It’s funny how things work out. If Henry hadn’t been absent that day, Zack and Renee might never have known about Edgar. As it was, though, Henry’s secret didn’t last until lunchtime. It was true that in all the weeks I’d known about Edgar, I’d never once said a word about him to anyone but Henry. But after that near miss with the car, I was worried, and even Zack could tell something was up.
We were supposed to be doing a group project. Building our container for the egg drop contest. And Renee and Zack were having this huge fight about how to design it.
“The box has to be bigger,” Zack said. “So we can fit in more stuff to cushion the egg.”
“The bigger you make it, the heavier it gets!” Renee said. “That’s just going to make it land harder and crack even more.”
“That’s why we stuff the box!” Zack said.
“We need Henry,” Renee said. “Henry would know what to do.”
“I know what to do,” Zack said. “Just help me stuff it.”
“Stuff it yourself!” Renee said. “I quit!”
“How come you’re not helping?” Zack asked me. “You’ve been acting weird all morning.”
“I’m worried about Henry.”
“Biniam says he’s got bronchitis,” Renee said.
“It’s not that,” I said.
Renee and Zack were staring at me then. “Never mind,” I told them.
“Listen,” Zack said. “If something’s wrong with Henry, we want to know too.”
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I really shouldn’t. I told Henry I wouldn’t say anything.”
“Give us a hint,” Renee said.
“Did he get in trouble for something?” Zack asked.
“Henry?” I asked. “He never does anything wrong. He says ‘excuse me’ when he bumps into the pencil sharpener.”
“Oh, just spill it!” Zack said.
I know I shouldn’t have. I know I promised not to. But I couldn’t stand it anymore. “His house is haunted, okay?” I yelled at them, a little louder than I meant to.
“What?” Zack asked.
“Oh no!” Renee said. “Is that why you’ve been watching all those shows? Those ghost hunter shows?”
“That’s ridiculous,” Zack said. “My dad says there’s no such thing as ghosts. Whenever you hear a story like that, there’s a scientific explanation.”
“Like what?” I demanded.
“Like carbon monoxide.”
“What?”
“Yeah,” Zack said. “Carbon monoxide. You can have a leak, and then it poisons you. It causes hallucinations. You can start imagining all sorts of stuff.”
“Well, Henry saw something,” I insisted. “Up in the window of his room. And it wasn’t because of carbon monoxide! He’s lucky he didn’t get hit by a car. That’s how hard he was staring at it.”
Biniam came up to our pod then, to check on us. “Making progress?” she asked.
“Yes,” Zack said. “Barbara Anne has some really interesting ideas.”
But there must have been at least some small part of Zack that was willing to believe me, because instead of running off to play tetherball, he came looking for me on the playground after lunch. “Hey,” he said. “What makes you think it was a ghost Henry saw up in the window?”
“Well, for one thing, this isn’t the first time it’s happened,” I told him. “But look, I shouldn’t have told you any of this. Henry’s going to be really mad. Promise not to tell, okay?”
“About what?” asked Renee as she walked up to join us.
“About Barbara Anne spilling the beans,” Zack said.
“Maybe we can help him,” Renee said. “He’s not going to be mad if we help him get rid of it.”
And as soon as she said it, I realized that she might have a point.
“How do we do that?” Zack asked.
“No idea,” I told them.
But then, later, during silent reading time, Renee asked, “Do you know anything about him, this ghost?”
“Just his name,” I said. “Edgar.”
“What?” Zack asked. “He introduced himself?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “We used a Ouija board.”
“Wow,” Renee said. “Did you ask him anything else?”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “How he died, why he’s there, what he wants.”
I stared at her for a second. It was such a good list of questions. I almost wanted to write it down. “No,” I said. “We didn’t think of any of that. I guess we were just so freaked out to get any answer at all.”
“He was probably murdered,” Zack said.
“You don’t have anything to contribute to this conversation,” I told him. “You don’t even think he’s real.”
“True,” Zack said. “But I still say he was murdered.”
“Or, maybe his dad died at sea and he’s waiting for him to come back,” Renee said. “Oh, maybe he drowned! They didn’t give kids swimming lessons back in the day like they do now. Wait! What’s he look like?”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“It’s a clue,” Renee said. “Like if he’s dripping wet or bloody or carrying something strange. Oh! Does he say anything?”
“Well, one time when Henry saw him, Edgar was carrying a yo-yo,” I said. “And he asked Henry to play with him.”
“Sounds terrifying,” Zack said.
I glared at him. “We’re trying to figure out more,” I said. “We have some stuff. Henry has this letter, this section of a letter, but it’s pretty confusing.”
“You have a letter written by a ghost?” Renee asked.
“We don’t know who wrote it,” I said. “It’s written to some guy named Thomas, but it isn’t signed, and we’re not even sure what it’s about yet. And we have a book, a sort of scrapbook/yearbook thing. But we’re not exactly sure what that means either, or why it was up there.”
“Where?” Zack asked.
“In the trunk,” I said. “From the attic. At Henry’s house. It wasn’t easy getting it either. We tried to smash the lock off with a rock. Henry cut his hand wide open.”
“That’s why he got those stitches?” Renee asked.
I nodded. “His dad got it open later—with a crowbar!”
