Ghost Soldier (10 page)

The road had become more crowded, with buses chugging along and lots of cars pulling into parking spaces in front of the shops. I watched the traffic and thought about Dad's job interview.

“Is that why you're applying here?” I asked Dad finally. “Would you be doing something different than programming?”

Dad turned around in his seat and looked at me with his steady grey eyes. “No,” he said. “It's a programming job, Alexander.”

I felt the tension in my back and shoulders ease, and he smiled at me before he turned back around to face front.

*   *   *

At Research Triangle Park, wide green lawns stretched from the street down to new construction sites and up to low buildings with dark tinted windows, partly blocked from the road by perfectly trimmed hedges and saplings stuck in the ground at artistic intervals and held up with wires. The park looked polished and new and somehow artificial. I wondered what the farmland had looked like when Rich's family had lived there.

The ghost's face was drawn now, looking at the lawn as if he was seeing the burned fields after the war rather than the crops that grew here before he left home.

Mrs. Hambrick turned into a driveway. A big stop sign with a row of orange cones stood in the way. I could see a white one-story building beyond it, with those little wired trees blocking its windows. A security guard drove up in a black pickup truck, and I wondered how he got there so fast. When he climbed out and came over to the car, Mrs. Hambrick rolled down her window.

“Can I help you, ma'am?” he asked, looking across her at Dad, and then scanning the rest of the van. His eyes passed right through Rich, of course, but he frowned faintly at me.

“Yes, we've got a 9:30 appointment with Don Carey?” she said, almost as if she were asking him if that was all right. “Paige Hambrick and Bill Raskin.”

The security guard shook his head. “You can't come in this way, Ms. Hambrick. You need to drive around the complex to get to the reception area. Take this road and turn left at the next traffic light. Then turn in at the second driveway.”

He glanced once more at me, then added, “They'll call Mr. Carey for you from the guard shack.”

“What is this place,” I asked once we were out of the driveway, “a software company or some supersecret spy center?”

Dad laughed. “Software can be more supersecret than the spy business these days.”

“I guess,” I said. We drove by a driveway that led into some sort of park, with a little lake and picnic tables and basketball hoops, and then kept going past a hedge until we came to the traffic light and turned.

“There it is,” Mrs. Hambrick said, pointing to a discreet sign that read Entrance.

As we pulled up to the guard shack in the middle of the drive, a door swung open and another security guard came out. At least this one was smiling.

“Can I help you folks?” he asked politely.

My dad leaned over. “Bill Raskin,” he said, “and Paige Hambrick. We've got a 9:30 appointment with Mr. Carey.”

“Let me call reception,” the guard said. He went inside and spoke on a phone. A minute later he came back. “Please follow this driveway. You'll be met at the front door.”

Sure enough, another guard was waiting for us in front of a white building with windows that reflected like mirrors. He pointed to a parking spot and Dad climbed out of the van.

“Mr. Raskin? Ms. Hambrick?” the guard asked. “Mr. Carey's expecting you.” Then he looked at me, with a slight expression of concern on his face. “And this is?”

I slid the van door shut and wondered what the fuss was about.

“This is my son, Alexander,” Dad said. “Is there a problem?”

The guard smiled again. “Mr. Carey is expecting you two, but not a youngster, I'm afraid. We have pretty tight security here.”

Rich looked down and impatiently scuffed the air above the parking lot tarmac with one boot.

“That's all right,” Mrs. Hambrick said quickly. “I'll just wait in the van with Alexander. You go on, Bill.”

Dad got this worried look. Maybe he was counting on her for this interview. I guessed some teamwork was called for. Besides, I didn't exactly want to be stuck in the van with Mrs. Hambrick. I needed some time alone with Rich to find that tree. I turned to the guard and tried to sound very polite. “Look, sir, there's got to be someplace I can wait for them where you don't have to worry about security.” I thought of that little park we'd driven past. “You know—someplace I could just sit under a tree or something?”

The guard's expression brightened. “We have a recreation area for employees and their families that's outside the secured area. I could let you wait there—if that's all right with you, Mr. Raskin?”

I gave Dad a smile, and he relaxed. “Sure. Thanks, Alexander.”

“That was quick thinking,” said Rich as the guard told the receptionist inside to call Mr. Carey to come meet Dad and Mrs. Hambrick.

I kept my mouth shut while the guard led me around the outside of the reception building, past another parking lot full of cars, and along another building in the complex. Then he opened a gate, and we turned a corner and started down a paved walkway to the park I'd seen. Close up, the place looked like some sort of fancy country club. I saw tennis courts and volleyball courts and basketball courts. The little lake lay beyond them, with a fountain in the middle. There were weeping willows and pine trees, with picnic tables in the shade beneath them.

“Wow,” I said.

The guard laughed. “Think you'll be okay here, Alex?”

I didn't bother to correct him. “Yes, sir. I guess they'll come and get me when they're finished?”

He nodded, still grinning. “Or I will. Don't worry—we won't leave you here forever!”

I gave him a fake smile as he turned away. I was ready to bet they wouldn't leave anybody here and just forget about them. I mean—somebody might sneak into their supersecret buildings and make off with a prototype game or something.

“It should be over this way,” said Rich, glaring at the departing guard.

“If we just take off, he'll follow us,” I said. “Wait till he's out of sight.”

“Why are they so worried about guests?” asked Rich. “Your father was invited—what has happened to our Southern hospitality?”

I walked across the grass toward the lake, keeping an eye on the guard. “This isn't a home, Rich,” I told him. “They're not trying to be hospitable. It's a business—they design computer software, and it looks like they worry a lot about someone sneaking out with stolen programs.”

“I saw this place change over the years,” Rich said, frowning, “and realized it was no longer a home, but that's no excuse for such rudeness.”

