Rebel Spirits (8 page)

IT’S THE FIRST
day of the Battle reenactment, which means in two days Nathaniel will be gone. I feel a little flutter of panic about having only two more days to possibly help him, and also about him leaving so soon. But I push it aside.

I come downstairs in shorts and a tank top, feeling groggy. The McLean boys are snarfing down pancakes drowned in blackberry syrup. “Keep your purple tongues in your mouths, boys,” Mrs. McLean scolds as she pops a bite of Canadian bacon into the gaping mouth of Brownie, hiding in her beach bag.

I give the boys the lip-tapping
shoosh
signal and whisper, “It’s our secret, got it?” Jake nods. Max looks like I’d eat him alive if he breathed a word about our basement adventure.

Outside, I can already hear the drone of gunfire as the first battle of the day begins. What was it like, back in Nathaniel’s times, trying to carry on life in this small town while hundreds of thousands of soldiers marched down the main street and barricaded themselves on the surrounding hills and ravines? Knowing Nathaniel now gives those soldiers a human face, a name. Did they feel ready to kill, ready to die? Does anybody?

I blindly grab a plate to serve myself breakfast. I know that most soldiers in the Army of the Potomac were fighting to preserve the Union after the Southern states pulled out. Most in General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia fought to preserve the Confederacy, to keep slavery as their way of life. That much I learned in US history last year, even though I read that Lee wasn’t all that keen on slavery. But the rest, on both sides? Some were pure abolitionists, totally against slavery, and others were fighting on any which side, just for the adrenaline rush of war. Did they grasp that they might not live through it?

After helping Charlotte clean the guest rooms — she’s as easy to chat with as ever, but clams up when I bring up ghosts — I
join the masses outside. I’m one of a zillion people gathered around the grassy perimeter of the battlefield. Everybody’s slouching in lawn chairs, or huddling on blankets, with their picnic lunches spread around them. A group of kids next to me is running around dripping Popsicle juice and chasing their chocolate Lab. It’s a party, not a war.

I watch the reenactors in uniforms on the field. They are rebuilding their barricades with tree limbs and sandbags, slugging back water from sweaty canteens, reloading their muskets, watering their horses, rolling out the cannons. They’re aiming at the enemy across the field, waiting for the marshal to call the signal to fire.

The stands are jammed with excited spectators who smell fake blood, waiting for it all to come alive again. Someone’s windmilling his arms. Evan. He’s motioning me over and squeezing out a spot for me on the bleacher.

“I see you survived the first battle,” I tell him.

He tugs at his high collar, smiling. Luck of the draw: He pulled the rank of private in the Confederate army. I can’t help but notice that he looks handsome in the gray uniform.

“So far,” he says, “one down, but I’m in for a bunch more shoot-outs.”

I think of Nathaniel, with a
real
war wound in his back, but Evan is still joking around.

“Lived to tell about the battle, but in a couple days I’ll breathe my last in Pickett’s Charge when the General himself hollers, ‘Charge the enemy and remember Old Virginia!’ Funny thing is, I’ve never been to Virginia, but I’ll die in southern glory anyway.”

“How many times do you have to die?” I ask dryly.

“Six, all together.” He pauses, squinting out at the field The color guard dips the Union flag in front of us to wild applause — thirty-five stars in seven neat rows — and then another regiment dips the Confederate flag, and there’s just as much cheering.

“What’s it like out there on the field?” I ask.

“Hot. It’s not all fun and games. There’s lots to remember.”

“Such as?”

“You have to keep track of the signals, how far to hang back from the guy in front of you, who to aim at, how and when you’re supposed to fall. How to play dead. Out there on the field, you really have to look convincing.”

“But what does it actually
feel
like?” I demand, my thoughts on Nathaniel.

Evan’s cheeks inflate and he puffs out a giant burst of air. “Feels realistic. I know it’s just a show, nobody’ll get hurt, and the guys falling dead on the field will be carried out to do it all
over again an hour later. But you get caught up in it. Reloading the guns fast as you can. Squinting to get the enemy in your crosshairs, firing at a moving target. The scary thing is, I find myself totally hating the Union soldiers. You gotta have hatred deep in your gut when you shoot to kill, even if you’re just shooting blanks.” He sinks into himself, and I’m flooded with sympathy for him. Did Nathaniel feel the same way, pumped with hatred, especially when he felt that bayonet thrust?

Evan says, “This is my first year. I’m not doing it next year.”

