Haint Misbehavin'

by Maureen Hardegree

“Because he’s not you. He can’t let me into the special collections room.”

  “And you think I will?” He laughed bitterly, then he stopped mid-sidewalk. His dark gaze bore into me. “Do you actually think I’m such a doormat that I’d risk my volunteer job to help you?”

  “Please, I just want to look something up about the family whose graves we cleaned this morning. It’s not like I’m going to take anything. I don’t even have my backpack with me. I just want to finish reading the journal I found.”

  “I didn’t say you could read it,” Amy screeched.

  Oblivious to the angry ghost floating in front of him and how his next words could escalate her anger, Xavier resumed walking. “This is the same journal Mrs. Turnbull accused you of trying to steal. Why’s it so important to you?”

  I groaned. “I can’t tell you why I need to read it.”

  “Then forget it.” He stride increased.

  I jogged to keep up with him. “Xavier, please.”

  “No.”

  “Look, this is going to sound crazy to you, but I’m just going to say it. I feel badly that this kid who lived where I do died so young. I need to see that she had a happy life even though it was a short one. That’s all this is about. Okay?”

  He paused, so I did, too, and gazed in his troubled dark eyes.

  “What are you trying to say?” he asked.

  “The girl who lived here, whose grave we cleaned, Amy Malcolm. All this—” I waved my arms to encompass the neighborhood we were leaving. “—belonged to her family. She died at a really young age. Ten.”

  “Ten,” he repeated, his deep voice lower than usual. “Like my brother.” He looked away from me, but I could tell he was listening—really listening.

  “I need to read her journal. I have to know that she was loved no matter what she did that was wrong.”

  He didn’t say no. Was it because he wondered the same thing about—

  “Stevie,” Amy said. Great. Now she was reading my mind without even being inside my body.

  “Please, Xavier. If I could explain why this is so important to me, I would.”

  “Try,” he said, glancing down at his watch.

  Okay, I could do this, but I’d have to fudge the truth a bit. “This may be weird but I feel like I really know this little girl from what I read so far. She was a regular kid if a bit mischievous.”

  “Hey!” Amy glared at me.

  “If we’d lived at the same time, we’d probably have been best friends.”

  “Really?” Smiling, Amy twirled, her calico dress and her pinafore spinning in a blue and white circle.

  “Really,” I said, meaning it. “Amy thought her family hated her for something she did. I don’t know what that is yet. I haven’t gotten to the part in the journal where she explains.”

  “Don’t read it, Heather. If you do, you won’t like me no more,” Amy whined. Obviously spending too much time around Audrey was taking its toll on her.

  Xavier started walking again but slowly, so he hadn’t totally tuned me out.

  “It’s like a puzzle. I have the edge put together, but I have to fill in the rest of the pieces.”

  “No you don’t,” Amy said. “I’m perfectly happy here.”

  Liar, I thought, hoping she’d read my mind again.

  “You’re gonna find out you’re wrong,” Amy said, “I told you they hate me. My writing’s gonna prove it.”

  Xavier rubbed his temples like I was giving him a headache. Who could blame him? I was verging on a headache myself. Getting kicked out of the library permanently lay on the line, as well as my trip to Jekyll Island, and possibly the rest of my summer, including Suzanne’s boy-girl party, if she would ever send me an invitation.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Okay, then, I’m going to tell you a secret, Xavier.” What other choice did I have? I tried not to hyperventilate. “You are the only person I trust with this information and that’s because you know what it’s like to be treated like a weirdo, so I know if I tell you, you won’t share this secret.”

  Xavier sighed. “Get to the point.”

  “I will, but if you tell a soul—”

  “I won’t. I swear. Anything to move this along.”

  “Okay. You know the weird stuff that happened today? It was a lot like the weird stuff that happened that day all the books fell out of the stacks and the computers went haywire at the library, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah, I guess so.” Xavier shuddered as Amy settled on his shoulders for a ride. He looked from the tall pines bordering the no man’s land between the strip mall and the subdivision to the cloudless, breezeless sky for an explanation of the sudden chill.

