The Truce Read online

  Uncle Ash and Miss Spencer exchanged a worried look as they all set off up the road.

  “Bone?” he asked.

  “Trust me,” Bone said.

  “How do we know it’ll be there tonight?” Ruby asked.

  “Yeah, maybe it only shows up on that night?” Clay said.

  “And time,” Jake added.

  Will tapped his watch and shone his flashlight on it. Nearly 8:00 p.m. “I saw it last night. After the 8:15,” Will said.

  “It?” Miss Spencer asked.

  “Saw what?” Uncle Ash was getting a bit exasperated.

  Ruby giggled. The boys had big grins on their faces.

  Uncle Ash deserved a little razzing considering what they’d all been through.

  Just as they reached the edge of Flat Woods, Bone turned the flashlight to light up her own face for effect. “The ghost dog.”

  Uncle Ash stopped in his tracks.

  “Come on.” Bone shone the light into the woods.

  “You’re not afraid of a little ghost, are you?” Jake teased.

  “Well, I am,” Clay answered. “Just about wet my pants last time.” He shook it off and marched into Flat Woods with Jake and Will.

  Miss Spencer took Uncle Ash’s arm. “I thought those were just stories.”

  Uncle Ash shook his head. “Lead on,” he told Bone.

  They followed the same track as before. Bone quietly explained what they’d seen on Saturday night—and what Mr. Childress had said afterward. Soon Ruby was spreading out the blanket over the same spot.

  The 8:15 train came and its cars filled with coal.

  Will fidgeted. Just as the last of the coal poured into the last car, Will slipped a piece of paper into Bone’s hand.

  She held the note every which way, but it was too dark to read.

  “Go with me to the dance,” Will whispered over the noise of the train.

  Bone nodded. They were going anyway. Might as well go together.

  Will held his cupped hand to his ear as if he couldn’t hear her.

  “Okay,” she muttered, knowing she’d be drowned out by the train noise.

  He cupped his hand again.

  “Yes,” she hissed louder.

  He did it again.

  “I’ll go with you to the blame dance!” Bone sputtered. The train had gone, and Ruby, Jake, and Clay stifled their giggles.

  Bone buried her face in the blanket.

  Then the barn owl screeched and swooped down from the tipple, flying over them and into Flat Woods. When Bone looked up again, the black dog stepped out of the shadows, its saucer eyes gazing back.

  Uncle Ash stood, staring at the devil dog. Its pointy ears swiveled toward them, and its saucer eyes locked onto Uncle Ash.

  Bone rose beside him. “Y’all stay here,” she whispered to the rest.

  I brought him, she silently told the ghost dog.

  Uncle Ash stepped forward, but the dog didn’t disappear. It stood at attention, its stubby tail doing the same. The dog let Uncle Ash get within striking distance. Then it turned and loped toward the mine entrance—and disappeared.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Uncle Ash said.

  “Rainer Beck was struck on this spot,” Bone said. “Then he got dragged down into the mine.” She pointed after the dog.

  The boys, Ruby, and Miss Spencer came running from the woods.

  “I’ve never seen a dog like that,” Ruby said. “Even if it weren’t a ghost.”

  “I have,” Uncle Ash said. “It’s a Doberman pinscher. A German breed. The Jerries used them in the trenches and as guard dogs.”

  He lit a cigarette while he stared after the dog. Bone couldn’t peel herself away either.

  Ruby cleared her throat. “We better get back seeing as it’s a school night.”

  Uncle Ash nodded absently. “Go on ahead,” Bone told the gang.

  “Did you pee yourself this time?” Jake asked Clay—and got promptly punched in the arm.

  They walked ahead with Ruby and Miss Spencer, regaling her with more devil dog stories, all of which Bone had told them.

  “Sergeant Beck had two of those Dobermans, didn’t he?” Bone asked Uncle Ash as they purposefully lagged behind.

  “Did you see that?” Uncle Ash nodded. “He bred and raised them. Here in the States and back home in Munich.”

  That must have been the stone city she’d seen him in.

  “He was a major last I heard from him. Before we got into this war, he was assigned to a panzer division. Tanks.”

