“Well,” Liz said. She picked up the moth-eaten quilt. “You could put this on your bed.”
They both laughed.
“Anyway,” Gran said, “tears are probably the best cure for a touch of sadness. Or the second best, anyway.”
“What’s the best?” Liz asked.
“Don’t you know?”
Liz shook her head. She didn’t know. She didn’t have any idea.
Gran took a tissue out of her pocket and blew her nose. “Then I’ll tell you,” she said. “It’s sharing your bit of sadness with another Elizabeth.”
Liz felt warm all over. She lifted the last blanket from the trunk and looked beneath it. And that was when she saw it!
A handwritten booklet lay on the very bottom of the trunk. On the front it said, “Booke of Remedys.”
“Oh, Gran. Look!” Liz cried. She picked it up and handed it to her grandmother.
Gran stared at the booklet. “I wonder who this belonged to. I can’t remember ever seeing it before.” Her voice was filled with wonder.
“Open it,” Liz begged. “Read what it says about croup.”
Gran looked at her strangely, but she leafed through the booklet until she found the place. “The Croup,” she read. “A wet cloth over the face sometimes helps. But the best remedy is to boil a kettle or pots of water. Make a tent over the boiling pots so the sufferer can breathe in the steam.”
Liz nodded. “It works,” she said.
Gran studied the page closely. Then she studied Liz. “When I was a girl,” she began at last. She paused, then started again. “When I was a girl, sometimes I used to think I heard voices in this room. Voices calling ‘Elizabeth.’ Once I even thought I saw a—” She stopped, as though the word were too hard to say.
“A ghost?” Liz supplied.
Gran nodded. “How did you know? I never told anyone.”
Liz took her grandmother’s hand. “You tell me about your ghost,” she said. “And I’ll tell you about mine.”
Her grandmother wiped away the last of the tears. Then she smiled and leaned back against the trunk. “A good story might be the very best cure of all,” she said. “Why don’t you start?”
And so Liz did. “It all began,” she said, “with a blue ghost.”
Marion Dane Bauer is the author of more than forty books for children, including the Newbery Honor Book On My Honor and Rain of Fire, which won a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award. She has also won the Kerlan Award for her collected work. Marion teaches writing and is on the faculty of the Vermont College Master of Fine Arts in Writing for Children and Young Adults program.
Marion has two grown children and five grandchildren and lives in Eden Prairie, Minnesota.
Text copyright © 2005 by Marion Dane Bauer.
Interior illustrations copyright © 2005 by Suling Wang.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.steppingstonesbooks.com
www.randomhouse.com/kids
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bauer, Marion Dane.
The blue ghost / by Marion Dane Bauer; illustrated by Suling Wang.
p. cm.
“A Stepping Stone book.”
SUMMARY: At her grandmother’s log cabin, nine-year-old Liz is led to make
contact with children she believes may be her ancestors.
eISBN: 978-0-307-51468-4
[1. Guardian angels—Fiction. 2. Ghosts—Fiction. 3. Time travel—Fiction.
4. Grandmothers—Fiction.] I. Wang, Suling, ill. II. Title.
PZ7.B3262Bl 2005 [Fic]—dc22 2004024272
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks and A STEPPING STONE BOOK
and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
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