by Megan Atwood
Tabitha let go of Lizzie, and Olive saw tears in Lizzie’s eyes. She felt awful for Lizzie. This orchard was everything to their family.
“We don’t know how the fire started,” Tabitha said. “Albert and I were in the house trying to get some decorations up and we heard a yell and saw the smoke. Then we saw one of our horses run past the house. And then Patrick, Brett, and Sally ran by. And then Karin and Jordan ran by the other window. And since that was all of our seasonal help running by our windows, we figured we should really find out what’s happening. So we came out here. Sally gave us the update.”
“And then the lightbulb exploded,” Albert finished.
“What can we do to help?” Peter asked. Olive was wondering the exact same thing.
“Well, I think we have everything under control now. But I would stay out of the house for a little bit. There’s clearly something wrong with the electrical system,” Tabitha said. “I’ve called the company and they’re going to come out today. Thank goodness. We can’t afford any more accidents!”
Olive could see that she was really worried. She wondered if she meant that literally—they couldn’t afford any more accidents. She knew that putting on this seasonal show cost a lot of money up front.
Tabitha and Albert turned to talk to one of the firefighters. Sarah’s mouth set in a grim line and she said, “Come on. Let’s go to the picnic table and talk about this. We’ve got to come up with a way to stop this haunting.” Her voice went low on the word “haunting.” Peter and Lizzie nodded, but Olive hesitated.
“I’m going to go for a walk,” Olive said. She had to wrap her head around the accidents. She knew, just knew, that they weren’t caused by a ghost. And if she could find out what they were caused by, maybe she could help the Garrisons.
And maybe even get her friends back.
Peter gave her a strange look. “You’re going for a walk? Now?”
Olive nodded but didn’t meet his eye. She did, however, catch the hurt look in Lizzie’s eyes. She felt bad, but she was hoping this would help Lizzie in the long run. So she turned and walked toward the barn.
Two of the farmhands—Patrick and Karin, Olive thought—were tending to the barn doors as the horses stood in the pasture. The horses looked nervous; when Olive approached, they whinnied and shied away. This made Olive nervous too, but a voice rang out.
“Hey there! You’re Lizzie’s friend, right?” Karin called.
Olive nodded. She got closer to where they were working and said, “I’m Olive.”
Karin took off her work glove and extended her hand. “I’m Karin,” she said as she shook Olive’s hand firmly. She pointed to the stocky, friendly-looking man digging in a toolbox. “That’s Patrick.”
Olive waved and Patrick said, “Hiya,” then went back to digging. Karin put on her work glove again and moved to one of the barn doors.
“Um . . . so, what do you think happened?” Olive asked after a minute.
Karin said, “Well, it looks like these doors were opened. But we can’t figure out how. It’s almost like someone did it on purpose.”
Patrick brought a huge metal contraption over, and Olive could see it was a lock. The Garrisons hadn’t regularly locked the barn before. This seemed serious.
“Why would somebody do that, though?” Olive asked.
Patrick shrugged. “No one would have a reason to.”
Karin smiled. “Maybe a ghost did it! It’s the Halloween season, after all.” She laughed at her own joke, but Olive couldn’t even crack a smile.
Patrick set the lock down. “Well, I have a theory, actually,” he said. Karin rolled her eyes. “She doesn’t believe it, but here’s what I think happened.”
Karin said, “Oh, boy, here we go.”
“See these two windows that are opposite each other? I think there’s some strange wind pressure that happens when the weather is just right that pulls the doors in and rattles them.” Patrick stopped to point at the windows and to demonstrate the rattling with his hands. “So, the wind rattles the doors and it jars the wooden bar loose so that it falls out of the latch and lets the doors open. I’ve said this before, but no one will believe me.”
Olive knew how he felt. She got excited—that would mean it definitely wasn’t a ghost. There was a perfectly logical explanation for this!
But Karin scoffed. “Right. The same day the pumpkin patch caught fire and a lightbulb exploded, the wind managed to knock the latch off the barn doors and the horses got out. Doesn’t that seem like too much of a coincidence to you?”
