“Yeah,” I added. “We just want to make sure you get home safely.”
Little Belman hesitated, then came over to where we were, pushing her bike.
“How about if we just ride with you to your house?” Julie asked.
Little Belman looked mad, but she also looked a little anxious.
“We won’t even ask you again why you’ve been following us,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
Little Belman nodded but didn’t say anything. So we got back on our bikes and left, with her following a little ways behind. I thought she’d speak at some point on the way to her house, give us a clue about why she was there and had been there for the past couple of hours, but she didn’t. It had something to do with her knowing about Sally — though she didn’t exactly know about Sally, since I had chased her off from the Kitchen Sink the other day before Sally finally told me that she was a girl.
But Little Belman did know there was a ghost. And she had her strong suspicions about Sam being Sally.
She still didn’t speak when we stopped at her house. She just rode her bike around to her backyard and that was that.
“What a weird kid,” Greg said.
“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “People probably say the same thing about us.”
Julie sniffed. “Speak for yourself, Anderson.” And then off we went, heading home.
I fished around on the Internet that night until I actually found a casualty list for Sally’s regiment in the Irish Brigade — the 88th New York Volunteers. I couldn’t believe it. I mean, what great luck.
My happiness didn’t last too long, though, because scrolling down the list it wasn’t long before I found Sally, or rather Sam Keegan. All it said was “Age, 16 years. Enlisted at New York City, to serve three years, and mustered in as private, Company G, on October 2, 1861. Promoted corporal, no date. Wounded and missing in action; December 13, 1862, at Fredericksburg, Va; no further record.”
That stopped me cold. I read the notation a dozen times, trying to get my head around it. It all seemed so final. And Sally’s whole life, or her time in the army, anyway, summed up in just those three little lines.
But at least Frankie’s name wasn’t on the casualty list, and that was something good that I would get to tell Sally, and that I bet would make her happy.
My phone vibrated with a text. It was Julie, telling me she had just found out the same thing as I had. She was even on the same website, which made me feel pretty smart. Then Greg buzzed in. He had found it, too.
Nice! I texted back.
Sad about Sally, Greg texted. And still the mystery.
But good about Frankie, Julie texted, echoing what I’d been thinking. Will help Sally to know.
The next day was uneventful, except that all three of us got in trouble in our three different classes in the morning at school for dozing off.
“I’m just glad tomorrow is December 13,” Julie said when we met up at lunch and shared our stories about sleeping in class. “At least I think I am — if Sally will remember all the rest of her story, and we can finally help her find her answers.”
“I just can’t wait to tell her about Frankie,” I said.
“Yeah,” said Greg. “Wish we knew what happened to him after the Battle of Fredericksburg — if he survived the rest of the war, if he got to live for a long time and make something good of his life.”
I thought about that, and then, for no real reason, said, “I just have this feeling that he did.”
Julie and Greg nodded slowly, as if they had that feeling, too, even though none of us could explain why.
We got together at the Kitchen Sink for band practice, but really in hopes that Sally would show up. We were all still so tired that practice was terrible anyway, so we ended early. There wasn’t an All-Ages band competition in December, so I guess it didn’t matter that we weren’t practicing all that much. I promised I would call Julie and Greg if Sally showed up at my house again that night, and Greg said, “You better.”
“We’ll come right over,” Julie added. “We’ll want to see her, too. It shouldn’t be just you, Anderson.”
“You’re going to sneak out of your house?” I asked, not believing she would.
“Well …” Julie thought about it. “Maybe if Greg came over and got me and we came over together.”
“Sure,” Greg said. “I could do that.”
“Okay,” I said, still not believing it would happen. I figured Greg would sneak out for sure, but not Julie. “Anyway, it’s not like I can summon her to appear, or that I’m just waiting until you guys aren’t around to see her, you know.”
“We know,” Greg said, though he sounded just a little suspicious.
They rode off together on their bikes, but I stayed back to sweep the floor, something I’d been doing lately as a way to repay Uncle Dex for letting us use the basement for our band practice. Julie, Greg, and I were planning to try busking again soon — street performing — to raise some money for Uncle Dex, too. The broom seemed to kick up more dust than it swept, so I dragged out what must have been an antique vacuum cleaner and plugged that in. It made an industrial-level roar as I went through the store, careful not to knock anything over as I got up what dirt and dust that I could. Really, the whole place needed a good wiping down, but I wasn’t about to take on that project.
Uncle Dex was long gone, so I locked up with the store key he’d given me. But then I stopped short, because who should be sitting there on her bicycle on the sidewalk next to my bicycle but, once again, Little Belman.
“Oh geez,” I said. “Don’t you ever just be, you know, home?”
“It’s a free country,” she said. “I can be wherever I want.”
“Okay, well whatever,” I said, climbing on my bike. “I’m leaving, so I guess you can keep sitting right here the rest of the night.”
“Wait,” she said, suddenly not sounding so, well, so like herself.
I looked at her.
“Is she?” she asked.
“Is she what?” I asked back.
“The soldier. The ghost,” she said. “She’s a girl, isn’t she?”
