Davie Stephens was sure he must be dreaming when he heard his mother singing softly in his ear. It was an old call-and-response song she used to sing to him when he was young: “Kye Kye Kule . . . Kye Kye Kofisa . . . Kofisa Langa . . . Kaka Shilanga . . . Kum Adem Nde . . . ”
The sound nearly made him clap his hands in rhythm to the song, reminding him of the game they had played. His first name was Kofi, just like in the song, from his mother’s family in Ghana. But he had used his middle name since first grade because other kids called him Coffee and tried to pick fights. It was like a stranger’s name. He preferred to be All-American David, like his father.
“Kye Kye Kule . . . ”
When Davie felt a cold fingertip against his ear, he jumped up with a gasp.
He wasn’t sleeping! A shadow sat beside him on the bed, washed in darkness. Davie’s heart thumped. He opened his mouth to yell, but the shadow planted a firm palm across his lips.
“Don’t be loud. You’ll wake your sister,” his mother said.
Only Mommy! He smelled the smoky scent of her shea butter as she flicked on his light. She was wearing her “home clothes,” as she called them; green and gold and red and blue woven into her dress from Ghana. Davie looked at his Transformers clock radio, confused. Four a.m.
“I thought you left,” he said.
“I’m leaving now. One last goodbye,” she said, and kissed his forehead. Davie thought he saw tears shimmering, but Mommy was always emotional about trips and airplanes. She thought it was every airplane’s destiny to crash from the sky, and the pilots had to fight for their lives the whole way. For months, she had talked about nothing but her visit to Accra to see her family, and now she seemed sad to be leaving. “I’ll pack you in my bag, I think.”
“You’ll be back soon, Mommy,” I said.
Mommy didn’t answer, except to sigh. Suddenly, Davie was sure he saw tears.
“Saida?” Dad called from the hallway, his voice hushed in the dark. “Van’s here.”
Davie was glad Mommy had lost the argument, but he felt sorry for her. She wanted to take them all to Ghana with her, but this was time to go to Grandma and Grandpa Walter’s in Gracetown, Florida. The summer trip had been planned since Christmas, but Mommy wanted them to go to with her instead. Mommy had said they should take a vote, and Davie had felt guilty raising his hand to choose Dad’s parents over hers. Of course, Neema raised her hand to side with him too, because she mimicked his every movement.
Gracetown won, even though their older sister, Imani, had refused to vote because she was going away to Northwestern for the summer anyway. The relief Davie felt only had a little bit to do with the farmer in Gracetown who let them ride his tractor and horses whenever they wanted to, or Grandma’s fried chicken and sweet potato pie. Mommy and Dad knew exactly why he and Neema wanted to go to Gracetown instead.
It was never the same at Christmas. The best time to go was in summer.
“Hope you see your ghosts,” Mommy said, and kissed his forehead. She was smiling; a sad, empty smile, but still a smile. Mommy’s smile made Davie’s heart leap. Maybe she wasn’t mad about his vote against her, or how he had led Neema to his side. The injured look on her face when he’d raised his hand had pierced him in a strange new way, as if she was his child—and he a parent who had made a terrible, unthinkable choice.
“I’ll get video this time,” Davie said. “Proof. You’ll see.”
Mommy made a tssk sound. “You think I never saw ghosts? On my street, they lived in the acacia trees. They sang us to sleep! We never saw it as a special thing. Not like you. Take care of your sister. I’ll miss you, Kofi.”
“I’ll miss you too, Mommy.”
Her hug lasted so long that Dad called for her twice more. The last time, he came to the doorway and stood there as if to block her way. “You’ll be late. Come on.” His voice was clipped, like he was mad. But he was only tired. That was what Davie told himself then.
It would be a month and two days before he would see Mommy again. He had never been away from her so long, so he didn’t move from her arms even after Dad huffed out an annoyed sigh. More than annoyed, actually. Later, Davie would wonder why he hadn’t realized right then that something was very, very wrong.
He’d known, maybe, but he hadn’t wanted to.
That summer wasn’t going to be like the rest. Not one tiny little bit.
Davie heard the shuttle drive off beneath his window, taking his mother far away from them. But as he tried to go back to sleep, twisting and turning beneath his sheets until they bound his legs, ghosts were the only thing on Davie’s mind.
The weeks in summer usually fly by, but the two days before they would leave for Florida passed as slowly as the last two days of school. The day of the trip passed even more slowly. First, the flight itself was endless. One plane to Atlanta to took forever, landing at the airport that was more like a city, with a transit system and far-flung terminals. The next plane was so teeny that they climbed up metal stairs from the hot tarmac in the rain, and Dad had to stow his computer case because the attendants said there wouldn’t be room.
Neema, of course, complained the whole way. She always complained more when Mommy wasn’t around, because Dad would cluck and tug her braids gently and try to make her smile as if she were still a baby instead of eight already. She really played it up when Mom was gone, carrying around her brown-skinned Raggedy Ann doll and batting her eyelashes. Pathetic.
Maybe Mommy is right about planes, Davie thought when the second plane landed with a terrible shaking and squealing. But then they were on the ground and everyone clapped with relief, and Mommy’s fears seemed silly again.
Not Mommy, he reminded himself. He was twelve years old now. He was going to middle school in the fall, and he’d heard enough nightmarish stories about middle school to know that if any of the other kids heard him call his mother Mommy, he’d come home with a bloody nose every day. He’d already seen evidence of it: A hard glare from a teenager watching him play with Neema on the playground equipment at the McDonald’s Playland had been Davie’s first hint that the Punk Police were watching him now. He wasn’t a kid anymore; he was a target. His mother was Mom now. Nothing so hard about that. Like Dad told him, she would keep him a baby forever if it were up to her. He had to be stronger than that.
As if in confirmation, when the plane rocked to a halt Dad patted Davie’s knee the way he patted his business partner’s knee when he came over for dinner. (His father was a movie producer, except not the rich kind.) That pat made Davie feel grown, even important.
“Well . . . we’re here now,” Dad said. He didn’t look happy the way he usually did when he visited his parents. He said it as if flying to Tallahassee to drive to Gracetown were like being flown to the moon against their will, held prisoner for ransom by space pirates camping on moon rocks. Dad sounded like he wished he could go anywhere else.
There was no rain during the long drive past acres of thin, scraggly pine trees on I-10 east of Tallahassee, and Davie was disappointed to realize how much daylight was left even after such a long trip. Maybe two whole hours. He was ready to go to bed right now, even if it was only two o’clock in Los Angeles, not even time for SpongeBob.
But the ghosts never came until after dark. And to Davie, the ghosts were the point of visiting Grandma and Grandpa Walter in Gracetown during the summer.
The ghosts were why he put up with having to share a room with Neema, and the excruciating fact that Grandpa Walter and Grandma only had a huge old satellite dish, and every time they came to visit the number of channels had shrunk because all the networks were bailing to cable and DishNet or DirecTV or something invented in this millennium, so unless he was going to watch CNN or the History Channel or Lifetime—get real!—there was hardly anything on TV all summer long. And ghosts were definitely the reason he put up with mosquito-infested, broiling North Florida in the middle of hurricane season—yes, sometimes it rained every day—instead of just holding out for Christmastime.
In summer, it was all about the ghosts.
Large trucks carried away load after load of fallen pine trees, but the woods were still thick. You see how they’re cutting it all down? Grandma always said on her way to this or that meeting to try to stop a new construction project. But while Gracetown had a shortage of virtually everything else—particularly in the movie theater department—there was no visible shortage of trees whatsoever. Welcome to Gracetown—We’ve Got Trees!
Grandma and Grandpa Walter had lived in Miami most of his life, but they had retired to Gracetown four years ago, on six acres of land shaped like a slice of pie—well, not a perfect piece, but it tapered to nothing at the V at the far fence. The single-story house was fenced in and set back from a two-lane road where traffic raced past on its way to more interesting places.
It didn’t look anything like Davie would have imagined a haunted house should look—old and decrepit, or with an interesting feature like a balcony, or at least a veranda. Gracetown was full of plantation-style houses that looked like a reminder of the slavery Davie had seen with his own eyes when Dad showed him Roots, but Grandma and Grandpa Walter’s house looked like they had ordered it over the Internet from Houses-R-Us. Just like any other house, except painted bright peach, a splash of Miami in the middle of the woods.
Grandma and Grandpa Walter were waiting for them in the yard when they drove up. The gravel driveway was a million miles long, so his grandparents needed plenty of notice to walk down to unlock the gate. Locking the gate was a Miami habit Grandma never gave up. Sometimes Grandpa Walter drove his car instead of walking because of his arthritis.
When Davie and his sister got out of the rental car, his grandparents fussed over them as if they’d been gone half a lifetime, like they always did. Tight hugs from Grandma. Playful punches from Grandpa Walter, who liked to remind Davie that he used to box when he was in the army in the 1950s. Promises of special outings and homemade sweets.
But it was different this time, too. Usually Dad just stood in the background and grinned, watching his parents. Davie’s father had told him that when he was a kid, a psychic at a booth at a county fair told him that his parents would die when he was young—and he’d lived in fear of losing them since. Dad had never expected Grandma and Grandpa Walter to see him grow up, or to know his children. Dad said he finally figured out that the psychic wanted to scare him.
“But why would a psychic want to scare a little kid like that?” Davie had asked.
Dad had looked at him like it was the dumbest question in the world. “That was in 1976, Davie,” Dad said. He waited a moment, as if the answer was hidden in the year, a code. Davie’s blank face made him sigh. “Racist, that’s all. What do you think?”
Dad’s explanation for everything.
This time, Dad went straight to Grandma and hugged her almost as if he was too tired to stand, and she hugged him back with her eyes closed tight. Did somebody die? Davie thought.
The moment didn’t last long—and Neema didn’t even notice, because Grandpa was distracting her by pointing out a woodpecker in the oak tree—but Davie saw. Watching, Davie remembered that Dad hadn’t always been a grown man. He’d been a little boy once, just like him, and he looked like a boy again, clinging to his mother in a way he always warned Davie not to cling to Mommy. Mom. Their faces captivated Davie, full of weary pain. Davie hadn’t seen either of them look that tired before.
Then Grandpa Walter came over to pat Dad’s shoulder, two solid taps, and the moment passed. Dad pulled away from his mother, and she turned her face toward the house, but not before Davie saw her wipe her eye.
Yep. Someone must have kicked the bucket. Another one bites the dust, he thought.
“Let’s get the bags in,” Grandpa said, even though Davie knew he couldn’t lift heavy bags anymore because his joints hurt. He’d said it so Dad and Grandma would erase that hurting from their faces before Davie and Neema could see. Sometimes Davie wondered if he was psychic, too—a real psychic, not a county fair jerk who tried to scare little kids and maybe, just maybe, was a little bit racist. Davie could see things he couldn’t see before.
Neema was in full whine, telling Grandma she wanted a nap, not even getting excited when they told her she would have her own room this time, and Davie couldn’t bring himself to go inside yet to hear her complaining like a princess. There was a little sunlight left, and there was nothing to watch in the house, nothing to do. Not until after dark, anyway.
“Can I play outside?” Davie asked his father, an inspiration. They were in a foyer, walking carefully on the long rug so they wouldn’t scratch Grandma’s wood floor. There were a lot of rules in his grandparents’ house, and sometimes it was easier just to sit and do nothing.
But outside! Outside as a whole different universe.
“Just watch for snakes,” Grandma said. “And stay in the gate.”
“Don’t be silly, Mom,” Dad said. “He’s twelve now. Just don’t go too far, Davie.”
“Yessir.”
Grandpa Walter always smiled when he called Dad “sir,” so it was the quickest way to make sure Grandpa stayed in a good mood.
“ . . . the way those drivers race past that fence,” Grandma was saying, but the front door closed behind Davie and he flew down the steps, momentarily saved from having to answer yet more questions about how school was going.
If he was lucky, Ricardo might be around. Ricardo was a Mexican kid he met at Christmas, whose parents were migrants. Ricardo said he never stayed one place long, but he might get lucky. Or he could hang out with the Reed kids at the end of the street. The Reed twins were two years younger and obnoxious rednecks, but their older brother had Rock Band for PlayStation 3, so they were the most valuable friends Davie had, period. Rock Band was simply the coolest game ever invented, bar none.
The dirt in the area where his grandparents lived was called “red,” but to Davie it looked more like a deep shade of orange. It was still called “Georgia clay,” even though the Georgia border was a half hour’s drive—which Davie knew because the closest movie theater was in Bainbridge, Georgia, not to mention the awesome Golden Corral buffet. The dirt didn’t care which side of the border it was on, Georgia or Florida. The orange dirt was everywhere, right beneath the grass.
The orange dirt and gravel path ran through the center of the yard, presenting Davie with a clear choice—the gate and the road were on one side of the path, and the fence and the woods were on the other. Davie noticed that Grandpa still hadn’t repaired the broken logs in one section of the ranch-style fence that separated his property from the woods. The same fence had been broken six months before. Telltale hoof-prints gathered around Grandma’s fake deer near the driveway were evidence that woodland creatures were trespassing at night. Dumb-butts can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, Davie thought.
Decision time: Hunting for snakes in the woods, or Rock Band?
Davie was about to take the path down to the road and head for the Reed house when he saw something move in the woods, beyond the broken fence. He heard dead leaves marking footsteps as it ran away, fast. Whatever it was, it was big. A deer? Another kid playing?
Davie’s decision was made. He searched the castoffs from his grandparents’ own personal forest of pine and oak trees until he found a sturdy dead branch as his walking stick. The stick was almost as tall as he was, and Davie liked the way it fit in his hand. He stripped away the smaller branches until it looked more like Mad-Eye Moody’s staff from Harry Potter. He tapped the thick stick on the ground to make sure it would hold instead of breaking at the center. Satisfied, he headed into the woods.
Davie leaned on his stick for support when he climbed over the broken fence.
The woods behind his grandparents’ house wasn’t shady like the woods in movies. Most of the trees had thin trunks and not much shade to spare, but they were growing as far as he could see. Davie knew there were snakes, because Grandpa had told him he killed a rattler in the driveway only two weeks before. At the very least, he would go home with a story to tell.
Davie liked running in the underbrush, with obstacles every which way and snap decisions to be made. There—jump on the stone! There—watch out for the hole! He stumbled now and then, mostly just harmless scrapes. Acts of coordination and fearlessness were necessary for any ghost-hunter. Most ghosts were friendly, but how lame would it be to leave himself helpless if he met a hostile? Plan B was filed under R for Run.
Davie didn’t have to run far. He’d gone only about thirty yards when he saw three boys huddled in a circle in a clearing. None of them were wearing shirts, only ragged-looking shorts of varying lengths. The three of them looked like brothers, each younger than the next. The eldest could be Davie’s age.
Davie’s feet made a racket crackling in the dead leaves, but none of the boys turned around to look at him. When the boys held hands, Davie understood why: They were praying over a huge hole someone had dug in the ground. As he got closer, Davie saw a large German shepherd sleeping beside the hole.
Not SLEEPING, crap-for-brains, Davie told himself. The big dog was dead. Its face and muzzle were matted with orange-brown mud.
He’d interrupted a funeral! Davie backed up a step and halfway hid himself behind a rare wide-trunked tree of pale, peeling bark, thin as paper. Davie had never had a dog—Mom thought keeping a dog inside the house was a disgrace, as did her whole family in Ghana, where dogs apparently were not considered man’s best friend by a long shot—but he understood how sad it was when a pet died. He’d had a rat once, Roddy, like in the movie Flushed Away.
Roddy was an awesome rat. Lay across Davie’s shoulder while he walked around, no problem. Rats were as smart as dogs, people said, but rats definitely got screwed in the life-span department. His rat had lived only two years. When Roddy died, Davie had cried himself to sleep for two nights, and hadn’t wanted a pet of any kind ever since. He, Dad, Mom, and Neema had buried Roddy in the back yard, just like these boys.
But Roddy’s hole in the ground hadn’t been nearly so big, like a tunnel. The mountain of Georgia clay dirt beside the hole was as tall as the oldest boy. Someone had done some serious digging, Davie realized. Maybe their dad helped, or someone with a jack. It would have taken him all day to dig a hole like that. Or longer. Davie noticed that all of the boys were caked in red clay dust just as the setting sun intensified in a bright red-orange burst the color of a mango, turning the boys into shadowed silhouettes. Watching their vigil, Davie made up an epitaph: Here lies Smoky, a Hell of a Dog / Crossed McCormack Road in the Midnight Fog—
Suddenly, the youngest boy turned and stared him in the eye, whipping his head around so fast that Davie’s rhyme left his mind. The boy was standing only ten yards from him, but his eyes were his most visible feature. The whites were, anyway. That was all Davie could see, a white-eyed stare vivid against dark skin.
“Sorry about your dog,” Davie said. No need to be rude. The oldest boy looked about twelve, too. Maybe he knew somewhere to play basketball. This clan could be a valuable find.
None of the others looked at Davie. The youngest, who might be six, turned away again.
It seemed best to leave them alone. Davie had never been to a funeral, thank goodness—Mom couldn’t afford to bring him and Neema when her father in Ghana died, so she and Imani had gone alone—but he figured funerals weren’t a good place to make friends. If the boys lived nearby, he’d find them later. If not, whatever. Kids in Gracetown weren’t always nice to him, as if he didn’t meet their standards. He talked funny and liked weird things, from a Gracetown point of view, so he never knew what kind of reception to expect.
