Coco evidently did. She was half out of her seat, waving her hand. You had to hand it to Coco. Anyone else would have crept into class, head down, hoping the notebook incident had been forgotten. Not Coco Zintner. “Um,” said Coco, the words tumbling out, “I just have a question. What about the ghosts?”
A faint murmur of interest ran through the room.
“My mom told me about them,” Coco added smugly. Coco’s mom was a reporter for theEvansburg Independent. She had come to talk to their class once, casual in her jeans, with a thick, ash-colored ponytail. She made Mr. Easton go giggly. “Can you tell us, please?”
Mr. Easton looked torn. “I wouldn’t say there areghosts,” he said. “Not exactly. But there are certainly some sad episodes in Misty Valley’s past.”
Sad episodes were more interesting than agriculture. “Tell us!” said Phil Greenblatt, and the rest of the class took up the cry. Coco looked proud of herself.
Mr. Easton hesitated. He probably liked talking about ghosts too.
“Well, Misty Valley has been a farm for a while,” said Mr. Easton, giving in. “Or at least, people have been farming that land a long time. Back in the 1800s, it was called—oh, foggy—smoky—something. I forget now. It gets foggy after dark because of humidity off the river. That’s why it’s called Misty Valley now.”
Ollie thought of the smiling man, coming out of the smoky dark.
“There were two brothers who worked in the fields,” said Mr. Easton. “They used to go about with the owner’s daughter. The girl wasn’t even eighteen when her father died and she became the owner herself. Both boys were in love with her, and there was a lot of talk in Evansburg. Folk wondering which brother she would marry. Fifty acres isn’t anything to sneeze at.”
Ollie frowned and glanced at her book.
“She married the older brother, in the end. If his younger brother was jealous, there’s no record of it. They all lived on the farm. The married couple had at least onekid, a girl. The girl grew up, got married herself, moved away. All normal, right?”
There were probably lots of brothers trying to marry the same farm girl in the nineteenth century,Ollie thought, but she looked at her book again.
The whole class shifted in their seats. Long-dead romances were not as interesting as ghosts. “But one night the older brother disappeared,” Mr. Easton continued. “Just—gone. Vanished. No trace. Town rumor said the younger one had finally done him in out of jealousy.”
Now the class was more interested. Ollie was listening closely. “Soon after that,” Mr. Easton went on, “theyoungerbrother disappeared. No one ever found traces of either of them. Eventually the sheriff decided that the younger brother had killed the elder and then been overcome with remorse and thrown himself into the creek. That was when the rumors of hauntings started. Rustling in the corn. Voices. Footsteps without feet. They said the two brothers didn’t lie quiet.”
Now the class was silent. In the pause, Ollie could hear the roar of rain on the school roof. She wished she knew howSmall Spacesended.
“The woman herself didn’t live long after her husband vanished. Throughout her final illness, she swore that her husband wasn’t dead, that he was still on the farm. Of course, they never found him. Legend says that now thewoman haunts the farm too. Looking for her lost husband and her brother-in-law.”
Eyeing the silent room, he added, “You guys good on the ghost stories?”
Phil Greenblatt poked Brian and said, “Be careful; the lady ghost might decide you’re her murdered man.”
Brian snorted and the strange tension broke.
“Can’t imagine how your mother got hold of that story,” Mr. Easton was saying to Coco. “Bit of ancient history. I suppose she talked to Linda Webster. That’s how Linda got the farm, you know; she’s the great—however many times great—granddaughter of that poor young woman.”
Ollie stiffened.Jonathan Webster,Jon had said to Beth.This is my brother, Caleb, my mother, Cathy. Beth Webster. Linda Webster.Probably just a coincidence, though. A lot of people were named Webster.
“Websters have owned that farm since the late nineteenth century,” Mr. Easton added.
The author just heard of Smoke Hollow and copied the names,thought Ollie. But sharp in her memory was a woman, her pale face makeup-smeared, her eyes darting around the sunlit swimming hole, sayingI have to.
Coco’s hand was in the air again. “That wasn’t the weird thing,” Coco said. “You didn’t tell the bad thing. The other thing. The schoolhouse fire.”
“Yes, right, okay,” said Mr. Easton. He addressed thewhole class. “The Websters haveownedthe farm since the late nineteenth century. But no Websterslivedon the farm in the twentieth century except for once, briefly. I was a boy in Evansburg at the time. A man—his name was Garrett Webster, as I recall—moved onto the old property and tried to start a back-to-nature sort of school. Basketmaking and things. It was he who renamed the farm Misty Valley. But one day, late in autumn, his schoolhouse caught fire.”
The class looked at one another.
“It was right after dark. One of those thick, ugly nights. The kids had stayed late to rehearse a play, I think. The ash bucket for the woodstove caught fire, the fire department decided later. No one made it out alive. I think there’s a plaque somewhere on the farm with all the names of the kids that died.
Garrett Webster moved away after that. Well, of course he did. Devastated. They said he was quite successful—became a banker or something. But he never came back. No one came back until Linda Webster.”
“But theweirdthing,” insisted Coco. “You didn’t say the weird thing.”
“Yes, all right, Coco,” said Mr. Easton patiently. “Theweird thing, as Miss Zintner puts it, is this: they never found any bodies. The schoolhouse was burned to rubble, of course, right down to the foundation stones. People came up from Rutland to pick through it. But nothing. No bonesor teeth. Nothing to bury. Just stones and the nails that had held the building together.”
