13

“What on earth are you kids doing?”

Startled, I whirled around and almost dropped the hammer on my toe. We’d been making so much noise nailing the basement door shut I hadn’t heard the car or the front door.

“Mom! I didn’t expect you so early. How is Katie?” I asked, dropping the rest of the nails in my pocket.

“Hello, Mrs. Winter,” said Steve with a guilty look on his face.

“Hi, Mrs. Winter,” said Lucy. “How was your trip?”

“Fine, Lucy, thank you,” said Mom, looking distracted. She turned to me. “Jason, your dad and I need to talk to you. The doctors say Katie’s head injury isn’t serious but for some reason she’s still not making sense—babbling about ghosts and witches. What exactly happened here last night?”

Lucy and Steve exchanged glances. “We’ll be going now,” said Steve, edging toward the back door.

“But what is this?” said Mom, her glance catching on a half-hammered nail. “Jason, what are you up to? Why are you nailing the basement door?”

“It’s the witch,” Lucy blurted. “She’s in the basement. She’s real. We saw her. Didn’t we? Tell her, Steve, we saw her. She would have got Jason if we hadn’t all been roped together. It was the witch who attacked Katie.”

Steve nodded, his eyes on the floor. “It’s true, Mrs. Winter. This house is haunted.” He looked up at her and finished in a rush, “You shouldn’t stay here!”

My heart soared! Mom had to believe us now. She couldn’t think we were all making it up!

Could she?

Mom had a strange, baffled expression on her face as she looked at each of us, one after the other. She didn’t say anything. Her hair looked limp and there were dark circles under her eyes.

“We saw it, Mom,” I burst out. “Really we did.”

“You children better go now,” she said to Lucy and Steve. “Jason’s dad and I have some catching up to do.”

After my friends left Mom gestured at me to sit down at the kitchen table. “Dad will be right down,” she said. “He’s checking on Sally.”

It was kind of solemn waiting for Dad. Mom poured us each some juice but she didn’t say anything, just kept giving me these worried looks. I was relieved to hear Dad’s step on the stairs.

“Sally was really out,” he said, coming into the kitchen. “She never even opened her eyes.”

Then he stopped, seeing the expression on Mom’s face. “What’s up?” he asked, cocking his head worriedly at me.

But Mom spoke first. “I came in and found Jason and his friends nailing the basement door shut,” she said.

Dad’s face fell. I noticed he had dark circles under his eyes, too. He sat down at the table. “Maybe you’d better start at the beginning,” he said.

It was a long afternoon. I told them everything. No matter how crazy it sounded I went ahead and told about it.

My stomach was in knots. I could tell they didn’t believe me. They were trying to look understanding but the strain of it kept breaking through.

I felt like I was beating my brains out on a wall of soft pillows.

Finally Dad stood up. “Well, there’s one thing we can check,” he said. “This witch of yours is still nailed in the basement, right? Let’s go find her.”