Patrick shrugged. “It makes more sense to me than someone letting the horses out. And way more sense to me than a ghost.” He winked at Olive. “Right, Olive?”
Olive nodded and grinned. Karin made a pretend-shocked face. “What? You believe him over me? I suppose you also believe the accidents in the barn are a coincidence?” She winked at Olive too, so Olive smiled back.
“I do,” she said. “But my friends don’t. So I’m trying to find explanations for things so I can show them that they’re . . .” She was about to say so she could show them they were wrong, but that seemed, well, wrong somehow. “So I can show them there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Karin laughed a little and said, “Uh-huh. That’ll be helpful for them.”
Olive said, “Exactly. Okay, it was nice meeting you!” She pushed her glasses up on her nose and turned to leave.
“You know . . . sometimes things can’t be explained with a ‘normal’ explanation. We don’t know everything in the world!” Karin said.
Olive closed her eyes and tried to take a deep breath.
CHAPTER 9
When Push Comes to Shove . . .
Olive decided against talking to anyone at the pumpkin patch. Or figuring out what had happened with the lightbulb. It seemed that people just wanted to believe whatever they wanted to believe—Karin was the perfect example of that. And even though Olive knew her friends were probably still irritated with her—as she was with them—she wasn’t sure where else to go. She decided to meet them at the picnic table.
When she got there, Peter said, “Thanks for joining us.” But he was being sarcastic. She rolled her eyes and tried to hide her hurt.
“How is everything here?” she asked.
Lizzie lit up. “We’ve got news!” she said. This made Olive’s heart happy, and her mood lifted a little. Any good news at the moment would be amazing. Lizzie’s family was going through enough.
Sarah bounced up and down on the picnic table bench and said, “Yeah! So, I called my mom about Verity Wentworth. And she said she didn’t have any information because she was just an amateur historian or whatever. So she called a historian friend of hers and asked her some questions.” Sarah paused and her eyes got wide. “It turns out there was a family called the Wentworths and there was a pamphlet that circulated about the tragic death of Verity Wentworth. The pamphlet said, get this . . .” She was looking up like she was trying to remember the exact words when Peter cut in.
“It said, ‘Baron von Steuben requests any information about the wrongful death of the virtuous Verity Wentworth and offers a handsome reward of two hundred dollars.’ ”
Sarah nodded so hard her head looked like it might fall off. “And two hundred dollars is like a gazillion dollars back then!”
Lizzie squeaked. “The Verity story is true!”
Olive didn’t say what she wanted to say. Which was that it couldn’t be true. Because ghosts weren’t real. But every time she opened her mouth lately, her friends got mad at her. She was tired of it. And she was tired of being the only one who felt this way. She just smiled weakly.
Peter said, “Hey, we were thinking about going to see Sheriff Hadley at the hospital. Do you want to come?”
Olive stared. Why was he constantly asking her if she wanted to come and do things with him and their two best friends? It had always been a given. “Uh, yeah,” she said. “Of course.”
Lizzie smiled at Olive
. “I’m glad you’re coming,” she said. This made Olive feel worse, and she got up from the table. Like her coming was a huge favor or a weird event.
“How are we going to get there?” she asked.
Peter said, “Sarah’s mom is going to come pick us up. She wanted to visit him too.”
Olive nodded again. “That makes sense.”
Sarah furrowed her eyebrows. “What does that mean?”
Olive was about to answer, but she saw Lizzie’s eyes widen and saw Peter shake his head a little. Olive shook her own head, exasperated. Yet another thing she couldn’t be honest about. It was obvious to everyone except Sarah that her mom and Sheriff Hadley were a couple. Olive sincerely didn’t understand why people had to pretend the world was one way when it clearly was another way entirely.
She shrugged. “Just that she also fell out of the loft, so they probably want to compare stories,” she said.
Sarah nodded. “Oh, yeah. That’s true. Hey, we can ask him if something weird happened!”
Olive felt so tired all of a sudden. And about as old as the ghost of Verity Wentworth.
