The House Where Nobody Lived

by Brad Strickland

  It lurched again, though, when Rose Rita suddenly asked, “Mrs. Zimmermann, what is that strange old house north of town, about half a mile off the highway?”

  Mrs. Zimmermann’s spectacles suddenly gleamed as she turned her head toward Rose Rita. Her white eyebrows rose in surprise, but her eyes narrowed. “Have you two been exploring that dangerous old place?” she demanded, her voice surprisingly sharp.

  “Well, not exactly,” said Rose Rita. “But we saw it.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann touched her chin thoughtfully with her right index finger. “Hmm. What do you think, Weird Beard? Should we tell them?”

  Uncle Jonathan shrugged. “I don’t think it’s any great secret. Funny how people forget about the Hawaii House, though.”

  “The what?” asked Lewis.

  “It’s called the Hawaii House,” Uncle Jonathan repeated. “And that’s because it was built by a sea captain who settled down here in the middle of Michigan about, oh, seventy-five years ago or so, a few years after the Civil War. What was his name, Florence?”

  “Chadwick,” returned Mrs. Zimmermann at once. “Captain Abediah Chadwick, originally of Boston. He was the captain of a ship that took representatives of the United States government from San Francisco to the Sandwich Islands in the year 1869.”

  “It was a voyage of exploration,” explained Uncle Jonathan. “They wanted to see if the Sandwich Islands were ham on rye or Swiss cheese on whole wheat.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann snorted. “As Frazzle Face very well knows, the Sandwich Islands were given that name by Captain James Cook, in honor of John Montagu, the Earl of Sandwich. Later, though, they came to be called the Hawaiian Islands. Anyway, Captain Chadwick spent three years there, and during that time he met a beautiful young Hawaiian princess, or so the stories say. He was about fifty, and she was less than half his age. Her people tried to prevent them from getting together, but just like in a fairy tale, she fell in love with Abediah Chadwick and he with her, and the princess ran away with him. He married her at sea, and when he got back to the United States, he decided to take her as far away from the ocean as he could. They wound up here in Michigan.”

  “Old Chadwick sold his shipping business and retired with a fortune,” put in Uncle Jonathan. “He built his bride a magnificent house just outside of town, with lots of land around it. He wanted it to remind her of her home islands, so it was unlike any other house around here. It looked like a mansion that might be owned by a rich Hawaiian pineapple rancher.”

  Lewis wasn’t sure that pineapples were grown on ranches, but before he could ask, Rose Rita broke in with a question: “Did they live happily ever after?”

  Uncle Jonathan and Mrs. Zimmermann exchanged a long look, and Uncle Jonathan tugged uneasily at his beard. “Well—no.”

  “We don’t know that,” said Mrs. Zimmerman in a grim voice. “All we know is what happened. Chadwick hired a big staff of servants to help run that place—three maids and a butler, as well as a gardener and a cook. They all had rooms in the mansion. But in 1875 or 1876—I don’t remember which, but they say it was exactly one year to the day after the house was finished—well, they all died, all in one night.”

  “What?” Rose Rita sat up straight. “Did he go crazy and kill them, or—”

  Uncle Jonathan raised his hand. “No, no, and no. They all just—died. I’m not going to go into details, because then Lewis would have the heebie-jeebies for a month, but I will say that all of the people in the house seemed to be perfectly sound except for the fact that they weren’t breathing. This was during a cold winter, and one of the victims, Abediah Chadwick himself, seemed to have frozen to death, but no one knows what happened to the others. People thought it might have been some weird disease, but if it was, no one else ever caught it.”

  “But you can imagine how people in New Zebedee reacted to the terrible news,” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “One of Abediah Chadwick’s relatives out in New England inherited the house. He tried to rent it out, but no one would ever stay in the place because of what happened. Eventually he sold it, very cheaply, to some real estate company or other. Years later they fixed it up by wiring it for electricity and adding modern plumbing, but even so they could never interest anyone around here in buying the place. Years passed and the For Sale signs rotted and fell apart and the company simply stopped trying to sell or rent the old place. So it just stands out there, with quite a forest growing around it now. I expect it’s in pretty bad repair.”

