29

“Robert Wood, killed October 2, 1940, age five.”

Katie looked up from the old newspaper with tears in her eyes. “Fifty-five years ago!” she said. “The poor kid has been haunting this house for fifty-five years, waiting for someone to rescue him!”

I snatched the paper from her hand and read on. “‘Robert was killed instantly in a fall from the cherry tree outside his bedroom window. Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Wood, his parents, were on a European trip at the time and Robert had been left in the care of a nanny, Alice Everett.’”

“The poor nanny,” said Katie. “How horrible I’d feel if anything happened to you or Sally while your parents were gone.”

I shivered. She was right—the situations were pretty similar. Did that mean the time was ripe for another fatal accident?

“‘The nanny,’” I read, “‘was beside herself with grief and there were signs the balance of her mind had been affected. Miss Everett, twenty years of age, kept repeating that the child’s teddy bear was missing. Oddly, this favorite toy had still not been found at the time of the child’s burial.’”

Katie shuddered. “I wonder what happened to the poor woman?”

We gathered up the other newspaper clippings that had blown around the floor. They were mostly repeats of the same story. One had a description of the teddy bear—brown with a mended ear.

As I put the clippings away I noticed another piece of paper face down at the bottom of the box.

“What’s that?” asked Katie.

It was stuck in a corner of the box and didn’t want to come loose. I tugged gently, afraid to rip the old paper. “I think it’s a photo,” I said. “But I can’t see who’s in it.”

“Here,” said Katie, nudging me aside. “Let me try.”

Just then the paper came free, slipping easily into my fingers.

“That must be Bobby with his mother,” exclaimed Katie when I turned over the photo.

It showed a small boy and a pretty young woman in a wide-brimmed hat, which must have been fashionable at the time.

“They don’t look very happy,” I said, noticing that both the boy and the woman had pretty grim expressions.

“That was the style then,” said Katie knowingly. “People never smiled for the camera. Picture taking was serious business.”

It was so sad, looking at the photo of a small boy who would never get any older and his pretty mother who would be so far away when he needed her.

“What’s that?” said Katie suddenly.

I heard it, too. Something small and furtive rolling along the floor.

Then we saw it. A piece of chalk skittering over the floorboards.

“That’s strange,” said Katie, reaching for the chalk.

Before she could touch it the chalk swooped into the air.

It flew over to the wall and began to write. Very slowly, in large, uneven, childlike letters, it spelled out:

SAVE ME