Davie left and turned for home, digging his stick into pockets of soft soil as he walked. He didn’t run, this time. It was getting dark, harder to see, and there was no reason to take a chance on breaking his leg. It would be ghost time soon.
Davie didn’t realize how relieved he was to leave the woods until he saw the welcoming broken fence in the shadow of his grandparents’ huge oak tree, which was covered in moss like Silly String. Home! The underbrush had seemed unruly, and he was glad to find his shoes back on neatly cropped grass. He felt a strange wriggling sensation in his stomach. Until he climbed back over the fence, he hadn’t let himself notice he was a little scared. Just a little.
But the real scare didn’t come until he got to the house.
Davie decided to go to the back door instead of the front because his shoes might be muddy, and Grandma would have a fit if he tracked dirt on her hardwood floors. As he was climbing the concrete steps to the back door, he glimpsed the kitchen window.
What he saw there made his stomach drop out of him.
Grandpa Walter stood by the fridge, arms crossed and head hanging; he might have been studying his shoes, except that his eyes were closed. Grandma was clearing away dishes from the table, where Dad was sitting alone. Muted through the window, Davie heard Grandma saying, “ . . . It’s all right, baby. It’s all gonna work out. No court in the country will let her take them all the way over there, I don’t care if she’s the mother or not. What’s she gonna do, steal them? If she wants a fight, well, she’s got one. We have money put away. You’ll get a good lawyer, and that’s that. Don’t you worry.”
His father sat at the table, forehead resting against the tabletop, his arms wrapped around his ears. His father was crying.
All night, Davie lay in bed trying to unhear and unsee it. Every time he saw the snapshot of that kitchen window, remembering Grandma’s words and Dad’s grieving pose, his stomach ate him. Now he knew what people meant when they said Too Much Information: It wasn’t about stuff being too gross, or none of your business. Some information was too big for a single brain. Each time Davie remembered what he’d seen and heard, the enormity grew exponentially, with new and more terrible realizations.
His parents were definitely getting a divorce. Check. Hadn’t seen that coming, since they never argued or raised their voices in front of him. They snapped at each other sometimes, but who didn’t? Okay, so Mom thought Dad worked too much. She’d never made that a secret. And Dad definitely liked spending time alone. There was no denying it. And Mom’s bad moods probably got on his nerves. So now, after twenty years, they were getting a divorce?
Divorce. That nuclear bomb should have been enough for one night—hell, one lifetime—but there was layer after layer, and it unspooled slowly as Davie stared at his grandparents’ popcorn ceiling, seeing only visions of the kitchen window.
As if the D-word wasn’t enough, Mom wanted to take them to Ghana. Dad didn’t want them to go. Grandma and Grandpa were Dad’s war-chiefs, and they were about to go to war.
Against Mommy. And Mommy against Daddy, Grandma, and Grandpa. And no matter what happened, he and Neema and Imani were FUBAR. Effed Up Beyond All Recognition.
The only tiny morsel of comfort Davie could take from The Worst Moment of His Entire Life was the knowledge that Grandpa Walter, Grandma and—Thank you, God—Dad himself had not seen him at the window. He’d had the good sense to duck away before a wandering pair of eyes found him and waved him inside to take his seat at the Oh-Crap table.
“Davie, we’re glad you finally know the truth . . . You’ll need you to be a man now . . . ”
The very thought of that conversation with Dad made Davie want to vomit. He kept his palm clamped across his mouth, just in case of a surprise puke attack. He felt it in his throat.
As long as he ignored their sad eyes, went on with his life and pretended he hadn’t heard, they would have to keep pretending, too. All of them would be putting on a show for each other, like a reality TV show called “FUBAR,” but at least then Neema wouldn’t find out. Or Imani, who couldn’t possibly know, because she’d been in way too good a mood when she left for Evanston, Illinois, to meet her future as an incoming freshman in a minority summer program.
Let them have their lives a while longer, anyway. For the summer, anyway.
Ignorance was the only mercy he could still do for them. He only wished his father had his S-H-I-T together and could have kept him out of the loop a little longer, too. How the hell would he get through the next month?
Davie was on the verge of crying himself to sleep the way he had after Roddy the Rat died, but his unborn sob caught in his throat when he heard the footsteps padding against the hallway floorboards.
He thought he’d imagined it, so he sat up and didn’t move, not even to get his flashlight. His ears were his most important tool: He listened.
Click-click-click. This time, he heard not only the footsteps, but clicking nails. Like a dog’s paws. A heavy dog—about the size of the big German shepherd.
Davie had accidentally been holding his breath, and he needed to breathe. He took a long gasp of air, louder than he’d meant to, and stopped breathing again.
The dog’s feet padded closer to his closed bedroom door. Davie stared toward the crack between the door and the frame in the moonlight, and he saw a shadow cross from one side to the other. About the size of a dog’s nose.
Sffffff sfff ffffff. Sniffing at the door.
“Holy effing S-H-I-T,” Davie said, but only after the sniffing noise stopped and the sound of footsteps had padded away to silence.
Davie’s plan was to lie absolutely still and do everything in his power to convince the dog that there was no reason to try to get into his room. Good dog, bad dog, whatever, Davie didn’t want a ghost encounter with a dog. His central plan in case of a hostile entity—Communication and Negotiation—wasn’t worth crapola with a dog.
The first ghost he met up close should definitely be human.
But the ghosts were tracking him already.
The next morning, Neema was gone.
He heard her chattering to herself in her room through her closed door when he came to tell her breakfast was ready. Grandma had a thing about eating breakfast before nine, so there was no sleeping in at Grandma’s house, not if you wanted to eat.
“ . . . And this one . . . and this one . . . and this one . . . ” Neema was saying, probably for no particular reason. The eight-year-old girl’s brain was truly the nonsense wonder of the world.
He knocked on her door twice. “Breakfast.”
“ . . . and thi—”
Neema went completely silent, in mid-word. When Davie opened her door, the bed was empty. The covers were turned back as if she’d just gotten up, and Neema’s Raggedy Ann doll lay in her place, her wild black-thread pigtails fanned across the pillow. The doll’s face was painted with a deformed triangle nose and a mental patient’s smile. Dolls went from looking ridiculous to sinister in a blink. Davie took note: weird.
“Neema?” he said.
Neema’s room had been Grandma’s doll room until this summer, since Grandma decided Davie was too old to share a room with her. Finally! Grandma had cleared out only enough space for the bed and a small desk. Other than that, the room was filled with shelf after shelf of brown and black and white dolls, most of them babies dressed like it was baptism day, frozen in infancy. There were dozens of sets of little eyes in the room—none of them Neema’s.
Davie waited for her giggle, or a surprise lunge from behind, or a rustle as she tried to hide. Neema sucked at hide-and-seek.
Nothing. An empty bed. An empty room with too many dolls.
Definitely weird.
“Neema, you’re not funny. Breakfast,” he said. He glanced inside the open closet door, which was full of nothing but boxed dolls, collector’s items, except for Neema’s one Sunday dress and a wicker hamper with its lid piled with folded clothes.
Under her bed, Davie found nothing but dust.
The window was halfway open, Davie noticed, raised at least eight inches. Ten, maybe. Could a girl Neema’s size have squeezed out of so small a space?
Davie ran to the window to peer outside. Neema’s room overlooked the back yard, so he saw the bed of dried pine needles and pine cones that lay scattered across the grass. This side of the house was closer to the woods than the living room, shaded by the taller nearby trees.
The broken fence was only twenty strides from Neema’s window. The fence mesmerized Davie, as if it were a key to a puzzle. Neema had been here one second, and now she was gone.
But why the hell would Neema climb out of a window to go the woods? Since when? Wouldn’t.
But this room was too small to hide in.
Davie scanned the doll shelves, almost expecting to find her there, as if she could have shrunk herself down to doll size. Row after row of unblinking brown, blue and green eyes gazed back. And little taunting pink-lipped smiles.
“Neema, quit playing,” he said, poking at her bedcovers to make sure she hadn’t disguised her bulk somehow. The bed was empty.
Davie picked up Raggedy Ann—who truly was raggedy, since she’d belonged to their Aunt Evie when she was a little girl, special-made by a black dollmaker—and and even looked under Neema’s pillow, for no particular reason. “I mean it. Dang, you’re such a baby.”
Steely, eerie silence.
But I heard her. It was Neema. She was saying “And this one and this one . . .”
Just in case some law of physics or the space-time continuum had been violated, Davie checked the bathroom across the hall, too. And his own room. No Neema. There was always the front of the house, but how could she have gotten past him? No way.
You were standing right here in front of her door. YOU HEARD HER VOICE.
For the first time, Davie realized that the tears he thought he’d fought off soon before he heard the ghost dog hadn’t been banished very far. They were still there, just beneath his eyeballs, waiting for the slightest reason to peek out. Neema being gone made him want to cry.
How could he tell Dad?
“Please, Neema?” he said to her empty room, his voice small.
That did it—his appeal to her charity. Conceding his helplessness.
The closet rustled, and the lid to the clothes hamper opened, revealing Neema’s round face inside. She grinned. “I tricked you! I kept the clothes on top.”
Davie was so relieved to see her that he couldn’t get as mad as he wanted to be. “Good one. Seriously,” he said, and helped her climb out. “I’ll get you back, though.”
“Not-uh.”
“You wish, freak-girl.”
Just like that, life was normal again. Now there would be no exhaustive explanations (“See, this ghost dog was here, and I think he dragged Neema into another realm . . . ”), no looks of disappointment, and then concern, and then yawning horror.
Reality check.
Yeah, the divorce would be bad. But not as bad as losing Neema.
In daylight, armed with his new glass-half-full outlook, Davie couldn’t believe his luck: a ghost encounter his very first night! This house was like a lake brimming with catfish. If he hadn’t chickened out, he might have followed that dog to God-knew-what ghost rally, chock full of chances to capture the manifestation on video and audio for YouTube.
In daylight, Davie chastised himself for his crisis in faith in the power of communication. If he could say, “I don’t want to hurt you” to a human ghost, then “Good boy, good boy” should do for a dog. He’d let himself fall prey to species bigotry, and he’d lain there like a lump while his chance at ghost-hunting stardom had trotted down the hall.
He’d need to man up by nightfall. He was so determined that he walked to the Handi Mart at the corner and paid way too much for a bag of dog biscuits, just to be on the safe side.
“Yes, I’m sure it was a dog,” he told Neema in his room while he made his preparations, when she demanded the full story of why he had dog biscuits alongside his ghost-hunting supplies out on his bed.
“How do you know?”
“Because I saw some kids bury a dog yesterday. Right outside the back fence.”
He hoped he hadn’t blown Neema’s mind badly enough to give her nightmares.
“Cool!” she said. “I wanna see the dog too!”
“Shhhhhh,” he shushed her. That was the main problem with Neema: She couldn’t keep quiet. With Neema tagging along, living room recon was a nightmare. She could wake up an entire house without trying. Between that and her inability to sit still longer than five minutes, Neema was pretty much useless. Stealth and patience were the only two qualities that mattered in ghost-tracking. So far, at least, his baby sister had neither.
But if she was going to get trained, he had to train her now.
Imani said she heard the ghosts the first year she came to the Gracetown house in summer, but not after she was thirteen. She said it was as if the channel had changed, or she’d unplugged somehow. Grandma and Grandpa said they never noticed noises either except for occasional creaking, just like Mom and Dad. Maybe only kids could really hear the ghosts.
This might be his last chance. After this summer, Neema would be on her own.
“You have to take a nap so you won’t be tired tonight, ’cuz we’re gonna be up late,” I said. “If I hear any whining—and I mean any whining about anything—I’m gonna go back to bed and do it alone some night when you’re sleeping.”
“No you won’t. I’ll stay awake every night too.”
“I mean it, Neema. Either it’s my rules or you don’t play.”
That shut her up quick. He didn’t often have leverage over Neema, but he had big-time leverage now. She’d been begging him to let her track with him since she was three. Her face was longer every year, more like Mom’s, and the thin cornrows Mom had slaved over for hours before she left still looked fresh and flawless on Neema’s scalp, the ends anchored by a swarm of white barrettes shaped like tiny butterflies. She looked like a princess too.
“Why’s Daddy sad?” Neema said. Changing the subject was her specialty.
He decided on the nothing’s-wrong-here approach. “He’s sad?”
She nodded, certain. “Yeah.”
“I guess he misses Mommy.”
“Yeah, me too,” Neema said. Dad’s sadness was contagious.
“We’ll see her soon.”
“Not-uh,” she said. “A month’s not soon. A month is a long time.”
Neema often sounded certain of herself, but never more than now. She understood there was significance to it. She knew that Mom’s time away meant something.
It might be harder to keep the secret than he’d thought.
At six o’clock, just when Davie thought he would lose his mind waiting for the sun to go down, Grandma excused herself from The Game of Life. She had a meeting, she said. The community was trying to stop another construction project. The “community” was busy.
“Why don’t you want more houses, Grandma?” Neema said.
Davie wanted to kick her under the dining table. Now they were in for a whole tutorial on infrastructure and sewer lines. But instead, Grandma sighed and glanced at Dad, who shrugged. Dad barely listened to any of them; his conversations were in his head.
Grandma fixed her hairnet in an egg-shaped mirror on the wall. “I wasn’t gonna say anything to you kids—but there’s bodies buried over on that land across the street, out beyond Tobacco Road. McCormack’s land. They found an old burial site, the bones of people who lived ’round here a hundred years ago. And not a cemetery neither—this has been McCormack land for generations. But the university folks say they were black. Nobody knows how many bones there are, or how far they’re spread out . . . so if they keep building up these houses, we’ll never learn the full story about who they were, or how many people died.”
It was the coolest thing Grandma had ever said. Davie was captivated.
Grandpa Walter spoke up, half-limping from the kitchen. His joints hurt worse at night. “If it was Indians, see, there’s special laws about that. It’s a burial ground, so it’s sacred. But not for us. Nothing that’s got to do with us is sacred. “
“Our family?” Neema asked. She hadn’t figured out yet that whenever Dad and Grandpa said “us,” they meant “black people.”
“Everybody wants it buried,” Grandma went on. “So I’m going to a meeting to try to stop the people from building more houses on top of the bones. In case there are more.”
Neema looked at Davie with wide, gleeful eyes. Even Neema knew that the fresh unearthing of bones meant heightened ghost activity. What luck!
“How many skeletons did they find?” Davie said.
“Twelve,” Grandma said.
“So far,” Grandpa added. “Could’ve been a slaughter, like Rosewood. Hundreds of people hunted down like animals, a whole town.”
Dad looked up at his parents, as if he’d just noticed the turn of conversation. “Thanks a whole hell of a lot. This is a great goddamn topic for my eight-year-old.” He nearly roared Neema’s age, and Neema jumped as if he was yelling at her. It was the maddest Davie had ever heard his father. Cussing at his parents! And blasphemy too, which Grandma couldn’t stand.
Davie thought better of his next question, which was: Were there any dogs?
Instead, they all stopped talking about the bodies. Grandma went to her meeting, and Grandpa kept coaxing Neema to spin the wheel and help him read the cards while Davie and his father only pretended to play the board game. (More like a bored game, David told himself.) He and Dad were both happy to miss their turns if they were forgotten. Life was not the product as advertised.
Bedtime was a relief beyond words.
Thanks to a consistent campaign at every birthday and holiday, Davie had decent ghost-hunting gear. No EMF or motion detectors yet—but he had a lantern-style flashlight, an old 8mm video camera with night vision (a hand-me-down from Dad), a mini-cassette recorder he wore around his neck, and the digital camera his mother had given him for Kwanzaa. He kept it all inside his old army-green knapsack, alongside the extras: protein bars, water bottle (Mountain Dew would spray him, alas), a small notebook. And now, dog biscuits.
Be Prepared, the Boy Scouts said.
Waiting for Grandma and Grandpa to go to bed was always a breeze—they were down by nine-thirty, tops. Dad was the problem, usually. Dad liked to stay up late on his computer or watching TV, but on this trip Dad was sleeping late and going to bed early, with naps in-between. His laptop hadn’t come out of its case once.
“Are you sick, Daddy?” Neema asked him after dinner. Dad hadn’t even heard her.
Waiting for quiet was the hardest part. No TVs, no bathroom breaks, no refrigerator raids. Pure, uninterrupted quiet. Davie called it the Golden Hour, and it came at a different time every night. That night, the Golden Hour was ten-thirty. Quiet.
Davie leaped out of bed, unplugged his video camera (a dead video camera battery would be the difference between fame and obscurity), and strapped his ghost kit across his shoulder. Then he crossed the hall to Neema’s room.
Neema’s Raggedy Ann doll was propped up against Neema’s closed door. The doll didn’t look like it had been lain there gently, as Grandma would; Raggedy Ann looked thrown against the door, head lolling, legs akimbo. Her black-thread hair was wild, pulled of out its ponytails, or braids, or whatever she used to have. For the first time, Davie noticed the doll’s faded red gingham dress, a relic. The doll looked a hundred years old, not just from the seventies.
What did girls see in dolls? After scooping up the doll, Davie opened Neema’s door.
