Boys Rock! (8 page)

“You can tell just by looking. The neighbors said it’s the architecture of the late 1890s,” said Beth.

They crossed at the corner, passed the dry cleaners, and marched on toward the supermart.

“What do you suppose the
Old Times Tribune
is going to write about?” asked Josh. “I hope they don’t try to steal any of our ideas.”

“They won’t even
know
any of our ideas, because we’re not going to tell them,” said Jake.

The sun was low, but the air didn’t seem that much cooler. It was humid, and there wasn’t even a wisp of a breeze. Caroline felt a thin trickle of perspiration roll down the middle of her back.

“Okay, now,” Beth said finally, when they had gone almost a mile. “It’s on the next block, the house at the very end.”

The sky was turning purple and gray when the house loomed up before them. It, too, was gray, and the Hatfords and the Malloys simply stood and stared.

This was a part of town that even Jake and Josh didn’t know very well. The houses here were farther apart than they were on the other side of the business district—and old. Definitely old.

The big house with the peeling gray paint sat back from the street. One of the shutters had come loose and hung at an angle. The fence in front was falling down, and old newspapers and leaves had blown up against the remaining posts. No car was parked in the driveway. No light came from any of the windows.

“You’re sure no one is there?” said Josh.

“See for yourself! It’s deserted!” said Beth.

Josh opened the gate. “Let’s go take a look,” he said.

It was a corner house, so there was open space on one side of it. Beth led the way up the crumbling walk to the porch.

“Be careful,” she warned, testing with her foot. “One of these boards is loose.”

The porch creaked as the seven moved over to a window. Caroline could see some furniture inside. A tall upright piano. A worn couch. An old-fashioned lamp. An armchair.

“It looks like one day they all disappeared and left things just the way they were,” said Eddie.

Back down the steps they went so that Beth could take a picture in the fading light, and then they trooped around back. There were cobwebs and more leaves on the back porch, and mice had made a nest in a flowerpot.

“So where does the ghost come in, Beth?” asked Wally “Has anyone seen it yet?”

“I’m still working on that,” said Beth. “But it wouldn’t surprise me if the family moved away because of it. I mean, why else would a family move and not take anything? Why else wouldn’t they tell their neighbors goodbye? If we move back to Ohio,
we’ll
say goodbye.”

“Beth, you’ve got to have more proof than that!” Eddie said. “You can’t just say there’s a ghost because it wouldn’t surprise you if there was one! Come on. We’d better go.”

Night was coming on fast, as it always did in West Virginia. Once the sun went down behind the hills, it was as though the mountains had swallowed it up. In a little while it would be dark.

They walked around to the front again and started for the gate, but Caroline wanted one more look at the old piano and chair, at the worn velvet couch with a picture above it. She ran up on the front porch and over to the window.

But this time, when she looked inside, she screamed. Because, for just a moment, she saw the ghostly figure of a young girl looking back.

Eleven
Letter to Georgia

Dear Bill (and Danny and Steve and Tony and Doug)
:

P.S. Don’t ever read a book called
A Ghost’s Revenge.
Don’t ever watch a movie called
The Fog People.
Not unless you want to be scared out of your socks and underwear!

Twelve
Caroline Pickford

C
aroline lay on her bed, a booklet propped up on her stomach. She was learning all sorts of things about auras. The booklet had a drawing of a woman’s head with a sort of halo around it.

An arrow led from the space inside the halo to some print off to one side.

Innermost aura
, it read.
Natural protection force field.

Beyond the first halo was another. An arrow to the space under
that
halo pointed to the words
Midsection aura: recent emotions and current well-being
.

The space beneath a third halo was labeled
Early memories and past lives
. Each of these three sections had colors, the booklet said. With practice, a person could learn to interpret another person’s mood by the color of his aura, and thereby learn to get along better with those around him.

Caroline was not sure she believed in past lives, but if she’d had one, she was sure she had been an actress.

“Caroline!” came Eddie’s voice from below. “Are you going to help out on this newspaper or not?”

Eddie sure was getting crabby lately, Caroline thought. Why did she want to be editor in chief anyway? Just so she could boss everyone around?

“Coming!” Caroline called.

