“Martha Price was a mean, tyrant bitch married to a sea captain in the 1800’s.” This was how the story always started, no matter which boy was relating the tale. Phineas Wilkes was the best at the telling, so he began telling it to his cousin, Jimmy, who was visiting Phineas’s family at their Mystic Island home. Phineas, Jimmy, and Phineas’s two friends, Ralph and Patrick, sat on Black Rock Beach. Patrick ate chocolate-covered donuts from a cellophane package. Ralph threw rocks at an empty iced-tea bottle discarded on the sand. “The captain really loved her,” Phineas said, “like obsessively, but she was a real harpy. Let’s just say, she was not the most honest of wives. She cheated on him, stole from him, and some say she even murdered their infant son just to spite him.”

            Jimmy took a sharp intake of air.

“Even though it probably wasn’t even his kid in the first place,” Ralph added, tossing a rock and missing the bottle again.

“Anyway,” Phineas said, his eyes gleaming like the dying sunlight reflecting off the ocean’s water, his voice drenched with the solemn tone of the tale, “Captain Price was in one of those, can’t live with’er, can’t live without’er situations, so he killed her, and walled away good ole Martha in their sitting room.”

            “What do you mean, walled away?” Jimmy said.

            “He made a place in the wall and sealed her in there,” Phineas said.

            “I heard she wasn’t even dead when he did it,” Ralph said.

            Patrick swallowed an oversized bite of donut and said, “I heard that, too. I heard the captain knocked her out, and when she woke, she was in the wall. She died screaming and pounding, and Captain Price just sat there, drinking whiskey, until she finally stopped trying to claw her way out.”

            “Now she haunts the place,” Ralph said, nodding like a bobble-head doll.

            “That’s right,” Phineas said, almost sneering the statement, his eyes widening to emphasize the believability of the point. Phineas had stressed the believability, but Phineas himself did not believe it. Oh sure, Phineas believed the tale of Captain Price’s revenge on his young bride’s…indiscretions. If Phineas didn’t believe the story, he wouldn’t be planning to do what he planned to do that night. But Phineas laughed at the idea of Martha Price’s tortured spirit searching for peace in the walls of the Old Price House. He laughed at most stupid ghost stories. And Martha’s ghost was among the stupidest. No one would even live in the Price House. A beautiful, huge captain’s house and nobody even wanted the place. Potential homeowner after homeowner frightened off by the tale of murder and the bumps and groans of an old wooden abode. But Phineas knew that the people were scaring themselves, turning the bumps and groans, known to any old house settling, into Martha Price. It was like Jaws. Phineas was barely out of diapers when it came out eight years ago, but still he remembered it scared people so badly that some stopped swimming altogether. Millions of people turning a silly mechanical shark into an intense phobia.

            Well, not him, not Phineas Wilkes, no way. He wouldn’t turn bumps in the night or mechanical sharks into anything. And if Martha Price was walled up in that old house, she’d stay there. Why? Because she was dead, that’s why. And then he’d win the bet. Steve Mitchner saying Phineas was nothing but a blowhard who was full of crap with his stories. Mitchner even offering up his custom Mongoose BMX as stakes. Phineas figured that over the years, countless kids had snuck into the house trying to find the brooch, but they were all turned back, fleeing from the imagined presence of the brooch’s one true owner. But that’s all it was: an imagined presence. Phineas once convinced half his class to stay away from Lyme Street by telling them disease-carrying ticks infested the bushes. Why do you think they named it Lyme Street? And that’s all they needed to never walk down that street again.

            Phineas was going into the Price House that night. And somehow, he’d talked Ralph and Patrick into being his lookouts. And Cousin Jimmy? Cousin Jimmy would be along for the ride, and a killer ghost story to tell his friends back home in Rhode Island.

            “Anyway,” Phineas said, “Martha wore this brooch. You know, like the ones that are brown and white with a profile of a lady on it.”

            “A cameo,” Patrick said.

            “Yeah, one of them,” Phineas said. “Anyway, after Captain Price killed Martha, he carried that brooch around with him everywhere. Some say he even talked to it, thinking Martha’s soul was trapped in it.”

            Cousin Jimmy’s Adam’s apple bounced in his neck.

            “Well, good ole Captain Price went mad,” Phineas said, “and when the authorities came to take him away, he hid that brooch somewhere in the house, once again sealing Martha’s soul for eternity.”

            “Wow,” Jimmy said.

            Phineas smiled, satisfied with his cousin’s reaction.

            “I heard that when he talked to the brooch, it talked back to him,” Ralph said.

            “Wow,” Phineas’s cousin said again.

            Phineas let the story hang in the darkening beach’s quiet. He looked out at the waves under the violet sky and said, “I’m going after that brooch tonight.”

***

            They darted into the backyard in a crouching run. They were dressed in camouflage and all black, even painting their faces camouflage, telling their parents that they were trick-or-treating as commandos. Reaching the Price house, they sat beneath a window. Other than crickets chirping in the surrounding bushes, the night was silent.

