The ghost was back.
There was a strange guy at Ms. MacAllister’s house.
It took almost all morning to wrap my mind around both of these things. When I dragged myself out of bed around nine, I looked to see if the car was still there, just in case I’d dreamed the whole thing.
But there it was, right in the driveway: a vintage Mustang. Fastback, not convertible. I thought that it might have been green at one point, though it was now speckled with rust and the driver’s side door was a bright, cherry red.
By the time I made it down to the kitchen, my mom already stood at the stove, cooking. She was dressed in a floral button down and dark jeans, her blond hair curled and styled. I decided to broach the subject of Ms. MacAllister’s visitor.
“So,” I said as I pulled the orange juice out the fridge, “did you see that car in Ms. MacAllister’s driveway?”
Mom poured more batter into the skillet. “I did. I noticed it while I was on my run this morning.”
“Is someone visiting her?”
“Her grandson, probably,” she answered. “She mentioned a few weeks ago that he was coming to stay with her.”
“She has a grandson?” I hadn’t ever thought about Ms. MacAllister having children, let alone grandchildren. I hadn’t even thought she was old enough to have grandchildren—she looked decades younger than my own grandparents had been before they’d died.
“He’s around your age, I think.” She set a plate full of pancakes down in front of me at the kitchen island. “Why so curious?”
I cut the pancakes into tiny squares. “She never has visitors. I thought it was weird.”
Mom didn’t respond right away. She poured herself a cup of coffee and leaned back against the counter. “She doesn’t,” she said carefully. “I don’t think her daughter has been to visit once since she left. Not that I blame her, after what happened. People can be cruel.”
I forced a bit of pancake down. “Mark used to say she was a witch.”
She lifted her eyebrows. “Your brother said a lot of things,” she said. “That doesn’t mean they were all true.”
I shrugged. As much as Mom pretended otherwise, Mark hadn’t been the only one who thought she was a witch. Ms. MacAllister was a playground legend in our tiny town of Asylum, Pennsylvania. She lived alone in that big, creepy house and sold herbs and crystals who knew what else from her tea shop on the waterfront. Mark and I had achieved near hero-status among the kids at school; we’d lived next door to her our entire lives, even talked to her, and lived to tell about it.
“Is that why no one likes her?” I asked.
“Plenty of people like her,” Mom answered. “I like her.”
I’m sure some people liked her besides my mother, but not many. I still remembered when Hannah Green’s mother wouldn’t let her come over to play when we were in third grade because I lived next door to that woman. “You like everyone.”
“That’s not true. There are plenty of people I don’t like. Ms. MacAllister just isn’t one of them.”
“Mom.”
She waved me off and changed the subject. “I’m going to run to work for a few hours today,” she said. “You’ll be okay here by yourself?”
“But it’s Saturday.” My voice came out smaller than I’d thought it would.
“And I have a lot of work to do. The Quasquibicentennial Celebration isn’t going to plan itself.”
“Can’t you say two hundred and twenty-five like a normal person?” My mother, with her PhD in public history, was the head of the Asylum Historical Society. Actually, she was the Asylum Historical Society, the lone staff person among a swarm of blue-haired volunteers. “Why do you have to be such a weirdo?”
“I like Latin. It’s a beautiful language.”
“Dork.”
“Brat.”
I stuck my tongue out at her.
“Why don’t you call Leah and see what she’s up to?”
“She’s working a double at the shop.” Which was what she would be doing every Saturday for the rest of the summer.
Leah Howards had been my best friend since preschool. We were usually inseparable, but her mother needed help at the coffee shop she owned, and Leah was saving money for a two-month-long trip to Europe after graduation, which meant that we saw much less of each other than I was used to. And after everything that had happened over the last few months, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d ditched me all together.
I hadn’t exactly been fun to be around.
I thought of the ghost in the woods. I didn’t want to be home alone after dark, not when she was out there again. Not after that night.
“You’ll be home for dinner, right?” I asked. My fingers found the thick, ropy scar that ran down the back of my arm, my permanent reminder that Mark had died and I had not.
Mom’s face softened. “I’ll be home for dinner,” she promised. “We’ll do a girls’ night.”
I didn’t point out that in the months since Mark had died and my dad had left, every night had been a girls’ night. My hand drifted from my scar to the small gold and sapphire ring resting right under my collarbone. Mark had been carrying it in his pocket on the night of the accident. I didn’t know where he had gotten it or who it was for, but the minute I’d seen it, I’d claimed it as my own. My piece of him. I’d worn it every day since his funeral.
“Sure,” I said instead. “That sounds great.”
After she left, I dumped my pancakes down the garbage disposal and made my way back upstairs. I showered, dried my hair, and brushed my teeth. On my way out of the bathroom, my big orange cat, Prime, wrapped himself around my ankles. I leaned down and scooped him up, cradling him in my arms like a baby. “It’s you and me again today, buddy,” I said.
He purred and snuggled closer. At least someone appreciated me.
I climbed upstairs and deposited Prime on the foot of my unmade bed, right on top of my white comforter. I dressed, braided my long blond hair, and flopped down beside him. From the window over my bed, I could see clear across my yard to the MacAllister House. Generation upon generation had expanded the original house, each trying to outdo their fathers before them, and had turned a standard eighteenth century farmhouse into something huge, sprawling, and entirely out of place in a Pennsylvanian mountain town. It stood three stories tall, with a wraparound porch, wavy-paned windows, and a steeply pitched roof dotted with gables. White paint peeled from the wooden clapboard siding, and the roof sagged slightly in the middle. A low stone wall bordered with rose bushes separated their yard from ours.
The window directly across from mine opened, and the boy from last night rested his elbows on the windowsill and stared out toward my house.
Toward me.
I yanked the cords for the blinds and threw myself flat onto my bed, my face hot with mortification. Prime opened one eye and glared at me.
“Oh, shut up,” I told the cat, but he had already gone back to sleep.
Had he seen me staring at his house like some kind of creep?
The way he was staring at my house?
What was he, some kind of creep?
I sat up and peeked through the blinds. The guy still leaned out the window, but he had one hand pressed to his ear and waved the other around. He was talking, but with the glass in my window and the few hundred feet between us, I couldn’t hear a thing.
He was on the phone.
Not spying on me.
“He’s not a creep,” I said to Prime. “Crisis averted.”
I watched him for a few seconds longer. Who he was speaking to? His parents? A friend? His girlfriend?
The first few notes of AC/DC’s TNT erupted from my desk. I scrambled for my own phone, nearly falling off my bed in the process. My mom’s face lit up the screen. “Hello?”
“Amelia, honey, can you do me a favor?”
I stretched out on my bed and stared at the ceiling. “What is it?”
“I spoke with Ms. MacAllister, and she has a few things she’d like to donate for the anniversary. Would you mind picking them up and bringing them to me?”
I glanced at the blinds covering my window. “Uh, sure. Yeah. Right now?”
“The sooner the better.”