Rules for Ghosting Read online

  The engine squealed and Rutabartle shot out of the driveway.

  Mom sighed. “Never mind, we can make do for now, I suppose.” She turned and focused her laser gaze on Oliver. “Aha,” she said, and Oliver’s heart sank. She had that look in her eye.

  “Mom,” he said quickly. “There’s something really important I need to tell you about that guy—”

  But Mom had turned her attention to the letter Rutabartle had given her. She tossed aside what was left of its envelope and frowned over its contents. She looked back up at Oliver. “That Rutabartle’s a strange one, isn’t he? In any case, if we expect prompt service we’ll have to give it in return as well. You can be in charge of making sure this checklist is filled out by the end of the day. Get Poppy’s help on it if you like. And when that’s done, I want you both to report back to me. There are plenty of tasks that need to be done. It’s going to be the party of the century!” Her eyes glazed over again. “How magnificent it’s going to be!”

  “But Mom, I really—”

  Mom wasn’t listening. She thrust the paper at Oliver and whirled off down the hallway toward the kitchen, dusting as she went.

  Oliver ground his teeth. Not only had he not gotten to tell her about Wiley, now he was stuck with chores. With a groan, he unfolded the paper in his hand. He read the title—what?—he must have misread. But no, he read it again: NORMALCY QUESTIONNAIRE.

  What on earth?

  NORMALCY QUESTIONNAIRE

  Name:_________________________________________________

  Address:_______________________________________________

  Assigned by: Jock Rutabartle, Town Commissioner

  How many children reside in the household?

  Describe each child’s age, interests, and favorite pastimes.

  _______________________________________________________

  _______________________________________________________

  How often do children in the household engage in the following “normal” activities?

  a. Hopscotch

  b. Tic-tac-toe

  c. Video games

  d. Legos or other construction toys

  e. Other:_____________________________

  There was more—quite a lot more, and Oliver pored over every idiotic line. He turned the page over. On the back was an additional note:

  HELPFUL SUGGESTIONS

  Looking for a way to add more “normal” to your life? Want to learn how to blend in with the crowd? Follow these easy action steps and you’ll be cruising with the rest of the world in no time.

  1. Don’t make eye contact. Interacting with those around you is the surest way to risk standing out. Keeping your eyes cast down, hands by your sides, is a much better way to adopt a perfectly ordinary stance.

  2. Avoid sudden movements. A slow, steady pace is the way to go! No dashing or jumping or jerking about. If you want to truly be …

  Oliver couldn’t stand to read another gag-worthy word. He fought the urge to rip the paper into shreds, dig a deep hole, and bury it where it would never be found. But Mom had asked him to fill it out, and there was no way she would listen to him about Wiley until then. He also still hadn’t made any progress on figuring out how they were going to stay in the house.

  He set off for the circular staircase. It was time for him and Poppy to regroup, take time answering some miserable questions, and maybe—if they were lucky—come up with some solutions that would magically solve all of their problems.

  If only it could be that easy.

  Chapter 13

  Silverton Manor was enormous. Dahlia had always known this, and had spent years wafting around the various rooms to no particular purpose. But when it came to actually going through it for information, like a prospector panning for gold in one of those ancient television shows she’d used to watch with her mother—well, for the first time she understood how big it really was.

  “We should begin on the ground floor,” Dahlia said at last. “It’s where my mother spent just about all her time. It’s the most likely spot for us to find clues about my Anchor.”

  “I suppose,” Mrs. Tibbs murmured, just as Mrs. Day burst down at the far end of the hall, a pile of bedding teetering in her arms.

  It was clear that if they didn’t get busy soon, any potential clues would be buried under the stampede of progress and reorganization. Dahlia and Mrs. Tibbs ghosted through the wooden door into the living room. Of the surfaces she passed through every day, wood was Dahlia’s favorite. Plastic was so slight she hardly noticed it. Brick was a little rough and scratchy to her insides. But wood was spongy and velvety, and tickled every time she passed through it. Maybe because it had once been alive, like her.

