The Not-So-Boring Letters of Private Nobody

by Matthew Landis

  Maybe love made you forget stuff.

  Who knew these things.

  After third period Oliver raced to the computer lab to make sure they got their spot up front, far from other computers in case there was any sensitive dialogue.

  “Hey,” he said when she sat down.

  “About yesterday,” Ella said. “Sorry I was in such a bad mood.”

  “It’s okay.” Oliver picked at the fraying corners of his binder. “And sorry about your dad ignoring you and everything.”

  “Yeah. Sucks.”

  Awkward silence.

  “So other than, uh, Starbucks, did you have a good weekend?”

  “Not really. My sister came home from college Friday and made me go shopping with her to buy that stupid dress.”

  “Oh right,” he said. “Did you get one?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How come?”

  “Because the dance is this Saturday.”

  “I thought you weren’t going?” Oliver asked.

  “It’s complicated.”

  “Okay.” Oliver messed with the screen brightness on his monitor. “So who you gonna go with?”

  She shrugged.

  Oliver swallowed. Was this his moment? Should he go for it? Was she waiting for him to go for it?

  “I’m going by myself,” she said. “I’m gonna sneak into the computer lab so I can work on the documentary. It’s due that Monday, and I’m guessing we’ll have some last-minute edits to make.”

  “Right.”

  No. Not his moment.

  Mr. Carrow buzzed in, sipping his coffee. He pointed at them like they were rock stars. “The power couple. How goes it?”

  “Uh, good,” Oliver said.

  “How’s life at the historical society? Find anything good?”

  Ella opened her project binder and took out a folded piece of paper.

  The folded piece of paper.

  The love note.

  “I found a love letter,” she said.

  Oliver thought his eardrums were exploding.

  “Remember when I was rushing to transcribe that letter?” she asked Oliver. “The one Hal said we couldn’t photocopy? My laptop died, so I had to do it by hand.”

  Oliver tried to answer but could only offer a dazed nod.

  “Sounds juicy,” Mr. Carrow said. He took the letter and read it. Oliver tried to sort out exactly what had happened and also get rid of the terrible feeling that he’d fallen backward over a cliff.

  “What do you guys make of it?” Mr. Carrow asked.

  “It matches his handwriting, I think,” Ella said. “We couldn’t copy the original, but I can double-check later this week.”

  Oliver hated roller coasters because of this feeling—that his guts had been pulled up into his diaphragm and then shoved down into his groin.

  The letter had been written by Stone?

  Not Ella.

  “Ollie?” Mr. Carrow asked.

  Get a grip, Ollie. Pull it together.

  “The hard thing is,” he said finally, “is that it’s missing a location, date, and an address line.”

  Mr. Carrow stood on a chair and turned on the overhead projector. “And what do you think that means?”

  “Maybe he wrote it but decided not to mail it to her,” Ella said.

  Ollie looked at her copy and scrambled for another not-idiotic thing to say. “. . . Or maybe he didn’t plan on sending it because it wasn’t a letter. Maybe it was a love note and he was going to actually give it to her.”

  “Now that’s intriguing,” Mr. Carrow said. “Why do you think that?”

  Oliver skimmed the transcription until he got to the line he wanted. “He says that she’s been by his side for a couple days, and that he’s running out of time—that’s why he decides to tell her. We know he died of dysentery at Gettysburg . . . so maybe it was for someone who took care of him. Like a nurse.”

  “Ollie—that’s brilliant.” Ella put her hand up for a high five, but because Oliver didn’t give a lot of high fives he grabbed her hand instead and turned the whole thing into a really awkward midair handshake that was three seconds from turning into a game of Mercy.

  Ian came into the room and gave them a weird look. Oliver let go of her hand.

  “The theory is solid,” Mr. Carrow said. “How can you test it?”

  “Uh . . . I guess we could maybe check the muster rolls for his regiment. It might say where he died—like a field hospital or something. Maybe we can find a list of nurses who worked there? It’s a super long shot, but maybe some of them left records we could check.”

  Ella nodded three times really fast. “Yes. That. We should do that.”

  “Agreed,” Mr. Carrow said. He waved a finger between the two of them. “Quite a team you’ve made. I’m excited to see where it goes.”

  —CHAPTER THIRTY—

  TENSION

  “Muster rolls, muster rolls,” Ella said as she logged into their Ancestry account. “Where do we find those?”

  Oliver showed her how to find the collection and refine the search for the Pennsylvania 68th.

  “They’re scanned copies of the originals,” he said as the pages loaded.

  The document was like a giant spreadsheet listing Name, Rank, and so on. Oliver scanned with his finger down the name column until he found Stone.

  Raymond Stone | Private | Enlisted Sept 62 | Died of dysentery, July 5 1863, Home of Charles Wentworth, Gettysburg.

  “. . . Charles Wentworth,” Oliver said. “That sounds really familiar.”

  “He died in somebody’s house?” Ella asked. “Why not a hospital?”

  “There were so many sick and wounded that most of the local homes and buildings became hospitals. Pretty much every civilian became a nurse or undertaker in the weeks after.”

