Ghost train

Description

13-year-old Remi DuMont, newly arrived from Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where his family lived in poverty, hopes that life will be different in West Oakland, California, where refrigerators, hot running water and television are but three new wonders and some kids are wondrously fat. But when he and his parents move into the second-floor apartment of a spooky old Victorian house in a neighborhood haunted by real-life terrors of gangs, drugs and violence, the last thing Remi expects are ghosts! Every night at 3:13 while his mother and father sleep, Remi hears a train approaching, seemingly headed straight for the house. From his window he sees a murder committed aboard the train as it rumbles past below. Remi, who shares his father's interest in the supernatural, soon realizes that the murderer, the victim, and the train are ghosts; and the murder he sees reenacted each night happened in 1943 when Liberty ships were built in Oakland to help win World War II. Together with his downstairs neighbor, chubby, streetwise, Niya Bedford, also 13, they put together the pieces of this undiscovered crime, which includes the unexplained disappearance of another 13-year-old boy, the son of the elderly and reclusive landlady who lives on the house's dark third floor. In their attempt to solve the mystery by searching for a body they believe to have been buried in the house's basement, Remi and Niya find themselves pulled into the ghostly manifestation where the laws of the living don't apply, becoming ghosts from the future seemingly haunting the past and locked in a life-and-death struggle with a dead murderer and time itself.

Excerpt

“Just ‘cause I’m a girl don’t mean I can’t dig a grave.” Remy paused to lean on the shovel. He was shirtless, streaked with dirt, and his ebony body was gleaming with sweat as he stood waist-deep in the ground. “We are digging up a grave... or trying to, anyway.” “So let me do my share.” Remy climbed from the hole, almost losing his jeans, and sat with his legs hanging over the edge, his bottom half bare on the freshly dug dirt. Niya took the shovel, jumped into the hole and went to work, her T-shirt growing damp with sweat and clinging even tighter to the opulent orbs of her breasts while climbing to bare her rolly middle. Remy pulled his eyes from her figure and glanced to the basement window; the last light of day was fading beyond. An hour had passed since they’d come down here. Niya had brought a candle, and they had searched the floor in this corner, discovering a sinking about the shape and size of a grave. Yet Remy had been doubtful… the whole basement floor was uneven. But, Niya had been determined to dig up a body and set a ghost free, and the shovel in the tool shed had been in good enough shape to use. Remy’s eyes returned to Niya, which he found a pleasant sight. The rays from the light in the laundry area hardly reach-ed over here. The candle burned in an old wine bottle beside the mounting pile of earth, its soft glow casting flickering shadows over her chubby face. “Remy?” she puffed. “Figure he’s all gone to bones by now? I seen a real new body on my way to school last year, an’ I won’t get freaked by an old skeleton, but I don’t think I’d like somethin’ in between.”

Description

Thirteen-year-old Remi, who has just moved to California from Haiti, and his neighbor Niya travel back in time to solve the mystery of the night train.

Subjects

Genres

• Fiction

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Other Editions

• Ghost trainH. Holt1996-01-01
• Ghost TrainTrade PaperAnubis2017-01-01