Giving Up the Ghost Read online

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  The Secrets Within Excerpt

  About Phoebe Rivers

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Snowflakes swirled around me as I clenched my arms against my middle and shrugged my shoulders, shivering in my thin T-shirt, blue jeans, and sneakers. The wind whipped my hair around my face, but I was too cold to reach up and tuck it behind my ears. My body shook. My teeth chattered. Why hadn’t I worn a coat?

  I worked my half-frozen fingers into my front pocket, searching for my Christmas list. But my pocket was empty. I scuffed my sneaker through the powdery snow in frustration and immediately regretted it. Snow quickly soaked through the thin canvas of my sneakers, sending fresh shivers up and down my spine.

  Holiday shoppers bustled past me on the busy street, laden down with packages and looking warm and happy, bundled up in their parkas, wrapped in scarves, cozy in their knit hats. The shops along Beach Drive were brightly lit, twinkling with lights and decorated with Christmas stuff. Again I wondered why I was outside with no coat on.

  Then I saw her.

  The crowd seemed to part like curtains. She stood alone on the sidewalk, wrapped in a fancy-looking winter coat. Her head darted back and forth like a bird. She looked nervous. Wary. Suspicious. I’d never seen her before, yet I couldn’t shake the feeling that she was somehow familiar to me.

  She was a very strange-looking woman. Her eyes were the color of antifreeze. She had thin lips and a long, hooked nose. Her hair was snow white, but her smooth skin made me wonder if she was old enough to have white hair. She could be anywhere from thirty-five to sixty-five. Maybe she was one of those people, I thought, who have had such a sudden, nasty shock that their hair turns white overnight.

  And then, as if someone had just turned up the volume on a radio, I heard her thoughts.

  . . . can’t take this . . . get away from the crowd . . . that way, that way . . .

  Followed almost immediately by the thoughts of everyone else who was passing by.

  . . . get that scarf for Uncle George? . . . Did I send a card to the Nelsons? . . . The flight gets in tomorrow morning . . .

  They were all just snippets. Fragments.

  I had been able to hear other people’s thoughts for weeks now. Not always. And not everyone. But it was happening more and more. This was a new power. To add to the ones I already had.

  I’d been able to see spirits—dead people—for as long as I could remember. Recently that power had intensified, and for a while now I’d been able to interact with the spirits, to talk with them. Since I’d arrived in Stellamar last summer, I had gradually come to accept these powers. Before moving here, back when I lived in California, I’d hated them. They made me feel different, and I just wanted to be normal. But with my great-grandmother’s help, I was actually starting to look at them as the “gift” she insisted they were. Most of the time, anyway.

  But this new power was different. I wasn’t sure I liked being able to listen in on what people were thinking. Sometimes you heard things you wished you hadn’t.

  Now my head was pounding—the thoughts of multiple passersby crowded inside my head, bouncing around inside my brain and practically deafening me. It was like someone tuning a radio, from station to station, rapidly and on high volume. Or like being in a very crowded, noisy room with terrible acoustics.

  Suddenly I realized that the strange woman could also hear people’s thoughts, because she jumped when people passed by, as though their thoughts grew louder, the way they were doing in my own mind. And she looked as though she hated this scrambled, deafening noise as much as I did.

  The woman hustled across the street, weaving her way between shoppers. She scurried under the huge sign that announced the Stellamar Boardwalk. Ignoring my instincts, which were telling me to run, not walk, as fast as I could away from the woman, I followed her. My feet seemed propelled by a will of their own.

  As I emerged onto the windy, weather-beaten boardwalk, I saw her leaning on the railing and looking out at the slate-gray, choppy waters. Curling wisps of snow tumbled and danced between us. We were the only ones. No one else in their right mind would willingly stand there, bearing the full brunt of the icy December wind off the ocean.

  The woman didn’t notice me. She seemed way too absorbed in her own thoughts, staring out at the ocean. Now I could hear her thoughts clearly, because they were no longer mixed up with the thoughts of all the other people.

  Must stop . . . Can’t do this anymore . . . Why? Why did I not stop when I had the chance?

  As I watched, a scrap of paper fluttered and swirled around the woman in an erratic figure eight on the whirling wind. It hovered gently in the air in front of her, like a butterfly about to alight on a flower. As if in a daze, she plucked the paper from the wind and stared at it.

  I was at least ten steps away from her, but I could clearly see what it was. A copy of one of the flyers my best friend, Lily Randazzo, and I had made last fall. We’d made a bunch of them to help advertise my great-grandmother’s business and hung them all over the boardwalk. lady azura! psychic, healer, mystic.

  The woman stared at the paper. I heard her thoughts.

  Lady Azura is still in business? Well then, I will go to her. I will make her help me.

  She seemed to know my great-grandmother! Maybe I should approach her. Offer to help. But something stopped me. She seemed angry. Hostile. And what did she want? Suddenly I felt wary. Protective of Lady Azura.

  My teeth began to chatter. From the cold or from my fear, I wasn’t sure. But probably both.

  She folded up the paper and shoved it into her coat pocket. I had just decided that the best thing to do would be to run the other way when she wheeled around and faced me. Bored a hole through me with those eerie green eyes.