Neema was sitting at the foot of her bed, waiting for him. Still as a doll herself.
“What are you doing to her?” She said it as if Raggedy Ann were real.
He chuckled. “I’m not doing anything to your dumb doll.” To put the doll in its place, he tossed Raggedy Ann to Neema, who caught the doll mid-air and clicked her teeth, irritated.
“Stop! Then why’d you take it?” Neema said.
“I have more important things to think about. It was outside the door, Brainiac.”
“Liar.”
“Whatever. Let’s go.”
Neema didn’t get up. Instead, she hugged the Raggedy Ann to her chest, gazing across the room at the doll shelf. “I don’t like all the dolls in here. It’s like they’re looking at me.”
Davie glanced at the dolls’ unblinking rows of eyes, and they gave him the creeps, too. But this wasn’t the time to worry about a bunch of old dolls.
“If you’re a scaredy-cat, stay in here,” Davie said. “Ghosts aren’t for scaredy-cats.”
“I’m not a scaredy-cat.”
“Then come on. And no noise.”
Davie had recorded ghost activity all over his grandparents’ house: a salt shaker that fell down on the kitchen table by itself, a faucet dripping backward in the bathroom (hard to prove, but he had seen it), and the egg-shaped mirror skewed slightly to one side in the foyer (Grandpa, seeing Davie’s footage, had just said, “So the mirror’s crooked—so what?”)
But the living room was Davie’s favorite place to camp. The living room was his grandparents’ museum, the place for their old black-and-white photographs, old books, old paintings on the wall, old everything. Even the furniture had been in Grandma’s family forever, shaky antique legs and upholstery that smelled like a dark closet. Ghosts liked the old and familiar. The living room was definitely the first place he would go.
“What now?” Neema whispered. She couldn’t keep quiet to save her life.
“Shhhh. We camp out and we wait.”
“I’m thirsty.”
Davie closed his eyes and counted to five. Dad’s trick to keep from getting too mad.
“Davie? I’m thirsty.”
He reached inside his ghost kit and pulled out the water bottle. “Don’t spill it on the wood, or Grandma’ll freak out. Now just sit and be still. They won’t come unless it’s quiet.”
Bringing Neema was a mistake, he decided. Fine: They’d camp out in the living room for an hour, she’d mess it up with her complaining and whining, and he’d go to bed. Tomorrow, he’d wait until she was asleep for sure. Tomorrow, he’d wait until midnight if he had to.
But Neema surprised Davie. After he chose their ideal camping spot behind Grandpa’s recliner, right near the bookshelf full of musty-smelling books, Neema sat still. Sometimes she hummed a little, but she caught herself and covered her mouth. Like him, she just stared into the darkness and cupped her ear to listen. Davie couldn’t believe how much older Neema seemed since last summer, or even Christmas.
He’d tried ghost-tracking at Christmastime, but nothing happened, of course.
Ghosts only came in summer.
It was amazing how much noise even a quiet house could produce. When he was younger, Davie used to think he heard ghosts in every creak of the ceiling, every whir of the central air-conditioning, and every cyclic hum from the refrigerator. He used to jump when the automatic sprinklers went on outside and sprayed the windows with water.
Now, of course, Davie was an expert listener. And since he’d already heard a ghost the night before, he knew what he was listening for: click-click-click. The dog’s paws. He kept a dog biscuit in his hand, a ready peace offering. The sweat on his palm was making it gummy.
They sat and listened for a solid hour. No clicking.
Beside him, Neema was nodding to sleep with her head against the recliner. Just as well, Davie thought. With Neema asleep, he could wait another hour, no problem. After that, he’d take her back to bed.
Davie felt a cramp from sitting in the same position with his hip bone against the hard floor, so he shifted until he was sitting criss-cross applesauce. When he did, he felt something wet seep into the seat of his pajama pants. Wet and cold.
He touched his pajama pants, and they were soaked. His hand splashed into a shallow puddle of cold liquid. “Hey,” he said, nudging Neema. “You spilled your water.”
Neema blinked her eyes open, alert, and held up her half-empty water bottle, tightly capped. The light through the window allowed him to see her in the moonlight. “Not-uh,” she said. “The top’s on.”
But before Neema had said a word, Davie realized the water couldn’t have come from Neema’s water bottle. No way had Neema’s water been this cold. And there was too much. Water was all around them.
“Crap-o-la,” Davie whispered, and rushed to take off his pajama top. He started wiping the floor as fast as he could, because Grandma would have a serious meltdown if her floor got spotted with water. Who else would she blame but him?
Davie’s pajama top soaked through as soon as it touched the floor. Davie saw a shimmering sheen of water across the entire living room, from the foyer all the way to the kitchen, toward the back hall. The floor was completely covered in water!
A scent had been faint at first, but now he realized it filled up the entire room. The living room smelled like the water in the fish-tank where his third-grade teacher, Miss Richmond, kept the class’s frogs and turtles. Sour. Like old, rotting plants and leaves.
Neema was sleepy, but she was getting the picture too. “My clothes are wet—” she said, raising her voice, but Davie clamped her mouth quiet.
“Shhhhh,” he said. His heart was a jackhammer in his chest. “Ghosts, Neema. Ghosts.”
“In the water?”
“Yes,” Davie said, because he didn’t have time to explain. The ghost was the water—that was why it was so cold. The water was real, but it wasn’t. He hoped not, anyway, because it was getting deeper. Maybe an inch deep already.
Davie pulled Neema to her feet, and he stood at a crouch, pulling his ghost kit higher so it wouldn’t get wet. The dog biscuit fell out of his hand, forgotten, as he flipped his tape recorder to ON and opened the video camera’s eye. He switched on night vision.
Through the viewfinder, the room was almost too bright. The moonlight exaggerated the gleam in the mirror on the wall and the screen on the TV, washing them in whiteness. His hand slightly unsteady, Davie lowered the camera toward the floor. Toward the water.
SPLASH
He saw bands of ripples, as if he’d tossed a handful of pebbles into the water.
Neema made a whimpering sound, clinging to Davie’s hand. Without moving the camera, he turned his head to look at her, and Neema’s wide, delighted eyes met his.
Did You Hear That? Neema mouthed.
Davie nodded, grinning. Neema grinned back.
If Neema had been scared, or crying, he would have whisked her back into her room and locked the door. But Neema wasn’t a scaredy-cat, just like she said. Good girl! Neema was a ghost-hunter after all. Starting this young, she might be one of the best.
SPLASH SPLASH
Davie saw the water ripple again, synchronized with the sound. The sound was retreating. Someone—or some thing, like a dog—was walking toward the kitchen.
Davie held tight to Neema’s hand, kept his camera trained on the ripples, and carefully began walking to follow the splashing sound. Immediately, a sensation of cold water seeped up to Davie’s ankles, startling him. Behind him, Neema only giggled.
Weird, Davie realized. We feel the water, but it doesn’t splash when we walk.
The water only splashed for the ghosts.
SPLASH SPLASH SPLASHSPLASHSPLASH
The splashing sound was faster, from more than one direction. It sounded like several people, or dogs, splashing at once. It sounded like . . . running.
Suddenly, water spattered to Davie’s chest from the splashing. He felt something bump against his arm, knocking him off-balance for a step, and it was gone. Not a dog, then. Too big for a dog. Something as tall as him.
“Who are you?” a stranger’s adult-sounding voice said. “I’m Davie Stephens.”
It was only him. But his mouth was doing all the work, because Davie’s mind was frozen shut. Sure, he’d seen a salt shaker fall, and he’d seen water dripping backward and a mirror suddenly askew, but he’d never felt a ghost touch him before. In movies, ghosts always walked through people, weightless.
But that one had pushed up against him. That one could have knocked him on his ass.
“Run!” a child’s husky voice said in the dark, up ahead.
Not him. Not Neema. Someone else. A boy he didn’t know.
From somewhere very far away, Davie thought he heard the sound of barking.
Davie realized only then that he was struggling to breathe, because fear and surprise had clotted his throat. Warm liquid seeped through his pajamas now; he had wet himself for the first time since he was Neema’s age.
“He said, ‘Run,’ ” Neema said.
Davie’s lips only bobbed.
The boy’s voice came again, from the kitchen doorway: “Follow me!”
“He said ‘Follow me’!” Neema said, an urgent whisper.
Davie’s body had forgotten how to move. Neema tugged on his hand, pulling him ahead toward the kitchen. One or two steps were enough to freeze Davie again, because the water felt higher now, up to his shins.
From his new vantage point in the center of the living room, Davie saw that the back door was wide open in the kitchen. Grandma and Grandpa Walter would never leave their back door open, especially with the mosquitoes in summer. The door definitely had not been open before.
Davie remembered his camera. Somehow, he had let it drop to his side, but he raised it. In night vision, the doorway looked like it was bathed in a spotlight.
And Davie saw a silhouette framed there—a boy turning to look at Davie over his shoulder. He was wiry, like Davie. He reminded Davie of the oldest boy he’d seen burying the dog. The fuzzy black silhouette in the light motioned his hand toward Davie.
“Hurry!” His voice was fainter.
“I heard something else,” Neema said. “Something . . . ”
Davie raised his eyes to peek at the doorway—but it was all empty dark. He could only see the ghostly figure when he raised the camera to his eye again. Still there!
Davie’s instincts were at war. One part of him wanted to run back to his bedroom as fast as he could. The other part of him wanted to follow the boy calling to him from the doorway. Neema tugged on his hand, toward the kitchen. Neema wasn’t just a ghost-hunter—Neema, it turned out, was a kamikaze.
Davie allowed himself to be pulled for two more steps, but then they both stopped.
Davie felt water above his knees now, and had to be higher to Neema. He took a startled step back. Walking in ghost water was one thing—but swimming was something else. Neema was a good swimmer because Mom made her take lessons at the Y every summer, but Davie’s lessons hadn’t stuck. Davie never liked water above his knees, and the way this water steepened, it would be above his waist soon.
“No,” Davie told Neema, holding fast. “Stay here.”
The dark image framed against the doorway’s light hesitated. Turned his head to look outside, then back toward Davie. Then back outside again.
Then, he ran. And he was gone. As the boy ran, the splashing sound faded to nothing.
It took Davie a minute to realize there were tears running down his face.
It would take Davie Stephens several hours, until almost daylight, to realize why he had cried in that moment, standing with Neema in the living room. He wasn’t crying because the ghost had sounded so scared—even though he surely had, and the ghost was just a kid, like him. And Davie wasn’t crying because he knew that only his fear had held him back from following, and maybe the water wouldn’t have gotten any deeper.
No, Davie was crying for one simple reason: For all the summers he had come to Grandma and Grandpa’s house, with the strange noises in the hall and objects falling down, he had never actually seen a ghost. He had never seen a human being who had come to visit from somewhere far away; actual proof that dying wasn’t forever.
That ghost was the most beautiful sight of his life.
When a sight like that crosses your eyes, Davie learned, there is nothing to do but cry.
“Yeah, I see the dark spot, Davie. What I don’t see is a little boy.” From Dad’s voice, Davie knew that was the last time Dad would look into the viewfinder to see last night’s footage. “And I’ve told you about staying up late. Look at you: Did you get any sleep?” Dad swiped at the camera as if to knock it from the kitchen table. Davie pulled it out of his reach just in time.
“What you got there, Davie?” Grandpa said. “Show me.”
Neema was bouncing in her seat, dying to say what she’d seen, but Davie had made her promise that she wouldn’t tell anyone she’d been up late with him. If Dad knew that, Davie would be locked in his room all night the rest of the summer.
The water didn’t show in the camera, of course. Davie hadn’t expected it to. Anyone knew that even infrared cameras couldn’t pick up manifestations with any reliability; the energy field was too fragile. But he’d lucked out and captured actual evidence—the image in the doorway, silhouetted by the light. He could see it! There was no denying the shadow.
Davie leaned close to Grandpa while he gazed into the tiny viewfinder. Grandpa smelled like after-shave. Old Spice. An old man’s smell.
“So . . . that’s your ghost?” Grandpa said.
“I heard him, Grandpa. He said ‘Run!’ and ‘Come on!’ There was a splashing sound when he ran across the floor.”
“Lots of splashing,” Neema broke in. “And water up to here.” She motioned up to her belly button. Then she caught herself, remembering her promise. “Davie told me.”
“Well, that’s a strange story, all right,” Grandpa said, and turned his attention to his coffee cup. At least Grandpa pretended to be interested, which was more than Dad had done, but who wants to drink coffee when they believe they’ve seen a ghost?
What was wrong with grown-up eyes? Will I go blind like them too?
Grandma looked at Davie over her shoulder from the stove. “Well, there’s no sign of water now, thank goodness. One time the A.C. broke, and our bedroom was flooded. Those floorboards warped and cracked—”
“But it wasn’t real water, Grandma. It’s like . . . old. Like ghosts.”
Grandpa chuckled. “Well . . . you know what, Doris?”
Grandma shook her head. “Don’t encourage him, Walt. He needs his rest at night.”
“What’s the harm?” Grandpa put his coffee cup back down and leaned over to look Davie in the eye. What he said sent a bolt of lightning through Davie’s spine: “You know . . . All this land out here, before the developers came, it was nothing but swamp. Water all around.”
Davie’s heart was pounding as hard as when the ghost called out to him, beckoning.
Dad got up from the table and walked out of the kitchen. Probably to take a nap, Davie guessed, even though he’d just gotten out of bed.
“Swamp?” Davie said, remembering the smell of the water; almost a living smell.
“Shoot, yeah. They had to drain it. There’s still some swampy patches out back, probably a hundred yards beyond the gate. “
Grandma set a plate of pancakes down in front of Davie loudly enough to stop the conversation. “All these crazy stories about Gracetown in summer. You ought to be ashamed of yourself, Walt,” she said. Then she took up the conversation in her own way: “They’re trying to build back there now. You can bet they wouldn’t tell anyone who buys those houses it’s only swampland underneath. Just like they won’t tell them there’s no hospital for thirty miles. The land’s not fit! And where’s the sewage gonna go?”
Grandma could have gone on, but luckily the phone rang then. It was Imani, so her call was a big production. Everyone wanted their turn to talk to her. Even Dad came back to grab the portable kitchen phone to say hello.
Davie waited last to take his turn. Talking to Imani might mean lying, and he didn’t like to start out any day with a lie. If she asked How is everything? he’d be lying right from the start.
When it was Davie’s turn on the phone, he took it in his own room to tell her about his adventure with the ghost. For a while, Imani seemed interested, especially the part about the water. She talked to him like a real person, not her little brother, for a change. She didn’t try to rush him off the phone to be with her friends, or to watch her favorite anime, Death Note, or to do her work. She said things like “Wow” and “Cool!” She said she couldn’t wait to see his video. Couldn’t wait, she said.
But then she asked a question that had nothing to do with ghosts: “How’s Dad?”
Davie’s stomach, suddenly, was a knot.
“Sleeps a lot,” Davie said. “All the time.”
“People sleep when they’re depressed,” Imani said.
She knows, Davie realized. She wants to know if I know too.
“Well,” Davie said, heart pounding again—but this time from a deeper place, a more dangerous place, “I guess he’s got a lot to be depressed about.”
For a long time, neither of them said anything.
Then Imani said, “Did he tell you?”
And Davie said, “I heard him talking to Grandma.”
And they were quiet for a while again. Davie’s hand with the phone was trembling.
“It may not be for sure,” Imani said finally. “You know how Mom is. Dramatic. She calls me every other day. I’m trying to talk her out of it. And Dad’s stubborn, as usual. I know you don’t want to live in Ghana. Neema either.”
“No.” Davie could barely speak over the lump in his throat. He’d been to Ghana once, when he was little, and all he remembered about that trip was heat and a man with no teeth his grandmother had haggled with at an open-air market. Africa didn’t feel familiar to him, with too many differences—and it would be too far away from Dad. Too far away from his whole world.
“But if you do end up in Ghana, it wouldn’t be all the time,” Imani went on. “You’d go back and forth. And remember: Her dad worked for the government, so they have a nice house with a swimming pool. And there’s an American school nearby, like where diplomats and people send their kids. You wouldn’t be out in some village somewhere. You can’t blame Mom, Davie. Yeah, she’s dramatic, but look at Dad too. He works all the time. Mom says he used to laugh and have more faith in life. She feels isolated. When they got married, he promised her they could live in Ghana for a while—and it’s been almost twenty years. He always says no. What’s she supposed to do? ”
Davie had no idea what Imani was talking about, but the details of his life had already been decided. All he knew was that it felt wrong for Mom to talk to Imani like one of her girlfriends, not like her mother. Imani was on Mom’s side, Davie realized. So that was how it would line up: Mom and Imani against Dad, Grandma, Grandpa Walter, him, and Neema. Those would be the camps.
Davie blinked. His eyes stung, but they were dry. Tears weren’t enough for the feeling.
He suddenly hated his sister for her breeziness and her dorm room that felt safe to her, a haven she had claimed for herself. No wonder she’d been in such a good mood at the airport—she was escaping just in time, and she knew it. She had left him and Neema to fend for themselves.
“Anyway . . . ” Imani went on. “Like I said, I’m trying to talk her out of it. A month’s a good break for them. It’ll all be okay. Don’t worry. You’ll see.”
