There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  Copyright © 1999 by Vande Velde, Vivian

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  First Magic Carpet Books edition 2008

  Magic Carpet Books and its logo are trademarks of Harcourt, Inc, registered

  in the United States ot America and/or other jurisdictions

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows

  Vande Velde, Vivian

  There's a dead person following my sister around/Vivian Vande Velde

  p cm

  Summary Eleven-year-old Ted becomes concerned and intrigued when his

  five-year-old sister, Vicki, begins receiving visits from two female ghosts

  [1 Ghosts—Fiction 2 Slavery—Fiction 3 Underground Railroad—Fiction]

  I Title

  PZ7 V2773Th 1999

  [Fic]—dc21 99-11462

  ISBN 978-0-15-202100-9

  ISBN 978-0-15-206467-9 pb

  Text set in Aldus

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  H G P E D C B

  Printed in the United States of America

  To Michael—

  a wonderful editor,

  and a loyal friend

  CHAPTER 1

  We Don't Move into a New House

  MOST GHOST STORIES start with a new house. Well, actually, it's usually an old house, a little bit run-down but with more rooms than your average Howard Johnson—most of them with dark corners and cobwebs. But it's new to the people about to get haunted: The family moves out to the country or to an island dominated by an abandoned lighthouse; or the kids are sent to visit Great-Aunt Agatha, who lives by the windswept moors and talks to herself; or the car gets a flat tire or the horse breaks its leg, and the travelers are miles from anything except the gloomy mansion on top of the hill. The house is generally situated someplace that has frequent thunderstorms, preferably between a swamp and a cemetery.

  Our house is old, but we've been living here peacefully forever. At least, my family has been here forever. The house was built by my grandfather's uncle's father—I think I've got that right. Anyway, I know it was built by the ancestor I was named after—Theodore Beatson (except everyone calls me Ted)—and he built it before the Civil War. I've been living here just about twelve years, because that's how old I am, just about twelve. Not that the house looks 150 years old. Granddad says he signed the house over to my dad and moved to the condominium in Florida because Grandma had run out of walls to knock down and floors to refinish. So it's not like the house looks spooky or anything.

  And we're not out in the middle of nowhere, either. We're in Rochester, New York, which is pretty big even if nobody outside of New York State has ever heard of it. We're close enough to hear Mr. and Mrs. Lidestri arguing in the house on one side of us, and to smell the chlorine from the Wienckis' pool on the other side. Behind our house is a big ditch that was part of the old Erie Canal before the canal was rerouted about a mile south. But the ditch isn't as interesting as it sounds: There's a housing development right on the other side, close enough that in winter, without leaves on the trees, we can see their lights. We can also hear their dogs barking—summer and winter—but then again, they can probably hear my brother Zach's stereo, which only tunes in heavy-metal stations at about a thousand decibels, proving, I guess, there is justice in the world.

  So, no swamps, cemeteries, or windswept moors. (Just to be sure, I asked Zach what a moor is and he said it's a black person. I told him that sounded stupid, but his tenth-grade class is reading Othello and he showed me where it says "Othello the Moor"; and there's Othello on the cover, definitely black. I'm not sure what's so spooky about a windswept black person, but anyway, the closest black people are the Baileys, five houses down.)

  Not counting Zach, there's nothing weird about my family: no undertakers or mad scientists or people who only come out at night. My dad works for the telephone company and Mom is a waitress at the little coffee shop in the mall. Besides me and Zach, there's our little sister, Vicki, who's in kindergarten.

  So that's me, my family, and our house.

  No long-lost relatives have come to visit.

  Nobody died.

  Halloween was five months past.

  But suddenly we had a ghost.

  CHAPTER 2

  A Ghost Moves In

  THE HAUNTING STARTED so slow and easy we didn't know enough to be afraid.

  Mom, who usually works only during school hours, was working in the evenings because one of the other waitresses had just quit.

  Dad also would normally have been home in the evenings because he's a manager at the phone company—an indoor nine-to-five job. But the repair people had gone on strike the week before, so the management people were trying to cover for them, even though they didn't know what they were doing. All of a sudden Dad was working from seven in the morning to seven at night—sometimes later if he got in the middle of something—and when he was home, generally he'd be asleep or at the kitchen table, trying to make sense of the technical manuals. I can't remember which it was that particular night.

  Vicki was supposedly asleep upstairs, and Zach and I were trying to watch TV together.

  Except that Zach had the remote control.

  It's impossible to watch TV when Zach has the remote control. Every time there's a commercial, he starts to wonder what he's missing on the other channels. Nine times out of $ten$ it's more commercials, but that doesn't stop him. He'll hold his finger down on the button that advances the channels. Flip-flip-flip. Just about a second slower than it takes for the image to register on the eye. Very annoying. A black-and-white movie. Gilligan's Island in Spanish. Painting lessons. An opera about a woman who is dying, who'll still be dying fifteen minutes from now, the next time Zach flips through. By the time we get back to whatever we were watching, our commercial's ended and the show has gone on without us: I've missed the crucial revelation somewhere between Madonna on MTV and Senate hearings on C-SPAN.

