Chris Grabenstein - The Crossroads

“Yes! No matter what I say. No matter what I do. Don’t let me anywhere near Aidan, okay?”

“My, my, my. Who is this?”

The old bag, Gerda Spratling, appeared on the porch behind Sharon. She was wearing some sort of long black gown and a black veil that covered her face. She raised it to smile flirtatiously at Billy and give him a queasy stomach.

He tried hard to smile back. It wasn’t easy to do when a wrinkled old prune was giving you goo-goo eyes.

“Sharon?” Miss Spratling crowed dryly. “Who is this handsome young man? Your boyfriend, perchance?”

“No, ma’am.” Sharon’s ears burned red. “I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“Well, that doesn’t surprise me. Not in the least. You are rather homely.” Miss Spratling took a step forward. “Have we met before?” she asked Billy. “You look so familiar…especially around the eyes.”

Billy took off his sweat-stained baseball cap. “I’m just a friend of Sharon’s.”

“A friend, eh?” The old lady hunched her head toward her shoulder. “My, my, my.”

“Well, I have to go.”

“So soon?” Miss Spratling fluttered her eyelids. “You will call again, won’t you, Mr…. I’m sorry; I don’t believe I caught your name.”

“O’Claire. Billy O’Claire.”

Gerda Spratling cringed at the name.

O’Claire. Just like Mary O’Claire—the lying guttersnipe who walked off that bus and told all those horrible lies about Clint Eberhart.

She should have hated anyone named O’Claire.

But this charming boy named Billy was just too handsome to hate—almost too handsome to resist.

With such soulful blue, blue eyes.

Judy decided not to tell anybody else about the ghosts.

It would only scare Zack, and her new husband didn’t really believe in “goofy stuff” like goblins and ghouls. Even if George didn’t think she was crazy, Judy still didn’t want to talk to him about ghosts because he had one of his own. So did Zack. In fact, they shared the same one. How could you talk to people about the ghosts you thought you’d chatted with when they both wished they could talk one more time with just one: their late wife, their dead mother?

The ghost sightings would remain Judy’s secret. If she needed to talk to somebody about it, Mrs. Emerson would be more than happy to oblige.

Judy was out in the woods near the big stump, tamping down the soil around a newly planted rosebush, when George came out to join her.

“Hey,” she said. “All packed?”

“Yeah. What are you up to?”

“Putting in a couple rosebushes.”

“Neat. Have you seen Zack? I promised him I’d pound a few nails before I took off for the airport.”

“He and Davy went swimming again. They have a secret lagoon.”

George smiled. “Really? I had one of those when I was his age.”

“I think this one’s really a cow pond.”

“Yeah. Mine was, too. There was this big boulder you could dive off of. We called it Dead Man’s Bluff.”

They heard the crunch of gravel under tires—cars pulling off the road.

“Well, here she comes,” Judy said. “Right on schedule.”

George peered through the trees, down to the highway. “I remember seeing that Cadillac when I was a kid. They used to drive it up the middle of the road. Thought they owned the streets as well as everybody’s souls.”

“George? Behave. Promise?”

“Yes, dear.”

There were three cars parked on the shoulder of the highway this week. The Cadillac, the Hyundai, and, a new addition, a maroon Lincoln Town Car. Judy saw the feeble old chauffeur climb out of the big-bumpered Caddy and shuffle around to the right rear door.

A dark-haired young priest stepped around to the trunk of the Lincoln and disappeared under the lid. When he emerged, he was carrying a four-foot-tall resin statue.

“Oh, boy,” mumbled George. “Is that a birdbath?”

Judy shushed him.

“Hello again,” Judy called out cheerfully as Miss Spratling and the priest trudged up the woodsy slope to the stump. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”

“Mrs. Jennings,” the old woman said. Her voice was dry ice.

“What a pretty statue,” Judy said to the priest, a man she had never met before.

“Thank you,” he panted.

Miss Spratling cleared her throat. Loudly.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” said Judy. “Miss Spratling, I’d like you to meet my husband, George Jennings. He grew up here in North Chester.”

George extended his hand. “I’m very pleased to finally make your acquaintance, Miss Spratling.”

Miss Spratling clucked her tongue. “My, my, my. You’re just like your father, aren’t you? All la-di-da and polite. Just like your father.”

“Excuse me?”

The old woman pointed her gnarled finger at Judy’s new planting. “What is that?”

“A white rosebush.”

“Pull it out of the ground this instant! That’s where the statue is meant to go!”

“Whoa!” said George. “Take it easy, Miss Spratling. My wife was simply trying to—”

“I will not have you two defiling sacred ground!”

“And I will not have you telling us what we can and cannot do on our own property.”

“This is not your property, Mr. Jennings! Clint Eberhart purchased this soil with his soul!”

“Is that so? I’m a lawyer, so I’ll need to see the deed and title report.”

Miss Spratling scowled, then seethed.

The priest dabbed his brow with a linen handkerchief. “I just came to bless the statue,” he said. “To commemorate the fiftieth anniversary.”

“The anniversary of what?” George demanded.

Miss Spratling’s lips quivered.

“The accident,” said Judy.

“It was no accident, you foolish little girl! I remember what that bus driver did to Clint.” She glared at George. “I remember what others did to my father!”

“Look, it’s okay, George,” said Judy. “She can put her statue there for the celebration.”

“Celebration? Why, you ignorant, ill-bred child!”

“Hey!” George shot back. Judy cut him off with a shake of her head.

Miss Spratling knotted her fists. “There is nothing here to celebrate!”

“I’m sorry, I meant—”

“You wait. You’ll see. One day, your husband here will drop dead and you will be forced to go on living—knowing that you will never, ever see him again. When that happens, will you celebrate, Mrs. Jennings? Will you decorate your home with gaily colored balloons?”

“Okay.” Judy had heard enough. “We’re going inside now. You can pull up the rosebush. You can tear out everything. You can do whatever you want.”

“My, my, my. Aren’t you congenial?”

Then Miss Spratling grabbed the thorny rosebush with her black-gloved hands and ripped its roots right out of the ground.

Zack and Davy saw and heard everything.

They had come back from the swimming hole and were hiding in a thicket where they had a leaf-framed view of the Wicked Witch and her priest.

“So, pardner,” Davy whispered, “you think that statue is made out of plastic?”

Zack watched as the priest twisted the statue down into the loose dirt.

“Sure looks like plastic.” Zack heard a hollow plunk when the priest banged its pedestal against a rock. “Sounds like plastic, too.”