  After all that, though, investigating the first floor went remarkably quickly. The guest room and mudroom had been fully taken over by Wiley’s paraphernalia, which Dahlia found utterly distasteful. And she hated to go into the sunroom now, for being reminded of her lost cubby. Despite all this, over their next days of searching they quickly saw that the downstairs held no surprises. Dahlia had spent most of her time ghosting around on this floor, and knew every hidden nook and cranny. The kitchen might bear a closer look—there were several secret drawers and hidey holes that Dahlia knew of but had never bothered to examine in great detail, with their unexpired goods that she had never been able to handle—but the ghosts didn’t dare poke around there while the living folks were zipping in and out. They resolved to come back under cover of darkness, when the house was quiet and the Day family asleep.

  On the second floor Mr. and Mrs. Day had settled into the master bedroom, and the twins into a room across the hall. There was also a bathroom, a laundry room, and an endlessly long hallway that looked down over the huge living room and ended in a curved staircase leading to the front foyer. To Dahlia, everything appeared just as it always had—with the exception of all the newly moved-into areas, and she had to admit that most of the setup and decor was a huge improvement.

  But as hard as both she and Mrs. Tibbs looked, there was not a leading clue nor a meaningful scrap of paper to be found.

  Then they entered the library. Dahlia had never been much of a reader when she was alive—that she remembered, anyway—but there was nothing like being dead for fifty-eight years to give you an appetite for literature. Many times over her ghostly years she’d eyed those volumes, lined up all unread and tempting. Every time she’d tried to pick one up, her hands had shot right through its unexpired covers. But now … the idea that with a little more practice she might be able to pick up any book off the shelf and simply start to read was thrilling.

  Dahlia gave herself a little shake. She wasn’t here to read; she was here for action. Still, where to begin looking? Three wide walls were lined with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, and heavy curtains closed off the fourth wall. The whole room was dim and dull and dingy.

  “How are we going to search this place for clues?” she asked despairingly. It seemed so vast!

  Mrs. Tibbs drifted across the plush carpet, which was coated in a thick layer of dust. Clearly Mrs. Day had not yet made her way into this room, though several boxes labeled BOOKS were stacked just outside the door. Scooting toward the curtained wall, Dahlia drew up alongside the heavy velvet window drapes and started tugging. It took her four or five tries, and more than one accidental plunge through the wall into the outside, but finally she made Contact and managed to pull one of the curtains open a few inches. A fat beam of sunlight slid in from outside and set the dust motes sparkling.

  Mrs. Tibbs turned from where she had been examining a bookshelf, and lifted her eyebrows. “Are you seeking illumination, my glum gollywog?”

  Dahlia kept tugging. “A little light, yes. It’s awfully gloomy in here! I’ve always hated these curtained-in rooms. And nighttime too, all that darkness everywhere. I don’t like it one bit. I know I’m a ghost and I don’t need to sleep, but you know, most nights I would just curl up on my own recliner and go to sleep till
morning!” That made Dahlia think of her cubby, which made her start to feel soggy inside, but all of that skipped right out of her mind when she suddenly noticed … “Why, Mrs. Tibbs! You’re glowing!”

  The Liberator had drifted away from the books and now hovered in front of an ornate standing lamp, and at first Dahlia thought the lamp had been turned on. But no: a gentle core of light was gathering inside Mrs. Tibbs, growing and filling her all the way up in bright white light.

  “Mrs. Tibbs,” Dahlia breathed. “You’re like some kind of star! It’s so beautiful! Can I … can I do that too?”

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Tibbs. “It’s simply a matter of drawing on the hidden particles inside matter, and turning them around to display their unseen core.”

  “Uh …” Dahlia hadn’t caught any of that.

  “Here,” said Mrs. Tibbs, grabbing Dahlia’s hand in her own. It was warm as well as bright, and as their fingers connected, the yellow-white glow slid into Dahlia’s hand and up her wrist. And she understood—she felt the particles of darkness all around her, saw the pinpricks of light at their core, and could see how to tease out the buried strains of light, pulling them all the way inside her until she too was glowing like a miniature furnace.

  “I want to rocket through the sky like a shooting star!” she crowed. “But not right now. Thank you for teaching me this, Mrs. Tibbs—it’s positively amazing.” In the light of their two glowing bodies, Dahlia turned all the way around and surveyed the library, sweeping her eyes over the shelves. Could there be something in here? Some clue to her past?

