A Day in Mossy Creek

by Deborah Smith

  “Thank you, sweetheart.”

  Daddy had had a moment to think things over but wasn’t ready to make a decision. He wagged his biscuit in Momma’s direction. “What do you think about all of this, Mary Beth?”

  Momma ate a fork full of mashed potatoes before answering. “I think if Linda’s worried, maybe we ought to go and check on Hannah.”

  “We?”

  “Well, you wouldn’t want Linda to go down there alone, would you?”

  Daddy thought about that for a minute. I knew he was looking forward to watching wrestlin’ on ESPN after dinner, so I held my breath.

  “No need for all of us to go. I’ll go down there.”

  “I’ll go with you, Daddy. So I can explain to Mrs. Longstreet that we just have her safety in mind.”

  “I’ll pack up some dinner for you to take along,” Momma offered. “And, Linda, you gather up a couple of quilts and your daddy’s sleeping bag he uses for hunting. I hate to think of Mrs. Longstreet sitting up in a chair all night.”

  I started to stand up but Daddy stopped me. “Finish your dinner, girl. The ghost won’t show up without you.” So, he’d been on to me after all. Oh well. I sat and ate in my most ladylike manner—even helped Momma clear the table. This getting-what-you-wanted stuff was pretty cool.

  THE DOUBLE GLASS in the library front door rattled in response to Daddy’s heavy knocking. “So Mrs. Longstreet’ll know it’s humans at the door,” Daddy said when I winced. I watched his face but I couldn’t be sure if he thought the whole thing was funny, or he was taking it serious. Beyond the glass the library was dark except for a few lights toward the rear of the room. Near the head librarian’s office.

  I called out for good measure, “Mrs. Longstreet! It’s me, Linda!”

  A couple of minutes later, the florescent light at the desk flickered on, and Mrs. Longstreet’s face appeared on the other side of the door.

  She frowned and her face disappeared. A short time later she was unlocking the door. She pushed it open slightly but didn’t invite us in. Daddy took the decision out of her hand, literally, and pulled the door open wider to step inside, me on his heels with arms loaded with quilts.

  “Evening, Mrs. Longstreet,” Daddy said, before walking past her to set the picnic basket Momma had prepared on the checkout counter.

  “Good evening,” she managed. Then she turned her attention to me.

  I confessed again, right on cue. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Longstreet. I know you told me not to come, but I couldn’t stand the thought of you here all alone.”

  Daddy settled his hands on his hips and gazed toward the library shelves. “Now what exactly is goin’ on here?”

  “Nothing yet,” Hannah said with a sigh. “You’re my only visitors so far. But then—” she glanced at her watch “—it’s only eight o’clock.” Then she proceeded to give Daddy the condensed version of our ghost problem. She even showed him the poem that she’d put back up on the wall in case the ghost decided to check his work.

  “Where are you plannin’ on settin’ up camp?” Daddy said, like a general ready to take over the war. Still hard to say what his opinion might be on the ghost subject, but at least he wasn’t telling Mrs. Longstreet she needed hormones or something.

  “Why, back in my office.”

  Daddy picked up the picnic basket again and motioned to Mrs. Longstreet. “Lead the way.” She pressed her lips together, and the look she gave me could’ve been either gratitude or a storm warning. It was hard to tell. She moved past us and re-locked the front doors, then marched through the darkened library toward her office.

  Daddy and I followed. “Now if we was huntin’ deer or ducks,” Daddy said, “we’d need to build a blind.”

  “A what?” Mrs. Longstreet asked, like she hadn’t heard him right.

  “A blind, you know, a hidey place so the—” he straightened his back like he needed to impress her “—your quarry won’t be scared away by seein’ you.”

  It took less than fifteen minutes for Daddy to rearrange Hannah’s “camp” to his satisfaction. We moved her extra flashlight and disposable camera off the desk and I helped him stack file boxes around and on top leaving a hole on each side so you could look out. Then he pulled a chair up next to Hannah’s office chair before going with me to the children’s area to get a small chair for me. We were like the three bears in Goldilocks. Daddy in the office chair, Hannah in the regular size chair and me on a shorter version.

