The Girl in the Lake by India Hill Brown

Author:India Hill Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.

“Is anyone afraid?” I ask.

Owen and Capri shake their heads, but I can’t tell if they’re telling the truth or not.

“Grandma said she wasn’t scary, remember?” Daisy says.

“So, let me get this straight,” Capri says. “You’re afraid of thunderstorms but not the possibility of talking to a ghost?”

“Well, it’s not really the storms I’m afraid of, it’s the possibility of the power going out or someone getting hurt,” Daisy says.

“And that kind of already happened,” Capri tells her, pointing toward her knee. “The getting hurt part.”

Daisy shrugs. “Yeah. It’s just like how you’re not really afraid of driving, you’re just afraid of messing up, because you like to be perfect.”

“Who told you that?” Capri says, narrowing her eyes.

“Um. I thought it was Celeste, but now I’m not so sure.”

“Well, now that we have that out of the way,” Capri says, rolling her eyes. “It feels like we’re stalling. Let’s do this.”

Capri runs to her room and comes back out with her cell phone and a chair. She turns on the flashlight app.

“Spot me, Celeste,” Capri says. I hold the chair still while Capri stands on top, grabs the string, and pulls the attic door down. It creaks open and the steps lead to what looks like a black hole in the ceiling.

She shines her phone into the attic. It gives us a small view, but it’s still pretty dark.

“Creepy,” Owen says.

Capri takes a deep breath and hoists herself up. She grunts a little bit, and muscles pop out of her arms and legs. “You come, Celeste, then we can help Daisy up and Owen can come up last.”

We help one another up and look around the cramped, hot space.

“And Grandad said there was no light switch?” Owen asks.

“Nope. No bulb, either,” I say.

Owen doesn’t say anything.

We each walk around the attic. I try to remember exactly which box it was that I’m thinking of. I know it was by the window. It’s hard to see anything the farther we get from the attic door with the weak light that filters in from downstairs. It’s cloudy, so even the small window isn’t giving us much light.

There are boxes everywhere. Owen stumbles into one, and the sound makes us all jump.

My foot hits a really worn-looking box. I open it and it’s a jumble of random items: shoes and old clothes that look like they belong to a little girl. Maybe these were my mom’s things.

The attic gets a shade darker.

“Let’s move on,” I say.

Owen grabs another box and opens it, throwing things around. It just looks like a bunch of Christmas decorations.

“Nothing,” he says.

Finally, I see what looks like the box I saw when I was up here with Grandad.

“There it is,” I say. I wonder what we’ll find.

We open the box. I don’t see the pair of eyes staring at me like I did before. There are a bunch of old newspapers and photo albums.

We pull out a big tan photo album and a few newspapers. The photo album is worn; some of the edges are coming off and it seems like the cover is hanging on by a thread.

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