Free Spirits by Julia Watts Page A

is stick them in the ground,” Katherine says. “You’ll have a jungle in no time.” Katherine pats her husband’s shoulder. “Is the interview still going on?”
    “Oh, I think it’s winding down,” he says. “You know, I wish I could give these kids a tour of where Strawberry Fields used to be.”
    “It makes me too sad to see it now,” Katherine says, “the way it’s grown up where the gardens used to be. And Rick’s let the house sit abandoned for years. I don’t know why he hasn’t sold it if he isn’t going to live there. But then again, since when did Rick do anything that makes any logical sense?”
    “I’ll tell you what, though,” Dr. Branch says. “If we did try to take the kids to look at the place, we’d probably pick the one night Rick happened to be there, and he’d shoot us for trespassing.”
    “Or the ghost would get us,” Katherine says, laughing.
    “The ghost?” I ask.
    “We always believed the ghost of Rick’s grandmother haunted the old farmhouse,” Dr. Branch explains.
    “We always believed?” Katherine protests. “Try you always believed.”
    Dr. Branch points a finger at Katherine. “Hey, you saw that rocking chair in the upstairs bedroom rocking by itself just the same as I did. And you know how things in the kitchen cabinets would always get moved around at night.”
    “There was an open window when the rocking chair moved,” Katherine says. “It was the wind. And any number of people could’ve moved around the pots and pans in the cabinets.”
    Dr. Branch grins and shakes his head. “But at the time you believed in Granny Ghost the same as the rest of us.”
    “Well,at the time,I was young and impressionable,”Katherine says, smiling.

    Once we’re in the car, Mrs. So says, “I hope whatever that was about, you satisfied your curiosity.”
    “Yeah, we—” Adam starts.
    “But don’t talk about it in my hearing,” Mrs. So says. “I don’t want to know.”
    I look over at Adam and see his thoughts: I can’t wait to get on the Internet and look up Bobby Scoggins.
    Adam can’t see my thoughts, but if he did, here’s what he’d see: I can’t wait to talk to Granny Ghost.

Chapter 13

    Today’s the last day of school, and homeroom resembles a zoo at feeding time. There’s lots of screeching and howling and squirming, and Mrs. Pierce, the homeroom teacher, is reading a People magazine and pretending not to notice the chaos.
    Adam slides into the seat next to mine, then slaps a book-thick stack of paper onto my desk. “This,” he says, “is what you get when you Google Bobby Scoggins.”
    “Whoa.” The article on top of the stack is called “The Hatemongers’ Hall of Fame.” It describes Reverend Bobby Scoggins as “a traveling preacher most active in Kentucky, used his pulpit to preach hate toward Blacks, Hispanics,Jews, Catholics and gays and to extol the supposed superiority of white American Protestants.In nineteen eighty-four,he was sentenced to a twelve-year sentence in the Kentucky State Correctional Facility after leading a group of his followers in the attempted arson of several buildings at Berea College, which he denounced as ‘a hotbed of race mixing and communism.’ Scoggins attempted to continue his ministry in prison, but his views proved unpopular, and he was found dead in his cell two years into his sentence.”
    “I remember Mom talking about some crazy guy who wanted to burn down Berea,” I say.
    “Well, Bobby’s that crazy guy,” Adam says.
    “I wonder if Rick was in on the plan, too. It seems weird. I mean, he went to Berea, right? Why would he want to burn it down?”
    “Well, he flunked out of there, didn’t he? And his girlfriend there dumped him. To you and me, those might not seem like good enough reasons to torch a school, but if a person was a little nuts to begin with…”
    “You’re right.‘Why’ is a totally different question when you’re talking about somebody like Rick.” The bell rings, and