“Smart,” I say. Gotta hand it to him. At least he’s not as shallow as I’d thought.

“Okay, look,” Evan blurts out, and I turn to him, confused. “I’m not the most alert guy on the planet, but I’m picking up that you don’t like me. Why not?” Evan is clearly the kind of guy who knows
everybody
likes him.

I’m caught off guard by his question. What does he mean, exactly? Have I been cold toward him? Maybe I’ve been so distracted by Nathaniel that I’m not even aware of how I’m acting toward the living.

“Well, it’s not that I don’t like you,” I answer truthfully.

“Am I too aggressive? Too pompous? Too friendly? Too adorable?”

“All of the above, except maybe the adorable part.”

He smiles broadly, looking, well, reasonably cute. “I might not come back to you with all my parts still attached. How ’bout a kiss for a Reb going off to war?”

I can’t help but laugh a little, so I reach over and plant a dry kiss on his cheek. I feel a small tingle of nerves, and also a pang of guilt. But why? In case Nathaniel is watching?

“Lacking passion, but I’m much obliged, Miz Chase,” Evan says, holding his gray cap in both hands, like a true southern gentleman.

“When you’re back to being the aggressive, pompous, semi-adorable twenty-first century Evan, I need to talk to you about the ever-popular Drydens.”

“Right.” He nods. “I saw your e-mail this morning. We’ll have to talk more after the battle. Why don’t you meet me outside the house around two o’clock? I should be done by then.” He stands up. “Gives me something to live out the war for.”

In my best fake southern accent, I tease, “Y’all be careful, heah?”

Why not? It’s July first; everybody plays along.

Evan grins at me. “Count on it, Miz Chase.”

Evan has been gone maybe five minutes when an off-duty Union soldier squeezes into a small spot between me and a
family of four. I turn, noticing how realistic his blue uniform looks — and it’s
him
.

I just stare at Nathaniel, my face flushed with pleasure.

“I’m sorry we had to part ways last night,” he tells me. He’s murmuring but his voice somehow carries over the roar of the crowd. “I wanted to find you.” He doesn’t say anything about Evan, so I figure he must not have seen me kiss his cheek. I want to tell Nathaniel I didn’t mean it.

I glance around at the spectators and toward the field. “Is it okay for you to do this? Materialize right out in public?”

“It’s safe here around hordes of people who look just like me.” He smirks to himself. “Most of them don’t see me, anyway. You’re one of the few. I’ve practiced every year at this time for longer than a century. It takes so much energy to stay in this bodily form.” He throws me a shy glance. “If you hold my hand, I can soak up some of your energy.”

“Is that why you were holding my hand so much last night?” I ask, bristling a little. Still, I reach over to put my hand in his, amazed again at how firm and rough his fingers are.

“In part,” Nathaniel says, ducking his head. “But I confess I also very much enjoy how it feels.”

I lower my own head, blushing furiously.

“Something I’ve pondered, Lorelei, is why you weren’t scared off when I first showed up on your talking machine.”

I shake my head. “I
was
scared in the beginning, but you never seemed threatening, really.” I think again of that boy I saw in the tree. My séances with Jocelyn.

He nods. “I know. You have the gift. You understand.”

I feel a spark of frustration. “But I wish I understood more about you, Nathaniel.”

“Yes. We will finish our conversation from last night,” he assures me, brushing my palm with his ropy scar. Right now it’s as if the whole crowd has vanished. Their noises are dimmed — someone pressed mute — and Nathaniel and I are the only ones sitting on the bleachers, side by side.

Then the bustle of the crowd comes up again at full volume. Fake or not, smoke clouds the air; the sounds reverberate from dozens of bugles and drums and horses, and guns firing all at once. Men cry out in mortal pain; officers shout orders; wounded bodies scramble for shelter; caps fly; flags wave, riddled with bullet holes. It all feels so horribly real.

“Is this what it was like, Nathaniel, deafening and chaotic and terrifying?”

He gazes out over the battlefield, the men rustling around in tense anticipation of the next volley. “I’ll tell you what scared us most out there,” he begins, drawing in his breath. A ghost drawing breath at all is shocking. “The most terrifying thing
wasn’t falling in battle, getting shot up, hurting bad. It was dying alone out there, spending all the rest of time alone.”

Tears spring to my eyes, and then everything goes quiet on the field, as if every soldier is holding his breath. Nathaniel releases my hand when the next signal is shouted.

