The Whistle, the Grave, and the Ghost

by Brad Strickland

  “Could’ve been a bear,” said Billy.

  “Or maybe Crazy Jake,” put in Stan, as if he were trying to be helpful. The others giggled and sniggered.

  “This is not the way a Scout behaves,” scolded Mr. Halvers. “Who did this to Lewis?”

  The boys grew quiet as the flashlight beam traveled from face to face. Nobody admitted anything.

  “All right,” snapped Mr. Halvers. “Forget about earning any merit badges for this trip. All except Lewis. Now go to bed. Lewis, your tent’s in bad shape, but I don’t think it’s going to rain, at any rate. Can you manage?”

  Lewis nodded.

  “No more tricks,” growled Mr. Halvers, turning off his flashlight. “Turn in. Now!”

  As he settled down, Lewis was sure he heard some smothered chuckles. He lay with bitter anger burning inside him. If he were tougher, he’d show them! He’d teach them not to pick on anybody just because he was heavy.

  He lay in his sleeping bag with his heart slowly returning to its normal beat. With the flashlight out, the campsite was bathed in darkness. Only a thin column of gray smoke drifted up from the dead campfire, looking ghostly in the pale moonlight.

  Lewis closed his eyes. Then they flew open again. Smoke? They had doused the campfire with water! He rose up on his elbows.

  Did he really see smoke? It looked like a faint, writhing wisp, about as tall as a man, but it was so hard to see that Lewis thought his eyes might be tricking him. He rubbed them. Now he couldn’t see anything at all. Nothing but darkness and the distant stars and moon.

  Anyway, Lewis thought, the campfire wasn’t even in that direction. It was farther to the left.

  He closed his eyes again. Then he had an unsettling thought. The boys had been telling ghost stories. What if it had not been smoke at all, but a ghost?

  Lewis rose and stared again. Nothing. He lay back down.

  But this time he knew he would not be able to sleep.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The Scouts got back to New Zebedee on Sunday afternoon. “How’d it go?” asked Uncle Jonathan as Lewis staggered through the doorway under the burden of his knapsack.

  “Not so great,” admitted Lewis. He unrolled his pup tent. “Look.”

  Jonathan had red hair just turning gray, a red beard streaked with white, and a kindly manner. He came over and handled the ruined tent. “Looks like someone did this with a knife,” he said slowly. “What happened?”

  “Some of the guys clowning around,” said Lewis. “They thought it was a big fat joke. I’m sorry, Uncle Jonathan. I’ll pay for it out of my allowance.”

  “Don’t be silly,” his uncle told him. “I can afford to replace a pup tent! But this is worse than a joke. It’s mean, and it’s destructive. Who did it?”

  Lewis hung his head. “I don’t know for sure. It happened while I was asleep. I didn’t see anything.”

  Jonathan looked at Lewis. “Okay. But I’m going to have a word with Fred Halvers. This would be a pretty mean thing to do to a boy whose parents didn’t have the money to buy a new one.” He held up the pup tent by its edges and sighed. “Too far gone even to patch.” Then his eyes twinkled. “Of course, we could ask Florence to use her magic and make it as good as new. But that would be cheating.”

  Lewis nodded. Although Florence Zimmermann could easily do something as simple as patching a tent with a wave of her wand, she almost never used magic for something trivial like that. She had explained to Lewis once that magic was for important things. “Anyway,” she had finished, “that would take all the fun out of it. Why, if I used magic to whip up a German chocolate cake, it would taste just as gooey and sweet as my home-baked ones. But I wouldn’t have the fun of glopping and slopping the batter, and your uncle Weird Beard wouldn’t be able to lick the beaters!”

  “Well,” said Jonathan now, “we’ll toss this one out and I’ll buy you a replacement this week. Need any help unpacking your camping gear?”

  “No, thanks,” Lewis told him. “I can handle it. And then I’m gonna take a long hot shower. I’m all sweaty and grimy and gritty.”

  A few minutes later, Lewis stood under a stream of hot water. His shoulders and legs were aching from the hike, and it felt good to let the shower ease the kinks out of his muscles. He finally finished his shower, toweled off, and went back into his bedroom to dress.

