Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter 1 - Spy Report
Chapter 2 - The Sleepover
Chapter 3 - Darla
Chapter 4 - The Mysterious Gift
Chapter 5 - Spy Report #2
Chapter 6 - It’s Not Going to Happen
Chapter 7 - The Confrontation
Chapter 8 - A Rude Awakening
Chapter 9 - The Journey
Chapter 10 - Wedding Planner and Spy
Chapter 11 - Darla and Mary Louise
Chapter 12 - The Spell
Chapter 13 - A True Southern Bride
Chapter 14 - The Ghostly Friend
Chapter 15 - Gossip Girls
Chapter 16 - The Girl at the Gate
Chapter 17 - Darla’s Story
Chapter 18 - Gilda’s Ghost Tour
Chapter 19 - The Woman in White
Chapter 20 - The Message in the Dollhouse
Chapter 21 - The Ghost in the Mist
Chapter 22 - The Truthful Letter
Chapter 23 - The Secret Invitation
Chapter 24 - The Bones of the Holy
Chapter 25 - The Woman Who Died Twice
Chapter 26 - The Burial Ground
Chapter 27 - The Guardian Angel
Chapter 28 - Aren’t You Jealous?
Chapter 29 - Gopher Stew
Chapter 30 - The Freedom Trail
Chapter 31 - The Message in the Dream
Chapter 32 - Halloween Day
Chapter 33 - The Pendulum Speaks
Chapter 34 - Ghostwriting
Chapter 35 - Joining Forces
Chapter 36 - The Secret History
Chapter 37 - What Lies Beneath
Chapter 38 - The Ghost-Pirate
Chapter 39 - The Secret in the Cistern
Chapter 40 - The key
Chapter 41 - Charlotte’s Diary
Chapter 42 - The Lie
Chapter 43 - The Wedding Specter
Chapter 44 - Feats of Strength
Chapter 45 - The Grand Entrance
Chapter 46 - The Confession
Chapter 47 - Eugene’s Story
Chapter 48 - Still Single, Still a Doofus
Chapter 49 - Psychic Sisters
Chapter 50 - The Eyes of the Dead
Acknowledgements
also by Jennifer Allison
also by Jennifer Allison
Gilda Joyce,
Psychic Investigator
Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator
The Ladies of the Lake
Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator
The Ghost Sonata
Gilda Joyce, Psychic Investigator
The Dead Drop
DUTTON CHILDREN’S BOOKS
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Copyright © 2011 by Jennifer Allison
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Published in the United States by Dutton Children’s Books,
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To my friends
in the Sunshine State!
PROLOGUE
THE DREAM
Gilda walked through a jungle where animal bones grew from the ground like trees. She was on a quest to find someone, but she had no path to follow--no map or clues.
She entered a clearing and found a moonlit cemetery where a woman in white twirled and danced beneath the moon. Gilda knew this woman was not quite human. Her dark hair was a shadow, her dress a ghostly whorl of smoke.
Amidst the tombstones, Gilda sensed turbulence--the whispered arguments of trapped spirits. Intermingling voices spoke in different languages and old dialects--laughing, crying, and arguing with one another.
“I’m looking for someone who’s still alive,” Gilda said.
“In this place, the dead walk among the living,” said the phantom-woman.
A little bell rang, drawing Gilda’s attention to a wooden coffin that lay on the ground. A knocking sound came from inside. Struggling, Gilda managed to pry open the coffin lid.
Her heart sank when she recognized her mother’s chalk-white face inside.
1
Spy Report
TO: GILDA JOYCE
FROM: GILDA JOYCE
RE: SPY REPORT
Okay--I know snooping in someone’s suitcase is wrong, but sometimes it’s also necessary. My reason for spying: Mom suddenly announced that she’s going on something she called a “Mom’s Getaway” trip to Florida. That’s right; she’s heading for the beach and leaving me and Stephen behind in Michigan. I mean, I can understand leaving my older brother behind. But me?!
“You mean to tell me, you’re abandoning us and heading for the Sunshine State?!” I protested. “You’re leaving two defenseless teenagers to scrounge for scraps of lunch meat in the city Dumpsters, while you burn your freckles on some nude beach?”
“Very funny, Gilda,” said Mom. (I admit it: Mom is fun to tease because she never has a good comeback.) “Anyway, it’s just for a short weekend,” she explained. “You’ll survive without me for two days.”
Mom had a point: I’ve been telling her for years that I’m old enough to stay home by myself. I also knew that it wasn’t really Mom’s fault that I wasn’t invited. Her friend Lucy had won two flights to Florida in a fund-raising raffle. Even so, I was jealous, and I wasn’t about to make it easy for Mom to leave without me. “Some parents might worry about leaving two teenagers home alone,” I said.
