The Ghost Belonged to Me by Richard Peck Page A

she helped herself to three cakes, which cleaned me out.
    She commenced to nibble around one of the sugar roses and before I could back out of the bushes darted her face forward and gave me a thank-you kiss on the mouth. It took me by surprise and had a strawberry flavor.
    My luck being what it is, Lucille was mounting the porch steps just then and had a clear view of this business behind the bushes. Looking down, she said very haughty, “Alexander! How disgusting and at my party too!”
    So I told her that what I was doing under the porch was not a patch on what she did on the porch with Tom Hackett. Which set her face to crumpling, since Tom had not yet shown up.
    As I was exiting from the snowball bushes, I saw a young fellow approaching the house on foot, but it wasn’t Tom. This fellow was dressed like the rest in a stiff straw hat and a whip-cord suit. But he was tending to drag his feet along the lane, and I could not place him.
    Since I was free of my cakes and Blossom, I walked down to make him welcome. He said his name was Seaforth and that he’d been sent out by the Pantagraph newspaper to cover the party because the society editor was elsewhere covering a dog and pony show at Wood River.
    He said he had rather cover prize fights and other events with some action to them. But as a cub reporter he had to take such assignments as he was given. I asked him if he was from around these parts, and he said no, he was fresh from two years at the new journalism school over at the University of Missouri. And if I would fill him in and put him wise to the local scene, he’d be obliged.
    I thought this was a step up from passing cakes, and this Seaforth was a good fellow who talked to you man to man. Besides, I thought I’d better do my talking then because when Mother found out the paper was writing up our party, she’d be all over him.
    â€œThis is your sister’s coming-out party, as I understand it,” said Seaforth, whose first name is Lowell. “Is she good-looking?”
    â€œThat is a matter of opinion,” I told him, remembering that Blossom said girls of Lucille’s type were going out of style. “But Tom Hackett seems to think highly of her.”
    â€œThat’s Hackett’s Laxatives?”
    â€œThe same,” I told him.
    â€œThen I take it that everybody who is anybody is here today,” Lowell observed.
    â€œVery nearly,” I said. “The Breckenridges and the Hochhuths and the Hacketts senior to name but a few.”
    â€œWell, I guess the upper crust of one town is very like another.”
    I said nothing to that, not knowing.
    Lowell remarked that everyone there seemed to be fairly pleased with themselves. And then he said,
    A town that boasts inhabitants like me
    Can have no lack of good society.
    I saw that was a verse and thought it was clever. But he said it’d been written before him by the poet Longfellow.
    Lowell looked up at the house and strolled around a bit, viewing it from various angles. “They don’t build like this anymore,” he mentioned. “This is the old place where the sea captain or whoever hanged himself, isn’t it?”
    I admitted that but said Mother didn’t like it commented on.
    â€œWell, I guess it’d be easier to die in than live in, what with the upkeep,” Lowell said, “no offense meant. I see you have kept on the barn. But I suppose your father will be thinking of pulling that down in favor of one of these new garages they’re building now.”
    I told Lowell that was the best idea I’d heard all day and showed him to the punch pavilion.
    It was right then that Lucille’s party took a turn for the worse. Tom Hackett’s own auto, a brown and buff colored Crane-Simplex open model roared up the lane at an immoderate speed, swerved onto the lawn, and came to rest in one of Mother’s flower beds, narrowly missing four girls from the high school. Tom