The Secret of Midway

by Steve Watkins

  I nodded and said okay, all the while thinking I was pretty sure I was going to have to kill Greg.

  He showed up a few minutes after Julie left, and I let him have it. “What the heck, Greg! Julie Kobayashi? Really?”

  He grinned. “Yeah. Saw her this morning before school. So no need to worry about your uncle on keyboards. Although I did mention that he might be sitting in sometimes on his uke. You’re welcome.”

  “We never decided about this,” I said.

  Greg scrunched his face, a sign that he was thinking really hard. “We didn’t? Are you sure? I mean, you said you didn’t want Uncle Dex in the band and all. I just figured, you know, that meant Julie was in.”

  He paused. Then continued, “Anyway, I kind of think she likes me.”

  I grabbed his sleeve. “Are you serious? This is Julie Kobayashi we’re talking about. She doesn’t like anybody.”

  Greg pulled himself loose and smoothed out his sleeve. “Well, she smiled at me,” he said.

  I didn’t believe him. “Really? Like an actual smile?”

  “Yes,” he said firmly. “Really. Anyway, I already told her she’s in the band, so she’s in the band. Boy, are you a total grouch today.” He stood up with his tray, though he hadn’t eaten anything yet. Neither of us had. “See you this afternoon.”

  He had Julie’s sheet music stuffed into the back pocket of his jeans. I saw it as he walked away to the other side of the lunchroom — to sit with Julie, as it turned out.

  “Well, this is just great,” I said to myself.

  “What is?” a familiar voice asked.

  I did a double take like you see in the movies, but I guess I was too tired and too irritated by everything to react much more than that, even though the ghost was suddenly sitting right next to me.

  “How did you get in here?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Can’t exactly say.” He looked around the cafeteria. “This place looks kind of familiar.”

  “If you’ve seen one school cafeteria, you’ve smelled them all,” I said, as if I was talking to just anybody. And then I got nervous. “Can anybody else see you, besides me?” I asked, worried that I would get into trouble. Or worse, that there would be a scene, with security guards and police and me in the middle of it, and then I would be marked forever, or at least for all of middle school, as that weird kid hanging out at lunch with some guy — some ghost! — in a sailor suit.

  “You can,” he said. “Can’t say about your friends. Maybe the girl.”

  And sure enough, Julie Kobayashi had stopped chewing in midbite and was staring across the room at us.

  I didn’t even bother to pick up my lunch tray. I just bolted out of the cafeteria, down the hall, and into the bathroom.

  It didn’t matter. The ghost somehow ended up there, too, leaning against a sink.

  “Didn’t mean to upset you,” he said. “Just wondering if you’d thought over what we talked about last night.” He pointed to my backpack, which wouldn’t fit in my locker so I carried it with me all day. “I see you brought the letter with you.”

  “How can you tell?” I asked. “It’s inside!”

  He shrugged again. “Some things you just know.”

  “Okay, look,” I said, desperate to make him go away. “How about if I mail it for you? I’ll get a stamp. I’ll take it down to the post office right after school.”

  The ghost just looked at me.

  Of course that was a stupid thing to suggest. “You’re right,” I said, though he hadn’t spoken. “They might not be able to deliver it. She might not live at that address anymore. And I guess we wouldn’t exactly be able to talk to her, either, and find out, you know, your name and all.”

  Somebody came in the bathroom. A kid in my grade named Grady Ornish.

  “Hey, Grady,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t notice the navy guy/ghost/whatever standing right next to me. Apparently he didn’t, probably because the ghost had already disappeared, though I could tell somehow that he was still there in the restroom.

  “Hey, Anderson,” Grady said. “What’s going on?”

  “Oh, you know,” I said. “The usual.”

  The now-invisible ghost chuckled when I said that. “The usual.” As if. I almost had to laugh, too.

  “What was that sound?” Grady asked. “Did you hear something?”

  I shook my head and said, “Probably just the toilets.”