A sudden, loud knock on Davie’s door ended their conversation.
“Davie—unlock this door!” It was Dad.
Davie hadn’t realized he’d locked his door, thereby breaking the number-one house rule. He told Imani he had to go, clicked off the phone, and bounded from his bed to let Dad in. He hoped his unshed tears wouldn’t show too much. He didn’t want Dad to start talking to him about Mom and how dramatic she was (“Don’t you agree, ol’ buddy?”), patting Davie’s knee and asking him to see things from his side. Davie already felt like he might puke.
Dad looked like he had aged ten years in two days. He hadn’t shaved, and his stubble was more white than black.
“Did you leave this in my room?” Dad said. “Under my pillow?”
Davie looked at the object in his father’s palm for at least five seconds before his brain allowed him to understand what he was seeing: a gummy-looking dog biscuit.
Gnawed at both ends.
Davie wanted to go outside to the woods and find the place where the kids had buried the dog. That was his whole afternoon’s plan, a no-brainer. But as soon as he got outside, he saw his father standing at the back fence, near the broken log, almost like he was guarding it. Dad’s foot rested on the surviving lower log rail as he stared into the woods.
Davie walked beside him and stared, too, wondering if he would see the boys from there. He would enjoy a long conversation with them, all right. At first, Dad didn’t hear Davie beside him. There were too many crickets and bugs of endless varieties singing up a storm. But when Davie’s foot snapped a twig with a sharp crack, Dad turned around.
“I should fix this,” Dad said, squeezing the broken log, which crossed the next fencepost like an X instead of lying down flat. The break was a tangle of wire and splinters.
“Why?” Davie said. “It lets the deer come in.”
And maybe the ghosts too. Davie didn’t know why he thought so, but he did.
Besides, if the fence was fixed, he’d have to find another way to get back there. He couldn’t let the opportunity pass him by.
But if he couldn’t find the kids, or the place they buried their dog, he could cross the street to look for the construction site where the bodies had been found. He didn’t know if it was marked or anything—Grandma said the bodies had been dug up for weeks already—but it might be. There might be yellow tape strung up, like a police crime scene.
Dad sighed. “They expect me to fix it.” He was probably talking about the fence, but his voice had sounded so faraway that suddenly David wasn’t sure.
“Do you know how?” Davie said. He could answer that question either way. Dad could organize a whole documentary crew, but at home he could barely change a light bulb. That’s what Mom said.
Dad’s face snapped to look down at Davie, surprise in his eyes. Maybe he’d sounded too much like Mom. Or maybe he wondered what they were talking about, too.
“Neema’s shopping with Grandma,” Dad said. “We should go somewhere. Us two.”
Davie didn’t want to go anywhere with his father, but Dad needed him.
“How ’bout the library?” Davie said.
That time, his father even smiled.
“Kid, you’re a genius,” Dad whispered, setting up his laptop on the long library table. “I’m a week behind on this grant proposal, but there’s something about a library, right? Makes you want to work. You gonna be all right?”
To Dad, “doing something together” meant being in the same room at the same time. Davie had figured he would be able to peel off on his own if he brought Dad to a library, so he could kill two birds with one stone. The library in Gracetown was hardly bigger than the library in Davie’s elementary school, without the fun posters on the walls.
Dad was way too excited to be in a library. His knees bounced beneath the table, his eyes flitting around like every shelf was sprinkled with fairy dust. Davie wanted to ask his father if he was all right, but what was the point? Or course he wasn’t.
“I’ll go see what’s in the sci-fi section,” Davie said.
Dad winked at him. “Good man.” He clapped his hands, ready to work. “Good man.”
Davie made an appearance in Science Fiction/Fantasy/Horror, noting that with the entire Harry Potter series was checked out except for Chamber of Secrets. Lame. A quick peek at Dad, who was typing like a fiend, and Davie hustled over to the Research desk. The woman who sat there was old, of course, but weren’t all librarians old? Maybe it was a job requirement. She was a black woman with silver hair she had cut very short, and her face was dotted with what looked like freckles from a distance, but were really big moles. If the woman’s eyes weren’t so bright, it would have been hard not to stare at her moles.
“Help you, young man?” she said.
“Uh . . . ” Davie tried to think about the best way to put it. He had learned that mentioning the word ghost was a sure way to lose an adult’s attention. He didn’t discuss his hunts with strangers. “I live near the place where those bodies were found.”
“You do, huh?” She was instantly interested, taking off her reading glasses. Her eyes were suddenly intense. “How do you feel about that?”
Davie was confused by the question. “Okay . . . I guess.”
“What I mean is . . . does it upset you that so many people were buried there?”
“Nah. It’s kinda’ cool. I just wonder who they were. Did they live in the swamp?”
The librarian looked at him with a smile, as if he’d said the magic words. “So you want to know the history of the area?”
Davie nodded. “Right.”
Apparently, librarians get excited when kids come up to them and ask about history. The librarian even called her boss over, a reedy white man, and he recommended a book too. Before Davie knew it, she had a stack in her hands.
“By the way,” the librarian said, “my name is Mrs. Mabel Trawley. I’m from the Trawleys who live here in Gracetown, out near Trawley Hill. My great-grandfather was born on a tobacco plantation not far from the Stephenses. Are you their grandson?”
Davie nodded, but what did that have to do with anything? Just because he’d asked about the land didn’t mean he wanted to hear the history of the world. Or tell her his life story.
“Well, you just tell your grandmamma that Mabel Trawley said hello. That’s how people like to do here in Gracetown. We want to know how people’s families turned out. See, it didn’t start out so well for most of us. Our ancestors were slaves here. Did you know that?”
“Yeah. I know about slavery.”
Davie was glad his father had shown him Roots, or he wouldn’t have known what “slaves” really meant. Sure, he’d learned about Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War in school—and it had something to do with slaves—but only Roots had shown him how Kunta Kinte lost his foot trying to run for freedom. And how people’s babies got sold away. The librarian pulled out a book called Black Seminoles. “There were lots of runaways who lived in the swamps. Met up with the Indians, all of them hiding out together.”
“What about dogs?”
The librarian pursed her lips and flipped a book open to a drawing of black man, woman and young boy dressed in tatters, running through a swamp—chased by barking dogs. The dogs looked like ferocious monsters, with coats of fur so thick at their necks that they seemed to have manes. “Most times, tracking was the only way a slave master could bring his runaways back. Pieces of them, anyway.”
Davie’s neck felt ice-cold when he remembered the splashing water in the living room. The photo of the tracking dogs cast a very different light on the past two nights. Tracking. As in looking for him. Would he and Neema end up in pieces if they kept hunting for the ghost dog?
“Can I check out those books?” Davie said.
“What’s got you so interested?”
What the heck? “Ghosts,” Davie said.
“Oh, so you’re seeing spirits,” she said. Her voice made it sound everyday, like Oh, so you had chicken for dinner last night?
“That’s right,” she went on. “Summer.”
“What about summer?”
She pursed her lips. “Come on, now. You wouldn’t be seeing them otherwise.”
Aside from Mom, who talked about ghosts singing in trees, Davie had never met another adult who would hold still and listen when he talked about ghosts. Even so, this woman’s eyes were only half engaged; from time to time, she glanced down at a stain on her white blouse.
“What do you know about the ghosts?” he said.
“You tell me,” she said. “I haven’t seen any since I was your age.”
Davie’s heart fluttered. “It’s true you don’t see them when you’re older?”
“Not in Gracetown. Nope.” She brushed at the stain.
That afternoon, while Davie’s father worked on his computer to forget his problems, Mabel Trawley shelved books and told Davie the history of Gracetown, Florida. Founded in 1845 by James Grace, who would later fight as a Confederate officer in the Civil War. The town started out prosperous because of tobacco farming, since people who smoked rarely quit the habit, and there were plenty of new people to take it up—and slaves to bring in the harvests. (“No tobacco, no Gracetown. No slaves, no tobacco. Plain facts,” she said.) The huge tobacco barns, where the leaves were hung out to dry, still stood up and down the roads. (“There’s a tobacco barn out back there somewhere behind your grandmama’s house, for a fact.”)
There was one Really Bad Thing that happened right after the turn of the century, she said. The year was 1909.
“In summer?” Davie said.
“Course it was summer.”
Mabel Trawley told the story:
“Most black folks in Gracetown didn’t have two dimes to rub together since slavery, but there were a handful of Negroes here and there who did all right. Men farmed and hired themselves out to the growers, or sharecropped, women took in wash, and babies made up of all their parents’ hopes and dreams.
“One such family was the Timmons family. Isaiah Timmons and his wife, Essie, had three sons. He’d planned to stay in Gracetown only another year or so, just long enough to pay his debts and save enough money for train tickets to New York, where his brother could help them settle in a boarding house. He had it all planned out. Isaiah Timmons left behind his journal and notes. Otherwise, we might note have know much about him.
“Well, the Timmons family had to be mindful of all manner of trouble. All black folks back then lived under terrible rules with unthinkable consequences, so you best believe Isaiah Timmons was the most polite, gentle-mannered and kind-hearted Negro these white folks had ever seen. It was said he might have helped foil a riot or two in Gracetown; depending on the point-of-view, he was peacemaker or race traitor, or maybe both.
“Despite all of Isaiah Timmons’ unending politeness, he gained powerful enemies in Gracetown for the simple reason that he was doing all right. If white folks saw that Isaiah Timmons had a hog, why, their first thought was, ‘Well, how come that nigger’s got a better hog than me?’ (‘Sorry to use that word, but that’s how folks talked back then. Calling black folks nigger was the same as calling them by name.’) Instead of shaking their heads to marvel that a black man could put a roof over his families’ heads, they begrudged him every tiny victory.
“If there was one man he hated most, and who was happy to return the sentiment, it was Virgil McCormack. He was a grower whose father had been a genuine slaveholder, and Old Virgil McCormack had never gotten used to the idea that the Negroes who worked for him weren’t slaves. And that anyone with dark skin might have any rights to speak of.
“Isaiah Timmons worked for Virgil McCormack from time to time—a task he hated more than any other—and they also had the misfortune of sharing a border, right out where Tobacco Road is right now. Come to think of it, your grandparents’ house used to be McCormack land, of course, so you’re living right by the very spot where Isaiah Timmons and Virgil McCormack argued over whose land was whose.
“Well, the whole argument came to a head one summer when, in plain daylight, someone set fire to Isaiah Timmons’ barn. The barn wasn’t fifty yards from the house, and it burned straight to the ground. Well, that put the writing clear on the wall—Isaiah Timmons decided he and his family would head up north to New York whether they had train tickets or not. He packed up everything he could in a wagon, working the whole night through, and was ready to leave by dawn. Isaiah wasn’t a coward, but he also wasn’t a fool. Disputes with neighbors never ended well for black folks. Isaiah Timmons figured the sheriff would come next with an accusation of rape or some other charge to get rid of him—if he didn’t string him up in a tree outright—and he wasn’t going to wait around to see how creative his death would be.
“The three boys, it was said, had been helping their father pack that wagon . . . but when it was time to go, Isaiah and Essie Timmons called up and down the road, but they couldn’t find a sign of those boys anywhere. The way Essie Timmons would tell the story later, it was as if they vanished into the air itself! Friends and neighbors helped him search—even the white man who ran the general store, whose great-great grandson is the mayor of Gracetown today—and they searched through and through. But those boys never turned up.
“Well, Isaiah Timmons was sick at heart and mad as hell, no doubt out of his mind with grief. It was one thing to try to hurt him, but what kind of people would hurt children? He took his shotgun and walked across the road to McCormack’s land. Virgil McCormack lived in the same antebellum house his family lives in today. Isaiah Timmons found McCormack washing his automobile—the McCormacks were among the first in Gracetown to have a car—and Timmons aimed that shotgun right at McCormack’s head, demanding to know what happened to his boys.
“I can tell you no white man in Gracetown had ever been spoken to by a Negro that way; not one who lived, anyway. They say Isaiah Timmons fired a warning shot into the air and just about made McCormack jump out of his skin. Got him to crying and begging. McCormack swore to God’s Heaven he didn’t know where those boys were, and Isaiah Timmons let him live only because he was too heavy-hearted to pull the trigger.
“You remember this: He could’ve killed him, but he didn’t. And it wasn’t about trying to save his own skin, ’cause confronting a white man with a shotgun was gonna look like a murder to white folks whether the white man lived or died. Isaiah Timmons’ fate had been decided from the moment he walked up behind McCormack with a gun and too much manhood in his voice. But he lay that shotgun on his shoulder and walked away. That’s the part everyone forgets.
“Well, that night the fireworks went off in Gracetown.
“All those folks who’d been held off from rioting, and all those scared whites who were sure the blacks were planning to slit their throats, built a bonfire of hate and fear that night. “Did you hear what happened to the Timmons boys?” on one side, and “Did you hear a nigger tried to shoot McCormack?” on the other, and everybody all worked up in a frenzy.
“There’s always blood in a frenzy like that, and the side with the most manpower and the best weapons always wins. Isaiah Timmons was easy to find: McCormack and the police found him looking for his boys, and he probably didn’t live long enough to tell his side. He died first. But lots of other black men in Gracetown got held to account for Isaiah Timmons and his shotgun. Anyone who looked like they were in a bad mood got rounded up, especially if they didn’t have family in town. It’s said a bunch of black men were rounded up and taken to McCormack’s place and questioned. Somebody must not have liked their answers, because they got shot down right there in the muck. (‘Are those the people the bones came from? The ones the builders are digging up?’ Davie asked, and Mabel Trawley nodded slowly. ‘That’s what we think. The bodies from the Gracetown riot. It looks like they were dumped in the same plot.’)
“There’s bad blood between the McCormacks and the Timmonses to this day—they say McCormack stole those three Timmons boys, probably killed them outright, and that’s what started it all. They had a sister, born not long after they died, and she later wrote a book about those boys and the Gracetown riot. Three Brothers, I think she called it. I haven’t seen a copy of it, but people mention it from time to time. Isaiah Timmons probably ended up in that mass grave with the bones from the construction site—but I hear his widow told the story until the day she died: “McCormack took my boys. My three precious boys.”
“I saw them,” Davie said, his heart banging in his chest. The library felt like a church chapel, as if they were talking about something holy.
“You saw who?”
“The boys. The three Timmons boys. They were burying a dog. I didn’t know they were ghosts. I thought they were real, ’cuz it was still light outside. I forgot that . . . ”
“ . . . sometimes you can see them at dusk,” Mabel Trawley said, with a nod and a smile.
“That used to fool me too.”
Davie hadn’t realized his father was listening from the next row until he and Mabel Trawley rounded the corner and almost ran into him. There was a thunderstorm on Dad’s face.
“Are you the one who’s been filling his head with these ghost stories?” Dad said to the librarian. Davie was so embarrassed by his father’s anger, he wanted to melt into the floor.
“No, sir. I’ve just met this young man today. He’s the one filling my head.”
Dad’s face softened. He shuffled his feet, unsure. “Sorry. I thought I heard you say . . . ”
“You’re Darryl Stephens, aren’t you? Your father’s the Stephens who enlisted in the Army, went to Korea, settled in Miami. You didn’t grow up here in town at all, did you?”
Dad looked at the librarian as if he were almost afraid of her, like she was the psychic at the county fair of his youth. “How’d you know that?”
“Everyone knows everything in a small town. Bet you never even spent a summer here.”
“Once. When I was about . . . fifteen.”
“Too late,” she said.
“Too late for what?”
Mabel Trawley looked at Davie and winked. “You and your son should have a talk, Mr. Stephens,” she said. “He can show you what you missed. And while he’s at it, Davie might be able to answer a question that’s given a whole lot of folks in Gracetown a whole lot of grief.”
Summer 1909
The Timmons boys were, in order of birth, Isaac, Scott, and Little Eddie. Isaac, the eldest, was twelve, and each brother was separated by almost two years to the day, ending with Little Eddie, who had just turned eight the day before the barn burned down.
Isaac had never been afraid of fire. He’d mastered fire when he was younger than Little Eddie, and he’d been using it ever since for cooking, heating water for bathing and washing clothes, melting lye, sharpening blades, and any number of other tasks for which fire came in handy. Fire, to Isaac, was just another tool. He had forgotten how destructive it could be.
The fire that burned down the barn had actually started outside of the barn, where the boys were roasting themselves yams while their father was out in McCormack’s field and their mother was pounding clothes at the creek. Isaac had gotten some honey from his gal Livvy’s mother, and yams with honey were his favorite treat. He and his brothers were roasting yams in secret because they were supposed to be hanging clothes up to dry, but the Timmons boys found ways to do what they wanted when no one was watching them.
One call from Mama waving in the distance was enough to get them on their feet and running. They didn’t notice the change in the wind, and they didn’t realize the barn wall’s wood was so dry because it hadn’t rained a drop all summer. They never actually saw the cloud of sparks from their cook-fire that flew against the barn wall and came alight almost immediately. They were nowhere near the barn when it happened. What they did see an hour later, however, was roiling smoke carrying bad news. As soon as Isaac Timmons smelled smoke, he knew.
Their family’s two horses and milking cow were safely clear of the barn when the fire broke out, but everything else was lost, charred and black. The barn was still standing, but two of its walls had burned clean away, and it was nothing but a big, ugly ruin. It was as if God was laughing at his father, telling him he would never have a farm of his own. He would be working for Old Man McCormack forever.