She got up off her bed and went downstairs. The dining room had been transformed into a newspaper office. The long table was covered with notebooks and paper and pencils and scissors. Eddie had taped a piece of paper to the wall, and on it she had written:
first issue, July 16; second issue, July 23; third issue, July 30.

“So what do you want me to do?” Caroline asked.

“We need someone to go to the library and get an early map of the city. If this is going to be a historical newspaper, we should have an old map or drawing or sketch or
something
to put in the paper,” Eddie told her.

“Okay, I’ll go,” said Caroline, noting that Beth was hard at work on her haunted house story.

“Make a copy of the downtown area of any old map you can find and I’ll scan it into our paper,” said Eddie. “And while you’re at it, think of something else you can write about. I’ve got your Tessie and Bessie Crane story, but we still need more. Go ahead and do that story about the first theater in Buckman if you want. We’re really hurting for material here.”

“The article about the first theater in Buckman and
the aspiring young actress who happens to be living here right now?” Caroline asked eagerly.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah—just make sure that ninety percent of the article is about the theater, Caroline, and only ten percent is about you.”

At last!
thought Caroline.
Publicity! The first thing an actress needs, besides talent.
She got her book bag and packed paper, pen, paste, scissors, colored pencils, and a heap of photographs of herself so that she could choose the best one.

It wasn’t difficult to find an early map of Buckman at the library, but Caroline didn’t know how she could find out which theater had been the very first.

“Try the vertical files,” the librarian told her, and showed her where the file cabinets were that held newspaper clippings of long ago. Caroline didn’t even know such files existed.

There it was at last, a brown folder marked
Theaters
on the tab. Inside was a photograph of the Cinema Theater on Main Street, which had been called the Princess Theater before that and the Royale when it first opened. And there, just as Caroline had hoped, was a newspaper story about the grand opening in 1920—the very first movie,
Pollyanna
, starring an actress named Mary Pickford!

Those old silent movies! Caroline thought. Imagine being an actress and not having to say a word because moving pictures didn’t have sound back then. Everything an actress needed to tell, she did with her eyes, her lips, her hands, her posture!

Caroline studied the picture of Mary Pickford, who looked very shy, with her eyes downcast. Caroline lowered her own eyes and studied the floor.

Now terror. Silently she put her hand to her throat and shaped her mouth into a huge O, her eyes wide.

Anger next. Caroline brought her eyebrows together over the bridge of her nose. She clenched her teeth, her fists.

Sadness? She tried to think of the saddest thing that had ever happened to her, and decided it was the death of her puppy back in Ohio. Her mouth began to sag at the corners, her chin began to quiver. She could feel tears forming in her eyes.

Then she saw a boy staring at her from between the rows of books. She quickly picked up her pen and got to work.

“A Look at Yesterday and a Glimpse of Tomorrow,” she had titled her story.
Nine decades ago, Mary Pickford, appearing at the old Royale Theater on Main Street, now the Cinema, took Buckman by storm
, she wrote.
And today an aspiring young actress lives in Buckman, hoping to follow in the footsteps of that famous actress. …

When she had finished her story, Caroline stared again at the photo of Mary Pickford. Except for the curls, did Mary look that much different from her? she wondered. Why wasn’t it possible that Caroline had been Mary Pickford in an earlier life? Why else was she so passionate about being onstage? Why else did she want to be an actress more than anything in the world?

Caroline got out the pictures of herself she had brought to use with her article. She found one the same size as the photo of Mary Pickford. Their heads in the photos were turned in the same direction. Caroline took the newspaper article over to the copy machine, put in her dime, and made a copy of the article. Back at the table, she carefully, carefully cut out Mary Pick-ford’s shy face from the copy she had made, and slid her own photo beneath the paper so that her own face was showing through the hole.

And there she was, curls and all—Caroline Lenore Malloy Pickford. But
this
Mary Pickford was smiling.

Back she went to the copy machine and made a copy of the copy. Then another. She would not share this with anyone, of course, but it would be her dream and inspiration. When the road was rough and she was discouraged, she would get out this picture of her as Mary Pickford, and she would tell herself that anything was possible.

Finished with her article at last, Caroline put the newspaper story back in the vertical file and packed up the rest of her things. The boy who had been staring at her while she practiced her emotions peered at her over the top of a magazine, and Caroline smiled sweetly so that he would know she was perfectly normal.