  I tried looking Miss Betty Corbett up on the Internet, at the address on the envelope, in that North Carolina town, but got nothing.

  I tried every search engine I could think of, but still came up with a big, fat zero, unless Betty Corbett was twenty-seven years old and had been convicted of murder last year in South Dakota. Or she was a fifty-five-year-old advice columnist. Or an eleven-year-old flute player with her own YouTube channel.

  I asked Mom that afternoon after school how to find out what happened to somebody from a long time ago.

  “How long?” she asked. She’d just come back from physical therapy and was pretty wiped out, sitting back in Dad’s recliner in the living room, holding an ice pack. It was for her hands, which she said felt as if they were on fire a lot of the time (it had something to do with her MS).

  “Like about seventy years,” I said.

  “And what is this all about?” she asked.

  I figured there wasn’t any harm in telling her about the letter I’d found in the navy peacoat at Uncle Dex’s store, though I left out the part about the ghost.

  “Why not just open it?” Mom asked after I explained. “After all this time, it’s likely that the person isn’t even alive anymore.”

  “But they could be,” I said, showing her the envelope. “Anyway, I thought maybe if I could track this lady down, and maybe write about it, I could get some extra credit or something in school.”

  Mom laid her ice pack down and dried her hands, then took the letter. “You could call the courthouse down there in North Carolina, I suppose,” she said. “Ask if this Betty Corbett is listed anywhere in their property records, or if she ever got a marriage license and changed her name. Or if there’s a death certificate. That sort of thing.”

  “Do you think I could text them instead?” I asked hopefully.

  Mom smiled but shook her head. “No. Sorry. You’re going to have to man up on this one, Anderson.”

  I sighed and retrieved the envelope and left.

  The ghost was waiting for me in my bedroom.

  “What does that mean — ‘man up’?” he asked.

  I explained as I gathered up my guitar and amplifier and Julie Kobayashi’s sheet music.

  “Gotta go to band practice,” I said when I finished, but when I looked up, he had already vanished.

  It was hard riding my bike with everything balanced on the handlebars, so it took me a while to get downtown to the Kitchen Sink.

  “Hey, rock and roller,” Uncle Dex said when I walked in. I didn’t actually see him when he said this because he was totally hidden behind a giant pile of used books somebody had left on the counter. How he knew it was me was another great mystery of the day.

  “Hey, Uncle Dex,” I said. “Anybody else here yet?”

  “Not anybody,” he said back. “Everybody. Though I haven’t heard them start actually practicing yet. Afraid I’m too busy this afternoon to join you guys on my ukulele.”

  “Maybe next time,” I said to be polite, and dragged my guitar and amp down the narrow stairs to the basement. I had been so excited when Greg and I came up with the idea of the band, and when Uncle Dex said we could practice down in his basement and everything. Now, though, I felt the weight of the world on me. This ghost business. Julie Kobayashi joining the band. Having to talk on the phone to some strangers in North Carolina about a lady nobody probably even knew.

  “Anderson!” Greg shouted when he saw me in the door. “Check this out!” He swung his arm dramatically behind him to reveal none other than the ghost, who had obviously beaten me there.
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  The ghost waved, and I gave a faint wave back.

  “So you guys met, huh?” I asked.

  “Oh yeah,” Greg said. “We met all right. You should have been here half an hour ago for the totally flipping out part. I thought I was going to faint when he showed up like that — you know, just all of a sudden sort of materializing here and everything.”

  “Sorry again about scaring you,” the ghost said to Greg. He was leaning against the wall, though he didn’t seem to be disturbing the dust.

  Julie Kobayashi crossed her arms over her chest. “He didn’t frighten me,” she said. “Only Greg. I had already seen him before. Back at the cafeteria.” She paused. “Actually, not him as he is now. More the idea of him.”

  “But he explained already,” Greg said, surprisingly calm for a guy who had just met a ghost. It kind of made me annoyed. It had taken me all night long, and then some, but Greg — and Julie — seemed to have adjusted just fine, and in what I was betting to be record time.