I hesitated, not wanting to say anything to confirm that there even was a ghost. The less Little Belman knew — or could be sure she knew — the better.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “You really have a big imagination.”
She narrowed her eyes to glare at me. But that didn’t last.
“Nobody will believe me,” she said. “Not my mom, not Morris, not anybody.”
“Who’s Morris?” I asked.
Little Belman sighed with exasperation. “Morris Belman? Hello? He’s my brother? The one you and your friends dropped eggs and my rubber chicken on?”
I started laughing, though I knew I shouldn’t. It would only make her mad. But I couldn’t help it. “Oh,” I finally said. “Him.”
“I just need to know about the ghost,” she said, changing the subject. “Is she a girl — which I know she is. And what happened to her? And what’s going to happen to her? I want her to be all right.”
It was practically a speech, coming from Little Belman. But I still wasn’t going to confirm anything for her. I said, “Let’s just say that if there was a ghost — and I’m not saying there is, because there’s no such thing as ghosts — but if there was one, and if that ghost happened to have been a Union soldier in the Civil War, then, um, okay, so maybe the ghost could have been a girl dressed like a boy, and maybe some people might be helping the ghost find out the answers to the rest of your — or her — questions.”
I realized in trying to dance around actually answering Little Belman I’d answered her anyway, and just about totally confirmed everything she suspected.
But she didn’t ask anything else, which surprised me. I thought she’d be all over me with a bunch more questions, like a police detective, or like Julie. But she just took a deep breath in, let it out really slowly, and then said, “Okay. Well, just l
et me know what happens. I can see her so that means you have to include me, too.”
And with that she climbed on her bike and pedaled away.
I felt bad for Little Belman, who I was actually starting to think of not so much as “Little Belman” but as “Deedee.” I don’t know what I’d do if Julie and Greg didn’t believe me about the ghosts I’d met — or rather if they weren’t able to also see and talk to the ghosts, too. I’d probably lose my mind and go through life like a crazy person.
But since they were right there with me, it all seemed okay. Weird, of course. Very, very weird. But okay.
So I guess if I did sort of confirm the existence of Sally to Deedee, it might not be so bad.
As long as she wasn’t up to something sneaky and devious, and totally trying to trick me. I mean, she was a Belman, after all.
I didn’t have too long to mull all that over, though, because once again I’d managed to be late for dinner without calling or texting. Thankfully, Mom seemed to be all the way better from her fall, and she was in a pretty good mood. Dad still wasn’t home because of the usual traffic jam on the interstate from DC, so we sat at the kitchen table and played Uno for half an hour. I won three games in a row, but Mom didn’t seem to care. She smiled and called me a stinker.
Sally showed up in my bedroom again early the next morning.
“Meet me at Federal Hill,” she said. “As soon as you can.”
It occurred to me that, except for Julie, I’d never had a girl in my bedroom, even one pretending to be a boy, and wearing a dirty, weathered blue Union army uniform.
“What time is it?” I asked, struggling to sit up in bed.
“Early o’clock,” she said. Then she repeated what she’d said before. “Meet me at Federal Hill. Tell the others.”
“When?” I asked. “Right now? We have to go to school today, remember? Isn’t it, like, Wednesday?”
“It’s December 13, 1862,” Sally said.
She vanished before I could ask anything else. But I did anyway. “Sally! Did you just say it’s 1862? Like, the year 1862! You know it’s not really that, right? Right?”
She wasn’t there to answer, though. And I hadn’t had a chance to tell her the most important news — that Frankie survived the Battle of Fredericksburg.
Federal Hill is an enormous house at the top of the hill on Hanover Street at what used to be the southern edge of Fredericksburg. Union officers used it as their observation post because it overlooked the field of battle. They also had a hot air balloon for watching the battle and sending reports down from high above everything, but it kept getting blown off course and didn’t work too well. A doctor’s family owns Federal Hill now and restored it. They even put in a swimming pool where those Union officers once stood and watched the terrible scene below them. There were probably soldiers buried there under that pool. Every standing house after the bombardment got turned into a hospital after the battle, according to Julie.
“So where’s Sally?” Greg asked that afternoon after school as we surveyed the neighborhood that had grown up over the past hundred and fifty years where there had once been just open fields, or mostly open fields, south of town.
I shrugged. “She just said to meet her here.”
“The Irish Brigade would have marched down this hill,” Julie said. “Or near here, anyway, over on George Street a block over, on their way into the battle. That’s probably why she wanted us to come to this spot — to see what she saw.”
While we waited for Sally, Julie told us some more about the day of the battle. “For one thing it was really foggy, so the Confederates who were positioned behind the stone wall at Marye’s Heights didn’t see the first Union soldiers attacking until they were about two hundred yards away and the fog lifted. Back then, everything in front of us, all the way to Sunken Road, was empty, except for some fences that cut through the field, and that the troops had to push through or climb over, which slowed them down. But that wasn’t the worst of it.”