  When Dad is in the room, he takes the remote control away from Zach; but Zach's sixteen, and if I try to use force with him, he sits on me.

  So I have a tendency not to get too involved with TV when it's just the two of us.

  That's why I noticed Vicki in the upstairs hall. She was sitting on the floor, wearing a robe and her ratty gray bunny slippers, watching the TV through the slats of the stair rail.

  I called up to her, "You better�
��"

  "Jeez"—Zach smacked me on the side of the head with the remote control—"not in my ear, you jerk."

  "You bigger jerk," I said, but I moved before I said it. My head must have made contact with the mute button—it felt like all the buttons were imbedded in my scalp—but anyway, Zach ignored me while he tried to figure out what had happened to the sound. I told Vicki, "If Mom comes home and catches you out of bed, I don't want to be around to see what happens."

  "Keep it down," Zach grumbled.

  Vicki said, "Marella wanted to see what TV's like. She's never seen TV before."

  "Who's Marella?" I asked.

  Vicki pointed to the empty spot next to her. "My new friend."

  Well, I thought, kids pick up the strangest things when they go to kindergarten. I'm told Zach acquired a pet giraffe in kindergarten, though I only got chicken pox. Anyway, I figured one of the other kids had an imaginary friend and Vicki had decided she should have one, too.

  "Well, you tell Marella—" I started.

  Zach threw one of the decorative pillows at me. "You tell Marella to go to bed," Zach finished for me.

  Vicki got to her feet. Disdainfully she said, "Marella didn't like TV, anyway," and she stomped off back to her room.

  I should have been suspicious. From a girl who names her stuffed animals things like Pink Bear and Big Rabbit—I should have been suspicious.

  But that was how it started.

  THE NEXT MORNING at breakfast, just as Zach was about to sit down, Vicki screamed.

  Zach nearly swallowed the pen he was carrying in his mouth, and Mom poured out about two cups of milk, none of which landed in her coffee mug. I'd been looking at Vicki, however, and I figured I knew what it was all about.

  "What?" Mom asked in her frantic mother's voice. "What's wrong?"

  "Zach almost sat on Marella," Vicki said.

  "Who?" Mom asked.

  "Her new friend," I explained. I wiggled my eyebrows at Mom to indicate the nature of that friendship. When Mom continued to look at me as though I were speaking Martian, I added, "Her new—invisible— friend."

  Zach, who'd frozen midsit, said, "Obviously someone dropped both of you on your heads when you were babies," and he let himself fall the rest of the way into his seat, so hard the chair skittered backward on the floor. "How's that feel, Marella?" he demanded.

  In that self-satisfied tone all girls master by the age of two, Vicki said, "She already moved to Daddy's chair."

  Zach, whose brain is not up to competition with a five-year-old, mimicked, "'She already moved to Daddy's chair.'" He started poking at the air above the empty seat.

  "Stop it!" Vicki screamed. "Stop it! She doesn't like that."

  "If she doesn't like it," Zach said, "she should tell me to stop."

  "She can't talk," Vicki said. "Stop it now!"

  "If she can't talk, then how do you know her name's Marella?" Zach asked with uncharacteristic clarity of thought.

  Vicki was trying to grab hold of his jabbing finger, but she wasn't fast enough. "She can talk if she has to, but it's hard. Mommy! Make him stop."

  "Vicki!" Mom said, having finally caught her breath again. "Stop that awful squealing. Zach, leave your sister alone. Ted, elbows off the table."

  That's Mom. She never wants to show favoritism, so she figures if she yells at one of us, she'd better yell at all of us.

  As Mom turned her back to get the sponge from the sink, Zach gave the air a final poke. "Does Marella like this?" he whispered.

  "She moved again," Vicki said. But this time she didn't say where.

  "Knock it off, all of you," Mom warned, sponging up the spilled milk. "And hurry up, your buses are going to be here any second." She indicated the pen and paper Zach had brought to the table. "Is that something I have to sign?"

  "Nah, it's just science."

  "And it's due when?"

  Zach glanced at his wristwatch. "Twenty minutes. But there's only one essay question left. More than enough time."

  I pushed my chair back, to get out of there so I wouldn't have to hear Mom's lecture.

  At the same instant, Vicki lunged across the table, hitting Zach's glass of orange juice at just the right angle so that it fell over and drenched his science paper.

  With a cry somewhere between pain and anger, Zach picked up the sheet and tried to shake off the juice, which was already making the orange-stained paper curl. "Why you little—"

  "Zach," Mom warned, sponging the area around him.

  "I didn't mean it." Vicki had gone white and her bottom lip was beginning to tremble.

  "What do you mean, you didn't mean it?" Zach said. "You just reached right over—"

  "I was trying to stop Marella," Vicki said. "She was going to knock over your juice for being mean to her, and I was trying to stop her."

