Ghosts Beneath Our Feet

by Betty Ren Wright

  Mr. Trelawny dashed back up the stairs, returning almost at once in trousers and shoes. “I’m goin’,” he shouted. “Don’t know what’s goin’ on up there, but I’ll find out.”

  Katie slipped from Mrs. Trelawny’s embrace and ran after him.

  “Wait for me,” Joan cried.

  Katie felt as if she were caught up in a nightmare and must run forever. Going uphill was harder; she was aware now of her scratched and bleeding feet. Lights flickered on in some of the houses, and she glimpsed Mr. Trelawny pounding ahead of her. Scared-looking faces peered from windows.

  Katie was only a few steps behind Mr. Trelawny when they hurtled out of the woods. He stopped so suddenly that Katie bumped into him.

  “What’s this, now?” he exclaimed. “Look at that, will you?”

  Katie stared. The old house loomed like a lighted ship in the darkness, a ship on the slope of a wave. The whole facade was tilted. Katie’s mother stood out in front, alone on the road.

  “Mom!” Katie screamed. “Where’s Jay?”

  Mrs. Blaine pointed at the house. “I—I couldn’t stop him. He broke a window and went in!”

  Mr. Trelawny took the porch steps two at a time and disappeared through the gaping parlor window. Katie clung to her mother as the ground trembled under their feet and the house groaned.

  “I tried to hold on to him,” Mrs. Blaine sobbed. “He broke away from me—oh, Katie, they’ll be killed in there. I know it!”

  The yard began to fill with people, most of them in bathrobes. Joan pressed close to Katie, and Mrs. Trelawny stood behind them, her face grim.

  The house tilted more sharply.

  “Is my husband in there?” Mrs. Trelawny’s voice was steady.

  Katie nodded. “And Jay and Uncle Frank.”

  “It’ll be all right,” Mrs. Trelawny said. “If the gas line just don’t break.”

  As if the words were a signal, there was a dull explosion in the back of the house. The lights went out, and the house moved like a great dark animal settling on its haunches. Flames shot from the kitchen windows.

  “She’s finished now,” a man’s voice said. “Look at that!”

  As the crowd surged to the side of the house, Katie saw Jay’s face through the glass in the front door. The door opened partway, then stopped, jammed by the sloping porch floor. Katie ducked from her mother’s grasp and darted toward the house and up the steps.

  “Katie, no!”

  The porch was split from end to end. The front section, attached to sturdy posts, remained level; the inner part sloped sharply. Katie grasped the doorknob and pulled, without hope.

  Jay looked out at her, his face white and anguished. Where were Uncle Frank and Mr. Trelawny? She pulled again as Jay’s shoulder thudded against the door. Then the porch shifted under her feet, and the two sections of the floor separated. Katie dropped, screaming, into the opening between them. She scrambled to her feet just as the door flew open overhead and Jay stumbled into the hole beside her. Behind him, Katie glimpsed Uncle Frank lying on the floor, and Mr. Trelawny crouched and coughing. Smoke billowed around them. At the end of the hallway, the kitchen door was a blazing rectangle.

  “My arm,” Jay gasped. He sagged against Katie, and she clutched at the ragged floorboards for support. Then strong hands grasped her and she was lifted from the hole and passed to other hands extended from the steps. A moment later Jay was out, too, and standing beside her.

  The disintegrating porch was crowded with struggling figures. Someone had leaped over the hole in the floor and was lifting Uncle Frank. Mr. Trelawny was carried out next. Katie heard Joan sob and felt Mrs. Trelawny move away after the rescuers.

  “There she goes!”

  With a roar, the old house fell in on itself. Sparks rose in a spectacular shower, and a wave of hot air drove the watchers back across the meadow.

  “Oh, Katie, what a terrible chance you took! Are you all right? Jay, are you all right?” Mrs. Blaine’s face shone with tears in the firelight. “Stay close to me. Please!”

