by Richard Peck
Various teachers had dropped in through the evening to support our fund raiser and to keep an eye on us. Even Miss Blankenship had turned out. It was reported that she approved of the sign from Hamlet over our front door. But she hadn’t come up to have her fortune told. Anybody as near retirement as Miss Blankenship isn’t looking to the future.
But lo and behold, Mr. Lacy, the history teacher, as the official chaperon for this Haunted House, called on me. Clinging to his arm was none other than Miss Fuller of Girls’ Gym.
“Better yet,” I muttered, seemingly to myself, when I caught sight of her.
Miss Fuller was dolled up in a medley of flowing scarves. Her hair was swept up artistically above a colorful bandeau. Though her eyes are ever sad, they were bright tonight. She was riveted to Mr. Lacy’s side.
He was in one of his natty outfits with matching haberdashery. “Well, Blossom,” he boomed in his teacherish voice, “they tell me you have turned out to be the star attraction!”
He hovered there in the door with Miss Fuller hanging on him like a drowning woman.
“I hope you are a better student of the future than you are in my history class. Ha-ha.”
“Oh, Ambrose,” Miss Fuller simpered, “you are such a card.”
I scooted my crystal ball into place.
“Good evening, folks,” I said. “Step right in. Who’s first?”
“Oh, ha-ha,” booms Mr. Lacy. “I don’t think Miss Fuller and I are in the market for any fortunes this evening. We have just stopped by to wish you well.”
“Many thanks,” I said, arranging my shawl, “but this is a place of business, and there are others waiting.”
“Oh, Ambrose,” says Miss Fuller, bending his sleeve, “go on and have a reading. These children need encouragement.”
“Anything you say,” he replied, giving her the old eye. Then he marched over to me, smirking.
“Take a chair,” I told him. “You’ll need it.”
Smirking still, Mr. Lacy laid out his large white hand on the table. “I hear you are first-rate with palms,” he boomed encouragingly.
“I’ll just take a peek into the crystal ball if it’s all the same to you,” I said. The candle was burning low now, and I’d counted on that.
Miss Fuller crept up behind where Mr. Lacy sat. Now she was looking fondly down at him. I rolled my eyeballs abruptly back, and both my customers started.
A breeze seemed to stir the sheets of the tent that enclosed us. The wavering candle threw long shadows. “Oh, my,” Miss Fuller murmured.
I made a couple passes over the crystal ball, seeming to read it with the whites of my eyes.
“I don’t think that can be good for her vision,” Miss Fuller said.
“Hush, honey,” Mr. Lacy replied.
I made a couple more passes over the crystal ball. “That’s real interesting,” I remarked, “but strange.” My hands cupped my face, and I swayed from side to side.
“I wish she’d quit doing that with her eyes,” Miss Fuller whispered.
My knee knocked the underside of the table, and the crystal ball jiggled, taking on a little life of its own.
Then I rolled my eyes back to a seeing position. A worried look crossed my face. “What we have here is an unusual situation,” I explained to Mr. Lacy. “You don’t seem to have any future at all to speak of.”
“Oh, ha-ha,” he boomed uncertainly. He began to rise. He wouldn’t have minded leaving right then.
“Never mind, Blossom,” Miss Fuller said kindly. “As I’ve often said in the locker room, you can’t win them all.”
“But poor student of history that I am,” I continued, “I believe I’ll try to delve around in your past, Mr. Lacy.”
“Oh, a little personal history?” He smirked again, broader than before.
“You got it,” I said. “After all, what is history but mankind’s record where we look for guidance? We search the past for wisdom because the future is the Great Unknown!”
“I couldn’t have put it better myself,” Mr. Lacy said. The last of the candlelight gleamed in his yellow wavy hair.
“Here it comes,” I said, peering deep into the blank ball. “Here comes Wisdom sharp and clear. Lay it on me!”
Fresh breezes seemed to whip the sheets around us. The screams of sophomores going through the deadman’s dungeon far below our feet echoed upward.
“I see a small town, somewhat backward,” I moaned distantly, “on the banks of the Mississippi River. I see steamboats drawn up to the wharf, taking on cotton and grain.”
“How interesting,” Miss Fuller remarked. Mr. Lacy said nothing.
“From the general condition of the place,” I moaned on, “I’d put us back about 1905, or 1906 at the latest.”
Mr. Lacy stirred.
“I see a festive occasion and half the town turned out for the event.” My nose was practically flat against the ball by now. “A wedding!” I exclaimed. “They’re throwing rice at a happy couple.”
“How sweet,” Miss Fuller said.