  “No,” said Rose Rita. “That’s the funny part. It doesn’t look bad at all. Just empty.”

  “Well,” said Uncle Jonathan, “be that as it may, it’s no place to go prowling around. It still belongs to some real estate company or other, and companies can be very touchy about little things like trespassing. Promise me that you two won’t go near it again.”

  “I promise,” Lewis said fervently.

  It took Rose Rita a couple of minutes, but finally she gave her word too.

  It was a promise that both of them kept for months, and then for years. At first Rose Rita would mention the old house every once in a while, but in time other things came along to occupy them. Eventually Lewis all but forgot about the isolated building, the drumming sound, and the ghastly story of how everyone in the Hawaii House had died all in one night.

  And then, a long time later, when Lewis was over thirteen, something happened.

  CHAPTER 3

  THE LEWIS BARNAVELT WHO started school that year in the 1950s was not only older, but also a little braver and a little more confident. In the years since they had first seen the Hawaii House, Lewis and Rose Rita had shared some pretty amazing adventures. Rose Rita had taught Lewis to play a fair game of baseball. She was a real baseball fiend, not only a good pitcher and batter, but a walking encyclopedia of facts and figures about the game. After Uncle Jonathan treated Lewis to a long summer vacation in Europe, where they walked for miles at a stretch and where the strange food did not appeal to his appetite, Lewis had lost some weight. He still was heavyset, though not as chubby as he had once been. At least, for a long time no one, not even the annoying little kids, had yelled the insulting rhyme at him:

  Fatty, fatty, two by four,

  Can’t get through the kitchen door!

  Oh, it was true that Lewis was still clumsy on the baseball field and so timid that he didn’t dare play football for fear of getting hurt. He still loved to read piles of books about adventures in strange, far-away places. And he still fretted when other kids sometimes teased him about being too smart for his own good or called him “teacher’s pet.” Still, he had finally decided that he would never be a real athlete, and now he didn’t worry about that anymore. He was becoming far more interested in things like astronomy than sports, anyway.

  When school started that year, Lewis learned that for the first time he would be changing classes. Up until then, he had been with one or maybe two teachers all day, first the nuns at the Catholic school and then later the teachers at the public school. Beginning on the day after Labor Day, however, Lewis would now report to Mr. Beemuth’s homeroom. After that, he would have to go to Mrs. Zane’s English class, then to Mr. Furling’s math class, and so on, ending up back with Mr. Beemuth for science in the afternoon. Rose Rita was in just two classes with him, which threw Lewis into the dumps.

  “I don’t like this crazy old schedule,” he fretted to Rose Rita at lunch on the first day. “I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to remember where my classes are and when they start. I’ll probably flunk out of school, and then I’ll have to go be a garbage man and ride on that stinky truck with Skunky Stevenson!”

  Rose Rita was drinking milk, and she laughed so suddenly that some of it shot out her nose. “Stop it! Ow!” she complained, reaching for a napkin. “Look, Lewis, if you can remember the names of Jupiter’s moons, and when Venus transits the sun and the whatzis and whosis of Mars—”

  “Right ascension and declination,” Lewis said. “It isn’t that hard—”
<
br />   Rose Rita carried right on: “—then you certainly can remember when to go to English and so on. What made you think of Skunky, anyway?”

  Lewis shrugged. Skunky wasn’t the man’s real name, of course. In fact, he had what Uncle Jonathan called a three-barreled name: Potsworth Farmer Stevenson the Fourth. He was a squatty, red-faced, bleary-eyed man with a frost of gray hair around his lumpy bald head, and he always seemed about a beat and a half behind everyone around him. His family had been rich, but Potsworth Farmer Stevenson the Fourth had lost all the money he had inherited. People felt sorry for him, and at last the town had hired him to be the assistant sanitation man, which meant he got bossed around by foul-mouthed old Jute Feasel as he drove the clanking, battered garbage truck through the streets of New Zebedee.

  To Lewis, Skunky Stevenson represented the terrible things that could happen to a person, and the kind of things that he sometimes feared might happen to him. He was about to explain this to Rose Rita when he heard a commotion behind him. He turned away from his unappealing lunch of soggy, cold fish sticks, runny but lumpy mashed potatoes, and wilted green beans to see who was laughing behind him.