• • •
Sheriff Hadley sat up in his hospital bed, his arm in a cast and a sling and his bright red hair sticking straight up. He also looked incredibly happy—but he kind of always did. Especially when he saw Ms. Shirvani.
“Ana!” he said as they walked in the door. “And of course the awesome Sarah, the fantastic Lizzie, the amazing Peter, and the wonderful Olive!”
Even though Olive felt pretty rotten, she couldn’t help smiling back at Sheriff Hadley. He was always so cheerful. And goofy-looking.
“Thanks so much for coming to visit me. I’m so bored. But the doctor says I got a concussion when I fell, so they’re keeping me for observation.” He picked up a Jell-O cup. “But you want to know the worst? They like to taunt me. Like they give me this Jell-O but then they won’t open it for me!”
Olive giggled, and so did the rest of the group. Sheriff Hadley looked beseechingly at Ms. Shirvani. “Ana, would you mind opening this?”
Ms. Shirvani crossed her arms in front of her chest. “I don’t know, Colin . . . it seems like you’re going to need to learn some independence here.”
He narrowed his eyes and pretended to look mad, but then Ms. Shirvani laughed and so did he. She opened his Jell-O and patted his head like he was a little kid. “Don’t get used to this, though,” she said, and sat down on a chair near his bed.
Olive wasn’t quite sure what to do with herself. Hospitals were weird—they smelled funny and there were beeping noises going on constantly. And she felt in the way no matter where she stood. She leaned against the wall and hoped she looked natural.
Sarah said, “We want to know how you fell.” Olive had to hand it to Sarah—when she wanted something, she didn’t beat around the bush. Olive admired that in her. It was something they had in common.
“Ahhh. How is it that Ana here fell out of the loft and ended up in a pile of hay, but I fell out and didn’t? Well . . . the falling out was weird, I’ll tell you that,” the sheriff said.
Lizzie looked at all of them with big eyes, and Sarah’s legs started bouncing. Peter leaned into Olive and said, “See? WEIRD.”
Olive cleared her throat. This perked her up. Maybe now she could find a reasonable explanation for something. “Can you go through the whole thing?”
The sheriff looked at her with admiration. “You would be a great sheriff, you know that, Olive?”
She shuffled her feet and looked down, blushing. She had to admit, she loved the idea of being a detective. She even had a detective game that she used to play with her whole family. No one liked playing with her, though, because she always won.
“Well, Ana, do you want to tell your part?” the sheriff asked.
Ms. Shirvani nodded. “So, we were pretending to act out what the kids will act out at the end of the haunted barn. Except, we weren’t going to REALLY act it out. But then I lost my balance somehow and fell. Luckily, we’d put a whole bunch of hay on the spot where the fall was supposed to be, so my landing was soft.”
Lizzie asked, “How did you lose your balance, though?”
Ms. Shirvani shrugged. “I honestly don’t know. I looked up to say something to Colin and then the next thing I knew, I was flying through the air.”
Peter said, “And then not too long after, you fell off too, Sheriff Hadley, right?”
The sheriff nodded and swallowed the Jell-O he’d just taken a huge bite of. “Yeah, only this time, there was no hay.”
Sarah said, “Someone or some THING moved it, huh?”
The sheriff laughed. “Well, I’m voting for someone. I think there were people in and out of there and part of their job was to make sure everything was clean. They probably moved the hay to mop the floor or something. It was just bad timing.”
Olive nodded. “Yeah, a total coincidence, right?” she asked.
The sheriff nodded. “Totally.” He took another bite of his Jell-O and then looked up thoughtfully. “Though . . . the fall part was weird. And a couple of other things were, too. . . .”
Peter, Lizzie, and Sarah all said, “What things?” at the same time.
Both Ms. Shirvani and the sheriff looked surprised. Olive didn’t doubt it—three really intense kids asking the same question at the same time would be surprising.
“Well. I don’t know. First of all, why was the hay only cleared off from the spot where someone would land if they fell out of the loft? That was weird. But also . . . and this may be the concussion talking . . . but it almost felt as if I were . . .”
