Waiting Spirits by Bruce Coville Page A

But Myra Halston knew her children would mourn the loss of their beloved nurse, and she did not want that to happen. She was torn between her desire to regain what she thought she had lost and her eagerness to keep her children happy.
    She began to do small things to make Ellen McCormack’s life miserable. She concocted stories to turn her husband against the woman. She would call Ellen into social gatherings, then humiliate her in front of the guests with carefully worded questions. At the same time, she tried to buy back her children’s affection with increasingly lavish gifts, not realizing she had never really lost their love to begin with.
    But it was when she tried to do what she could not, tried to take Ellen McCormack’s place, that the trouble really began. She was simply not able to handle the stress. She would play with the girls and end up panting and exhausted, lying on the sofa and fanning herself pathetically.
    The children came to dread these episodes. It terrified them to see their mother so ill.
    And then Carrie died.
    Myra Halston blamed Ellen McCormack for her daughter’s death because the child had drowned while the nurse was not watching her. Myra’s sorrow was made more bitter by the fact that Carrie had drowned in the small fish pond that Myra herself had begged her husband to install only a year before. Playing in the backyard, Carrie had tripped, knocked her head against a rock at the edge of the pool, and fallen in, unconscious.
    They found her at the pool’s edge, her golden hair floating on the water, the curious fish nudging against her open, staring eyes.
    Then Myra Halston went mad indeed. She threw herself at the nurse and tried to scratch her eyes out. Her husband had had to pull her off and hold her arms while the nurse fled to the house with the weeping Alice.
    For weeks after that, the cries of Myra Halston echoed through the night as she wept and wept for the lost Carrie. She shoved Alice out of her life; it was too painful for her to see the remaining child, reminding her so much of the one she had lost.
    She blamed the nurse; she blamed her husband for not being there when the tragedy had occurred; she blamed Alice for being in the kitchen instead of the backyard with her sister; and she blamed the cook and the maid and the gardener, all of whom she thought should have been there when Carrie met her doom.
    The doctor came twice a day to give her an injection to calm her. Alice watched with terrified eyes as he passed grimly in and out of her mother’s room, shaking his head.
    Each time he left, things would be quiet for a while. But all too soon Myra’s shrieks and curses would ring out once more.
    Everyone in the house walked quietly, every eye held a haunted look. They had all loved Carrie. She had been a golden child, as joyful and vibrant as her mother was sickly. Her loss affected each of them deeply—and continued to affect them because of Myra Halston’s madness.
    Then one day Myra stepped from her room, and though her eyes were larger and darker than ever, she was calm and beautiful. For a few moments it seemed that all was well.
    She crossed to her remaining daughter and took her in her arms. “I’m sorry, my darling,” she said. “I’ve been away too long. Did you miss me?”
    Alice looked at her with wide eyes. “Yes, Mother,” she said. “I missed you terribly.”
    â€œThat’s good to hear,” crooned Mrs. Halston. “I missed you, too, Carrie.”
    Alice began to scream. She beat at her mother’s face. “I’m not Carrie! I’m not! I’m Alice! Carrie is dead!”
    Her mother slapped her. Alice staggered back against the wall. Her mother’s eyes went wide with recognition and with horror. “You’re not Carrie!” She cried. “Get away from me. Get away! Get away!”
    Myra Halston stood for a moment, her breast heaving, her eyes wild. Then she