like that. Way past paranoid. After all, it wouldn’t matter if I told the girl what was inside the backpack. She was dead. She wasn’t going to tell anyone.
Still, I didn’t want her to know.
I’d already scared her once, and once was enough.
A fly buzzed around her head. She swatted at it, not noticing as the insect passed through her hand. “You can trust me,” she said. “I know how to keep a secret.”
“So do I, and I promised I’d keep this one all to myself.”
My words weren’t meant to sound harsh, but they did to the little girl. She apologized quickly, and I could tell that she was both embarrassed and ashamed.
“Maybe you can help me,” I said, hoping to smooth things over. “There’s someone I’m supposed to meet, and I think I might have missed them.”
“A boy or a girl?”
“A girl.”
She giggled, at ease now. “Clay’s got a girlfriend.”
“Not quite.” I laughed, but I didn’t like the blush that warmed my face. Even if I was talking to a ghost, I was talking too much.
The girl didn’t notice my discomfort. She stared into the creek, pretending to watch for another fish. But I knew that she was only pretending now. She hadn’t forgotten me, or my backpack, at all.
She couldn’t keep quiet for long. “I’ve been here all day,” she said finally, “and I haven’t seen any girl. Only you.”
“We’re not supposed to meet here, exactly.” I glanced up at the redwood boughs that hid the sky from view. “I think I’m on the right trail, but I’m a city boy. Put me in the woods and I’m lost.”
“I’m lost, too. At least I think I am. My mom said Daddy would meet me here, but he hasn’t come. It’s been a long time, too. But I just keep waiting, because that’s what my mom told me to do.” She paused, staring at the water. “I don’t mind waiting. Not really. It’s nice here.”
She reached out for my hand.
“We’re alone, just like Hansel and Gretel,” she said, and her voice whispered through the forest like a lonely wind that touches no one. But her fingers were like the wind, too, and though they passed through mine I knew that she had touched me, even if she could not hold my hand.
She kept on trying, though. Without a word. She didn’t give up.
I tried, too. It was like trying to hold a five-fingered breeze. And while I tried, I wondered how long the little girl had been here. Her clothes were hard to place. That little black dress, simple and severe, like something out of The Addams Family, but timeless in its way.
Maybe she’d been here a hundred years, or maybe a hundred days. I couldn’t decide. I only knew that as long as she’d been here, she’d been all alone.
I wondered how long it had been since someone had spoken to her. How long since she’d shared a smile or a laugh, or tried to hold someone’s hand.
I didn’t want to ask those questions. Questions are never good.
But there was one question I had to ask. “I’m looking for the bottle house,” I began. “Do you know where it is?”
“Sure.” Her fingers drifted away from mine. “It’s not far.” She seemed to float away. “Follow me.”
I did.
2
“There it is,” the little girl said.
I didn’t see the bottle house at first. There was the ocean to look at, so different from the blue waters that washed the golden beaches of Mexico. Two thousand miles north of Los Cabos, the Pacific was wild and cruel. The coast here was framed by arthritic knots of cypress, gray limbs crippled by winds that were as cold as they were relentless. Iron-colored combers crashed against a beach shaped like a reaper’s scythe. The sand was as dark as freshly poured concrete, and the sound of each wave shook me to the bone.
Just like an ordinary little girl, the ghost scrambled over a fallen redwood. I followed. We threaded our way through knots of bleached driftwood as we crossed the concrete beach. My boots compacted damp sand, but the little girl’s shoes left no mark at all.
A splash of sunlight washed the shoreline and I spotted the bottle house, nestled on the cresting cliff that dropped cleanly into the ocean at the south end of the beach.
I wondered why I’d had trouble finding it. After all, it was exactly where Circe Whistler had said it would be.
The sand slowed me down, but there was no slowing the girl. She started up a narrow trail that climbed the cliff, cutting through heavy underbrush. For a while I lost track of her. I hurried to the trail, picking my way through tall stands of beach grass that hid the girl and the house from view.
I was afraid that she would be gone by the time I reached the house. Sometimes it happened that way. Some ghosts have territories which bind them to a plot of ground the same way fear binds an agoraphobic.
But that’s not the way it was. Not this time. When I reached a set of concrete steps and a twisted wrought iron railing, there she was, waiting on the patio above.
The patio was concrete, too. Beach grass knifed through wide cracks that brought California earthquakes to mind, and I suddenly found myself wondering if we were anywhere close to a fault line.
Another look at the bottle house and I stopped wondering. If this were earthquake country, the place wouldn’t be here at all. Composed almost entirely of old bottles set in concrete, the abandoned structure looked about as stable as a sand castle.
But looks could be deceiving. I knew that the house had stood for nearly forty years, since Circe Whistler’s father had cemented the crowning bottle with his own two hands.
Several PRIVATE PROPERTY and NO TRESPASSING signs flapped in the wind, but the house wasn’t exactly secure-there was no door at all, only a battered wooden jam with rusting hinges that held nothing but air. The concrete walls were golden brown with white flecks that caught the afternoon light and added to the sand castle impression. The bottles were of every color, their bases facing out from the walls like startled eyes.
A passing cloud eclipsed the sun. A hundred glass eyes closed all at once, and the wind whipped through the open doorway and played in as many glass throats, the sound a terminal inhalation.
“Some people think this place is haunted,” the girl whispered.
“People believe a lot of strange things.”
She hesitated, drawing close. “I don’t want to go inside.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I will.” She looked up at me, a trembling smile on her face. “If you come with me.”
“Do you suppose your girlfriend is late?”
“Anything’s possible.” We were inside now, and I wasn’t surprised to find that the house’s interior was just as unusual as the exterior. The flagstone floor rose and fell at funhouse angles, throwing off my sense of balance. There was no furniture at all, only a pile of dry tinder heaped near an empty fireplace as if a group of kids had decided to have a party in the ruin only to think better of it as night closed around them.
It seemed a reasonable explanation. Even in the daylight, there was no escaping the spectral wind that played in the open bottles. It sounded like a dying man wheezing through glass lungs. If that kind of thing got to you, it would certainly get to you here. And good.
“No one ever lived here,” the girl said. “Not truly.”
“I can see why.”
The child nodded, staying close to the door. “My mom said this place was like a church. She said there were