  Ella slouched at that. “So it’s going to be pretty much impossible to find out who Stone wrote the love note to.”

  Oliver blinked. “Not impossible.” Charles Wentworth . . . Charles Wentworth . . . “Let me see something.”

  Oliver opened the massive document where they kept all the transcribed letters from the historical society. A quick search for “Wentworth” turned up the July 6 letter. “I knew I’d seen that name before: Susanna Wentworth. She’s the lady who wrote Stone’s last letter home after he died.”

  “Wait . . . wait . . .” Ella said, her eyes bouncing back and forth. “She took care of—she could have been his nurse. What if he wrote the note to her?”

  Ella opened a new Ancestry window. In about ten minutes she’d narrowed the results down and found Susanna’s info card. “She was Charles’s daughter . . . about twenty years old when she took care of Stone. It could totally be her.”

  “Maybe . . . but a lot of women from different charity and church groups came to the town to help out. Other nurses could have taken care of him.”

  “He should have put her name on it,” Ella said. “There wouldn’t be so much confusion.”

  “You’re telling me.”

  Ella slouched again. She seemed weirdly invested in figuring out what was up with the letter, which kind of made Oliver want to figure it out faster.

  “Maybe we’re thinking about this the wrong way,” he said. “Gettysburg is a pretty historical place. The whole town is pretty much one big reenactment all year long. They have to have a historical society like ours. And if our town has records on Stone, then—”

  “They might have something on the Wentworths,” Ella said. “Ollie—that’s brilliant. You’re like . . . like a historical detective.”

  He loved that she said that. “This feels like a fist-pounding moment.”

  “Good instincts, but saying it takes some of the momentum away.”

  “Right.”

  He put his f
ist out, and she pounded it.

  Ella found the historical society website for the Gettysburg area, but it didn’t have many online sources, so they decided to call. After checking first with Mr. Carrow, they went into the hall and slid to the floor, lockers against their backs.

  “Adams County Historical Society,” said an elderly woman after two rings. “Margaret Bolton speaking, how may I help you?”

  “Hi, my name is Oliver Prichard. I’m a seventh grader doing a social studies project about a Union soldier from my town who died at Gettysburg. I was hoping you could help my partner and me track down some information about where he died, exactly.”

  “Oh, sounds interesting,” Mrs. Bolton said. “We have a very extensive archive on civilian families before, during, and after the war. But we’re not so up-to-date on technology; most of our documents remain in hard copy. I could put in a work order and hopefully get back to you by the end of the week? Who is it exactly that you’re looking for?”

  Oliver gave her Raymond Stone’s name twice, spelling it each time to make sure there weren’t any mistakes.

  “And here’s my cell phone and email,” he said. He double-checked that she got those right too, thanked her, and then hung up.

  They went back inside and started to pack up. Oliver was feeling pretty good about how class was ending, considering how horribly it had started.

  “Who’s Henry Weller?” Ella asked.

  “Huh?”

  Ella pointed to her screen. “Henry Weller. His Ancestry card is saved to our favorites board.”

  “H. Weller—the guy who wrote a couple letters to Stone’s dad. I think he’s the key to figuring out why Stone enlisted in the 68th. I’m pretty sure Weller paid him to fight in his place.”

  Oliver gave her the rundown of his research, ending with the email he sent to the Weller Group. “I was gonna tell you about it today but then, you know . . .” He indicated the love letter, still lying on top of Ella’s binder.

  “Sounds . . . complicated,” Ella said.

  Oliver thought she sounded a little icy. “I guess.”

  “So we should focus on things that were actually a part of his wartime experience.”

  “Like this love note.”

  “Exactly.”

  The rebellion churned in his gut again. “I don’t think you understand what I might have found: an undocumented type of substitution for a lot of money. This could be totally new and undiscovered. A secret gold mine that Civil War historians don’t even know about.”

  “A gold mine that only you know about.”

  “For right now, yeah.”

  “It’s not important to the project.”

  Oliver stared at her for a few seconds. Was it possible to like someone and also want to tell her to back the heck off?

  “It’s definitely as important as him not playing baseball and not fighting and maybe writing some love note. And it might be important to the whole war and like, how soldiers actually fought.”

  They stared daggers at each other for a minute.

  “Okay,” she said, but it was another one of her whatever okays.

  “Okay.” He meant it as a yeah, that’s right whatever.

  “Just don’t forget we have to proof Kevin’s narrative and do the voiceovers this week.” Ella logged off and packed her stuff up. “Oh—and we have to film your death.”

  —CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE—

  DEATH BY DIARRHEA

  Kevin read out loud from the dysentery page on WebMD. “It says your poop was, and I’m quoting here, loose and filled with blood.” He turned to Oliver. “Got any fake blood?”

  “Gross,” Oliver said. He wondered if Stone was as embarrassed as he should have been about dying from something so stupid and disgusting.

  “We can just put some red food dye in the dirty bed pan,” Ella said. She readjusted the blankets on Oliver’s bed and stood back to survey the scene. “Maybe sit up a little more.”

  Oliver scooted around. “Good?”