  Julie ran her hands over her keyboard, though it wasn’t turned on yet. “We have agreed to help.” She looked at the ghost and nodded again. He nodded back.

  I sat down on my amplifier. “I have to make some phone calls to try to find this lady he’s looking for,” I said. “But can we please have band practice first?”

  Everybody thought that was a good idea, including the ghost, who had found a beat-up old trumpet somewhere in the bowels of the Kitchen Sink. Greg and I tuned our guitars as best we could to Julie’s keyboard, and then we stumbled through the first song in the pile of music she had decided we should play. We sounded terrible, which wasn’t surprising. When the ghost tried to come in on his horn, though, it got really terrible.

  We all stopped playing at once. The ghost blinked at us, looked down at the trumpet, then back at us again. “I remembered I used to play. At least I think I did. High school band, maybe?”

  “Are you sure about that?” Greg asked.

  Julie, who was all business, suggested he go off into another room and work on his “skills.” I’m not sure if that hurt his feelings, but he did that fade-out thing again that I’d seen a couple of times. I wasn’t sure how all this ghost stuff worked yet. The horn went with him, and that was fine with us.

  “Wow,” Greg said. “That was the worst.”

  Our second time through wasn’t much better than before, but I was pretty sure there was at least a little bit of improvement. Julie must have thought so, too, because her deep frown lifted to medium, so that was a little bit of improvement.

  We hammered through a couple of more songs over the next hour and then decided that was enough for our first day. “Don’t want to burn out or anything,” Greg said. Julie didn’t disagree, which for her probably amounted to the same thing.

  “Hey,” Greg said, remembering. “What about a name for our band? We have to have a name.”

  “Any ideas?” I asked.

  Julie furrowed her brow, obviously thinking very seriously about the question of band names.

  Greg brightened. “How about something to do with your, uh, friend?” We couldn’t hear the ghost practicing down the hall, if he was even still around, but it was impossible to forget about him, of course.

  Greg and I threw out a bunch of different names — the Sailors, the Graveyarders, the Invisibles — but Julie said no to all of them. She didn’t explain, but she probably didn’t need to.

  “Well, what do you suggest?” I asked Julie. “You don’t like anybody else’s ideas.”

  She furrowed her brow even further, and went into her deepest frown yet. Her black bangs practically covered her eyes. She stayed like that until I thought she’d frozen, and then her face lifted.

  She leaned in close to us, as if sharing some great secret, and whispered, “We’ll be the Ghosts of War.”

  The ghost didn’t follow me home, and he didn’t show up when I got there. Even after dinner, when I went to my room to do homework, he never showed up. I was still trying to figure out how this ghost stuff worked exactly: where he could be and when he could be there; who could see him and talk to him; where he went when he disappeared; whether he had any superpowers.

  Just before I went to bed, my phone rang and it was Greg, totally freaking out about the ghost.

  “Delayed reaction?” I asked.

  “You have no idea,” he gasped.

  I said I thought I probably did and then spent the next half hour listening to him stammering and babbling until he finally wore himself out and said he was going to bed.

  I was a little surprised, but not as much as I thought, when I got a text a few minutes later from Julie Kobayashi, who I guessed was also freaking out, but in her own quiet way.

  She said she was just checking to see if I was okay.

  I said I was, and asked if she was having a delayed reaction to the ghost, like Greg.

  Of course not, she texted me back, which, of course, I took to mean “Of course.”

  During study hall the next day at school, I braced myself, got a hall pass to go to the bathroom, and sat on a toilet to call Dooley, North Carolina, the town where Betty Corbett lived, or at least where she lived when the ghost wrote the letter. I’d gotten the number from the Internet.

  I was pretty happy at first because it seemed like nobody was going to pick up. I was also surprised that it didn’t ring to voice mail, or even just go to one of those automatic answering services right away, where they tell you to press one for this and two for that, and by the time they get to nine you’ve forgotten what most of the options were and so you just hang up and decide you didn’t need to make that call anyway.

