“Why won’t she?” Ida asked, sounding a bit less angry.
“Because she doesn’t think any of it’s good enough. She’s afraid of people like—”
“Marcus Mattigan, Professional Skeptic,” Max and Maddie both said.
“Exactly.”
“Wait,” Ida said. “So, all that research you put online was hers?”
“For the past few months,” Sam explained, “I’ve been turning myself into this—” he pointed at his clothes, “so people wouldn’t be surprised by what I was going to do. At the same time, at night, I was sneaking into my mother’s office and copying her research findings, waiting for a good chance to share it all. Well, this weekend, she went camping — though I think that really means she’s out looking for plants and roots used for summoning — so I decided it was now or never to post her theories. I wasn’t worried she’d find out. She doesn’t even have a computer. But I wanted to act like it was all my research, because I didn’t want to embarrass Mom if nothing worked. She tries so hard. I don’t care if Marcus Mattigan calls me a kook and a publicity hound. But if it did turn out to work, I was going to tell everyone it was hers. I just want her work to mean something. Heck, if it went really well, I thought maybe I’d end up summoning our older brother for her, so she can finally be happy.”
“You’re a really nice person,” Maddie said.
“You’re definitely you again,” Ida sighed, and then rushed up to Sam and hugged him. Sam hugged her back. “And it does work!” she realized. “One of her theories is right! Otherwise, that thing wouldn’t have come!”
“Yes,” Sam agreed when they let each other go. “I saw Fifi’s video of me getting attacked by the — shadow. Though, I don’t remember any of it. Something was definitely controlling me. It made me destroy all of Mom’s research!” Sam bowed his head. “All of it! It’s gone!” He looked up with tears in his eyes again. “Do you understand what I’m saying?” he asked. “She has no computer. It was all on paper. Years of research. It made me go down to her office and burn it all in the fireplace! When she gets home tomorrow…” He couldn’t even finish the thought.
Ida hugged him again. “I’m so sorry.”
After a moment, Sam pulled himself together and let Ida step back again. “I’ve been online since the shadow left me,” he said. “I’m trying to learn everything I can about ghosts. The least I can do is figure out how to get it out of Fifi. It’s my fault my sister is possessed!”
“It’s still in her?” Ida gasped.
“Yes,” Sam confirmed. “She was just in here talking like a robot, telling me to forget about all this ghost silliness.”
“Why did it attack her?” Ida asked.
“Hold on,” Max said, trying to think like a spy. “Back up. First things first.” He looked at Sam, and asked, “Are we sure we know exactly why it attacked you?”
“Like Ida explained,” Sam said. “Because I posted my mom’s research.”
“But that doesn’t really make sense,” Max realized. “Research means it was already published somewhere. If the ghost goes after anyone who publishes some important information about it, then—”
“Sam said in his video that his mom had some theories of her own,” Maddie pointed out.
“Ah-ha!” Max exclaimed. “That’s why the ghost came. Your mother figured out something no one else knows about ghosts!”
“Wow. You’re good!” Sam said, sounding like Ida’s dad. “But I have no idea what it was!”
“Because it got you to delete the video, and even to forget it,” Max said, trying to follow the logic. “So, why didn’t the shadow just scram?”
“Because my sister saw it get me,” Sam realized. “And not just on some Internet video where it might be fake. She saw it up close and personal, with her own two eyes. So, it jumped into her to make sure she’d forget it. And it forced her to tell people not to believe that video as a bonus.”
“Right!” Max and Maddie agreed.
“So—” Ida asked, “why didn’t it scram after that? Why’s it still in her?”
“Good question,” Sam said.
Everyone fell quiet as they considered the possible reasons.
Finally, Maddie asked Sam, “When exactly did it get you again?”
“Midnight last night.”
“And when did it get your sister?”
“Noon today.”
“So, it let Fifi’s video stay online for 12 hours,” Maddie calculated. “That’s why all those people are outside. That doesn’t seem very smart, unless—”
“It’s stuck in people for 12 hours!” Max cried. “Maddie, you’re a genius!”
“I told you—Maddie skills.” Maddie was smiling, but when she looked around the room, the smile fell away.
Her youngest brother was gone.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Fifi Inada
“Maybe he went back into my room,” Ida suggested.
“No,” Sam said. “Look — my bedroom door wasn’t open.”
It was now.
The kids all rushed out of the room, which was, of course, also on the second floor of the Inadas’ house. As soon as they got into the hall, they heard a voice — Theo’s — coming from behind a closed door.
“That’s my sister’s room,” Sam said.
Theo was talking loudly and urgently. They could all hear him clearly.
“Please come out,” he said. “We came to take you home with us! You’ll love our new family. You really will! Please! You’ll get to meet—”
“Theo!” Maddie nearly screamed. Looking not unlike Bigfoot with her arms and hair flying, she charged through the door, desperate to stop him before he spilled the beans about their secret houseguests. The others followed her in. Theo was sitting with Fifi on her bed. The room was a typical teenaged girl’s: yellow and white, with stuffed animals on the bed and posters of boy bands on the walls. Fifi was wearing a yellow top over jeans shorts and long, brightly striped knee-high socks with “finger-toes.”