“I’ll ask Grandma Joyce to come over and check on you,” Mom replied.
I wasn’t too pleased about this since Grandma Joyce has a way of turning a perfectly fun pizza-and-a-movie night into a tedious clean-up-the-whole-house night. “That’s okay,” I sighed. “Grandma Joyce doesn�
��t need to come over. We’ll be fine.”
I suppose it’s a little ironic that I’m jealous of Mom’s trip. I guess I always assumed that if Mom ever went anywhere, it would be to somewhere boring--perhaps a bedpan-cleaning convention in Ohio or a nineteenth-century slipper museum in downtown Detroit. I never expected Mom to announce a trip down to sunny Florida without me!
Just then, the phone rang, and Mom jumped up like a jackrabbit to answer it. I noticed that she disappeared into the hallway to take the call, which seemed a little suspicious. While she was talking, I took the opportunity to peek at some of the clothes she had hidden at the bottom of her suitcase. What I saw hidden under her beach towel made me even more suspicious. NEW things. A new black bathing suit instead of her usual mom-style floral tankini-with-attached-skirt. A new sundress with matching sandals. Earrings and a necklace. A toothbrush. DENTAL FLOSS. (Okay. I guess those last items were normal enough for Mom.) Still. Mom doesn’t buy new things very often since she’s been saving money to help pay for Stephen’s room and board at college next year. And she definitely doesn’t dress up just to see her friend Lucy, whom she sees dressed in hospital scrubs practically every day of the week.
I pressed my ear against the wall, trying to hear what Mom was saying on the phone. I couldn’t make out any words, but I heard the familiar nervous giggling that usually signaled a first date. I’ve been hearing it every few weeks, ever since Mom joined that online dating service over the summer, so I had a gut feeling Mom was talking to a man--and not just a friend either.
What is Mom up to? I wondered. What is she hiding?
“Who was that?” I asked, trying to sound nonchalant when Mom returned to finish packing.
“Oh, just Lucy, reminding me to pack some sunscreen.”
“Are you SURE it was Lucy?”
“Why wouldn’t it be Lucy?”
One thing I’ve learned in my career as a spy and sleuth: When you confront a person with something (“Did you steal my sandwich?”) and they answer your question with another question (as in, “Why would I want to steal your sandwich?”), the chances are good that they actually DID the very thing they’re denying. Especially when you’re dealing with an inexperienced liar like Mom.
As I stared at Mom’s open suitcase, watching her nervously fold and refold clothes with her freshly manicured hands, I distinctly felt a psychic signal--that little tickle in my left ear I sometimes get when something unusual is about to happen. Sometimes it means there’s spirit activity in the area. Other times, it’s a premonition of danger.
I realize I have no proof, but I’m almost certain that Mom is hiding something about this trip to Florida. I just need to figure out what and why.
2
The Sleepover
I dunno,” said Wendy. “It looks kind of clownish.”
Gilda and Wendy stared at Gilda’s hair in the bathroom mirror. Wendy had been Gilda’s best friend for years, and most often, Gilda appreciated Wendy’s honesty. Other times, like now, it annoyed her.
The experiment with red hair dye hadn’t turned out the way Gilda had hoped. She had imagined returning to school on Monday as a more interesting version of herself—a sultry, sophisticated, and intriguing redhead—and she figured her mother’s absence for the weekend provided the perfect opportunity to attempt the experiment.
But this red looked far too bright, even for Gilda’s adventurous taste. It looked as if she had dipped her hair into a pot of orange acrylic paint.
Wendy had bravely (and somewhat uncharacteristically) joined Gilda in the hair-dying experiment, but as it turned out, the red hair dye scarcely showed on her darker hair.
Gilda eyed Wendy’s faintly auburn black hair with resentment. “Why isn’t your hair red, too?” she demanded. “You must have cheated.”
“Cheated how?”
“I don’t know. You didn’t put enough hair dye on there or something.”
“I didn’t realize we were having a contest to see who can look most like a Raggedy Ann doll,” Wendy retorted.
“Well, we were. So there.” Gilda considered her options: She could go back to the drugstore and buy a darker shade to cover the bright red. The problem was that she might not have enough money left in her purse to buy more hair dye after a weekend of movie theater and shopping mall excursions with Wendy.
“Hey,” said Wendy as she clicked through some Internet links on her cell phone. “It says here on this Dye Your Own Hair website that grape Kool-Aid is supposed to tone down red hair color. It also says that if it’s temporary hair color, it won’t lighten dark hair like mine.”
“Oh.” Gilda squinted at the empty package of hair color. “I guess it would have been a good idea to read the directions first.”
“You said you read them!”
“Well, I didn’t read all the fine print. I read the quick ’n’ easy steps.”