  “Hello,” a lady’s voice said. “Dooley Courthouse. How may I direct your call?”

  I’d written out my questions on a sheet of folded-up paper and nearly dropped my phone as I fumbled it open, which I should have already done. I was balancing a lot on my lap while perched on the toilet — my backpack, my notebook, my pencil, the list of questions.

  “I am calling to request information on someone,” I read.

  “Okay,” the lady said. “Fire away, honey.”

  I wasn’t expecting the “Fire away, honey,” and it threw me for a second. But then I kept going.

  “Her name is Betty Corbett,” I continued reading, “and I am hoping that you have a telephone number or address or marriage license or death certificate or some way to get in touch with her.”

  The lady at the Dooley, North Carolina, courthouse was quiet for a minute, and then she asked me, “Who is this?”

  “This is — I mean, I’m, just, I mean I just have something I’m trying to get to her. It’s this old letter that I found,” I said in a rush, not really prepared for her question.

  “Where you calling from?” she asked.

  “Um, Virginia.”

  “And your name again?”

  “Anderson Carter,” I replied, wondering if I was going to be in trouble.

  “And just how old are you, Anderson Carter?”

  I told her I was twelve, and then I told her I was calling from my school. About the only thing I left out was that I was sitting on a toilet.

  “And you found a letter for her?” the lady asked. “Who is it from, and why didn’t you just put it in the mail? And what’s it doing up in Virginia?”

  I said it was hard to explain totally, but that I found it in a junk shop my uncle owned and that my grandfather used to own before he died and it was so old I didn’t think she still lived at the address on it — and there I went babbling again, with all this stuff she didn’t need to know and I didn’t know why I was telling her, though I did remember to tell her the address on the letter and that I couldn’t read the return address, so I didn’t know who it was from.

  “Do you know who I am?” the lady asked.

  This stumped me. Of course I didn’t know who she was. “No,” I said.

  “I’m her granddaughter,” the lady said. “Arlene DeMille. Betty Corbett is my grandmo
ther. Only that’s not her name. Hasn’t been since she married my grandfather. She’s Betty DeMille. And I’m pretty sure that address was where she used to live when she was a girl, before she married my granddaddy, Glenn DeMille.”

  “So you said she is your grandmother? So she’s still, you know, alive?”

  Arlene laughed. “She sure is, honey. She’s in her nineties, but she still goes for her walks every day.”

  “And her name is Betty DeMille now?” I asked, just to be sure. “I mean, like, Mrs. Glenn DeMille?”

  Arlene laughed. “That’s right.”

  I felt a strange sort of breeze just then, even though I was still hiding in a stall and the bathroom window was closed. I looked up, half expecting the ghost to be there. He wasn’t, at least not that I could see.

  Arlene said it was awfully sweet of me to get in touch about the letter and that she was really curious to know who it was from.

  “How about I give you her current address,” Arlene said. “Maybe you can put it in a bigger envelope for safety and mail it on down here. I know she’ll get a kick out of getting something from back whenever. And you say there’s no return address? No name on there for whoever wrote this letter?”

  “No,” I said. “He didn’t put his name on it.”

  “He?” She sounded surprised. “He who?”

  I wasn’t about to mention the ghost, so I said, “Oh, I just meant whoever it was, you know. I mean, it’s not a bill or anything. They wrote it by hand and all. It’s very good handwriting. But it does look like the way a guy would write, I think. Maybe.” There I was, babbling again.

  I swallowed hard and then asked, “Do you think it’d be all right if my friends and I delivered the letter?” I figured I could convince Uncle Dex to drive.

  “I think my grandma would like that very much,” she said, sounding surprised.

  I thought she’d ask more questions, but the bell rang just then and so I thanked her and said I had to go to my next class.

  I didn’t get all the way out of the bathroom, though, because the ghost was standing right outside the stall. I nearly ran into him — if that was possible.