The Legend of Annie Murphy Read online

  Mac nodded very somberly. “Yeah, I think I know where they are.”

  FIVE

  Deputy Erskine Hatch returned to the Crackerby Boardinghouse without finding the sheriff. “No sign of him. I found his tracks going into that old crack in the west cliff, but they went in there and just . . . well, that’s as far as they went. He kind of disappeared after that.”

  Mrs. Crackerby gasped. “What if Annie took him, pulled him straight down into hell?”

  “Hardly,” Judge Crackerby scoffed.

  “But I found two other sets of footprints coming back out of there,” the deputy added. “They were smaller. Maybe some kids were in there.”

  Judge Crackerby’s face brightened as wheels turned in his head. “Two children, you say?” He picked up a calico skirt from the coffee table and handed it to Hatch. “Two children were here only moments ago, and the girl was wearing this.”

  Hatch stared at the skirt. “Uh . . . why isn’t she wearing it now?”

  Judge Crackerby exchanged a brief, knowing glance with his wife, who was still seated in the big chair looking pale. “She slipped out of it as she made her escape.”

  “Escape?”

  “They’re strangers, Deputy, and clever practical jokers. I want them found and brought back here. The boy is around five-and-a-half feet tall with blond hair; the girl a little shorter and blond as well. They’re both just entering adolescence and dressed strangely.”

  That rang a bell in Hatch’s memory. “Did the boy have a shirt advertising a Chicago livestock company?”

  The judge raised an eyebrow. “So you’ve seen them?”

  Hatch nodded. “Out on the street. They said they were new in town.”

  The judge laughed derisively. “Well, I think they have an explanation for all this ghost business, and I’m going to get it out of them.”

  Hatch examined the skirt. “Hmm. Still has the Bodine Mercantile’s tag on it.”

  “Stolen, no doubt.”

  “I’ll get to work on it.”

  “Find those kids, Deputy!” The judge’s eyes narrowed with menace. “And bring them to me!”

  The kids had managed to slip unseen out of town, and now they were sneaking, stooping, and crawling up the hill toward the cemetery, the last place they’d seen their father.

  “Ouch!” Lila plucked a cactus thorn from her hand. “I guess we’re solid again.”

  Jay raised his head just enough to see the town below. “Yeah, the town’s solid too. Guess we’re all the way into the past like before.”

  “So what’s happening to us?”

  “Well, I think we’re fading between the past and the present every time gravity gets wiggly.”

  “So why can’t we just stay in the present where we belong?”

  “That’s what we have to find out.”

  They kept crouching until they were hidden from the town by the crest of the hill. Then they straightened up, confident they would not be seen. They found the cemetery, in much better shape now, with the headstones new and still standing. There were even flowers on some of the graves.

  “Here it is,” said Lila.

  She’d found the grave of Cyrus Murphy. It was still fresh, recently dug.

  “Oh no . . .” said Jay.

  Beside Cyrus’s grave was another, more freshly dug: the grave of Annie Murphy.

  “So she is dead,” said Lila. “Then how could we have seen her?”

  Jay shook his head, totally perplexed. “It’s this time warpy stuff, I guess. Everything’s mixed up. But I wonder . . .” He stared at Annie’s grave.

  “What?”

  “Why is her grave here in the past, but not in the present?”

  “Maybe the marker got moved.”

  “Maybe.”

  They looked toward the cliff to the south. They knew just where to find the image of the weeping woman, but . . .

  “Can you see it?” Lila asked.

  Jay squinted, closed one eye, and tried to retrace all the landmarks he could recognize, but the image wasn’t there. He shook his head. “If it was a natural formation, you’d think it would still be there.”

  “So somebody carved it, all right.”

  “Which means it hasn’t been done yet.”

  Lila recalled, “Professor MacPherson said Annie Murphy was a wood and stone carver. She could have done it . . .”

  “But it’s not there yet, and she’s dead.”

  Lila’s face sank. “Oh yeah . . .”