“Wow,” Zack said. And for somebody who didn’t believe in ghosts, he seemed pretty curious about the whole thing. “Where’s the stuff now? I want to see.”
“Henry’s got most of it,” I said. “But the yearbook thing is in my locker.”
“Go get it,” Renee said. “I want to see too.”
So I fetched it, and we all had a look. It wasn’t easy, because every time Biniam came anywhere near our pod, we had to stuff it back into my desk and pretend we were busy reading our books.
“Do you think it belonged to him?” Renee whispered. “Was it Edgar’s book?”
“I think so,” I said.
But when we flipped through the book, looking for his picture and his name, we didn’t find him. These kids were older anyway. Their pictures were just small squares that looked like they’d been cut out of an old newspaper and pasted into the book. I couldn’t decide exactly what it was, but there was something creepy about them too. Maybe it was the way the ink had started to fade. They seemed to be looking out at us from a haze or fog. Smiling. Like they knew something that we didn’t. They had strange, old-fashioned names, like Evangeline. But we didn’t see anyone named Edgar.
“Check inside the front cover,” Zack said. “See if there’s a name.”
And inside the front cover, it said:
This Book Belongs to
P. Winterson
“Look at that,” I said. “It’s the fanciest cursive writing I’ve ever seen.”
“Biniam’s coming!” Zack said. And I hid the book in my desk.
When Biniam came over to our pod, we all thought she was going to yell at us for talking, or ask to see what we’d been looking at, but instead she just said, “Barbara Anne, I was wondering if you might want to take Henry’s homework to him. He might be out for a while.”
“Sure,” I said, and I reached to grab the folder she was handing me. Then I looked inside Henry’s desk to find his math book. And that’s the first time it happened. A blue marble rolled out of Henry’s desk and onto the floor. I didn’t really think much about it that time. I just put it in my pocket, thinking I would give it to Henry later. But I never did. It ended up on my dresser, and I forgot all about it for a while.
I was thinking of other things. On the walk over to Henry’s house, I kept wondering if he would be able to tell, right away, that I’d betrayed him. I’m not good at hiding what I’m thinking. Whatever the opposite of a poker face is, that’s what I have. I was sort of hoping that Henry would be sleeping when I got there, but no such luck. He was on the couch in the living room watching television. He waved at me as soon as his dad let me in, and he looked so happy to see me that it almost broke my heart.
“Better keep your distance, Barbara Anne,” his dad told me. “We don’t want you coming down with this too.”
“True,” I said. “I really just came to drop off the homework.”
“Oh, you can stay for a minute,” his dad said, and he motioned me to a chair as he started to leave. “Henry probably wants to hear all about what he missed at school today.”
That made me gulp. But before Henry could ask me anything, we both spotted them through the window—Zack and Renee, heading toward Henry’s front door. Renee had a scraggly-looking bunch of flowers in her hand. I was betting that Zack had ripped them out of someone’s yard on the way over.
“Hey, look,” Henry said. “It’s Zack and Renee.”
“What are they doing here?” I asked, already beginning to panic.
“I guess they’re coming to check on me, same as you,” Henry said. He was smiling, but I barely had time to notice. I was already on my way to the door.
“He’s fine,” I said. “Thanks for coming. I’ll take those.” I reached for the flowers with one hand and started to close the door with the other.
“Barbara Anne, don’t be so rude. Ask them in,” Henry said from the couch.
“Yeah, Barbara Anne,” said Zack. “Ask us in.”
Zack had a smirk on his face, and I whispered to him, “Don’t say ANYTHING!”
Renee was even worse. She kept wandering slowly through the room and staring at the ceiling like she expected Edgar to materialize at any moment.
“What’s wrong, Renee?” Henry asked.
“Nothing,” she said. “I…just…your house is so…interesting.”
“Yeah,” Zack said. “Not that we know anything about it, but—”
“No,” I said. “How could you?”
Henry looked at the three of us, confused for a minute. But Henry is pretty smart, and we weren’t fooling him one bit. He let out an exhausted sigh. “Barbara Anne!” he said. “You promised you wouldn’t tell.”
I said the only thing I could say. “I didn’t mean to, Henry. I’m really sorry.”
My grandmother was over at my house when I got home, and she took one look at me and asked, “Why so glum, Bitsy?”
“Henry’s sick,” I said. Of course, I left out the part about what I’d done, and how, sick or well, Henry might not want to spend much time with me in the foreseeable future because of it.
“Oh dear,” my grandmother said. “What’s wrong with Henry?”
“He has the flu or something,” I said.
“Bronchitis,” my mother told her, unloading a bag of groceries.
“Same thing,” I said.
“It most certainly is NOT the same thing,” said my grandmother. “The flu can be very serious. Deadly.”
“Who ever died of the flu?” I asked her, grabbing for a cookie.
“Lots of people,” she said. “And those are for after dinner.”
“Of the flu?” I asked. “The flu is like a cold.”
“If you’re lucky,” she said. “When my father was a child, they shut the schools because of the Spanish flu. So many people were dying, they were running out of coffins.”
“Mom!” my mother said.
“What? I’m explaining history!” my grandmother said.
“You’re scaring your granddaughter,” my mother told her. “Honey, Henry has bronchitis, not the Spanish flu. He’s going to be just fine. Stop worrying about him and go get started on your homework.”
And, of course, my mother was right. Henry did get better—for a while.