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 grandmother. 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.

He had the strangest look on his face.

“What?” I asked when I got over being startled and got my breath back.

“Glenn DeMille,” he said.

“Okay?”

“I think I know that name.”

“That’s great,” I said, grinning. “But I kind of have to get to class right now, so maybe we can talk about it later.”

The ghost didn’t step out of the way, and I wasn’t about to see if I could just walk through him.

He looked at me, straight in the eyes, with that strange look still on his face. And then he said, “I think he might have been my best friend.”

It was four hours to Dooley, North Carolina. The only way we could convince Uncle Dex to drive was to tell him about the letter, the same as with Mom — but, of course, not about the ghost. Obviously, there was nothing Uncle Dex liked more than a historical mystery. Every piece of junk that came into his shop, he insisted on knowing the story behind it — who used to own it, where they lived, what happened to them, why the person was getting rid of whatever it was: rocking chair, picture frame, Confederate money, signed copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.

The ghost sat in the back of the van. Or he sort of sat there, anyway. He’d barely spoken to me, to any of us, since my conversation with Arlene DeMille. And now, sitting back there alone in Uncle Dex’s Econoline van, he kept flickering in and out of view. At least I guessed that was what was going on back there. The rest of us were pretty quiet, too — “unnerved” was probably the right word for how we felt.

Uncle Dex, on the other hand, babbled just about the whole time as he drove, and kept putting on different old songs, telling us we should do some songs by this band or that band, or “Never mind about these guys,” or “Whoa, didn’t remember how bad those dorks were.”

Somewhere south of Richmond, Greg asked Julie about her mom and dad, and that led to all of us talking about our families.

Julie’s Mom was American. Her dad was Japanese. “Everybody thinks my mom must have been a hippie,” she said. “One of those girls who graduates college and goes to Japan and teaches English and marries the serious Japanese man. But it was the opposite. My dad was the one with the guitar, always just wanting to play his music. When my mom visited Japan, she was on a business trip, but they met and fell in love anyway.

“I’m like my mom in my manner,” she added, sounding very formal. “I’m like my dad in my clothes and music.” She didn’t explain beyond that.

Greg told Julie about his mom and dad when she finished: “They’re divorced. I mostly live with my dad.”

What he didn’t mention was that his dad was older — old enough to be his grandfather — and his mother had moved to another state and only saw Greg for one month during the summer and every other Christmas. They talked on the phone sometimes, too, but not all that much.

“Anderson’s dad is a spy,” he said, quickly changing the subject. “Works in DC.”

“No he’s not,” I corrected Greg. “He just works for the government.”

“Doing what?” Julie asked.

“I don’t really know,” I said with a shrug. “He’s not allowed to talk about it.”

“Oh,” she said. “So he is a spy.”

“No,” I said, though the truth was I’d always wished that was the case, but I’d never known one way or another. Dad wouldn’t talk about it. Whenever I brought it up, he just said the same thing: He worked for the government and it wasn’t very interesting. End of story.

The conversation died there, and I turned my attention to the real mystery sitting in the far back of the van. I was worried about the ghost ever since we found out Betty had probably married his best friend, Glenn DeMille. He just seemed so sad after we heard that, though he didn’t say anything more about it — except that he needed to go down there, and the letter still had to be delivered.

I turned around to check on him, but the ghost flickered out just as I did. Greg and Julie saw it, too, and they both shivered. I must have shivered, too, because Uncle Dex asked if we were cold, and did we want him to roll up his window.