with Beth anymore, and that Beth better stay away from her house.
Beth, her eyes blurred with tears, had gone back home, but the emptiness of her father’s little apartment had made her feel even more lonesome than Peggy’s rejection. So she’d gone down to the mill, and spent the rest of the day there.
As the days had turned into weeks she’d tried to make friends again with the kids she’d known before she moved up to the top of the hill, but it hadn’t worked. All of them had heard about what had happened to Patches, and all of them had heard Peggy’s story about the grave up on the hillside, and about the fact that Beth thought the person who was buried there still lived in the mill. At first, they’d simply ignored her when she tried to make friends with them, but when she’d persisted, they’d started calling her names, and invented a nickname for her.
Crazy Bethy.
They called it out at her when she walked down the street, and if their parents were with them, and they couldn’t yell it out loud, they’d whisper to each other, and point at her.
Her father told her not to worry about it—that in a few weeks something else would come along, and the kids would forget all about it.
But Beth wasn’t at all sure that would ever happen.
She started spending more time at the mill, and finally it got so that the workmen expected her to be there, and stopped worrying about her every minute. They were always friendly to her, and she wandered around anywhere she wanted, watching them work, bringing them tools, sometimes even helping them.
It wasn’t so bad, really, except on the days that Phillip Sturgess came to inspect the progress of the work, and brought Tracy with him.
Phillip was always friendly to Beth, interested in how she was, and what she was doing.
But Tracy never spoke to her. Instead she just stared at her, a little smile on her mouth that told Beth she was laughing at her. Beth tried to pretend she didn’t care, but of course she did.
Sometimes, during the afternoons, she’d see Tracy outside, just standing there watching the mill, and Beth knew what she wanted.
She wanted to come inside, and go down into the basement.
But she couldn’t. All day there were people there, and at night, when everyone had gone home, the building was carefully closed up, and the padlock on the one gate in the fence was always checked twice.
But for Beth, going down to the basement, and the little room under the loading dock, was simple. No one ever missed her, and part of every day she spent sitting alone in the darkness of that room, feeling the presence of Amy, who was now her only real friend.
At first it had been a little bit scary being down there by herself. For a long time she’d always left the door open and kept her flashlight on, using its beam to search out every corner. But soon she’d decided there was nothing to fear in the darkness of the room, and began closing the door behind her, turning off the light, and imagining that Amy—a real Amy—was there with her.
After a while even the strange smoky odor of the room didn’t bother her anymore, and in late July, she’d brought an old blanket to the mill. Now she kept it in the little room, where sometimes she’d spread it out, then lie on it while she daydreamed about Amy.
She knew a lot about Amy now. She’d gone to the library, and found books about what the towns like Westover had been like a hundred years ago when Amy had been alive.
She’d read about children like Amy, who’d spent most of their lives in buildings like this, working all day long, then going home to little houses that had no heat, and no electricity, and no plumbing.
One day, she’d wandered around Westover, trying to decide which house Amy might have lived in.
Finally, in her own mind, she’d decided that Amy’s house was the one on Elm Street, right by the railroad tracks. Of course she knew that part of the reason she’d decided on that house was that her mother had showed it to her a long time ago, and told her that the house, abandoned now, its roof sagging and its windows broken, with weeds growing wild around its weathered walls, had once been her own family’s home, long ago, even before