There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around

by Vivian Vande Velde

  Such a terrible night, I thought, as the rain lashed at the windows and my ears picked up the rumbling of thunder coming in from the west. Surely the slave catcher would not be able to talk the Federal marshal into coming out in this. Would the Stearnses' friends with the boat come? And if not, what should we do next?

  The storm was on us quickly, and just as quickly, the slave catcher was banging at the door. I stood in the parlor, looking out the window. As lightning lit the sky, I could see the outline of the big elm tree, which stands leaning on the very bank of the canal. Even knowing where to look, I could not make out the shadows that were Adah and Marella.

  I turned my back to the window and pretended to warm my hands at the fireplace as the two men who were hunting Adah entered the room. In truth, I was so afraid I felt nothing.

  "Nasty night," said the slave catcher, trying to be civil now that he had gotten his way.

  Rebekka clung in fear to my skirts as the men looked behind drapes and chairs. Jacob we had sent upstairs and to bed, telling him he was to answer any questions by saying, "I am not allowed to speak after my bedtime."

  Theodore delayed the men as much as possible, talking all the while and demanding that they look in every impossible corner and underneath every little table so that should they decide to search the grounds beyond the barn, which they had searched before ever coming inside, Adah and her child might be safely away by then or, at least, their footprints washed away by the rain. The three men clattered through the downstairs, the upstairs, and the attic before I saw the flicker of light by the elm. There was a particularly bright flash of lightning, almost simultaneous with an explosive clap of thunder. Hurry, hurry, I urged her in my mind, pretending to be rearranging the table lamp as the men came downstairs and headed down to the cellar.

  And then there was another flash of lightning, except that this time it did not harmlessly light up the sky. It struck the elm tree. Even from this far away I could hear, after the thunder, the crack of the wood itself, the tree splitting. I had shut my eyes against the bright flash, but though I reopened them immediately I could not find the spot of light that was Adah's lantern.

  "Stay here," I commanded Rebekka. I ran outside, all the while trying to convince myself that, after traveling for so long and through such difficulty to reach safety, Adah had simply dropped the lantern in startlement. Outside the wind tugged at my hair and clothing, the rain pelted my face, and the mud sucked at my shoes.

  At the canal's edge, the elm had been cut in half. That part that normally faced the canal was hanging in the water, still attached to the trunk by thick wooden threads. The remainder of the tree was tipped almost entirely over, its roots up in the air, glistening with mud. A whole section of the canal bank was gone, having slid into the water. From the water, from the canal boat sent to rescue Adah and Marella, someone was clanging a bell. A voice called out to me, "They're in the water. Can you see them?"

  I stepped too close to the edge, and felt the mud shifting under my foot. I grabbed hold of the tree and felt it give under my weight, but then it caught and held fast. "Adah!" I cried out. "Marella!"

  "My God," someone on the boat called to me, a second man, I thought, though I could not see, "I think they're under all that mud."

  They could not be, I thought. Surely they could not be. The tree gave another loud crack. I backed away, though that took me even further from helping them. If I looked hard enough, I thought, I would find them. It was simply a matter of looking and I have always been good at finding lost things. "Adah!" I called. Why did they not answer?

  With one final crack, the broken part of the tree snapped off and slid down the steep bank the rest of the way into the water. But it happened too late to be of any good to the remainder of the tree. "Stand back!" one of the men yelled out. "Stand back! Stand back!" And with that, the tree tipped the rest of the way over and crashed into the water, taking another section of the bank with it. "No!" I screamed. How could I ever find Adah and Marella if things kept falling into the water?

  "Someone is coming," one of the men in the boat said. "Friend, is that your husband?"

  I could hear the boatman, I could understand what he was saying, I could tell that he wanted to be reassured it wasn't slave catchers approaching, but I couldn't answer, I couldn't stop crying.

  It was only when I heard the oars hitting the water and I realized they were leaving that I was able to catch my breath, that I was able to call after them, "Don't go, you can't just leave them."

