There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around Read Online Free

so-you're-behind-all-this looks.
    I shook my head to indicate my innocence and ignorance.
    "Did you wake us all up for a bad dream?" Zach demanded.
    Vicki shook her head. "It wasn't a dream. The bad lady was in my room, and I threw the hammer at her, just like you said, Zach."
    Mom turned her look onto Zach, who smiled guiltily, then hunched in his shoulders and tried to look small and innocent.
    "And it made her go away," Vicki continued, "but then she floated across the hall to Teddy's room."
    Dad said, "If Zach's the one who gave you the hammer, she should have gone after him.
I'll
go after him if that hammer put a dent in the wall."
    "This is not funny," Mom told him. "I don't know what kind of stories you two have been telling Vicki—"
    "I haven't," Zach protested, at the same time I said, "Not me."
    Dad finally pulled Vicki away from me. He gave her a tight hug before picking her up. "I know it seemed real, honey," he said. "But it
was
just a dream."
    "It wasn't," Vicki insisted. "I saw her in Teddy's room. She was touching his face."
    Zach reeled back in horror, clutching at his heart. "Wow!" he exclaimed. "That
was
dangerous! Good thing you stopped her in time."
    "Go to bed," Mom ordered Zach. Then, "Sometimes," she told Vicki, following as Dad began to carry Vicki down the hall back to her room, "when we wake up from an especially real-seeming dream, it takes us a few seconds to stop being confused."
    "It wasn't a dream," Vicki said again, as the three of them disappeared into her room.
    "We'll leave the hall light on," I heard Dad assure her. "Night-lights keep away both bad dreams and bad ladies."
    Zach yawned loudly, scratched his rear end loudly, and returned to his room.
    Which left me alone in the hall, wondering why Vicki would dream about the bad lady touching my face at the exact moment I was dreaming about cobwebby fingers touching my face.
    On the other hand, I thought with a shudder, maybe I didn't want to work that one out after all....

CHAPTER 5
My Sister Develops an Unreasoning Fear of Susan B. Anthony
    THE NEXT DAY WAS Saturday. With the telephone strike, Dad had to work both days of the weekend; for the time being, the only day he had off was Thursday. Mom at least had Saturdays off.
    Saturdays Vicki and I go to the Rochester Museum and Science Center for fun-type classes. Zach used to come, too, but now he likes to say he's too smart not to recognize school, however it's disguised. I figure he just doesn't like to get up before noon for fear he'll see his shadow and have to crawl back into his hole for six more weeks. I don't think of it as school. In the past I've taken things like snowshoeing, pottery, "Dinosaur Madness," and "Clownology." At the moment, I was two weeks into a four-week session on magic. Vicki was taking something called "Chipmunks and Squirrels," a nature course that involved, as far as I could see, running around the museum's grounds terrorizing small animals, making leaf rubbings, and stuffing down as many animal crackers as possible.
    At breakfast Mom didn't say anything about the night before—as though she was hoping that Vicki and I would each assume it had all been a dream. So everything was the same as usual when she dropped us off in front of the building where they have the classes. I took Vicki to her room (the small kids' rooms are clustered together on the second floor, where their noise won't drive the older kids or the office workers crazy), then I went down to the basement for my class.
    On this particular day, we learned a couple rope tricks, a mysteriously-disappearing-then-miraculously-reappearing-coin trick, and how to pull foam-rubber rabbits out of the ears of members of our audience.
    I was feeling pretty pleased with myself as I trudged up the eighty or ninety stairs between the basement and the second floor. Everybody else was heading down, of course, to the parking lot and their waiting parents.
    By the time I got to the second floor, Vicki was