The Ghost of Fossil Glen

by Cynthia DeFelice

  Grimly, Allie held on and looked above her to consider her route. Overhead was a relatively flat shelf; if she could reach it, she could rest a moment and then angle over toward a bunch of weeds and vines that would offer a handhold. Beyond that, she didn’t know. She’d deal with it when the time came.

  Grunting with effort, she managed to pull herself up to the shelf. She looked back over her shoulder and was surprised to see how far she had climbed. Raymond Gagney was about twenty-five yards below her. His smug grin had turned to an annoyed grimace, probably from the realization that Allie was going to be more trouble than he had anticipated. With a sound of disgust, he threw the shovel to the ground and started up the cliff after her.

  Terrified, Allie began to scramble haphazardly toward the tangle of vines. She clutched blindly until her fingers wrapped around a stalk. Too frantic to remember to test its strength, she used it to pull herself up. For a moment the stalk held her weight. Then she felt it slipping right out of the cliff, sending her sliding backward in a shower of dirt and shale. At last, she found a foothold on the shelf again and tried to gather her wits and her courage.

  Beneath her, Gag-Me was slowly, determinedly climbing higher and closer. She had to figure out each hand and foothold; all he had to do was follow the route she had chosen. A sob of terror and frustration rose in her throat. No, she told herself fiercely. Don’t cry. Don’t think about him. You can do this; you’ve climbed places this steep before. Well, almost this steep. Remember the other day. Pretend you’re looking for fossils. Take one step at a time. Test each hand and foothold before you trust your weight to it. Slow down. Don’t panic. Don’t look back. Keep moving.

  With desperate concentration, Allie climbed, no thought in her head beyond her next step and that of the man beneath her. There was no sound except for Raymond Gagney’s steady swearing, the grunts of his exertion and hers, and the occasional shower of loose stones and dirt.

  Gag-Me’s breathing was becoming more and more labored. Allie, too, was near the point of exhaustion, but she made herself push on. And then, to her utter dismay, she came to a spot where she was stuck. Above her was a sheer, blank rock face. There was no place to dig a toehold, nothing to grasp, nowhere to go. Below her, very close, was Gag-Me.

  Clinging to her fragile position on the side of the cliff, Allie began to sob with helplessness, fatigue, and fear. Gag-Me was climbing steadily. Soon he would reach her and then he would kill her as he had killed Lucy.

  Allie closed her eyes and waited to die.

  Gag-Me was very close. She could hear the sounds of his struggle, the scramble of his feet, the clawing of his hands on the rock just below her. She imagined that she could feel his hot breath on the back of her legs, and she waited for his hand to close around her ankle.

  Suddenly everything was quiet: no breathing, no falling rock, no slipping shale. Allie felt a familiar chill steal down her neck. She heard Gag-Me draw in a sharp breath.

  “No!” he cried shakily. “No!” he repeated in a voice filled with horror. “It can’t be! Go away! You’re dead! No-o-o-o-!”

  Next came a long, drawn-out, anguished scream which seemed to go on forever but which could not have lasted more than seconds, as Raymond Gagney fell more than one hundred feet down the side of the cliff. There was a sickening thud when he hit bedrock, followed by an awful silence. It was broken by what Allie only dimly realized was the raw, strangled sound of her own voice, crying for help.

  Twenty-Five

  “Hang on, Allie. You’re going to be all right. Help is on the way. Don’t try to move. Hang on.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. Listen to me, Allie. You can do it.”

  The voice was Mr. Henry’s. It was calm and soothing, and when she thought she couldn’t hold on any longer, it insisted that she could. And she did.

  Then more people were speaking to her, from the top of the cliff this time. A rope appeared above her, and a man in a safety harness came down with it. He tied the rope around Allie and said, “It’s all over now, honey. We’re going up. It’s okay, you can let go.”

  But Allie couldn’t let go. Her fingers refused to uncurl from their death grip on the cliff; her feet wouldn’t budge from their desperate hold on the rock. Finally, her rescuer gently pried open her hands and wrapped his arms tightly around her. Together, they were pulled to the rim of the glen, to safety.