  They did not answer, they did not come back, and in a moment I felt Theodore's arms around me. "The slave catchers are gone," he said. "What happened?"

  "They're in the water," I said, beating away his hands because he was holding me back. "I need to get closer so I can find them. They'll come up for air any moment now. They have to. We know their names. I'll find them if I look hard enough."

  After a while Theodore picked me up and carried me back into the house.

  CHAPTER 14

  Jackie Comes to the Rescue (Sort Of)

  I FOUND I COULDN'T sit still.

  I put the journal down and started pacing back and forth, to work off some of my nervous energy, before I realized I probably shouldn't leave the book untended, since the ghost—Adah; now I knew her name—since Adah had seemed so intent on preventing me from getting it in the first place. Not that there was anything in what I had just read that gave any indication Adah would harm the book. I snatched the journal up, anyway, and held it close. There was nothing in what I had just read that gave any indication that Adah would do any of the things she had been doing for the last several days.

  "What's going on?" I asked out loud, just in case Adah decided to explain all.

  She didn't.

  I pictured her as Winifred had first described her: standing in the cold, having given up her blanket for Marella to have two. I remembered how she had refused to say anything against her Southern master. Either she'd totally fooled Winifred, or maybe dying had changed her. Never having died myself, I was willing to grant that dying might have a bad effect on someone's personality.

  It was already a quarter past two. Vicki would be home in another half hour, and Zach shortly after that, unless he had detention again. It's hard to keep up with Zach's detentions. Regardless of what Winifred thought, Adah was getting more and more dangerous, and I couldn't just sit around waiting to see what she would do next and who she'd do it to.

  Jackie, I thought. Jackie would have ideas.

  Jackie lives just close enough to her school that she gets to ride a bus, but she's the last one on in the morning and the first one off in the afternoon. Still, when I called her number, she wasn't home yet and the answering machine kicked in. It's in Jackie's room, and I hoped it would be Jackie who played back the message, because if it was Aunt Rose or Uncle Bob, boy would I feel like an idiot.

  Not having any idea how long a message the machine was set to take, I talked fast. "Jac, this is very important. I found Great-Great-Grandmother Winifred's diary, which tells all about how the ghosts came to be ghosts. But it's getting really spooky around here. Adah—that's the mother ghost—she tried to drown me in my dreams, except that it really made me sick, which shows she's getting stronger or something. First she was able to flip a board, and now she can move keys, and she threw some boxes at me. My parents are next to useless because they don't believe anything I say about this, and the journal won't help, because it just says what a nice person Adah was. And I don't know what to do." I was running out of words. "Do you have any ideas?" I asked lamely. "Call me back, will you?"

  I set the phone down and looked at the journal some more.

  By two-forty, all that I'd learned was that Winifred felt that she and her family had made things worse than they were and she was determined never to get involved with smuggling runaways again. There was absolutely nothing to indicate that at that time Adah and Marella were still ... hanging around. Between the fallen tree and all the mud from
the collapsing canal bank, not to mention that Winifred and Theodore didn't dare make too big a deal of looking for bodies because it would prove they were helping runaways, which was illegal, it didn't sound as if the bodies were ever found.

  Maybe that was it. Maybe the ghosts weren't at rest because their bodies had never been buried.

  But then, why did they choose now to start haunting?

  People from the canal authority had called the tree a hazard to navigation and they'd hauled the tree out before Winifred had resumed writing in her diary; but maybe it had taken this long for the weather to wear away the mud. Maybe the bones had been covered then, but now they weren't.

  But if that was it, why had the ghosts briefly appeared to Jackie eight years ago, only to disappear, only to reappear?

  The more I thought, the more confused I got, and then Vicki came home. Just as I was letting her in, the phone rang.

