Eglantine Read Online Free PDF Page A

them need help. Some of them are only drifting about because their killers have gone unpunished, or because their earthly remains haven’t been given a decent burial.
    I wondered what could possibly have been troubling Eglantine Higgins. She couldn’t have been buried under the house, because the house had been built in 1886, and Eglantine had been alive twenty years later. Had she died in the house, perhaps? Had someone killed her in it? That was a nasty thought, but it had to be faced.
    I asked Mrs Procter, the librarian, how you could find out who had been living in your house a hundred years ago.
    ‘Well,’ she said, after some hesitation, ‘that might be a bit difficult. Is this your new house, Alethea?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Why do you want to know?’
    I had no intention of telling her the truth. I was already having a hard enough time convincing people that I wasn’t a weirdo – the last thing I needed was a reputation for seeing ghosts.
    ‘Just some things we found,’ I replied vaguely. ‘A book and . . . other stuff.’
    ‘I see.’ She thought for a moment. I like Mrs Procter, because she always takes me seriously. She’s very intelligent, too, and knows a lot about books. (I’m a favourite of hers, because I actually read them.) ‘You might ask your neighbours,’ she finally suggested. ‘Sometimes people have been living in one place for a long while, and know things about the neighbourhood.’
    I grunted. Our new neighbours weren’t very friendly. On one side lived a big sloppy lady who spent all her time in front of the television, when she wasn’t on the phone complaining to Mum about the noise of our renovations. On the other side lived a well-dressed young couple with an expensive car, who were hardly ever home. The big sloppy lady wouldn’t talk to us any more. The young couple were never available.
    ‘I don’t think our neighbours would be much help,’ I said.
    ‘Of course, if you wanted to find out who owned the house a hundred years ago, you could check the title deeds,’ Mrs Procter remarked. ‘When your mother bought the house, her lawyer would have done a historical search, and had a copy made of the old title deeds. Title deeds show the names of all the past owners, and tell you when they bought the house. That might be useful – although just because a person owned a house, it doesn’t mean that they lived there.’
    Or died there, I thought. Then something else occurred to me.
    ‘How do you find out where and when somebody died?’ I asked. ‘If it happened about a hundred years ago, say?’
    Mrs Procter fixed me with a curious look.
    ‘There’s a name in the book we found under the stairs,’ I added hastily. ‘I want to find out if the person who owned the book lived in the house. And whether she’s still alive.’
    ‘I see,’ said Mrs Procter. ‘Well, you can check with the Registry of Births, Deaths and Marriages. There’s one in every state. They keep records of death certificates.’
    ‘Where’s the New South Wales one?’ I inquired, wondering doubtfully how I might persuade Mum to take me there. But Mrs Procter assured me that, like most other government bodies, the Registry would have its own internet site. I would simply have to log on.
    ‘They do have rules about privacy,’ she continued, ‘but I don’t think rules like that would apply to people who died a long time ago, or no one would ever be able to trace their family trees. Anyway, you should give it a try. Can’t do any harm, can it?’
    ‘No,’ I said. But then the bell rang, and I had to put off looking at the Births, Deaths and Marriages site until the next day.
    We don’t have the internet at home, you see. Mum doesn’t really trust it, for some reason – she says it’s too expensive. She doesn’t even like computers very much, despite the fact that she works in a bank. So I have to use a school computer, or one at the local library. It’s very annoying. The school computers are