Page 76 of Shake the Habit

“Arthur Calebaugh,” she said. She spelled it slowly. “I think that’s how you came by your name, too.”

“Arthur’s Precious Gem,” I said, and I saw Caleb nod slowly when he heard the name of the new peach variety that Lara-Lee had developed. Aunt Paula really didn’t have any more to add and for the rest of the way out to the farmhouse, we were all very quiet.

She broke the silence when we arrived. “That’s Marc’s truck, the dumb giant thing,” she said as we turned into the driveway, “but whose car is that?”

“It’s Taygen’s,” I answered. I had parked next to her at the loan office when we’d worked together, and I knew it well. “She must have come out here with him.”

“That’s interesting,” Aunt Paula said. “I wonder.”

“Don’t start on them,” I warned her, but she was out of the car as fast as she could move. It wasn’t very fast, but it gave me a moment to talk to Caleb as we got out, too.

“Wow,” I started. “That was…” I wasn’t sure of what to say, though. Overwhelming, upsetting, shocking? It was a lot for a car ride. And he looked like he felt all of those things, and also angry and confused.

“Do you think Aunt Paula is right about any of it?” he asked me.

“I think we can try to find out more,” I offered. “We can look up that Arthur Calebaugh and his family. I didn’t see anything about him in her papers but we didn’t read through all the science stuff very much, and…” There was one clear clue. “It seems like she used his name for her peach and maybe for you, which is a very strong indication unless it’s just a crazy coincidence. And those do happen! Once, at a pageant, it turned out that I was singing the same song as a girl from Mississippi, and that girl was the daughter of a woman that Aunt Amber had competed against. She and the mom were none too happy…” I trailed off again. “I’m sorry you heard like that.”

“I don’t know what would have been a good way to find out. Now, at least, I have some more information. Without the quilters’ gossip network, I might never have known. It shouldn’t make any difference to me now.”

“Of course it makes—slow down, Sir!” He had come barreling out of the barn fast enough that I took a protective stance, but he skidded to a stop before knocking us down like bowling pins, and he sat politely while nearly bursting with excitement.

“You need him,” I told Caleb, and he knelt down.

“Sir, you’re a good friend,” I heard him say, and I thought I would give them a moment. Aunt Paula was currently trying to get up the steps to the farmhouse, which had not yet been repaired and weren’t exactly all the same height.

“Wait,” I called, and hurried after her.

“Marc and that woman are in the barn and all over each other,” she informed me, her face sour.

“My Lord! Is the engagement back on?” I asked.

“They said no, but they’re going to work on things. That work seems to involve a lot of tongue.”

“Aunt Paula!”

“Their behavior was more than I could stomach.” She looked around the sad, decrepit porch. “I must say, this farm surprises me. It’s tacky and I expected more from Lara-Lee, being a Woodson and all.” She opened the front door and strolled in.

“Shh!” I told her as I followed. “Be careful!” Her eyebrows raised, so I explained. “There’s something going on in this house. Lara-Lee is still, um, present.”

“What are you saying? You mean that she made her mark on the place?” She stared at me. “No, you think her ghost is here!” Aunt Paula considered the idea. “Well, if anyone would be too mean and stubborn to go ahead and die, it would be Lara-Lee.”

“Aunt Paula! We were just at church! And you just finished telling us in the car how you’d done her a disservice in the past.”

“I’m only being honest about her faults, of which there were many,” she answered piously.

I looked around, too, making sure that nothing was going to fall on our heads or jump out of the walls. “I’m not saying that there’s a ghost here, but there is something. It may be only bad memories because she made Caleb’s life so miserable.”

A door slammed in the floor above us and I jumped at least a yard into the air.

“Kayleigh Lynn McCourt, settle down,” my aunt ordered. “I saw a window open in the second story and when we came in, we created some kind of vortex.”

“We did?”

“There’s no such thing as ghosts.”

I told her about the fire going out, that something had touched my leg under the desk, and how the workmen had been scared. “Sir barks and he watches things that aren’t there,” I added, but taken as a whole, my evidence sounded scanty.

“Why would she hang around in this hellhole?”

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