Chapter Two
Today, I baby-sat for the Lodge kids with Pyle and Vince.
By the time we arrived, Pyle had Vince all nervous telling him what could happen with those jewel thieves and espionage and all that. When a cat came along, Vince jumped a mile.
"Oh, there's nothing to worry about, Sergeant," Pyle assured him. "It's not the jewel thieves—it's a cat." Pyle picked the cat up and stroked his fur. Vince rang the doorbell.
Two girls who looked exactly alike opened the door. "Hi!" they said in unison. "Mom and Dad already left for their meeting in Pasadena. They left after they heard you were coming."
We were all shocked. "Shazam! Your parents just left you kids here alone?" Pyle exclaimed. "Don't they know it's dangerous?"
"Yeah," said Vince. "If they're just going to leave you alone anyway why hire baby-sitters?"
"Well," the one girl responded, "they only left about ten minutes ago, 'cause they knew you'd all be coming soon."
"That's no excuse," I answered. "You could get hurt being here all alone."
"Oh, we don't mind," the other girl said nonchalantly. "It's fun to rule the house for a few minutes. By the way, I'm Samantha and this is Denise. And you can come in."
We walked in. Vince looked around expectantly. "Isn't there supposed to be another kid? Louise?"
The first girl, Denise, laughed. "You mean Louis. He's upstairs in his crib."
Samantha noticed the cat Pyle was holding. "You've met Mr. Fritz," she announced.
Vince looked dubious. "Mr. Fritz?" he repeated.
Samantha stroked the cat's fur. "Yup. He's the family cat. His father was from Germany, so we thought we'd give him a German name."
Pyle handed the cat to her. "Well, he sure is a handsome cat. What kind is he?"
"He's a purebred Blue-and-White Persian," Denise said proudly. "And he's the smartest cat there ever was, or will be. History is his specialty. Just ask him a history question. He'll answer correctly in Morse code."
In a low voice, Vince said to Pyle and me, "Typical little girls' imagination."
Just then we heard a loud clatter. "What was that?" I exclaimed.
We were going to rush up the stairs to find out when this little kid came toddling down, holding a long wooden bar in each hand.
"Louis!" Denise reprimanded him, "you're not supposed to do that!"
"What'd he do?" I asked.
"Nothing much," Samantha replied. "He just unscrewed the bars on his crib and jumped out again. He does it once every day, and you never know when, so you always have to be on the alert."
Louis held out a bar to Vince and said something in unintelligible baby talk.
"Kid, you ought to be careful with those things! You could hurt somebody—including yourself!" Vince scolded.
Suddenly Denise said in a loud voice, "I saw her again today."
We all turned to look. "You saw who?" Pyle asked.
"Miss Mabel," Denise answered simply.
"Who's Miss Mabel?" Vince asked. He looked like he half-expected the answer.
But he wasn't prepared for what Samantha said next. "Miss Mabel is a ghost. She used to live in this house. She lives on the fourth floor in her old room. One night, Denise and I saw her walking down the hall, singing ‘Somewhere My Love.' We told Mom, but she just thinks it's our imagination."
"But you believe us, don't you?" Denise added. "We're telling the truth. Every word is true."
Vince couldn't believe what he was hearing. "A ghost?"
"Shazam!" Pyle exclaimed. "She's a good ghost, I hope."
Denise and Samantha nodded vigorously. "Oh, yes!" they said together.
"What do you think of that, Vince?" I asked in a low voice.
"What do you think I think of it, Boyle?" Vince replied. "It's just their version of an imaginary friend. Surely you don't think I believe there's really a ghost living here, do you?"
I looked at him, amused. "Who knows? Some girls do have imaginary friends, but others actually have seen ghosts," was all I said. Vince looked annoyed.
Suddenly Denise spoke up. "I'm hungry," she said matter-of-factly. "And . . . Oh, no! I think Louis is climbing up the cupboard!"
"He is?" Pyle exclaimed. "Well, golly, we've got to get him down from there 'fore he hurts himself!"
We dashed into the kitchen, where it started to snow. Dry, wheat-like flake poured down. Oatmeal.
We looked up. There was Louis, hanging precariously from the bottom cupboard shelf, triumphantly holding a half-empty carton of Quaker's oatmeal. "Goo da mash!" he said. He jumped down to the oven range and then to the floor.
"He said ‘It's snowing uncooked mush,'" Samantha interpreted. "He opens the oatmeal cartons and pours it out. Once he even did it when we had guests."
"Oh brother," Vince moaned.
"Well," Pyle said, "I guess we'd better clean it up 'fore it gets tracked into the carpet. Why, back home in Mayberry, Maude and Cora Mendlebright talk on the telephone for hours every Sunday. One topic they covered was tracking oatmeal into the carpet."
Vince was starting to lose patience. "Pyle!"
"I'll get the broom and dustpan," Denise volunteered. "We keep them in the old dumbwaiter."
She opened an ancient door and took out a yellow broom and matching dustpan. "We just moved in a month ago," she said, as she and Samantha energetically helped us clean up the fallen oatmeal. "Our house has four floors and a basement and an attic. And since Sam is the adventurous one, she somehow always manages to slip away and explore parts of our house she's never seen."
