The Ghost in the Big Brass Bed

by Bruce Coville

  CHAPTER NINE

  Art Lesson

  I shivered. There’s a lot about the past they don’t teach you in school.

  “What happened next?” Chris asked.

  Marcus shrugged. “I’ve spent the better part of the last year trying to find that out. Unfortunately, it’s still pretty much a mystery to me.”

  “Well, if we find anything, we’ll let you know,” Chris said.

  Marcus laughed. I could feel myself begin to blush. Clearly he thought the idea that we might turn up something he hadn’t already found himself was pretty ridiculous. Yet it wasn’t a mean laugh. If anything, it was a little bitter. I had a feeling he was getting frustrated with his research.

  “Just tell me what you know about Phoebe Watson,” he said. “That will do for now.”

  We told him a shortened version of our visit to Phoebe’s house—more about what Phoebe was like and how the painting was displayed than about what had happened there.

  “Why is Phoebe so important to you anyway?” Chris asked when we were done. “I thought your paper was about Cornelius Fletcher.”

  Marcus gave us a knowing smile. “I guess you still have a few things to learn yourself,” he said. “Phoebe Watson is Cornelius Fletcher’s daughter.”

  He could see by our faces that he had scored with that piece of information. He let it sink in for a while, then told us that if we went over to the Everson Museum, we could see some more of Fletcher’s work.

  I wasn’t all that eager to see more paintings like “Early Harvest.” On the other hand, I couldn’t think of anything else we should do next. So we left the library and headed for the museum, which was about three blocks away.

  The quickest way to the museum was through Columbus Circle, which is this little plaza with a big statue of Christopher Columbus. It also has a nice fountain, a lot of pigeons, and a mix of business people and bums.

  “That Marcus was a nice guy,” said Chris as we crossed the circle.

  “He seemed to be,” I said. I was still a little boggled by what he had told us about Phoebe—and a little worried by what we had told him. “You don’t suppose he’s up to anything, do you?” I asked at last.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know—trying to find the Lost Masterpiece or something? Why else would he spend two years trying to get an interview with Phoebe?”

  “College students are like that,” Chris said. “Especially graduate students. One of my aunts spent three years studying fish intestines.”

  “Eeuw!”

  I was still feeling disgusted when we got to the museum.

  “Hey, this place is fabulous!” exclaimed Chris as we walked up to the building. I happened to agree with her. The Everson Museum looks like four big concrete boxes stuck together. The artwork starts before you even get inside; there are lots of big sculptures in a courtyard outside the building, including some you can walk through, and even a few you can climb on.

  My favorites aren’t for climbing, though. My favorites are these five clay towers, each about ten feet tall, that look as if they were made by some giant kindergarten kid who was losing his mind. I always get upset when I see them, though, because the green one has repair lines where they had to fix it after some jerk knocked the top off.

  Chris spotted the towers as we were heading for the door. “Wait!” she cried. “I want to look at these!”

  “Haven’t you ever been here?” I asked, after she had examined them for a while.

  She shook her head. “My parents aren’t big on this kind of thing.”

  “Yeah, but I thought every kid in Syracuse got dragged through here on a field trip by the time they hit sixth grade.”

  “Maybe I was absent!” snapped Chris.

  I decided to drop the matter.

  We went inside.

  When you enter the Everson, you find yourself in a huge space with an extra-high ceiling. A wide concrete staircase that looks as if there’s nothing holding it up curls to the second floor.

  We asked a guard where to find the Cornelius Fletcher paintings, and she sent us off in the right direction. “If you’re lucky, you might even see Dr. Bond there,” she said.

  When we entered the room where Fletcher’s pictures were hanging, I caught the smell of peaches. It wasn’t until that moment that I connected the name Bond to the woman we had met at Phoebe’s house on Saturday. I think it was the “Dr.” part that threw me off.

  Carla Bond seemed as surprised to see us as we were to see her. “Well, what brings you two here?”

