by Glass, Debra
“A chauffeur?”
“She was old, even then. She never married and had bright red hair right up until the day she died.” Laura added the part about the hair as if it was the reason Miss Polk had never married.
“Did you ever see her?” I asked.
“I thought I did, once,” Laura said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. “We came up here on a dare one Halloween and tried to peek in the windows but…I…got scared.”
“Halloween?” I arched an eyebrow hoping she’d tell me more.
She did. “You…uh…don’t you know?”
“Know what?”
“Your house is…haunted,” she whispered to me as if it was a secret.
Not wanting to get the reputation as the loony ghost girl in town, I tried my best to play it cool even though her declaration confirmed my suspicions. Still, I had no intention of telling her I’d seen the ghost just last night. “Haunted? Surely, that’s just an old tale.” Secretly, I hoped she would enlighten me without my having to ask.
“Probably,” she said. “But hey, I’m doing all the talking. Why’d you move here from Atlanta?”
Disappointment surged. I didn’t want to talk about myself and I didn’t know how to steer the conversation back to my house without seeming overly interested. “My stepdad took a job at the hospital in Columbia,” I explained, surreptitiously leaving out the fact that my mom blamed my dead friend for the unsightly scar on my face and none of us could live in Atlanta any longer because of me.
My answer seemed to satisfy her. Or so I thought.
To my horror, I watched her eyes narrow and then the blue washed dark with pity. “What happened?” she asked her gaze moving from my scar to my eyes and then back to the scar again.
I thought I’d done a better job with my makeup. I was wrong.
“She was in a wreck,” Ella suddenly announced. She twisted and peered over the back of her seat. “She was dead for four whole minutes!”
I shot the little cretin a hard look and then turned my back on her to face Laura.
Laura’s eyes rounded. “Really?”
By this time, I’d attracted the attention of the people in the eight or so seats surrounding us. My scar actually burned as my face flushed with a hot blush. Ella would die a slow and painful death when we got home. “I…I don’t really like to talk about it,” I said, hoping Laura was sympathetic enough to drop it.
She was.
Curious to see my new surroundings, I gazed out the windows at the now familiar zigzagging slate fences. Ancient trees stretched toward the bright blue sky, obscuring other houses every bit as old as mine.
A cemetery fronted by a thick hedgerow stretched across the gentle slope on my left. Beyond the hedge the crenellated tower of an old church reached toward the cobalt October sky.
A foreboding premonition, the details of which I couldn’t discern, seized me in a vice-grip.
I’d seen old churches before. I’d been in larger ones but for some reason, this particular church held some sort of psychic significance to me.
“That’s Saint John’s,” Laura chimed.
As the bus passed, I twisted to look at the weathered gray stones out the grimy back window.
“That church is haunted,” she said with authority.
I smiled indulgently as I turned back around in my seat. “I guess all these old houses have at least one ghost?”
“No. That one’s really haunted. They only have one or two services in that church a year.”
“Only two services? Why? It’s a beautiful building.”
“There’s a Bible inside that’s cursed.”
“A cursed Bible?”
Laura’s eyes widened as she nodded. “They say if you go in there and pick it up, you’ll drop dead on the spot.”
“How do you know?” I asked. “Has somebody done it?”
She shrugged. “That’s just what they say.”
The bus took a sharp turn. I gripped the back of the seat in front of me to keep from sliding against Laura as my very open, cheery new school loomed into view.
My old school had been several stories high and surrounded by businesses and concrete. This campus sprawled lazily across a field that would have been bare if not for two scrawny maple saplings standing sentinel in front of the building. I had expected something older.
As the bus stopped out front, the brakes emitted a whoosh of air. All the students gathered their backpacks and hopped up to file off, even the elementary kids. Back home, the high school was in a different part of town than the elementary or middle school.
“Do you already have your schedule?” Laura asked helpfully.