  Katie followed to where Uncle Frank and Mr. Trelawny were lying on makeshift mats of jackets and sweaters and robes. She knelt in the grass beside Uncle Frank and touched the flyaway white hair. The hubbub of voices, the crackle of the fire, and the rising wail of sirens seemed far away.

  The next day, two memories would remain of the time she knelt there. Once when she glanced up, she thought she saw May Nichols in the crowd, looking down at Uncle Frank with love and concern. As Katie stared, the ghost-girl turned toward her, smiling slightly, and her lips shaped a silent “Good-bye.” Then she was gone, and in her place was Jay, his eyes huge and staring in a soot-covered face. One arm hung limp at his side. The other arm supported Katie’s mother.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “You lived there?” The young deputy looked curiously at Katie. She and Joan had backed into the brush to let him drive by, but he stopped when he saw them. “You can look around if you want, but don’t go inside the fence. That ground’s going to be settling for a long time.”

  The girls watched the squad car continue its bumpy way back toward town. “I’m not sure I do want to look,” Katie murmured, but they walked on through the woods.

  Katie stumbled occasionally, because the sneakers she wore were Ed Trelawny’s and a size too large. She was wearing a shirt of Ed’s, too, and some old blue jeans of Joan’s that barely fastened around the waist and were at least three inches too long. The barrette in her hair belonged to Joan’s older sister, who lived in Hancock.

  Katie had tried to prepare herself for what she would see, but it didn’t help much. Both girls stopped short when they emerged from the woods.

  “Wow!” Joan took Katie’s hand, and they crossed the yard, ducking under the low-hanging branches of a willow. A snow fence had been put up sometime during the night or early in the morning. Beyond it, wisps of smoke rose where Uncle Frank’s house had stood.

  They peered over the fence at a sight worse than anything Katie had imagined. Deep cracks in the earth radiated from the pit where foundations, chimney, and scorched beams lay in a blackened jumble. Here and there, recognizable pieces of the house could be seen—a charred door, a window frame, a section of stairs—but most of the pit was covered with ashes. On the far side, a willow, uprooted by the shifting of the ground, lay on its side with yellow-green branches catapulted over the ruin.

  “It’s like a bomb fell on it,” Katie murmured. Most of last night she’d been awake, remembering first one thing, then another, that she wouldn’t see again. Her favorite blue sweater with the monogram. Three books from the Newquay town library. The brown loafers that had been new at the beginning of the summer. Her father’s lodge pin, and the wristwatch Tom Blaine had given her. The stamp collection Uncle Frank had given to Jay. They were all buried in the pit, along with the chairs and tables and beds, the linen and dishes, the carpets and paintings and the grandfather clock.

  “I wish I had—” she began, and then stopped. Was there one thing down there that she absolutely couldn’t get along without? Her mother was safe. Jay was all right except for a badly bruised shoulder, and the doctor at Ashland Hospital said Uncle Frank would probably recover after a few days’ rest. Mr. Trelawny had regained consciousness almost at once and had gone to work this morning. The events of last night had been nightmarish, but Katie knew she could survive without the things she’d lost. Uncle Frank was the one who would be heartbroken when he learned the house was gone.

  “Gram wants to come up here and have a look,” Joan said. “She’s telling the neighbors she knew it was going to happen. And my pa’s told everybody that your brother’s a hero. He says Jay pulled him and your uncle to the front door when the smoke got so bad they couldn’t breathe. He thinks Jay is one great kid.” She turned away from the pit and drew Katie after her. “I guess I think he’s okay, too. Even though I was mad this morning when you and he told me about the trick he played on us. I could have killed him then, but now
it seems kind of funny. I don’t mind.”

  “I don’t either,” Katie said. And she didn’t. The old resentments and concerns had given way to a quite different feeling. It began when she and Jay had struggled together to open the front door of the house. They had been closer right then than they’d ever been before, and now that it was over, she felt as if they’d passed some kind of milestone. Uncle Frank had been right when he told Jay to be grateful just to be alive. It was enough. If Jay wanted to move out, Katie wasn’t going to try to change his mind. Wherever he went, he would still be her brother. He’d remember last night, too.