  He saw a skinny, miserable-looking boy about his own age standing near a table, holding a tray of food. The four boys already sitting at the table were talking to the kid with the tray, but they sounded anything but friendly. “G-g-g-go s-s-s-sit s-s-s-s-omewhere else, you baby,” mocked Curt Schellmacher, the shortest of the four boys, in an exaggerated stammer.

  “He’s gonna cry,” said big Jimmy Taubman, while the others laughed in a nasty way.

  “Great,” growled Rose Rita, starting to get up from the table. “I’d better straighten this out.”

  “Don’t make it worse on him,” warned Lewis. Instead of making a big deal of it, Lewis just motioned to the standing boy, and with a look of relief in his eyes, the new kid noticed and hurried toward them. Mike Dugan, another of the boys at the table, stuck out his big black P.F. Flyers sneaker and tripped him, and the new kid went sprawling, milk, mashed potatoes, and fish sticks splattering everywhere.

  Lewis jumped up, and he and Rose Rita helped the poor guy get to his feet as Mrs. Thayer, a plump, kind, gray-haired lunchroom lady, hurried over with a towel. “My goodness!” she said. “What happened?”

  The boy’s thin face turned so red, it was nearly purple. “T-t-t-tripped,” he stammered. “Muh-my f-fault.”

  Rose Rita’s eyes flashed in surprise and anger. Lewis saw her glare toward the four boys who had been teasing the victim, and he gave a warning shake of his head. Lewis knew what it was like to be bullied and browbeaten, and Rose Rita didn’t. Mrs. Thayer swabbed potatoes off the boy’s red plaid flannel shirt, then helped him pick up his tray, plate, and tableware. “You sit down,” she said in a motherly way. “I’ll bring you something to eat.”

  As she hurried away with the tray and the ruins of the lunch, the boy slid gratefully into the empty seat beside Lewis. He clenched his fists on top of the table and stared at them, his blue eyes red-rimmed and shiny with tears.

  “Those guys are jerks,” Lewis said quietly. “Don’t let them know they got to you, or it will never end.”

  “Most of the kids here aren’t like that,” put in Rose Rita. “Most of us have a little sense.”

  Lewis scooped up a little of his mashed potatoes on a fork and let it gloop off in a runny, stringy blob. “Anyway, they were actually doing you a favor.”

  The boy tried to smile, but it was the most miserable-looking smile Lewis had ever seen. Mrs. Thayer returned with a little glass bottle of milk, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and an apple. “Here you are, dear,” she said. “Maybe this will hold you. I’m sorry, but we’re all out of fish sticks.”

  When she had left, Lewis said, “Wow, you got actual food. Maybe tomorrow I can get those guys to trip me.” He held out his hand. “I’m Lewis Barnavelt. This is my friend Rose Rita Pottinger. Welcome to the wonderful world of New Zebedee public school!”

  The boy seemed too shy to shake Lewis’s hand. “I’m Duh-D-Duh-” he started, his face turning all red again. “Muh-my nuh-name is, is, is, Duh-David. David Kuh-Keller,” he finished in a strained voice.

  “Better hurry and eat,” said Rose Rita, looking at her watch. “We have to get to the next class in seven minutes and sixteen seconds.”

  David pulled the little round paper lid off his bottle of milk and took a gulp. “I cuh-c-can’t tuh-talk vuh-v-very good,” he confessed.

  Lewis felt the terrible tension that the effort had cost David, and he felt sorry for the kid. “That’s okay,” he said. “Everybody can’t do something. Rose Rita’s right, though. You don’t have much time. You’d better eat up unless you want your stomach to growl in your next class.”

  David nodded and hastily munched his way through the peanut butter and grape jelly sandwich. He offered the apple silently to Lewis.

  “No, thanks,” Lewis said, making a face. “I already had the delicious and nutritious lime Jell-O cube with a grape floating in the middle. You eat the apple.”

  “I wuh-wanted to th-thank you,” David said in a low voice. “Everybody else makes fuh-fun of muh-me.”

