School had been out for a week and it was hotter than Hades. When I looked out the window I could see little dust devils kicked up by the lazy wind and the Johnson children running to stay under the shade provided by passing clouds. Seemed like a waste of energy to me, but I wasn’t young any longer. Not that young, anyhow. At nineteen and a little, I considered myself pretty adult, actually.

"When I grow up, I want to move to the west."

I glanced up from my book to see my brother Jack, who had uttered this declaration, and who was at present occupied in looking surly and playing mumbledy-peg with his old jack knife. Ma probably would have scolded him for doing so indoors, but the wooden floor was already so splintered and worn down that I figured it didn’t matter a whole lot. Besides, I didn’t want to provoke an argument. It was too blasted hot for that.

I did, however, feel obliged to point out the obvious to my twelve-year-old brother. "You’re already pretty far west, Jack. Go much farther and you’ll end up in the Pacific Ocean."

"Nuts. I want to go to where the cowboys are." A sidelong glance at the Zane Grey novel lying on the pickle barrel clued me in to why Jack was feeling sulky this particular day. Not that he needed more of a reason than being twelve, I suppose.

"We’ve got lots of cowboys right here in Rosedale."

"Not like these guys." Jack slapped The Man of the Forest. "These guys wear guns. They have adventures. Ain’t–"

"Aren’t." Sometimes I can’t help myself.

Jack sighed heavily. "Aren’t any gun-totin’ cowboys in Rosedale."

"You mean like Billy the Kid?" Billy the Kid was the closest thing to a legend we had in our neck of the woods, which was the Pecos Valley in southeastern New Mexico.

"Yeah. I guess."

"Billy the Kid was a vicious outlaw," I said gently, not caring to fight, but again feeling obliged to clear up the mud in my brother’s brain.

"Huh. Well, our cowboys are all boring."

"Thank God for that. From what I’ve read about the so-called Old West, even the good guys weren’t very good, and the bad guys were awful."

"Huh."

"Real life isn’t much like novels, Jack." Even as I spoke the words, I wished they weren’t so. Not that I wanted more cowboys in my life, which was full enough of those already. Anyhow, I knew more about ranching and cowboys than Jack did. The most exciting thing your average cowboy did, no matter where he lived, was fight to stay awake while driving herds, keep the cows from falling into flooded arroyos, and maneuver through hideous dust storms.

What I wanted was a more glamorous brand of excitement. A jungle safari with a great white hunter, maybe, or a trip down the Nile with Sir Richard Burton. Something like that.

All right, I guess I wasn’t the ideal person to quibble about Jack’s unrealistic wishes and desires. Until he interrupted me, I’d been totally engrossed in The Sheik, by Edith M. Hull, and wishing I were the heroine. It was probably as hot in Arabia as it was in Rosedale, but we didn’t have romantic sheiks here. All we had were . . . well . . . cowboys. And Jack was right about them. They were pretty darned boring.

Perhaps I should elaborate. My name is Annabelle Blue. I’m the fifth child, third daughter, and second youngest overall, of William and Susannah Blue of Rosedale, New Mexico. My mother and father own and run Blue’s Dry Goods and Grocery Emporium, a business founded by Grandpa Blue in 1892, on the northeast corner of West Second Street and Robertson Avenue. It’s a pretty good business, for Rosedale, and, after I graduated from Rosedale High School in 1921, I worked there, too.

My two older sisters, Hannah and Zilpha, were married and living nearby. Hannah’s husband, Richard McDougall, worked at the Rosedale Farmers’ and Ranchers’ Bank. Hannah said he was going to own it one day, and I didn’t doubt it. Richard cared more for money than he did anything else, including poor Hannah. Hannah didn’t think so, probably because she was blinded by love. I guess that was a good thing.

Zilpha was married to Mayberry Zink, who owned the saddlery and shoe-repair shop down the street from Blue’s. I liked him better than Hannah’s husband, but I did take exception to his name, as regarded my sister. I mean . . . Zilpha Zink? Oh, well. I guess one can’t choose the name of one’s beloved.

Unless you were me. I’d made up dozens of names for the man I aimed to marry. Unfortunately, the man who went with the names didn’t exist, except in my imagination.

My older brother George was in the U.S. Air Service, flying airplanes for General Mitchell. During the Great War, George had been shot down over France, had thereby earned himself a Croix de Guerre, a Bronze Star, and a Purple Heart, and was generally considered to be a hero by the citizens of his home town. The Rosedale City Council was contemplating naming a street after him.

I was kind of surprised that Jack hadn’t voiced a desire to join the Army Air Service. Maybe he wanted to be his own man.

