Home Improvement: Undead Edition Read Online Free PDF Page B

Why hadn’t she found out what was wrong and fixed it?
    The normally placid JB nudged Sam to make him move away from the grave. Sam’s jaw set in a way I knew meant he was barely holding on to his temper.
    I didn’t trust any emotion I felt.
    Tara was angry with me, which wasn’t normal. Sam and JB were glaring at each other. The anger in the air was affecting all of us. I made myself run into the house to find out why the babies were weeping. Tara should be doing this! I followed the sobs to their little room.
    Quiana was sitting in the rocking chair crammed in beside the cribs, and she was crying, too.
    “Oh, for God’s sake,” I said. “Snap out of it.”
    Her tear-stained face looked at me with resentment written all over it. “I have a right to grieve for what I’ve lost. Only my brother knows the real me,” she said bitterly.
    Uh-oh.
    “Quiana,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot calmer and a lot more nervous, “you don’t have a brother.”
    “Of course I do.” But she looked confused.
    “You’re being haunted,” I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. I didn’t want to say the word possessed , but it was definitely hovering in the air.
    “Sure, that’s right, blame me because I’m the one who’s different,” she snarled in a complete emotional about-face.
    I flinched, but I had to pass her to get to the babies, whose cries had redoubled. I decided to take a chance. “You want to go outside?” I said. Then I made a guess. “You can see your bones.” I watched her carefully, since I had no idea what she’d do next.
    There was someone else behind Quiana’s face, someone both anguished and angry. All I could think about was getting her out of the room.
    And then Quiana got up and left the room, her face blank. She wasn’t even walking like herself.
    I scooped up Sara, who was shrieking like a banshee.
    “Sara,” I said. “Please stop crying.” To my amazement, she did. The baby looked up at me, her face red and tearful, panting with exhaustion. “Let’s get your brother,” I said, since Robbie’s wails continued unabated. “We’ll make him happy, too.” Robbie also responded to my touch, and in a moment I was walking slowly holding the two babies. It was awkward and terrifying.
    What would have happened if Quiana had been utterly overrun by the ghost while she was here alone with the twins?
    Now that the bones had been uncovered, the emotional miasma in the house was intensifying, without any doubt. It was a struggle to get out of the house, aside from the difficulty of carrying two children. Though I wanted to leave more than anything, I stopped in the kitchen to put them in their child seats. I opened the back door and passed Sara to JB. I went down the back steps with Robbie, moving very carefully. Sam, Tara, and Quiana were in the corner of the yard farthest from the bones, and JB and I joined them there.
    In sharp contrast to the lighthearted meeting we’d had when we were planning the renovation, our conference in the backyard was grim. The late-afternoon sun slanted across the bricks of the patio, and the heat of them radiated upward. Even the heat was preferable to the haunted house.
    We waited. Nothing happened. Finally, Tara sat in a lawn chair and started feeding Sara after JB fetched her nursing shawl. Robbie made squeaky noises until it was his turn. They, at least, were content.
    Sam said, “I dug some more, and I think it’s a complete skeleton. We don’t know whose bones, whose ghost, or why it’s angry.”
    An accurate and depressing summary.
    “The only neat stories are the ones made up,” Tara said.
    Quiana, who seemed to be herself at the moment, sat slumped forward, her elbows on her knees. She said, “There’s a reason all this is happening. There’s a reason the haunting started when the hammer came out of the wall. There’s a reason there’s a body buried in the backyard. We just have to figure it out. And I’m the psychic. And it’s trying to