  Lewis liked living with his uncle. One reason was this house. When Jonathan’s grandfather had died years and years ago, he had left most of his money to Jonathan. Jonathan had explained that once with a wink and a chuckle. “That’s because my brother, Charlie, your dad, was a real go-getter, Lewis. Granddad knew he’d make a good living for himself. And the old man couldn’t stand our sisters, who were bossy and nosy and who both disgraced the family by marrying Baptists instead of good, steady Catholics. But I was the old boy’s favorite, because he and I were a lot alike: fat, lazy, and too easygoing to worry about making money!”

  Lewis knew that Jonathan had invested his money, and that the investments brought in a steady income. Back during World War II, Jonathan had bought the mansion at 100 High Street, and he had never regretted his purchase. It was three stories tall, and all the bedrooms had fireplaces in different colors of marble. Lewis’s fireplace was of black marble, with a fire screen. His bed was a big, solid four-poster, with battlements on the top that matched the ones on the frame of his tall mirror. From the window of his bedroom, Lewis could look out on the Hanchett house across the street, and beyond that to the water tower at the top of the hill. It was a great room, and Lewis felt a little smug when he thought that probably neither Billy Fox nor Stan Peters had ever slept in a bedroom as neat as his.

  Lewis tugged on jeans and a red striped T-shirt, then slipped into his sneakers. He had dropped the whistle on his bedside table, next to his Westclox alarm clock. He snatched it up and stuck it into his pocket, then hurried downstairs. “Okay if I go over to Rose Rita’s?” he asked his uncle.

  Jonathan looked at his pocket watch. “I suppose so. Be back before six, though, because Florence is cooking for us tonight. Invite Rose Rita over if you want. There’s always room for one more!”

  “Okay.” Lewis banged out the door, crossed the lawn, and opened the wrought-iron gate. Then he hurried down the hill and over to Rose Rita’s house at 39 Mansion Street. Back when Michigan was on the verge of becoming a state, the people of New Zebedee had hoped that their town would be chosen as the new state capital. They planned to build a fine governor’s mansion, and they even named the street after the proposed building. But then they lost out to Lansing, so the street name was a little misleading.

  Rose Rita’s house was not a mansion, but it was pleasant enough, like all the other houses on the tree-lined boulevard. As he walked up to the house, Lewis heard the crack of a bat and ball from around back. He went around to the backyard and saw Rose Rita tossing a baseball up and hitting it. “Hi,” he said.

  Rose Rita grinned at him. She was a tall, plain girl with long, stringy dark hair and big round black-rimmed glasses. “Hi yourself,” she returned. “Hey, you’re just in time. Want to play some flies an’ grounders?”

  They took turns pitching and whacking the baseball. Rose Rita was much better than Lewis at both, but at least she didn’t tease him. “How was the hike?” she asked when they had gotten tired enough to pause and rest.

  Lewis made a face. “Kind of bad.” He told about the mean trick the others had played on him.

  Rose Rita’s cheeks flushed red. “What a rotten thing to do! Who was it?”

  Lewis shrugged. “I don’t know for sure.”

  Sternly, Rose Rita said, “I’d bet you pesos to peanuts that it was Billy and Stan, right?”

  “Maybe,” said Lewis slowly. He hated to get Rose Rita involved. She tended to take charge of things, and if she walked up to Billy and Stan and demanded they pay for Lewis’s ruined tent, he would be in even worse trouble with them. And they would call him a sissy and say that he and Rose Rita were
in love with each other. He suddenly remembered the whistle in his pocket. Maybe it would distract Rose Rita, he thought. He pulled it out. “Hey, I found this in the woods.”

  Rose Rita took it from him. “A British police whistle?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Lewis. “I think it may be really old. It was under a rock.”

  Rose Rita turned the whistle in her fingers. “It’s got engraving on it,” she observed. “Curlicues and loops . . . and some words.” She squinted through her glasses. “S . . . I . . . these are hard to make out.”

  “Let me see.” Lewis squinted at the silver tube. No wonder he hadn’t noticed the letters. They were very faint, and in such a swirly script that it was hard to tell if he was looking at a word or just a part of the engraved design. Slowly he read, “Sibila et veniam. At least I think that’s what it is.”

  “Latin?” asked Rose Rita. “‘Something and I come’?”

  “ ‘Something and I will come,’ ” corrected Lewis. “But I don’t know that first word. It must be a verb, and it’s imperative, but that’s all I know.”

  “I’ve got my dictionary upstairs,” said Rose Rita. “I’ll run and get it.”

