“Hey, Mom,” I said. “Here’s kind of a weird question for you, but I was wondering what your thoughts might be on the subject of ghosts?”
Mom put the teacup back on the saucer and frowned. “Honey, you know Pop Pop is gone, and he’s not coming back, no matter how much we miss him, right?”
“I didn’t mean Pop Pop,” I reassured her. “Just, like, a spirit or something. Like, hypothetically, what if there was a ghost or whatever that might not want you wearing a jacket that belonged to him, and might even say something to you about it, even though you didn’t know the jacket was his, and even though you couldn’t actually see who was saying it, so you weren’t even sure there was anybody saying anything about the jacket in the first place.” The words just tumbled out of my mouth. I guess I was still pretty freaked out.
Mom stuck the teacup and saucer onto the tray, sloshing some over the side. “What in heaven’s name are you talking about, Anderson?” she asked.
I realized how idiotic I probably sounded. “Nothing. Never mind. It was just something I read about in school. Just something from a book. Forget it. Here, you better eat your soup before it gets cold. You want some crackers? I’ll go get you some crackers.”
I left as quickly as I could, feeling dumb and embarrassed, before Mom could ask me anything else. Fortunately, Dad came home then, so Mom got distracted talking to him, probably telling him about how strange I was acting. I went into the kitchen to make a sandwich for dinner, since that was about the only meal I knew how to fix besides soup. I made one for Dad, too, and left it on the counter.
“Going to get started on my homework!” I yelled, grabbing my sandwich and a glass of milk. I ducked down the hall and into my bedroom, kicking the door shut behind me.
Right away I noticed something wasn’t quite right. I’d tossed the U.S. Navy peacoat on my bed when I first came home, but now it wasn’t there. The hair on my neck stood up, and I got goose bumps all over. I tried to convince myself that maybe Dad had done something with it when he got home. But Dad never comes in my room and picks up after me.
I shoved a bunch of papers off my desk and set my sandwich and milk down, then flopped on the bed.
What had I been thinking, asking Mom about ghosts and stuff? Of course there were no such things as ghosts.
But there was somebody in my room!
I yelped when I saw him, and sat straight up, practically flying off the bed. He was leaning against my bedroom door, holding the navy peacoat.
The intruder glanced up and nodded, but didn’t say anything. He quickly went back to examining the peacoat, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. My heart, meanwhile, was practically pounding through my chest. My mind raced through all the possibilities for why a strange guy might be standing in my bedroom, none of them good. Including the possibility that he might belong to the voice I heard in Uncle Dex’s basement, and he had followed me home. Did he think I stole his coat? Was he here to get his revenge?
I wanted to yell for Dad, but I was too scared.
The intruder pulled something out of the peacoat pocket — an envelope — and studied it for a minute, then he looked up. I could tell he was just about to say something, but he didn’t get the chance because somebody knocked on the bedroom door and opened it. Light from the hallway flooded the room as Dad stepped inside.
“Hey, sport,” he said. “Just checking to see how it’s going with the homework.”
The second Dad opened the door, the intruder suddenly, totally, completely, mysteriously vanished!
Actually, he didn’t vanish altogether. This time he left behind the peacoat. And the letter. And me, stammering and stuttering and trying to tell Dad what had just happened, and making no sense at all, even to myself.
Dad finally cut me off and laid his hand on my forehead and said I felt “feverish.”
“I’m going to get the thermometer,” he said. “There must be something going around. Tonight’s an early night for you. Pajamas and bed.”
“But, Dad!” I yelled.
“But nothing,” he said. “Just calm down and let’s get you some rest.”
I started to follow him to the hall pantry, since the last thing I wanted was to be alone, but Dad repeated his pajamas-and-bed order. I skipped the pajamas and curled up in a ball under the covers even though I still had my clothes on. Had opening the trunk released some sort of horrible curse?
“There’s no such thing as ghosts,” I whispered. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. There’s no such thing as ghosts.”
But apparently there were such things as ghosts, or whatever the intruder was, because as soon as Dad left the room, he was back. I swallowed hard. Maybe if I stayed under the covers, he’d just take his coat and go. Just thinking that made me feel like a giant baby.
But the ghost didn’t seem to notice me. He was just standing there checking out the posters on my wall: a soccer player from Brazil in the World Cup doing a bicycle kick for a goal; Shaun White snowboarding; Mount Everest under a full moon; and, finally, King Kong on top of the Empire State Building, from the original black-and-white movie they made about a million years ago.
He looked at that one the longest.
Finally, he spoke, but it wasn’t at all what I expected. “Hey,” he sort of whispered. “I remember that movie.” His voice sounded really, really far away, like he was speaking from the other end of a tunnel. There seemed to be an echo to it.
I didn’t say anything back. I couldn’t speak, and I was afraid I might wet my pants.
“King Kong,” he said. “I saw it when I was a kid, right when it came out. Once it finally got to our town.”