  Allie was carried to a waiting ambulance and placed on a stretcher, despite her protestations that she was really perfectly fine. As she was being loaded into the ambulance, she saw that a crowd had gathered. There were two Town of Seneca police cars and a fire truck, as well as many trucks belonging to volunteer rescue workers from the neighborhood.

  One of the policemen walked over and stuck his head inside the back of the ambulance. “Do you know the identity of the man at the bottom of the glen?” he asked.

  Allie nodded. “Raymond Gagney,” she said. Her voice came out sounding dry and croaky. She cleared her throat and wet her lips. “There’s another body, too,” she added. “It’s buried in the side of the cliff. You’ll see. It’s where Hoover—she’s a dog—was digging.”

  The policeman’s eyes widened in surprise. “Another body?” he repeated. “Do you know who it is?”

  “Lucy Stiles,” said Allie.

  “Lucy Stiles. That sounds familiar.” His eyes narrowed with concentration, then his expression turned to one of recognition. He said incredulously, “You mean the girl who fell off the cliff some—what?—four years ago?”

  Allie nodded again as the ambulance driver appeared at the door. “We’ll be heading to the hospital now, officer,” he said.

  “I’ll follow you,” said the policeman. To Allie he said, “I’ll need to ask you some more questions after you get checked out by the doctor.”

  Just then Mr. Henry appeared, breathless from running up from the bottom of the glen. “I’m her teacher,” he told the driver. “Okay if I ride along?”

  “Get in. Let’s go.”

  Mr. Henry slid into the seat beside Allie’s stretcher. He grabbed her hand, and she looked up into his worried face. “How are you doing?” he asked.

  “I’m fine, really,” said Allie. At that moment the siren sounded its urgent wail. Allie smiled. “I always wanted to ride in one of these things,” she said.

  Mr. Henry laughed and looked relieved, but he soon became serious again. “Who was that man? And why were you so far up the glen? I feel responsible for this, Allie. I should have kept my eye on you.”

  Allie shook her head. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I was chasing after Hoover.”

  “Hoover! You mean she’s the one who led you into this mess?”

  “Not exactly,” Allie answered. “I was in it before. But if she hadn’t run off, I wouldn’t have followed her, and then I wouldn’t have known that she’d discovered Lucy’s body. So, if you think about it, it worked out.”

  “Wait a second,” Mr. Henry said. “Back up. There’s another body down there?”

  “It’s Lucy Stiles,” Allie answered solemnly. “Gag-Me murdered her.”

  “Gag-Me?” Mr. Henry repeated, looking confused.

  “Raymond Gagney,” said Allie. “Lucy’s mother’s boyfriend. Gag-Me was Lucy’s nickname for him.” At Mr. Henry’s look of bewilderment, Allie explained, “See, I found Lucy’s diary. That’s how I knew about Gag-Me. He murdered Lucy, Mr. Henry. It wasn’t an accident at all.”

  Above the wailing of the siren, Allie told a spellbound Mr. Henry the bare facts about Lucy’s death. When she finished, she said, “Lucy was a great journal writer, Mr. Henry. When I read her diary, I felt as if I knew her.”

  “I bet the two of you would have been good friends,” said Mr. Henry. “I told you she was special. And smart, like you.”

  Allie felt her face flushing. To cover her embarrassment, she said, “I’m so glad she kept that diary. I mean, it helped me to solve her murder. But also, in a weird kind of way, when
I read her words, it was almost as if she was talking to me—as if she was still alive.”

  Mr. Henry nodded. “That’s one reason I’ve been encouraging you to put your thoughts and dreams down in your journals.”

  “Do you keep a journal, Mr. Henry?” Allie asked.

  “Sure do,” Mr. Henry answered. He started to say something else, hesitated, then began again. “Allie,” he said, “when I first got to you, when you were still hanging there on the cliff, you said something. Something I’m wondering about.”

  “I did? I don’t remember. What did I say?”

  “You said, ‘Thank you, Lucy.’ Then I thought I heard you say, ‘for saving my life.’” Mr. Henry looked quizzically at Allie.

