The Mini had rolled only a short distance when Ariel sat bolt upright and cried out. “What time is it, Aunt Effie? What time is it?”
“Half past two or thereabouts.”
“Is that close to three o’clock?” asked Ariel.
“Yes, dear. Quite close to three.”
“Will we get home for three o’clock?”
“No, we’ll be at the vet’s then.”
“Then I can’t go!” cried Ariel, grabbing the door handle and opening the Mini door. They were still on the long Griffinage driveway. They hadn’t gone far. “Kay Kay’s birthday party is at three. She said so.”
Aunt Effie, however, didn’t want to let her go. She kept talking about responsibility, and how old everyone was. Ariel was getting impatient. Meg and Will often looked after her at home; why not here? Finally, Aunt Effie took out her cell phone and called Shep.
“There,” she said. “Shep’s just around the corner at the hardware store. He’ll stop by.”
“So I can stay?”
“You can stay, dearie. Mind Meg and Will, and Shep will be there in a jiff. Now I’m lucky to get Ben to the vet before she closes.”
Ariel bounced out of her seat and waved to Meg, who was standing by the red Griffinage door, and seemed to be waving to her with great big waves. Meg would help her know when it was three o’clock. It was confusing which hand was supposed to point at the numbers. Then she remembered: She didn’t have to. Kay Kay had told her to listen for the bells.
“Bye, Uncle,” she said, as she slipped from the car and ran back down the drive to the Griffinage. Inside the car, Uncle Ben heaved to his feet, clunking his head against the roof. He turned in circles, frantically barking. The Mini lurched as Aunt Effie restarted the engine. His enormous body rocked the Mini as the car pulled away to Yeovil.
At the Griffinage, the cottage was bathed in fresh sunshine, the kind of spring sky that breaks out after a big storm has gone. Water dribbled off the eaves. Daffodils nodded from a light breeze by the rain barrel. The plum portion of the orchard was at its peak of new life, bursting forth with a radiant display of white blossoms.
“Seems safe now, doesn’t it?” said Meg, looking around. She and Will were standing on the slate front walk. Ariel had her jump rope and was skipping again, hopping from stone to stone. She sang:
Miss Lucy had a baby.
She named him Tiny Tim.
She put him in the bathtub, to see if he could swim.
“The trouble is we don’t know,” Will said. “We know the manor ghost is looking for a child. We know she goes dormant, so most of the time she’s not a threat. What we don’t know is what wakes her up.”
“You’re right,” said Meg miserably. “We’ll always have to watch and always be watching Ariel.”
Miss Kitty had a dolly.
She named her Gillian.
She put her in the well, to see if she could swim.
“What time is it?” Ariel left off singing.
“Let’s go see,” said Meg. “Shep should be here any minute.” She smiled as she said this. She’d been shocked at the sight of Ariel skipping back down the Griffinage driveway, but Ariel’s reappearance was quickly tempered with the news that Shep was on his way. At last!
Meg and Will followed Ariel indoors. The hall clock read 2:38. Ariel plunked down in front of it.
“Play with me, Meg?”
So Meg joined her on the floor and they played Hickory Dickory Dock, with Ariel being the mouse, running her fingers up and down Meg’s back, then switching who was the mouse and who was the clock. After that, Ariel put on the dress-up pinafore and played with Gillian, while Meg and Will sat silently and stared at the time ticking by. Eleven minutes since Aunt Effie had left. Now fifteen. Where was Shep?
“I’ll go check his house,” offered Will, reading her thoughts. “Maybe he forgot and showed up there or something.” Will disappeared, but returned soon.
“What time did Aunt Effie say he’d be here?” he asked.
“She didn’t say,” replied Meg. “Just that he was around the corner and would be here in a jiff.”
“Well, it’s a long jiff,” groaned Will, and he flopped on the sofa.
The minutes ticked by. Meg and Will agreed to stick together, all three of them, except for quick runs to Shep’s house to grab him the minute he got home. “We’ll take turns going to check,” said Meg.
At five minutes to three, Meg set out to look for Shep. She left Will lying on the sofa with Ariel beside him on the floor. He was half listening to Ariel, half batting a sofa pillow in the air. Outside, robins sang and pulled stalks from the thatch. A bumblebee buzzed by. Everything looked so calm and normal, it seemed strange to believe they were battling a ghost.
Will sprawled on the sofa as he watched Ariel line up her stuffed animals. She was playing “party” again, and delighted to have all the attention from her brother. Ariel chatted incessantly, prattling on about Kay Kay and her birthday party.
“Mmm-hmm,” he said to Ariel. He yawned.
The sun was pouring through the window. Will squinted his eyes to shade them from the bright patch of sunlight, as Ariel chattered on. He yawned again. His headache was coming back. The effects of the warm sun and two harrowing nights with broken sleep crept up on Will. He did something he shouldn’t have done.
Will fell asleep.
Ariel looked up. Her brother wasn’t talking to her anymore. In the silence, she heard three distinct bongs from the St. Giles bell tower. Then the hall clock whirred and struck its chimes. One-two-three: three o’clock. Both clocks said three.
She smoothed out the white pinafore she’d put on for the party and tucked a lace collar around the doll’s neck. For a moment, she sat still and enjoyed the surge of loving warmth she felt whenever she held Gillian. It was a delightful feeling, like the way your tummy feels when you were surrounded by blankets and cozy fireplaces and hot chocolate. It was almost like being with her Mama. She gave Gillian a tight squeeze. Then she stood up, and gathering Gillian in the crook of her arm, slipped on her outdoor shoes over her bare feet. As she lifted the latch to the Griffinage door, she remembered what Mama always said: tell someone where you’re going before you leave the house. Ariel turned and came back.