            Phineas wondered what Cousin Jimmy thought about all this. Did he think Phineas was a bold hero or a stupid hoodlum? Judging from Jimmy’s reaction to the tale of Martha Price and her Poe-like demise, Phineas’s image was probably holding up just fine. Besides, what else would they be doing tonight? Actually go trick-or-treating? Watch horror movies and wait for their younger siblings to come home so they could steal their Halloween candy? No thanks. Phineas would rather go for, as his hero, Indiana Jones, said, “Fortune and glory, kid. Fortune and glory.”

            “Ready?” Phineas said to the other boys. No one answered.

            As most kids on the island knew, the house’s windows were never locked, as if Martha were encouraging intruders. Patrick gave Phineas a boost, and Phineas opened the window. The house gasped, as if letting out a breath it had been holding for centuries. Phineas peeked in the window. The full moon reflected across the floor and onto the far wall. The room was empty.

            Phineas climbed in through the window, sliding over the sill and coming to rest, face first, on the floor.

            The place smelled like death.

            No. It smells like dust, he assured himself.

            He surveyed the darkness. No glowing eyes in the room’s doorways. No maniacs charging from the dark with chainsaws. And no Martha.

            Phineas popped his head back out the window. “Boo,” he said in a low voice.

            His friends gasped. Phineas laughed. “C’mon,” he said.

            One at a time, the other boys climbed into the room. They stood in silence, their eyes darting in the moonlight.

            Phineas held up his hands in a halting manner. “Wait.” he said.

            They all froze.

            “Did you hear that?” Phineas said.

            “No. What was it?” Ralph said.

            “I farted,” Phineas said.

            The other boys murmured curses.

            Phineas pulled a flashlight from his backpack. “All right,” he said, clicking on the light, “I’m going to look around. Who’s coming?”

            The other boys looked at one another.

            “Figures,” Phineas said. “Fine. You girls stay here and knit, I’ll check the place out.” He walked off with the flashlight’s beam bouncing before him.

***

            Phineas stepped into a foyer, the moonlight spilling through windows like silver fog. Several rooms branched off from this room, and a sweeping stairway climbed into the darkness. The flashlight’s beam brought to life a strange sense of movement, dancing shadows and silhouettes. The shadow of the stairway’s globe-topped banister created an especially lifelike specter ascending and descending the steps.

            Phineas peeked into the room to his left, flashing the beam of light across the walls, just to be sure there was no one in there. But there was someone in there, and Phineas’s gasp echoed in the darkness like a gale. On the room’s far side, he saw the fiery face of a glowing, pale specter that looked just like…Phineas Wilkes. It was his flashlight-lit image mirrored in glass. He pointed the beam at the glass doors of an inlaid hutch. Taking a deep breath, he scolded himself for almost screaming—not wanting to admit it would have been a very girly scream at that—and it was a stupid reflection the whole time. The mechanical shark almost got the better of him, and for a moment, his own reflection had become Martha Price.

            He scanned the rest of the room with his flashlight, careful not to look toward those glass doors again. He then returned to the foyer. He’d long envisioned finding the prize upstairs, having thought long and hard as to where the captain would have hidden the brooch. He’d already ruled out the servant’s quarters—which was a large wing off the house’s vast kitchen—figuring the captain would never trust such a treasure where the hired help could stumble upon it, accidently or otherwise. And for that matter, Phineas could rule out the kitchen, too. The two places Phineas thought most likely the brooch’s final resting place—final, that is, until he found it—were the captain’s study and the master bedroom. Phineas and his friends had actually entered the house via the study, so he figured he’d check there should his search upstairs prove futile. Besides, he didn’t want to go poking around the study with his friends there only to have to slink into the other rooms empty-handed. He wanted a flare for the dramatic. Find the brooch and return triumphantly.

            Phineas approached the bottom step of the stairway, paused a moment, and then began to climb, stopping a few times to push the lingering shock of the dining room from his mind, but he assured himself that it was only a reflection, and that the sounds behind him were just echoes of his own footfalls. There was no ghost in the dining room, and there was not someone following him up the stairs. He glanced back over his shoulder, whispering, “Just reflections and echoes.”

            His heart was pounding, and his arms and legs felt weak. He suddenly wanted to run. He wanted to get out of the house. He wanted to—

He stopped. Stopped his footfalls up the steps. Stopped his spinning thoughts. Would Indiana Jones be scared by reflections and echoes? No way. Nothing’s supposed to get in the way of one’s quest for fortune and glory. Not reflections, or echoes, or dart-blowing natives and face-melting Nazis. And certainly not the mechanical shark. Suck it up. After all, he’d already proved his muster by winning past challenges of adventure. Like camping a night in the island’s supposedly haunted Parson’s Woods. Or sneaking into the basement of Saint Sebastian’s church to knock on the bolted metal door, which supposedly led to Hell itself. Or staring into the Old Stone Church’s stained glass windows, which everyone knows can steal the souls of children and adults alike. Phineas took a deep breath, slowing his heart, conjuring his strength back into his limbs, and he continued up the steps.