  She hadn’t spent much time in this room as a ghost, and her memories from early childhood didn’t fit here at all. But something about the room still felt somehow familiar. Closing her eyes, Dahlia let her body tell her where to move, let herself drift back to a time when she had been floor-bound and needed to walk to get anywhere. She swept across the floor and when she opened her eyes she was standing in front of a small, friendly-looking bookshelf. Dusty, faded volumes cluttered the low shelf, and Dahlia’s eyes passed over the titles: Jack and Jill. Pippi Longstocking. Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown. She used to read these. These were her books. This was her shelf.

  She crouched down and ran her fingers over the spines, but after the first thrill of excitement, she felt nothing. There were no tingles, no tug of energy. Not even a nasty-smell feeling, like she’d felt from that closed-up attic room. Nothing. Just dead pages, bits of her old life that had been left here to fall apart in dust and ruin.

  Dahlia gathered herself up. “Let’s go.”

  But Mrs. Tibbs was on the other side of the room, drifting in a zigzag pattern along the far bookshelf wall. “Quite an interesting selection,” she observed. She waved energetically. “This whole wall here—nothing but medical books! Every topic you can imagine, but a good deal on depression, dementia, mental illness, and so on. I have to say, it’s quite unusual to find such a dense collection in an average person’s home. Perhaps there was a doctor in the family?”

  Dahlia frowned. “I don’t think so. My mother wasn’t, anyway. And I don’t think my father—I don’t think—” Something jarred her. Her father? She had hardly thought of him for decades, though she wasn’t exactly certain why. Now that it came to it, she could remember next to nothing about him. Just a flash of beard, light curly hair … and nothing else. Except—“He was not a doctor.” She knew that positively. “He did something with cars, or travel. That’s all I can remember.”

  Mrs. Tibbs turned away, and Dahlia sighed. “I’m afraid this is another dead end.” She moved toward the door, and then let out a little cry. There on a small coffee table was a huge, black-leather-covered volume. It lay open with a thin red ribbon marking the page. Opaque dust lay heavily over the surface, but not nearly so much dust as Dahlia had seen on the far side of the room. This table and chair and this book had seen regular use—not recent, but not too long ago, either.

  “She used to sit here sometimes and read. It’s a Bible,” Dahlia said slowly, remembering. Then her eyes lit up. “A family Bible! I heard her say so. I know this.” Concentrating hard, she brushed a layer of dust off the open pages. The dust was light and came off easily, gusting up into the air and glinting in her body’s glow like a cloud of late-afternoon fireflies. But try as Dahlia might, she couldn’t get the pages to turn. They were stiff and crinkly and settled in place, and the combined effort of trying to make Contact while not ripping them clear out of the book tied her hands up in knots. Finally she groaned in frustration and flopped over onto the nearby armchair. And fell through it to the floor.

  By the time she’d picked herself out of the upholstery, Mrs. Tibbs had flipped the book open to its title page. Dahlia came to hang over Mrs. Tibbs’s shoulder as the older ghost turned several pages, coming at last to a carefully written family tree. It began in the mid-eighteen hundreds with Archibald Silverton, who married Margaret Lawrence. They had one daughter, Laura, who died in her teens, and two sons, both of whom married and carried on the Silverton name. The younger son had a daughter and died in middle age, along with his wife. The elder son, Archibald Silverton, Jr., had two daughters and, very late in life, a young son.

  The lists went on like this for a number of pages until the very last one, which bore only the words:

  Reginald Silverton + Ernestine Clemments

  Dahlia Silverton

  None of these three names bore any dates—neither for birth nor death. But the ink on Dahlia’s name was wavery, as though several small wet drops had splashed on it shortly after it was written. As though someone had sat in this very chair, perhaps, aching for a daughter who was no more.

  “But I’m still here,” Dahlia whispered, and something inside tightened into a knot and squeezed. “I’m still here, and where have all the rest of you gone?” She stayed motionless for a few minutes, head lowered, chest heaving, until she felt a warm touch on her shoulders. She tilted her head and leaned in to Mrs. Tibbs’s hug. Then she lifted her shoulders in determination. “Let’s go,” she said quietly. “There’s nothing more to see here.”

