“Yeah,” Jonah said absently.
He was facing his desk, where he’d dumped the contents of his backpack after school, before they’d gone to see Mr. Reardon. Jonah hadn’t been able to concentrate on homework—not enough to do it, and certainly not enough to put it all in a tidy stack—so he had a half-finished math sheet sliding into the paper giving instructions for his next language arts paragraph sliding into a sheet announcing the school’s Halloween dance. But that wasn’t what Jonah was looking at. On top of those papers, Jonah could see another one that was half–folded up, as if it had just been removed from an envelope.
He wasn’t at the right angle to see everything written on the half-folded paper, but he could see a little bit: “ Bewa—”
It was one of the mysterious letters he’d received, which he knew he’d left in the back of his top drawer, under his collection of state quarters.
Jonah remembered the tiny light hovering over his desk that he’d seen from outside.
“Are you sure you weren’t in here a few moments ago, right before I got home?” Jonah asked his parents. Suddenly he wanted to believe that they’d been searching through his room, snooping around. It was better than any of the other possibilities.
“Jonah, we weren’t,” Dad said. “Neither one of us has been upstairs since before dinner.”
Jonah could barely remember dinner. He and Katherine had rushed through the leftover chili so they could get to Chip’s house.
Dad was peering at him with a concerned squint, worry lines ringing his eyes.
“Is something wrong?” Mom asked. “I mean, something we don’t already know about?”
Was that the opening Jonah wanted? He did want to tell Mom and Dad about the letters—let them worry, so he wouldn’t have to. But the tale of the letters now involved disappearing ghosts, and Katherine taking cell phone pictures of secret documents with Jonah’s name on them, and witnesses, as if Jonah had been involved in some crime.
“Nothing’s wrong,” Jonah said. He yawned unconvincingly. “I’m just tired.”
Mom and Dad were both still looking at him doubtfully, but it seemed like they were willing to play along.
“Maybe you should go to bed early,” Mom said. Mom was big on the curative powers of sleep. Jonah was surprised she didn’t add, “Everything will look better in the morning.” Instead she said, “I’m glad you came back from Chip’s. Was Katherine with you? I didn’t see her….” She looked around as if, having acted so worried about Jonah, she now had to show the same amount of concern about her daughter.
“She’s still at Chip’s,” Jonah said.
By her face, Jonah thought he could practically see the calculation going on in Mom’s head: Goodness, there couldn’t be anything romantic going on between those two, could there? She’s only in sixth grade, but this is an older boy….
“She’s got the cell phone with her, doesn’t she?” Mom asked with studied casualness. “I think I’ll give her a call, tell her to come on home. It’s almost nine o’clock.”
“I’ll go get her,” Jonah volunteered. He was still a little mad at his sister, but somehow he didn’t want her walking home alone, along the dark street with all its eerie shadows.
Which was crazy, because he was the one who’d gotten the threatening letters.
Of course, she was the one who thought she’d seen a ghost….
“Would you do that?” Mom asked. “Thanks.”
Jonah waited until Mom and Dad were out of his room before he tucked the mysterious letter back in his drawer. Then he went outside. He was nearly back to Chip’s house when he saw Katherine, slipping out of the Winstons’ front door.
“Tomorrow,” she was promising Chip. “We’ll solve this. We will!”
Jonah waited until Chip had shut the door, and Katherine was stepping out onto the sidewalk. He hid behind a maple tree and then jumped out just as Katherine was passing by: “Boo!”
Katherine shrieked and then she giggled and then she pounded her fists against Jonah’s chest.
“I hate you!” she screamed, laughing. “You’re terrible!”
Jonah almost laughed too because it felt so good to treat everything like a joke, to pretend that he wasn’t worried about anything. And, fortunately, Katherine’s fists didn’t hurt at all. She wasn’t hitting very hard.
“Just for that, I’m not going to tell you what Chip and I found out,” Katherine threatened.
“Good. I don’t want to know anyhow,” Jonah said. “Remember?”
“Okay, then, just for that, I’ll tell you everything,” Katherine corrected herself. “Chip and I called every name on the witnesses list.”
Jonah thought about putting his hands over his ears and chanting, “I’m not listening! I’m not listening! La, la, la, la, la…” But he couldn’t quite bring himself to do that.
“Two of the people just hung up on us,” Katherine continued. “But I did get one guy to tell me that he worked as an air traffic controller. I was pretending that I was working on a career project for school, and I was supposed to call people at random and talk to them about their jobs. He was really friendly and wanted to talk and talk and talk—air traffic controllers must not get out much. But then I said, ‘Did you ever witness anything unusual, like maybe thirteen years ago or so?’ and he got really, really quiet, and then he said he had to go, he didn’t have time to talk to me. That means something, don’t you think?”