  Jackie! I thought, lunging for the phone. But it was only Dad, calling to see how I was—and putting off his next repair order, which was for a woman who claimed she had no phone but kept hearing a phone ringing. After assuring Dad that I was fine, I was just handing Vicki the phone when the doorbell rang, and there was Jackie.

  "Jaclyn," Jackie said as soon as I opened the front door. "The name is Jaclyn. I know it's hard for someone of your limited intelligence to grasp words with more than one syllable, but try it slowly: Jaaac-lynnnn."

  Beyond her I could see Aunt Rose, sitting in their car waiting for the traffic to clear enough to pull out of the driveway. Seeing me, she beeped and waved.

  "Are you going to let us in?" Jackie asked, still on the other side of the screen door. "Or is your little brain still trying to process my name?"

  " 'Us' ?" I repeated, a second before a dog barked and I realized that Jackie hadn't developed sudden curvature of the spine but was leaned over, holding on to Cinnamon's collar.

  Jackie sighed, opened the door herself, and came in, dragging along Cinnamon, who was busy sniffing the welcome mat as though it was the most fascinating thing she'd smelled all day.

  Knowing how Jackie felt about our house, I was so relieved to see her that I threw my arms around her before even giving her a chance to disentangle herself from her backpack.

  "Back off." She planted her hand on my chest and pushed me away. She was dressed, as usual, like a mourner at her own funeral. Her fingernails were painted chrome.

  "Thank you," I said. "For coming."

  "Yeah, well," Jackie said, fidgeting with her jacket.

  By then Vicki was through on the phone. "Cinnamon!" she squealed, ignoring Jackie as though Cinnamon had walked here on her own. "Can I take Cinnamon outside, Jackie?"

  Jackie shook her head. "No, Cinnamon doesn't know enough to stay out of a busy street."

  "Why'd you bring her?" I asked.

  "Animals can sense things people can't," Jackie said, giving me a long, meaningful stare. "They act strange around otherworldly beings." Ghosts, I guessed she was saying. But Cinnamon's one of those big dumb dogs that's always twitching and drooling and chasing her own tail. How could we ever guess if she was acting stranger than that?

  "Can I go out and play?" Vicki asked.

  "No," I said, thinking I wanted her closer by than that.

  "Just on the swing set."

  That was halfway to the canal ditch. "No," I said.

  "I'm going to tell Daddy."

  "Don't you dare bother him at work two minutes after he just called us."

  "Teddy, you're so mean. I'm going to tell Daddy when he gets home." Vicki stomped up the stairs. "Or Mommy," she added, and slammed the door to her room.

  Cinnamon, in the meantime, had jumped up onto the couch, which would have made my mother crazy if she'd been there to see. Jackie pulled Winifred's journal out from underneath my arm and plunked herself down next to Cinnamon, which left no room for me.

  "July third," I told her. I leaned over the back of the couch. She seemed to have a lot less trouble than I did making out the handwriting. "There was a part earlier," I said, "where the neighbor woman, Naomi Stearns, asked them to take in a runaway slave woman and her child because the Stearnses' house was being watched by slave catchers. Apparently the Stearnses' did this on a regular basis."

  Jackie nodded without looking up.

  "I guess there was some sort of law that said people couldn't help slaves."

  "Fugitive Slave Act of 1850," Jackie said, still not looking up.

  Big deal. She's in eighth grade. She's supposed to know stuff like that. I'm supposed to know Luxembourg.

  When Jackie was near the section where Winifred asked their names, I explained, "There was another part where they helped a black man who just showed up in their barn. They helped him escape, but Winifred felt bad that she'd never gotten around to asking his name."

  Jackie ignored me.

  A page later, I said, "Mulatto means half white and half black."

  "I know what it means," Jackie snapped impatiently.

  So I didn't say anything else. I just stood behind her, biting at a piece of skin near my thumbnail until she was finished.

  "I've made it to the end of July," I said as she flipped through the next few pages, "and there isn't anything about strange dreams or visions, or unexplainable things going on."

