Hellfire

that’s all.”

“I thought we’d agreed that was just an optical illusion,” Phillip said carefully.

“But what if it wasn’t?” Beth asked. Her eyes brightened, and the beginnings of an eager smile came over her face. “What if we were sort of looking into the past? What if it did burn, and sometimes you can still see it?”

“Now, that,” Phillip chuckled, “is a story I haven’t heard before. How on earth did you come up with that one?”

“But what if it’s true?” Beth pressed, ignoring her stepfather’s question. “Could something like that happen?”

Phillip shrugged. “It depends on whom you ask, I suppose. If you ask me, I’d say no. But there are plenty of people who claim that whatever happens in a building never goes away. That’s the whole idea of ghost stories, isn’t it? That people die, but instead of going to heaven they stay around the place they died, scaring people?”

Beth fell silent, thinking about what Phillip had said. Was that what had happened to her the other day? Was that what she had heard? A ghost?

Beth didn’t believe in ghosts.

Still, she’d heard something in the mill, and she had seen something from the mausoleum that same day.

And there was the dream, too.…

She turned away from the view of the town, and wandered back into the meadow. From the tree where she was tied, Patches whinnied softly, and pawed at the ground. Beth started across the meadow toward the horse, then stopped as something caught the corner of her eye.

She looked around, and frowned slightly.

A few yards away, a small depression, almost barren of the lush grass that filled the rest of the meadow, dipped slightly below the clearing’s floor. In the morning light, it almost looked as if the grass on that spot had been burned away.

And from where she stood, the spot looked exactly like a grave.

Suddenly she became conscious of her stepfather standing next to her.

“Beth? What is it?”

“Over there,” Beth said, pointing. “What’s that?”

Phillip’s eyes scanned the meadow, but he saw nothing unusual. It looked exactly as it had always looked. “What?” he asked.

Beth hesitated, then shook her head. “Nothing,” she replied as she untied Patches and remounted the big mare. “I just thought I saw something, that’s all.” Then she grinned. “It must have been another optical illusion.”

“Either that,” Phillip laughed, “or you’re seeing things. Come on. We don’t want to be too long, or you’ll be late for Tracy’s party.” He swung easily up onto the Arabian, and cantered out of the meadow onto the trail that led around the hillside to the paddock. But before Beth followed him, she looked once more around the little meadow.

The strangely sunken area was still there, and the more she looked at it, the more certain she became that it was, indeed, a grave.

And in her own mind, she decided whose grave it was.

It was Amy’s grave.

By the time lunch began, Beth wished the floor would open up, and she could just fall through.

It had begun after she’d spent almost an hour trying to decide what to wear for the party, and finally settled on a green dress that she’d found in the thrift shop almost a year ago. Now, of course, she never shopped at the thrift shop, but she missed it. The thrift shop was an adventure. You never knew what you were going to find there, and she and her mother used to spend hours rummaging around, looking for things they wouldn’t have been able to afford new. The green dress had been one of their best discoveries. It had been almost new, and her mother had had it cleaned and pressed, and then they’d put it away for a special occasion. And today, Beth had decided, was the special occasion.

But when she’d gone downstairs after all Tracy’s friends had arrived, she’d realized her mistake.

All the other kids, Tracy included, were dressed in jeans and Lacoste shirts.

Beth had burned with humiliation as Tracy had eyed the dress scornfully, then said, “I guess I should have told you it was informal, shouldn’t I? I mean, how could you have known?” Beth had flinched at the slight stress on the word “you,” but said nothing.

Then Tracy began making introductions, and Beth squirmed miserably as Tracy’s friends asked her questions that weren’t really quite questions.

“You go to school right here in Westover? How can you stand it?”

“Where do you go during the summer? My family’s always in Maine, but it gets sooo boring up there, don’t you think?”

“You mean you’ve never been to Maine? I thought everybody went to Maine.”

“How come you never go to the country club? Everything else here is so tacky!”

It was a boy named Jeff Bailey who delivered the final blow. He looked at Beth with large blue eyes, and a smile on his face. “I like your dress,” he said. Then his smile turned into a malicious grin. “I even liked it when my sister bought it three years ago.”

That was when Beth had suddenly fled back upstairs and quickly changed her clothes, shoving the offending green dress back into a corner of the closet where she’d never have to see it again. Finally, after washing her face and recombing her hair, she’d gone back downstairs.

Tracy and her friends were playing croquet, and when they offered to start over again so she could play, she should have known what was going to happen.

Instead, she’d thought they were being nice to her.

Half an hour later, she had still not made it through the first wicket, and all the rest of them were finished.

“In croquet, you never want to go first,” Tracy had told her after it was all over, then dropped her voice and glanced around to see if Carolyn was within earshot. “But you wouldn’t know that either, would you?”

When they had asked her to play tennis, Beth had only shaken her head.

Now all she had to do was get through lunch and the movie Tracy had talked her father into getting for them, and it would all be over.

Tracy opened the curtains over the library windows, then turned and grinned maliciously at Beth. “You were scared, weren’t you?” she asked.

“N-no,” Beth replied, not quite truthfully. Even though she had kept telling herself it was only a movie, she had been scared. Horror movies always frightened her, no matter how much she told herself they weren’t true.

“Well, I think you were,” Tracy insisted. “If a silly old movie scares you so much, I don’t see how you can stand to live in this house.”

Beth frowned uncertainly. “What are you talking about? There isn’t anything so scary about this house.” That wasn’t really true, but Beth wasn’t about to admit that when she’d first moved into Hilltop, she’d spent several nights lying awake listening to the strange sounds that had seemed to fill the old house.

“Isn’t there?” Tracy asked. “What about the ghost?”

Beth’s frown smoothed out as she realized that Tracy just wanted her to look stupid again. “What ghost?” she asked, trying to make her voice as scornful as Tracy’s.

“We’re not sure.” Tracy’s voice took on a tone of smug self-importance, and she glanced at Alison Babcock. “But we think she’s friendly. She’s an old lady, dressed in black, and she prowls around the house late at night, looking for something.”

“That’s your grandmother,” Beth ventured, but nobody laughed, and Tracy only shook her head.

“No, it’s not,” she replied. She turned to Jeff Bailey. “It isn’t Grandmother, is it?”