  She lugged the big, black-bound Latin-English dictionary to the front porch, and they leafed through it with no luck. “Must be a rare word,” muttered Lewis. “Maybe if we check the big dictionary in the public library . . .”

  “Well, we can’t do that right now,” said Rose Rita. She picked up the whistle and raised it to her lips.

  Lewis grabbed her arm, stopping her. “Don’t put that in your mouth! My gosh, I told you that I dug it up from under a rock. It was in wormy old dirt and might have all kinds of germs on it.”

  “Yuck.” Rose Rita stuck out her tongue. “Thanks for stopping me.” She handed the whistle back to Lewis. “I just wondered what it sounded like. Maybe you can wash it or soak it in alcohol or something.”

  Putting the whistle back into his jeans pocket, Lewis said, “Oh, I was supposed to ask if you wanted to come over for dinner tonight. Mrs. Zimmermann’s cooking.”

  “Sure,” said Rose Rita promptly. “I’ll go tell my mom.” She carried the dictionary back inside and in a few minutes was back, clapping a Detroit Tigers baseball cap onto her head. “Let’s go!”

  They walked to High Street, then up the hill. On the way, Rose Rita asked, “So who do you suppose lost the whistle in the first place?”

  Lewis shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought it might be pre-Columbian or—”

  “Nah,” put in Rose Rita. “It wouldn’t be native to America. Not with a Latin inscription.”

  “But I hadn’t seen the inscription then,” explained Lewis, a little irritated. “Anyway, some people think the Romans and Carthaginians came across the Atlantic Ocean centuries before Columbus.”

  Rose Rita laughed. “In their quinqueremes and galleys? That’s very far-fetched.”

  “I didn’t say I believed it. It might be something a missionary dropped, though. There were French priests here at one time, converting the Potawatomi and the—”

  “Priests don’t usually carry whistles, though,” interrupted Rose Rita. “None that I ever heard of.”

  “Some of them might,” insisted Lewis stubbornly. “Anyway, I found this near a grave.”

  “A what?”

  “You heard me,” said Lewis smugly.

  Rose Rita stared at Lewis, her eyes wide behind her spectacles. “Where was it?”

  “In the middle of Richardson’s Woods.”

  “That’s nuts,” declared Rose Rita. “There’s no cemetery in the middle of Richardson’s Woods. It’s just a stretch of ground that was too rocky to plow up for farming, that’s all.”

  Lewis closed his hand on the whistle in his pocket. “Well, it looked like a grave, and it had the person’s name carved on the stone. ‘Here lies Lamia,’ it said. Maybe she was some pioneer’s wife or something.” Lewis had a good imagination, and he added, “They could have been the first settlers from back east to come to Michigan, and she got sick on the covered wagon and died. And her grieving husband buried her and put a big stone on the grave to keep the wild animals off, and he carved her name on the stone.”

  Rose Rita rolled her eyes. “And maybe it was an ad for Lamia Brand Super-Sudsy Washday Detergent.”

  Lewis grunted. “Okay, okay. But it looked like a grave! And—” He broke off suddenly. “And, come to think of it, the inscription on the stone was in Latin, just like the one on the whistle.”

  “Oh, so you think the whistle belongs to a dead person?” asked Rose Rita with a trace of sarcasm.

  “I don’t know,” confessed Lewis. “But they must be connected. My gosh, an ancient stone inscription in Latin, and next to it a whistle with a Latin inscription of its own, way out in the middle of nowhere. That can’t be coincidence.”

  Rose Rita did not look convinced. They pushed open his gate. Lewis’s nostrils twitched. Mrs. Zimmermann was a fabulous cook, and the aroma of the dinner she had prepared drifted out and made him drool with anticipation. It smelled like a pork roast, and there was the wonderful yeasty scent of fresh-baked bread, and maybe the spicy-sweet fragrance of a hot apple pie.

  Rose Rita sniffed too. “Yum!”

  They hurried inside. Mrs. Zimmermann and Uncle Jonathan were just setting the table. “Hello, you two!” said Mrs. Zimmermann with a wide smile. As usual, she was wearing a purple dress, and her untidy gray hair was piled up in a loose bun on the top of her head. “Just in time. Wash your hands and hurry back.”