  The girls reached the top of Newquay hill and looked down over the town.

  “Jay’s kind of quiet, though,” Joan said. “If I was a hero, I’d be bragging about it.”

  “It’s that barn fire,” Katie said. “I think he’s really worried. He didn’t start it—but what if no one believes him?”

  “The sheriff’ll believe,” Joan said. “Didn’t Jay risk his life to save my pa and your uncle? Everything’s going to work out, you’ll see.”

  “You sound like the president of the Jay Blaine Fan Club,” Katie said. “That’s quite a change.”

  Joan grinned. “Well, I always thought he was cute. Stuck up, but cute. Now that he’s a hero I’m willing to forget the stuck-up part.”

  Katie hoped Joan was right about everything working out. Last night Lillian had given up her bedroom to Katie and her mother, and Jay had slept with Ed. In the tiny, dark room, Mrs. Blaine had whispered that they would return to Milwaukee as soon as they had the sheriff’s permission and they were sure Uncle Frank was recovering. “We can’t impose on the Trelawnys like this,” she’d said. “In a couple of weeks, I’ll come back and get Uncle Frank. He’ll fight the idea of moving to Milwaukee, but it’ll be up to us to make him feel welcome. He and Jay can share a room, I suppose.”

  Katie wondered what her mother would say when she heard that Jay wanted to leave them. She’d be deeply hurt, but would she stop him? After last night, maybe she, too, would decide Jay had earned the right to make some decisions of his own.

  “Look.” Joan pointed. Jay and Ed were just starting up from the bottom of the hill. They pulled a coaster wagon laden with groceries.

  “Pasty makin’s, I bet,” Joan commented. “Meat and taters and onions—”

  “And beggies,” Kate finished. “I know.”

  They sat on the Trelawnys’ steps and watched the boys drag the wagon up the steep slope. “Took you long enough,” Joan teased when they reached the front walk at last. Ed made a face at her as he carried two of the bags inside. Jay followed with the third, then returned to sit on the steps beside them, cradling his sore arm.

  “Mom’s going to see Uncle Frank,” Katie told him. “She talked to a doctor on the phone this morning. He’ll be okay in a couple of weeks.”

  “Good deal.”

  “She’s coming back to Newquay to get him later on,” she continued. “He’s going to live with us. He’s going to be p-part of our family.”

  And then, to her own astonishment, she began to cry. She cried and cried, great hiccuping sobs, while Joan patted her arm and Jay shifted uncomfortably, as if he might be getting ready to bolt. When she stopped at last, she felt relieved, as if something unpleasant but necessary was now behind her.

  “Well, I’m glad that’s over,” Jay muttered. “I thought you were going to wash us downhill.”

  Katie mopped her eyes. “Just because you’re a big hero, you think you’re smart.”

  “Hero! That’s a laugh.” He tried not to look pleased. “A hero who’s maybe going to jail.”

  “You aren’t going to jail,” Joan said positively. “No way. My pa won’t let you. Besides”—she leaned in front of Katie to peer at him through strands of red-gold hair—“we’ve got a pretty smart sheriff, even if he is just a hick.”

  A butterfly danced across the road and lit close to Katie’s toe. Butterflies would be part of her Newquay memories, and wildflowers, and meadow winds, and the deer that lived in Uncle Frank’s woods. And sitting here on the hill, between her brother and her friend.

  “I suppose I could come back on the bus myself and get the old man when he’s ready,” Jay said carelessly. “Depending on how things go.”

  Katie took a quick breath. “Mom thinks he won’t want to come to Milwaukee,” she said. “He won’t want to leave Newquay.”

  Jay shrugged. “He’ll come around. What the heck, we’re his family now.” He jumped up, as if he’d said more than he’d intended. “Hey, what’s for lunch, does anybody know?”

  “Meat and taters and onions,” Joan chanted.

  “And beggies,” Katie added with a giggle. My mother and my brother and my uncle and me—the words rang in her head like the start of a poem. Someday she might figure out the next line, but right now she was too hungry to try.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1984 by Betty Ren Wright

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-1337-6

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