Dirty Faces- Book 1

Chapter 12: Murders and Such

Chapter 12: Murders and Such

Sitting on the rickety bench at the ball field, Ginny stared across the street to the old foreman's house. They were waiting on Becky to arrive; she was always the last to get there because she tended to have more chores to complete than the rest of them. Baseball was out for the day, they knew, but they had seemed to gravitate to the field anyway out of habit. The sun hadn't been up long and already the air seemed heavy. It was sure to be another sweltering day, and their best bet would most certainly be to head down to the river as soon as Becky joined them. Tommy looked over at Ginny and read her thoughts. 

"You can forget it," he said. 

She didn't say a word, but just kept staring at that house. He kept looking at her, waiting. "Huh?" she finally said, when she'd felt his eyes on her. 

"I said you can forget it." 

"Forget what?" 

"I'm not going back in there." There was a sense of finality in the way he said it. 

She turned her gaze back to the house and thought another minute. "But dontcha wonder?"  

"Wonder what?" 

"Tommy, you saw inside that house. Don't tell me you don't wonder why them folks just up and left all their stuff, and why it's still empty." 

"It don't really bother me." 

 "Oh, really?" 

"The foreman hung himself in the basement," J.D. said. "A couple other families moved in and moved out real fast 'cause he haunted 'em." 

Ginny rolled her eyes. "If ya ask twenty people, you're gonna get twenty different stories about that house."  

"I always heard the Widow Lester cursed it after the foreman shot her ol' man in that poker game," Danny added. 

Becky's carrot top came into their view now. She crossed the street and trotted across the dirt patch to join them on the bench. "Morning, y all." 

The boys mumbled a greeting, but Ginny was eager to prove her point and asked, "Hey, Becky, how come that ol' house by your uncle's is always empty?" 

Becky cocked her head to the side. "I thought everybody knew." 

"Tommy don't." 

"Well," Becky began, "There was this creature or demon or something that possessed the foreman and made him kill his wife. He tried to tell the judge that the creature made him do it, and they ended up carting him off to the asylum. Reckon the demon's still in the house, waiting for its next host."  

"And now ya know," Ginny said, smirking at Tommy. 

"Still," he insisted, "What does any of it have to do with me? Nothing, that's what. I don't need to know." 

"None of those stories sounds very likely," Danny offered, in his shy, unsure way of saying most everything 

"They're not," Tommy agreed. "It's all just a bunch of hearsay." 

"Exactly!" Ginny chimed, perhaps a bit too enthusiastically. "But even hearsay has to have some fact to be based on, wouldn't you agree?" 

"Well, yeah but-" 

"And if there's facts, there's probably record of those facts..." she said, as if only to herself. Maybe she could find out what she wanted to know without actually entering the house again.