The older boys, in quick conference, tried to decide on the best way to tell Papa how they started the fire. Confession would mean consequences, of course: Their father had been raised on a razor strap his father had learned to wield like a long-dead overseer once wielded his cow-hide, so a confession would mean marks, welts and blood for Isaac. But he was the eldest, and it was his fault anyway—he’d told Scotty to put out the fire, but he hadn’t seen him put it out with his own eyes—so a man had to take a punishment like a man.
He planned out how he’d say it: Papa, we didn’t mean it, but we burned down the barn. He said it over and over again, marching outside to where Papa was assessing the damage.
“Papa?” Isaac said.
“Goddamn crackers,” Papa said.
The idea came from Papa’s own mouth.
To Isaac, his stroke of luck was too good to be true: Papa thought white folks had burned down the barn—probably McCormack and his sons. From the conversations Isaac had overheard when his parents thought he was sleeping, Papa already had plenty of reasons to be mad at the McCormacks. They were cheats, one thing. Never wanted to pay Papa what he was owed, like Papa was too dumb to count. And if Mama worked her hands raw to make Isaac a new shirt, one of the McCormack boys would go and tattle, and Ole Mr. McCormack would tell Papa, “Well, your boy just got a new shirt, so I reckon ya’ll doin’ better’n most niggers.” And then he paid Papa even less. Mama hated Ole Missus McCormack so much that she could hardly make herself smile when she passed her on the road.
And McCormack, who had more land than he knew what to do with, was trying to say his plot bordering Papa’s land was beyond the old oak, rather than just shy of it. He was planning on calling out surveyors and putting up a fence, since he knew Papa couldn’t afford to pay anyone to say what he wanted them to say—not that any surveyor would side with him over McCormack. That McCormack was a thief to his bones, Mama always said.
And McCormack had the biggest, meanest dog in the county, trained to snap at black folks on sight. Papa had told him it was called a German shepherd dog, ordered special from up north, but Davie was sure that big dog was part wolf. It had wolf eyes and wolf teeth. Sometimes Isaac had nightmares about being chased by that dog. He never went anywhere close to McCormack’s place without a big, heavy stick in his hand.
All in all, Isaac Timmons figured the only reason Ole Mr. McCormack hadn’t burned down the barn was because he hadn’t thought of it first.
“It was McCormack, huh Papa?” Isaac said to his father, outside the charred barn.
Papa looked at him good and long. At first, Isaac was afraid his father had seen straight through his lie, but there was something new and terrible in his father’s eyes—it wasn’t there long, but Isaac would never forget how his father’s face chilled the blood in his veins. Papa was afraid! Isaac wanted to tell the truth as soon as he saw how scared his father was of McCormack, but he couldn’t make his mouth work.
And so the story was born.
After that, the truth just got harder and harder to utter. And by the time all of them had been up for hours loading the wagon, with Papa trying to cheer them up with stories about the north while Mama pretended she wasn’t crying, he had almost forgotten what the truth was.
Little Eddie would have told on them for sure, but Little Eddie hadn’t figured out that the barn burned down because their makeshift cook-fire was too close to the wall where they were hiding from sight. Scott was usually the fastest tattle in town, but this time he kept the truth to himself, too—especially given his role in not putting out the fire properly. Scott was thinking about that razor-strap and how Papa had promised that the next time he and his older brother messed up, Isaac wasn’t the only one who would take the blame. So Isaac and Scott cast each other miserable looks by lamplight all night long, folding Mama’s quilts and blankets neatly into crates, carting out cooking utensils, and packing up the few farming supplies that weren’t burned beyond usefulness.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad to move, they thought. Mama was always afraid someone would come burn their whole house down with everyone inside, not just the barn. It had happened to a family in Quincy just a month ago. Besides, Papa was always in a bad mood after a day’s dealings with McCormack, and Mama was worried Papa might say something to get them all killed. Papa did have a mouth on him.
Maybe, in fact, the barn burning down was something like Rev. Crutcher had said in church on Sunday, about how ad-ver-si-ty is a blessing in disguise.
The secret weighed heavier with each passing moment.
But the Timmons boys carried it. They were stronger than anyone could have imagined.
“So . . . you heard a dog . . . and then a little boy?” Grandma said.
After a half-dozen repetitions, she finally had it right. At dinner, Davie had told the whole story, even admitting that Neema had been up with him. He’d started with the sniffing dog at his door and ended at the library. Mabel Trawley’s information made his story seem that much more worth telling, so he had left nothing out.
“Right,” Davie said. “A dog and a little boy.”
“The boy said, ‘Run! Follow me,’ ” Neema added.
“Pass the meat loaf,” Grandpa Walter said. He was usually quick to play along, but not this time. Maybe his arthritis was hurting, Davie thought. He had noticed that Grandpa Walter laughed less and less because of pain.
Dad, though, was suddenly so interested that he was resting his cheek on his elbow as he listened. His elbow was planted beside his plate on the table. No elbows on the table, Grandma always said, but she was probably so glad to see Dad talking for a change that she kept quiet.
“But slave-catchers with dogs were before their time,” Dad said. “Those boys, I mean.”
“You think tracking dogs went away after slave times?” Grandma said. “The point is, maybe we can find an argument to stop the construction in all this, since those Timmons boys were never found. There weren’t any children’s bones at that first dig. I’ll need to talk to that librarian myself.”
Davie knew that Grandma couldn’t care less about ghosts—she was just happy to have new ammunition in her anti-construction arsenal. Grandma reminded Davie of the mother in Mary Poppins, Mrs. Banks, who only truly came to life when she talked about her protests.
Davie noticed that both Dad and Grandma had red plastic cups instead of regular water glasses. A quick glance over, and Davie saw foam in his father’s cup. He smelled it then: both Grandma and Dad were drinking beer. Davie had never even heard of, much less seen, his grandmother drinking beer—but Dad drank a lot of beer between projects. He drank more than Mom knew, because Dad took his bottles out for recycling late at night. Davie had seen him do it once and hadn’t understood why until they were sitting at the dinner table a year later. Dad was used to hiding his drinking. It was a habit.
The mashed potatoes in his Davie’s mouth suddenly tasted like paste. He missed his mother so much he wanted to cry, maybe because he was thinking about the three missing boys. He only had a very tiny idea of what being lost from his parents might feel like, one at a time, and already he could tell it might be a feeling that never got better.
“Tell me again what you saw out back,” Dad said. “In the woods.”
Dad’s eyes were dancing like they had at the library, and Davie didn’t like those eyes. Dad didn’t believe in ghosts either; he was just trying to lose himself in something else. Davie felt like he was wearing X-ray glasses and could see down to his father’s bones.
“I saw three boys burying a dog,” Davie said. “There was a deep hole. Really deep.”
Dad snapped his fingers. “Stop right there. Look at that image like a filmmaker would. You’re looking at it too literally—it’s a symbol. If these are ghosts, their appearance doesn’t have to be some kind of literal recreation of an event from their lives. It might be more like a dream instead. That deep hole is a visual symbol for you. A message.”
Grandma grinned, her eyes sparking. “Evidence in a town mystery buried right smack in the middle of Lot Sixty-five!” she said, giggling with glee. “You wait ’til I call Alice and tell her! What are those fat cat lawyers gonna say when we roll poor old Miss Timmons up in her wheelchair? Bet they won’t be throwing up any more models after that.”
“Who’s Miss Timmons?” Davie said.
“She’s ninety-some years old now,” Grandma said. “She was kin to those boys, a sister born not long after they died. I think their mama was the only one who survived. How she didn’t lose her mind after her whole family died, I just don’t know. Maybe having the baby helped. And the geography checks out, doesn’t it, Walt? We’re right near the McCormack land.”
Grandpa Walter grunted, fascinated by his cornbread. “Half the town’s McCormack.”
“You know what I mean. The plantation’s still there.”
“That really, really big one?” Neema said. “The really, really big white one?”
“Pass it by every day,” Grandpa Walter said.
“I know which one,” Dad said. “I see it through my bedroom window.”
Maybe there had been fairy dust at the library, Davie realized. No one else in his family had cared about the ghosts he’d seen, and now everyone cared except Grandpa Walter. Neema grinned at Davie with rare admiration. She was wondering how he’d done it too.
Davie’s father nudged his grandfather. “You sure you never saw ghosts, Dad?” Joking.
“I went through all that,” Grandpa Walter said. “During the day, I watched my father catch hell from folks who couldn’t stand the sight of a black man who wasn’t stooping. At night, it was bumps and creaks. I loathed Gracetown. I was glad to be through with all of it.”
Loathed was a strong word, and Davie hadn’t heard his grandfather say it before. Grandpa Walt had seen ghosts as a child! He just hadn’t liked it.
But maybe it could be different now.
“Will you stay up with us and hunt for ghosts, Grandpa Walter?” David said. Across the table, Grandma only laughed and shook her head. He’d known better than to ask her, beer or no beer. Ghost-hunting wasn’t Grandma’s style.
“Please, Grandpa?” Neema said.
“I’ll stay up,” Dad said instead.
Grandpa Walter shrugged. That was how it was decided.
That night, all four of them sat huddled behind the easy chair, not just him and Neema.
Davie heard Grandma watching TV in her bedroom, so it didn’t feel like the Golden Hour, not exactly. But with Neema, Dad, and Grandpa Walt with them, Davie figured that whatever beacon he sent out to the ghost world was in Overdrive tonight.
“I didn’t know you felt that way about Gracetown, Dad,” Dad said in the quiet.
“Why do you think I didn’t want to raise you here?” Grandpa said.
“Why’d you come back, then?”
“Times are different now,” he said. “Mostly. And your mom wanted to go to the country. Home is home. Even if it doesn’t always feel good, it’s the only home you’ve got. You find a way to make it work.”
“We’re not talking about that,” Dad said, voice clipped and low.
“We need to,” Grandpa said.
Silently, Davie groaned. The real world couldn’t intrude on their hunt! Davie had learned a long time ago that he never heard ghosts if he brought a book, or tried to do Sudoku puzzles. A ghost hunter’s mind had to be quiet, even on the verge of sleep. That was when they came.
So Davie was afraid the spell would be broken. Dad would sigh and say they were being silly, or Grandpa would complain that his knees were aching. Neema might trigger the collapse by purring to Dad that she wanted something to drink. Davie could hear the foundation cracking.
But miraculously, for five minutes, they were quiet in the dark.
And then, just like that, the water was back.
Neema was so startled that she let out a little yelp, which scared Dad enough to jump.
“The floor’s wet!” Neema shouted. Yes, shouted. (Ghosts, FYI, do not like shouting.)
“Shhhhhhh,” I whispered, shaking her arm. “You’ll scare it off.”
“Davie, let go of your sister,” Dad said. “And I don’t feel any water.”
“Me neither,” Grandpa said. “We were promised ghost water, and I expect ghost water.”
“You have to be a kid,” Neema and I said together.
Dad and Grandpa looked at each other, practically winking.
Even with all of the distractions, Davie’s mind was on the hunt. In a flash, he’d switched on his video camera, and his eyes were armed with night vision. Seeing in the dark was like being a superhero. Tiny snakes of light wriggled across the living room floor.
“It’s all shimmery, like in moonlight,” Davie said.
Neema wrestled over his shoulder. “Let me see.”
Neema had pointed out that she hadn’t been allowed to look through the night vision even once the previous night, so he gave her the camera. He pointed the lens toward the coffee table; the light hitting the glass-top table made it easier to see the water underneath.
“Whoa,” Neema said.
“Before, we heard splashing,” I whispered to Dad and Grandpa. “I don’t hear any splashing yet. We need to be still and listen.”
“Yessir, yessir,” Grandpa said, and saluted.
So, they sat. While they waited, the water felt deeper. And colder. Neema and Davie rose to their feet because the floor felt so wet. Dad and Grandpa watched with fascination while Davie and his sister shook invisible droplets of water from their fingers, patted down wet clothes. Both Dad and Grandpa looked like they could hardly keep a straight face.
Then, Davie heard barking.
It was distant, but very distinct. And getting closer. Moving fast.
“The dog . . . ” Neema said.
“It’s coming.” Davie said.
The barking didn’t sound friendly. It was jabbering, persistent. Angry.
“Is it a good dog or a bad dog?” Dad said.
Davie’s hands shook as he reached into his ghost kit for his doggy biscuits, wishing he had a better plan.
“Wait a minute,” Dad said. “You did put that biscuit in my bed, Davie.”
“No I didn’t,” I said.
“The ghost did it,” Neema said.
“That’s not funny, Davie. Playing games is one thing, but I when I ask you a question, I expect a truthful answer.”
“Relax, Darryl,” Grandpa said, sounding tired. “Let’s be ghost-hunters.”
Most ghosts run off lickety-split when there’s too much talking. Davie had read countless stories about it on the ghost-hunter message boards on the Internet. But all in all, that angry dog scared him enough that maybe he hoped the dog would turn and run the other way. Maybe he wished the dog would do just that.
But the barking was louder. The dog was still coming.
Davie thought he’d been snapped into the dog’s jaws when his father grabbed his arm and yanked him closer. It almost hurt. Maybe it did, a little. Dad’s breath smelled like beer. “Davie, you promise me you had nothing to do with that doggy biscuit getting into my bed. You swear it wasn’t you.”
“Dad, I swear. It wasn’t me.”
“Me neither, Daddy,” Neema said, although of course Dad would never get mad at her.
It was too dark for Davie to see his father’s face, and Davie decided that using the night vision on Dad would get his camera broken. A painful instinct told him to expect a blow, maybe a slap. His father had never slapped him before, but there was always a first time. Dad was breathing fast, as if he had been running.
“You still hear a dog barking?” Dad said.
“Yessir,” Davie said. He always called Dad “sir” if he was in trouble.
“And you and Neema feel water on the floor? Both of you?”
“Actually,” Neema said, “it’s up to my ankles.”
“Shhhhh,” I said.
Splashing!
Davie heard the chaotic sound of feet splashing in the water in uneven patterns, staggering. A boy shrieked like Davie had never heard anyone shriek, much less a child. The shriek wiped the grin off of Neema’s face. It was the kind of shriek it was best to hear from a distance, because it might tear a hole in you up close.
But the shrieking was getting louder. Crying children were getting closer, splashing and stumbling. The three boys.
Davie’s knees stopped working. His legs could barely support him.
“I’m scared,” Neema said. She was crying too, joining their chorus.
When Grandpa turned the lights on, all the noises went away.
Grandma called a family meeting at breakfast. After she heard Neema’s crying the night before, she was in a bad mood about the whole ghost business. Neema had been too scared to sleep in the room full of dolls, so she had slept with Daddy. While the eggs and bacon got cold, Grandma spent the morning telling everyone she thought it was foolish for two grown men to be fed a children’s fantasy about ghosts chased by a dog. And she had some choice words for Davie, too: He was too old—too old, she kept saying—to behave that way. He was supposed to be an example to Neema, and he needed to start acting his age.
“It was just some fun that went too far,” Grandpa Walter said.
But that didn’t satisfy Grandma. Dad tried next, telling her it was a valuable exercise in imagination, and how working through the scenario would help them understand the region’s history—in fact, he said, the whole history of black America. Dad made it sound like something boring from a classroom, but that was Dad.
“It helps them process their history in terms they’ll relate to,” Dad finished.
Grandma gave him a dirty look.
Davie sighed, raising his hand. “Grandma . . . ” he said. “If we don’t listen to them, nobody else can. We can follow their voices. Maybe even find out if they died out back where I saw them with the dog. If their bones get dug up, you can stop the builders.”
“Get an injunction . . . ” Grandpa Walt cooed. He blew on his coffee to cool it.
But Grandma didn’t fall for it right away. Not this time. “It’s not good for Neema!”
“I won’t cry this time,” Neema said. “Davie told me to remember we’re not hearing real screaming. It’s old, so it’s not really there. And they’re not hurting anymore.”
Well, that last part wasn’t exactly true, Davie thought. If the three boys weren’t hurting, they wouldn’t be trying so hard to be heard. But Neema didn’t need to have that spelled out. Like all ghosts, they just wanted their story known.
Grandma stared from one face to face, shaking her head. “Everyone in this house has lost their doggone mind. That includes me.”
And so it was decided. Again.
That night, Grandma made special ghosts packs for everyone: extra flashlights, including the powerful hurricane flashlight that could light up the night like a spotlight. Packages of cheese and crackers. (“In case you’re up late and get hungry.”) Bengay for Grandpa. (“You know how your joints get, Walt.”) Even boots and raincoats! (“Real water or not, I don’t want you all getting wet.”) For good measure, she handed Dad a shovel. (“Just in case you can get the digging started . . . ”) Then she wished them luck and went to her bedroom to watch TV, closing her door tight so Lifetime wouldn’t be too loud.
That night, Davie felt more like a ghost soldier than a mere ghost hunter. He had better supplies and reinforcements! And now that all of them knew what to expect, they wouldn’t be surprised by the shrieking. The pain might not bother them so much.
He hoped not, anyway.
That night, the ghosts made them wait.
The excitement Davie had felt all day—really, every day since he’d first heard the dog sniffing at his door—burned into exhaustion. By nine o’clock, an hour after their vigil began, his eyelids were heavy and he was bothered by the hot raincoat. He felt a little silly wearing a raincoat inside the house. In the quiet, it was hard to remember the past few nights at all.