  “Oh.” She didn’t know what to say. How could she explain to Mr. Henry what had happened on the cliff?

  “Sometimes,” Mr. Henry said quietly, “when it’s difficult to talk about something, it helps to write about it.”

  “The way Lucy did, in her diary,” Allie said softly.

  The noise of the siren began to fade as the ambulance pulled into the entrance of the hospital.

  “How did you find me, anyway?” Allie asked. She was curious, but she also needed time to decide how much, if anything, she wanted to tell Mr. Henry about Lucy’s ghost.

  “Are you kidding? Your scream came echoing down the glen and we all came running. As soon as I saw you—and the body on the ground—I sent the kids back to school for help, and I stayed there with you. That’s when I heard you talking.” He paused. “I’d like to hear the whole story sometime, Allie, about you and Lucy.”

  Allie looked out the window, thinking.

  “Maybe in your next journal entry…”

  “Maybe,” she said uncertainly. Then, looking into Mr. Henry’s eager, open face, she said, “All right. I’ll write the whole story.” With a grin she added, “You’ve already read the beginning.”

  “I kind of thought so,” said Mr. Henry, grinning back.

  The ambulance door opened and a hospital attendant appeared. Mr. Henry scrambled out of his seat. As Allie was lifted out of the ambulance and wheeled inside, he called, “I’m going to wait until your parents arrive, and then I’ve got to get back to school. I’m afraid to think of what Hoover might be up to. You take care now. I’ll see you on Monday.”

  Allie waved. “Bye, Mr. Henry. Thanks.”

  In a little cubicle in the emergency room, Allie was examined thoroughly, even though she tried to tell the doctor that she was okay. Despite her scrapes and her sprained ankle, she really did feel fine, except when she thought about being on the cliff with Raymond Gagney. His terrified scream echoed through her head again and again and, worse, it was followed by the horrible thud of his landing.

  But what she thought about most were the words Gag-Me had spoken right before he fell.

  After the doctor had taken her temperature and blood pressure, made sure she could follow a finger with both of her eyes, and poked her here and there to find out what hurt, her parents arrived, breathless with concern. They hugged her over and over and asked the doctor what seemed like a hundred questions. Then the policeman came into the little examining room and asked Allie to tell him what she knew about the bodies in the glen. Here we go again, she thought. Feeling suddenly tired, she said, “There’s a red leather book in my desk at home that will help to explain everything.”

  “Your journal?” asked her mother in a puzzled voice.

  “No,” said Allie. “It belonged to Lucy Stiles. It’s the diary Mr. Curtis was looking for. His boss is the dead man in the glen.”

  Mrs. Nichols’s hand flew to her mouth and her eyes grew round. “What in the world?”

  “You know that man?” her father asked with astonishment.

  “Sort of,” Allie answered. She looked at the expressions of amazement on the three faces above her, took a deep breath, and prepared to tell her story. Or, at least, most of it.

  Twenty-Six

  Allie was released from the hospital a little after noon. At home, she slept for a while. Later she sat in bed, propped up on pillows her mother had fluffed behind her head. Her parents sat at the foot of the bed, and Michael snuggled right by her side. Although he didn’t understand exactly what had happened, he seemed reluctant to let Allie out of his sight. She was happy to have his warm little body next to hers.

  Allie took a sip of the sweet tea her dad had brought on a tray. She looked gratefully at her family. “I’m really okay, you know,” she said. But she had to admit that it felt good to have so much care and concern lavished on her.

  Michael reached for the afternoon edition of The Seneca Times, which Mr. Nichols had brought into the room. “Look, Allie. It’s you!” He pointed to a front-page picture of Allie being lifted out of the glen by a rescue worker.

  Allie looked at the headline: MAN DIES, GIRL RESCUED, BODY UNCOVERED AT FOSSIL GLEN. She set the paper aside. She didn’t feel like reading the article just yet.

  “Oh, I can’t bear to look at that picture,” said Allie’s mother with a shudder. “When I think—” She broke off and reached over to hug Allie once again.

  Allie swallowed hard as she, too, imagined what could have happened in the glen.

  “My brave little Allie-Cat,” said her father, stroking her hair.