  Jay thought a moment. “But what if—let’s just try this a minute—what if Annie isn’t dead? I mean, Mrs. Crackerby and the gardener both saw her and thought she was a ghost. But like we just found out, when this time thing gets stirred up and we fade between the past and the present, everything looks ghostly to us.”

  Lila nodded, turning it over in her mind. “And we must look like ghosts to them. We scared Mrs. Crackerby pretty good.”

  “So it goes both ways.”

  “Well, we know we’re not ghosts. If we were really dead, we’d be in heaven with the Lord right now, not stumbling around in the past trying to figure out what happened.”

  “So what does that say about Annie Murphy? She looked like a ghost when we saw her, and she must have looked like a ghost to those other people. But she doesn’t have to be dead to do that. Maybe she’s alive and tangled up in all this time business just like we are.”

  Lila’s eyes brightened. “And maybe she’s the one who got us tangled up in it. It all started when she ran into us.” Then her face fell again. “So why is her grave here?”

  “I think there are some missing pieces to this puzzle that we need to find out.” Jay was already laying plans. “What did Mrs. Crackerby say? Something about Annie being up in her old room?”

  “Up in her and Cyrus’s old room, looking out the window.” She snapped her fingers. “And remember what Professor MacPherson said? He said Annie shot her husband in the bedroom of a boardinghouse!”

  “Let’s go have a look.”

  The Crackerby Boardinghouse had a back door that opened into a rear hallway. The door was unlocked for the benefit of boarders who came and went, and the kids timed it pretty well: They could hear Eloise working in the kitchen and the Crackerbys talking in some closed room somewhere. But nobody was around to see them enter and sneak up the back stairway.

  Upstairs they found a long, beautifully woodworked hallway with a thick carpet to muffle their footsteps. The trick now was to find the room Annie and Cyrus had rented. The first door they came to opened on a broom closet. The second was locked and so was the third. The fourth was ajar, and they took a peek inside.

  It was a spacious, airy room with a large, four-poster bed and a lacy-curtained window. There was a beautiful, claw-footed dresser in the corner that made Lila breathe a slow gasp of admiration. But it was the object sitting on top of the dresser that drew them farther into the room.

  It was a wood carving of an old miner in a droopy hat smoking a pipe while sitting on a keg of blasting powder. The humor of the piece was easy to see and chuckle about. The artistic skill was so impressive that Jay and Lila just stood there a moment admiring it, hesitant to touch it.

  Finally, with the utmost care and respect, Jay rotated the carving, then lifted it, looking for the signature of the artist. He finally found a name crudely carved on the bottom: A. Murphy, 4 •18•85.

  There were other carvings in the room, just as beautifully done: a cowboy on a bucking horse, a mother and her daughter all dressed up for church, and a bust of . . .

  “Cyrus!” Lila exclaimed, recognizing the face from the old photograph.

  “This is it,” Jay said. “This was their room. Mrs. Crackerby must have left everything just the way it was.”

  “Maybe because she feels guilty,” Lila theorized. “She wants to appease Annie’s ghost.” She carefully studied the carving of Cyrus Murphy, noting the toolwork, the technique. “What do you think, Jay? Recognize the style?”

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nbsp; He nodded. “Annie did that carving in the cliff. It had to be her.” Then he frowned. “But how?”

  “It must have something to do with being a ghost,” Lila quipped.

  Jay felt unsteady on his feet. “Whoa, careful . . .”

  “Oh-oh!”

  They both knew what was happening. Gravity was having another hiccup.

  And they were on the second floor!

  “Let’s get out of here!” Jay said, and they bolted for the door.

  Too late. Their feet sank right through the dissolving floor, and they dropped into the room below, settling slowly like leaves falling from a tree.

  Unfortunately, the room below happened to be Judge Crackerby’s office, and the Crackerbys happened to be there. They were standing at the window, their backs to the room, having a hushed conversation as Jay floated down from the ceiling. He could see he was heading for a big splash in the middle of Judge Crackerby’s desk, something that would be hard to do quietly.