  "She mention the kids?"

  "Just that they were upset."

  Jackie didn't take my word for it but skimmed the whole rest of the book. She never acknowledged that I was right but, in the end, just set the book down and said, "So tell me exactly what happened that got you so"—she wiggled her chrome fingertips—"hyper."

  I told her all about it: the dream where I'd sucked in the water that Marella had drowned in—before I ever knew that Marella had drowned in real life—and how I'd choked on it and thrown up ("Gee, Ted," Jackie said, "thank you for sharing that"), and how I'd learned about the journal from Grandma and Granddad, and what had happened in the attic.

  "But she didn't do anything once you actually got the book?" Jackie asked.

  "No," I admitted. "What do you think it all means?"

  "I think it means we have a crazy ghost on our hands," Jackie said. "That's why Marella is afraid of her."

  "You mean dying made Adah crazy?"

  "Or being not-quite-dead all these years."

  "Not-quite-dead sounds suspiciously like vampires," I said. I found my hand straying to my neck.

  Jackie sighed loudly. "Forget the vampires. Look, when you die, you're supposed to kind of ... move on ... to heaven, right?"

  "Or not," I pointed out.

  Jackie gave me a dirty look. "Anyway, obviously Adah and Marella didn't move on anywhere. Maybe because they died violently or because they were never properly buried. Whatever the reason, the two of them are obviously stuck somewhere between being alive and being dead. Just the two of them, because, obviously, one of the rules of being a ghost must be you have to stay near where you died. Obviously, Adah and Marella are both lonely. But the difference is, every time there's a little girl about her age in this house, Marella tries to contact her to play with her."

  "Ahhh," I said, suddenly getting it.

  "But, obviously,"—Jackie could use the word obviously about things that weren't at all obvious more often than anybody else in the world—"the mother is jealous and doesn't want Marella talking to anybody but her."

  "Because," I said, and Jackie joined in so we both finished together, "she's crazy."

  It fit better than any theory I had. "So what do we do?"

  "Obviously, an exorcism."

  "Call in a priest?" I asked. Somehow I couldn't picture myself picking up the phone and inviting over Father D., our sixty-year-old pastor. "Oh, and by the way," I'd have to tell him, "don't mention this to my parents."

  But Jackie was shaking her head. "Oh, Ted," she said, "you always make everything so complicated. One of us came prepared." She got off the couch, which woke up Cinnamon, who began bounding around the family room
while Jackie fetched her backpack. Jackie held up a tiny bottle.

  "Perfume?" I guessed.

  Obviously not. "Souvenir holy water," she said with a sigh. "Don't you remember when Aunt Len went with that church group to Lourdes?"

  I didn't bother to point out that Len is her mother's sister and therefore no relation to me at all; and, no, I did not remember when she went to Lourdes.

  Cinnamon was so eager to see what Jackie was doing, she tried to stick her head in the backpack, and Jackie had to push her away.

  "Ghost-repelling music," Jackie said, pulling out a cassette tape.

  "What's ghost-repelling music?" I asked. "Do you mean religious songs?"

  "Opera," she said.

  "How about Christmas carols?" I said. "We've got John Denver and the Muppets singing 'Silent Night.' Maybe that'd do better?"

  "Opera," Jackie repeated, forcing me to take her tape. "Opera will drive anybody out of the house. Don't put it on till the last minute."

  The next thing she pulled out was a mirror, the small round kind with a handle. The next thing after that was another mirror, one with a little metal stand. After that, she pulled out yet another mirror, this one set in the middle of a stained-glass daisy pattern, which I recognized to be the one that normally hung on her bedroom wall. She also had two tiny mirrors in cases, the kind girls carry in their purses. Jackie set the mirrors faceup in a semicircle around her. "We need to complete the circle with more mirrors," she said.

  "How come?"

  "To form a barrier around us, which the ghosts can't cross."