Violet’s voice trembled a little. “Poor Celia. She must have waited to hear from her father and she never did. So she thought he didn’t want to talk to her.”
“It’s so sad,” Jessie said.
Just then Benny let out a big yawn. Henry smiled at him. “Let’s quickly finish cleaning out this desk, then we can go to sleep,” he said. “It’s been a long day.”
The bottom drawer opened easily. Violet looked in and said, “Look at this! It’s a tape player.”
She lifted it out carefully and placed it on the desk.
“There’s a tape in it, too,” Benny said.
Jessie rewound the tape to where it started and pushed the play button. A girl’s sweet voice, singing a sad song, filled the room. “That’s the singing we’ve been hearing,” Jessie cried out.
“It was a tape all the time,” Violet said. “Not Celia’s ghost.”
“There’s no such thing as ghosts, Violet,” Benny said.
“This tape recorder couldn’t have belonged to the Roths. It’s brand-new,” Jessie pointed out. “Someone brought it here just to play this tape.”
“Who would do that?” Henry asked. “Who would play this, knowing it would bother us?”
“Let’s go downstairs and get into our sleeping bags,” Violet said. “We can talk about it some more.”
Once the children were snugly in their sleeping bags, Jessie said, “Well, someone is deliberately trying to scare us. Who?”
“It’s probably the same person who brought the flowers and the dress and left the letter in the mailbox,” Henry said.
By now the rain had stopped and the house was quiet. “Can we talk about this in the morning?” Benny asked. “I’m sleepy.”
Henry laughed. “Sure. But there isn’t that much to talk about. It has to be either Mr. Carter or Mr. Farley or Ms. Evans or Mr. Yeats.”
“But how do we find out which one of them it is?” asked Violet.
“I don’t know,” said Henry. “Maybe we’ll think of something in the morning.”
CHAPTER 9
The Back Stairs
The Aldens woke up early. The storm had moved on, and sun filled the house as they ate the breakfast of cold cereal and bananas and drank the milk Mrs. McGregor had packed. They tried the phone and were happy to find it was working again.
“There isn’t much more work we can do,” Violet said. “Let’s just clean up the kitchen.”
“I want to go upstairs again and make sure everything looks neat there,” Jessie said.
“We can use the back staircase,” Henry added.
The children walked up the back stairs, which Henry lit with the flashlight. Halfway up, Jessie stepped on something soft, and stumbled. She bent down and picked up a gray and red sweater. “This is Mrs. Carter’s,” she said. “She had it on the first time we met her. Why is it here?”
“She must have been using this staircase,” Henry said.
“But how did she get in?” Violet asked. “We were always so careful to lock the doors.”
“Then she must have had a key,” Benny said. “But why does she have it?”
“I know what we should do,” Jessie said. “We’ll hide outside. If we close all the windows and pull down all the shades, the Carters will think we’ve gone home. If they’re the ones who’ve been trying to scare us, they’ll probably come back into the house again soon.”
The Aldens quickly packed their things and rolled up their sleeping bags. Henry looked out the window and spotted a couple of large bushes at the side of the house that would be a perfect hiding place. They were big enough for the children to hide in, and from there they’d be able to see anyone who might come up the front walk or use the back door.
The children locked up the house, and walked down the front walk as if they were going home. Then one by one they sneaked into the bushes. Jessie and Benny watched the front walk, and Henry and Violet watched the back door.
“Look!” Henry finally whispered. “Mr. and Mrs. Carter are going in the back door. And they do have a key.”
The Aldens stayed hidden and soon the Carters came out of the house carrying the tape player and a lacy pink dress.
“That’s the dress that was on the bed!” Violet said. “And the tape player.”
The children watched the Carters go back into their own house. “We have to tell Grandfather and Aunt Jane about this,” Henry said. “Come on, let’s call home.”
The Aldens went back into the house and phoned their grandfather. Jessie quickly told him what had happened and he said, “Just stay in the house. Aunt Jane and I will drive right over. Don’t talk to anyone. Just stay there.”