“It’s a good thing you aren’t planning to be a surgeon or something.”
“I doubt surgeons are sitting there reading the directions as they cut into people.”
“You know what I mean.” Wendy took the hair-color box out of Gilda’s hand. “We’re lucky this is temporary color.”
“See? I knew what I was doing.”
“It will wash out in about thirty shampoos.”
“Thirty?! I don’t have that kind of time. We’ll have to try the Kool-Aid.”
“So go down to the kitchen and get the Kool-Aid. Let’s try it.”
“We don’t have any toddlers around here, Wendy. Now I have to ask Stephen to drive me to the store. Which means I’ll never hear an end to the jokes about this.”
“I could go with him,” Wendy quickly offered.
A bit too quickly, Gilda thought, annoyed that Wendy still had a crush on her older brother. Why does she even like him? Gilda wondered. Sure, he’s tall and his skin has cleared up a lot lately. And I guess he acts more confident now that he’s been accepted into college. Still, Wendy has no idea just how self-centered Stephen can be.
Stephen and Wendy had gotten to know each other better at a math camp over the summer. While Stephen had felt a very secret spark of attraction to Wendy during their conversations about quantum mechanics, he maintained that she was “too young” for him, since he was a senior and she was only a sophomore. Besides, Wendy was his little sister’s best friend. Nevertheless, Wendy harbored hope that Stephen would change his mind and see her as a potential girlfriend.
“I mean,” Wendy added, “you could stay here so Stephen won’t see your hair. I’ll go with him and I can run into the store and pick up the Kool-Aid.”
“I should have known this whole sleepover was just a ruse to see my geeky brother,” Gilda complained.
“It’s not. I’m just trying to help you solve this hair problem.” Wendy tapped on her cell phone again. “Stephen’s at work now, right?”
“Probably just finishing.”
“So I’ll just call him and see if he can help us get some Kool-Aid.”
Wendy held the phone to her ear and smiled broadly at Gilda’s hair, struggling to suppress her laughter. “Hey, Stephen? It’s Wendy! Hey, congratulations on getting into University of Michigan, by the way. That’s awesome! The School of Engineering? Cool!”
Gilda sat on the edge of the bathtub. She hoped Wendy and Stephen wouldn’t get into one of their long conversations about math.
“Well, I’m just here with your little sister—”
Gilda stood up.“‘Little sister?!’ Hello! You’re not my babysitter, Wendy!”
Wendy pressed her finger to her lips, shushing Gilda. “Oh, no, we’re at home—I mean, at your house—and everything’s fine,” Wendy continued. “She just had a little mishap in the bathroom here and we need some grape Kool-Aid ASAP.”
“Give me that, please.” Gilda wrenched the phone from Wendy’s hand.
“Stephen?”
There was a silence on the other end.
“Stephen? Are you there?”
; “Yes. I’m just leaving work. What are you guys—like, seven years old? You better not be doing something dumb that will get me into trouble.”
Of course he’s only worried that Mom will be mad at him, Gilda thought. “There’s no problem,” Gilda assured him. “We just need some Kool-Aid for a new recipe we’re making.”
“What kind of recipe calls for Kool-Aid?”
“The one we’re making.”
“Wendy said you did something in the bathroom.”
“Wendy gets confused about the names for different rooms in our house.”
“Don’t believe her, Stephen!” Wendy shouted in the background.
“Stephen, it doesn’t matter why we need it. Can’t you just pick it up on the way home? I mean, I’m sure Mom wouldn’t want me standing outside at the bus stop in the middle of the night just to go to the grocery store. She’d be pretty upset if she found out my older brother couldn’t be bothered to help me finish making my award-winning Artificial Grape Surprise Soufflé recipe.”
Stephen sighed. “Oh—all right. I’ll get you the Kool-Aid.”
An hour later, Gilda towel-dried her Kool-Aid processed and shampooed hair, which had now mellowed to a lighter shade of red-brown. “That’s better,” she said, eyeing her reflection in the full-length mirror in her bedroom. “Now it’s kind of caramel.”
“It is much better,” Wendy agreed. “But I’d say it’s closer to the shade of Chicken McNuggets.”
“Which reminds me,” said Gilda, deciding to ignore Wendy’s joke, “we need to think about our Halloween costumes.”
Halloween was Gilda’s favorite holiday, since it involved dress-up and disguise, not to mention ghosts. She threw open her closet door and surveyed the combination of ordinary clothing, disguises, theatrical costumes, and vintage flea-market finds that made up her wardrobe. As a result of a clearance sale at a Halloween party store in Detroit, she had recently expanded her impressive collection of hats and wigs.
Gilda Joyce: The Bones of the Holy Page 1