“Daddy?” Neema said in the hush.
“What’s that, Pumpkin?”
Davie hoped they would keep their voices low.
“Are you and Mommy mad at each other?”
As scary as the barking and shrieking had been, Davie was more afraid to hear his father tell Neema a lie. Or worse, to tell her the truth.
“We shouldn’t be talking now,” Davie whispered.
“No, let’s talk,” Dad said. “It’s all right.”
But then Dad paused so long that Davie thought he’d changed his mind. After a few seconds, Dad took a deep breath. “Your mom and I love you very much . . . ”
Oh crap, here it goes, Davie thought, his heart pounding. His hands trembled like they had when the ghost dog ran toward them with that angry bark. “ . . . And we love each other very much. God knows that’s true. But Mommy misses her family in Ghana—her mother is sick—and she wants to live closer to them. But I have a job where I can’t just pack up and move. I work in Hollywood. So right now we’re having a disagreement about where we’re going to live. And where you’re going to live.”
It didn’t sound as terrible as it had seemed when Dad was crying on the kitchen table. It didn’t even sound like a divorce, not for sure.
Neema squirmed, moving to her father’s lap. He was sitting cross-legged in front of the bookshelf behind the big recliner. Their lucky spot.
“You mean . . . we can’t all live together?” Neema said.
“Maybe not right now.”
“But . . . ” Neema fought to put it all together. “ . . . where would we live? Me and Davie?”
“With Mommy,” Dad said, and Davie heard his voice crack. “Probably.”
Grandpa’s sigh was the only sound in the silence.
Until the scream.
The scream sounded like it was from right across the room, as close as the living room window. So loud that the windowpane cracked. All of them jumped and gasped. Neema wrapped her arms around her father’s neck.
Grandpa’s flashlight switched on. He bobbed the light near the window. The curtain was open, revealing veins of broken glass. “What the . . . Who broke that?”
“No light,” Davie whispered. “Shut it off, Grandpa. Ghosts like the dark.”
Muttering and cursing to himself, Grandpa turned off his flashlight. When he did, the brightness in Davie’s night vision dimmed enough for him to gaze through the lens without squinting. This time, he didn’t see any shadowy figure framed against the light from the window. Whoever had screamed was gone.
But the water was back, creeping higher while he hadn’t been paying attention. This time, he saw currents swirling in the water, tiny rapids. Cold water crept into his boots, numbing his toes. Davie switched on the tape recorder around his neck. Back-up evidence.
“Water!” Neema said.
“I know. Watch out—it’s getting higher.”
“I can’t believe that damn window broke,” Grandpa said. “That thing cost . . . ”
“Shhhhh.” This time, it was Davie’s father. “Don’t break the spell, Dad.”
Sixty seconds passed. The scream sounded again, as if it were a movie that had been on Pause. Sounds crashed into the room: Splashing. Yelling. Barking and growling. Chaos.
“Git ’im off! Git ’im off!” a child’s voice screamed.
Davie’s mouth dropped open. His hands were unsteady, but he trained the camera back toward the window, toward the noise. This time, he saw several shadowy figures against the moonlight, arms flailing in a struggle. The tallest shadow—the oldest boy, Davie figured—was holding what looked like a giant stick. He raised it high and stabbed it like King Arthur’s sword.
This time, the scream wasn’t human. It was a dog’s.
Another window cracked. Glass tinkled to the floor.
Grandpa Walt came to his feet. “Goddamn it,” he said, sounding almost as scared as he was mad. He spoke to the darkness. “You stop breaking those windows!”
“The noise is doing it, Grandpa,” Neema said. “Can’t you hear it?”
Maybe Grandpa Walter was lucky he couldn’t hear it. One, two, three, boys were sobbing. One was outright wailing, as if he was in the worst pain of his life.
“Is he dead?” one of the boys said.
“Ithurtsithurtsithurtsithurts . . . ”
“Hurry up and help me grab ’im. Let’s go!”
In Davie’s viewfinder, the shadowy figures were gone. But he heard the splashing of several sets of footsteps running toward the kitchen again. Where the water would be deeper.
“They’re moving,” Davie said.
“The kitchen,” Neema said, on Davie’s heels.
While the rest of them scrambled to grab their supplies and follow, Grandpa only shook his head. “I’m not chasing nobody nowhere,” Grandpa said.
“You sure, Dad?” Davie’s father said. “It may turn out to be something.”
Davie barely heard them over the sloshing of water as he ran to the kitchen doorway; he ignored the terrible feeling of cold water rising as high as his thighs. The back door was wide open again, just like he’d known it would be. When Davie looked through the viewfinder, he saw the taller boy beckoning in the doorframe.
Beckoning to them? To his brothers? Davie didn’t know.
“We have to hurry!” Davie said, forgetting not to shout. “Before they’re gone!”
The recliner hissed when Grandpa plopped himself down to sit. “My chasing days are over. But I’ma sit right here, and nobody better break no more of my damn windows.”
Grandpa was talking to the ghosts.
“The water’s too deep for me!” Neema said at Davie’s side. “Over my waist!”
“Here, Pumpkin,” Dad said, and hoisted her to his shoulders.
All three of them were breathing fast.
This was as far as Davie had ever followed the three boys. He didn’t know what would come next. The dark kitchen suddenly looked strange and forbidding, full of shadowy hazard.
Still, Davie waded into deeper water, one step on the linoleum at a time.
Summer 1909
It was an hour before dawn, and Isaac Timmons was supposed to be resting. That was what his mama had told him to do. She’d made all three of them curl up on the living room rug under the oak tree, where the grass was soft. Mama had moved her favorite rug out of the house to keep it from getting muddy tracks, and she was planning to roll it up to pack last. She said they’d worked hard all night, so they deserved some sleep. “There’s a long journey ahead,” she’d said. Then she’d given them each a kiss and said, “And then we’ll be away from Gracetown forever!” As if she’d come up with the plan to leave all on her own, and it had nothing to do with the barn. Mama had always considered Gracetown cursed, especially for Negroes.
His brothers were asleep, but Isaac Timmons wasn’t. He was thinking about his best gal, Livvy, and how sad it was he would never see her again. Livvy’s mom had just given him the honey he’d taken home to his brothers, which started the whole business with the barn, but Isaac couldn’t blame Livvy for that. Hadn’t Livvy only said last Sunday that she was his gal? And what kind of man would abandon his gal without so much as a goodbye?
No kind of man, Isaac thought. That’s what Papa would say.
He would slip away and come right back. He’d be gone a half-hour at the most, if he ran. He couldn’t ask Mama and Papa, because he knew what they would say. Livvy lived out McCormack’s way, and he should never go that way. Not ever.
But Livvy was his gal. Once, she’d held his hand. Papa said he could expect to get married in three or four years, and Isaac decided he would come back for Livvy when he could. But for now, he had to tell his gal goodbye. Had to.
Isaac wasn’t planning to wake his brothers, but each one nudged the next when he rolled off the rug. Even Little Eddie woke right up with bright eyes, ready to play.
“Where you goin’?” Scott said.
“Nowhere. Just stay here. I’ll be back.”
“No, Isaac,” Scott said, sitting straight up. “He’ll blame me.”
“Pretend you’re sleeping. Use your head.” Papa used that phrase a lot.
“You goin’ to Livvy’s?” Scott said. “I wanna go too.”
So all three of them snuck away from the rug, through the pines in back, beyond the creek and over to the McCormack side of the road, which had a fence. The long fence stretched as far as they could see. It was still half-dark, so it was quiet and still. Isaac took a long look at Gracetown as he walked—the long grass, cotton patches and pine trees—and wondered what New York would look like. He had never even seen a picture in a book.
All of the lights were still off in the McCormack house, which stood on the hill. That house looked like a castle, which he had seen in a book. He wondered if the McCormacks would ever find out his father thought he’d burned down the barn. Maybe they would never even know. Isaac hoped not. He didn’t want to give Mr. McCormack the satisfaction.
“We gotta go faster,” Isaac said. “Or they’ll see we’re gone for sure.”
“You think Livvy’s mama’s gonna give us more honey?” Little Eddie said.
“You think Livvy’ll give you a big sloppy kiss?” Scott teased.
Instead of getting mad, Isaac enjoyed the quiet around him. McCormack’s land was on one side of the red clay and gravel road, swampy land on other. Walking with his brothers on the empty road toward Livvy’s, it was hard to believe Mama and Papa were packing up everything they owned in a wagon to drive farther than Isaac’s mind could imagine. Two days’ journey was a long way away. If you married someone two days away, your parents might not see you for years. Papa had said New York was weeks away, by wagon. Papa didn’t even think the wagon could make the trip.
A dead pine had toppled over and knocked out the logs to the McCormack fence. Most of the fence was intact, but one entire section had been crushed, and the fence was gaping open.
That was why he’d felt so peaceful, Isaac realized. Quiet. He should have known.
Isaac tugged on Little Eddie’s shirt to keep him from walking ahead. He held up his hand to hush his brothers’ tittering. The dawn was as silent as a tomb.
“Where’s the dog?” Isaac whispered.
The boys looked up and down the road, dreading the sight of the dog sprinting toward them, freed from its prison. In their imaginations, the dog was three times its normal size, a monstrous beast. A Negro man in town missing three of his fingers told stories about McCormack’s dog. McCormack trained his dog to bite niggers, the man said.
No dog was in sight. On McCormack’s land, only a few chickens stirred. On the swamp side, there was no sound except from insects and reptiles; the swamp’s constantly trilling song.
“We gotta go back,” Isaac said. He held tight to Little Eddie’s hand.
“What about the honey?” Little Eddie said.
“Mama say they treat that dog like family,” Scott said. “Maybe it sleeps in the house.”
It was a tempting thought, for a moment. Surely the dog was somewhere close to the house. The dog wouldn’t be roaming on the road or the swamp, would it? Issac hated to lose his honor by leaving Livvy without a word of explanation. What would she think of him?
“Yeah . . . maybe,” Isaac said. “Maybe.”
Then they heard the barking.
“You hear that? Run!” the shadowy figured in the kitchen doorway said. He waved furiously, as if their lives depended on it.
“He’s telling us follow him,” Neema said from her perch on her father’s shoulders.
“Then . . . let’s follow,” Dad said.
Davie waded farther into the kitchen, until he felt the water at his mid-chest. The sensation of fighting against the water to walk made it feel like he couldn’t breathe. He was shaking all over. But the door was so close! The shadow was almost within his reach.
Water converged around the base of Davie’s throat, a collar of ice. But the cold liquid didn’t feel like clean water: it was heavier, more viscous, a slime of sweet-sour dead marine life and vegetation. The smell of the old, dead swamp made Davie want to vomit.
“I can’t go anymore,” Davie gasped. “The water’s too high.”
“Just to the door, Davie,” Dad said. “If you can’t after that, you can’t.”
“You can do it, Davie!” Neema said. Easy for her to say, Davie thought.
Davie gulped at the air. He didn’t want to know what the water tasted like, but he wasn’t going to turn back. With his next step, he held his breath in case he wouldn’t touch bottom.
But he did.
The next thing Davie knew, he was standing outside on the back porch. Dad was one step below him, still carrying Neema. Staring toward the woods. The water had receded dramatically, only as high as Davie’s ankles. Davie gasped two or three times at the clean air, remembering the awfulness of the water he’d waded through. He reeked of it.
“What now?” Dad said.
Neema pointed. “That way. I hear splashing.”
His bearings returned, Davie raised the camera, using night vision to follow her finger. Whether she knew it or not, Neema was pointing straight toward the broken fence. With every step, Davie better heard the urgent whisper ahead in the darkness.
“We’ll lose ’im in the water! Run!”
More splashing. Sets of feet in a hurry.
“Yeah, this way,” Davie said.
They trotted off together, following Neema’s finger and the splashing. They didn’t run in a straight line, but they eventually ended up at the broken fence. Even with night vision, the woods were nearly pitch through the viewfinder. His only clear view was of the broken fence post, a jagged log toppled down.
The sight of the broken fence in the frame scared Davie. Once they left the backyard, all of the light would be behind them. “Official ghost-hunting audio journal,” Davie said in a shaky voice to his tape recorder, remembering his protocols. “We’ve reached the broken fence. We still hear the splashing on the other side.”
“Hurry, Davie!” Neema said. “They’re going too far.”
“Hold on,” Dad said. “I can’t carry Neema on my back in the woods.”
Thank goodness. Dad was predictable, and suddenly Davie was glad.
“How’s the water?” Dad asked me.
The water was like cold claws grasping his ankles, even with oversized boots on.
“Fine,” Davie said. “It’s lower now.”
Dad grunted, lowering Neema to the ground. Then, Dad bent over to be closer to her eye-level. Neema giggled and danced when her feet touched the water.
“All right, listen, you two,” Dad said. “We’ll go to the woods. I’ll allow this. But we’ll have rules, and I’m only gonna say them once.”
“Daddy, just say them fast,” Neema said. The broken fence didn’t scare her at all. She sounded like she was ready to wet herself from excitement.
“Stay close. Come when I call. Watch where you’re walking,” Dad said. “Davie?”
“Yessir.” The splashing had veered right, up ahead. “The splashing is softer and softer,” he said, speaking his audio journal. “But I still hear it.”
Neema pointed again. “That way!” she said.
“Let’s do it,” Dad said, raising his shovel high.
As he stepped over the fallen log, Davie’s heart pounded so hard that the blood rushing his ears drowned out the splashing. He couldn’t believe Dad was letting them do this! There were snakes in the woods. There were coyotes and bears too, not just deer, and there were ghosts for an absolute fact. And Neema was with them, the one he babied to death over nothing!
Something was different about Dad. Something had changed, and Davie didn’t know if the change was good or bad. Davie wondered if he should be the reasonable one tonight, just in case Dad had forgotten how. Maybe Dad had snuck more than one beer after dinner.
Dad flicked on the hurricane flashlight, and a precious circle of the woods before them turned as bright as midday. Every twig, leaf and stump threw a shadow.
Behind them, in the dark, came the sound of barking. The dog’s splashing was directed, more disciplined. Like a guided missile.
“The dog!” Davie said.
“Run!” the boy up ahead yelled.
They ran awkwardly, more like jogging, careful with their speed to avoid tripping. Up ahead, the splashing sounded more and more frantic. The younger boys were crying, or maybe all of them were. Their cries filled the woods.
“Faster,” Davie huffed.
“No,” Dad said. “Too dangerous.”
“No, Dad, it’s too dangerous not to.” Davie ran ahead, just to set a good example.
“Get out your doggie biscuits,” Dad sad.
“That won’t work!”
“How do you know?”
The dog was very large, and its bark sounded slobbery. Hungry.
“Because I can hear him! That. Won’t. Work.”
Neema wasn’t saying anything by then. Neema could hear the dog’s hunger too. She was proud she had made it past the first shrieks this time, but Neema was good and ready to go home. Lesson learned. She wasn’t old enough to be a ghost-hunter. Like with Grandpa, the idea had lost all of its attraction.
Davie’s father, who couldn’t hear the barking, tugged on Davie’s raincoat to slow him down. “Keep this up, Davie, and we’ll go home.”
“Yeah, Dad, we should go home, but now I don’t know if we can.” Maybe Dad would have understood if he’d waded through that muck. They had crossed to another side. It might not be easy to cross back. “Let’s just go faster.”
“Kofi David Stephens . . . Slow down. Someone could break a leg out here.”
The barking and splashing behind them grew impossibly loud just before it fell silent. Davie held his breath.
Neema screamed.
For a blink, Davie’s brain shut down: His baby sister was screaming?
Water thrashed as Neema writhed beside their father, still screaming. “Something bit me!” Neema cried, all childhood stripped out of her voice. “It bit me, Daddy! My leg!” And she screamed again, her horror renewed at the retelling.
There was more splashing when Dad bent over to pick her up. Vaguely, Davie wondered when their feet had started making the water splash, too. If the splashing water was real now, was the dog real now too? In his flashlight beam, Davie saw something wet glisten on Neema’s leg. The dark wetness startled him so much that his hand shook, nearly dropping the flashlight, and the terrible image went away. Not water. Blood.
“Oh, babydoll, you’re okay. Shhhh. You’re okay.” Even while Dad comforted Neema, he sounded petrified. Davie didn’t have to wonder if he had imagined the blood. He knew the blood was there from the tremor in his father’s voice. Davie hadn’t seen the blood long, but he knew it was more than a little. Davie felt steaming water in his pants as he pissed on himself.
“Davie,” Daddy said, in a soldier’s voice Davie hadn’t heard before. The tremor was gone, as if it hadn’t been there at all. “Grab Neema.”
Davie couldn’t say anything. Couldn’t move, at first.
“Davie, grab her. Something bit her, it’s big, and it’s still out here.”
Davie grabbed Neema’s hand, and Neema sobbed because she didn’t want to be away from her father. Dad was the solver of all of Neema’s problems, and now he had pushed her aside. Davie had to physically restrain her to keep her from clinging to their father. Using his muscles helped Davie shut off the panic ruling his mind.
Dad grabbed his shovel and picked it up, testing its weight in its hand.
Splashing came from behind them.