“They told me to pick it up in the office.” I hefted my backpack onto one shoulder and craned to find my little sister in the throng. “Ella, do you want me to go with you?”
“No,” she shot back, chin lifting defiantly. “I can do it myself.”
Mom had already registered us and independent Ella would have no trouble asking for directions.
The high school office was near where the bus let us off. “Wren!” a jeans clad secretary greeted me warmly. “Come on inside. I’ve got your schedule all ready for you.”
After a short explanation of the location of the class wings, Laura and I searched for my locker. Like the rest of Middle Tennessee, Mt. Pleasant High had a very different accent from my school in Buckhead. Unlike the haute couture clothes of rich Buckhead girls, jeans and sneakers seemed to be the style of choice for Middle Tennesseans, even for the teachers. I was glad I’d worn my jeans and more than happy that I shared at least one class and lunch with Laura. At least there’d be a familiar face. Eating alone was equivalent to the kiss of death in high school.
The upside about having only one class with Laura meant that I could finagle conversations around to where I lived with a vast number of kids without sounding overanxious to find out information. Maybe someone—besides me—knew the ghost story associated with my house.
But when the lunch bell finally sounded, I still didn’t know anything new about my house. Or my ghost.
Luckily, Laura had bragged about being one of the first students to meet the new girl and my scar wasn’t what people wanted to talk about when they met me. Instead, everyone wanted to know how my big Atlanta school compared to Mt. Pleasant High School.
There was more contrast than comparison, however.
My friends in Buckhead had driven BMWs and Range Rovers to school. Here, most drove American made models or big mud spattered trucks. But music and clothing tastes aside, kids were kids with similar stories of love and rejection, the desire to fit in and the horror of being shunned by peers.
Even given the differences, I felt an ease here I had never felt in Buckhead. Here, it seemed almost as if I’d belong because of my personality, not because my stepdad was a prominent doctor at a local hospital or because we lived on the ritziest street in town.
When I joined my classmates in the lunch line, I was surprised that I actually looked forward to meeting new people. I fixed a salad from the salad bar, pumping on enough ranch to cover every limp lettuce leaf and then grabbed a Styrofoam cup filled with sweet, iced tea.
“Hey, Wren,” Laura called enthusiastically, patting the empty seat next to her. “Sit with us!”
Pleased I had easily made some new friends, I made my way through the crowd to their table.
“This is Waylon,” Laura said, introducing me to a broad shouldered boy wearing a school football jersey.
He gave me a nod. With his short, spiky blond hair, he was cute in a country boy sort of way with an honest face and a guileless smile. I even thought I detected the hint of a blush when his light blue eyes met mine.
A pretty freckle-faced redhead leaned forward. “And I’m Holly.”
One look told me she was more like the Buckhead girls I was used to, the type who enjoyed primping and reading the fashion mags. Intuition revealed a serious boyfriend in Holly’s background
who’d graduated a year prior and now was away at college. My psychic hunch was confirmed by the glint of a big class ring dangling from a delicate gold chain around her neck.
“I’m Frank,” said a handsome, dark-skinned boy I thought must be Indian. Thin, with long limbs and overly large features he’d not grown into yet, I figured him for the studious type. “My father works at the hospital in Columbia, too. He is an oncologist.”
I nodded. So, word had gotten around that my stepdad was a doctor. Still, I thought it was nice that everyone wanted to find things in common with me. Perhaps I’d been too quick in thinking I wanted to spend my senior year as a loner.
Setting my tray on the table, I straddled the picnic style seat and let my backpack slide to the floor.
The lunchroom quickly filled with a variety of kids. The typical preppy girls. Jocks. Girls in cheerleader outfits. Geeks. Plain Janes and, across from our table, a small group of Emo girls dressed in various shades of black sat sullenly watching everyone else. Atlanta had its share of Goth kids, too. More than the three who sat at that table.
To each his own was my motto, so it seemed odd to me that the one I recognized from my first period class was boldly staring at me as if she was issuing some sort of challenge.