“You saw it change? But I thought you stayed at Fort Stedman.”

“I would come back sometimes—” he said, “not often, perhaps every twenty or thirty years—to see if Louise, or someone with our family features, had ever come back to Two Stirrups. But I never saw anyone, so I'd return to the battlefield.” He looked down like he was embarrassed. “It was lonely here with everyone gone. And there were other ghosts at Fort Stedman who couldn't rest either. We stayed together all those years. It's fairly quiet except on the anniversary of the battle. Then we all experience it again. I guess we always will.”

“I wonder why you were the only one to realize I was an out-of-timer,” I said, remembering all the soldiers crowded into Fort Stedman. Why had he zeroed in on me, someone who had lost his mother at the same age and who was going to end up so near Stirrup Iron Creek? There seemed to be an awful lot of coincidences bringing us together.

Rich looked at me. “When the right out-of-timer comes for one of us, he knows. It's meant to happen.” He seemed to be taking it all in stride.

Rich glanced back at the computer company's buildings. “The last time I came here, I saw those buildings and the lake and these trees around us. The buildings were brand new and I went inside, just to see if I could recognize anyone—”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How did you get inside with all this security?”

He smiled. “They never saw me, of course. I walked through that first building, and there were lots of small rooms, with people sitting by themselves, pushing buttons and staring at lighted windows. Then I walked through another building, and I saw people wearing strange, thick spectacles, working with tiny strips of gold and copper, laying them down in patterns on shiny green plates of something—glass or metal perhaps? I watched them for a long time but couldn't understand the purpose of their work.”

“Those green plates are called circuit boards,” I tried to explain. “They make a computer work. The guys in the little rooms were working at computers.”

“Computers? Yes—that was the word they used,” said Rich. “But what does a computer do?”

I scratched my head. I used my Mac for everything from games to writing papers to doing my math homework. Big companies used their computers to figure payroll and calculate engineering statistics and utilities usage, I guessed. “Well,” I said slowly, “basically it calculates things, only it does it really fast. And it remembers the calculations forever—at least until you tell it to forget them.”

“It figures?” Rich asked. His eyes widened. “Instead of working out the mathematics on paper, or trying to calculate it in your head, this computer figures?”

“Basically.” I wondered how something so simple as turning on my Mac could be so complicated when you tried to explain it.

Rich turned around and looked back at the buildings with awe. “They make these circuit boards and computers right here?”

I nodded.

A grin lit up Rich's face. “And the Yankees said the South would never have industry! They said we couldn't build anything here—we could only grow things and we'd never amount to much. Hah! And now the Yankees are buying
our
circuit boards! At Petersburg we tried to figure the angle and corrections to aim the mortars, and we had to do it all with pencil and paper—half the time we got it wrong. To have a computer that could figure for you! And we're building them right here in North Carolina!”

He let loose a whoop of delight and I laughed with him. Then I remembered where we were and hoped the guard wasn't watching. He'd think I was crazy, laughing all alone in the park. “How about we find this box that Louise left for you?”

Rich looked around suddenly. “They've cleared the land,” he said, his face stricken as if the thought had only just occurred to him.

I studied the trees around us. “Some of the pine trees are old,” I told him. “Where's your oak tree? If these trees lasted, it could have, too.”

He looked at the pines. “They
are
old,” he said slowly, “much older than the computer buildings. Our house was back there, near where the buildings are, but the oak was over that way from the house, near the creek.” He pointed his musket past the pines and weeping willows, to the far edge of the recreation area. “Come on.”

I followed Rich, ducking beneath the weeping willows and sweeping aside their drooping branches while he appeared to walk right through them. The sight was kind of creepy. We crossed the street we'd driven up before, then walked along a lawn and went over the paved top of a culvert filled with swampy, stagnant water.

“There.” Rich pointed to a stand of scrub oaks and pine trees. “It should be around there, just this side of the creek.”

“That's Stirrup Iron Creek?” I asked, looking down at the murky water, thick with overgrown weeds.

“Well, the creek used to be much larger,” he said. “But they changed its course as they cleared the land.” He shook his head in amazement. “I saw this powerful machine pushing the dirt—no horses at all, just this big machine! To change the course of a waterway with an axe and a shovel and a mattock is a tremendous undertaking, but that machine made it so easy.”

“I don't know—it seems a waste to sacrifice the creek and change the lay of the land in exchange for industrial development,” I told him. “I'd hate it if someone dug up my garden back home to widen a street or build another house or something.”

Rich looked at me, his black eyes unreadable. “I suppose you have to choose whether to move forward or stay where you are. You can grow things on the land, or you can build industry, even if it changes the land. We might have won the War if we had built more industry back then.”

I shrugged and followed Rich toward the trees.

But when we got there, there was no sign of his tree with the low-hanging branches. I couldn't see any old oak trees at all, just some young pin oaks and scrub pines. And beyond those, I could hear a bulldozer digging—that must have been the machine Rich had seen before.

“The tree
must
be here!” Rich cried, frantically. “It was here the last time I looked!”

“When was that?” I asked. “The time you went through the buildings?”

He shook his head. “I—I don't think so. I believe I was pondering those green plates and didn't come over here to check. I could see other trees still standing. I just assumed…” His voice trailed off in a tired sigh.

“Well, it's gone now,” I said. “Even if the tree
was
there that time, there wasn't anything you could have done about it, not unless you had someone to take the box out for you.”

He jerked around suddenly and looked at me. “If the tree's gone,” he said, “then someone must have found Louise's metal box and opened it!”

Maybe someone had, I thought. But how in the world could we ever find out what they did with it?

Chapter Nine

A N
EW
P
LAN

I led the way back to the recreation area slowly, knowing how heartsick Richeson must feel.