  This time Bone stopped. That’s what she’d seen, Beck riding in a tank in the desert—where he got captured. She’d imagined, like the sheriff did, Beck had been a civilian who moved to America years ago. A major? And he’d been fighting in the desert—against Daddy.

  “Wait, do you mean this man was a Nazi?”

  UNCLE ASH HAD SOME EXPLAINING TO DO. Not only had Beck been fighting Daddy, but his people sunk Uncle Henry’s ship. And the radio said the Germans were killing millions. Millions! How could Uncle Ash be friends with a Nazi?

  He didn’t answer right away, though, at least not until they got to the boardinghouse. He motioned for her to sit down on the front steps, then struck a match on the stoop and lit his Lucky.

  “When we were trapped in that tunnel, we had plenty of time to talk,” he finally said, letting out a long stream of white smoke.

  “Do you speak German?” Bone wrapped her arms around her knees.

  “Nah, he spoke better English than me. Beck was going to college in Chicago when the war broke out. Then he went back after the armistice—and marrying his childhood sweetheart—to finish his schooling. Engineering or architecture, I think. He wanted to build skyscrapers. He started writing me at Christmas every year when he was working on some big bank building in Cleveland. I got cards from New York, Chicago, Detroit, and even Toronto.”

  Uncle Ash sank down on the step next to her.

  “How did he end up in a tank?” Bone asked. She’d figured Beck must be too old, like Uncle Ash, to get drafted.

  “His family was all army. Generals and field marshals, and such. You know, the big brass. They called him and his wife and kids home before the war started in ’39 and lined him up with a command in the Afrika Korps.” Uncle Ash shook his head. “That’s the last I heard from him. I wrote back to tell him to stay.” He took another long drag on his cigarette. The exhaled smoke floated above them. “I don’t excuse his going back. He coulda stayed. Greta and the boys were in the States, too. But they all moved back to Munich—”

  “You told the sheriff you hadn’t seen him since 1917.”

  “Well, I haven’t seen him since then.” He stamped out his cigarette and fieldstripped it. Then he pulled out his dog tags, both of them. They hung there, together, like they had since 1917. “Look, all I know is that he saved my life as much as I saved his.”

  Bone was grateful for that at least. She couldn’t imagine her life without Uncle Ash. “What did y’all talk about in that tunnel?” she finally asked.

  “Our homes. Dogs. And stories.” Uncle Ash grinned. “He told me his favorites from the Brothers Grimm—and from Wagner. I told him plenty of Jack Tales—and spirit dog stories. He was right partial to those.” He studied the German’s dog tag for a moment and then tucked them both back into his shirt.

  And now Beck had his own ghost dog to guard where he fell.

  They sat in silence for a while, listening to the train across the river round the bend.

  “So what are you going to do?” she asked Uncle Ash.

  “Forever Girl, I don’t rightly know.” Uncle Ash lit another Lucky Strike. “If I call the army, Mr. Matthews is going to fire Junior and whoever else he likes.”

  Like Daddy or even Will.

  “It ain’t fair,” Bone said. �
�What about Tiny?”

  “That does put me in a quandary.” Uncle Ash took a long drag of his smoke and let it out. “Calling the army might not help Tiny neither.” He tossed the still-burning cigarette on the ground and crushed it under his boot. “They might pin a medal on Tiny. Or they might side with the sheriff and Mr. Matthews.”

  On one hand, Rainer Beck was the enemy, and worse, a Nazi. His people were killing millions. But Big Vein was no battlefield in Belgium—or North Africa. Someone murdered him. Someone who was not Tiny Sherman. And no one would know what happened to Beck. His family would feel like Bone’s had, only worse. No one would hear his story.

  Was that what her Gift wanted? To tell the story? Bone shivered. That’s what the ghost dog wanted, too. But how could she do that without risking everyone’s jobs? Or Tiny’s neck?

  “Uncle Ash?” Bone asked slowly. “What if we solved the mystery ourselves?”

  Uncle Ash looked up. “Where would we start? We don’t even know how he got here.”

  Bone thought for a second. “He was in the army, right? Wouldn’t he still have a dog tag, even if he got captured?”

