THE GHOSTS

Can the living alter the past? alter it so that the very graves change from one day to the next? and are sworn to be just as they have always been? ""I don't think that I understand this Wheel of Time business even now, Lucy admits to her brother after they have interceded to save two Victorian children from being roasted alive by a malevolent housekeeper. ""Oh, I don't understand it,"" brother Jamie agrees cheerfully, but then I don t understand television either."" Children who are not mystified by television are not apt to be impressed by this evasion -- which also routes the reader through some sticky business about faith. And it will take charity plus faith to accept the conclusion, in which Jamie becomes the long-lost and circuitously-related heir to the very property they've come to love as temporary caretakers, and where they intervened as ghosts -- to forest all the premature death of their own great-great-grandmother, it appears... which is certainly a new wrinkle in time.