“FIRE!”

He whispers in my ear, “Up in the attic, one o’clock.” And he’s gone; my hand is empty. I jump up, looking for him in the crowd, and people are darting their heads around me so as not to miss a single moment of action. I know I won’t see him in this mob. He must have returned to spirit form, and I wonder if he’s watching me.

I can’t stay here anymore. I stand up and run as fast as the crowd will let me, stepping over blankets and toes and picnic baskets. I have to get out of this scene where war is a jolly spectator sport. In the real world, men and boys as fine as Nathaniel Pierce, who can’t possibly be a traitor, fall with bullet-torn bodies and die. Alone.

AFTER I COME
inside, sweaty and overwhelmed, Bertha asks for my help with the dishes. I agree, though I’d rather spend time with Charlotte. But she’s already left for the day.

I’m elbow deep in soaking pans, counting the minutes down to one o’clock, when Bertha cries, “Well, lookee here what I found!” She walks over, dangling an old baby’s shoe like a dead mouse. “Way in the back of the pantry, kinda lodged into the unfinished part of the wall.”

“Looks like a piece of mothy trash to me.” And why would she be messing around back there, anyway?

“Trash? Not on your life, missy. It’s the concealment shoe. Folks around here always used to put a well-loved child’s shoe in the wall when they built. Supposed to hold the spirit of the child and bring good luck to the family. Still waiting for that.”

“So,” I casually announce, ignoring her comment and turning off the faucet. “I ran into Mr. Dryden in the middle of the night.” I haven’t mentioned this to my parents yet — I want to investigate it on my own first.

“Couldn’t’ve, unless you were on my sleeping porch on Washington Street. The racket from my old man’s loose sinuses kept me up half the night. Musta been some other ugly old man you saw.”

She’s lying.

“I could be wrong,” I say, shrugging.

“There’s a lot of that going around,” Bertha mutters.

“The hospital that was here before the house was built?”

“What about it?” she grumbles.

“You said some people still hear the cries of wounded soldiers.” Like the boys, last night. Can sounds of extreme intensity be stored in a bubble of time that bursts in another century? If I screamed in terror today, would some girl hear it in 2300?

“What do you wanna know?” Bertha asks.

“Anything. I’ll tell you when I get bored.”

She slams a drawer; silverware clatters inside. “There were makeshift hospitals, here, there, up at the Lutheran Seminary. This was only one of ’em. You could tell which were used as hospitals by the trail of blood up the front steps, and the arms and legs tossed out the back window. Kept dozens of civilians busy just burying the piles of limbs.”

Piles of limbs?
I’m turning green, swallowing down my nausea.

“Doctors didn’t know what to do for splintered bones besides amputate, else the legs would have gone to infection or gangrene and killed the soldiers. Doctors and nurses back then, they hardly knew you had to wash your hands. Didn’t have time, anyways, and there wasn’t much clean water, with the blood running like an open spigot.”

My stomach’s doing backflips. “So, most of the soldiers died from gunshot wounds or amputations?” I’m thinking of the jagged bullet hole in Nathaniel’s back that killed him.

“From minié-ball shot and cannon-fire balls and bayonet stabbings.” Bertha’s delighted to share the grim details. “Not the worst of it, though. Disease took more of ’em. Wasn’t a pretty time.”

“So, why do the locals want to preserve that horror if it was so miserable?”

She shrugs. “It’s our history. What’s yours?”

The question startles me. “Not war and piles of severed legs,” I stammer.

“Anyways, why are you asking me about my old man?” she shoots back.

My turn to shrug. “Okay, I got bored. Talk to you later.”

Nathaniel’s waiting for me in the attic, so I fly up the stairs, Gertie lapping after me. I’ve noticed Nathaniel and Gertie seem nervous around each other. Are animals to ghosts like silver daggers to vampires? Another thing I don’t know about spirits. Gertie barks at the ceiling door to the attic; she hears something I don’t.
Nathaniel.
I open the door a crack, and Gertie backs away, skitters down the stairs. And then the door is pulled open, and Nathaniel’s reaching for me.

“You poking your head up like this reminds me of that groundhog you told me about.” He smiles; his eyes dance. “Punxsutawney Phil, meet Punxsutawney Nate,” and he pulls me up into his arms.

Before I can respond, he lowers his head and kisses me.

