The Unwanted by John Saul

to the bed there was a wooden desk, a bureau, and a rocking chair, all of it painted white. The rocking chair had a cushion on its seat, upholstered in the same blue as the quilt on the bed.
    “Don’t you just love it?” Jennifer asked excitedly.
“Alice in Wonderland
is my favorite book in the whole world.”
    Cassie suddenly understood. “This is your room, isn’t it?”
    Jennifer hesitated, then slowly nodded. “It’s always been my room. Mom and I just finished decorating it, and I was going to move back into it today. But then when we found out that you were coming, we decided I should stay in the other room and you should have this one, because this one is bigger.”
    “That’s dumb,” Cassie announced. “Let’s go see the other room.”
    Jennifer’s eyes clouded over with doubt. “I shouldn’t show it to you. Mom says I shouldn’t let anyone in my room unless I’ve cleaned it, and I didn’t even pick it up today.”
    “Well, that’s dumb too,” Cassie decided. “I never cleaned my room at home, and I had anyone in it I wanted. Let’s go see it.”
    Reluctantly Jennifer led Cassie back into the hall, then across to the other side of the house. “It’s kinda small,” she said before she opened the door. “Daddy says there didn’t used to be a bathroom up here, and when they put one in a long time ago, they took half of this room for it.” She pushed the door open and let Cassie step inside.
    This, she knew as soon as she crossed the threshold, was the room that would be hers.
    Had it not been for the space lost to the bathroom, the bedroom would have been large and L-shaped, with two windows on each wall. As it was, the room was perfectly rectangular, but no more than eight feet wide, with its fifteen-footlength giving it more of the feeling of a hall than a room. Just inside the door—to the left—a closet had been built. The floors were pine, and as Cassie moved slowly down the length of the room toward the single window at the far end, the planks creaked under her feet.
    And yet despite its odd proportions and creaking floor, or maybe even because of them, the room felt right to her. Its relationship to the rest of the house seemed to her to reflect her own relationship to her father’s family.
    Not quite connected, not quite fitting in.
    Set apart.
    In her mind’s eye she emptied the room of Jennifer’s toys and filled it with her own things. She covered the pink wallpaper with forest-green paint, and trimmed the window sashes in white enamel. Suddenly the room took on a cozy feeling, as if it were wrapping itself around her, protecting her. As Jennifer had said, the room wasn’t nearly as large as the other one, but it wasn’t really small either. It was just oddly shaped. As Cassie examined it more carefully, she realized she could divide the space in half, with her bed in the part closest to the door. The rest of the room would be set aside as a private place, a place shut off to everyone else but her.
    She came finally to the window and looked out. Below her was the backyard, its lawn neatly cut, and beyond that, separated from the yard by a black wrought-iron fence, was a small cemetery. “What’s that?” she asked, and Jennifer came over to stand beside her.
    “It’s the graveyard,” the little girl said solemnly. “It’s the oldest one in False Harbor, and everyone in it’s been dead a real long time. Practically nobody ever gets buried there anymore—it’s almost all full.”
    Cassie grinned mischievously at the little girl. “Are there any ghosts in there?”
    Jennifer’s eyes rolled scornfully upward. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Everyone knows that!”
    “But it’s still fun to think about,” Cassie replied. “I mean, wouldn’t it be neat to think maybe there are still people down there who’ve been there for hundreds of years, and sometimes, when it’s real dark, they get up and wander around the town?”
    Jennifer frowned. “Why would they