Even under water I could hear him yelling bloody murder.
“Help!” he screamed. “Help! It’s got me! Help!”
It was great. I held on as long as I could and then let go and broke the surface with a huge splash. I was laughing so hard I had to get out of the water. Steve was beet red.
“Gotcha,” I said.
“That’s cheating. I never snuck up on you. All I did was tell a scary story.”
“Hey, Steve!”
I wheeled around. That was a girl’s voice calling Steve. It turned out to be this black-haired girl with big, dark eyes. She came down to the landing and stood there with her hands in the pockets of her denim cutoffs. “I heard somebody calling for help,” she said.
“Forget about it, Lucy,” Steve said. He made a face at me to shut up.
“Hi,” I said. “We were just fooling around.” I stuck out my hand. “I’m Jason. Do you live around here, Lucy?”
“My family comes here every summer,” she said, smiling. “I’ve known Steve since I was six.”
“Careful of him, Lucy.” Steve warned. “Jason’s our age but sometimes he acts about six. Or maybe he’s possessed by the old witch that haunts that house he’s staying in.”
“Whaaat?” Lucy raised her eyebrows at me.
“Steve’s just mad ’cause he can’t take a joke,” I said.
“Jason’s spending the summer in that creepy old place on Cherry Street,” said Steve. “The one that weird old lady used to live in.”
Lucy’s eyes widened. “I’ve heard stories about that place, too. What’s it like, living there?”
“What kind of stories?” I asked, my pulse quickening.
Lucy looked away. “Nothing much really. Just silly stuff. You know how people make things up.”
“Go on, Lucy,” urged Steve wickedly. “Tell him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Tell me.” At first I didn’t want to know but now I had to, she was acting so mysterious.
“Well,” said Lucy. “A family came to stay in that house last year but they only stayed a couple of days.”
I nodded. Steve had already told me that.
“My parents talked to them just before they left. They said that one night the ghost of an old woman came into their kids’ bedroom,” said Lucy. “Although it wasn’t an old woman, really, more a skeleton, all bent over and wearing some kind of black cape. She pointed her fingerbone at the little kids and warned them to get out. They said her voice sounded like it came from the grave.”
I snorted. It sounded like another made-up story.
Lucy held up her hand. “That’s not the end of it. The ghost then snapped her skeleton fingers and there was a huge clap of thunder and the bed lifted up and turned over on the kids. They thought they were going to suffocate! Their parents found them like that, trapped under the bed. Naturally they left the next day and nobody’s been in that house since. Until you.” She looked questioningly at me.
I tried to think of something funny to say but nothing sprang to mind. “There’s always stories about old houses,” I finally said dismissively.
“Of course,” said Lucy. “We know there isn’t really any such thing as ghosts.”
She had a real nice way of laughing, I noticed.
Lucy took a band off her wrist and pulled her long hair into a ponytail. “The real truth is probably something boring like the kids heard noises all night. All old houses make strange noises. They got scared and made up that story so their parents would leave.”
“Or maybe she threatened to roast the kids like Thanksgiving turkeys,” Steve said with a big laugh, shoving me and then dodging away.
“Or maybe she sneaked in and pinched their toes, scaring them half to death,” I teased.
Lucy looked at us and shrugged. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but I’m going for a swim.”
“I’ll come, too,” I said.
“I’m waterlogged,” said Steve, dropping into one of the wooden chairs on the little beach.
As we entered the water, I turned to Lucy and asked what she knew about the house on Cherry Street. “Okay, you don’t believe in ghosts,” I said. “But was there really an old lady who lived there?”
Lucy nodded, her eyes very serious. “Oh, yes. For years and years. She was kind of crazy, I guess. If a kid so much as stepped on her property she would come out screaming and cursing them. Everybody said she was a witch. But that was a long time ago. I don’t remember her at all. She died when I was a little girl.”
I took a deep breath. I had to know. “Did she die in the house?”
Lucy hesitated. “No one really knows. They never found her body.”
15
When I pushed open the door to my bedroom I was thinking pretty hard about what Lucy had told me about the old lady.
Then I stepped inside and my heart went right up into my throat.
The room was in chaos. It looked as if a monster had torn it apart with his bare hands. Stuff I hadn’t bothered unpacking was thrown all around. Models I’d left in the boxes were all in pieces, scattered everywhere. My clothes were tied up in knots and draped around, hanging from the bedposts.
Worse, the pillow feathers were everywhere. It looked like a million chickens had been fighting on my bed. The mattress was hidden under a layer of tiny white feathers.
What had really happened here? Who had done this?
I approached the bed cautiously. My pillow had been cut to ribbons and the feathers thrown every which way.
Then I noticed it. Something metal sticking out of the mattress. Slowly I reached out and brushed away feathers.
I jerked my hand away as if I’d been burned.
Mom’s super-sharp cutting shears. They were plunged up to the hilt in my mattress—right in the spot my heart would be if I had been sleeping!
I yanked the shears out of the mattress and looked around in a panic. I remembered what Lucy had said—“The kids probably made up the whole story to get
