The Haunted

“I gotta go,” Megan said, and headed down the hallway to the bathroom.

Julian found himself still jingling his keys. He hadn’t realized how nervous he was, how much he wanted to get out of the house, until his daughter said she had to use the bathroom. James looked in that direction and started to say something, but Julian cut him off. “You can go at Taco Bell.”

“McDonald’s!”

“Whatever.”

As soon as Megan finished, he ushered the kids out of the house, not relaxing until they were safely in the van.

“You said we were going to flip a coin,” James said.

Julian nodded. “We will.”

“But how will we know where we’re going unless we do it first?”

Julian pushed himself up from the seat in order to get a hand in his pocket. He pulled out a dime. “Okay, call it.”

“Heads!” they both said in unison.

“One person gets heads; one person gets tails,” he said patiently.

“I want heads,” James insisted.

Megan sighed melodramatically. “Fine.”

Julian flipped the coin, called it. “Tails.”

“Ha!” Megan said, pointing a finger in her brother’s face and grinning.

“Taco Bell it is.” Julian drove to the fast-food restaurant, where they ate a reasonably harmonious meal before heading over to the library. James parked himself in front of one of the computers and Megan wandered into the young-adult stacks, while Julian went over to the reference desk to talk to the librarian. As he’d suspected, the library did have a lot of items dealing with local history. There was actually a closet-size “history room” that held nothing but books, brochures, pamphlets and magazines related to the history of Jardine and Tomasito County. Most of the items could not be checked out, but they could be studied in the library, and Julian pulled out two volumes that looked promising: the relatively recent New Mexico Ghost Stories and the considerably older Tales of Tomasito County. Behind a glass case were stacks of old newspapers, and he asked the librarian whether he could look through them, but she said the papers were in fragile condition and were kept in the case for protection. There was microfiche of the newspapers available, however, and a viewer near the computers, and she showed him the file cabinet containing the microfiche, explaining how they were organized by year.

Julian couldn’t spend all day in the library, and even if he could, he still wouldn’t be able to read everything. So he skimmed the books, neither of which was as helpful as he’d hoped, before grabbing a handful of microfiche and sitting down to scroll through the headlines of Jardine’s early days. The newspapers didn’t go back as far as he wanted—maybe not enough people could read back then—but he began at 1900 and started working forward.

Megan came up while he was still halfway through the year 1901 and asked whether she could go to her friend Kate’s house for the afternoon. Kate was standing next to her; the two had obviously run into each other.

Or they had purposely planned to meet here.

It was impossible to keep up with the cell phone shenanigans of teenage girls.

Kate smiled shyly. “Hi, Mr. Perry.”

Julian looked from one to the other. “You can go,” he told Megan. “If your mom is home,” he said to Kate.

“My mom’s right here. Mom!” she called.

There was a chorus of shushing from annoyed patrons, and the librarian at the front counter frowned at her, but seconds later, Kate’s mother was standing before him, and the two of them talked over logistics. She and Kate were going to The Store first, but then they were going home, and Megan was welcome to come with them.

“What time should I pick her up?” Julian asked.

“Oh, I’ll drop her off. What time do you want her back?”

“Five o’clock,” Julian decided.

After saying their good-byes, his daughter happily went off with her friend, and Julian paused for a moment to check on James and make sure he was all right. Sitting between two other boys, his son was deeply engrossed in the cartoony mayhem of a computer game, and, satisfied, Julian went back to his microfiche.

Sometime later, Julian became aware that a person was standing behind him. Assuming it was another patron who wanted to use the microfiche reader, he was all set to apologize for hogging the equipment when he turned to see James standing there. In a first, James said he was tired of playing games and wanted to leave. Usually it was the other way around, and Julian glanced at his watch, shocked to see that it was almost three o’clock. He hadn’t really come across anything useful yet, and didn’t want to feel as though he’d wasted the entire afternoon, so he said, “Ten more minutes.”

“I’m bored, Dad.”

“I know. But …” He had a sudden idea. “Hey, do you want to hang out at Mom’s office?”

James’s face lit up. “Yeah!”