  “My point is that I’m being haunted, and that cold feeling against your neck and shoulders is the ghost of the girl I was telling you about. Amy’s riding your neck.”

  “Right.” He felt around, and Amy giggled like he was tickling her.

  “You can’t deny you overheard me talking to her at the movie theater,” I added.

  He had the decency to blush. “So why are you the one being haunted?”

  Don’t worry. I wasn’t about to get into the ghost-seeing being triggered by my period. Teenage boys don’t need to know this; they already think the female reproductive tract has magical properties. “I don’t know why I’m the one being haunted. This ability to see a ghost isn’t something I want. I’m just trying to help Amy. But to help her, I need you.”

  He shook his head and resumed walking. “Just ask her what you want to know.”

  “She won’t tell me. Please, I’m begging you.”

  “I don’t know.” He jammed his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “So if you can see this Amy ghost, can you see other ones, too?”

  “If you’re trying to ask about Stevie, no I can’t see him. But I can feel him. I know he was in your yard when I was waiting for you.”

  “Why is he there?”

  “I don’t know. He hasn’t told me. I only recently figured out why Amy is here, and, to be perfectly blunt, I can only handle one ghost at a time, thank you, very much.” I blocked him from any more forward progress and gave him my best sad puppy dog eyes. “I have to show Amy her family loves her. If I can read the journal, I might find something that proves it to her.”

  “What if you don’t convince her?”

  “Then I guess I’ll start high school weirder than usual. Amy’s easily bored.”

  He pondered my request for a couple more seconds, which passed like hours. Then he met my gaze. His dark eyes glittered with that mixture of hurt and love I’d seen before. I was sure the answer was no.

  “Where’s the ghost now?” he asked.

  Amy was off his shoulders, lollygagging behind us. She stuck her tongue out at me.

  I pointed at her. “She’s coming up on your right. No, she’s darting to your left.”

  He rubbed his arm and shivered. “You got any ideas on how I can sneak you in?”

  Wait a minute. “This means you believe me?”

  He nodded.

  “This means you’ll do it? You’ll help me?”

  He nodded a second time. “But we’ll have to keep an eye out for Mrs. Turnbull.” AKA the Library Dragon.

  “I could kiss you!” I shouted, meant entirely figuratively.

  Xavier grinned, revealing that dimple in his cheek. “No one’s stopping you.”

  For appeasement purposes only, I gave him a quick peck on the cheek. “That’ll have to do.”

  “For now,” he said.

  Chapter Twenty

  By the time we arrived at the Five Points Branch, Xavier and I had a plan. Amy still wasn’t crazy about me reading her journal, but she didn’t want to go back to my house either. Xavier would start working as usual. At twenty after, when the Library Dragon took her cigarette break, he’d unlock the special collections room. I’d wait in the ladies room for his signal.

  I know what you’re thinking. With Amy’s track re
cord, a place full of faucets and toilets wouldn’t be your first choice. It wasn’t mine either. Fortunately, Amy quickly tired of flushing the automatic toilets. While I waited for Xavier’s knock, she played with the water in one of the sinks.

  My heart lurched at the three-two knock sequence. All I needed was the music from Mission Impossible and some black clothes.

  I poked my head out the bathroom door. The Library Dragon was standing outside on the brick-stamped concrete by the entrance pacing and puffing on her cigarette. People were filing in the meeting room, looked like this GASP meeting would be standing room only.

  I darted across the corridor and infiltrated the stream of traffic flowing into the main building. Amy followed on tiptoe as if we were playing Follow the Leader

  That was when the lure of an empty computer carrel and the possibility of seeing whether Suzanne had e-vited me called like a siren song. Yes, I went to check my e-mail. Probably not my smartest move.

  I’d gotten to my e-mail account and all was well. But before I could even check my inbox, Amy said, “Who You Gonna Call?”

  Ghostbusters! My brain filled in. Wait, how could she know the lyrics from that old song?

