Free The Ghost of Grania O'Malley by Michael Morpurgo

Jack’s baseball hat. She kept her distance. It wasn’t the kind of game she could play very well. When they picked sides, she would be the last to be chosen and she always hated that. And besides, she didn’t want to encounter Marion Murphy again. She’d sit it out.
    Watching from the seat under the tree, with Mole grazing around her feet, Jessie could think of nothing else except the ghost on the Big Hill. Even when her legs cramped up with the cold and she had to rub the life back into them, she hardly felt the accustomed pain. There was still this niggling doubt in her mind. One way or another she had to know for sure. Perhaps the ghost was close by somewhere, watching, listening, just invisible, that’s all. ‘You’re there, aren’t you?’ She said it aloud. ‘Grania O’Malley, can you hear me? If you can hear me, let me see you, please.’ The ball came rolling towards her feet, chased by Marion.
    â€˜Talking to yourself again?’ said Marion, bending down to pick it up.
    â€˜No, I’m not,’ she replied. Marion gave her a puzzled look, threw the ball in and ran off.
    With each day that passed, and with no sign of the ghost, no reappearance, and no second earring, the two began to believe that they must have had some kind of joint hallucination. They went over it again and again, and both clearly remembered every little detail – or they thought they did. Jessie showed Jack the evidence of her first meeting with Grania O’Malley. Time after time she took the earring out of its hiding place in Barry’s bowl and showed it to him, and each time Jack was even more sure it was the same as the one he’d had in his hand that afternoon on the Big Hill, quite sure, he said. She showed him the mirror where she’d seen the head of the ghost all those weeks before, and he sat in front of it just as she had, holding the earring in his hand, and looked deep into the mirror. ‘And she was right behind you?’ he said.
    â€˜Not all of her, just her head. But it was the same woman. It was Grania O’Malley. Honest it was.’
    â€˜But if we saw her like we think we did,’ Jack went on, ‘then where’s the other earring?’ That was always the problem they came back to. There was no second earring, and until there was a second earring, then there was room for doubt. They searched everywhere, everywhere they had looked for Jack’s lucky arrowhead, and elsewhere too. But they found neither the second earring nor the lucky arrowhead.
    Their shared doubts and fears threw them more and more together in school, as well as out of school too. In school, all the playground talk was of the controversy still raging over the Big Hill. Anyone who said a word against the gold mine was branded at once as some kind of traitor. So no one spoke up against the mine, except Jessie; and the more she found herself standing up for the preservation of the Big Hill, the surer she was of her cause. And being alone against the others only made her more defiant, more determined. Jack was her sole ally, but a silent one. He rarely left her side, and was, Jessie thought, the main reason anyone listened to her without shouting her down.
    Jack was still new enough to fascinate. Baseball had become all the rage – every evening down on the field. Anyone who was anyone had by now acquired a baseball hat of sorts. He had a quiet way with him that everyone liked and respected. Marion Murphy, and she wasn’t alone, still hung around him all she could. Jessie overheard her one rainy playtime when they were cooped up inside. ‘I can’t understand it,’ Marion was saying. ‘He’s Jessie’s cousin, and I fancy him rotten.’
    It was Marion too who did most to stoke up the furore about the Big Hill. She would do all she could to provoke frequent and often nasty confrontations with Jessie. She’d catch her alone in the