The Secret Tree by Natalie Standiford

ID.

“You stole this too!” I peeled Paz’s photo ID off the page. “From the roller rink! I didn’t see you there.”
    “Nobody saw me,” Raymond said. “When I wear my camouflage, I’m practically invisible.”
    “I can see you just fine.”
    “That’s because I let you see me.”
    “Okay …” I turned another page in the book. A few scraps of paper were slipped between the pages. They were just like the notes I’d found in that murmuring tree. Secrets.
    I’m in love with Kip Murphy.
    I just want people to like me.
    I wish I had the guts to run away.
    Im so stoopid. Im affraid something is rong with my brane. But I dont want anywon to find out or theyll kep me back.
    “I found this one before.” I pointed to the badly spelled note. The others I hadn’t seen. “Where did you get them?”
    “From the Secret Tree.”
    So I wasn’t the only one. To be sure, I said, “You mean … that tree in the woods? With the big hole in it?”
    Raymond nodded. “A ghost lives in that tree. He eats secrets.”
    “A ghost.” I blinked. That would have sounded crazier to me than Lennie’s stories of the Man-Bat, except … I’d felt something. The humming. The murmur.
    “People tell secrets to the spirit in the tree, and the spirit makes the secrets go away,” Raymond said. “He swallows them and whispers them out on the wind.”
    “Who told you that?”
    “Otis,” Raymond said. “He drives down our road once in a while. He gives me some strawberries or a watermelon, if he has extra. He says if I don’t take them, he has to throw them away.”
    “Does he ever talk about your aura?” I asked.
    “No,” Raymond said. “But he told me about ghosts and spirits, and how they can live in the trees.”
    “That’s just a story,” I said. “Like the Man-Bat.”
    “It’s true. One day the construction workers were digging up the dirt under that house there —” Raymond pointed out the window at the unfinished house closest to the woods. “And they found a skeleton. They dug up a grave by accident.”
    “A grave!” I thought of Crazy Ike, buried long ago on the Witch Lady’s farm.
    Raymond nodded. “They took the skeleton away and kept on building the house. I told Otis about it, and he said it must have been the bones of Crazy Ike.”
    “The boy who died from a bat bite!” I knew it.
    “Otis said when you disturb a spirit’s grave, the ghost floats out of the ground and goes to live in a tree. Especially a tree with a hole in it. And it eats secrets. So if you find a tree with a hole in it, you can put your secret in there, and the spirit makes it go away.”
    “So Crazy Ike’s ghost lives in that tree? I thought Crazy Ike turned into the Man-Bat.”
    “You believe in the Man-Bat?” Raymond scoffed. “He’s not real.”
    “And Crazy Ike’s ghost is?”
    “Yes.” Raymond said. “I saw him. I saw his spirit float out of the ground and fly into the woods. He lives in that tree. Didn’t you feel it humming? That’s his spirit. He’s calling out, ‘Bring me your secrets….’”
    “I did feel it humming,” I said. “It sounded like voices murmuring.”
    “Those are the secrets blowing on the wind,” Raymond said.
    “Oh.” This story was crazy, far-fetched … but I believed it.
    “After they dug up those bones, the construction guys started having problems. One of their trucks broke, some pipes wouldn’t work, and the wood they used had termites. They stopped coming to work. Otis said Crazy Ike cursed them.”
    “Because he was mad that they dug up his grave?”
    “Yes. But I think Crazy Ike made sure they left this model house for me to live in. Because Crazy Ike looks out for me.”
    “How does Otis know so much about spirits?” I asked.
    “He’s from Louisiana,” Raymond told me. “He knows voodoo.”
    Voodoo! That could not be a coincidence.
    “Do you think Otis put a curse on my friend Paz?” I asked.
    “I don’t think so.” Raymond reached for the can of