can get her to tell you about the other staff members—especially Sheldon and that black-haired girl from the blacksmith’s shop. I’m sure there’s something going on with them. They’re way too prickly. I think they’re hiding something. Okay?”
“Pas de problème,” Josée said. “I am the spy in the women’s quarters, yes?”
“Exactement,” Alan said, and snitched a couple of apple-peelings to chew on the way. “Come on, Zig. We’ve got a tree to climb.”
The day had started out bright and sunny, but it had begun to cloud over. The air was very still, and it felt like a thunderstorm was on the way. As Alan and Ziggy began putting the fallen apples into the basket, a couple of pigs in a pen next to the tree left the muddy shade they’d been lying in and wandered over to poke their snouts through the gaps in the split-rail fence.
“Hungry, guys?” Ziggy said, and rolled a half-squashed apple within reach of the biggest one. It was crunched up in a moment, and the pigs jostled lazily for position, hoping for more, baffing each other aside in a blubbery way, their mouths half-open in piggy grins.
“I like pigs,” Alan said. “They’re sort of comfortable.”
“Smelly, though. I’m glad we weren’t assigned to clean out their pen,” said Ziggy.
“Yeah, how come the gun wasn’t tossed in with them? Nobody would ever have found it.”
“Good point.” Well, the pigs might’ve. They’re smart, I think. If they’d found it, they would have busted outta there and gone on a rampage.”
“Ha. Right—they would have broken into the tourist money safe, then bought tickets to some place where they don’t eat bacon.”
The pigs got the really rotten apples, and the rest were put into the basket, but there weren’t many, so the next job was to pick some of the fruit that was still on the tree. They looked around for a ladder, but not very hard. Climbing without it would be much faster.
Alan, the taller one by several inches, gave Ziggy a hand up, then swung onto the lower branch himself.
“Wait—shouldn’t we take the basket with us?” Ziggy said.
“Yes, Mr. Spock, we’ll haul it up with a rope or something, then when it’s full, we can lower it down without having to carry and climb at the same time.”
Alan went back to the back porch of the inn, where he’d seen a coil of thin rope that would be perfect. Ziggy called out to him, “Hey—if I’m Mr. Spock, and I’m guessing you’re Kirk, who’s Josée?”
“Maybe Dr. McCoy?” Alan called back.
“A friendly alien,” she said, coming up behind him. “Madame Creasor heard you at the back door and wants to know where the apples are.”
“We’ve got some you can take, but we haven’t picked any from the tree, yet,” Alan said.
Josée came over with him and filled her apron pockets with the ones in the bottom of the basket.
“Not many here,” she said. “We’re too fast for you, yes?” She looked up. “Whoa! You’re very high, Ziggy.” Ziggy had climbed up a good way, and they could only see his feet through the branches. There were lots of apples up there, at least, and some of them had fallen while he was climbing. Alan started picking them up and tossing them to Josée.
“Are you guys just going to throw them down?” she said. “It’ll make them have bruises, won’t it?”
Alan explained the rope-and-basket idea. “We’ll toss the end of the rope up to him,” he said. Then he called up, “Ready, Zig? It would have been easier if you’d waited. You could have taken it up with you.”
“This is more fun,” Ziggy shot back.
“He likes climbing trees,” Josée said. “So do I, actually. But not in a skirt. Pioneer girls must have been really mad about that.”
It took a couple of tries before they figured out how to tie the end of the rope to a small stick, which made it easier to throw. Ziggy looped the rope over a branch and tossed the stick end back down to them. They tied one end through the basket’s handles, then pulled the other end, easily raising the basket.
“Elementary, my dear Watson,” Ziggy called down, pleased. Alan clambered back onto the bottom branch and started climbing up to where Ziggy was.
“I’m not coming to rescue you if you two get stuck up there,” Josée said, heading back to the inn.
There were plenty of clean, ripe apples within reach, and they filled the basket quickly. Alan climbed down again, untied the end of the rope holding the basket up, and lowered it without trouble to the ground.
“Come on, Zig. We’ve got enough.”
“Just one more,” Ziggy said from above. “There’s a beauty one just a little further up, all red and perfect.” There came a rustle of branches, and then—“Hey!”
“Hey what?” Alan called up.
Ziggy came down double-quick, almost falling in his haste to reach solid ground again. His eyes were wide.
“I thought I saw something move in that little window up by the roof of the inn—a face, maybe. Really pale and sort of blurry. Just for a second. Next moment, it was gone.”
“Can’t be. That’s the attic. Remember that trapdoor in the ceiling? There can’t be anything up there.”
“That’s what I mean. I think I just saw a ghost!”
FOUR
Mrs. Creasor was pretty interested in Ziggy’s ghost-sighting, but not enough to investigate, much to Alan’s disappointment.
“It could have been a manifestation of some sort,” she said. “Some years back, before I started here, another woman insisted that there was a poltergeist in the inn. But more likely, it was a reflection of light you saw.”
“Couldn’t we go up and check it out?” Alan said.
“No, dear. You can’t get up into the attic without a ladder, and we’re not about to do that. I don’t believe anybody’s been up there for years. It’s not a very convenient place for storage, after all.”
“What’s a poltergeist?”
“Well, they say it’s a ghost or spirit that likes moving things around. They’re said to make pictures on the wall go crooked, or move furniture around—sometimes they even throw things. Now, I do admit I’ve sometimes felt a presence here, as I told you, but I won’t go as far as to believe in poltergeists, and you shouldn’t, either.”
“But what if it’s a raccoon or squirrel stuck up there?” Josée said. “Shouldn’t we rescue it?”
“Oh, I think we’d have heard a lot of scrabbling in the roof