Theo looked at Maddie and said, “She won’t come out!”
“Theo—” Maddie said, though there was no way to yell at him in front of everyone. Instead, she said, “Why are you calling the ghost a she?”
“Because,” was all Theo had to say about that.
“I’ve been telling this silly child here that there is no such thing as ghosts,” Fifi told everyone in that weird, slow voice she and her brother had each used in their videos. She apparently hadn’t been alarmed to find a strange boy in her room.
“You’re not my sister,” Sam snarled. “I know whatever is talking to us stole my sister, and I’ll prove it!” Then he turned and left the room.
“Sam!” Ida cried, hurrying after him.
“He is so silly,” Fifi said. “This is all very silly. I wish I could convince you silly people that there is no ghost in me. You are all so silly!”
“Maybe you can!” Max suddenly said. “You could, I don’t know, go see if there’s any of your mom’s research Sam didn’t destroy still in her office, stuck in the back of a drawer or something.” Max stared hard at his sister, hoping she’d get the hint. “Maddie could go with you to help, or to make sure you don’t destroy it if you find any.”
Maddie looked hard at Max. She didn’t know what he was up to, but she knew him well enough to know he was up to something. “Yeah, I could do that,” she said.
“Okay, then,” Fifi said. “I will do that. Follow me downstairs, strange young lady who I don’t know. I think the silly child needs a nap, though. He called me Mom!”
The moment she and Maddie were gone, Max immediately got into his spy crouch. He turned to Theo and whispered, “Start looking!”
“For what?”
“For Sam’s diary! When he said the ghost stole his real sister, I remembered that, in her video, sh
e said she swiped his diary. I bet it’s in here! Maybe he copied some of the research into it!”
“Okay,” Theo said. “Good idea. This’ll be a cinch.”
“Why do you keep saying that? You know, you are acting really weird.”
“You’re the one who looks like he’s going to poop on the floor.”
“You know this is my search mode!”
“Still.”
The brothers began rummaging around the room.
Max searched under the bed.
Theo looked in the dresser drawers. “Gross,” he said. “Girl stuff.”
Max sifted through a box of stuffed animals.
Theo went to look around in the closet.
Max was sorting with mild interest through the books on Fifi’s bookshelf when Theo came out just a minute later, holding a giant three-ring binder bursting with paper. “Found it,” he said.
“Brilliant!”
“Told ya.”
CHAPTER NINE
The Diary
Thirty minutes later, Maddie pushed Sam’s door open to find Sam, Max, Theo, and Ida all on the floor between the gravestones, each hunched over huge stacks of papers, all taking pictures of the sheets on top with their phones.
“What’s going on?” Maddie asked.
“Your brother’s a genius!” Sam told her.
“Humpf!”
“Both your brothers.”
“Fifi filched Sam’s diary,” Max explained. “Which turned out to be his research notebook — all the stuff he copied from his mom’s office. Everything he scanned! Theo found it in her closet.”
“That’s right!” Maddie realized. “She said she took his diary in her video! That’s why you wanted us out of her room! Great job! Fifi and I didn’t find anything downstairs, but I guess it doesn’t matter now. I let her think she convinced me that she’s ghost-free. She’s back in her room now.”
“Good,” Sam said. “She should stay there.”
“So, what’s going on with the phones?” Maddie asked again.
“We’re rescanning everything,” Sam explained, “just the way I originally did, so the shadow will have to come after me again. It’s going to take all day, though, to get it all copied and uploaded to my webpage.”
“Wait,” Maddie said, “you want the shadow to attack you again?”
“Yes,” Sam said. “I have a plan. But it doesn’t put you Mattigans in any danger. Ida and I talked about it before these guys came back in here. It’s our risk, okay? If you want, you can be our back-ups — to make sure nothing goes wrong.”
“What’s the plan?” Maddie asked, worried already.
“The plan is to upload all this stuff before midnight, same as last night, but I’m sending a copy to Ida and Fifi. The shadow will come and jump into me at midnight again, but this time Ida will be filming it. She’s going to tell it that she knows that it will jump into her next, but that before that happens, Ida or I will relearn everything that’s going on and then repost the research. And so on, on and on forever. The ghost will never be able to make us all forget. It’ll see it’s trapped, and it’ll have to make a deal.”
“A deal?” Maddie asked.
“Yeah. I’m going to offer to let it make all three of us forget about it, totally and completely. I just want it to let my mom know it’s real, that ghosts are real, or that we live on somehow after we die. Of course, I mean my older brother, in particular. I think that’s all she really wants to know, anyway.”
None of the Mattigans said anything to this. They were all amazed both by the cleverness of the plan and by the kindness of Sam Inada.
“Sam,” Maddie finally said, “that’s amazing.”
“Thank you. I was thinking you guys could sleep over, maybe stay in Ida’s room and listen through the hole to make sure nothing goes haywire.”
“Of course, we will.”
“Great. Then let’s get copying, shall we?”
“But,” Maddie said, “I don’t think you actually need to copy all of that.”