  "Dropped on your head!" Zach shouted at her.

  Vicki began to sob.

  One thing I have to admit: Even then, I thought she was convincing.

  "Zach!" That was Mom's final-warning voice. "You shouldn't have been doing your homework at the breakfast table in the first place. And you, young lady, if you're going to bring your friends—invisible or not—to breakfast, you better tell them to behave themselves. Ted, don't slouch."

  Outside, a bus began to beep.

  All three of us scrambled to our feet, because Zach's bus comes about twenty seconds after ours.

  I grabbed hold of Vicki's sleeve to get her to hurry up—it's embarrassing to have the whole bus wait for the kid everybody knows is your sister.

  "I didn't do it on purpose," she repeated to Zach.

  Zach, holding his homework at arm's length so it wouldn't drip on him, tapped her none too gently on top of the head to show just where he figured she'd been dropped.

  She began to howl again, but fortunately she kept on walking.

  None of us bothered to answer as Mom's voice followed us outside. "And have any of you brushed your teeth?"

  CHAPTER 3

  I Learn Everything There Is to Know about Luxembourg

  FOR THE NEXT COUPLE days, I pretty much forgot about Marella. For one thing, she behaved herself the rest of that first day, which was a good thing, since Dad was able to take off enough time from accidentally sabotaging people's phones to drop in for dinner, so there wasn't an extra chair. And apparently she wasn't much for eating, so—after a while and because our table conversation was boring, according to Vicki—she stopped coming at mealtimes.

  Still, Vicki seemed to be spending a lot of time in her room, playing quietly, having earnest little conversations with herself. Mom and Dad thought it was cute, Zach asked if there were any other demented people in the family, and I spent more time worrying about the Social Studies Fair than about people who weren't there.

  My project was Luxembourg—which just goes to show that our countries were assigned to us, since who in their right mind would choose Luxembourg? The whole country isn't that much bigger than Rochester. The year before, when we'd done states, I'd gotten Ohio. I'd written a real nice letter to the board of tourism, explaining about the fair and telling them I'd appreciate any flyers or travel brochures or other information they might have. The entire fifth grade wrote these letters to various states, and most of them got all sorts of wonderful stuff in return: postcards, state flags, bumper stickers. Ohio was one of two states that did not respond. Anyway, this year I'd written a letter to Luxembourg. Now, with only the weekend left till the fair, it looked like I was going to be stood up again.

  So Friday, after dinner, I bicycled to the library to look up information about Luxembourg, the one country in the world in which nothing interesting has ever happened.

  I'd already done the written report—it had been due the Monday before the fair—but I was looking for maps and interesting pictures to trace for my display. Still, all the while I was thinking about how Joe Antonio had constructed a Lego model of the Eiffel Tower, and Andrea Dittman—who was doing Scotland—had this inflata
ble Loch Ness Monster her dad had brought back from a business trip, and Lenny Stetzel had been telling us for weeks about the delicious Greek baklava his mother was going to bake.

  The librarian suggested National Geographic and—hooray!—there was an article in the July 1970 issue. (National Geographic has been around forever, so it's probably even done a piece on Ohio.)

  Luxembourg is kind of pretty, but there was no way I could trace those pictures. I started feeding quarters into the photocopier.

  The librarian came up behind me. I was sure she was about to tell me I was damaging the binding on the magazine and that I'd have to stop making my little black-and-white, nearly illegible copies, but she said, "Are you aware, young man, that there are several large boxes of National Geographic in the used-books room? The magazines are only twenty-five cents each."

  For once I was lucky. Somebody must have been cleaning out their attic, because there were these boxes full of magazines—boxes labeled and in chronological order—from 1963 to 1981.

  I found the July 1970 issue, paid my quarter, and bicycled home.

  Now what? The judges would not be impressed by my report and a single issue of National Geographic lying side by side, no matter how old that issue was. I decided it would look like more if I spread it out: cut out the pictures, paste them on something, maybe draw a picture of the Luxembourg flag in the middle (three horizontal stripes: red, white, and blue—real creative), or maybe I could draw a giant map of Luxembourg and put the pictures around the inside of that.

  I decided I did not want to use poster board. For one thing, we didn't have any, and if I asked my mother to buy some now, she'd ask why I'd waited so long to start. For another, I remembered that last year those of us who'd used poster board had spent half the evening picking up our displays every time they tipped over. I needed something more substantial.

  After generations of Beatsons living in the same house, our basement is full of just about everything anybody could need. In fact, our basement—come to think of it—is the only part of the house that is the least bit spooky, with its packed-dirt floor and separate little cubbyhole rooms for storage. But Mom has about a dozen braided area rugs all over the laundry and workbench areas, and it's well lighted. I found a section—about three feet by five feet—of wall paneling left over from the latest redoing of the downstairs bathroom. Just what I needed. Properly braced, that wouldn't sag under its own weight and fall.