  Braids swaying, she glided down the hall toward the meeting room. I needed her with me in special collections. Now it was my turn to follow her.

  Outside the room, an easel and placard stood with those exact words from the Ghostbusters song. Under the big question in all caps, a mention of the speaker of the day, Dr. Herman Sherman, president of the Georgia Association of Spectral Phenomenon, GASP for short. No telling what havoc Amy’d cause, but Xavier, who was guarding the special collections room, motioned for me to hurry toward him.

  The sooner I got to the journal, the sooner I’d find what I needed to help Amy move along, but what good would any evidence do if she wasn’t in the room to hear it? I had to get her first. Plus, I was a little, shall we say, nervous about the havoc she’d wreak at this meeting.

  Xavier stared at me. He lifted his hands. “What?” he mouthed. Apparently, he didn’t understand that I was actually saving his butt.

  I waved him off, then slipped into an empty seat in the middle of the last row as a man, presumably Dr. Herman Sherman, took the podium and tapped the microphone to make sure it was working. I would have preferred a seat closer to the aisle, but such is my luck.

  Amy floated around the man, looking at him from every possible angle. He was totally oblivious to her presence. Yup, I’d learn absolutely nothing of any help as I attempted to draw her out of here. That was, once I could figure out how.

  The large woman seated next to me who was dressed all in pink down to the faceted ring she was wearing leaned toward me. Her ring winked as she tapped her pen against her legal pad. “Nice to see a young person here.” Her accent was nasal and flat, upper mid-west.

  “Thanks.”

  The parapsychology professor grabbed the edges of the podium with both hands and placed his mouth way to close too the microphone so that you could hear him breathing as he spoke. “I’m Dr. Herman Sherman, and I’d like to welcome you to our first meeting of the summer.” Big intake of breath, big outtake.

  I wanted to suggest he step back from the mike.

  “Many of you may suspect you’re experiencing paranormal phenomenon, and you might just be.” Spit, spit, breathe. “Most things you’ve read, or heard, however, are wrong.”

  Whispering rose in the audience. I hoped they were recognizing Herman Sherman for the charlatan that he was. Amy was standing right next to him, and he didn’t notice the temperature cooling.

  He held up a digital recorder. “This device, my friends, is one of your best ghost hunting tools. I want you to listen to what I recorded at a bed and breakfast in Savannah.” He depressed the button and kept twitching his lips like he was so proud of the static that sounded to me like “sp, sp, sp” he recorded. Not at all what real ghosts sound like. I rolled my eyes.

  Delighted with the buzzing in the room, he clicked off his recorder and set it back on the table. “That communication is called electronic voice phenomena or EVP for short.”

  I felt I needed to move the meeting along. The sooner Amy and I got out of here the better. “Do you think there could be a ghost in here today?” I asked.

  Dr. Sherman smoothed his long-handled mustache. “Young lady, if there were a ghost in here, I’d sense it.”

  Yah, right. “So you’ve seen ghosts before?”

  “Not seen per se, sensed.”

  Amy poked him.

  “Sensed as in you felt the temperature drop?” I asked.

  “No, it’s more of a hair-raising, if you will. The whole temperature drop is a fallacy.”

  Amy rose high enough to lift the flap of his comb-over. He didn’t even notice!

  Several members of the audience, however, buzzed over the hair. One, who must be as skeptical about this man’s abilities as I was getting, even shouted, “Well, I’ve felt cold spots in haunted rooms.”

  “I can see I need to bust a few myths.” Dr. Sherman said, then made a big deal of opening his seersucker sport coat and draping it over the chair next to the podium. He straightened his bow tie. “Let’s conduct an experiment. Note that I’m taking a fresh scan card.” He wrote on the label. “I’ve recorded the date, the time, and Five Points Library. I will now place the fresh card in the recorder and turn it on. We’ll test the young lady’s hypothesis that there’s a ghost in the room.”

  “I didn’t say there was one,” I clarified. “I just asked.”

