Under the Light by Laura Whitcomb

Author:Laura Whitcomb
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Love & Romance, Girls & Women, Family, Juvenile Fiction, Paranormal, Parents
ISBN: 9780547367545
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2013-11-14T23:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

Helen

JENNY TURNED THE PAGE OVER, but that was the last entry. She was trembling. I came to stand behind her again and rested my hand gently on her back to quell her fears.

Billy seemed uncertain now, took his hands off her arm. “Are you scared?” he asked. “They’re ghosts . . .”

“I’m not afraid of them,” she said. “I think one was trying to talk to me yesterday.”

I tensed, my spirit rippling with nerves. I wasn’t sure I wanted her to share our experience with Billy.

“Really?” He watched her face, fascinated. “What happened?”

Jenny folded up the pages. “It’s hard to describe. But I think maybe one of them drowned,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“Was it Helen?”

I squeezed her shoulder, but she made no sign of feeling my presence this time.

“At first I thought it was someone I’d met, maybe, during the time I can’t remember.” Jenny handed the pages back to Billy. “But he was probably just something I dreamed.”

“A ghost tried to talk to you?” he asked. “How?”

“I could have imagined it,” she said. “I’ve had a really strange week.”

“Tell me about it,” Billy whispered. He returned the pages to his pocket and pulled out a small, thin book from his other back pocket and held it out to her. “And it’s about to get even stranger.”

It had a soft cover, plain black, no title.

“Is that a journal?” asked Jenny.

“Sketchbook.” He opened it to the first page, where there was a beautiful pencil depiction of what looked like a wooden ladder and a kind of carpenter’s table. I recognized it but apparently they did not.

“Did you draw this?” Jenny touched the paper tentatively.

“No. Someone living in my room did it with my pencils and left it under my bed.” Billy turned to the second page. Another drawing, this one of the tree under which James and I had shared a picnic. “It’s the tree from school, across from the cafeteria.”

Jenny nodded. He kept turning the pages, five in all, not in chronological order of when James and I had visited them, but laid out as if James had been recalling random moments from our handful of days together. The third was a phone booth (the one where James and I spoke—he was holding the receiver to his ear, but he was speaking to me, and I was inches from him though invisible to everyone else); the next a sketch of two empty chairs and a table in the school library (where we did Billy’s homework assignment together); and the last was a drawing of a face, not mine, and not Jenny’s, but somehow both.

“Is that her?” Jenny asked out loud. An elderly man with an armful of art books was passing their carrel and stopped as if Jenny had spoken to him. Billy motioned her to hush. But the man did not move away—instead he stood a few feet from them, reading book covers in the adjacent aisle.

Billy turned to the next page in the journal and snatched up one of the little pencils from the shelf where scratch paper is left in small trays.

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