  Then we commenced to watchin.’ Daddy convinced Mrs. Longstreet to eat some of the food that Momma had packed up while he and I kept an eye on the book shelves. When she’d eaten about enough to feed a bird, Daddy rummaged around in what was left and had a second supper of cold biscuits and gravy. Then he sighed and leaned back in his chair. “Well, now, this ain’t so bad. Reminds me of camping up on old Colchik in the spring.” He patted his stomach. “The food’s better, though.”

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what the both of you have done, but I really can’t ask you to stay here and watch with me. After all, nothing may happen.”

  I could see she was still worried about her county supervisor finding out that she thought there was a ghost in the library. She knew my daddy. Unless the library’s Casper presented himself in the invisible flesh and asked my daddy to dance, by tomorrow morning when the library opened, it would be all over town about the ghost-watch.

  Maybe it had been a bad idea to get Daddy involved.

  “You two should go on home,” Mrs. Longstreet said. “I can handle this.”

  “I think we’ll stay a bit longer.” He checked his watch. “Leave in time to catch the eleven o’clock news.” He yawned then crossed his arms.

  So there we were, hidden from the world in our box fort.

  “Is there anything we can do while we wait?” I whispered to Mrs. Longstreet. I was thinking of some kind of library work since the dimmed lights made reading a threat to our eyes. In answer to my question she slid open her desk drawer and withdrew a pack of cards.

  Mrs. Longstreet didn’t play poker and Daddy didn’t play canasta, so we settled on Go Fish. It didn’t take long for Daddy to lose interest since we beat him twice in the first half hour. That and the fact we had to whisper as we played so we wouldn’t scare off the ghost.

  Hannah and I continued to play for another hour or so. By that time, Daddy had fallen asleep in Hannah’s office chair. I tried not to jump at every wayward noise, but I guess my big eyes gave me away.

  “Every building or house has its own sounds,” Hannah whispered. “That particular thump and wheeze was just the heat kicking on.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  In the middle of the next hand, Daddy let out a snorting snore that made us both jump. With one hand on her heart, Mrs. Longstreet gazed at my daddy for a long moment before adjusting her glasses and looking at me. “Your mother must be a wonderful woman.”

  I wasn’t exactly sure what she meant by that, but it qualified as a compliment so I said, “Thank you, she is.”

  We played cards until both of us were fished out. Then we settled back to wait.

  Wrapped in one of my momma’s quilts, I had dozed off myself when something startled me awake. It took a couple of seconds to remember where I was. I found the library clock on the wall in the dim light and realized it was just after midnight.

  Uh-oh. We’d slept through the eleven o’clock news. Daddy would be . . .

  A sliding sound, like something being dragged, sent a flash of fear from my toes to my hair. I sat up and looked into Mrs. Longstreet’s wide eyes. She’d heard it too. “The ghost,” I whispered.

  I pushed up to my feet and dropped the quilt. Just then, Daddy let out another loud open-mouthed snore, and I had to clap a hand over my own mouth to stop a scream.

  “Wake him up so he doe
sn’t chase the ghost away,” Hannah ordered in a tense whisper.

  Daddy was winding up for another snore, so I removed my hand from my mouth and clapped it over his. He snuffled and turned his head, but I stayed with him—holding in the sound.

  There was a thump in the back, near the employee break room, in the hallway leading to the rear door. Then the stomping of feet. Hannah gave me a worried look.

  I shook Daddy awake, keeping my hand on his mouth. “Daddy! The ghost is here!” I whispered. He pushed my hand away, and I pressed my finger to my lips to shush him.

  The squeaking of a door brought him up straight in the chair. He nodded that he understood, searched around for the flashlight at his feet, then stood.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  Hannah grabbed his arm. “Oh, no, you don’t. I’m going with you. I intend to see this with my own eyes.” She grabbed the disposable camera and pushed the little button to turn on the flash.

  Daddy looked at me.

  “I don’t want to stay here by myself,” I said, and I wasn’t kidding. Every scary movie I’d ever seen had some stupid girl who went in the basement or the garage or anywhere alone and ended up the next victim. Not me. I guess he could see decision in my eyes.

