Visiting Henry’s house the day of the snowstorm scared me more than I’d like to admit. And I felt sort of guilty for running out of there the second Renee’s dad showed up in the driveway. I mean, I didn’t even wait for Renee. I just ran to the car, pulled the door open, and said, “Hi, Mr. Garcia, I’m Renee’s friend Barbara Anne, and I would be really grateful if you could give me a ride home.” I believe in self-sufficiency; I really do. But you have to know your limitations too. And that’s why I finally decided to get some grown-up help finding out about Edgar.
I showed up at Henry’s house one Saturday and rang the bell. “Grab your stuff,” I said to him as soon as he answered the door. “We have an appointment.”
“An appointment?” he asked.
And I realized then that, from his point of view, it might sound like I was trying to take him to the dentist, so I said, “More like a field trip. Think of it as a field trip.”
“I was gonna play some chess with my dad,” Henry said.
“Henry!” I said (and I’ll admit my voice was a little whiny). “Don’t be so boring.”
“And I have a cold, Barbara Anne.”
I hesitated then because Henry did look a little pale. And ever since the bronchitis, he’d had this inhaler he had to use sometimes. But still, this was urgent. I couldn’t let him off the hook. “Oh, come on, Henry,” I said. “It’s important.”
“Why?” Henry asked.
“It’s a surprise.”
Henry looked uncertain for a minute, but then he went to the top of the basement steps to yell to his dad. His dad does environmental testing—like checking how polluted the air or water is—and he has this whole basement workshop with cool-looking gauges and meters and other stuff that we are not supposed to touch. It seemed like he was ignoring Henry, but eventually he came up the stairs.
“You sure you feel okay?” he wanted to know once Henry had a chance to ask for permission. But he gave in pretty easy. We were just lucky that Sophie was grocery shopping and Alice was at her dance lesson.
“Here,” he said as we headed out the door. He handed Henry a scarf. “But when you get back, you need to clean up that mess in your room. I didn’t know kids still played marbles. That was old-school even in my day.”
“Marbles?” Henry asked.
“Yeah,” his dad said. “I assumed that’s why you drew all those circles on your bedroom floor.”
Henry and I exchanged a look. And while we walked toward the bus stop, I told Henry about the marbles rolling down the stairs at Miss Leary’s house.
“Weird,” Henry said. “How come you never told me before?”
“I would have,” I said. “But you and Miss Leary were busy. Playing checkers.”
“Checkers?” Henry asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “Don’t you remember?”
“No,” Henry said. And he looked upset.
“You just forgot, Henry. It’s not a big deal,” I said. I didn’t want to tell him more, didn’t want to find out if he remembered Miss Leary calling him Edgar.
“Barbara Anne, do you think my dad is right?” Henry asked. “Do you think the circles are just a game? I wipe them away, and they keep coming back.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
Later, while we were riding on the bus, Henry turned to me with a strange look on his face. “What?” I asked.
“My dream,” Henry said. “That’s the first thing he ever said to me. ‘Play with me!’ ”
Henry and I were quiet for a while, but as the bus got closer to downtown, he kept asking me where we were going. He pestered me like a fly at a picnic, but I wouldn’t tell him. I was using the same technique my mom does when I have to get new school shoes: don’t say anything until you’re almost there, and all opportunity for escape is past. Besides, I was afraid that if I announced our destination, Henry would feel hugely disappointed. I’d made it sound like such a top-secret mission that he was probably picturing the two of us taking an elevator to a strange old building and knocking out a coded message on some mysterious door.
Once we got off the bus and it became clear where we were headed, Henry stopped walking entirely and stared at me.
“The library?” he asked. “Really? That’s the big emergency?”
“Keep an open mind, Henry,” I said.
I was afraid Henry might stop following me, so I tried not to talk and instead just walked as fast as I could into the library and up the escalator. When we arrived at the counter marked REFERENCE, the man behind it smiled at me and tilted his wrist to look at his watch.
“You must be Barbara Anne,” he said. “You’re right on time.”
Then he spotted Henry. “Henry Davis!” he said. “What are you doing here?”
“You know Mr. Corrigan?” I asked, amazed.
“Mr. Corrigan!” Henry laughed. “That’s Uncle Marty.”
“Henry is my honorary nephew,” Mr. Corrigan said. “His mother and I have known each other for years. I was her history teacher, way back in the day. How is your mom, Henry?”