  I wanted to throw the question right back at her. Unfortunately, I knew that wouldn’t do me much good. Adults can demand to know why kids are in a certain place, but kids don’t have the same privilege when it comes to adults.

  “We got interested in that painting we saw at Phoebe Watson’s house and decided to find out more about it,” Chris said. “Next thing we knew—here we were!”

  I smiled. Chris had managed to answer Ms. Bond’s question and let her know what she thought of the way she had asked it, all without crossing that invisible line labeled “smart aleck.” She had stepped close, but she hadn’t crossed it.

  Ms. Bond’s face twitched a little. “You must be very interested in art to go to all this trouble.”

  “Oh, we’re very cultured,” replied Chris. “We act, we sing, we look at pictures.”

  She was about to stick her toe over the line. “It was finding out that the artist was local that got us so interested,” I said quickly. I paused, then added, “Is that why you’re here?” I tried to ask the question in a way that wouldn’t offend her.

  “I’m here because I’m preparing a paper on the museum’s Fletcher collection. The work of Cornelius Fletcher is my specialty.”

  “Oh,” I said, feeling a little silly.

  “Would you like to know a little about these pictures?” she asked. She sounded friendlier, which I thought might have something to do with the fact that she was slipping into her teacher role. Ever notice that people love to tell you what they know?

  “Sure,” Chris said. “We’re always ready for a little culture.”

  If I could have kicked her without Ms. Bond’s seeing, I would have.

  “Let’s start with this one,” Ms. Bond said, leading us to a large picture that hung just to the right of the door. “It’s called ‘Love and Flowers.’”

  “Hey, I like this!” I said in surprise. “It’s sure prettier than ‘Early Harvest.’”

  Ms. Bond gave me her “What a rude sound!” look. “It’s an inferior painting,” she said, as if I were some kind of moron not to have known that. “The museum keeps it out for historical purposes, so people can see the growth in Fletcher’s work. Other than that, it has little to recommend it. It’s shallow and sentimental, pretty much representative of the worst of American art during that period.”

  I stared at the picture, which showed a woman and a little girl playing in a field of flowers.

  “I still like it,” I muttered to myself.

  “Now this piece is from Fletcher’s sketchbook,” Ms. Bond said, pointing to a pencil drawing of a soldier leaning over a ragged, skinny boy. “He made it while in France, during the war. Notice that the style is cleaner, less cluttered. Of course, it’s still sentimental. But he’ll get past that.”

  She showed us several more sketches. The work seemed to get progressively more dark and ugly, which Ms. Bond seemed to think made it progressively more artistic.

  “I like the sentimental ones,” I said at last.

  Ms. Bond sighed. “Most young people do. I suppose as decoration they’re quite nice. But they have very little personal vision in them. In the later work you see a man being forced to face a terrible truth, and sharing that truth through his art. Cornelius Fletcher went to war filled with foolish ideas about glory. His later pictures show what he found instead.”

  After the series of sketches we saw a big painting of a battle scene. Unlike looking at “Early H
arvest,” where the horror was hidden at first, seeing this picture was like getting hit between the eyes with a hammer.

  “This was Fletcher’s first major painting after his return from the war,” Ms. Bond said. “It doesn’t have the subtlety of his later work. Still, it made his reputation.”

  After I had studied that picture, and the ones that followed it, I said, “It’s hard to believe these were painted by the same man who did ‘Love and Flowers.’”

  I wanted to ask what had happened to change him so much. But I remembered the way Carla Bond had reacted to my curiosity on Saturday, so I let the question hang.

  Either Chris had forgotten the woman’s snappishness or she didn’t care, because she asked, “Is it true that he went mad?”

  I waited for Ms. Bond to blast her with one of those looks, but she just nodded. “Quite mad,” she said softly.

  I decided she must have considered my Saturday questions pure nosiness. Now that Chris and I were trying to get some culture, curiosity was all right.