What I wanted was to be a princess. Failing that–and I think being royalty requires either an accident of birth or marriage, and I didn’t have a clue as to where I could find myself a prince–I’d take adventure, as long as somebody like Allen Quartermain adventured with me. It seemed unlikely, what with this being Rosedale and all, but you never knew. There might be a hero out there for me. Somewhere.

"Aw, shit."

Shocked, I cried, "Jack!" before I could think better of it. After all, he’d said it to shock me, and reacting only encouraged the little wretch. Then as Jack, pleased with himself, the rat, disappeared into the back of the store, I saw what had provoked his outburst.

Aw, shit.

It was our aunt Minnie.

Minnie–short for Minerva–Blue was one of those people that infect almost every family to one degree or another. Some families have their dipsomaniacs, some have their slow-witted cousins, some have out-and-out criminals in their closets. We Blues had Aunt Minnie, who was about two quarts shy of a gallon. Maybe three. And that was on a good day.

Uncle Joe Blue, my father’s oldest brother and a perfectly normal individual except for his unaccountable affection for Minnie, had married her in the late nineties, but Joe was gone. Pa said he’d died to get shut of Minnie, but I doubt that. Actually, when Joe was alive, he’d been able to curb Minnie’s most alarming eccentricities. More or less. But Joe was dead, and Minnie was heading straight at me.

About five foot nothing, Aunt Minnie used to have bright, carroty red hair. According to family legend, her hair had turned white when she was about twenty-five. Her hazel eyes were as vivid as ever, and they snapped with a manic ferocity. I don’t think she was really crazy, but she was incredibly . . . well, intense is a good word for it . . . and she could get worked up over just about anything that took her fancy.

Not that she wasn’t nice. There wasn’t a mean bone in her body, and she was forever baking things and giving them away. She was a good cook. But there was no getting around the fact that she was weird. And she was headed in a bee-line toward the store. And I couldn’t hide. Darn Jack, anyhow! If I’d seen her first, I might have found an excuse to leave the store for a few minutes and make him face her. No chance of that now.

On she came, holding her parasol aloft to protect her fair skin from the relentless sun–a more sensible solution than running around under clouds, in my opinion. She was chubby and always wore clothes that had been fashionable in her youth, which meant she looked not unlike a particularly mobile mushroom. She marched across Second Street without bothering to check for oncoming traffic, heedless of Mr. Pullen’s Model T Ford. Aunt Minnie didn’t approve of automobiles and demonstrated her contempt by ignoring them. Pa said she’d be sorry about that one of these days, but so far the kind–or the merely observant–citizens of Rosedale had managed to avoid running her down.

Minnie also ignored the blast of Mr. Pullen’s horn; Mr. Shenkel, the high school principal, who tipped his hat at her; Mrs. Wilson’s second-youngest son Jesse Lee, who jumped out of her way and spilled the armload of neatly folded Rosedale Daily Records that he’d been delivering; and Phil Gunderson, one of our many cowboys who didn’t wear a gun and who was, therefore, not romantic enough for my kid brother–or me, to be honest. Aunt Minnie was pretty single-minded when she was agitated about something. And she looked agitated.

I braced myself when she reached the door, because I anticipated what would happen next. Minnie pushed hard, the door flew open, crashed against the wall, sent a shiver not unlike that of an earthquake rippling along the shelves, and sent two boxes of Quaker Oats tumbling to the floor. Minnie ignored them, too. It was better than the last time she’d visited, when she’d managed to break two bottles of Lydia Pinkham’s Syrup. Ma had rearranged the dry goods after that, so that nothing breakable was in Aunt Minnie’s firing range when she came to visit.

Rather than rush to pick up the oatmeal and replace the boxes on the shelf, I remained behind the counter. It was much the safest place to be when Aunt Minnie was in a mood if you couldn’t avoid her entirely. I was going to get Jack for this later.

Minnie didn’t break her stride until she arrived at the counter, behind which I stood, worried, hoping the counter was enough of a barrier between the two of us. Not that Minnie was at all violent. She was only . . . oh . . . energetic, I suppose describes her pretty well.

"It’s come back to plague us all!"

I blinked.

That was enough encouragement for Aunt Minnie. "It’s haunted, I tell you! It’s come back, and it’s going to be a judgment upon us."

I guess I neglected to mention Aunt Minnie’s strong, not to say extreme, religious streak. She also went in for things like seances, crystal balls, and Madame Blavatsky.

"Um . . ."

"The whole town will suffer before it’s over!"

Without a doubt. Especially if Minnie kept going on at this rate.