"Like the fourth floor," Samantha interjected. "I'm dying to go up there and see the ghost room."
Vince wasn't sure what to say to that, except, "Well, maybe your mother wouldn't like you going up there."
"Mom doesn't like her exploring anywhere," Denise told me. "Everytime Sam disappears, we look everywhere and can't find her. Mom always wants to call the police, but then Sam appears seemingly out of nowhere. She and I have found secret passages hidden all through the house. And we like to keep them secret. So even though I'm telling you we found them, I'm not going to say where they are."
Samantha then stood on a kitchen chair and said loudly, "I want to be called ‘Sam'!"
"That's fine with me," Pyle said agreeably. "I knew a little girl back home named Samantha. She always wanted to be called ‘Sam.' She wouldn't even come if you called her Samantha."
"Pyle, don't give her ideas!" Vince hissed.
After the oatmeal disaster was over, Pyle put Louis in his high-chair.
"What kinds of baby food does Louis like to eat?" Vince asked the girls.
"Not much," Denise replied. "He hates peaches, pineapples, beef surprise . . ."
As she continued her list, Vince opened a jar of carrots and tried to feed it to Louis. One spoonful and he pitched the whole thing across the room, luckily, minus the glass jar. It hit the wall and slid down.
Denise paused in her long list, surveyed the situation, and said very sweetly, " . . . And carrots."
Diary of Cpl. Charles Boyle
October 5th
"Where did Sam go?" Denise asked suddenly.
We all looked around the old kitchen. "Well, golly, I thought she was here," Pyle said nervously.
Vince opened the dumbwaiter, then shut it abruptly. "She's not in there," he stated.
Denise wasn't too worried. "Oh, she probably just went exploring again. That's her passion, you know. Exploring. Sam's the dare-devil."
I decided to go look for her while the others fixed food.
"I'd look up in the ghost room on the fourth floor," Denise called after me. "She's been wanting to browse around up there."
"Oh brother," I heard Vince say.
I had no idea which room the girls had christened "The Ghost Room," since all the rooms were deserted. All looked like places a ghost would adopt as home.
At the end of the hall, there was a door standing wide open, with a crayon-scrawled sign reading "Ghost Room." It looked ancient, but then, so did all the other rooms.
"Sam," I called softly. No answer.
I cautiously peered into the room. The furnishings were from the 19-century and had never been updated. "Sam, are you in here?"
The door slammed. This was ridiculous! I tried the knob. It was locked. Either there really were ghosts, or Samantha was playing a practical joke. She didn't seem like the type for that, however. Maybe some burglars had broken in. "Hey! Let me out of here!" I called. I pounded on the door, trying to get someone's attention. How could anyone hear me? As far as I knew, the only others in the house were four floors down.
The door opened suddenly, and I was thrown to the hallway floor outside. I looked to see who had opened the door. No one was in sight.
And then I saw this woman. She seemed to appear out of nowhere. She just suddenly came out of a wall.
What was going on? Maybe when I had been thrown to the floor I'd knocked myself unconscious or something and this was a resulting dream or hallucination.
But no, I was definitely conscious. And she was really there. It almost seemed like she was floating. She paused briefly to look at me, then wandered on down the hall and down the stairs.
I followed. Who was she?
When I reached the third floor, she'd disappeared. Then suddenly I heard someone calling for help. It sounded like Samantha.
I started looking for her, calling to her, but I didn't see anyplace she could be trapped in.
And then, a panel in the wall opened and Samantha came rushing out. I heard her say a few words to some unseen person, then she raced up to me.
"Hi, Corporal! Guess who rescued me from the secret panel?"
"Who? I didn't see anyone."
"Miss Mabel."
Miss Mabel? The so-called ghost? She was probably the lady I'd seen. It all made sense now. There really was a ghost living there.
We came downstairs and entered the kitchen. "Hi!" Samantha said cheerily.
"You went up in the ghost room, didn't you?" Denise asked, half-expecting the answer.
"I was heading that way," Samantha admitted. "But I got locked in some secret panel I'd never been in before. Miss Mabel rescued me."
Vince looked at me with a glance that said, That kid and her pretend ghost.
When I got to the part about the door locking, Pyle exclaimed, "It was a ghost who did it, wasn't it?"
Vince glared at him. "Pyle! You're a grown man! You know better than to believe such nonsense!"
I then told how the door suddenly opened. And about the woman I'd seen, and how it looked like she came right through the wall.
"Oh, Boyle! What's the matter with you?" Vince asked. "Did you knock yourself out or something?"
"Actually, Vince, that's what I wondered too. But I was conscious, and she was really there," I replied.
Pyle's thoughts immediately ran to Miss Mabel. "Shazam! There really must be a ghost living there!"
Vince started giving Pyle a lecture on how such things were "just not possible." But I wasn't so sure. There was something strange about that Lodge mansion, no matter what Vince—or anyone else—said. And whether Vince liked it or not, I had the feeling that we were going to find out what.
