CHAPTER TEN

Learning to Fly

I needed to know more about this broomstick. Andre had called it a Hawthorne broom—maybe he had more information. But how could I reach him? I remembered I had Elizabeth’s phone number. When I got home from school, I dug out her business card and tried dialing the number on my dead desk phone, but it didn’t work.

If I couldn’t reach Elizabeth and Andre on the phone, maybe I could just fly down to the city. I had the address. That must have been what Andre had meant when he told me on the phone to pop over. But what if they weren’t there? I had no idea what hours they worked. And anyway, I’d better practice some more before I tried to cover hundreds of miles on a saddleless broomstick.

• • •

I took the broom out to the field behind the patch of woods by the barn and tried it. It’s not so easy keeping your balance on the round dowel handle of a broom. It dug into me uncomfortably when I sat astride, but when I tried sitting sideways I kept slipping off backward or forward. I found myself doing a lot of dangling. No wonder bicycles have saddles.

Still: flying!

I flew so far up that I could see the ocean stretched out flat to the distant horizon.

Kitty didn’t think I should go up so high. She didn’t think I should be doing this at all, but I should at least keep down to about knee level, preferably with a pile of nice wet leaves underneath. No no NO! Was I crazy? Not above the trees! I better stop this, right now, or else!

“What are you going to do, Kitty, haunt me?”

Kitty didn’t think that was funny.

“Come on, Kitty! Why should you be the only one who gets to fly?”

I’m sure Kitty thought it was a lot easier when I was little and she could just pick me up and carry me when I started to run off into danger.

Still, once I got the knack of balancing—it involved bending my knees back and looping my feet up behind me—she started to relax.

It took me a while to figure out how to guide the broom. Telling it out loud where to go turned out to be unnecessary. The broom was sort of between a horse and a bicycle, or maybe a mule and a toboggan; if you shifted your weight to match your intentions, you could usually get it to take the hint.

Kitty thought I was getting pretty good, but could I do this? She showed me a loop de loop.

I could, as it happened, although I had a little trouble hauling myself up on top of the broom again after I slipped down under it.

After some practice, I could also do a vertical ascent, a five-point turn at least as good as Kitty’s, and a pretty good backward spiral, even though it’s hard to see where you’re going when you’re flying backward.

On my second circuit, a branch grabbed my hat. Kitty cracked up. Then we had another game of tag, a game of keep-away with the hat—try keeping a ghost away from a hat when she can control the wind—and more loop de loops, until I managed one without slipping under the broom. After that, we both flopped onto the ground and lay panting (me) and laughing (both of us) while the damp soaked through my jeans.

I hadn’t had so much fun with my sister since before she died.

“See, Kitty? I didn’t get hurt, not even a little bit.”

That, she let me know, was because she was here taking care of me.

• • •

After dinner, I filled half the divided sink with hot sudsy water and dumped the silverware and glasses in it. Yet another thing I missed from our old house: the dishwasher. Cousin Hepzibah pulled her chair over to the sink, picked up a dish towel, and dried the glasses as I finished rinsing them.

“Hey, Cousin Hepzibah,” I said, “that broom you gave me. Is there anything else you can tell me about it?”

Cousin Hepzibah nodded. “Best to wear trousers,” she said.

“Trousers?” I asked.

“Yes, long skirts tend to tangle and short skirts—well, they’re not very modest.” So she did know about the broom’s powers! No wonder she didn’t want to sell it.

“And it’s best to stay beneath the tree line during the daytime. You’re more visible than you think.”

“Did you use the broom a lot when you were younger?” I asked.

“Quite a bit, at one time. Not for years now, though.”

“Where did it come from?”

“Oh, it’s been in our family for a very long time.”

“Do you know why the guy from that library in New York called it a Hawthorne broom?”

She considered. “Hawthorne . . . I don’t think we’re related to any Hawthornes. It’s possible, of course, but I’ve never heard of any. Corys, Feltons, even an Usher. Toogoods, of course.”

“But Cousin Hepzibah—” I didn’t even really know what to ask. “What is it about our family? I mean, ghosts and buried treasure and flying broomsticks . . .”

“It’s true. Our family has some unusual history,” she said. “But I think most families do, if you look far enough back—or far enough forward. The world is a very strange place.”

I couldn’t disagree, especially after everything that had happened since we moved to the Thorne Mansion.

“Now that I think of it, though,” Cousin Hepzibah went on, “have you ever read Nathaniel Hawthorne, the mid-nineteenth-century author? We’re not related to him, as far as I know, but he has characters named Cory and Felton in some of his stories. I wonder if there’s any connection.”

“You mean he knew our family, and that’s where he got the inspiration for those stories? He wrote about us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. The Ushers, too . . . they’re not in any Hawthorne books, but there’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ that famous short story by Edgar Allan Poe.”

“I wonder whether Laetitia Flint knew our family too,” I said. “Lately I’ve been feeling like I’m living in a Flint novel, with all the ghosts and crows and bats and cliffs.”

“She may well have known the Thornes,” said Cousin Hepzibah. “And I often feel that way myself.”

• • •

We started our sheep-heart lab that week. The thing reeked of formaldehyde and squirted when you squeezed it—or, to be more precise, when Cole squeezed it—but it was pretty fascinating, actually. I loved the system of valves and chambers.

“Quit it, Cole,” I said. “You’re getting disgusting heart juice all over everything.”

“I’m just demonstrating the pump action! See how it comes out the aorta?”

A spray of liquid pattered on Dolores’s notebook. “Hey!” She scrubbed at it with a paper towel.

“Sorry, Lola.” He flashed his white-toothed smile at her, and she smiled back indulgently.

Why does everybody melt when he does that? I sliced into the heart with my scalpel, biting my tongue and thinking of all the jokes I could make about heart attacks and heartbreak.