Davie grasped, diving away from the splashing, yanking Neema with him. Neema screamed, clinging to him with so much strength that Davie nearly staggered to his knees.
Dad whirled, his eyes following his flashlight beam. Nothing visible but brush. Davie tried to help with his own flashlight, but his beam kept zigging into the treetops because he couldn’t hold his hand steady, especially with Neema pulling on him so hard.
“Can’t see it . . . ” Dad was whispering to himself. “I can’t fucking see it . . . ”
Davie remembered his audio journal: “Something just bit Neema,” he said. Neema wailed, hearing the horror repeated.
“Davie, be quiet,” Dad said.
But Davie couldn’t be quiet. He was screaming too.
First, he felt a tug on the back of his raincoat. Then, something raked through clothes and skin on the back of his thigh, with the precision of knives. Davie had never known his body could feel so much pain. Davie fell to his knees, stunned by the fire in his nerves. As he fell, slimy water splashed his face.
Not cold anymore. Warm.
Inches in front of him, more water splashed, some of it stinging his eyes.
The dog was probably staring him dead in the face.
“IN FRONT OF ME!” Davie screamed, and Dad took a wild swing with his shovel at the air in front of Davie’s face. Dad only threw himself off-balance.
But Dad’s second swing hit something. There was a ping sound, a watery thud, and the sound of an animal’s yelp. Dad stabbed the shovel down like a stake, and a shriek flew from the nothing under Dad’s shovel. A beast, invisible.
“Is it dead?” Neema said.
Dad jabbed his shovel into the land around him, and water splashed.
“I hear that,” Dad said, amazed. “Jesus. I hear it.”
“Why can’t-can’t we-we see it?” Neema said, wrapped so hard around Davie that he could barely breathe. He screamed out again. The pain was truly dazzling.
By then, all three of them might have been crying.
“Okay,” Dad said, trying to find a place for it in his mind. “Okay. Okay. I know it’s here, but we can’t see the dog. We can’t see it. Okay.”
“Is it dead?” Neema said again.
Dad jabbed at the ground. More splashing. “I don’t know. I don’t know where it is. I don’t know if it’s dead. It’s not here. It’s not here.” Dad’s voice sounded far away, from California. Dad was fading too.
Davie felt his father’s hands patting him, examining his injury. His father’s touch made him cry out again.
“Davie? Listen to me.”
Davie tried to listen, but Dad’s voice kept melting. Slipping under the world.
Water splashed on Davie’s cheeks, and his eyes jolted open. Dad’s nose was nearly touching him. “Davie, I know you’re hurt, but you need to listen to me: Can you walk?”
Davie tried to stand up, and the pain made him vomit. Dad patted his shoulder.
“Davie, I can’t carry both of you. Do you hear me?” Dad said. His voice was shaky, almost pleading. “Neema’s ankle’s hurt, so she can’t walk. But I think you can.”
“I can’t!” he said. The back of his thigh was on fire. “Dad, it hurts.”
“I can’t leave you here. So that means we all have to go—now,” Dad said, breathing in his face. This time, Davie didn’t smell beer; he smelled his father’s perspiration, the smell of horsey rides and swinging from Dad’s arms in the back yard. The memories made Davie cry out, worse than the pain from his bite. Dad was panting. “This one time, Davie. I need you to grow up very fucking fast.”
Davie gasped out a sob, but then he lost interest in crying. He was in pain in every way, but the pain wasn’t as bad as knowing the dog was still out there. They were in big trouble, and crying wasn’t going to change it.
“I need a stick,” Davie said. He sniffed, and snot churned in his nose. “A weapon.”
“Good boy.” Dad’s flashlight swept the forest floor, and the stick appeared as if by miracle. “Grab that one, fast. Then we’ll go back the way we came. Did you get enough for YouTube?”
Davie tried to laugh, but it only came out like crying. He grabbed the fallen branch, which was thick, but not too thick for his palm. A perfect fit. It reminded him of the same stick he’d used when he saw the boys in the woods, already free of excess twigs and dead leaves. But it couldn’t be way out here. Could it? My magic staff, Davie thought, hopeful. Desperate.
When Davie shifted his weight to his good leg, his injured leg screamed at him. He didn’t know how much he was bleeding, but he could feel the fabric of his jeans knotted up in his bloodied parts. Every movement was agony. Panic tangled his breaths in his lungs. He was gasping suddenly.
“Stay calm. We’re gonna get out of here, Davie. I promise. I’ll get you a doctor.”
“Me too?” Neema whispered from the safety of Dad’s arms.
“You too, Pumpkin. You ready, Davie?”
Davie nodded, catching his breath, but his lips were shaking. He gripped his stick tightly with one hand, trained his flashlight ahead with the other. He couldn’t use night vision now—it limited his scope too much. He would have to trust his own eyes for the walk back to the fence.
“Let’s go,” Dad said, just before they heard the barking behind them again.
Angry barking. SPLASHSPLASH
Davie just kept thinking No. It wasn’t possible. It couldn’t be. It wasn’t fair.
“I heard that,” Dad said, amazed and frightened. “I hear something coming.”
“Run!” said a boy’s voice from ahead of them.
“I heard that,” Dad said. His voice was dazed.
They had no choice but to run; the boy’s urgent voice only confirmed their instincts. Dad’s feet made heavy splashes as he staggered under Neema’s extra weight. Tree trunks appeared suddenly in their flashlights, almost too late to avoid colliding with them, so running took all of Davie’s concentration—at first. Then he realized they were following the voices, keeping ahead of the dog’s splashing behind them, running the wrong way. The fence back to his grandparents’ house was behind them.
Where were the ghosts taking them?
Davie ventured a quick glance through night vision for a long view—and he saw a huge, looming structure up ahead and toward the right, blocking the moonlight.
“A tobacco barn,” Davie said.
He had never seen it in daylight. He doubted that it was real, but it was there. At the edge of the swamp. The Timmons boys crossed a swamp to lose the dog, Davie realized. He thought he said it aloud for his audio journal, but he was only whispering.
“Come on, we’ll close the barn door,” the boy’s husky voice ahead said, full of reason.
“The barn door!” Dad said. “We’ll close the door.”
Consensus.
The barking was getting closer again.
Davie and his father must have caught up to the others, because the splashing of the ghost boys blended with theirs. He heard their sobs and whispers close to his ear. They were running together, all of them. Combined, their feet sounded like an army, and Davie hoped they were.
Like Davie, they were crying and in pain. They understood. But still they ran.
Davie thought his lungs would burst. The meat of his back thigh hurt so much that he was convinced it was falling apart, unfurling flesh with every twig he brushed against. He couldn’t tell the difference between his sobs and his hitching breaths, but he checked his night vision lens again. Part of his head was still working.
Were they moving at all? The tobacco barn was too far. Too far. They wouldn’t make it, he realized. The barking behind them was gaining too fast. The dog was too loud, too close.
They needed another plan.
“We can’t . . . we can’t . . . ” Davie wheezed.
A shriek sounded, to Davie’s left. The bottom fell out of his world until he saw that neither Dad nor Neema was shrieking. Dad froze in his tracks, lowering lowered Neema to the ground so he could wield his shovel as a weapon. Neema sobbed, clinging to their father’s legs, staring wide-eyed toward the place where the shrieking had come. Dad was wide-eyed too.
Beside them, there was a frenzy of splashing in the water.
“Ithurtsithurtsithurtsithurtsithurts!”
Davie didn’t know whose voice it was. It could be any of them.
“Where is it?” Dad said, ready with his shovel.
Davie looked through night vision and saw the whorls of water dancing about ten yards ahead of them. There was a great commotion. “There! By that stump!”
Dad had only lunged ahead one step when a beast let out a terrible sound. For an instant, right before he blinked, Davie thought he saw water splash as if a boulder had just been tossed inside, framing the dead dog like a chalk drawing. The dog was big. He could have killed them.
“I got it!” The oldest boy said.
“Is it dead?”
“It’s not dead!” Davie said. He had heard the dog felled three times and counting, but the dog always came back. Davie had learned that much. As soon as his legs started pumping again, he heard a splash behind him—and a sound like a shower as the dog shook off water.
The barking started right away.
“Run!”
Davie no longer knew whose voice he heard. Dad scooped Neema up into his arms and followed Davie’s lead, racing toward the barn. Neema clung to Daddy so she wouldn’t hit her head on tree branches, but Dad still had to run slowly with Neema in his arms. Too slow!
The dog would catch them again. The dog always caught them.
“Run!” the voice said ahead.
Then, even worse, an urgent scream: “STOP!”
But Davie couldn’t stop his legs in time. Suddenly, there was no ground beneath Davie’s feet. His feet plunged downward to nothingness, like stepping off of a sand bar at the beach.
He was drowning in soft earth. Mud.
Even before Davie fully realized he had fallen into some kind of hole—and a large one, since the earth yawning around him—he began scrabbling to try to pull himself out. His slide was slow, a taking-its-time kind of terror, and Davie screamed, grasping for a twig or a rock, anything to hold him above ground.
“Be still!” Dad said. Davie had heard that same terror in Dad’s voice when Neema screamed, except now Dad’s voice was more hollowed out, like he was witnessing a death. He had dropped Neema just short of the hole, or they all might have fallen. “Davie, don’t move! Please don’t move, Davie.”
As Dad reached for him—his hand still a good six inches off—something cracked beneath Davie, old damp wood aged beyond its time, and Davie plunged downward again. Suddenly, Dad’s hand was gone.
Dad and Neema both yelled his name, as if he could will his fall to stop.
Davie screamed and sobbed, panicked by the taste of bitter mud in his mouth. His legs jerked, kicking and there was nothing but air beneath him. Below, there was a long fall. As mud slid down around him, gathering speed and resolve, Davie couldn’t understand why mud had risen to his chin and no farther. Or why he hadn’t fallen yet.
His clothes pinched at the nape of his neck, as if he were dangling on a hook. Something was holding him up from behind.
The ghost?
His jaw trembling, Davie turned around to see with his own eyes.
A stubborn tree branch had snagged his raincoat, he saw from the corner of his eye. Grandma’s raincoat had saved him from falling.
“I said be still,” Dad said, grabbing his arm. “It’s like a . . . well . . . or something. It’s a long drop down, Davie.”
Davie last brave act that night was to train his night vision down to the hole below his dangling feet. He thought he saw the flare from the whites of a small boy’s eyes. No, two, then three, pairs of terrified eyes! Davie heard three boys yelling beneath him, and then only a horrible silence.
They had fallen. All three boys had fallen, just like he, Neema, and Dad almost had.
Davie could only breathe again once Dad had pulled him far clear of the hole, when he was sure all four limbs were on solid ground. He was afraid to walk anywhere, afraid of falling again. “You’re okay,” Daddy said, stroking Davie with one arm and Neema with the other. Davie could hear his father’s heart thundering in his chest. “You’re okay. It’s all okay.”
“Is it gone?” Neema said.
Davie wondered if she was talking about the dog or the hole, or both. No barking, but it could be hiding. Waiting.
“I don’t know,” Dad said. “We’re going to the barn. Where is it, Davie?”
“What if it’s not real?” Davie said.
“It’s real enough.”
They were only forty yards away from the barn, but it was a long forty yards. Davie realized he didn’t hear splashing when he walked anymore. The barn was on dry land.
By the time they got to the barn door, Davie’s body was drenched in perspiration. He felt like he was swimming in his clothes. But he helped Dad pry the barn door loose from its mooring, and they slammed the heavy door shut. Dad used his shovel to lock it in place, since there was no other way to secure it.
By then, Davie was lying on the barn floor, his face pressed against the scratchy wood. The barn smelled of sweet tobacco leaves, a smell that burned his throat. “The dogs chased them to the swamp,” Davie said. “They killed the dog. But they fell in a hole.”
Dad barely heard him, too consumed with comforting Neema. As much as Davie craved comfort himself, he didn’t mind. He would have died to keep Neema safe. He still might.
“Maybe a . . . storm cellar,” his father panted. “Maybe a well. Probably no way out.”
Maybe they had fallen and broken their necks right away. Or been buried alive. Maybe they had died waiting for someone to find them. And all the while, the town was going to hell because they were gone. Davie could only cry about the whole sad mess.
The Timmons brothers never made it to the barn. They fell when the barn was just within sight. It wasn’t fair, after what they’d been through. It wasn’t fair.
While Davie cried, Dad undressed him and Neema, examining their wounds by flashlight, washing them with bottled water. He looked relieved. There was blood, but the bleeding had already stopped. He divided the packet of Extra Strength Tylenol he kept in his wallet between them. The pain was still at a roar, but having a pill to take made him feel better.
“You’re fine,” Dad promised them, and they hoped he wasn’t lying.
The tobacco barn was cavernous. When Dad walked to the other side of the barn to make sure there were no other doors to lock, his absence seemed eternal. Davie thought he would faint waiting for his father to come back to their corner, where Dad had spread out their coats to make a cushion for them to rest. If Davie hadn’t been stroking Neema’s hair and telling her everything was fine, just like Dad, he might have started crying again.
But his father did come back, and he brought good news.
“We’re locked tight as a drum,” he said. “I checked every corner. Nothing’s getting in.”
And that was that. By silent agreement, they knew they weren’t going to open the door until morning. Ghosts don’t like the light.
They ate cheese and crackers and drank bottled water. They talked about favorite characters from television, movies and books to keep from thinking about their world.
That was when Davie heard it from the slats in the wooden wall, a foot from his ear:
Snnnnffffff snnfff snnfffffff
The dog was sniffing at the door.
A loud bark woke Davie, a roaring in his ear. Daylight blinded him when he opened his eyes. He blinked, his limbs frozen by a sight so improbable that he forgot his pulsing pain: The towering tobacco barn around him was no more than a shell, most of the wall planks stripped away, its rooftop lost among the pines, its floor overgrown with generations of underbrush.
A German shepherd’s face lunged toward Davie, pink tongue caressing sharp teeth.
He’s followed us to daytime, Davie thought. That thought whitened out anything else that tried to come into his mind, until he couldn’t remember where he was. Or who.
Neema’s scream pulled Davie out of his trance.
Davie let out his own yell, pinwheeling his arms as his only weapon against the dog.
“Calm down, Davie!”
“Son, it’s all right. Whoa there. Whoa.”
“Neema, it’s Grandma! It’s all right.”
“Can’t you see, Sheriff? They’re scared of the dogs.”
Once the police tracking dogs were well out of sight, the world came back to Davie in slow bits and pieces. But it took a while.
Davie’s next fully formed memory was sitting on a yellow police blanket slurping apple juice from a juice box; the best apple juice he’d ever tasted. Neema, slurping her own juice box across from him, was sharing the exact same feeling as she gazed at him. Both of them almost smiled. That was the first hint Davie felt that maybe they were all right. Maybe.
Davie couldn’t hear what his father was saying to the sheriff over the hood of the sheriff’s huge SUV, the sheriff nodding and taking notes. Davie couldn’t imagine what kind of story Dad could tell someone who hadn’t been there.
Davie gasped. He patted his side for this gear, but everything except his shirt had been stripped off by the paramedics. “My camera!” he said. More like a croak.
Grandpa held his ghost kit high up in the air. “Got everything here, Davie. Just relax.” Grandpa was using his cane, Davie noticed. He had never seen him use his cane outside before.
“Grandpa, it bit us,” Davie said. “Even though we couldn’t see it.”
Grandpa nodded, gesturing for him to hush. “Shhhh. You just relax right now. No need to get excited. It’s gone now.”
Grandma’s eyes were tired. Davie realized his grandparents must have both been up all night, worried sick when they never came back from the woods. Davie didn’t know how far they had traveled, but it had taken a long time to find them. Davie felt terrible for giving his grandparents the same awful suffering Isaiah and Essie Timmons had, even for a night.
When Grandma stroked Davie’s head, he held her wrist tightly. “Grandma, I know what happened to the Timmons boys,” he whispered.
“Hush, Davie,” Grandma said. “Walt’s right. Forget about that, baby.”
“There’s a hole—over there! A dog was chasing them, and they fell in. I know it. I almost fell in, too!”
Grandma sent a withering look Dad’s way. She was so mad at Dad for taking them out into the woods at night, she probably could barely think of anything else.
“Somebody has to find the bodies,” Davie said. “Or it’s all for nothing. Just tell them to dig. Tell Miss Timmons her brothers are here. If she wants to find them, she’s got to dig.”
The particulars are unnecessary. All three Timmons boys eventually died, though not at once. Isaiah Timmons died never knowing that his sons lay trapped in the abandoned cellar of a house knocked over in a twister in ’02. That house had crumbled like toothpicks, but the barn beyond it hadn’t had a scratch. Such is the way with twisters.
The boys’ mother, Essie, would walk the ground within a stone’s throw of her sons’ burial place on three separate occasions in the fifty years before she died. She never knew, not even a hunch.
All Old Man McCormack ever knew was that someone had killed his dog.
The dog was found, at least.
There was no justice in it. All four of the deceased thought so.
After Davie and Neema were released from their night’s stay at Tallahassee Memorial, Dad moved them to the new Quality Inn that had just opened off of the 10, only ten minutes from Davie’s grandparents but safely across Gracetown’s boundary. Technically, out of town.