  “Better. And we should probably get those out of the shot.” Ella leaned over him to take a poster of General Ulysses S. Grant off the wall. She was exactly zero inches from him. Negative inches, actually. Her stomach was resting against his hip as she picked at the tape.

  “What are you guys doing?”

  “Jeez, Addie!” Oliver yelled. He’d sat up so quickly he was now basically burrowed in Ella’s neck. “It’s for the documentary. Now leave.”

  “Actually, I’m glad you’re here,” Ella said, finally unsticking the poster. “Could you get us some food dye? We’re trying to make fake blood.”

  “To mix with our fake poop,” Kevin added.

  “Ewwwwww,” Addie said, running up the steps.

  “Careful with that,” Oliver said as Ella laid the poster on the computer desk. His heart was still going a thousand miles an hour. Her neck smelled really good.

  Ella sprinkled some water on his face to make it look like he was sweating. “Okay. Now act like you’ve been going to the bathroom nonstop for months and are about to die of stomach cramps and dehydration.”

  Oliver turned his head to the side and blinked lazily.

  “You look like my uncle Donnie after he’s hit the special punch at Christmas,” Kevin said.

  “Think of something sad,” Ella suggested.

  “Like what?”

  “For me it’s those orphan dog commercials with Sarah McLachlan,” Kevin said. “You know, where they zoom in on puppies in cages and play ‘I Will Remember You’ in the background? Kills me. Every. Single. Time.”

  Oliver didn’t have to think long to find a sad moment: the exact second he realized Ella’s love note was actually Stone’s.

  “That—right there,” Ella said. “Hold that face.”

  Addie stomped back down with a tiny bottle of red food dye.

  “This is about to get awesomely gory,” Kevin said.

  “Thanks, Addie,” Ella said.

  “Can I watch?”

  “Sure. You could be like our assistant. Get us things we need.”

  “Like snacks,” Kevin said. “I recall a discussion about Capri Suns—specifically a variety pack.”

  “Mom says you guys drank all the Capri Suns, so we’re out until the next Costco run,” Addie said.

  “Budget cuts. Happens to all the great projects near the end.”

  “Ollie, time to die,” Ella said.

  Ten minutes later Oliver’s stomach and back felt like they’d been through a trash compactor from all the fake cramping and writhing. Who knew pretending to die would make him feel like he was actually going to die.

  “Is that good?” he panted.

  Ella reviewed the footage on her phone. “Good. Now for the climax: the actual moment of your death. It needs to be really dramatic.”

  “I consulted with the Head Writing Consultant,” Kevin said. “And he agrees you need to sell it.”

  Oliver closed his eyes. He hunched forward and let out some of the worst groans he could conjure. He convulsed like there was an earthquake in his lower intestine. He balled up the blankets in his fists. He clawed at his gut. He took in a great, mighty breath of air.

  And then he collapsed.

  “That,” Kevin said, “was disturbingly amazing.”

  “So you didn’t die of getting shot?” Addie asked from her perch on the couch arm.

  Oliver was still out of breath. “No. I got dysentery.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a bacterial infection of your intestines,” Kevin said. “You poop blood and usually die of dehydration.”

  “But you’re a soldier,” Addie said. “Soldiers die in battle.”

  “Most soldiers actually died of disease,” Ella said. “And tons of those died of dysentery like the guy Oliver is playing.”<
br />
  Addie went over to Oliver’s desk drawer and took out a Time-Life Civil War book. “The guys on this cover are fighting.” She grabbed another one. “Here too. And here—”

  “We get it, Addie,” Oliver said.

  Addie sat back down. “It’s just funny. Ollie got a soldier who died from disease, when he spends every Saturday pretending to fight—”

  “It’s not funny, Addie. It’s stupid. So just shut up about it.”

  As soon as the words were out of his mouth, Oliver knew he’d made a Big Mistake.

  The newly hired assistant ran upstairs. Oliver heard her crying for his mom.

  Great.

  The silence was deafening. Oliver looked at Kevin and Ella.

  Kevin tiptoed to the computer desk and pretended to be typing; Ella packed up her tripod. Neither of them would look at him.

  “Guys.” Oliver threw back the covers and stretched his legs out. “I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. She’s just really good at annoying me.”

  Awkward silence.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just—”

  “Dude,” Kevin said. “Don’t make it worse.”

  Oliver felt like his lungs were overinflated. It wasn’t healthy to hold it in any longer on this issue. He just had to say it.

  “No matter how cool we make this project, you’re never going to convince me that Private Stone is—”

  “Who wants to stay for tacos?” Oliver’s mom shouted from the top of the steps.

  More awkward silence.

  “Everyone alive down there?”

  “Hard or soft shell, Mrs. P?” Kevin asked.

  “Both.”

  “You convinced me. I’m in.”

  “Great. Ella, are you staying?”

  Ella waited a few seconds. “Okay. Let me text my mom.”

  “Why don’t you text up here? We know how bad the service is down there.”

  Ella grinned a little as the tension broke.

  Oliver did too, but lost the smile when Ella threw him a stare.

  “I’m gonna wash my hands,” Kevin said, heading to the bathroom.