Nothing but Ghosts Read Free Page B

of the hilltop is Miss Martine’s house—the same stone as the Ayrshire walls,a million tiny windows, a wide, three-sided porch, a big gray door that is the color of the massive slated roof. Where there are no shutters, there are curtains, and the curtains are always closed. There are pots of sweet Williams on the wooden railing of the porch. If you were just driving by, you wouldn’t guess that anything was strange.
    But the house smells ancient like the earth, damp like the day after a storm. There is silence; nothing moves; there are no cats sleeping in the shady parts and no dogs getting snippy. Miss Martine’s is quiet as the stones down in the stream, quiet as the robin’s nest that Danny found the other day, which had been lived in, then abandoned.
    I don’t dare knock, and I don’t dare stand there staring. I hurry around to the back, to where the porch finally stops, and the pickaxe is there in a thin ray of sunlight, leaning against the house just as Old Olson had promised. I reach for it, and it is wood handled, heavy.I bend a little in the knees, and as I pull it up toward me, I stagger back, stepping—I don’t mean to—into a bed of pachysandra. I hear the snap of green things at my feet, the crunch of leaves that had more living in them, and suddenly I am certain I’ve been seen. I look up, and nothing moves. Only in the far right corner window of the second story does a white curtain dance in the breeze. Behind that curtain a shadow moves. Or nothing moves: I can’t be certain.
    “Sorry,” I say, not nearly loud enough, about the pachysandra. “Didn’t mean to.” Cradling the pickaxe, I step out of the patch and away. I take cautious, even-if-she’s-watching-I-won’t-look-nervous steps. I turn the corner of the house and start to run. When I reach the crest of the hill, I’m sprinting—wondering if Miss Martine ever saw me in the first place, if she’s up there right now watching, standing in a new window, following me with her eyes. I try to get a picture of her in my head, fix her—old and stooped, or tiny and light,her hair in a braid in a coil around her head, or her hair cropped close and neat. Who is she? I wonder. What has time done to her? But every time I’ve asked Ida to describe her, she won’t; every time I’ve asked Reny, he grunts. I only have, in my head, an image of Miss Martine young, old-newspaper young—small boned, fit, dark haired, alluring, but not what my mom would have called delicate. Mom was always making distinctions like that. Find the fine line, she would say, and understand all that it separates. The fine line at Miss Martine’s is between the living and the dead or dying, between all that is growing and all that has stopped behind the walls of the heiress’s house. I am glad for Danny’s cap and the shadow that it lays across my face. I am glad for the hill that falls down hard and fast.
    “Long time coming,” Ida says when she sees me making the leap across the stream, which isn’t, by the way, an easy thing to do with a pickaxe in your arms. From the looks of things they haven’t gotten too far;the hole is much like it was.
    “We thought you’d absconded,” Reny says, pulling a long finger down one of the lines in his face.
    “Hey,” I say. “I’ve traveled miles.”
    “Give me that thing,” Danny says, and I hand it over, gladly. He fits his hands around it like he’s testing out a baseball bat. He digs his feet in and takes one impressive swing. The earth beneath the blade breaks up. There’s a minicloud of dust. “Not bad,” he says, and now Owen wants to take a turn, and there’s another blast of dust. “This’ll work,” he says to nobody, and the two of them go at it now, two brothers with an axe. There are buckets in the back of Old Olson’s cart. I get enough for the rest of us, so that we can haul the first layer of dirt away.
    “Keep it up,” Old Olson says when he’s satisfied that we’ve got ourselves a