He was dressed in an old-fashioned navy sailor’s clothes — white Dixie cup sailor’s cap, light blue work shirt, white T-shirt underneath, bell-bottom jeans, black boots — everything scuffed up and tattered and faded. The scariest thing, besides the fact that he was there in the first place, was that he didn’t seem to be exactly solid, as if I could see through him to what was on the other side, but not quite. I kept shaking my head hard to clear it out because what I was seeing wasn’t possible for me to see. And yet there he was. And there I was, still unable to speak.
“I was a few years younger than you at the time,” he said, still staring at King Kong but talking to me. “You look about twelve. That right?”
I tried to say, “Yes,” but only managed to squeak.
He must have understood, though, because he turned to me and smiled a crooked smile. For the first time, I saw his face clearly and could see how young he was — not much more than a teenager. He even had freckles. How could he possibly have seen King Kong when it first came out? I was pretty sure that was before my parents were born, probably even before when Pop Pop was a kid.
He kept that crooked smile going and ducked his head as if apologizing for something, then sat down on the end of my bed. The mattress didn’t seem to sag underneath him like it always does for anyone else.
I inched as far away as I could, and wondered what had happened to Dad. How long could it possibly take to find a stupid thermometer?
The ghost seemed to be waiting for me to say something, so I tried speaking again and somehow managed a couple of questions: “Who are you?” Quickly followed by “How did you get in here?” and “Please don’t hurt me.”
He waved his hand, as if brushing away the idea. “Never hurt anybody before, I don’t think,” he said. “Not directly, anyway. Doubt I’ll be starting now. Specially given the circumstances and all.”
“The circumstances?” I was back to squeaking.
He started to hand me the letter he’d found in the peacoat and say something else, but then stopped as my bedroom door swung open again. He vanished, leaving behind the coat and the letter, lying on the end of my bed.
Dad was back.
I babbled some more to Dad, trying to tell him what had just happened, but I knew from the worried look on his face that I wasn’t making any sense. I kept trying
, though, until I even started to doubt what I was saying myself.
Dad eventually got me to stop so he could take my temperature, which was normal, and then he made me take a couple of Extra Strength Something or Other, which must have been pretty powerful because I finally passed out after about an hour. My mind was spinning too fast for me to stay asleep, though, since I woke up again in the middle of the night. I lay there for a long time until I finally got up enough nerve to peek out from under the covers.
There was nobody in my bedroom. I sat up and rubbed my eyes.
The room was bathed in a yellow light that seemed to be coming from outside. Everything still felt spooky, though. And I had that feeling again that I was being watched.
“There’s no such things as ghosts.” I kept repeating it to myself. “There’s no such things as ghosts.”
There were such things as WWII navy peacoats and old letters, though, and they were both lying on the floor now where I must have kicked them off, next to my bed. I reached over to pick them up, then tossed the coat over the back of my desk chair. The letter was stiff and yellow with age, so dry and brittle I was afraid it might crumble in my hands.
I squinted at the cursive writing. It was addressed to a Miss Betty Corbett in a town in North Carolina I’d never heard of. The return address was too smudged to read. It didn’t have a stamp on it, though, so it must not have ever been mailed.
“Hunh,” I said to myself.
Somebody cleared his throat on the other side of the room, and this time I jumped up so fast I lost my balance and fell off the bed.
“You okay there?” the now-familiar voice asked, still sounding far, far away, with that faint hint of an echo.
The ghost was back yet again.
“Sorry to scare you,” he said as I picked myself up, trembling so hard I couldn’t speak. He had already moved to the end of my bed, holding the peacoat and the old letter, which I’d dropped when I fell.
“I might have written this to Betty,” he said, waving the letter while I stood there trembling. “It just came to me. Betty was my girl. Way back before everything that happened.”
He looked up once again, as if expecting me to say something, but I was too busy forcing myself to take deep breaths and try to calm down — or at least stop freaking out. I slowly eased myself down on the bed, as far away from the ghost as I could without falling off again.
He kept his eyes on me the whole time, with that expectant look on his face, so I took one more deep breath and forced out a response.
“Before what happened?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. But maybe Betty does.”
“Is it important? What happened, I mean,” I managed to squeak. My hands were shaking. I squeezed them together to make them stop.
He gestured at his faded work uniform. “I think so,” he said. “I mean, I’m here, but I don’t know how …”
He trailed off and got this sad look in his eyes. “I guess I’ll just come right out and tell you,” he said, “but I don’t want you to get all nervous again, okay?”
“Okay,” I lied.
He nodded and then continued, “About all I know for sure is there was a war against the Japanese and the Germans, and I was on a ship. Besides that — I mean, how I came to be here — that’s what I came to ask your help figuring out. Seems like I’ve been wandering a long time, not sure where I was, just sort of frustrated and restless. In a kind of, well, limbo is I guess what you’d call it — between where I used to be and where I’m supposed to be going. Then you found my coat and put it on, and that brought me to that room that you and your buddy were cleaning out. And now it brought me here. At least I think that’s what happened.”
“Wait,” I blurted out. A war against the Germans and Japanese? There was only one war that could possibly be … “You’re saying you were alive during World War II? And just wandering around for over seventy years?” This was all too much for me to take in.