  “All right, let’s go, but stay behind me.”

  We were a lot quieter than the ghost. Once he, or I guess to be fair, she, had shown up, he/she didn’t seem to worry about making noise. When the three of us reached the hallway door, where the carpet gave way to linoleum, we stopped. Daddy signaled for us to stay on one side of the door, and he stepped across to wait on the other.

  The light was on in the break room and the sounds coming out of there were just like the ones in that movie Close Encounters when all the electrical appliances started running on their own. We could hear the microwave and the little radio the staff sometimes used to listen to the Braves games. This was my first experience with a ghost, but already I could tell the movies must have it all wrong.

  Then the microwave dinged, the radio changed stations several times before going silent and the overhead light flicked off. Footsteps were coming down the hall toward us, headed for the library shelves. Looks like we’d caught our ghost. I had the fleeting thought that people always assumed ghosts flew from place to place. But then Mrs. Longstreet said under her breath, “Now, we’ve got you.” She raised the small camera and, like a mirror image on the other side of the door, my daddy raised the flashlight to use as a club.

  I’m sorry to admit I screamed when the dark shadow loomed toward us. The flash of the camera blinded me for a moment, but another sound scared me worse. My daddy had swung the flashlight and caught the edge of the door instead of the ghost, but he let out a howl like he’d been run through with a sword. And now he and the ghost were wrestling on the linoleum, bumpin’ the walls in the small space and cussin’ a blue streak.

  “Hold him!” Mrs. Longstreet said, and took another flash picture.

  Unable to stand still any longer, I pushed past her and found the hallway light switch. When the lights flashed on, there was my daddy, red-faced, with his shirt all stained by ectoplasm just like in Ghostbusters. Except this ectoplasm smelled like coffee. And the ghost looked exactly like Mr. Foxer Atlas, the elderly man who ran Mossy Creek Woodwork and Signs, out on Trailhead road.

  “What in tarnation are you folks doin?” the ghost yelled. “Ya nearly scared me into the great reward.”

  “Foxer Atlas! What do you mean, what are we doing? What are you doing in my library at this time of night?”

  I knew Mrs. Longstreet had to be upset, because normally she wouldn’t let anyone know she considered the library hers. I bent down to take Daddy’s arm. “Are you all right, Daddy?”

  Before he could answer there was a loud metallic tapping coming from the front of the library. I think we all jumped, even Mr. Atlas. Then the beam of an industrial- sized flashlight flashed across the walls.

  “Open up, it’s the police!” a female voice ordered.

  Mrs. Longstreet handed me the keys she carried in her pocket. “Here, go let Sandy in.”

  Turned out it was Sandy and my mother.

  Momma decided, after we didn’t come back home, that she needed to check on us. When she’d pulled her car into the library parking lot, Sandy was driving by and saw her.

  “Mr. Atlas,” Sandy said in a firm tone, “the Mossy Creek Police Department, consisting only of the chief, my bubba Mutt, and yours truly, has had a real long day. Mutt’s gone home, the chief’s sitting over at his office in a foul mood with his door shut, and I was just about to head home, myself. Jess is waiting for me with a cold beer and a cherry cigarillo. Now, I want you to explain to my and to Mrs. Longstreet’s satisfaction why you have been breaking and entering the library at night. And make it quick.”

  “I’m an insomniac,” Mr. Atlas said.

  “A what?” My Daddy asked as he let my momma fuss over his scorched belly and ruined shirt. You could say he was a little perturbed with Mr. Atlas for a lot of reasons. I think the possibility of a real ghost had given us all a good fright.

  “An insomniac,” Mr. Atlas repeated. “I can’t sleep good.”

  “Your husband is a true hero,” Mrs. Longstreet said to Momma. Then she gave Mr. Atlas a hard look. “Insomniac, my hind foot. Who knows what would have happened if I’d confronted you with a gun instead a camera. I was so afraid, I might have shot you before I recognized you.”

  “Oh, now Miz Longstreet, I wasn’t hurtin’ nuthin’,” Mr. Atlas said, sounding hurt. “I can’t help it if I can’t sleep and I like to read. I’ve had a key to that back door for ten years, since I did some signs for the library. If I hadn’t taken to writing poetry you woulda never caught me.”