  He smiled at me in that condescending way people over thirty do. “Let’s move on to debunking some of the other things we’ve been told about ghosts over the years. For example, that whole tapping theory—recently discarded as malarkey in the Journal of Parapsychology.”

  Amy giggled and tapped on the podium, then flew to the wall and tapped with her fist.

  Everyone laughed. The professor laughed with them, like he’d rigged the room somehow.

  “What about ghosts being tied to one place or room?” the pink lady sitting next to me asked.

  “Now that, my friend, is true.”

  What a joke.

  I raised my hand. “So, like, if there were a ghost in this room—”

  “Young lady, there isn’t a ghost in this room, but if there were, the ghost would be tied to this spot. All ghosts are tied to a specific haunting parameter, usually where they died. I carefully researched this library and can assure each and every one of you that nothing unseemly has ever happened here. There are no ghosts.”

  Other than the one hovering next to you and humming something into your recorder, or the others hanging out in the children’s section with the kids they belong to. I channeled my inner Audrey and rolled my eyes a second time. I hoped Dr. Herman Sherman noticed.

  “Besides it isn’t dark,” he added, his contempt for my stupidity evident in his careful voice. “It’s a documented fact that all hauntings occur between the hours of nine p.m. and six a.m.”

  Amy hovered in front of the clock , winding the hands until the face read one minute after nine. She snickered when this man in the audience noticed and inhaled sharply.

  “What about poltergeists? Maybe there’s a poltergeist in here.” The man said, pointing at the clock. “The hands on that clock moved. I think that girl is right.”

  The man who saw the clock hands move leapt out of his chair took this electromagnetic device out of his backpack. It beeped more frequently the closer he came to me. “I read somewhere that poltergeist activity is somehow connected to females just entering puberty.”

  “No. no. no!” Dr. Sherman shouted. “More fallacies. Let me repeat there is nothing otherwordly in this room. Allow me to prove it to you.”

  Professor Sherman lifted his handy dandy recorder. “If there is a ghost in the room, we’ll be able to hear it. Please quiet down, so we can all listen.”

  He depressed the button. His voice sounded out, recording the time, dat
e and place. A space of nothing but him jabbering on, then “Aba daba daba daba daba daba daba, said the chimpie to the monk, Aba daba daba daba daba daba daba, said the monkey to the chimp.”

  A woman one row up with highlighted flippy hair slumped to the floor in a faint.

  “I have no idea. . . what?” Dr. Sherman’s face beaded with sweat.

  Amy’s singing came through loud and clear on the tape, and even louder in the room, for me at least, because she sang along with it, eyes bright, cheeks flushed. “All night long they’d chatter away, All day long they were happy and gay, Swinging and singing in a Honky Tonky way . . . ”

  I couldn’t hear the rest of the tape because people started exiting the room, and Amy followed them, springing briefcases open, unzipping purses. Dr. Sherman clicked the recorder off and glanced out at his dwindling audience, which at this point was—I glanced around—me.

  Amy must have decided she couldn’t do much more damage to the man and made her way out while he packed up, muttering under his breath about the lack of intelligence in this county. Xavier was in the hall standing next to a cart of books as I followed.

  He looked angry enough to spit. “What are you doing?”

  “I had to. . . I mean, just don’t worry about it.” I glanced back and noted the speed at which the professor seemed to be heading toward me. “I’m going.”

  I entered the special collections room across the hall, shut the door behind me, then plastered my ear to it and listened.

  “Where is your superior? Where is Mrs. Turnbull?” Dr. Sherman asked.

  Xavier remained calm, thank goodness. “She’s on her break, smoking outside. Is there something I can do to help you?”

  “I should think not!” he harrumphed, then wheezed and stomped away.

  I stepped away from the door just before Xavier poked his head in. “Stop wasting time, and don’t sit where anyone can see you.”

  I searched the room and found Amy’s journal in a glass display case with a china cup and some quilt pieces. I tried to lift the lid, but the glass top didn’t budge. Locked.

  Okay, now I needed her. Where was she?

  I saw the miniblinds move slightly, and the room cooled.