She tucked her dark cherry hair behind a multi-pierced ear, leaned back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest.
“Don’t mind them,” Laura whispered conspiratorially. “Briar’s staring because she knows you live in the Polk house.”
I shrugged as if I wasn’t bothered at all but there was something else, something far more sinister behind Briar’s stare. My psychic senses divulged that the root of her hostility stemmed from much more than the fact I lived in a haunted house.
Unfortunately, I didn’t know how to direct my sixth sense into figuring out the basis of Briar’s apparent dislike of me.
A chill swept over me as I recalled the last time I’d purposefully focused my psychic ability.
I’d seen a ghost.
The vivid memory of his face ran so deeply I could recall the precise widening of his eyes when I’d spoken to him, the slight parting of his lips.
“Did you say that Wren lives in the Polk house?” Waylon asked, drawing me out of my daydream about my handsome ghost.
When I glanced at Waylon, his expression shifted from mild interest to enthusiasm.
“Yes,” Laura exclaimed. “Isn’t it cool?”
“My dad’s a real estate agent,” Holly said, dropping her lip gloss back into a stylish purse. “There was a million dollar price tag on that house.”
A million dollar house was nothing in the Buckhead area of Atlanta but I gathered that sort of cost impressed people here. “It…uh…came with the furniture,” I said with an apologetic tone.
“And some ghosts?” Waylon asked. A grin slid across his face.
I tried to smile. I didn’t know these people well enough to relate what I’d seen, and yet, I was dying to tell somebody. I resisted the temptation and shrugged. “That’s what I’ve been told.”
“Did you know it served as a hospital during the Civil War?” he asked.
“My mom told me but that’s about all I know.”
Waylon began work on a second hot dog and after he swallowed a large bite, he said, “The original owner nursed injured relatives in the house during the war but after the Battle of Franklin, the whole house was filled with the wounded.”
“People died there?” Laura asked, horrified.
“Oh yes,” Waylon said and chased his hot dog with a gulp of milk.
“I couldn’t live in a house where people died!” Holly exclaimed, shivering.
My gaze shot to Holly because before she shivered, I actually felt a tingle on my own spine. “There’s a blood stain on the floor in my bedroom,” I blurted before I could stop myself.
Everyone looked horrified except for Waylon. He nodded. “You should see the one on the floor at Carnton Plantation in Franklin. That’s where they took most of the wounded after the battle there.”
Waylon seemed to think that being from Atlanta made me some sort of expert on the Civil War. Although I made good enough grades in history, I’d never been an enthusiast. Where to get the best deal on a purse was my specialty. And all I knew about Franklin was that there was a mall there. A big one.
Still, I suppose the ghost I’d encountered could have been from the Civil War. It was hard to tell since he hadn’t been wearing any sort of uniform. A shiver raced up my spine as I recalled the white shirt and dark pants. He could have been from most any time period. The suspenders and clumsy looking shoes had given me the impression he hailed from a much earlier time than mine.
“Is Franklin very far from here?” I asked.
“It’s a thirty minute drive by car,” Waylon said. “Back then, it took longer by horse and wagon.”
He flashed an infectious smile but I hoped he’d tell me more about my house and my ghost. “And wounded were brought as far as my house?”
He nodded. “All the houses along the Columbia Pike were overflowing with wounded. Franklin was a bloodbath.”
“Then, if there is a ghost, it could be anybody. Even Mrs. Polk?” I asked, although I knew better.
“Miss Polk,” Laura corrected.
Waylon was obviously the keeper of local lore because all eyes then turned to him. His cheek bulged with the half hot dog he had just bitten off. Hurriedly, he chewed and swallowed. “Yeah,” he said, swallowing the rest of his milk to drive down his lunch. “Miss Polk never got married.”
“Why not?”
“Nobody knows for sure,” he said. “Rumor was she was in love with the ghost who haunted the house.”