"It was a tragedy then, and it’s going to be a worse tragedy now!"

Oh, dear. I didn’t like that word, tragedy.

"Mark my words, Annabelle Blue, we’ll all be sorry before this is over."

I was sorry already.

"I only hope nobody else will suffer."

Me, too.

She nodded with such vigor that her hat tilted over one of her glittering green eyes. Shoving it back, she said, "Just you wait."

Guess I’d have to.

"It’s going to be worse than before. I know it in my bones."

"Um . . . what’s going to be worse, Aunt Minnie?"

Minnie, whose eyes were startlingly large even when she wasn’t on a rampage, stared at me as if I were daft. "What? What? What do you mean what?"

"Um . . ."

"It all started with that poor little child!"

"Child?" I must have sounded about as puzzled as I felt, because Minnie began puffing up like one of Ma’s Rhode Island Reds when one of her Buff Orpingtons hogged the chicken feed.

Minnie poked her finger on the counter. Lucky for me it was there, or she’d be poking my chest. "You know very well what I mean, Annabelle Blue! You were there!"

"I was?"

"What do you mean, ‘I was’? Of course, you were! You went to school with the girl. And it was the school outing that started the whole thing. You were there at the time! You can’t honestly expect me to believe that you don’t remember it!"

A dim bulb went on in the back of my brain. Electricity was fairly new to Rosedale, and this particular bulb flickered a good deal. "Um . . . do you mean Julia Gilbert?"

Minnie flung out her arm, and her furled parasol whacked Jack’s pickle barrel. Thank God Ma had rearranged the store, or Minnie’s broad gesture would have knocked over a display of Del Monte canned green beans, and I’d have had to pick them all up and re-stack them. "Well, who do you think I’m talking about?"

"Um . . ."

"And her ghost is back, and it’s active. She won’t rest, you know, because her body was never found, and the mystery has never been solved. Her spirit is restless, and she’s angry."

My stomach flopped as it all came back to me.

It had been a nice June day when Miss Feather’s eighth-grade class took a trip to the Bottomless Lakes for our end-of-school picnic. That was my class, and my best friend Myrtle Howell and I were ready to get out of the little kid’s school and into high school. We thought we were too smart to be with the little kids any longer.

You have to understand that there aren’t a whole lot of nice picnic places around Rosedale, because it’s mostly desert. However, the Bottomless Lakes, especially in the early summertime when the thunderstorms came and made the cactus and the weeds bloom, were pretty. Up to that time, it was a tradition of sorts for eighth-grade classes to hold their parties there, celebrating the end of the school year.

There weren’t all that many children in Miss Feather’s class, maybe fifteen in all, and we were a pretty rowdy group. We weren’t, after all, sophisticates. Most of us were the children of farmers or ranchers or small business people in the dinky town of Rosedale, New Mexico, which at that time had a total population of around ten thousand.

Rosedale is approximately two hundred miles away from a city of any size, and even those other cities (Albuquerque, Santa Fe, El Paso, Amarillo, Lubbock) weren’t exactly garden spots or Meccas of intellectual activity. There was a small clique of society matrons who put on airs and pretended to be urbane and classy, but I suspect a lady from New York City or San Francisco might have a different opinion about that.

Rosedale started out in life as a hub for cattle ranchers. They’d run their cattle to Rosedale and send them to Kansas City from the railroad yards here in town. We were still pretty much a hub in 1923, and we depended mainly on cattle ranching and sheep farming for our livelihood. I don’t suppose cows and sheep have ever appealed a whole lot to people with refined sensibilities, but we kids didn’t care. We enjoyed our life in the middle of nowhere. You have to remember that the moving pictures were fairly new, too, and most of use hadn’t had the opportunity to become dissatisfied with our rural, and rather limited, existence.

The Bottomless Lakes were even more nowhere than the town of Rosedale itself. About twelve miles to the east of Rosedale, there are eleven lakes in all, and they aren’t really bottomless. The name came about because in the late 1800s, cowboys from the Chisum ranch tried to find the bottoms of them by tying ropes together and sinking them. It wasn’t until a good while later that scientists figured out the lakes were fed by underground streams whose currents pushed the ropes sideways. Still and all, they’re pretty darned deep.

It was after lunch and we were having a good time, romping around and skipping stones and playing hide and seek. I remember that I was "it" when it happened. Actually, "happened" is a rather specific word for an imprecise event. What transpired was that I was "it," all the rest of the kids were hiding somewhere or other, Miss Feather and a couple of mothers who were acting chaperones were resting in the shade, and Julia Gilbert never showed up.

