night, we’d forgotten all about them.

  As soon as we came out of the woods, we saw the little china dolls lying on their backs in a row next to the bald doll—​just exactly as we’d left them. Except for Lily’s absence, nothing had changed.

  Maisie knelt in the weeds and touched each doll as if it were a sacred relic from the past. “These belonged to Lily. She’s gone, but they’re still here.”

  I stared at the little dolls with some distrust—​once, I thought they’d spoken out loud to me, but I must have imagined that. Today they were simply little china figurines, incapable of speech or movement. I turned away from the bald doll. She looked like a corpse dug up from her grave.

  “Lily loved that doll,” Maisie whispered. “She never would have thrown it in the midden.”

  “Mr. Bailey and Ellis Dixon probably did it,” I said. “They looted the house and left the stuff they didn’t want here in the dirt.”

  From where we knelt by the midden, we heard the noise of hammers and saws coming from the third floor. I looked up as one of the men opened the window in Lily’s room.

  “Hey, you two,” he called down to us. “What are you doing in the trash heap? Go play somewhere safe. You could cut yourself on something.”

  Gathering the dolls, we ran around the corner of the house. Maisie’s mother’s car was parked by the back door. Inside, we found her, Mom, and Dad gathered around the kitchen table. Stacked up against one wall were the paintings from Henry Bennett’s studio.

  “Look what I found on the third floor.” Dad pointed at the paintings. “Remember Henry Bennett? This is his work. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  The bright light of the kitchen lit the colors and details. Portraits and landscapes sprang to life. Maisie and I oohed and aahed, as if we’d never seen them.

  “Just look at this one.” Dad pulled out the portrait of Lily sitting in the willow tree. “Have you ever seen a more lifelike painting? You almost expect her to jump out of the tree and talk to you.”

  “Of all of them, it’s my favorite,” Mom said.

  “Such a dear little face,” Mrs. Sullivan said. “I wonder who she was.”r />
  “I’d guess she’s Bennett’s daughter, Lily.” Dad showed Mrs. Sullivan another painting. “This is his wife, Laura. And here’s one that shows Oak Hill as it was when the Bennetts lived here.”

  “What are you going to do with them?” she asked.

  “The Taubman Museum in Roanoke already owns a small collection of Bennett’s work,” Mom said. “They’re bound to be interested.”

  Dad sighed. “Stonybrook owns the paintings, but I’m sure the corporation will donate most of them to the Taubman or some other museum—​another tax write-off for them, as well as a gift for the public.”

  I pointed to the picture of Lily in the tree. “Is there any way we could keep this one?”

  “I’ll ask.” Dad laughed. “Maybe the corporation will give me one as a bonus for finding them.”

  Mom set two tall glasses of iced tea in front of Maisie and me. “You two have been out in the heat too long. Red faces, red noses. I bet you forgot to use sun shield.”

  While we gulped our tea, Mom picked up the bald doll. “Where on earth did you find this poor thing?”

  “In the midden,” I told her. “We think she belonged to Lily.”

  “Yes,” Mom murmured. “This must be the doll in several of the paintings.”

  “Can she be fixed up to look like she used to?” Maisie asked.

  Mom sighed. “She’s pretty far gone, but I once knew a woman who did wonders with antique dolls. Maybe I’ll send her this poor lost soul and see what she can do.”

  “We found these, too.” Maisie and I pulled the little dolls from our pockets and laid them on the kitchen counter.

  “Frozen Charlottes.” Mom smiled in recognition. “I had one or two when I was little, but I don’t know what happened to them. They belonged to my grandmother.”

  “Why are they called Frozen Charlottes?” Maisie asked.

  “They were named after a girl in an old song who froze to death because she was too vain to hide her party dress under an old cloak. Her mother warned her, but—”