Not a quick kiss on the cheek like I gave Evan, but a full kiss on the lips. My first kiss, actually. Who cares that it’s with a ghost? It sure feels real. It’s sweet and delicious and I want it
to go on and on. I close my eyes and kiss him back, and feel my insides turn to Jell-O.

Slowly Nathaniel pulls away, studying me with a small smile. “Forgive me,” he says with his usual politeness. “I have been wanting to do that.”

“Same here,” I tell him, still dazed, and I realize that
is
just what I’ve wanted.

Nathaniel leads me over to the trunk, and we sit on it, facing each other. I crisscross my legs. I know we’re here so Nathaniel can finish telling me his story. We keep a business-like distance between us even though all I want is for us to start kissing again.

“So now you know most of my story,” Nathaniel tells me. “And the question is, who would have wanted to kill me, besides any one of the eighty-eight thousand Confederate soldiers aiming guns and cannons at me?”

I think back to what Nathaniel told me late last night, in my room: how, as he lay on his cot bleeding, the doctor and Henry Baldwin had had a scuffle. Both men had been angry at him.

“What about Henry Baldwin?” I start. “He had a motive. He thought you were a traitor.”

Nathaniel nods. “Henry was ferocious with grief over his brother’s death, and he blamed me for bringing that Reb boy
in. But he left the tent, I remember. Though it could be he came back.”

We think together. I’d rather return to the kissing, where we’re in perfect sync, and treason and lies and murder evaporate. I inch a little closer and ask, “What about the doctor, then? He was going crazy about that stolen Lincoln ring, wasn’t he? Crazy enough to murder you?”

Nathaniel wets his lips. “I didn’t tell you the last of the story. Maybe the ring, Mr. Abraham Lincoln’s ring, was Doc’s good-luck charm, and maybe it was his curse. Either way you want to believe, the man fell to a random bullet as soon as he stepped outside our tent. I heard all the other soldiers in the tent talking about it when it happened. Just his time, I guess. Or maybe he was murdered, too.”

“Oh, come on, another murder? Let’s just deal with the one we’ve got: yours. At least we can cut that doctor from our list of suspects.” I think for another minute, chewing on my bottom lip. “So you gave the ring to Wince, right? Before you died?” Suspicion flashes through my mind. “And what did Wince do with the ring then?”

My thoughts are racing. Maybe Wince, Nathaniel’s best friend in the regiment, knew the ring was valuable. Valuable enough to take it from Nathaniel, and then shoot him to keep him quiet. Then Wince sold it for a small fortune after the war
ended. Maybe he sold it back to President Lincoln. Maybe that’s where Wince got the money to build the Vienna Carmody House. My house.

Nathaniel shakes his head, looking stricken. “Are you suspecting Wince of something sinister?” Nathaniel’s eyes turn hard. “No. Winston Carmody was the best friend I ever had.”

“At least since Edison Larch,” I blurt out, remembering his childhood friend. “Didn’t you say you thought you saw Edison at the Battle?”

Nathaniel looks thoughtful. The sun streaming in the window shifts and his face is partly hidden, reminding me that as real and present as he seems now, he’s actually shadow and smoke. A tiny pinpoint of hope dots my heart: Maybe he’s wrong about leaving me when the Battle Days are over. Maybe if I solve the murder, it will somehow keep him
here
. Anything’s possible. The laws of the universe are suspended sometimes, aren’t they? Newborns who weigh under a pound survive. Tornadoes take out a town, but leave one house standing. People who’ve been pronounced dead open their eyes and jump-start their lives all over again. Can’t a miracle happen just this once?

“I might have imagined Edison being here at Gettysburg,” Nathaniel says, looking back at me.

“But Wince
was
here,” I press, mentally adding him to the list of suspects.

Nathaniel shakes his head vehemently. “He was a good and loyal friend, Winston Carmody was. I’m certain that he went to the hospital to return the ring and placed it somewhere among Doc’s things so no one would ever suspect me of stealing it. He probably left the tent before I was shot.”

My shoulders sag. No wonder he’s never solved this murder. “We’re hitting a wall.”

Nathaniel looks around, searching for the wall, and I remember that he’s clueless about twenty-first-century slang. I hide my smile.

“Getting nowhere,” I explain. I glance at my watch. “And I have to talk to a friend now.” For some reason I don’t want to tell him that I’m going to ask Evan to explore the basement with me. “Can we meet in the evening, down by the creek?”

He leans over and kisses me again. I guess that means
yes
.