“What are we going to do until Grandfather gets here?” Benny asked.
“I know,” Violet said. “Let’s take some pictures with the camera you brought, Henry.”
They tried to forget about the Carters while they took pictures of each other in funny poses. Finally, they heard a car pull up to the house. They ran out to Grandfather and Aunt Jane.
Grandfather looked very serious. “I think we have to talk to the Carters about what you saw and get an explanation from them.”
They walked up to the Carters’ front door and rang the bell. Mr. Carter answered, looking, as usual, very unfriendly. “Yes?” he said.
“We’d like to come in and talk to you and your wife about something very important,” Grandfather said.
“We don’t want any visitors,” Mr. Carter said.
Then Mrs. Carter appeared behind her husband at the door. “What’s going on?” she asked.
“We’d just like a few minutes with you and your husband,” Grandfather said.
Mrs. Carter looked at Mr. Alden’s serious, unsmiling face and her own face turned pale. She glanced at her husband and then said to the Aldens, “Come in.”
They all went into the Carters’ living room. “Won’t you sit down?” she said to Mr. Alden and Aunt Jane.
They sat and the children stood near them. “Why don’t you tell the Carters what has been happening and what you saw,” Grandfather said to Jessie.
Jessie began. “All sorts of strange things have been happening in the Roth house. We found roses we didn’t put there. An old dress was on the bed one day — and then it disappeared. A threatening note was in the mailbox. And there was this voice … the voice of a girl singing a song. Last night we found a tape player with a tape of the girl’s voice. And this morning, Mrs. Carter, we found your sweater on the back stairway. And then …” Jessie hesitated, “we saw you and your husband unlocking the back door and going into the house. You came out carrying the tape player and the dress.”
Mrs. Carter gasped.
Grandfather said, “Since you knew where the tape player and the dress were, you must have put them there. You have been deliberately trying to frighten my grandchildren. Why? I don’t like people upsetting my family.”
Mrs. Carter began to weep softly. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I knew this wasn’t right.”
“I think you’d better explain,” Mr. Alden said.
Mr. Carter, now as pale as his wife, began to talk. “It was the house. We had wanted to buy the Roth house and the land for a long time. But we never had enough money to do so. We thought if we made sure the house stayed empty long enough, we would manage to save the money to buy it.”
Mrs. Carter took up the story. “When we heard that Joe and Alice Alden had bought the house, we thought that if they could be made to believe the house was haunted, they wouldn’t move in. Then we would have a chance to buy the house someday. So we did all the things Jessie mentioned. But I guess the children were smarter than we were.”
“What you did wasn’t very nice,” Benny said. “I really was scared.”
“I’m sorry, Benny. I know what we did was wrong,” Mrs. Carter said.
“Where did you get a key to the house from?” Violet asked.
“Once the real estate agent gave us a key to let some people in to see
the house, on a day she couldn’t show it herself. We just made a duplicate of the key.”
“The dress, and the roses … you did all that?” Violet asked.
“Yes,” Mrs. Carter said. “I found that dress in an antique clothing store, and it seemed like the kind of thing Celia might have worn. Mr. Farley had told us about the Roth’s beautiful rose garden, so the roses seemed to make sense, too.”
“And the singing?” Benny asked directly.
“We used the back stairs to turn on the tape recorder,” Mr. Carter explained.
“But other people thought the house was haunted,” Henry said.
“We started the rumor about the house and Celia’s singing years ago,” Mr. Carter said. “It worked with some people, like Mr. Farley. And even some people who bought the house didn’t stay very long. They just thought that every funny sound that you normally hear in an old house came from a ghost. We were successful for a long time. Until you children came to the house,” Mr. Carter said.
“We are sorry. Really. And we do hope your cousins will be very happy here. We really do,” Mrs. Carter said.