  But there was no need to worry. As he put out his arms to break his fall, his hands passed right through the judge’s important papers. He belly flopped into the desk and kept right on falling. When he finally came to rest on solid—which meant, present-day— ground, the terrain had changed a bit. Apparently the rubble of the house’s ruins had filled in what used to be the crawl space under the house. Jay couldn’t hide under the floor; he found himself only two inches deep in it, barely hidden under Judge Crackerby’s desk.

  “She’s come back, Amos!” Mrs. Crackerby was saying. “She’s come back to haunt us because she knows what we did!”

  Where was Lila? Jay poked his head out through the side of the desk to look around.

  Oh no! There was her head on the sofa, her chin resting on the cushion and her eyes on the Crackerbys. Jay could see through the murky sofa just enough to know the rest of her body was still attached, hiding inside.

  Lila saw Jay’s head sticking out of the desk and mouthed the words, “I’m okay.” She could still feel gravity tipping a little.

  It seemed Mrs. Crackerby was feeling the same thing. “Ohhh . . .” the big woman said with her hand to her forehead. “I still feel dizzy.”

  She turned from the window. Lila pulled her head inside the sofa like a turtle pulling into its shell.

  “Well it’s no surprise, the way you’ve been carrying on,” said the judge, sitting down at his desk and sliding his feet under it. His feet just about clipped Jay’s nose. “It’s high time you got control of yourself before you ruin everything!”

  Mrs. Crackerby settled onto the sofa. The cushions compressed under her weight, squishing down and exposing Lila’s head, which poked up right beside Mrs. Crackerby’s more-than-adequate posterior. Lila squirmed and struggled, trying to submerge herself again.

  “She was looking across the street, Amos!” said Mrs. Crackerby. “She was looking at the roof of the mercantile. She was figuring it out!”

  The judge shuffled through the papers on his desk. “She isn’t going to figure out anything! I’m going to find her first!”

  “But what could you do even if you did find her?”

  He muttered and stammered and then growled, “You ask too many questions.”

  Then Lila spotted Jay’s foot sticking out through the side of the judge’s desk. Jay, Jay, pull your foot in! she thought.

  “Well, at least you know I’m not crazy! You saw the ghosts of those two children yourself!”

  The judge looked up from his papers just as Lila finally managed to get her head down. “They were not ghosts, Beulah! They were tricksters and deceivers, and when Deputy Hatch rounds them up, they’re going to explain how they pulled off that clever little illusion!”

  Mrs. Crackerby’s voice took on an eerie tone. “Maybe Eloise is right. Maybe the spirits are seeking justice.”

  The judge slammed his papers down. “Beulah, you have no idea how foolish you sound, nor do you realize how far this hysteria of yours is going! John and Irma just came by—”

  “They did?”

  “I told them you were in no condition to have visitors.”

  “Amos!”

  “But they’ve already heard the ghost talk around town, and now they’re blaming ghosts for the rocks falling off the cliffs near their home. Hmmph! A rock slide blamed on ghosts, of all things!”

  “But what about the Billings? They saw—”

  “They think they saw something, that’s all!”

  “Amos, they saw Annie and Cyrus looking right at them from the cliffs above where the Murphys were building their cabin.”

  “Balderdash!”

  “It’s her way of warning us that she’s watching! She’s watching and listening to everything we say!” Mrs. Crackerby’s voice fell to a hush. “There could be ghosts in this room right now, listening to our every word!”

  You’re not too far off, Lila thought.

  “I am not about to be intimidated,” said the judge. “The auction’s tonight at eight, and we are going to participate, ghosts or no ghosts, Sheriff Potter or no Sheriff Potter.”

  Lila gasped. Something had grabbed her.

  “What was that?” Mrs. Crackerby whispered.

  “What was what?” asked the judge.

  Lila saw she’d been grabbed by her brother. She mouthed, “How did you—”

  He motioned to her to follow him. They slipped through the wall behind the sofa and into the hallway outside.

  “How did you do that without them seeing you?” Lila asked him in a hushed whisper.

  “I crawled outdoors first and circled around,” he answered. “Come on before we turn solid again and get trapped in here.”