  They were silent as they drifted up through the ceiling and emerged on the third floor. The thud of feet announced the Day family stampeding down for dinner—which, based on the tiny smell-bubbles expiring through the air, seemed like an especially fragrant beef stew—and the two ghosts emerged in the portrait room. Except … it was a little different from the last time Dahlia had been here.

  “Oh, my lucky stars!” she exclaimed. The heirloom paintings still lined the walls, but all the end tables and decorative knickknacks had been pushed to one end. The other end was entirely filled by a giant blue-and-green-striped circus tent. It was half-collapsed but easily large enough, once assembled, to comfortably fit several adults. Crates of equipment and boxes of machinery cluttered the floor, and scattered here and there—actually placed in neat piles all along the center of the floor, Dahlia now saw—were dozens of small, hand-sized puppets. Circus performers. Of course. She’d seen Mr. Day hard at work, but hadn’t realized this was the room he’d taken over. Nor that he had done it so completely. And colorfully.

  “At least he’s left the walls untouched,” Dahlia said, turning away from the colorful wreckage and waving her hand at the peevish-looking faces that lined the walls. “Well, here you have my relatives! Some of them, anyway.” There were twelve portraits down one side, eleven down the other, and the original Lord and Lady Silverton in a gilded place of honor at the non-circus end. Her mother’s portrait was especially lovely, with Ernestine Silverton looking about eighteen years old and glowing with apple-cheeked health and beauty. For the first time it occurred to Dahlia to wonder why there was no portrait of her father in this room. Or of her, for that matter. And at that moment she registered something she hadn’t ever noticed before.

  “Right here,” she whispered. There was one blank spot on the side of the wall that held just eleven portraits—one perfectly canvas-sized blank spot. The kind of place where a
painting might have once hung and been removed, with nothing left in its place. “An empty spot, just like me.” Her eyes filled with tears, but she knew she couldn’t handle another moment like the one she’d just had in the library. She squeezed her hands tightly, focusing all her energy on tamping down her emotion. She would not cry.

  Under her foot, something squeaked.

  Dahlia jumped. An evil little pink puppet face stared up at her, grinning a manic red-painted grin. Dahlia leaped three feet and fell halfway into a nearby portrait before she collected herself and let out a low groan. “The Days are taking over this house, Mrs. Tibbs, and all I’ve got to show for my clues are lists of names and a blank spot for a painting. Sometimes I think I’m going to be stuck in this house for good. Or until old Wiley gets me, anyway.” She wasn’t usually so gloomy, but to search all day and find practically nothing—nothing but sad, lonely spots, and tear-stained family trees—made her feel lower than a fruit fly.

  Just then, there was a scuffle at the door. “Speak of the devil,” muttered Mrs. Tibbs as Wiley burst in, nose aquiver, eyes darting from side to side.

  “Come on, my pretties,” he crooned, like the ghosts might be lured over to him by the sweetness of his song.

  Dahlia narrowed her eyes as her emotions did a quick zing, sharpening from sadness to white-hot anger to a deep sense of determination. Fruit fly, huh? Well, she still had some buzz left in her. “Let’s skedaddle,” she said. “Maybe there’s something to find in this old house and maybe there isn’t, but I’m not going to give myself up to this joker.”

  And with that she zipped off, Mrs. Tibbs trailing in her wake.

  Chapter 14

  In the few days since the sunroom incident, Oliver had been puzzling over what to do about Rank Wiley. With Poppy’s grudging help, Oliver had filled out the stupid Normalcy Questionnaire. There was nothing too strange on there—well, aside from the fact that a Normalcy Questionnaire even existed—but it came down to this: Mr. Rutabartle really, really wanted everything in Silverton Manor to be “normal.” He wanted the flowerbeds to look like normal flowerbeds. He wanted the children to run and skip and play like normal children. Good luck with that, Oliver thought, watching Joe and Junie zip past wearing giant brightly decorated paper bags, singing a nursery rhyme in pig latin.