“I agree with my wife,” Mr. Carter said. “I want them to be happy, too. We know what we did was wrong, and I hope we can make it up to you all. If your cousins ever need anything, I hope they’ll call on us.”
“We accept your apologies,” Violet said generously. “There was no real harm done.”
The Aldens got into Grandfather’s station wagon and they rode home. Jessie was frowning. “What about Celia? Where do you suppose she went? And do you think she is still alive?”
“She would be a very old lady,” Aunt Jane said.
“We can’t just forget about her,” said Violet.
CHAPTER 10
Where Is Celia?
After dinner that night, the family gathered in the den. Henry said, “How can we go about trying to find out more about Celia? Even Mr. Farley doesn’t know — and he was her neighbor.”
“Well, in her letter to her father she said she was going to Bromley to stay with George’s parents. Maybe she’s still there,” Jessie said.
“But she got married. Her name wouldn’t be Roth,” Henry added.
Aunt Jane was thoughtful. “It doesn’t seem likely that she would still be in Bromley after all these years.”
“Wait a minute!” Jessie said. She ran over to the bookcase and took Celia’s diary from a shelf. She ruffled through it until she came to the page she was looking for. “Celia says here: I told Father last night that I was in love with George Collins. So Collins would have been her last name if she married George.”
“You could try asking information if there’s someone by the name of Celia or George Collins living in Bromley,” Grandfather suggested. “People in this part of the state often stay in the same town for a lifetime.”
Jessie went to the telephone and got information for Bromley. She asked, “Is there a listing for George Collins?”
The operator answered, “I’m sorry we have no one by that name.”
“What about the name Celia Collins?” Jessie asked.
There was silence and then the operator returned. “Yes, I have a listing for a Celia Collins. The number is 555-3111.”
“I can’t believe it,” Jessie said. “There is a Celia Collins in Bromley.”
“Well, why don’t you call her?” Benny asked.
Grandfather looked thoughtful. “We must all remember that Mrs. Collins is an old lady. You can’t just tell her about her letter on the phone. If you want to call her, Jessie, you have to be careful how you tell the story of what has happened.”
“I know, Grandfather,” Jessie said. “But I have to call her.”
Jessie went to the phone and dialed the number she had been given. She waited with her heart beating rapidly as the number rang. Then a voice answered and Jessie said, “I’d like to speak to Mrs. George Collins, please.”
A sweet, strong voice said clearly, “This is she.”
Jessie quickly told Celia about how they had become connected with the old Roth house. “Well,” Celia Collins said, “I lived there a long time ago.”
“We know,” Jessie said. “Mrs. Collins, could we come to see you? We have some things we found in the house that I think you would want. I’m sure that my grandfather would drive me and my sister and brothers over to see you. I know that Bromley is not too far from Greenfield. We wouldn’t stay too long.”
“What kind of things did you find?” Celia asked. Her voice sounded sad.
“I think we should bring them to you,” Jessie said.
Mrs. Collins hesitated. Then she said, “All right. Can you come at eleven tomorrow morning?”
The next morning at eleven on the dot the Aldens were seated in Celia Collins’s living room. Mrs. Collins was a beautiful woman with short white hair. Her eyes sparkled and her voice was firm.
“Now, you must tell me why you came here,” she said.
Violet held out the diary. “We found this in an old box of books.”
Mrs. Collins gasped. “My goodness! That diary goes back a long time. It was filled with all the thoughts of a seventeen-year-old. Some not very happy, I recall.”
Henry cleared his throat and said, “We found something else. We found this letter jammed in the back of a drawer in a big old desk. The envelope had never been opened because it had gotten stuck in the back of the desk drawer.”
Celia Collins’s eyes opened wide. “My father never found the letter. Is that what you mean?”
“That’s right,” Jessie said. “We opened the letter. I hope you don’t mind. So, you see, your father never knew where you went.”
Tears came to the old lady’s eyes. “I never heard from him, so I just thought he didn’t want to talk to me. That he was so angry that he was disowning me. It never occurred to me that he hadn’t read the letter. I waited and waited to hear from him. Then, after a number of months, I called him. But he had sold the house, and no one knew where he had gone. He was just lost to me.”