“The bride is not much to look at,” I observed, “but the groom is one good-looking dude.”
Mr. Lacy’s white hand stole up to smooth his yellow hair.
I fell back in the chair. “My vision grows dim, dim,” I nearly sobbed. “Dark clouds obscure this joyous scene.
“But hark!” Back my nose went to the ball. I was reading it like a book, and you could have heard a pin drop. “The groom is a husband now, and a bad one. I see the bride, now a wife, weeping in despair. She has been deceived and knows it!”
“For shame,” Miss Fuller said.
“This poor deceived wife is tearing her hair and . . . rocking a cradle!”
“A cradle?” Miss Fuller plucked nervously at her drapings.
As if by chance, the fringe on my shawl swept over the candle, snuffing it out. We were in darkness now, within the swaying sheets.
“I can almost hear this abandoned wife and mother’s voice,” I said in rather a loud tone.
Silence fell.
I spoke again, louder. “I say I can almost hear this abandoned wife and mother’s voice.”
In a far corner of the darkened room something moved behind the sheets. It was only a shadow at first. Then there was the tiniest pinpoint of light, floating like a firefly.
“Owwww” came the weirdest voice you ever heard. Miss Fuller had Mr. Lacy in a hammerlock. Nobody breathed.
“Owwww, Ambrose! Ambrose!” The sheets stirred, and the pinpoint of lamplight grew to a glow. “Wherefore art thou, Ambrose?”
A lamp was held up by a bony hand. Its pale light filtering through the sheet fell on the frozen faces of Miss Fuller and Mr. Lacy. They stared in horror, and I had the willies myself.
There was only the hint of a wan and mournful face behind the sheet, for all the world like an abandoned wife and mother.
“Owwww, Ambrose,” the thing said, “it’s me, yore lovin’ wife. Why have you run off and left me, Ambrose? Don’t you know me, sweetheart? It’s me . . . Blanche!”
Mr. Lacy started from his chair. “Son of a—”
“Who?” Miss Fuller asked. “Who’s Blanche?”
The thing went right on talking. “And here beside me, Ambrose, is yore lovin’ little child.”
There was a short struggle behind the sheet. Another ghostly form, much smaller, was dragged up to our attention. “Here is yore little boy. Wave to Papa . . . Leonard.”
Mr. Lacy crashed back in his chair.
“Leonard?” Miss Fuller asked. “Who’s Leonard?”
A bony hand reached up to turn the lamp down. It gleamed like a firefly floating and went out. The pair of ghostly figures, the big one and the little one, faded.
Then things went haywire.
We remained in dark silence for an instant. Then Mr. Lacy lunged my way. He fumbled for the crystal ball and grabbed it. Then he hauled off and heaved it toward the sheet. It exploded against the far wall with a deafening sound. Miss Fuller commenced screaming a
nd wouldn’t stop.
20
THE WITCHING HOUR HAD PASSED, and November was upon us. There was already gray dawn light in the east, and the old Leverette farmhouse was abandoned once more.
The last of our customers had departed, and the Shambaughs’ Packard had long since called for Letty and her club. I had no doubt they were all snug in warm beds by now.
Still, I lingered in the upstairs room. I’d folded up all the sheets of my tent and pulled down my Madame Blossom Tells All sign. Now I was sweeping up the crystal ball that had shattered all over the room. Somehow, I wanted to leave the room neat for Jeremy-to-be.
Though I figured I was alone with my thoughts, I heard a footstep at the door, crunching on broken glass. I turned to see a shadow on the threshold. It moved and was Alexander.
He hesitated, still suspicious of this particular room.
“Blossom, you still here?”
“If I’m not, Alexander, you’re looking at my ghost.”
He peered from side to side. “Don’t talk that way,” he muttered. “I heard sweeping, so I figured you hadn’t gone.” He stepped cautiously into the room, carrying a couple of punch cups. “I was cleaning up the monster’s kitchen and thought maybe you’d like a cup of grape juice. After all, you put in a pretty good night’s work, I have to admit.”
“Many thanks, Alexander.” I propped the broom against the wall, and we settled at my table. It seemed empty without the crystal ball. Alexander placed a punch cup before me and withdrew his hand, fast.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve told enough fortunes for one night.”
Alexander nodded. “That’s what everybody says. You outdid yourself with Mr. Lacy. He took off like a bat out of you-know-where. Miss Fuller was right at his heels. She was screaming to beat the band and wouldn’t stop.”
“He was nothing but a philandering married man,” I remarked wearily, “and he was sparking both Miss Fuller and Miss Spaulding. If he wants to save his worthless hide, he’ll be on the milk train out of Bluff City this very morning.”
