House of Secrets

Chapter 7

She was a bone-white old woman, as tall as the stone angel, bald, with cracked lips pulled back over brown teeth. She stared at Jonathan with glistening steel-blue eyes. She wore dirty layers of rags and no shoes; her toenails were amber, encrusted with soil. She was the crone that Casper had seen and he feared, but a hundred times worse, and when she spoke, her breath was fouler than six-month-old compost.

“Leave this place!”

She wrapped her hand around Jon’s wrist. It felt like a rope. He tried to pull away, but she held him fast . . . and then she looked into his eyes. “Who are you?” she asked more quietly.

“J-Jonathan Walters,” he said.

“Walters?” she repeated.

Jon had never been so scared. Not scared stiff—beyond that, scared into action, like someone had shot a spike of adrenaline into his back. He twisted and wrested his hand free. He ran, spit flying out the side of his mouth. “Mom! Dad!”

Surely they’d seen her: She was a six-foot baldy with the body-mass index of a skeleton; she’d be tough to miss. He reached his family back at the Toyota after running across the lawn, which suddenly seemed to be the size of a football field.

“Jon, what’s wrong?"

“Are you okay?!” Nellie asked.

“I—you guys—you didn’t—?” Jonathan looked back. Suddenly the whole scene looked much smaller and safer to him. It couldn’t have been more than fifty feet from the sidewalk to the house. The whole time he’d been running, his heart pounding in his chest, still seeing the old crone’s face in front of him . . . that had been only seconds.

And the woman was gone.

The sun had moved. The side of Scott House was bathed in shadow. The stone angel might have been there or it might not. Shadows hid all sorts of things.

“Jonathan . . . ? Did something happen?” That was Alyssa. She was looking at him seriously; she knew he was freaked. Jonathan started to explain—but what would be the point? He couldn’t prove anything. He didn’t want to sound like a little kid.

“Nothing,” he said. “I just . . . I thought I lost this.”

He turned on his PSP. He had never been happier to see the title screen of Assassins. Back in a world that he understood and controlled, he slipped into the car.

A funny thing happened to Jonathan on the drive back from 422 Sea Cliff Avenue. Every second that he put between himself and the old crone, he became more and more convinced that she hadn’t been so scary after all. Dressed in rags, barefoot, with bad teeth . . . obviously she was a homeless lady. The more Jon thought about it, the more it made sense: She lived in the yard. That was why the price was so low. She’d been spying on the Walters, and she’d hidden when they’d spotted her—that was the darting shadow that Casper had seen. She loved the angel statue—she was obviously mentally disturbed; maybe she talked to it—and so she moved it (never mind how) when she saw Jonathan and his brother and sisters investigating. Then, when she had the chance, she snuck up on him to scare him, to drive his family away. And she asked his name because . . . because she was crazy! What other reason did there need to be?

Jonathan kept telling himself this as he went through the hypnotic motions of gaming, and soon he was not only convinced that the old crone wasn’t dangerous or supernatural (supernatural, come on); he was determined to go back and drive her from the property. After all, Brendan Walker wasn’t somebody you could just push around.

Sorry for the late update, guys :] *nervous laugh*