  I forgot all about how cold I was. My heart pounded in my ears. I felt as though that green, probing stare was hypnotizing me. Like it was drawing me toward her, and I could fall in and drown. She was so strange-looking. Not old, not young. Fierce. Determined-looking. I thought about running home to warn Lady Azura that this weird woman might be showing up.

  She tilted her head back and laughed. “Weird woman?” she said in a mocking voice. “You want to warn Lady Azura that I might be showing up? That is an excellent idea. But there’s nothing she can do. Nothing!”

  She’d heard my thoughts. Read my mind.

  “The damage has been done!” she said, pointing at me. “The energy has been released.”

  Now I was officially freaked out. I turned to run away. Fast. I ran. Tripped and fell.

  And then I woke up.

  I was in my darkened bedroom. I was all twisted up in my sheets. My hair was plastered to my forehead with sweat. My heart was thudding like a big bass drum.

  I managed to kick away my covers. I sat up and looked at the clock. My mind was groggy. It felt like the middle of the night. But the clock read seven fifteen. Why was it so dark in my room? It was too dark to be past seven a.m. on a morning in March. For a moment I had the strangest thought, that there
was a cloud in my room, hovering over my bed. I stared up into it and tried to make sense of how this was possible, wondering if I was still asleep.

  After closing my eyes and opening them a few more times, I realized it wasn’t dark in my room at all. It was a bright, sunny day. The window was open. I could smell the fresh sea breeze blowing off the ocean. I could hear birds twittering, and smell coffee brewing. The darkness in my room had been my imagination. It had to have been. It was a beautiful, sunny morning. Not a cloud in the sky, let alone one in my bedroom.

  I swung my legs around and got out of bed.

  That had been one weird dream.

  Chapter 2

  Yesterday’s jeans were lying on the floor next to my bed. I tugged them on. They were nicely stretched out and comfy where my body had molded them the day before. I grabbed a T-shirt from the pile of clean laundry on my dresser and quickly surveyed my outfit in the mirror. Fabulous it wasn’t, but it would do. I quickly ran a brush through my long blond hair and pulled it into a ponytail.

  I wasn’t all that concerned about fashion. A stark contrast to Lily, who always looked great. We were total opposites on a lot of things, but it somehow just worked for us. She was from a huge, bustling family. In the town of Stellamar, practically every person you met was a Randazzo or a close relative. I had just my dad and my great-grandmother. Lily was outgoing; I was shy. She loved being the center of attention. The idea of being the center of attention gave me palpitations.

  Having a best friend still felt new and strange. In a good way. I smiled a little. I loved saying the phrase “my best friend.”

  As my eyes scanned my bedroom, looking for my sneakers, I spotted my favorite picture of my mother, which I kept on the bedside table. In it, she was sitting on a big rock, her legs pulled up to her chin, and she was grinning at the photographer—my dad. She was so beautiful. My dad told me that people used to stare at her all the time because she was so pretty, and I believe it. She died giving birth to me.

  My dad and I had come to live with Lady Azura, my great-grandmother, at the end of last summer. She and I had something in common: the power to see the spirits of the dead.

  We’d moved from California to this seaside town in New Jersey and into this ramshackle Victorian house owned by my great-grandmother. My dad was slowly making repairs to the house, and it was looking better than when we had first arrived. And we were just a few blocks away from the beach, which was pretty cool. Dad and I lived on the top two floors, and Lady Azura lived downstairs, but we shared the big, roomy kitchen. Slowly the boundaries between her space and ours had blurred. Now it mostly just felt like a family living together.

  In the large bay window near the front door of the house, Lady Azura had hung a gold-and-purple-lettered sign, advertising herself as a psychic, healer, and mystic. She met clients on the first floor, although over the fall and winter they hadn’t been coming around very often. Maybe once or twice a week at most. Her business tended to pick up during the summer tourist season. On rainy days, when people weren’t able to go to the beach, business could get downright busy, or so she’d told me.

  As I headed down the stairs to breakfast, I glanced into the sitting room. I glimpsed one of the spirits who inhabited our house—the grumpy Mr. Broadhurst—pacing near the window. It felt weirdly comforting to see him there. I saw him most mornings, along with a handful of other spirits who shared the house with us: an older woman spirit, sitting in a chair on the porch, knitting; a younger woman in the upstairs pink bedroom, who often rocked in a rocking chair, crying, I had learned, about her son who had died a long, long time ago. There were others, too. I no longer got the nauseous feelings, the unpleasant tingling in my leg, when I felt the presence of the spirits in our house. I was used to them. They were part of my house.

  As I entered the kitchen, I was surprised to see Lady Azura sitting at the kitchen table, gloomily stirring her tea and staring into space. She was not one to get up early. We rarely saw her up and around before eleven a.m. And when we did, she was always fully dressed and made-up. Today she sat wrapped in a deep mauve dressing gown trimmed with white lace. Her dyed-mahogany hair was hidden in a turban. And—shocker of shockers—she wore no makeup.

  “Oh! Good morning!” I said.