  “Was it because he lost his legs?” pressed Chris.

  Ms. Bond looked a little startled. “You two have been busy, haven’t you?”

  I was afraid Chris was going to get smart-alecky again, but she just said, “We learned about it in the library.”

  Ms. Bond relaxed a little. “Well, I can only approve of such diligent research. Of course, there was much more to it than that. But the family kept the story to themselves. People weren’t so public with their tragedies in those days.”

  “But you know what happened, don’t you?” persisted Chris.

  She had pressed too far. “Whatever happened, it was long ago,” snapped Ms. Bond. “If the family didn’t want it talked about, I don’t see that people need to dig it up now.”

  That was pretty much the end of our conversation with Carla Bond. Chris blushed a little, Ms. Bond calmed down a bit, we talked some and then got out of there as quickly as we could.

  It was almost time to meet my father anyway. The quickest way to our meeting point was back across Columbus Circle.

  Since we had a few minutes and since it was only a week or so after Columbus Day, we stopped to take a look at the statue. While I was staring at it someone grabbed my arm from behind.

  I felt a surge of panic. “Hey!” I said, trying to pull free.

  “Listen, missy,” hissed a scratchy voice. “People who hang around with artists have to be careful!”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Dark Vision

  Yanking my arm free, I spun around. I found myself face to face with a skinny old man who had stringy hair, bad teeth and about two days’ worth of gray stubble on his chin.

  Before I could say anything, Chris shouted, “You leave her alone!” I could tell she was ready to kick the old guy.

  “Wait, Chris,” I said. “It’s okay. I know him.”

  “You know this guy?”

  “I see him on Saturday sometimes,” I said. “Don’t I, Jimmy?”

  “That’s right, missy,” he wheezed. “Saturdays. But I seen you this Saturday. Yes, I did. You, too,” he added, pointing to Chris. “You were up to the Watson place. You want to be careful when you go up there.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why do we need to be careful, Jimmy?”

  “There’s something terrible up there.” Shaking his head, he backed away from me. “Something terrible, something wonderful. And folks who hang around up there best be careful.”

  “What is it, Jimmy? What’s in the house?”

  The old man’s eyes got big, and he put his finger on his lips. “Never did tell,” he whispered, “never will tell. What kind of a guy do you think I am?”

  “Jimmy!”

  “Never did tell, never will tell,” he repeated. Then he turned and moved away from us as fast as he could.

  Chris started after him.

  “Don’t bother,” I said. “He won’t tell us anything now.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I’ve seen him like this before.”

  “Well that’s another thing I want to know. How come you know that old coot?”

  “He comes to the feeding program where Dad and I work.”

  Chris nodded. I’d been telling her about the program just a few weeks before. One of the downtown churches serves a daily meal for the kinds of people my grandmother used to call down and out. Only now they’re called homeless and hungry. Anyway, during the week a professional runs the program. But on weekends it’s handled by volunteers from different churches around town. My father and I like to go help when it’s our church’s turn.

  To tell you the truth, I was a little nervous about it the first time I went. But I found I really enjoyed the work. It feels good to do something that helps, even if only a little.

  “How can you stand it?” asked Chris with a shudder. “Guys like that give me the creeps.”

  “He used to scare me until I’d handed him his lunch a few times. Then I realized he’s just a lonely old man.”

  “Lonely and weird! What was that all about anyway?”

  “You’ve got me.” I was trying not to sound too shaken up. I don’t know why, but I felt some odd sense of loyalty to Jimmy. Maybe when you feed someone you start to get attached to him.

  Even though I tried to hide it, Jimmy’s words had spooked me. What was going on up at Phoebe Watson’s house? And what did Jimmy know about it?

  “I don’t have the slightest idea what this is all about yet,” Chris said, as we walked toward the corner where we were supposed to meet my dad.

  “That makes two of us. Right now we’ve got more mystery than we have clues.”

