Lilah's Ghost
Deb Logan
Includes Bonus Story
Angelic Voices
and
Preview of
Smashwords Edition. Electronic edition published by WDM Publishing. Copyright © 2011 by Deb Logan.
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction, in whole or in part in any form. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
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Lilah’s Ghost
My best friend is a ghost, but sometimes I forget she’s dead.
I discovered Lilah at the end of June when my family moved into this old mansion on the remains of a Georgia cotton plantation. It’s not as grand as it sounds. The house is practically falling down around us and the live oaks, lining the drive, drip with grey-green moss. Very creepy.
The owner, Bill Richardson, lives in Oklahoma. He hadn’t been able to keep a tenant for more than a month in the ten years he’d owned it. I bet that’s because of Lilah.
I keep trying to guess when Lilah lived, but it’s hard to tell. She looks like a pretty normal girl, except she’s all silvery-white, so I have to guess at colors. Her hair is dark, like frosted coal, and she wears it in two long braids, the kind where each braid starts right at her forehead and ends in a little ribbon bow. She wears loose fitting jeans and a short-sleeve plaid shirt. My jeans aren’t baggy and rolled up at the ankles, but I have a shirt that looks just like hers. Her shoes are the biggest clue. I described them to Mom who said they were called saddle shoes, because the darker piece of leather that runs across the middle looks like a saddle. I don’t know anyone who wears shoes like that.
She’s really a very nice girl, but most folks aren’t too keen on chatting with the dead. Me, I’m used to it. Mom says I’m psychic and, since not every twelve-year-old talks to dead people, that I should keep this stuff to myself.
My name is Hannah Barnes and my family’s been here in Fraser, Georgia about six weeks. Before that, we lived in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Dad met Mr. Richardson when he did some repairs on the guy’s office. Richardson liked Dad’s work and offered him this gig. A free place to live if Dad would make the needed repairs to keep the place standing. He forgot to mention the ghost.
Dad’s making good progress restoring the mansion to its former glory while Mom works in town as a legal secretary. She tried helping Dad with the restoration, but the mansion makes her jumpy. She says the only way she can live here is to escape for forty hours each week.
Lilah and I try to help Dad as much as possible, but he gets jittery whenever Lilah hands him a tool. I guess it’s ‘cause he can’t see her. Maybe flying nail guns would freak me, too. Anyway, he asked me to keep her away from his work area, said it wasn’t safe for little girls to play with power tools. Right. He never had a problem with me helping him in Tulsa.
So, until school starts, I’ve got nothing to do but shoot the breeze with Lilah. Killing time with a ghost has its ups and downs. Lilah’s shown me all the house’s secrets from the priest hole behind the cellar wall to the loose floor board in the attic where an ancestor kept her diary. She’s even shown me cool stuff on the grounds, like the secret spot under the roots of the huge, live oak by the river. The only thing she won’t do is go beyond the big iron gate that separates the driveway from the road.
That’s a real bummer, because the Sweet Pea Festival is next week and I really want to go. I know, just because Lilah can’t go doesn’t mean I have to stay home. But what fun is a Sweet Pea Festival if you can’t share it with your best friend?
“Have you ever been to the Sweet Pea Festival?” I asked Lilah as we sat on the big porch that circles the house. Lilah calls it the verandah. I sat on the old-fashioned porch swing, pushing off every now and then with my left foot; Lilah sat suspended beside me. When I first sat down, it looked like she sat beside me until I started swinging. The swing kind of swooshed through her as it moved back and forth.
“Only once,” she said. “I went with my parents and little brother when I was ten.” She turned her silvery eyes toward me and I saw the sparkle of happy memory fade. “Something happened before the next one came around. Why are you asking about the Sweet Pea Festival?”
“Well, it’s next week, and I was kind of hoping you’d break your rule about stopping at the gate and go with me.”
The wooden slats of the swing pushed through her chest as Lilah shook her head. “Sorry, it doesn’t work that way. I can’t just decide to go somewhere new. I have, um, what’s the word? Oh, yes, boundaries. I have boundaries.”
Watching the swing move through Lilah started to make me queasy, so I anchored my foot and stopped swinging. “Who told you about the boundaries?”
She shrugged. “No one. It’s like I’m on a leash from the main staircase. The farther I get from it, the harder it is to move.” She pulled her legs up and sat tailor-fashion on the swing. “By the time I get to the gate, I’m so heavy, I can’t move.”
I nodded and put on my best sympathetic expression. I didn’t understand, but I acted like I did. “Um…when you…you know…died,” I watched her face to see if the word bothered her. No reaction, “…why didn’t you go to the Light? You did see the Light, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I saw it.” She closed her eyes and her face relaxed into a peaceful smile. “It was golden and warm and the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.” She opened them again, leaned forward, and said in a vibrant whisper, “I wanted to run right into it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
She leaned back, and her voice dulled. “I couldn’t. My little brother needed me.”
“I don’t understand. Your little brother asked you to stay?”
Lilah jumped off the swing and paced between the house and the porch rail. “It wasn’t his fault. He was only six. He didn’t mean to push me down the stairs!”
She rushed to my side and grabbed my hands. I felt ice grip my fingers, but I didn’t pull away.
“He cried so hard. He begged me not to leave.” She dropped my hands and kind of wilted onto the rotting floor boards. “I love William. I couldn’t leave him. Not alone and terrified.”
“But he’s not here anymore. He left you, didn’t he?”
“Yes.” She shook herself and straightened up again. “But now I have you,” she said, “and you’re the best friend ever. You’ll like the Sweet Pea Festival,” she said, and closed the subject of her death.
*~*~*
For a tiny little southern town, Fraser sure knows how to throw a party. The Sweet Pea Festival had country stuff like a petting zoo and hay rides, and all the regular fair rides like bumper cars and a Ferris Wheel. I’d seen a million carnivals in Tulsa, so I liked the local stuff best. The mayor sitting on a collapsible ledge, daring folks to dunk her for a dollar. The artists who set up booths and not only hawked their wares, but demonstrated their craft. After trying an “easy” project, most people could hardly wait to plunk down their hard-earned cash. The glass blower was the exception. He couldn’t re-create the fires he needed to melt the glass ingredients into a gooey blob, so he settled for a video clip and invitations to drop by his studio.