  Rose Rita smiled. She would never be a great beauty, but Lewis had often thought that no one had a better face for smiling than Rose Rita. “That’s all right, David,” she said. “Listen, the other girls call me Beanpole and Four Eyes, and people used to call Lewis Tubby and—”

  “Hey,” Lewis objected, but he was grinning.

  “—and other names,” said Rose Rita. “But you know what? He and I decided that the names they call us aren’t our problem. They don’t really mean anything. Except that the people who call us those things are morons.”

  David actually chuckled at that. He didn’t try to speak again, but just nodded. A moment later, the bell rang, and all the students at lunch trudged off to their next classes.

  Lewis and David had history with Mrs. Angdale, who was about the oldest teacher at the school. She was tall and thin, with a big beak of a nose and white hair that she kept in a hard-looking bun at the very back of her head. She always wore black dresses, and before the end of every day, her dresses had streaks and sprinkles of white chalk dust all over them. Because her eyesight was very bad, Mrs. Angdale wore big, heavy square-rimmed glasses, with lenses so thick, they made her eyes look enormous, like a lizard’s eyes. She was also hard of hearing, and she insisted that you answer very loudly when she called the roll.

  “Lewis Barnavelt!” she said, staring down at her attendance book.

  “Here!” Lewis replied, loud and clear.

  “Mary Callandar!”

  And so on, until Mrs. Angdale reached “David Keller!”

  David’s face turned tomato-red, and he struggled to say, “Huh-h-huh-huh—” Some of the other kids started to snicker.

  Lewis dropped his voice to a lower pitch and quickly said, “Here!” as if he were performing a ventriloquist’s trick. Some of the other kids looked at Lewis in surprise, and Patty Lowan giggled and snorted, but Mrs. Angdale did not appear to hear that. She seemed to assume that David had answered when she called his name, and she never even glanced up from her roll book. “Lawrence Lemon,” she said, mispronouncing Larry’s name so it sounded like the fruit.

  “Le-mon,” squawked Larry, as Patty guffawed again, but Mrs. Angdale just checked him off and then went on calling out names. David gave Lewis a glance of such pure relief that Lewis wondered if the poor kid had ever had a friend before.

  CHAPTER 4

  WHEN SCHOOL ENDED, LEWIS met Rose Rita out front. “How was it?” he asked.

  She made a face. “Most of it’s okay, but I really don’t want to take home ec. Maybe I can talk my way into science with you. I don’t want to learn how to make clothes and bake cherry pies—I want to be a famous writer someday, not Betty Crocker!”

  David came out, lugging a heavy load of books, and he gave them a shy smile as he waved at them. “Walking home?” Lewis a
sked him.

  Shaking his head, David pointed at one of the two yellow school buses parked nearby. Most of the kids in school came from homes within walking distance, but forty or fifty of them lived outside the city limits, out on farms or in one of the little villages close to New Zebedee. “See you tomorrow,” Lewis said as David climbed on the bus that took kids to outlying homes that were north and east of town.

  He fell into step beside Rose Rita. “Poor guy,” he said. “I remember when I was new in town and people made fun of me all the time.”

  “You were right when you said people like that are idiots,” said Rose Rita in a moody voice. Then she brightened up. “You know what? We should show David around, help him learn the ropes.”

  “That’s okay with me,” replied Lewis. “But I get the feeling he’d be kind of uncomfortable if we’re too obvious about it. The last thing someone wants is people being nice just because they feel sorry for them. I know.”

  “I don’t feel sorry for him,” insisted Rose Rita. “Well, I mean I do, but it’s not just that. He seems like a pretty nice guy. And we’re pretty nice too, if I do say it myself. We’re not mean, like Woody Mingo, or stuck-up, like Brenda Biggins, anyway. If David wants to hang around with us, at least we’ll treat him like a person.”

  “Sure,” agreed Lewis. He thought a minute. “You know, maybe I can invite David to the house for lunch one day. Uncle Jonathan won’t mind—at least he won’t mind if Mrs. Zimmermann comes over too, and does the cooking. Then maybe you and I could show David around a little.”

  “Sounds good,” said Rose Rita. “How about Saturday?”

  “I’ll ask.”