  They got out of the boardinghouse, being careful to stay out of sight. The town of Bodine didn’t need any more ghost sightings for today.

  “Right now we can see both the present and the past,” Jay said as they hurried through back alleys and behind fences. “Maybe we’ll be able to see Dad and let him know what’s going on.”

  They didn’t know exactly where to look but decided they would find their father if they had to search the whole canyon.

  In the present, it was getting close to dawn. Dr. Cooper, Richard MacPherson, and Sheriff Dustin Potter had just returned from a fruitless search of the canyon. They sat in the jeep near the south end of the ruins trying to figure out what to do next. Cooper and Mac were nearly exhausted. Sheriff Potter was still suffering from shock and confusion.

  “No sign of them,” said Dr. Cooper, upset. “So maybe they are in the past.”

  “We don’t know for sure,” said Mac. “I’m only guessing about a possible time vortex, and so far I can’t tell you how it works, or what triggers it, or where to find it. Apparently the sheriff and the kids encountered it back in that cliff, but it’s no longer there.”

  “But you figure the kids could have fallen into it.”

  “It’s starting to look that way. The kids may have encountered the vortex the same time the sheriff did, and they all fell into it at the same time and—” He froze, staring toward the ruins. He grabbed Dr.

  Cooper’s arm. “Heads up, Jake!”

  Dr. Cooper looked in the same direction.

  Two vague shapes were coming their way, floating and drifting through the ruins like wisps of smoke.

  Dr. Cooper stood in the jeep. “It’s them!” He waved, then leaped from the jeep and waved some more. “Jay, Lila, can you see us?”

  “If we can see them, they should be able to see us,” Mac advised him.

  The two ghostly shapes waved back excitedly and began running toward them.

  Dr. Cooper started to run, but Mac held him back. “Don’t, Jake!”

  Dr. Cooper almost jerked his arm away. “Why? What’s wrong?”

  “If you try to touch them, you could interrupt the time–dimensional interphase and lose them for good—or be sucked into the time vortex yourself.”

  Dr. Cooper was desperate to touch his kids, to hold them again. “You can�
��t mean that.”

  “We don’t know how it all works!” Mac insisted.

  Dr. Cooper stood still and let the kids approach. It was eerie. They seemed to be moving in slow motion, then fast motion, then slow again; they were fading in and out, first almost solid, then so transparent they almost disappeared.

  “The town!” cried the sheriff, his voice strangely distant. “I can see the town again!” And then he cried out as if falling.

  Mac looked back over his shoulder and saw the sheriff sitting in the road—waist-deep in the road, as if the gravel and dirt were liquid around his body. He was transparent just like the kids, and looking very perplexed about it as he twisted his head around, gawking in every direction.

  “Bodine!” he was saying. “Bodine! It’s back!”

  Mac looked toward the kids again. They had come within ten feet of their father, but Dr. Cooper had gestured for them not to come any closer.

  Dr. Cooper could see their lips moving, but their voices were so faint and garbled that he couldn’t understand them. He quickly responded with the OK hand signal and mouthed the words, “Are you okay?”

  Their images wavered and fluctuated, but he could tell they were nodding yes. Jay began to signal back in Morse code, making dot and dash motions with his finger. We are in the past. June 8, 1885.

  How did you get there? Dr. Cooper signaled.

  Jay answered, We were following Annie Murphy. Lila pointed toward the cliff to the west.

  Dr. Cooper nodded. He understood. Tracked you that far. Found camera.

  Jay nodded excitedly. Took pictures of Annie.

  What happened?

  The kids looked beyond their father, seeing something behind him. Their faces registered shock.

  They were gone. Instantly. There was nothing to see now but the empty canyon and the ruins in the early gray light of morning.

  “Jay! Lila!” Dr. Cooper cried out, his heart breaking. “Are you there? Can you hear me?”

  “Who were those kids?” came a voice behind him.

  Cooper turned. It was the sheriff. He was solid again, staring at the spot where the kids had stood.

  “They were my children,” Dr. Cooper replied.

  “For a minute, they were the only thing that still looked solid,” said the sheriff.