Peter, Lizzie, and Sarah all said, “. . . pushed?”
Olive rolled her eyes. Now Ms. Shirvani and the sheriff laughed. “Geez, you kids sure are in sync today,” Ms. Shirvani said. Olive didn’t bother to correct her to say that only three of the kids in the room were in sync.
She spoke up. “Pushed how? Was there someone around you?”
Sheriff Hadley shook his head. “That’s the thing. No one was around.”
Ms. Shirvani patted his hand. “But Colin . . . you have to admit, even on a good day you’re kind of clumsy.”
The sheriff pretended to look offended. “That is neither here nor there, madam!” he said in mock outrage.
Ms. Shirvani giggled. “Remember that time you fell out of your car because you tripped over your own feet? Or that time you spilled an entire bucket of paint on your own head? Or what about the time at the Comic Con festival when you lost your balance and knocked into someone, who knocked into someone else, and so on until there were five people who fell because you tripped?”
He put the spoon near his mouth, but the Jell-O slid right off onto his chest. Everyone started laughing, including him. “Well, fine. It’s true. Sometimes I can be a LITTLE clumsy. So it might have just been that.”
Olive looked at her friends, hoping they were starting to come around to her way of thinking, but none of them looked back at her.
“But it still felt like someone pushed you,” Sarah said after the laughter died down.
The sheriff got serious. “It really did. Or at least, that’s how I remember it. Anyway, let’s forget about all that—who wants to get me some more Jell-O?”
CHAPTER 10
Aunt Willow
Outside the hospital, they were all a little uneasy. Olive felt like she was just meeting all of them for the first time. Like she’d never really known them at all, even her twin. Or at least, like she was totally different from them all of a sudden.
After an uncomfortable silence, Lizzie said, “Do you all want to come over Friday and spend the night? We can finish planning the zombie hayride and the haunted barn.”
Olive relaxed a little. She still loved the idea of doing that. They had all bonded over the idea of a zombie hayride when they’d first met. She nodded. “I think our dads will let us,” she said, looking at Peter. He nodded.
Sarah said, “Okay, sounds good.” But her words
were clipped and she didn’t look at Olive. They all agreed to meet Friday night, and Olive vowed to herself that she would try to keep her mouth shut about all the ghost stuff. Even though she was right.
Peter and Olive headed off toward home to wait for the following weekend and the sleepover.
• • •
The two of them did their best to avoid each other for one long week, until, finally, Friday came and Olive packed her stuff for the sleepover, patted her backpack to make sure the papers she was bringing were there, and trotted down the stairs to meet her brother and their dads. She had a secret weapon in her backpack and she was feeling pretty good. She would get her friends back. And she would do it using facts and smart thinking—her normal MO.
“You ready to go?” she asked her brother cheerily.
He gave her a curious look. “Yes . . . ?”
“Good! Let’s go,” she said, and pushed her glasses up her nose and smiled.
John walked in, jingling his car keys. “All right, children of mine, let’s get you slumbered!” They got into the car and drove to the Garrisons’.
Sarah was already there. She and Lizzie stood on the porch, bouncing on their heels. When Peter and Olive got out of the car, Sarah squealed, “Finally! You’re here!” She ran down the stairs and grabbed them both by the hands, pulling them up the stairs.
When they were all inside and had all patted the banister three times, Lizzie said, “There’s a surprise here.” Olive wasn’t sure why they patted the banister—just that it was a tradition they observed every time they came into the house.
“Ms. G got us Monster House to watch!” Sarah said excitedly. “But that’s not all.”
Lizzie nodded, just as excited. “There’s someone you should totally meet. She’s the absolute best!”
Suddenly a voice Olive hadn’t heard before called out from the dining room. “Well, bring them in here! I have to meet your new friends.”
“It’s Aunt Willow!” Sarah and Lizzie squeaked at the same time.
Peter and Olive exchanged looks. “Okay . . . ,” Olive said. They had aunts too, and although they loved their aunts, they were never this excited when they visited.