Neema wouldn’t hear about sleeping at the house another night, even when Grandma promised to put the dolls away. But Davie wasn’t ready to go home to California yet.
Not until he knew.
Grandpa Walter and Grandma were sweetness and spice around Davie, but Davie knew they were furious with Dad for taking his two children into the dark woods. What were you thinking? Mom was on her way, too. Dad had tried to sound happy when he told Davie she was coming, but the dread on Dad’s face had been hard to ignore.
So Davie knew there was really nothing in the way of it now. So much for their month apart. So much for Imani’s plans to change Mom’s mind. The future was here, a month early.
To take his mind off of the impending disaster, Davie checked his video footage.
The footage of the living room only showed the broken windows—not the breaking windows, a key distinction—and conversations between him, Neema, Dad, and Grandpa Walter. No splashing or shrieking on the video. Same old same old. Nothing new. Even the shadow of the Timmons boy in the kitchen doorway wasn’t as distinct as it had been the first time, and the first time it had been pretty sucky.
The footage got better in the woods, but Davie had to stop the tape when he heard Neema scream. Out of nowhere, he suddenly heard all of it: Barking. Voices. Water. Not as loud as it had been, but undeniably there—true ghost phenomena, when he was ready to show it. He just wasn’t sure when. Maybe soon, maybe not. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe never.
Davie found that it was hard to know anything anymore.
Dad quietly let himself into the hotel room and motioned Davie over. Grandma had dozed off in the hotel room’s recliner and Neema was curled up sleeping at the foot of the bed, where she’d been watching the Disney Channel at a low volume. Hopping with his crutch, Davie followed Dad into the hotel room’s bathroom. The bright lights made Dad look older.
“So . . . they’re digging,” Dad said, out of the blue.
“Right now?”
“Started this morning. Mom and Dad didn’t think I should say anything, but I thought you deserved to know, Davie.”
Dad said it as if it was something to think about.
“I have to go,” Davie said.
Dad’s face flinched, a tic that almost closed his right eye. “How’s your leg?”
Davie’s back thigh radiated pain, flaring with every step, but that was irrelevant. “Painkillers,” Davie said. “It’s fine.”
“Davie, they might not find anything. Or, maybe they will. Either way, it’ll be hard.”
If Dad hadn’t been there . . .
The thought began as a constant refrain in his mind, but it never finished itself. That thought didn’t need finishing, because he would be dead if his father hadn’t been there. Davie knew that as well as he knew his name. But they hadn’t talked about it yet. Dad had never told Davie what he thought had happened in the woods. Maybe they didn’t need to.
“Is Mom coming to take us now?” Davie said.
Dad didn’t blink. “Looks that way.” He made a fist before slowly fanning his fingers.
They stood in the bathroom, quiet. Dad’s fingers drummed on the sink’s fake marble counter. Dad didn’t seem like man who had been crying in the kitchen anymore.
“I’ll tell her it’s not your fault,” Davie said.
“It has nothing to do with that. Or you. That’s the truth, Davie.”
Davie believed him, but he also remembered the animal terror and loathing on his father’s face when he was swinging his shovel at the invisible thing chasing him and Neema. He wondered if Dad would feel that about Mom one day, or if maybe even he would. He wished a fight weren’t coming. He would have to choose sides.
“What time is Mom getting here?”
“Late. Seven.”
There was still time for things to stay the same. Just for a while.
“Don’t you want to see the bones too, Dad?”
“I just . . . want to be careful about it. I’m on thin ice around here, Davie.”
Davie hoped Dad wasn’t convinced there had never been a dog, that maybe they had been attacked by a hungry bear in the dark. He hoped Dad wouldn’t start forgetting.
“But you want to, don’t you?” Davie said. “Don’t you want to see?”
Dad bit his lip and nodded.
So, they left a note for Grandma on Quality Inn stationery—and they went.
The dig for the bones of Isaac, Scott, and Little Eddie Timmons had begun quietly, without fanfare. The attorneys for the warring parties—the developer, Stellar Properties Inc., and a group of residents calling themselves the Gracetown Citizens Action Council, of which Miss Essie Timmons was an honorary chair—exchanged phone calls and reached a compromise.
The digging had begun only a day after the missing family told its ghost story.
At dawn.
Despite the instability at the surface, much of the old abandoned cellar had filled with debris and soil over time, so it wasn’t as easy as finding a ready tunnel. The dig took time.
As the day wore on, a bulldozer and small scooper wound their way down the newly worn path to the abandoned tobacco barn developers would have razed the week before, if town politics hadn’t hung them up. They would have found the hole themselves the hard way, so it was best it was found before someone got killed.
The company CEO, who’d approved the dig personally, thought it was a win-win: His company could demonstrate goodwill to the superstitious, rustic locals, and symbolically lay the whole issue of corpses to rest. (“You see?” he could say. “This proves it for once and for all: No more bodies here!” It wasn’t exactly the ideal slogan for a housing development, but it was an improvement over their current PR standing.)
Neighborhood Watch, which had transformed into a satellite of the Gracetown Citizens Action Council, had volunteers up and down McCormack Road who called multiple numbers on their phone trees when they saw construction trucks on the move. The movement of workers and equipment to Lot 65 gained more attention on a Saturday than one might think.
By mid-morning, a good crowd had gathered at the edge of the dig.
In fairness to the Timmons family, the excavation was eight feet by eight feet, which Stellar had argued was more than enough of a safety margin for finding the bones. A square block of the soil would be dug up, bit by bit, and the dig wouldn’t end until it was twenty yards down. Almost like digging for oil, some onlookers thought.
While one set of workers hauled up the soil, another sifted through for bone fragments on blankets with students from the anthropology department at the college. Adults shooed children away from the sifters, and police officers shooed adults and children alike away from the growing hole, which looked more deadly as the day wore on.
Before noon, there were three occasions of great excitement at the dig on Lot 65.
The first was when a green van from Gracetown Glen Retirement Home came bouncing along the path, and two uniformed workers wheeled out ninety-one-year-old Essie Timmons, named for her mother, who had spent her lifetime drowning in her mother’s grief about her three lost sons. Essie Timmons had been raised in the shadow of her dead brothers, and her mother’s obsession with finding out the exact how and why of their vanishing had been bequeathed to her. In the 1940s, she had written a book on the subject, Three Brothers: The Timmons Family and the Gracetown Riots. (She owned the only three remaining copies, and she never allowed anyone to touch their pages.) She had always given talks at the elementary school on the subject until her stroke a decade before. But while her body was diminished, her mind was sharp.
Essie Timmons’ dark face was deeply webbed by her age lines, but her cheekbones were still a carbon copy of her dead brother Isaac’s. She wore a mound of white hair so vivid that it was visible from a distance. She never left her wheelchair and had trouble holding her head upright, so she looked more dead than alive. But no matter. While a uniformed worker stood over her with an umbrella, Essie Timmons sat out in the sun and watched the workmen dig.
Every once in a while, a well-meaning citizen came up to the old woman to offer her a cold drink, or to ask her if she was hungry. Essie Timmons just raised her hand to motion them away. Her eyes were an eagle’s, never distracted from the rising clumps of Georgia clay soil.
Watching and waiting.
The second event of great excitement was heralded by a murmuring through the onlookers that spread from one end of the gathering to the next: McCormack’s here.
Frank McCormack was a slightly-built man of seventy-two whose face looked much older. He owned the land where the first bodies had been found, and his grand old house on the hill was visible from the Stephens’ windows.
In the wake of that ill-fated dig on his property, nearly two miles from this one, word had spread that his great-great-grandfather sanctioned the burial—on his own land—of twelve black men killed in the Gracetown riots. A different reporter called him about it every other week, the latest from as far as California. As if that wasn’t enough to make his stomach ache at night, Frank McCormack had lost a million dollars so far when the construction on his lots came to a halt, and much of that money had been lost because of Essie Timmons.
Although they technically weren’t in sight of each other yet, it was rare to see Frank McCormack and Essie Timmons in the same company. Their families hadn’t spoken for generations. And there they both were, at the dig.
The third unexpected thing was when the boy and his father came.
By that time, the number of onlookers at the dig had swelled to at least sixty, maybe more, with yet more planning to come watch the spectacle on their lunch breaks. No one had wondered before why the Stephens children weren’t there, given their ordeal, so the boy’s arrival was that much more a surprise. He was so small! And so brave.
A crutch was the only visible sign of whatever had happened to the boy in the woods. Both the father and son had the haunted look of war veterans, and they stayed close to each other, but far from everyone else, standing in the shade of a live oak as old as the tobacco barn. Their shyness was understandable, after what they’d been through. (And the Stephens clan could be standoffish, so it was to be expected.)
Some of the onlookers speculated that Davie Stephens had dreamed it, and he’d found the burial site sleepwalking. Others were sure that the ghost of the Timmons boys had taken him by the hand and led him to the collapsed cellar. As for the reports of a wild animal attack, no one gave that much credence. (“That’s just crazy talk.”)
In any case, the Stephens boy’s presence made the dig seem even more significant—perhaps, in a way, even historic. A few people grumbled about poor taste when Hal Lipcomb showed up selling roasted ears of corn and bags of pecans from a basket, but he sold plenty. If it felt more like a town fair, so be it. This wasn’t something that happened every day.
“Don’t you get your hopes up, Miss Essie,” said the man with the old woman’s umbrella. His name was Lee, and he loved his work; every old woman reminded him of his grandmother, who had raised him and whom he missed every day. He didn’t want any more heartaches for Essie Timmons. He had warned her not to come. Not being from Gracetown, he didn’t understand all the excitement about somebody claiming they’d seen a ghost.
Essie Timmons nodded, barely hearing him. Her eyes on the clods of falling dirt.
“The boy said so,” she said.
One of Frank McCormack’s sons, Sam, who had driven to the dig from his tax attorney’s office in Tallahassee, sighed and ran his fingers through his sandy hair. Tobacco squirted from his teeth to the soil below. He noticed that he and his father were only two of a handful of white people at the gathering; his wife said that noticing such things made him a racist, but he noticed all the same. Lately, race was all anyone wanted to talk about, and Sam McCormack was so sick to death of it that he didn’t care if he was racist or not.
“Reckon they’ll find anything?” Sam McCormack asked.
Old Man McCormack shielded his eyes from the sun with his palm. He ventured a quick glance at Davie Stephens before his eyes went back to the dig. “He’s the right age,” he said. “For seeing ’em.”
“Yeah, just right,” his son said. “And it’s summer.”
Essie Timmons, far across the plot, whispered to her attendant: “He saw them. They’re down there. He says they fell.”
Davie hadn’t realized how much he was considered a celebrity until he and his father arrived at the dig and people stepped aside to make way for them. He’d never experienced so many eyes on him, like a movie star. The hush following his every step felt as dreamlike as the shouts and screams he’d heard in the night.
Davie took his father’s hand as he walked, like Neema would have. He felt eight years old again. Davie hadn’t expected so many people either, like someone had sold tickets.
What if everyone ended up thinking he was a fool?
A hydraulic shovel was set up over a gaping hole, which reminded Davie of the hole he thought the Timmons boys had dug, with the dead dog lying beside it.
Thoughts of the dog made Davie shiver. He blocked the memory by watching the people picking through clumps of soil, and his heart caught when a young woman in a white college T-shirt pulled up something big enough to be a leg bone.
But it was just a heavy stick.
Davie’s heart pummeled him. Maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to come.
“We’re here in Gracetown, Florida, at a most unusual community event,” Dad said. Davie thought his father was talking to him, but when he looked up he saw that his father was shooting the video camera, panning across the crowd. “Three young boys have been missing for nearly one-hundred years, and these Gracetown residents believe the bones of those boys will be found. Here. Today. And they believe it because of ghosts.”
“Hope you’re not recording over mine,” Davie said. Part of him knew he wouldn’t care, in some ways. The video of that night only showed part of what had happened.
“Fresh tape. Yours is safely labeled, in the drawer.”
Davie smiled. Dad was right: It felt safer to look at everything through a lens. Like someone else. His eyes followed his father’s camera to the shell of a tobacco barn, nearly hidden within the trees. Next, two young boys buying roasted corn from a vendor. Girls climbing a tree. An old black woman sitting in a wheelchair under a caretaker’s umbrella.
Dad put the camera down. “That’s Essie Timmons, Davie,” Dad said. “Those boys were her brothers. Do you want to go over and . . . ?”
Davie shook his head, mortified. He wouldn’t be able to talk to her about the boys.
“That’s okay,” Dad said. “I only said it in case you wanted to. You’ve done plenty.”
“Are you making a documentary?” Davie said.
Dad nodded. “Actually, we are, if that’s okay with you. Forget a grant—we can get investors. A ghost story. Then I could take some time off.”
“What for?” Davie said. He hoped Dad wasn’t going to go off to hide in his work.
“To go to Ghana.”
Davie was afraid he had heard wrong. “I thought you didn’t want to go.”
“Shouldn’t we all be in one place?”
Davie nodded, blinking to keep his tears away. “Does Mom want you to come?”
“I think so,” Dad said. The tic squinted his eye again. “We’ll see.”
That answer was a kick in the stomach, far from the assurances Davie had hoped for. But that was growing up, Davie figured. Gloves off. The bites are real.
The truth would have to do.
A workman wearing a red helmet popped up above ground to wave his flashlight frantically. “Hold up!” he said. His voice tremored with excitement. “Look at this!”
By then, in the middle of lunchtime, the crowd numbered more than a hundred.
The woods went silent as the machinery stopped. Miss Essie Timmons sat up straighter in her wheelchair than she had in years. Old Man McCormack began reciting the Lord’s Prayer. Both of them were begging God for relief.
A faraway dog was barking, mostly yapping, but Davie and his father were probably the only two who noticed the sound. The barking raked across Davie’s memories, sharp as teeth. Davie closed his eyes, feeling a lightheadedness he knew might make him faint.
That’s not him. He’s not real. He won’t come out in daylight.
Slowly, Davie’s heart slowed. His breath melted in his throat so he could swallow.
A sound traveled through the crowd Davie would never forget. A chorus of gasps first, almost one collective breath, then a continuous hum from one throat and chest to the next, some high, some low, a sound of depthless grief and boundless wonder. Davie felt his father’s hands squeeze his shoulders hard, clenching so tight it hurt.
“God,” his father said.
Davie opened his eyes to see what the people of Gracetown had found.
The workman climbed to the surface gingerly, cradling a calcified child’s frame. The corpse was curled in rigor mortis, but intact. Muddied bones dangled, but didn’t break. He was small. Maybe the youngest.
“Little Eddie!” Essie Timmons said, rising to her feet. Two miracles, side by side.
An old white man wearing a suit and tie walked to the old woman’s wheelchair and leaned close to her ear. She nodded. He put his hand on her shoulder, and she patted it. Then the man walked away, toward a younger man who might be his son.
Dad kept his camera trained on Essie Timmons for a long time. When the worker brought the bones to her and she wiped away a tear, Davie heard his father suck in his breath.
It took two more hours to find the other two sets of bones, and they weren’t intact like the smallest child’s had been. Instead, they came up in pieces.
All Davie ever saw of Isaac was his skull, every tooth in place. Smiling, in a horrible way.
By that time, Davie was almost sorry he’d come. He would rather remember the Timmons boys as living, at least. Running. Trying to save each other.
Davie’s thigh was killing him. He needed more pills. Besides, he noticed, it was three o’clock. Three was a long way from dusk, but he didn’t want to take any chances. No way did he want to be in these woods anytime even close to dark.
“I’m ready,” he told his father.
“You okay?”
“Yeah, just tired,” Davie said, but that was a lie. He didn’t know yet if he was okay. That would depend on whether Neema would ever again sleep through the night without screaming and crying. Or if either of them would ever pet a dog. Being okay depended on Dad. Or Mom. Or maybe all of them.
When he and his father started walking toward Dad’s rental car parked at the edge of the orange Georgia clay road, everyone stopped what they were saying and doing, even the workers. Someone started clapping, and soon everyone was, a few of them hooting. Their applause rose into treetops that had been filled with screams so soon before. The prettiest girl Davie had ever seen—tall and dark, about thirteen, with a face like a girl from TV—grinned at him as if she had met him in her daydreams. Davie felt his face blush for the first time in his life.
His heart almost didn’t give a cold shudder when he heard the faraway sound of the yappy dog’s barking. He almost didn’t wonder how he would ever sleep again.
This story and the previous one, “Summer,” are a kind of odd prophecy: In 2013, I received a call from the Florida Attorney General’s office informing me that my late mother, Patricia Stephens Due, had an uncle, Robert Stephens, who probably was among dozens of children buried on the grounds of the Dozier School School for Boys, a reform school in Marianna, Florida, where boys were tortured and killed for generations. I had never heard of the Dozier School, buried children, or Robert Stephens, my great-uncle who died there in 1937, at fifteen. But months later, my father, husband, son, and I would go to the excavation site in the woods in Marianna where University of South Florida researchers sifted through soil in search of bones—just like I had written in “Ghost Summer” five years earlier. Even my nine-year-old son, Jason, wore gloves and helped search the excavated soil. Jason was just the right age to help out, after all.
The eeriness of the coincidence makes me think it isn’t a coincidence in the slightest.
The story was first published in The Ancestors, edited by Brandon Massey. It received a Kindred Award from the Carl Brandon Society.