2 Empath by Edie Claire Page B

trees. As we turned off the road and onto bare dirt, clusters of ancient looking white tombstones appeared scattered among the trunks ahead of us. There was no building on the property. Nor was there any kind of sign.
    “I see no schoolhouse,” I remarked.
    “Oh, it’s long gone now,” Kylee explained. “But you can see the foundation where it was.”
    Tara rolled down the car windows and killed the engine. “Tell her the story,” she urged, turning around in her seat.
    Kylee’s eyes sparkled as she, too, turned sideways in her seat to face me. “Well, way back in the olden days, when this place was first being settled—”
    “It was in the 1880s,” Tara noted.
    Kylee’s eyes rolled. “When ever. It was a long time ago. Wild West and all that. There were little settlements scattered around all over, what with the railroad camps and mines and everything, and Striker was one of them. There were families here, and they built a one-room schoolhouse for the kids that doubled as a church. They planted trees on the lot and started a cemetery behind it. I don’t know how long the school had been around before this happened, but at some point they hired a teacher who was majorly messed up — twisted and sadistic. She was abusive to the students, beating them for all sorts of imagined crimes, and threatening them not to tell anyone. Some of the children tried to complain about her, but the settlers didn’t believe them. Teachers were allowed to whip students back then, so this witch’s authority went unquestioned. Horrible, horrible things went on in that little schoolhouse, but none of the adults would intervene. Around them, this woman was calm and reasonable — she was like a split personality. One day, as the story goes, the teacher started to beat on one particularly sweet little girl for doing nothing at all, and the students had had enough. The bigger kids overpowered the old woman and tied her to a chair. Then they all got out, lit the schoolhouse on fire, and burned it to the ground.”
    I flinched. “They burned her alive?”
    “So the legend goes,” Tara answered skeptically. “At least, that variation of it. You hear it different ways.”
    “I also heard it where the kids beat her to death with schoolbooks and lunch pails,” Kylee admitted. “But they always end with the building burning down.”
    “Let’s check it out,” Tara suggested, opening her door and popping out of the car. Kylee followed.
    I sat still another moment, letting out an unenthusiastic sigh. I knew that many perfectly normal people had a fascination with horror stories — even enjoyed letting themselves be scared by them. I wasn’t one of those perfectly normal people. I hated the grim and the gruesome. Dwelling on any sort of pain and agony, real or imagined, made me feel way too much like I was experiencing it myself.
    And I did not care to be burned to death this afternoon.
    I gritted my teeth and opened the car door anyway. With luck, the legend wouldn’t be true — or at least there would be no shadows to remind me of it. I tried not to blame Tara for my predicament — she had no idea how deeply scenes of tragedy affected me. Kylee knew, but even she didn’t really seem to understand. For her, tromping around the ruins of a schoolhouse and a spooky old cemetery was harmless fun. And she could actually see ghosts!
    Could it be that she, too, secretly thought these local legends were crocks?
    Feeling a bit more confident, I stepped out of the car. We were near the edge of the cemetery, and Kylee approached a group of tombstones and waved us over. “These are the oldest ones,” she said knowledgably. “Most of the writing is worn off, but they look about the same age. I heard that a bunch of people were buried all at the same time because of a cholera epidemic.”
    I looked at the aged stones, now leaning randomly this way and that, many of them tumbled and broken. The wind gave a sudden gust, buffeting their