He blinked a couple of times, as if it was his turn to be shocked. “That how long it’s been?”
I nodded. “I mean, I guess so,” I said, because, of course, this was all impossible: his story, his being here, me sitting on my bed having a conversation with the ghost of a sailor who looked like and said he was from the 1940s!
“Well, anyway,” he said. “Something pulled me back here for a reason, and that reason must be you, to help me figure out where I need to go and what I need to do. Starting with finding Betty.”
He waved the letter again. “I must have written her this,” he said. “So I’m betting we can find out all kinds of things once she opens it.”
“Like what?” I asked
“Like what I go by, for starters, and then what I was doing in the war, and how I came to be missing.”
I sat up straighter. “You don’t know your own name?”
The ghost frowned and furrowed his brow, struggling to remember. Then he exhaled hard and shook his head.
“What about dog tags?” I asked. “Aren’t soldiers — and sailors — supposed to wear their dog tags around their necks on a chain, with their name and stuff, in case something happens to them?” I was pretty sure that’s what Pop Pop had told me.
The ghost patted the front of his shirt and then shook his head again. “Must have lost mine.”
I suggested we just open the letter and see what it said for ourselves, but he didn’t like that idea.
“It isn’t right to open other people’s mail,” the ghost said. “Plus, it’s against the law. Or it used to be.”
“But you wrote it,” I pointed out.
“True,” he said. “Least I think so. Can’t be too sure about that, either. Guess we can ask Betty. Once we find her.”
“What?” I said. “No. I mean, I don’t think I can do that. I have school. I wouldn’t know where to begin. I wouldn’t know how.” Even as I was saying the words, there was this tiny part of me — I guess it was the history-nut part that I got from Pop Pop — that actually, kind of, sort of liked the idea of maybe helping solve the mystery of what happened to a ghost from World War II.
He didn’t say anything, just laid the letter back down on the bed. The peacoat, too.
“Don’t you want to keep those?” I asked, worried that he would leave them with me and have an excuse to come back. “You might change your mind about reading the letter,” I added. “And you might get cold.”
The ghost shook his head. “I don’t exactly get cold,” he said. “Hot, either.”
He stood up from the bed. “It’s late and you’re just a boy,” he continued. “So I’m going to go now and let you get some sleep. And so you can think things over.”
He looked straight in my eyes and held his gaze there.
“I need your help,” he said in that faraway voice. “I have a feeling that this might be the only chance I get to find out what happened to me.”
He paused. “And so maybe I can finally get some rest.”
When I blinked, he went from semisolid to translucent, and then from translucent to transparent.
When I blinked again, he went from transparent to invisible, though his voice lingered a little while longer.
“See you tomorrow, Anderson.”
That took all the air out of me. This guy didn’t know his own name, but somehow he knew mine.
How I ever got back to sleep was a giant mystery, but somehow I did. Dad must have yelled up to me twenty times in the morning to get up, it was time for school, but I just kept pressing my pillow down hard over my head until he came in, turned on the light, pulled the covers off my bed, and left me lying there shivering — partly from being cold and partly from still being scared of the ghost.
Dad was gone to work by the time I finally dragged myself downstairs. Mom was having a hard morning with her MS, so I decided I shouldn’t bother her about what happened last night. Or about what I dreamed happened last night, which is what I tried to convince myself it must have been. Without really thin
king about it, I pulled on the peacoat and tucked the letter to Miss Betty Corbett in my backpack as I ran outside to try to catch the bus.
It was already pulling away, though, so I had to walk. That’s the kind of day it turned out to be.
I was so late for school that I didn’t get a chance to talk to Greg. We didn’t have any classes together in the morning. Julie Kobayashi was in my math class, though, and I was pretty sure she smiled at me, or as close to a smile as I’d ever seen from her. More like the absence of her usual frown, along with what appeared to be a nod of her head when our eyes met briefly.
She also sat down next to me at lunch, something else that had never happened before.
“We should get started right away,” she said.
This caught me by surprise. “Get started with what?” I asked.
“Band practice,” she said. “Greg told me you changed your mind about having me in the band. I don’t know why you didn’t say yes in the first place. I’m very good on the keyboards. But thank you.”
Before I could say anything back, she laid several sheets of paper next to my lunch tray. Music and lyrics. “I wrote some of these,” she said. “The others are contemporary songs. And some classic songs that I learned from my dad. I figured we could start with these. I printed out copies for both of you during study hall this morning. Also for your uncle.”
“Wait,” I said, bewildered. “My uncle?”
“Yes.” She nodded. “Electric ukulele, correct?”
“Well, sort of,” I said. “But, I mean, did you and Greg come up with all this?” I waved at the sheet music. “These songs and everything?”
She frowned. “Of course. I explained what our band should play. He understood. He did say that perhaps I should write out chords and draw pictures to show the proper fingering for guitar.” She pointed to the music. “As you can see, I did that as well.”
Julie stood up. “I’m going to get my lunch now. I’ll bring my keyboard to your uncle’s store this afternoon after school.”
The Secret of Midway Page 2