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was starting to get on my nerves. I wished he’d go fall in love with somebody else.
    “What did the ghost look like, Maddie?” Ricky Ray asked, same as he always did, tugging at my shirt. “Weren’t you scared?”
    “I was just a baby, so even if I had seen him, Iwouldn’t have remembered,” I explained. “But I didn’t see him.”
    “I’d be afraid that ghost was going to track me down,” Donita said. “We ain’t that far from Roan Mountain. He could find you, check to see how you were doing.”
    “He wouldn’t hurt her, though,” Murphy said, turning to face Donita. “Why would he hurt somebody whose life he saved?”
    “A ghost is a ghost, friendly or not,” Donita said. “Whichever way, I bet Maddie don’t want to shake hands with one in the middle of the night.”
    Donita was going to the library to check out a book on dolphins for a science report. When Corinne heard that Murphy and I were going to the library, she told Donita to scoot along with us. It was fine with me, but Donita didn’t look any too happy about it. From what I could tell, Donita hadn’t warmed up to Murphy one bit over the past few days.
    The Elizabethton Public Library used to be the Elizabethton Post Office, back in the old days when they made post offices in the beautiful styleof high ceilings and gleaming floors. Once everything turned modern, though, they built a new post office over by the Wal-Mart. The new post office had gray linoleum and ceilings of regular height, and it was hard to get too excited about going over there to buy stamps if you should need some, which I rarely did.
    On the other hand, I was always in need of books to read since I read through a stack or two of them a week, so I was happy that they turned the beautiful, old post office into a library.
    The minute we walked in, I went to straight to Mrs. Dugger, the head librarian, and asked her where the house-building books were. Mrs. Dugger didn’t blink an eye, but marched us right over to the shelves featuring books on home repair and the like. I like a librarian who doesn’t ask too many questions and respects your privacy.
    Everyone but Donita, who’d gone to find dolphin books, grabbed handfuls of books with titles such as Designing Your Own Home and Contemporary Home Plans and lugged them over to one of the long, oak tables by the reference section.
    “This one’s got a lot of house plans in it,” Logan said, flipping through the pages of one of his books, “but I don’t see any directions for how to build the house itself.”
    “That’s easy,” Ricky Ray said. “You just get hammers and nails and wood. Everybody knows that.”
    “I think it’s a little more complicated than that,” Logan told him in a superior tone of voice. “Although you have the basic idea, I guess.”
    Murphy stood up. “I’ll go see if they have any books with instructions. We’ll probably need several different books if we’re going to figure out how to build a house.”
    The books in my pile mostly showed plans for the sort of houses you saw out by the new mall in Johnson City. They were subdivision houses with big garages and windows that lay flat against the outside walls. Over the years Imyself had developed a liking for houses with more character, although I understood why people might want to buy a house that was fresh and new and completely their own. I spent a lot of time wondering about the girls who lived in the dorm before me. It seemed strange to think how their stuff once cluttered up my desk and their clothes filled the closet I now shared with Murphy, Donita, Brittany, and Kandy. Sometimes I worried about those girls, what might have happened to them.
    “My books give a lot of measurements,” I told Logan and Ricky Ray after I’d gone through the whole stack. “But that’s it.”
    Murphy came back to the table at the same time that Donita was settling in at the far end of the table with a pile of books I guessed were on the subject