The Ghost of Gruesome High (19 page)

I guess real life is sorta like the movies sometimes. That’s good to know.

Other good things happened, too, but I’ll get to those in a minute. First the Big Bomb Shell.

Mayor Thompson pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and hindering a police investigation or something like that. He was kicked out of being mayor and owed the insurance company half a million dollars and had to stay in jail for a few days and go through more court stuff later, but none of that’s really important.

The big thing he dropped on everyone, especially Mr. Greenwald, was that he didn’t rob his store like we all thought, and he didn’t kill August Wallenberg!

He had papers to back it up, and the coroner who studied August Wallenberg’s remains said there was no sign of a gun shot or a knife wound or anything like that. In fact, the Mayor’s story evidently checked out completely.

According to the Mayor, August Wallenberg did rob the jewelry store. But for some reason he tried to get away by climbing down an old sewer tunnel beneath the store and he must have slipped and fallen because when Mr. Thompson found him several days later he was dead, still clutching the bag of stolen coins and jewelry.

By this time, of course, Mr. Thompson had already filed a report of the robbery with his insurance company and he needed the half million dollars desperately so he decided to bury August’s body and the coins in the old cemetery. His son, Ben, was almost eight when all this happened, but he was big for his age even back then and Mr. Thompson got Ben to help him hide the body and the coins.

Mr. Thompson used the insurance money to pay the debts he owed and to start a construction company. When the city decided to build a school on the site of the old grave yard, Mr. Thompson panicked. He couldn’t risk anyone else digging around and finding the body and the coins, so his company under-bid everyone else to get the job. He then hired Mr. Bell to be his night watchman because everyone knew Mr. Bell was an alcoholic and so no one would believe anything he said.
 

Then Mr. Thompson bought a large machine used to find buried metal pipes and treasure and stuff like that. Then, every night he came to the construction site and checked to make sure no one was digging where the body was buried. The metal detecting machine was so large that it was basically dragged along the ground, which accounted for the strange grating noise that was always associated with the “ghost”. The beeping noises the machine made when it detected metal were the sounds that people mistakenly thought were voices. And the glowing red eyes were nothing more than red lights which lit up when the machine was turned on. Everything else was just in people’s imagination.

Anyway, after the construction was complete, Mr. Thompson figured he was safe, and so he put away the metal detector and the “ghost” vanished for about eight years.

But then, a couple years ago, Ben decided that he wanted the half million in gold buried at the school, but because he was only seven when he helped his father bury the body, he didn’t remember where it was. Mr. Thompson ordered him to forget it —but Ben wasn’t the kind of guy who listened to anyone, not even his father.

So for the last couple of years, Ben had been dragging that big, cumbersome machine up to the school at midnight, trying to search the entire ten acre campus, looking for the coins.
 

Needless to say, this news devastated Mr. Greenwald and his family. I felt terrible about it. Even though my brain told me it wasn’t my fault, every time I saw Mr. Greenwald’s down-turned face, and looked at the hurt and sorrow in his eyes, my heart still felt as if I had somehow betrayed him and his family. If it wasn’t for me, they would all still think that August Wallenberg was a wonderful family man who had been brutally murdered by a cold-hearted, desperate man to cover-up a robbery.

I guess this just proves that once you start something like this, you never know where it’s going to lead.

Mr. Greenwald has been out of the hospital for a couple of weeks now, but he’s still not back at school. I’ve stopped by his house to see him a few times, and he’s friendly enough, and he assures me that none of this is my fault and that he’s happy to know the truth—but I can tell things have changed between us.

I don’t know what I can do about it yet. Jason and the others tell me to just give it a little more time.

Oh yeah, Jason is back home. He’s still got the cast for another four weeks or so, but he and his father seem to be getting along a lot better now.

So maybe something good came out of all this after all. Something good besides the truth, I mean.

Ben is still in jail for carrying a gun and shooting at me and Mr. Greenwald. It looks like he’ll spend quite a while in jail, which is also good. Mr. Thompson is out of jail, but he’ll never be mayor again and he’s having to sell all of his businesses to pay back the insurance company. Everyone says he’ll have to declare bankruptcy.

There was one other good thing that came out of all this, and it was totally unexpected. The insurance company was very happy to get the coins and jewelry back. And since the coins are worth several times as much as they were ten years ago, the insurance company wants to pay us a reward of fifty thousand dollars! We decided to split the money evenly among the six of us (including Mr. Greenwald) so each of us will soon get a check for $8,333.33.

Unfortunately my parents say I can’t touch the money until I’m eighteen—but I guess that’s O.K. It’s not like I could drive a car if I bought one now anyway.

Well, that’s about it. All of us are considered heroes around the school, and that’s pretty neat. Even the teachers and Principal Wright treat us differently.

I learned something about myself from all this. I learned that I really like the thrill and the excitement of solving mysteries! There’s no other feeling like it in the whole world! I’ve decided that solving mysteries is definitely what I want to do when I grow up.
 

And you know what? There’s an old, old lady who lives in an old house on the edge of town. I’ve heard stories about her since I was a little girl. My parents say that when they were kids Mrs. Christy was an old woman, and everyone said she was a witch! Supposedly she hasn’t aged a day in the last twenty-five years or so and just last week a girl my age moved into the house with her.

I’m not sure what it all means yet, but my nose tells me there’s a mystery here, and I’m gonna solve it!

– THE END –

Larry Parr has written and edited more than 350 half hours of animation for the television industry over the past 25 years.

—Photo by Joseph Davila