Kindred Spirits by Julia Watts Page A

way to stop being
Asian, but she didn’t think that was funny.” He looks down at his tray. He
hasn’t touched his lunch either.
    “I understand what she
means, I guess. If she makes enemies here, nobody will want your dad to be
their doctor.”
    “Yeah,” Adam says. “And
she doesn’t want me making enemies either. She told me to forget about the
Jameson murder, that I ought to be spending more time on my schoolwork and less
time trying to change something that it’s too late to change.”
    “But
what about the spirits in your house, the weird noises and the hand prints?
Doesn’t she at least want to fix that?”
    Adam rolls his eyes. “Mom
has convinced herself or maybe she let Dad convince her that there aren’t
really any spirits. She says the sounds were probably just the mice in the
attic, and the weird feelings she had were just because she hasn’t adjusted to
the move yet. And the handprints... well, maybe she just hasn’t found the right
kind of cleaner to remove that stain.”
    I put my uneaten sandwich
back into my lunch bag. I’d offer it to one of the poor kids, but nobody will
take food from the witch girl. “Do you think she really believes all that?”
    Adam is quiet for a few
seconds. “I think she really wants to believe it because the only other choice
is to be afraid.”
    A terrible thought pops
into my head’so terrible I almost can’t make myself say it. “Adam, does your
mom want you to...stop being friends with me?”
    “Oh, no,” Adam says. “Mom
likes you. She thinks you’ve gotten a little too caught up in the whole Nancy
Drew thing, but she still thinks you’re a nice kid. She says you’re welcome to
come over any time to play games or watch movies. She just wants us to give up
this...obsession, she calls it.”
    I look into Adam’s eyes
and then into his mind and see that it’s just as full of questions and ideas
about the Jamesons as mine is. “You don’t want to give up, do you?” I say.
    “No,” Adam says. “Not
when we’re so close to an answer. But I also don’t want to get in trouble.”
    “Well,” I say, “we’ll
just have to be extra careful then.”
    This
afternoon we’re pretty well covered because I told Mom I might be going over to
Adam’s house after school, and he told his mom he might be coming to my house.
For once, I’m grateful that my family doesn’t have a phone.
    “So,” Adam says, as we
walk toward downtown, “what’s the plan?”
    “I thought we might go by
the Wilder Herald office and see Roy Silcox,” I say. “Maybe ask him a few
questions about his brother.”
    “What, like did your
older brother ever strike you as the cold-blooded murderer type?”
    “Oh, I think we can be a
little smoother than that.”
    The lady at the front
desk at the Herald office looks up at us through cat’s eye glasses that were in
style back when my mom was a little girl (I know this because there’s a picture
of Mom when she was younger than me wearing glasses just like this lady’s).
“Are you kids selling something for school?” she asks.
    “No, ma’am,” I say. “We’d
like to talk to Mr. Silcox.”
    “Well, Mr. Silcox is a
busy man.” The lady’s hair looks like a hard gray helmet. A pencil sticks out
of it like an antenna. All of a sudden she yells back to the office, “Roy!
There’s some kids here to see you! You want to talk to them?”
    “Send ‘em on back,” a
man’s voice calls.
    “Third door on your
left,” she says.
    Mr. Silcox’s office is
small and cluttered with papers, half-empty coffee cups, and overflowing
ashtrays. Mr. Silcox is leaning back in the chair at his desk, his glasses
pushed up to rest on top of his bald head. His eyes look droopy, like he’s just
been woken up from a nap, which, I think, is what we’ve just done.
    “Hello, young folks, come
on in and sit down,” he says. “You’ll have to excuse the mess. My wife comes in
here with a bulldozer once a month and cleans this place up,