“Why not?”
“Because you didn’t upload it all at once. You said in your video that it took days.”
“So?”
Max understood. He slapped himself on the forehead for not realizing it sooner himself. “She’s saying that, if the new theory was in the stuff you scanned first, the shadow would have come earlier. It didn’t come until your very last scan! It must be on your last page! That’s all you need to re-scan and post! Maddie, you’re a genius!”
“We’ve already established that.”
“Who has the last part of the notebook?” Sam asked. Sections of it were all over the room.
“I do!” Theo announced. He got up and rushed it toward Sam at his desk, but he slipped on another pile of papers from the notebook and face-planted. The pile in his hands went flying all over the place.
“Theo!” everyone screamed.
“My bad,” he said into the carpet.
Between the five of them, the kids were able to re-gather Theo’s stack, but it was impossible to determine which had been the last page. Even so, scanning that one stack was much less of a chore than scanning the entire notebook.
So, that was what they did. Everyone worked steadily at snapping pictures and emailing them to Sam, who transferred the images to his website.
Two hours later, at five o’clock on the dot, he finally said, “Done!”
CHAPTER TEN
Follow the Money
Maddie’s phone buzzed. “Crikey,” she said to Ida after reading the text. “My dad and your parents are on their way back.”
“Perfect,” Sam said. “Ida will come over a few minutes before midnight. That’s when you guys should set up watch in the closet.”
“Okay,” Maddie agreed. Max gave her an inquiring look, because he could tell by her voice that something was bothering her. He was pretty sure he knew what it was because it was bothering him, too.
“Be careful,” Ida said, giving Sam another hug. “I don’t like the thought of that thing in you for another twelve hours.” Then she hurried back through the closet and into her family’s side of the duplex. The Mattigans hurried in behind her. They were in Ida’s room for only a few minutes before they heard the front door open downstairs and the sound of shouting protesters filtering in from the street. Everyone rushed to greet their parents.
“Any luck?” Maddie asked her father when he came in.
“Offended!” Marcus said. But he was smiling. “How dare you call it luck?” he added, pretending to be hurt.
“Your dad’s the man!” Kirk proclaimed. “You think they’re just simple conversations, but he knows what questions to ask, and one leads to another, and then another, and then he turns on the charm for the news cameras and Bam! That was pretty much it! Not exactly top-secret spy stuff, but wow!”
“What happened?” Max asked.
“Well,” Marcus said, “you’ll see — assuming someone will run the interview I just did out there. I think there’s a good chance at least one of the stations will. The protests are only picking up. We’ll just have to see after dinner. Or,” he added, looking at his phone, “during dinner.”
“Speaking of which,” Kirk said, holding up a bag of fried chicken. “Chow Time!”
Everyone sat in the Kubatniks’ living room so they could eat while they watched the news. It didn’t take long to learn whether Marcus’ interview would be featured. It was the lead story on the first channel they tried.
“We begin tonight with local news,” the anchor said, a man with a shiny helmet of black hair. “Let’s go out to the scene of the ‘Ashland Ghost House,’ as people are calling it. Protests there began overnight and have grown all day. People are demanding to know whether the children inside are actually possessed by ghosts. It seems we might just have an an
swer from a well-known and very trusted homegrown source.”
The scene changed to the street right outside. A reporter was standing in the middle of the protesters. “That’s right,” she said. “I think we might be able to sort this out, thanks to Oregon’s own Marcus Mattigan of Monstrous Lies with Marcus Mattigan fame.”
“Yay!” Louise cheered, clapping.
Marcus came on screen.
“Thank you for joining us, Mr. Mattigan,” the reporter said. “What can you tell us about this ghost situation?”
“Well,” Marcus replied, “as I always say on my show, follow the money. Someone is usually benefiting from these kind of publicity stunts, and that, I’m afraid, is just what this is. I happened to learn this afternoon that Julie Inada, the mother of the kids in these admittedly impressive videos, is also the author of half a dozen paranormal romance books written under a pseudonym.”
“Is that right?” the reporter asked. “What name does she use?”
“Well, I’m sure that’s the point, so I’ll take a pass on sharing it. She wants people to find out. And I’m quite sure someone will reveal it for her now. And no doubt her books will soon be flying off the shelves.”
“You didn’t!” Max and Maddie moaned.
“See what I did there?” Marcus asked the reporter. “Flying off the shelves?”
“Well, there you have it,” the reporter said, turning back to the camera. “Back to you.”
“Oh, yes, I did,” Marcus said to his kids, grinning.
Max, Maddie, Theo, and Ida all ran to the front window and swept aside the curtains. Everyone outside had been watching the news on their cell phones and tablets.
They were already packing it in.
“Well,” Marcus said. He’d come over to take a look, too. “I guess we might as well head home after dinner.”
“No!” all four kids shouted at once.
“Surprised!” Marcus told them. “I’m getting the impression you’d like to say.”
“Yeah,” Maddie told him, trying not to sound desperate. “We’ve kind of made friends with Ida. Can we just stay the night? Would that be okay, Mr. and Mrs. Kubatnik?”
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