Although I forced a dubious laugh, the back of my neck grew hot. “How silly.” A blush crept into my cheeks. I snorted. “I mean…how does that work? How can you be in love with a ghost?” But the image of that boy I’d seen was already tumbling over and over in my mind. A girl could easily fall for somebody like him. Something warm and mysteriously exciting unfurled inside me. So far, Tennessee was far from being the boring Podunk place Id originally thought.
“I don’t know,” Laura said. “I think it’d be kind of romantic to live in a haunted house with a hot ghost.”
Holly snickered. “I’d rather have a hot vampire.”
“Ghosts. Vampires. My IQ just dropped twenty points,” Frank joked. He stood and collected his tray. “Wren, nice to meet you,” he said politely. “I’ll see you guys in class.”
“If you ever need help with math or science, Frank’s your guy,” Laura said as he walked away.
“Good to know,” I said but my gaze lifted instead to the Goth girl.
Briar.
She continued to glare and this time, despite her open hostility, I didn’t look away. This was more than a dare for me to make fun of her for her eclectic style, which I’d never intended to do. I was a veteran of MARTA, Atlanta’s public transportation system. I’d seen all kinds on the trains. An Emo chick was hardly an anomaly. Still, I could almost feel her pushing her thoughts at me telepathically. I squinted in concentration.
Then it hit me. Briar’s thoughts were not thoughts at all. They were threats!
Threats that evaded me like elusive wisps of smoke.
Go back to where you came from, Miss Scarlett, or you’ll be sorry.
My lips parted.
Finally, she nodded as if she knew I’d received her message loud and clear. Her blood red lips pulled into a smirk and she stood, gathered her lunch tray and strode away without looking back.
I gaped after her, wondering why she’d want to threaten me.
“Don’t pay any attention to her,” Holly said, checking her reflection in her compact mirror. “She thinks she’s some big psychic and is always trying to tell people what they’re thinking.”
My gaze drifted back to Briar. “Really?” Was she a better psychic than everyone thought? Perhaps she’d seen something in me. Or around me.
>
A shudder swept through me. I wondered what—or rather who—it was.
When the lunch bell rang, everyone shot up and the clatter of trays echoed in the cinder block room.
“Hey, Wren,” Waylon said over the noise. “Would you care if I came and metal detected on your property?”
“Sure,” I responded, still wondering about Briar. “Any time.”
He beamed. “I like to look for Civil War bullets, buttons, belt buckles. Stuff like that,” he explained. “I found a couple of old laudanum bottles over by the Rattle and Snap Plantation.”
“That’d be fun,” I told him. “What about Saturday?” That I’d actually invited someone to my house at all surprised me. But hopefully, without all the distractions at school, he could tell me more than the little I already knew about my house.
“I’ve got plans with my dad this weekend. How about next Saturday?” he asked.
“That’d be fine.” I couldn’t believe how easily I’d invited him.
“Sounds great.” He winked and then sauntered off.
“I think he likes you,” Laura confided softly so no one else would hear.
“Who? Waylon?” I scoffed.
She nodded, smiling. “Do you have a boyfriend back in Atlanta?”
Trying hard not to let it show on my face that I’d had a boyfriend, I shook my head. “Nope.”
After the accident, I’d just wanted to be alone. Troy had been sweet and had tried to be understanding. But being able to tell what he was thinking—knowing he suspected Kira’s death was my fault and feeling his inherent disgust at the sight of my scar—had made my decision to break up with him easy.
I debated whether or not to tell Laura I wasn’t interested in dating anyone right now. Certainly no one would want to date me with this unsightly wound. Instead, I kept my mouth shut. It wouldn’t hurt to let Waylon come metal detect at my house. He seemed to be the one who knew local lore.
* * * * *
When I got off the bus that afternoon, I was exhausted. My backpack weighed a ton and I had about that much homework.