One by one the other kids either tagged home or I found them and tagged them, until Julia was the only one left. We called and called, nobody concerned at first. Then we went looking. It was unusual for Julia, who was a quiet and obedient child, to misbehave. After we’d called and searched for maybe an hour, Miss Feather became really concerned. She organized search parties consisting of a parent and a few children each, and we went to every lake in the district, calling and looking. No Julia.

It was a subdued group that went home in the wagon that had carried us to the lakes, leaving Mrs. Howell there . . . just in case. Sheriff Greene and Willard Vickers, who was the police chief, mustered all the men in town to head out there and search as soon as we returned, but Julia was never found. It was presumed that she’d drowned, but her body was never recovered. That in itself was odd, since bodies eventually rose to the surface. I mean, Julia wasn’t the first person to drown out there, and she wasn’t the last. But, as far as I know, she was the only one whose body was never found.

After that calamity, eighth-grade classes celebrated their end-of-school picnics up at the Spring River, in spite of the mud holes and mosquitoes. No class ever went back to the Bottomless Lakes.

Remembering that day always gave me the willies.

"But . . . well . . . Aunt Minnie, why is Julia haunting your house? If you have a ghost? You don’t live anywhere near the Bottomless Lakes."

There went her parasol again, and again it cracked against Jack’s pickle barrel. "The ways of the Other Side are infinite," she declared sententiously. "Who are we to quibble with the spirits?"

Good question, and one to which I had no answer. I did, however, ask rather timidly, "What does Uncle Joe have to say about all this? Doesn’t he mind Julia’s ghost butting into his territory?"

I know, I know. Uncle Joe was dead. According to Minnie, he was still in communication with her. Poor Uncle Joe. Communicating with Aunt Minnie was difficult even if you were a living and fully functioning entity.

"That’s the problem," she muttered, allowing her parasol to droop.

"What’s the problem?"

"Her! She’s interfering with my communion with your uncle!"

A few people in town at that time had short-wave radio receiving sets. Some of those people, including Minnie’s late husband Joe, had been interested in wireless communication since far before the radio craze of the 1920s. In actual fact, a friend of Joe’s, who lived in Massachusetts at the time, had intercepted a distress signal from the Titanic after it hit the ice burg in April of 1912. When he ran indoors and told his folks the great ship was sinking, they didn’t believe him. True story. Ma thinks that might be one of the reasons Aunt Minnie believes Joe still communicates with her, although I can’t see a connection myself.

But I digress. The thing about radios is that sometimes something will interfere with their signals, and they’ll fizz and bubble. Radio people call this phenomenon "static." I had a mental image of Minnie sitting down before her crystal ball and seeing fuzz.

"Um . . ." I wasn’t sure how to ask the question. Or even what question to ask.

"That’s why you have to do it."

I think I blinked again. I know I said, "Do what?" even though I figured it would only set Minnie off again.

I was right. Up went the parasol. Crash went the pickle barrel. Good thing it was sturdy. "What? Why do you keep asking silly questions, girl? You have to stay at the house with me."

Oh, no. I didn’t groan aloud and was proud of myself. But . . . staying at Minnie’s house? Nuts. "But what can I do?" I protested feebly.

"Do? Do? You can talk to the girl, of course! You’re her age! You can understand her!"

"But . . . Aunt Minnie, she’s been dead for six years."

The look she gave me shouldn’t be bestowed upon any but the feeblest-witted. I resented it, although I knew my resentment to be as foolish as it was useless. Nobody ever understood Minnie; my current befuddlement wasn’t my fault.

"Of course, she’s been dead for six years. That’s the whole point," Minnie said, as if she were explaining a simple equation to an extremely dull student.

"But why can’t you communicate with her by yourself? You’re better at that stuff than I am." Truer words were never spoken.

"Oh, for heaven’s– Listen to me, Annabelle Blue."

I listened. Couldn’t do anything else, darn it.

"You were in her class. You were with her when she vanished."

Vanished. Now there was a good word for it.

"You were her age–"

"But I’m not any longer," I pointed out, thinking it was a valid detail.

"Fiddlesticks! You were her age when she vanished."

No doubt about it.

"Therefore, you’re obviously the one to do it."

"Stay with you, you mean?"

"Of course."

"But . . . ." Arguing with Minnie once she had her heart set on something was almost invariably useless, but I figured it was worth a try. I hated staying at her house. It was a big, lonely ranch house, although all ranching operations had died with Uncle Joe. Now, where there used to be cattle and horses and men to run and ride them, there was a whole lot of nothing. And it was way far away from the town, out on the Pine Lodge Road, which is the road leading to Capitan and Ruidoso, which were up in the mountains. The place was eerie and full of strange noises even when it wasn’t being haunted.