  “Yes!” Uncle Ash stood up, hand on his dog tags. “But the sheriff said he was only wearing mine. Oh—”

  Whoever killed him took his other dog tag.

  “What if we found Beck’s dog tag?” Bone asked.

  Uncle Ash snapped his fingers. “I can ask around a couple places in Radford. Somebody might have tried to sell it as a souvenir.”

  “A souvenir?” Bone had a bad feeling about this.

  “Some folks collect and sell war medals, dog tags, knives, and guns. German ones are worth a lot—even during the war. I saw orderlies and soldiers strip things right off German prisoners and the dead to sell on the black market. These days, pawnshops and auction houses deal in those types of things.”

  Robbie’s father had all those things in a glass case in his study, including dog tags. Her Gift had shown her that.

  MRS. JOHNSON READ FROM A Christmas Carol, the part where stingy ole Mr. Scrooge is mean to his clerk and doesn’t want to give to charity. Under the cover of her textbook, Ruby slipped the Little Jewels a picture torn from the Sears & Roebuck catalog. It was the dress she was wearing to the dance.

  Bone didn’t care about the dance—or the working conditions of Victorian England. She cared that Robbie Matthews actually deigned to show up today. He’d been out sick two whole days! It was Friday already, and she’d have to get a look at his souvenirs soon. Uncle Ash and Miss Spencer hadn’t had any luck finding anything at the pawn shops in the whole New River Valley. Bone needed to convince Robbie to bring in the dog tags.

  During math, Robbie leaned back and whispered, “Father said your uncle was no hero, not like him, of course.”

  Bone steamed. Miss Johnson shushed them both—even though Bone hadn’t said a word. Yet.

  She had a plan, though. She just needed to egg Robbie on a bit.

  * * *

  “Did I ever tell you all about the Christmas truce of 1914? It’s a war story of Uncle Ash’s.” That got Robbie Matthews’s attention—and he slid into a seat next to Jake. She told the boys and Little Jewels what Uncle Ash told her, how soldiers on both sides of the trenches stopped the war to celebrate Christmas Day—but the big brass tried to stop it. And it didn’t ever happen again.

  “Oh, you’re making that up,” Robbie complained. “Father never said anything about no Christmas truce.”

  “He wasn’t there yet—unless he joined up early like Uncle Ash. He fought with the Canadians and Brits three whole years before your daddy even got into the war.”

  “But mine killed a lot of Germans! He even has the souvenirs to prove it.”

  “He does not!” Bone countered, beginning to feel a tiny bit bad now for egging him on.

  “Real dog tags and medals plucked right off their chests!”

  “Now you’re making that up.”

  “I’ll prove it!” Robbie sprang up. “I’ll be right back. If’n she asks, tell Miss Johnson I forgot my lunch and ran home to get it.” He took off running up the road past the mine toward the big house on the hill.

  “That was easier than I thought,” Bone whispered to herself. “I’ll explain later,” she told Ruby and the boys as they looked at her expectantly.

  “You better!” Jake said. “All this mystery is killing me.”

  “And you know the price, Bone!” Clay said.

  “Oh, I agree,” Ruby jumped in. “You won’t tell us what’s going on, then you need to tell us a story.”

  “A good and scary one,” Jake added. “But maybe not a ghost dog one.”

  Another story. Bone was almost getting tired of telling them. Almost.

  This time she told them about the Greenbrier ghost.

  “Over in West Virginia, a young newlywed named Zona died suddenly,” Bone began. “Now they all thought it was natural causes—at least that’s what the husband said it was. He arranged to have the body buried quick so nobody could check. The night she was buried, Zona’s ghost appeared to her mother and told her the man abused her. He broke her neck because she didn’t put no meat on the table. The ghost swiveled her head clean around to prove it. The next night the ghost appeared again and told the same story. And the next night. And the next.”

  “Ooh.” Ruby squirmed but she was still all ears.

  “Dang!” Jake said.

  “Now, we’re talking about a story!” Clay added.

