Hellfire

“It didn’t look like her to me,” Jeff said, picking up the game. “She’s real old, and her eyes are all sunken in, like she’s blind or something. And she carries a candle,” he added, in his most sepulchral tone.

“When did you see her?” Beth demanded.

“Last year,” Jeff replied. “There were a bunch of us here for the weekend, and we all saw her. Isn’t that right?”

Brett Kilpatrick nodded. “I saw her the same time Jeff did. She was in the upstairs hall, right by the top of the stairs. And when we spoke to her, she disappeared.”

Beth looked around at the rest of Tracy’s guests. All of them were nodding agreement and looking a little bit frightened. Maybe, after all, it was true. Then, slowly, an idea began to form in her mind. “Maybe … maybe she was looking for Amy,” she said.

Tracy Sturgess’s eyes clouded uncertainly. “Amy?” she repeated. “Who’s Amy?”

“The ghost who lives in the mill,” Beth replied, her confidence beginning to grow. “Don’t you know about her?”

Tracy shook her head slowly, glancing at her friends out of the corner of her eyes. “Tell us about her.”

Beth shrugged. “She’s a little girl,” she improvised. “And she’s lived in the mill practically forever.”

“Oh, sure,” Jeff scoffed. “But have you ever seen her?”

Beth felt herself flush. “No,” she admitted. “But … but I’ve heard her.”

“Really?” Tracy asked. She was smirking now. “What did she say?”

“She said—” But before Beth could think of anything a ghost might have said, Jeff and Brett looked at each other and broke into loud laughter.

“She believes it!” Brett crowed. “She really believes there’s a ghost in the mill.”

As the boys’ raucous whoops filled the room, Beth felt her face flush with humiliation once again. “Well, if there’s a ghost here, why couldn’t there be one in the mill?” she demanded, her face scarlet and her voice desperate as the laughter grew among Tracy’s friends.

“Because there isn’t any ghost here,” Tracy said triumphantly. “I just made all that up! And you believed it, just like I thought you would. You really are stupid, aren’t you?”

Beth stood up, her chin quivering. “Not as stupid as you and your dumb friends, Tracy! There is a ghost in the mill, and I know who it is! And I’m leaving!”

“So leave,” Tracy taunted, dropping the last vestige of politeness from her voice. “Who wants you here anyway?”

Beth fled from the room, intent on finding her mother.

And then she remembered.

Her mother had made an emergency appointment to go see Dr. Blanchard. Neither she nor even Uncle Phillip was home.

Her father.

She would go and see her father.

Tears welling from her eyes, she hurried out the front door, and started toward the driveway.

And then, as she came to the lawn, she remembered the trail leading down the hill.

It was a shortcut, and would get her to the village much faster. She ran across the lawn, and plunged through the brush until she came to the trail from the paddock, then hurried along to the path that led down the hill.

It was when she was halfway down the hill that the idea came to her.

She wouldn’t go see her father after all. Instead, she would go to the mill, and find a way to get inside.

And once she was in the mill, she would find out if Amy was truly there or not.

But even as she started on her way again, she knew what she would find in the mill.

Amy would be there — because Beth wanted her to be there.

9

Jeff Bailey and Brett Kilpatrick presented an odd contrast as they walked along River Road. Though they were distant cousins, Jeff was blond and gangling, while Brett’s thatch of dark curly hair gave the same clear evidence of Celtic descent as did his compact body. They were approaching the point at which River Road crossed the railroad tracks, where they would turn right, cross the trestle over the river, and head north toward their homes near the country club. It was the long way around from Hilltop, but neither of them had felt like taking the shortcut directly down the hillside to the river.

“How come she was even there?” Jeff asked, casually kicking a battered beer can that lay by the road. It arced into the air, then dropped back into the drainage ditch. “Tracy hates her.”

“She lives there,” Brett replied. “Tracy tried to switch the party, but her stepmother found out. She’s sure a creep, isn’t she?”

“She’s a local — they’re all like that.” Jeff watched idly while Brett took careful aim on the beer can, then snickered when it rolled only a few feet ahead. “And you think you’re going to make the soccer team next year?” At St. Francis Academy, where both of them spent nine months of each year, the soccer team was the team to be on.

Brett ignored the gibe. “Can you believe the dress she was wearing?” he asked, bringing the subject back to Beth Rogers. “It looked even uglier on her than it did on your sister. And when Tracy started telling that story about the ghost, and she believed her, I thought I was gonna piss my pants.”

Jeff skidded down the shoulder into the ditch, and kicked the can neatly back up onto the road. Then, as they came to the railroad tracks, he glanced across the street, his eyes falling on the scaffold-covered walls of the mill.

“What about the ghost she claimed lives in there?” he asked.

“Give me a break,” Brett groaned. “She was just trying to look smart. Or she’s so dumb she really believes there’s something in there.”

Jeff eyed his friend, a mischievous grin playing around the corners of his mouth. “Want to go in and take a look?” he challenged.

Brett hesitated. All his life he’d heard stories about the mill, and he knew as well as everyone else in Westover that Mr. Sturgess’s older brother had gotten killed in the building years earlier.

And according to Brett’s father, no one had ever found out exactly what had happened to Con Sturgess. It was supposed to have been an accident, but everyone knew that old man Sturgess had always claimed it wasn’t.

Then he saw Jeff watching him, a smirk on his face. Ignoring the knot of fear in his gut, he nodded. “Why not?” he asked, aiming one last kick at the battered can and missing completely. He followed Jeff down the tracks toward the back of the mill. “How do we get in?”

Jeff surveyed the building, then shrugged. “It’s got to be a cinch. I bet they aren’t even keeping it locked up.”

Brett’s eyes followed Jeff’s, but he didn’t feel nearly as confident as Jeff sounded. “What if someone catches us?”

“So what? All we’re going to do is look around. What’s the big deal? Besides, they’re working on it, right?”

Brett nodded.

“So everybody pokes around buildings that are being restored. If anybody catches us, we’ll just tell them we wanted to see what was going on. Come on.”

They followed a spur from the main line that led to the long-abandoned loading dock at the rear of the mill, skirted around a pile of trash that had accumulated against the dock itself, then scrambled up to try the freight