The only other person on the place was Miss Libby Powell, the lady who’d been with Minnie for more years than anyone could remember. I think Minnie had hired her to be a maid in the Dark Ages, but Libby was now her companion and friend. She was built like a house and did the work of two men, thereby negating any need Minnie might otherwise have had for a hired hand. Also, and not the least of the reasons I was loath to visit Minnie, Libby was both deaf as a post and exceptionally sharp-tongued.

She was also big. I think she must have been six feet tall, and must have weighed well over two hundred pounds. I don’t think much of that weight was fat, either. She was just all-around big. I’m not sure, but I think she might have had Indian blood in her background somewhere, because she had an olive complexion, and used-to-be-jet-black hair that was naturally wavy. Her hair was more gray than black anymore, and she wore it pulled back in a severe bun. Just about everything as regarded Miss Libby was severe. I didn’t consider her a comfortable person to be around, although Minnie loved her like a sister.

It’s odd to me how friendships develop. If you met Minnie and Libby separately and didn’t know they were friends, you wouldn’t think of connecting them in your mind. But they were kind of like ham and eggs. Toast and butter. Samson and Delilah. You couldn’t have one without the other, if you know what I mean.

I suppose in mitigation of Minnie and Libby, there was Jeepers, the dog. Jeepers was of uncertain origin and a peach of a canine. His coat was medium-short, black and white, and he had a tail that was basically black but had white feathers that waved when he wagged. I loved Jeepers a lot, but he, too, was elderly and deaf, and I couldn’t count on him for company because he slept all the time.

Add to that Minnie’s only close neighbor, Olin Burgess, and you have a setting that would have appealed to Robert Louis Stevenson in his Jekyll-Hyde mode. Poor Mr. Burgess. It wasn’t his fault. But he was a very unpleasant-looking individual. Rumor had it that he’d been torn up in the Civil War, lost an eye, and received the hideous scars that marred his face and made him limp. He scared people, and kids taunted him. I felt sorry for him . . . but he scared me, too, darn it. I didn’t like being around him. But I was positive Aunt Minnie would only pooh-pooh any objection based on Mr. Burgess. I didn’t dare tell her about my objection to Miss Libby.

The fact that Minnie’s house was also a good twenty miles eastward from where Julia Gilbert disappeared, however, seemed to me a cogent point and a fairly good place to start my argument. "Aunt Minnie, there’s no earthly reason for Julia to be haunting your house. If she’s dead–"

"She’s dead."

"Probably. But even if she is–I mean, even though she is, there’s no earthly reason she should be haunting your house."

"We aren’t speaking of the earthly plane, Annabelle. Will you get that through your head?"

Oh, brother. I forged onward through the bog. "But think about it, Aunt Minnie. She can’t be haunting your house. You don’t live anywhere near where she died."

"How do you know?"

I’d opened my mouth to keep arguing, but this statement made the words I was going to speak shrivel up. I swallowed the dried bits of them. "Well, because she died at the Bottomless Lakes, didn’t she?"

"We don’t know that."

"But . . . that’s where we were when she . . . vanished."

"It must be obvious to you, then, that she didn’t die there! She died near my house!"

Huh? "Um . . ."

"Just because the whole world believes something to be so doesn’t make it so, Annabelle Blue. You, of all people, ought to know that?"

"Why me of all people?"

"Because you’re young! You’re open! You don’t scoff as much as the rest."

Boy, I decided then and there not to be so darned polite to my crazy aunt. I mean, there are limits. "But . . ."

"And furthermore–" She broke off suddenly and, to my utter horror, tears started dripping down her cheeks.

I reached for her hand–a first, believe me–but she looked so wretched, I felt sorry for her. "Aunt Minnie, what is it?"

"I miss Joe. And he won’t come as long as she’s there."

Oh, brother.

My mother came into the store from behind me–we lived in the back–and I thought rescue was at hand. With profound relief, I turned to her. "Ma! Aunt Minnie’s here."

"So I see."

My mother is a saint. She might occasionally say sarcastic things about people when they weren’t around, but she was invariably kind to them in person. She held out her hand and gave Minnie a sweet smile. "So good to see you, Minnie."

She must have noticed the traces of tears on my aunt’s face. "But what’s this? Is something the matter, Minnie?" Ma rushed around to the other side of the counter and took Minnie in her arms. "Tell me, dear!"

So Minnie told her. Even as she spoke, I saw Ma’s face crunch up into her I can’t believe my daughter said that to you expression. I was intimately familiar with that expression. And I knew my days of peace were numbered.