  “Well, Zona’s mama went to the prosecutor and convinced him to dig up Zona’s body. They did the autopsy right in the local school.” Bone paused to look around the school yard for effect. “And sure enough, Zona’s neck was broken. They arrested her husband. Her mother got up in court and told them exactly what the ghost had said—and done.”

  “What happened to the man?” Ruby asked.

  The boys leaned in.

  “He died in prison. Later it came out he’d had several wives and killed at least one other one, too,” Bone concluded. “That’s the only time a ghost ever helped convict her own murderer.”

  Could the Big Vein ghost dog help catch Beck’s murderer?

  Just as Miss Johnson rang the bell, Robbie came chugging back down the road like a winded steam engine. He spread out a number of dog tags of varying sizes. None of them looked exactly like the one Ash wore around his neck. Most had names on them. Krieg. Stollen. Schmidt. No Beck. One of the tags was bigger and shinier. A deep line split it down the middle, with the same thing stamped on the top and bottom halves. No name. It was mostly numbers with a few letters Bone didn’t understand. She brushed it aside to look at the others. A flash of surprise and pain assaulted her. Trying not to flinch, Bone picked up the bigger tag again. In it, she saw the same woman and children, now older, young men almost. And the same black dogs.

  Robbie snatched the tag from her hand. “Don’t smudge them.” He wiped it with his sleeve and laid it out carefully on the table. “See, I didn’t make it up.”

  The son didn’t but his daddy might have. He hadn’t got all those tags during the Great War.

  The odd one belonged to Beck, she was sure of it. But it didn’t have a name. Bone tried to commit those numbers and letters to memory. She reached for it again. “You’re right, Robbie. And you know who’d love to see these? Will—and my uncle. Could I take one to show him?”

  Robbie swept up the tags. “No, Daddy will miss…I mean, he doesn’t like me to lend them out. Too valuable, you know.”

  Mr. Matthews clearly didn’t know Robbie took his war trinkets. How was she going to get time to read this one—away from Robbie—and show it to Uncle Ash?

  The dance.

  “Bring them tomorrow night,” Bone finally said. “Everyone will be there.”

  “Deal!” Robbie grinned. He poured the tags back into his pockets. “Maybe
I’ll bring some medals, too.” He sauntered back into the schoolhouse.

  “You got a pencil?” Bone took one from Jake’s shirt pocket, tore off a piece of brown paper from her lunch poke, and scribbled down the numbers she could remember.

  Jake and Clay peered over her shoulder. “Maybe we ought to go to this dance, too,” Jake said.

  Clay nodded vigorously. “And then maybe you’ll tell us what’s going on!”

  “Maybe,” Bone said with a grin. “Come by tonight after supper.”

  Miss Johnson cleared her throat from the schoolhouse door. “Are you three planning on rejoining us?”

  Bone carefully slid the brown paper into her pocket.

  AFTER SCHOOL, BONE FOUND UNCLE ASH and Miss Spencer rocking in the chairs on the porch of the Scott Brothers’ store, just like old times. Uncle Ash had his boots on the porch railing. Miss Spencer sipped an RC Cola. Bone plopped down on the milk crate between them. Uncle Ash handed her a grape Nehi. The dogs stayed in the truck, and Bone couldn’t blame them.

  “We made some more calls,” Uncle Ash said as he flipped the cap off his Dr Pepper with his pocketknife. He checked to see if anyone was in earshot. “Still didn’t find any dog tags, but India did figure out where he probably came from.”

  Bone turned to the professor.

  “Near me!” she said, still amazed. “First your uncle called someone he knew at Camp Pickett.”

  Uncle Ash leaned in. “The Brits asked the US to take thousands of Germans captured in North Africa. They started arriving a few months ago, going to camps all over the country. Including one in Mason’s Cove in Catawba.” He took a long drink of his pop.

  “That’s just a few miles from my college. Then I remembered a couple of weeks ago, the army was searching campus for someone. They wouldn’t say who.”

  “An escaped prisoner?” Bone asked, though she knew the answer.

  “He probably walked off a work detail,” Uncle Ash explained. His friend at Camp Pickett said the prisoners were picking fruit in orchards and digging the new reservoir.