  “I keep thinking about those shutters,” Chris said. “Who—or what—was slamming them?”

  “I suppose the main candidate is the little girl in the bed.”

  “Do you really think so?”

  I paused. “No, not really. It’s just that she’s the only ghost we saw. Could it have been some kind of trick? You know, someone trying to scare Phoebe?”

  Chris shrugged. “Possible. But my guess is that there’s another ghost kicking around Phoebe’s house.”

  “Then we’ve got two ghosts—”

  “Not to mention a mad genius.”

  “Well, he could be one of the ghosts.”

  “He probably is. But what does he want?”

  “He doesn’t want Phoebe to sell the house, that’s for sure. At least, that’s what she seems to think.”

  Chris paused to stare at a pigeon. “You’d think he’d be more interested in having her keep the picture,” she said.

  “I don’t know. If that’s the family home, he might want her to stay there.”

  “But we don’t know if it is the family home,” Chris said. “Phoebe has a different last name, so she must have been married at some point.”

  I nodded. “So the other ghost could be her husband.” I sighed. “This is getting too complicated. We need more information.”

  Chris tugged at a strand of her reddish hair and said, “We could just forget the whole thing.”

  I knew she didn’t mean it. We had to go on with this. Seeing ghosts is special, and it gives us a special responsibility. I was trying to figure out how to say that without sounding stupid when my father drove up in the GC.

  GC stands for Golden Chariot, which is what my dad calls his car, an ancient yellow and white Cadillac with huge fins. I don’t want to say it’s overgrown, so let’s just say that if cars were dogs, this one would be a Saint Bernard on steroids.

  “Expedition successful?” asked Dad, as Chris and I climbed into the front seat, which easily holds all three of us with no crowding.

  “Well, we learned a lot,” I said. “It just doesn’t make much sense yet.”

  Taking turns, Chris and I filled him in on the information we had picked up from Ms. de la Pena, Marcus, and Ms. Bond. By the time we were finished, we had reached Chris’s house.

  “Bus stops here,” said my dad, pulling up t
o the curb.

  “Call me if you get a flash of inspiration,” Chris whispered as she stepped out of the car.

  “Okay,” I said. “You do the same.”

  I sighed as she ran up to her front door.

  “She’s a good kid,” said my father.

  “I hate it that she lives way over here,” I replied.

  He nodded. He didn’t say much as we drove home.

  I decided to take a walk before supper. I had a lot to think about. (Besides, I’m trying to keep from putting on weight.)

  As I strolled down Westcott Street, I spotted Norma kneeling on the sidewalk, talking a mile a minute. At first I thought she was talking to the ground. As it turned out, she was encouraging some daffodil bulbs she had just planted.

  “Now you kids listen,” she said, patting the soil. “I’m expecting to see you come spring. So you have a nice sleep, then just bust up and bloom so bright it hurts my eyes. You hear?”

  “Do you always talk to the things you plant?” I asked.

  Norma shrieked, then turned to look in my direction. “Nine!” she cried, putting her hand on her chest. “For a minute I thought one of those bulbs was talking back to me.”

  Then she laughed that huge laugh of hers.

  “I’m glad you came by,” she continued, climbing to her feet. “I was meaning to give you a call. Come on—let’s go have a cup of coffee.”

  I made a face.

  Norma made a face back. “I forgot you have unenlightened taste buds. Well, come on up and chat with me while I have some.”

  I followed Norma up the walk to her porch, wondering what she wanted to talk about. We settled onto the swing, where I decided I could easily forgive a coffee addiction in someone who could make the kind of chocolate chip cookies she now handed me.

  I felt happy as I looked out on our neighborhood. The sky was filled with dark clouds, but it was so late in the afternoon that the sun was below them, shining in from the side. The light was strong and dramatic, the trees draped in scarlet and orange. The still, quiet air was warm enough to be comfortable, cool enough to feel fresh and exciting.