  “Yes, I know, I know. I feel the way I look,” she said drily, tapping her teaspoon lightly against the china cup and laying it down in the saucer. “At my age, beauty sleep is of utmost importance. But bad dreams are keeping me awake. I don’t like the energy in the house. Something is amiss.”

  I opened a cabinet and grabbed a bowl. As I poured out my cereal, I thought about the weird, creepy dream I’d had just before waking up. It was the first time I had dreamed about the white-haired lady, but I had definitely been having odd, fragmented, vaguely frightening dreams for a while now. Lady Azura had been talking about her bad dreams for weeks too. So far I had hesitated to mention my dreams to her, but maybe it was time.

  And I felt the strange energy in the house too. Lady Azura had been teaching me to listen to all my senses, and while I’m not totally sure what that means, I have noticed lately that I can kind of pick up on vibes sometimes. And the vibes in our house were different lately. But somehow I wasn’t as bothered by it as Lady Azura was. Maybe it was because my birthday was coming up, so it was hard for me to stay in a gloomy mood.

  I always looked forward to my birthday, with an irrational, little-kid excitement that I really ought to have grown out of by this point. Maybe it was because my dad was the same way. His birthday is in June, and we’ve always done something really fun on each other’s big day. Last year I got to take the day off from school, and we went deep-sea fishing. We hadn’t caught anything, which I was secretly relieved about, but we’d seen whales. My dad brought a cooler onto the boat with lunch, and then he surprised me with a little cake, with candles and everything, in the middle of the ocean. That was one of my happiest days I could remember before I moved to New Jersey. I had been wondering what we would do this year to celebrate.

  Lady Azura’s voice pulled me out of my reverie. “Have you been feeling it too, Sara? The negative energy?”

  The white-haired woman’s face was etched in my memory. I paused, midway through slicing my banana onto my cereal. “Well, actually, yeah. Kind of. Just last night—”

  We heard a loud crash in the hallway outside the kitchen. The sound of breaking glass.

  I dropped the rest of my banana beside my bowl. I bounded across the kitchen in three steps and banged open the swinging kitchen door.

  “Stay back!”

  It was my dad. He was standing frozen in the hallway, in the midst of at least three broken picture frames. They’d fallen off the wall and shattered.

  “There’s lots of broken glass,” he said.

  “I have shoes on,” I said, pointing to my Converses and turning back toward the kitchen. “I’ll grab the broom. You stay there so you don’t track any little pieces of glass.”

  I guess I must have sounded take-charge and convincing, because he did as I ordered and stayed put.

  Lady Azura had risen from her chair and walked toward the kitchen doorway in her high-heeled mule slippers. She peered down the hall at my dad, her brow furrowed. I couldn’t tell whether it was a look of concern or annoyance. I was used to reading her face when it was fully made-up.

  “What happened?” she demanded of my dad, as I gently edged past her, carrying the broom, dustpan, and kitchen garbage can.

  “I don’t know,” said my dad, taking the broom from me and shooing me away. “I’ll take care of this,” he said to me. “Go finish breakfast.”

  I ignored him and carefully stooped down to pick up the large pieces of glass, which I dropped into the bin.

  “I was just walking down the hall—careful, honey—thinking about the presentation I have to give today,” he said. “And the pictures seeme
d to jump off the wall. I don’t think I even touched them. Maybe it was the vibrations from my footsteps?”

  Lady Azura’s frown deepened.

  “I’m going to be late if I don’t get a move on,” my dad said, glancing at his watch. “Are you sure you can clean this up, Sara? Are you okay on time before school?”

  “It’s fine, Dad. Go. Good luck with your presentation!” I said, looking up from the floor to give him a quick smile. Lady Azura had retreated back to the kitchen.

  A few seconds after the front door had closed, I heard another crash. This time it was a thud, heavy footsteps, and then the sound of my father saying a bad word. Before I had time to react, the front door slammed back open.

  My father stood there, breathing heavily. Now it was his turn to have an annoyed look on his face.

  “Whatever is the matter now, Mike?” asked Lady Azura. I heard a slight hint of exasperation in her tone. Evidently my father did too.

  “I just tripped over the front porch chair, which someone left directly in the way,” he growled in an angry voice I seldom heard him use.

  Lady Azura sniffed haughtily. “Well, I certainly didn’t leave the chair there, if that is what you are implying.”

  My dad held up a paperback book. One of Lady Azura’s romance novels. “This was on the chair,” he said, placing it on the table next to the door.

  Maybe you shouldn’t be such a bull in a china shop.

  I’d heard what Lady Azura was thinking.

  I hope you aren’t getting forgetful. First sign of senility, maybe?

  I’d heard that, too. My dad’s thoughts.

  My head started to throb. It was too early in the morning to listen to family drama.

  “I might get stuck working late again and may not be back until after supper’s over tonight,” my father said as he closed the front door.

  I hastily finished sweeping up and tied up the bag. I was going to be late to meet Lily at this rate. I grabbed my backpack, then picked up the garbage bag and headed out the door. “Bye!” I yelled. “I’ll grab something to eat at school!”