The Ghost Belonged to Me Read Online Free

never entertained the notion of taking the dog to the house. The minute my mother saw it, she’d call the pound. She grew up on a tenant farm surrounded by many a four-legged critter, but she’s put all that behind her now.
    When the dog finally let me, I handled her front paw enough to know it was fractured. So I nipped down the stairs to find a couple of laths I could skin off an orange crate and whittle down for splints. I was much encouraged to have ghosts off my mind. And already planning to keep that dog up in the loft, feed her regular, and make her my own. She was an indoor dog anyway and wouldn’t mind the confinement. She’d belonged to somebody, so like as not she was paper-trained.
    Later, when I had her bound up with splints and tire patches, I made a bed for her out of the remains of the crate and an old shawl. I brought her a coffee can of water from the downstairs tap and planned on slipping her some food. When I left the loft, her big eyes followed me to the door.
    It was pretty near evening then, and I’d have some questions to answer when I got up to the house. But when I’d pulled the barn doors to behind me, I lingered a while. There was an old stone hitching post by the drive. It was left from horse days, sunk in the time of Captain Campbell who built the place.
    The top of the post is carved like a pony’s mouth coming up out of acanthus leaves with an iron ring in its mouth. Down at the base in tall grass were initials cut into a panel: I. D. I’d seen those letters so often that I didn’t wonder what they signified.
    I fiddled with the hitch ring and contemplated Blossom Culp. She was brazen enough to plant a small dog up in the barn just to give some weight to her storytelling. She was brazen enough for anything. But she was a liar, I decided, and from a long line of them.
    I planned to slip back after supper with food and a curry comb to get some of the mud out of the dog’s tangles, which I did. I figured once she got her food from me, she’d be mine. When I went back later, she wouldn’t eat, but she looked grateful. I named her Trixie.
    I was in bed that night after my second trip to the barn, grinning in the dark about Blossom Culp and pink halos. If there was such a thing as a ghost, I figured it would haunt the house, not the barn. And it wouldn’t be any young girl cut off in her prime.
    It’d be old Captain Campbell, who built this place and hanged himself in it before the mortar was dry. Nobody remembered just which of the twenty-three rooms it was where he’d strung himself up. Ever since I was quite a small kid, I had roamed through the rooms, wondering which one it was.
    Very nearly all the downstairs rooms have eighteen-foot ceilings, which would have put the captain to a lot of trouble with a tall ladder and a long rope. The word was that Captain Campbell did himself in before he got well acquainted. Nobody seemed to know how he came by his money. Some said he’d been a captain in the Civil War. Which didn’t explain the fortune he’d put into the house he hadn’t hardly finished before he did away with himself.
    Mother wouldn’t hear any talk on the subject. And I never thought for a minute she’d allow a ghost in the house. Certain people thought we got the place cheap since it had an evil name from standing empty all those years. But my dad said that any place that cost fifty-five dollars a winter to heat was not his idea of a bargain.
    On account of all this deep thinking, I didn’t drop right off to sleep. I twisted around in the bed till my nightshirt was in a knot up under my neck. Which only made me think stronger about old Captain Campbell.
    It’s possible that I drifted off for a minute, but no longer. The ironwork on the ceiling fixture threw a pattern across the room. There was a light breeze ballooning the curtains. I got up to close the window.
    It faces the barn. I looked maybe a