“You married your George, didn’t you?” Violet asked softly.
Celia Collins laughed. “Oh, yes. We married before he went overseas. When he came back, we settled here in Bromley and had three children. He died about ten years ago. My daughter lives just down the block, and I have a housekeeper who lives in this house with me. I was always sad about father, but George and I had a good life together.”
Benny said, “Now you know your father wasn’t mad at you. He just didn’t know where you were.”
“That makes me feel much better,” Mrs. Collins said. She smiled at the children. “You have made me very happy, and I am delighted to have my diary back.”
Grandfather stood up. “We have taken enough of your time. We should leave now.”
Mrs. Collins took Violet’s hand. “Will all you children come and visit and tell me more about the house?”
“If you’d like,” Jessie said. “Someday maybe Grandfather will bring you to your old home so you can see it again.”
“That would be my pleasure,” Grandfather said.
Mrs. Collins stood and walked to the door with the Aldens. “Someday I will call you, and my housekeeper can drive me to the old house. I would like to see it again and to meet your cousins.”
She kissed each of the children and shook Grandfather’s hand. “I can’t thank you enough for giving me back my father.”
The Aldens got into Grandfather’s car and rode in silence for a while. Then Jessie said, “I’m so glad we found Celia.”
One month later, on a warm Sunday afternoon, there was a party going on at the old Roth house. Joe and Alice were having a housewarming party. There were platters of food and cookies and cakes on the dining room table. The living room was filled with flowers, and the house was filled with people.
All the Aldens were there and Aunt Jane and Uncle Andy. Joe and Alice had also invited Mr. Farley, Ms. Evans, Thomas Yeats, and even the Carters. The Carters, who felt so sorry
that they had tried to keep Joe and Alice from moving in, had become perfect neighbors. They were helpful and welcoming. But the person whom everyone was waiting for was Celia Roth Collins. She had been invited and had said that her housekeeper would drive her over.
The moment came, and Celia Collins walked into the house she had not been in for decades. Alice ran to the door to welcome her and led her into the living room. As Mrs. Collins looked around, tears came to her eyes. “The house looks beautiful,” she said to Alice.
Alice said, “Let me introduce you to everyone. You know the Aldens. And this is the children’s aunt and uncle.” Then she reached Mr. Farley. He looked at Celia and asked, “Do you remember me at all?”
Celia Collins stared at him. “Well, it’s been a long, long time but you do look a little like a boy who lived next door to me. He was a real imp. His name was Charlie Farley.”
Mr. Farley smiled broadly. “That was me! You know, Mrs. Collins, I had a real crush on you when I was a boy.”
Mrs. Collins smiled, too. “I knew that, Charlie.”
Mr. Farley looked thoughtful. “I think that was why I wanted to believe your ghost was still in the house. Just so I could pretend you were still here.”
Alice took Celia over to Mr. Yeats. “Mr. Yeats is painting a picture of the house,” she said.
“Yes, I wanted the house not to change so I could finish the painting. When the children started fixing the place up, I was so angry. I was afraid all my work would be wasted. I even asked Mr. Farley to keep an eye on the children for me — let me know what they were up to. He refused, and rightly so. Anyway, I did finish the painting.”
“Perhaps,” Mrs. Collins said, “you would sell it to me.”
Mr. Yeats bowed slightly. “Madam, it would be a pleasure if you would let me give the painting to you as a gift.”
“I would love that,” Mrs. Collins replied.
The last one Alice introduced Celia to was Terry Evans. “Ms. Evans is writing a history of Greenfield.”
“Yes,” Ms. Evans said, “and this house will have a chapter all to itself. I wanted it to become a landmark but Joe and Alice have fixed it up so beautifully. It is as well cared for as if it were a landmark.”
The Boxcar Children Halloween Special Page 5