“She’s fine,” Henry said. “I’ll tell her you said hello when she calls on Sunday.”
“Do that!” Uncle Marty said. He smiled at Henry.
I liked Uncle Marty already. He looked a little older than our parents but not as old as my grandmother, somewhere in between, and everything about him was gray: his hair, his sweater, the frames of his glasses, even his eyes.
“So, what are we doing here?” Henry asked, looking from Uncle Marty to me. “What’s this all about?
“Well, it’s pretty simple, really,” Uncle Marty said. “Your girlfriend asked me—”
“My friend,” Henry corrected, and I felt my face turning seven shades of red.
“Of course, of course,” Uncle Marty said. “Foolish of me to presume. Well, Barbara Anne asked me to find out about your new house, Henry. And I’ve got some information that—”
“You TOLD him?” Henry asked.
“Not about the ghosts, no,” I said.
“Well, you have now!” Henry yelled.
A few people looked up then, and one lady even shushed us.
“By the time you’re through, everybody in Seattle will know.”
“Henry,” Martin said. “I think you really might want to know what I’ve discovered. It’s quite interesting, actually. And I assure you I won’t say a word to anyone about…the other bit. Scout’s honor.”
Uncle Marty raised his hand in some sort of ancient Boy Scout salute. He had a smile on his face and cookie crumbs on his sweater. Honestly, how could you get mad at somebody who looked that harmless?
“I want to know whatever she knows,” Henry said.
“That’s the spirit!” Martin said. “Well, Henry, to begin with, it seems your new house is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.”
“Sophie says that’s because it’s over a hundred years old,” Henry said.
“That’s right,” said Martin. “Its age alone would put it on the register. But it also turns out that the original owner was Dr. Thomas Winterson.”
“Winterson?” I asked, looking at Henry. I wondered if he was thinking what I was. Was Henry picturing the cursive handwriting inside the little book from the trunk? This book belongs to P. Winterson, it said.
“Yes,” Martin said. “And Winterson is quite an interesting fellow. Let’s take a walk, and I’ll show you.”
We passed endless rows of books and people studying. Then Uncle Marty reached a tiny glass room. There was no secret code to unlock the door, but it did require a key. And once we were inside, we had to put on white cotton gloves.
“Gloves?” Henry asked.
“It’s required,” Martin told him, “for handling anything in the archive.”
Once we put them on, Uncle Marty put a big, white cardboard box on the table. Then he lifted out a pile of thin, yellowish paper and a black leather book.
“What is it?” Henry asked.
“A journal,” Martin said, handing the book to Henry. “Dr. Winterson’s journal. He began it near the start of the First World War and concluded it just as the war—and the worst of the pandemic—were ending.”
Henry was holding the book, but all three of us were reading the small cursive handwriting.
Monday, October 21, 1918
Another long day of tending to patients and providing the experimental serum to as many as we were able. Commissioner McBride seems convinced that the pandemic has at last reached its peak and will now begin to abate. I wish I shared his confidence. Elizabeth is doing the best she can at home with the boys, but they grow restless with nothing to do all day and have no real motivation to keep up with their studies now that the schools have been closed.
“Pandemic?” I asked.
“From Latin,” Martin said. “Meaning ‘all people.’ It was a virus, a horribly deadly one. No one knows exactly how many people it killed, but the estimate is fifty million or more all over the world. Three percent of the world’s population. Worse than the war. Nobody knows for certain where it started, but it spread fast. And the soldiers, in their military camps…well, it was bad there. Crowded. The soldiers were malnourished. Hygiene was poor.”
“So he was a soldier?” Henry asked. “This Dr. Winterson?”
“No,” Martin said. “He was a civilian doctor. Here in Seattle. Soldiers just brought the virus home. It was highly contagious. Imagine this: Every time someone who was sick sneezed or coughed, millions of virus particles could spread to anyone nearby. It was easy to catch and impossible to cure. They handed out masks, passed laws against spitting, told people to stay home, but there were no good ways to treat it, really. Some of them died directly when the virus ruined their lungs. Most of them got a secondary infection, pneumonia. And that’s what did them in.”
“That’s awful,” I said.
Uncle Marty looked at his watch. “It’s time for my break,” he said. “Why don’t I take you two out for a bite to eat?”
And Henry and I were glad to leave.