Free Rain of the Ghosts by Greg Weisman Page B

approve?
    Her mother seemed to be considering the same things. Finally, she took a deep breath and said, “We can discuss it.” Which meant not now .
    Rain looked around from the doorway, craning her neck into the far corners, looking for some sign that she was welcome. Nothing spoke to her, but eventually she began to feel silly standing out in the hall. She stumbled in. Her mother had resumed her redistributions and took no notice. Rain tried to affect nonchalance as she wandered about the room. It’s bigger than mine . The thought left her feeling immediately guilty. She didn’t want to want it that way. It’s not across the hall from Callahan. Another thought unbidden. Her face tightened. No. I’ll stay across from him. He’s not getting away with this. Whatever this was.
    Rain paused to look down at ’Bastian’s old Spanish desk. An antique map of the Ghost Keys was unrolled flat on the dark wood and held in place by two paperweights: a steel-cased compass and her grandfather’s homemade astrolabe. He had tried to teach her to use both when she was nine. She had mastered the compass easily enough, but the astrolabe was beyond her then. Now she didn’t remember what it was even for. A good paperweight though.
    She studied the map. It suddenly struck her that the islands were correctly labeled: “The Ghost Keys” and not “The Prospero Keys.” A local made this map, she thought. She found the legend and a date, “Summer, 1799.” A very old local.
    Rain crossed to the bed and peeked inside an open box. A faded embroidered pillow lay on top. “What’s this?” she asked and pulled it out.
    Her mother paused to look. She gently took the pillow from Rain. It had been white once with irises neatly stitched into the cotton fabric. Now the white had yellowed and there was a brown water stain across the back. “Your Grandma Rose made this. When I was little I wouldn’t go to sleep without it.” Iris shook her head in something like amazement. “I had no idea Dad kept this.”
    “He was very sentimental.”
    “I suppose. I never thought of him that way. To me, he was this dashing rake. Like a pirate in an old movie.”
    Rain tilted her head and gave her mother an incredulous look.
    Iris tilted her head right back. “I know. That sounds silly to you. But you only knew him as a very old man. He was so handsome, Rain. He wasn’t young when he had me, but even when I was your age all my friends still had big crushes on him. Ask Charlie’s mom.”
    Now Rain looked ill. “Mrs. Dauphin had a crush on Papa?”
    Rain’s mother considered this for a moment and soon her expression mirrored Rain’s. “Yeah, I thought it was creepy too.”
    Rain felt a desperate need to change the subject. She took another look inside the box, reached in and pulled out a glass-framed black and white photograph that had long ago begun to brown with age. She glanced at it. Men in front of an old airplane. She started to put it down on the bed, to reach deeper into the box. Then she froze.
    Terrified, she slowly turned her head to look at the picture again. It was like seeing a ghost, and for Rain that wasn’t just an expression. Men in front of an old airplane. Familiar men. The Eight. And standing in the center of the crowd: the Dark Man. To be sure, she silently counted the heads. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten? She counted again. And a third time. It wasn’t the Eight plus One Dark Man. It was the Eight plus One Dark Man plus one more.…
    She studied each face carefully to see if she could find the extra body. The ghost who hadn’t yet appeared. It wasn’t hard. All the faces were young. Barely men at all. All looked familiar, but on closer inspection, she realized that the second man from the right in the lower row was sitting in a wheelchair. His forehead was bandaged. He wore a bomber jacket like the others, but it seemed to her that he was wearing his over pajamas and a robe. She studied the