  “Well, I think you owe Miz Hannah an apology,” Sandy said. “Just for scaring her. And I also think Amos will ask Judge Blakely to order you to do some community service to pay for your crimes. So, unless you want to go to jail, I decree that you are the newest library volunteer. It’s up to Miz Longstreet to decide what she wants you to do. Whatever she says, goes.”

  Then she looked at Hannah. “I think you could use a good janitor around here, couldn’t you? Might even need a night watchman. You think about it. If he gives you any trouble, you just call me.”

  Hannah sniffed and looked down her nose at Atlas, before saying, “You can start by putting away all the boxes in my office.”

  “Sure thing.” He looked back at her gratefully. “If I’m gonna be a librarian, will you teach me the Dewey Decimal System? I’ve always had a hankerin’ to learn that thing.”

  Hannah gaped at him, but her surprise slowly turned to affection. How many men actually want a librarian to teach them the Dewey Decimal System? “Why, I’d be honored,” she said.

  Case closed. Although, before Sandy left, Mrs. Longstreet quizzed her on the overdue handwriting book. Sandy mumbled, frowned, then brightened when her walkie-talkie began to beep. “Got a call from the chief,” she said, and hurried out the front door. “Andy Griffith must be over.”

  By the time we got home, Daddy had finally found the humor in the night’s events. Reluctant or not, he’d come out of the situation a hero and a ghostbuster—with only a ruined shirt.

  Nightfall: Sunny’s Story

  I had spent the last few hours experimenting. While Honey and Bert put the babies to bed, I tried moving the rocking chair. No good. It sat there. When Honey headed back downstairs to get out the pizza pockets, I tried blocking her on the stairs. No dice. I listened in when Mayor Walker called on the phone. I heard Bert tell her the babies were doing great. I tried to shout my opinion to the mayor. Didn’t work.

  And later, as Honey prepared Jeremy for bed, helping him bathe, drying him off, brushing his teeth, I tried sitting on the toothpaste. If I could only write a word or two in toothpaste . . .
>
  Nope, didn’t work, either. This being a ghost got more and more annoying by the moment.

  Honey put Jeremy to bed, then went back downstairs to join Bert, who was already in bed himself. Thank goodness they were both tired—I didn’t know how I’d handle watching my sister and her husband make love. And I would have watched, too, if there was any chance it would make them notice me.

  As they drifted off to sleep, I made one last attempt to reach her. If I could somehow appear in Honey’s dreams, maybe I could tell her how I felt about Jeremy being around the babies.

  But how does somebody appear in another person’s dream? I flew through her head a couple of times, I tried whispering in her ear, I even danced in front of the bed like a fool. Honey snored, that’s all. Of course, that didn’t mean she wasn’t dreaming about me. And how could I know if I’d succeeded anyway?

  Still, I had to keep trying. I was in the middle of a particularly creative maneuver, sort of a charades for ghosts, when I heard a noise on the baby monitor. The twins were stirring. They didn’t usually eat in the middle of the night, but with Cam and me being dead, their schedule was off.

  I looked at Bert and Honey. They didn’t move. Honey had always been a sound sleeper, but she ought to hear my babies. Soon Amy and Anna were launched into full-fledged wail mode. Bert and Honey roused a little, then turned over and continued to sleep.

  That’s when Jeremy appeared, apparently bothered by the noise. Thank heaven he hadn’t done anything about it, like try to silence the babies. Instead, he approached the bed and nudged his mom. Honey snorted a bit, but didn’t wake. Geez, couldn’t they hear that racket?

  Jeremy frowned, then went to his father’s side and nudged him. Nothing. Bert was sleeping like the dead, no pun intended.

  I watched in a panic as Jeremy headed back upstairs. I flew after him, praying that he’d go straight back to his room, but oh no, he trudged right into the babies’ room. He stared down at them a long moment. Then, to my horror, he picked them up awkwardly, holding one under each arm the way a quarterback would carry footballs, and headed down the stairs.