  They practically ran. The food was just as good as Lewis had anticipated. Mrs. Zimmermann beamed to see how they dug in, and she chuckled as Uncle Jonathan took a big bite of apple pie and murmured, “Mmmmmm! Superb, Pruny Face! This is even better than the cherry pie you baked last month, and that was the best cherry pie anyone ever made!”

  “Thank you very much, Brush Mush!” said Mrs. Zimmermann. “But don’t think that compliments are going to get you out of washing the dishes!”

  Lewis had to grin at the way his uncle and Mrs. Zimmermann traded their insulting nicknames. It was an old habit with them, one that often made him smile.

  Mrs. Zimmermann smiled as she watched Lewis finish off his first piece of pie. “Well, Lewis, your uncle tells me that Father Foley is coming down a little hard on you. Are you going to late Mass?”

  Lewis looked at his uncle. Jonathan said, “Missing one Mass isn’t exactly a mortal sin, Florence. And Father Foley knew all about the weekend hike. The church helps to sponsor Lewis’s troop. I don’t think he needs to worry about dragging himself in tonight.”

  Mrs. Zimmermann served Lewis a second slice of the delicious pie. “Back when I was teaching school, I’d run into people like Father Foley from time to time,” she confided. “Lots of teachers who were short and snappy with their students. Almost every one of them had had a hard time of it somewhere along the line. They’d taught in tough schools where most of the kids were trouble-makers, or maybe even they had been through hard childhoods themselves. Don’t let him get you down, Lewis. I’m sure he means well, and you know sometimes priests don’t understand young people as well as they should.”

  Uncle Jonathan chuckled and stroked his red beard. “Sometimes they don’t understand us old fogeys either. Last week Father Foley said the parish house was in desperate need of new gutters and he hoped some of his rich parishioners would step in and pay for them. And he cast a very beady eye at me, so I suppose I’m on the spot. Lewis, I’ll tell you what: I’ll donate the money for the gutters, and maybe that will make Father Foley ease up on you. What do you think?”

  Lewis took a big sip of milk. Then, very seriously, he said, “I think . . . I think . . . well, I think I’d like to have another piece of pie.”

  Rose Rita snorted with laughter and milk spurted from her nose. Mrs. Zimmermann jumped up with a napkin, but Rose Rita was fine, and her laughter was infectious. They all joined in. It was a happy moment.

&
nbsp; Before long, Lewis was wondering whether he would ever be that happy again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Days passed. Lewis had not forgotten about the whistle, but he had not used it either. It was now quite clean. Lewis had indeed soaked it in alcohol, for a whole day, and then he had scrubbed it over and over again under running water. Oddly enough, he saw no stain of tarnish, as you would expect of something that had been buried under a rock for who knows how long. The silver tube gleamed, as good as new.

  Or at least Lewis supposed it was as clean as new. It certainly did not look new, but ancient, just like a museum artifact that had been painstakingly restored, but that still showed the wear and tear of ages. The engraved lines were faint, as though the touch of fingers over the centuries had gradually all but erased them. Even the puzzling inscriptions were no easier to read after Lewis’s thorough cleaning. At times they hardly seemed to be there at all, and Lewis would have to turn the whistle this way and that to catch the light just in the right place to make the letters readable. More and more he wondered what connection tied this whistle to the stone in Richardson’s Woods. Latin inscriptions, but with strange words that seemed to be in no dictionary, a similar strange feeling that he got when thinking of either—the two things belonged to each other. He just knew that somehow.

  Lewis had found an old beaded chain, like the ones that soldiers wore their dog tags on, and had looped that through the round hoop at the end of the whistle, but he didn’t hang the chain around his neck. There was something about the whistle that Lewis did not like. The black earth had been packed in it, worms had no doubt crawled in and out of it, and just the thought of putting it in his mouth turned his stomach. And then, too, what if it had belonged to the person who lay in the grave? The very idea spooked Lewis.

  On the next Saturday afternoon, he and three or four other boys had to report to the church to sweep the aisles and polish the pews. It was part of his penance. Father Foley had him work on the Communion chalice and tray, as well as the censers, all of which had to be rubbed with polish and then carefully buffed with a soft cloth. It was boring work, but Lewis didn’t complain. It was better than using a handful of rags, a bottle of Old English polish, and lots of elbow grease to shine up all the pews in the church. Somehow, making the gleam come out on the silver surfaces reminded Lewis of the whistle.