The Golden Ghost by Marion Dane Bauer Page A

clean walk is always spectacular.”
    Delsie usually liked helping out around her parents’ store. But not today, with the sun shining so brightly and the summer almost gone.
    She kissed the top of Bug’s head and ignored the broom.
    Todd jumped up and took it. He would have stood on his head for Delsie’s dad if he’d asked him to. Todd’s father had moved to another state and rarely called.
    “I wish I could have a dog,” Delsie said. She said it loudly enough for her father to hear as he headed back inside the store.
    Her father didn’t slow his stride as he said over his shoulder, “No dogs. No cats. No hamsters—”
    Delsie interrupted. “I know. No groundhogs, either. You’re allergic.”
    “Right!” her father said. The bell over the door jangled as the door fell closed.
    Todd began sweeping, though there wasn’t much on the walk except more gravelly dust.

    Delsie stayed where she was. She rubbed Bug’s other ear, and he groaned some more. How she wished she could have a dog of her own! Any kind of dog would do. Even one named Bug!
    Maybe she could get a dog without any fur, if there was such a thing. If a dog didn’t have any fur, would it still make her father sneeze?
    Delsie didn’t much mind being an only child. She didn’t have to put up with teasing, except for her dad’s. She didn’t have to share her bedroom. She didn’t have to watch her birthday cake disappear before she’d had seconds. Todd had to do all those things.
    But while being an only child was okay, being a dogless one wasn’t.
    There seemed to be hardly a moment in Delsie’s life when she wasn’t longing for a dog. She missed having one most when she was waiting to fall asleep at night.
    That was when she pretended her dog was there, snuggled in close beside her. She even slept on the very edge of her bed tomake sure her dog had enough room. (It would be a girl dog, she’d decided.)
    Delsie gave Bug a hard squeeze. He said
“Ooomph,”
and squirmed away. The street was empty, but still she looped her hand through his leash to keep him close.
    Billows of dust rose from Todd’s sweeping. Delsie got up to move out of the way with Bug.
    “Is that all you’re going to do?” she asked. “Sweep my dad’s walk?”
    “Do you have a better idea?” Todd said.
    That was the problem, though, and Todd knew it. She was out of ideas.
    She scrambled through her brain for something. “We could check out the ghost houses,” she said after a thorough search. She didn’t know where that idea had come from. Had it been lurking in a dark corner?
    Todd stopped sweeping. He studied her, his eyes narrowed. “Are you serious?” he asked.
    She hadn’t been. Not really. But the look on Todd’s face made her suddenly determined.
    “Yeah,” she said. “I’m serious. Why not?”
    She waited for him to tell her it was a dumb idea.
    The truth was she knew it was dumb. Every kid in town had been told not to hang around the empty old houses by the mill.
    But Todd surprised her. “Okay.” He took one last swish at the walk and leaned the broom against the storefront. “The ghost houses it is,” he said. “Let’s go.”
    It had been her idea. What could Delsie do but follow?

s Delsie pedaled behind Todd’s bike toward the edge of town, she had plenty of time for regrets.
    People were always telling her that she let her imagination run away with her. Even Todd said that sometimes, and he was her best friend. Here she’d gone and proven the point again. Who wanted to check out ghost houses, anyway?
    They weren’t really ghost houses, of course. That was just what the kids called them. They were houses that had been built for the long-ago workers at the cement mill.
    Now they stood staring at one another across an empty street, as silent and dusty as the abandoned mill. No one lived in them now. No one had lived in them for a long time.
    The kids in town liked to say that ghosts lived there … if what ghosts did could be called