“What was?” I asked
“That millrace, where Kenmore Avenue is now,” Julie said, pointing down to the bottom of the hill. “Right down there. It was fifteen feet across and five feet deep, with three feet of water in it. Soldiers had to break ranks and tightrope walk over some narrow beams to get across, which slowed them down even more.”
I was pretty sure we’d talked about that millrace before, but just to refresh my memory I asked Julie about it. Surprisingly, it was Greg who answered. “It was dug to bring water to run a couple of mills in town, or just south of town,” he explained.
I turned to Julie. “You have taught him well,” I said, trying to sound formal, or pretend-formal, anyway.
Greg grinned. Julie just looked annoyed.
There was still no Sally, but we did have a fourth person with us, as it turned out. And once again it was Deedee Belman. Greg was the first to spot her, peeking out from behind a parked car half a block away. “Oh, great,” he said. “She’s back.”
I suggested we just invite her to join us. Greg and Julie asked me if I had lost my mind, so I quickly filled them in about my conversation with Deedee the evening before.
Then, without waiting for them to respond, I waved to Deedee. “Come on,” I yelled. “You can hang out with us.”
Deedee stood up, hesitated, then picked up her bike and slowly walked it toward us down the sidewalk next to Federal Hill. “The ghost told me to come here,” she said.
“Really?” Julie said. “We’re supposed to believe that?”
“It’s true,” Deedee said. “And anyway I have a right to be here, too, you know.”
“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “It’s a free country. We get it. It’s okay. I invited you to join us, so let’s all just get along for a minute and see what happens.”
“You mean wait for the ghost,” Deedee corrected me.
None of us would confirm that, but if Sally had really shown up at Deedee’s house the same way she’d shown up at mine this morning, then I guess we didn’t have to. I could tell Greg and Julie weren’t at all happy about this turn of events, though, so I took them aside and made the case for letting Deedee stay.
“Look, for some reason she can see Sally, and she was the first to figure out Sally was a girl, and Sally invited her here. That has to be true, because how else would she have known to come?”
We argued about it back and forth for a few minutes. I wasn’t even totally sure why I was making the case for Deedee to be there with us, but Greg and Julie finally, reluctantly, agreed that she should stay. “But she better not mess anything up,” Greg said.
“And this better not turn out to be a trick,” said Julie, echoing what I’d wondered myself the night before.
“Well, the good news is nobody believes her, or at least that’s what she told me,” I said. “Also, I found out Belman’s first name. It’s Morris.”
“I always thought he looked more like a Derek,” Greg responded. I had no idea what a Derek would look like myself. Then again, I had no idea what a Morris would look like, either.
We didn’t get a chance to discuss it any further, or to make fun of Belman’s name, because Sally showed up. Suddenly. Standing right beside us. Deedee let out a little chirp of surprise but quickly settled down and acted like she was one of us, which I guess now she sort of was.
“The Irish were down by the city dock,” Sally said, as if we’d already been in the middle of a conversation about the day of the Battle of Fredericksburg and she was picking up where she’d left off. “That’s where we made camp after the crossing. Had to sleep in the mud, what sleep anybody got. Bugle sounded reveille, and breakfast wasn’t much. Just coffee, pork, and hardtack, then they called us to ranks and we lined up. Word went around that General Burnside wasn’t sending the whole army in at once. There wasn’t room. We’d be going across that field in waves, a couple of brigades at a time. So there we were, guns loaded and powder dry. Must have been midday before the first wave went in. All we c
ould do was stand and watch it happen.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like, how Sally’s heart must have been pounding, and how scared she must have been, no matter how brave she also was. “Julie told us about the open fields, and the fences, and the millrace,” I said.
“Yeah,” Greg added. “And she said the bridges were torn up so you all had to break ranks and walk single file over the steel beams.”
Sally nodded. “Did she tell you that it made easy targets for the Confederate sharpshooters to take aim at our boys as they crossed over like that? And did she tell you that cannon fire came at us from different directions, scattering units all out of formation and killing left and right?”
We were silent.
“Well, that’s what happened,” Sally said. “And that wasn’t nearly the worst of it. The worst was the Johnny Rebs behind that stone wall must have had their orders to hold fire until our boys in that first wave were a hundred yards out. One of their officers held his hat up way high, and when he dropped it those Confederates behind the stone wall fired for ten minutes without stopping. The smoke got so thick we couldn’t see anything about what was happening down on the field.”
Sally paused. “And then they stopped. I guess to let the smoke rise up off the field so they could see. And so we could see, too. But it wasn’t something anybody should have to ever look at. There were hundreds of our boys from the Third Division, under General William French, lying dead. Word filtered back up the ranks from men closer to the slaughter about what all else there was on that battlefield: boys shot in all parts, with their heads, hands, legs, arms shot off and mangled. Somebody said it looked like a giant hog pen and all of them killed. Nobody made it any closer than fifty yards to that wall.”
Deedee, who’d been standing next to me, I guess because she thought I was her only friend, started shaking. I let her lean against me and that seemed to help some. I felt all shaky on the inside, too, but tried not to show it. Julie and Greg were both blinking, as if they were trying to hold back tears, or just were having a hard time imagining what Sally was describing.
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