Will’s mouth was open, and his left arm was tossed over his eyes. A red sofa cushion covered part of his face, and his bangs splayed out on the pillow. He didn’t move when she spoke.
“I hafta go to the party now, Willy,” she said. “Bye.”
“Where’s Ariel?!”
Will sprang awake the moment Meg came barging in.
“She’s here. She’s right here!” he protested. Then, with a sickening twist in his chest, he realized she was not. A patch of sunlight illuminated the floorboards where Ariel had been sitting, but Ariel and her doll were gone.
Meg gave him a disgusted look, but didn’t waste an instant. She dashed upstairs, calling Ariel’s name. Will scrambled off the sofa, flinging the sofa cushion to the floor.
They checked the east room first. Ariel’s crayon box stood at the foot of her bed in the alcove. Its lid was closed. Scattered pictures were strewn about the floor, but not her usual pictures of animals. These were pictures of girls and bells and dark holes, made starkly black by pressing hard with the crayon.
“Nothing here,” said Meg. She spun around, knocking into Will who was a few paces behind her.
“The attic.” They both said it at once. There was something odd about that little room perched so high up in the house. And wasn’t there something she’d said about playing birthday party today? That was it! She’d probably brought the tea set up to the attic for her “party.”
“I’ll go!” said Will, desperately wanting to find Ariel and redeem himself for losing her in the first place. “You check downstairs.” They split up. Will dashed upstairs, scrabbling up the little ladder, but one glance told him the attic was empty. He clattered down the steps again, two at a time, and bumped into Meg in the hall. Will stood on the slate paving stones in the entryway for a moment, undecided. Which way would she go? Kitchen? Root cellar? Then he looked down.
“Her shoes are gone!” cried Will.
“Okay, she’s outside,” said Meg, “Quick! She could be anywhere! Oh, where is Shep?”
The orchard looked the same as when Meg had passed it a few short minutes ago. Limbs dipped and bowed in the breeze. A few plum blossoms fluttered to the ground. But now the sunlight felt harsh, the stark white blossoms mocking, menacing. The blossoms themselves blocked their view. Meg felt a tight knot of fear growing in her stomach. She wanted to call her parents, wanted Shep to appear, wanted someone to step in and take over. Beyond the stone garden wall, a robin chirped and the wind rustled the orchard branches.
“How long were you asleep?”
“I don’t know!” said Will miserably. “Only a minute, I think.”
“A minute? She can’t be far, then.”
“It could’ve been a minute, or could’ve been longer,” said Will. “I have no idea.”
Ariel’s jump rope lay discarded on a front walk paving slate. Meg forced herself to focus and scanned the garden. The Griffinage grounds sprawled before her, full of corners, hedges, and hiding places. How could she have disappeared so fast? Maybe she was in the enormous block of orchard trees. The apples weren’t blooming yet, so it was easy to see through the bare branches, but the plum trees were thick with blossoms. She knew Ariel played there to make it “snow.”
“Ariel!” she called. The robin stopped singing, and only the wind blew. Meg dashed around the first hedge and glanced at the back garden. No one there, but it was riven with nooks and foliage where a five-year-old could hide. Maybe the toolshed or the chicken coop, or out in the pastures.
“You don’t think she’d go see the lambs, do you?”
“Let’s check the orchard first,” said Will. “She could be on the swing.”
Meg tried to imagine Ariel playing on the swing and waving to them. She’d be pumping her legs and begging for an underdog push. But in her heart, she knew it wasn’t the swing that had drawn Ariel out of the house. She was sure of that, and more sure when Will began to hiccup.
They said nothing, but broke into a run, calling Ariel’s name. Meg raced down one row of orchard trees and Will the next, agreeing to split up without saying it. The blossoms had an infuriating way of blocking her view and playing tricks on her eyes. Every time she looked up, she thought she caught a glimpse of a girl dressed in a white pinafore. Then the wind blew and the image vanished into snowy blossoms.
She caught up to Will at the end of the orchard row, where he stopped and stood hiccupping.
“Shhh!” said Meg. “What’s that?”
“What?”
“I hear something.” She held her breath to hear better. Will was trying to do the same, partly to stop his hiccups, but only succeeded in muffling them. They both strained to listen.
“It’s singing.”
A high-pitched melody was drifting through the air. It sounded like a child’s voice, though plaintive and slow, not the sort of tune a young child might sing. Then the tune changed to a song Meg knew, and the voice grew louder. The sound was coming from behind the Griffinage, way back at the end of the garden, from the direction of the old walnut tree.
“Over there!”
Will led the way, and they both pelted toward the Griffinage. When they rounded the corner hedge, they saw her. It was Ariel who was singing. She had her back to them, the pinafore string tied in a lopsided bow around her waist, one loop drooping behind her like a tail. She was walking directly toward the spreading branches of the ancient walnut tree. The storm-damaged area, where the ground was newly churned up and unstable.
Ariel was holding something. The next moment, she stretched out her arms as if to give a present to someone.
Meg gasped and tried to double her speed. Beside her Will’s feet pounded. Ariel wasn’t alone. Someone else was there. The stone wall and Ariel’s pinafore string and the walnut tree all jumbled together as Meg ran, bouncing up and down in a blur. Despite running hard, a chill enveloped her. She was much closer now. Suddenly, Meg could see it clearly. Her eyes bugged wide. It was a figure with a slight blue glow and something odd about the eyes.
Ariel was walking straight toward a ghost.