  The telephone rang, and Mr. Nichols went to answer it. He came back to Allie’s room and announced, “That was the police. They’re coming over for the diary.”

  “I’ll get it,” said Allie, starting to get up out of bed.

  “You’re supposed to stay off that ankle, young lady,” said her mother. “Let me get the diary.”

  “I’ll be careful, Mom,” Allie said, hopping on one foot across the room. “I’ve got to get it myself. You’ll see. It’s kind of tricky.”

  Her parents and Michael watched as Allie pounded twice on the top of her new desk. When the hinges popped open, Allie reached into the secret compartment and took out Lucy’s diary. As she held it up for them to see, the doorbell rang.

  “The police!” said Michael excitedly. He ran downstairs to open the door, followed by his father.

  Allie handed the journal to her mother. Maybe it was the little blue pills the doctor had given her, or the aftermath of the morning’s excitement, or the relief of handing Lucy’s journal over to the police, but she suddenly felt exhausted. She hopped slowly back to bed, curled up beneath the covers, closed her eyes, and almost immediately fell sound asleep.

  That evening, Dub stopped over. Mrs. Nichols told him to go on up to Allie’s room.

  “Al? Are you all right?”

  “Hi, Dub.” Allie sat up in bed. She was awfully glad to see him, even though she felt a bit embarrassed to be wearing her old pink pajamas with little purple ponies all over them. “Yeah, I’m okay,” she replied. “Mom and Dad are treating me like an invalid, but I’m really fine.”

  “Michael told me the police came.”

  Allie smiled. “Yeah. Michael thought that was really cool.”

  “What did they want?”

  “They came to get Lucy’s diary. They’d already asked me about a million questions at the hospital.”

  “Did you say anything to them about—you know…”

  “What?”

  “The ghost.”

  “No.”

  “Good thing,” said Dub, with a sigh of relief.

  “I almost did,” said Allie. “But then I tried to imagine explaining it…So I just told them about the diary and kept quiet about the other stuff.”

  “Did you tell them about Gag-Me following you to the glen after school yesterday?” Dub asked.

  “I said I was pretty sure he was there. I told them to look for those footprints we saw. They asked why he would have been after me, and I had to tell about calling him, and what I said. My mother nearly had a heart attack when she heard that.”

  “I can imagine,” Dub said dryly.

  “The police aren’t sure whether he actually knew t
hat I was the one with the diary. My mom bought all that furniture from the Stiles house, so they think he might have figured it out. Anyway, they said the diary by itself wouldn’t have been enough to prove that he murdered Lucy. Without a body, Gag-Me could have said the diary was nothing more than Lucy’s overactive imagination.” She stopped to grin at Dub. “We all know about girls and their overactive imaginations. So getting rid of the body was even more important to him than getting his hands on the diary.”

  “So that’s why he was at the glen, to get rid of the body?” Dub asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you discovered him in the act!”

  “Yeah. Hoover took off, and I was trying to get her to come back.”

  “I was wondering where the heck you’d gone when these loud screams started echoing down the glen. Geez, Al, talk about bloodcurdling. You scared us to death.”

  “You think you were scared!”

  They were both quiet, remembering.

  Allie broke the silence. “The police called again a while ago. They tracked down Lucy’s mom out in California to tell her about finding the body and all, and guess what? Gag-Me followed her out there after Lucy died and got her to marry him somehow.”

  “Yuck,” said Dub.

  “I know. And guess what else? She never signed any papers saying he could sell building lots in the glen. She didn’t know anything about it. She said she told him a couple of weeks ago that she wanted a divorce. So he probably figured this was his last chance to make his big deal.”

  “Wow,” said Dub. “He almost got away with it.”

  “And guess what else? She called here while I was asleep and talked to my mom.”

  “Lucy’s mother?”

  “Yeah. She said she wanted to thank me and all. I guess Mom told her the whole story, including how upset we all were when we saw Gag-Me’s FOR SALE sign. Anyway, Mrs. Stiles said she was going to make sure the glen can never be developed. She’s going to make it a nature preserve or something, and name it after Lucy.”