Alexander considered this. “I hope they’ll be in no hurry to find a new history teacher,” he said, which is the way a boy thinks.
We sipped a little grape juice, and then he said, “Blossom, how did you get the goods on Mr. Lacy? Did you use the crystal ball on him, or did you go off into one of your spells?”
I twitched my elbows slightly. “Well, now, Alexander, that’s an interesting point. As you know, I have a number of Powers to draw on. And as I’ve often said, a Gift is a curse unless you put it to work. Now you take, for example, a deck of cards. I’ve done some of my best work this very evening with this very deck.”
Reaching into a pocket, I withdrew the cards and fanned them on the table before us.
The room had gone from black to gray. In the cold light of dawn they were only ordinary playing cards, greasy from Mama’s hand.
Alexander waited, almost politely, for whatever tall tale I cared to think up.
But Halloween was over, and it was just me and Alexander Armsworth there together. So I told him the truth.
I told him it was Mama who’d known about Mr. Lacy’s shameful past. Naturally that brought in Daisy-Rae and Roderick, whom Alexander had already more or less met. I had to work them into this conversation, for Daisy-Rae played the role of Blanche, Mr. Lacy’s poor, deceived wife. And Roderick played the role of his abandoned little son, Leonard.
It was lucky indeed that Mr. Lacy hadn’t knocked one or both of them senseless when he let fly with that crystal ball. Even that polecat’s aim was bad.
Of course, in the confusion that followed, Daisy-Rae and Roderick had slipped off to their chicken coop home and were doubtless fast asleep by now.
Alexander rubbed his chin for all the world like Jeremy. “Blossom, do you mean to tell me that Daisy-Rae sleeps in a chicken coop all night and lives all day in the girls’ rest room at Bluff City High School? Is that what you’re telling me?”
The trouble with the truth is that it’s hard to believe.
But by and by I got Alexander convinced. It was time we headed for home. The sun was all but up. Though I hadn’t liked to leave this room, somehow I didn’t mind with Alexander by my side.
We were climbing down the creaky stairs to the cobwebby hall. “Now that Daisy-Rae has helped out at our Haunted House fund raiser,” I said, “I think I can convince her to be a regular freshman. A little nudge or two, and I’ll have her attending classes.”
Alexander nodded his approval of this plan.
“If Daisy-Rae’s going to be a real freshman,” I observed, “she’ll naturally need a beanie. But I’ll find one for her somewheres.”
Alexander reached up to his bare head. “I’ve lost my beanie,” he said, “somewheres.”
“Is that a fact,” I remarked, and he gave me one of his most suspicious looks.
His suspicions deepened when I led him to the dining room. It was bare in there except for some burned-out jack-o’-lanterns and the old gasolier fixture hanging down. The china closet door stood open.
He saw that Roderick was not lurking inside, ready to scare him out of a year’s growth again. Still, he was puzzled when I said, “I’d be obliged if you’d check around in that china closet for a loose floorboard.”
He went down on all fours and peered inside. “All the floorboards are loose,” he said in a hollow voice.
I reached into one of my many pockets and fished up the spelling medal. “Just hide this medal of mine under one of them boards.”
When he’d wedged it tight under the floor, he sat back on his heels. “How come we’re burying your medal, Blossom?”
“I’ve left it as a token of friendship,” I told him, “for a kid of my acquaintance.”
“A boy?” Alexander wondered.
I nodded.
“Is it anybody I know? It’s not Champ, is it? Or Bub?”
“Mercy, no, Alexander.” I shook my head till the hoops swung in my ears. “It’s a boy yet to be. He won’t be born for many years.”
Alexander rubbed his chin in thought. “And yet you know him, Blossom.”
I nodded.
“There are more things in heaven and earth, Alexander,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”
“Hamlet?” he inquired.
“Act One,” I answered.
Then me and Alexander Armsworth walked out into the bright November morning, almost hand in hand.
Richard Peck was born in Decatur, Illinois. He attended Exeter University in England and holds degrees from DePauw University and Southern Illinois University.
In 1990, he received the American Library Association’s Margaret A. Edwards Award, which honors “an author whose book or books, over a period of time, have been accepted by young adults as an authentic voice that continues to illuminate their experiences and emotions, giving insight into their lives.”
His other books include The Ghost Belonged to Me, Ghosts I Have Been (both about Blossom Culp), Are You in the House Alone?, A Long Way from Chicago, which was both a 1999 National Book Award Finalist and the 1999 Newbery Honor Book, and its sequel, A Year Down Yonder.
Richard Peck lives in New York City.
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