Ghost Talkers (16 page)

Ben slid around her in a gust of wind. “Truck.”

She looked past the men. A truck trundled down the road toward them, kicking up dust in its wake. Merrow saw it and stepped back. “Come—come on, miss. We can make it to—to the walls and—”

“And what!” Johnson screamed. “I'll bloody well tell them where you are.”

The truck had closed half the distance, and the people in the front were just visible through the dust-spattered windshield. A member of the Indian Army drove, his white turban creating a marked contrast in the world of khaki. Next to him sat an elderly white woman.

An elderly white woman wearing the blue of a Spirit Corps volunteer.

Ginger lowered the pistol. “Mrs. Richardson?”

The truck slowed to a stop on the other side of the cluster of men. Mrs. Richardson leaned out of the passenger side door. “Oh, hello, dear! I saw these nice young men following you and thought you might need a ride after your chat. So I found Cpl. Patel, and he was good enough to bring me along.”

Ben brushed against her again, the breeze almost like his hand at her back. “Go.”

She edged to the side of the road, where Merrow stood with his jaw hanging open. He shook himself and followed her to the truck.

Johnson was still screaming from the ground. “I'll tell the captain about this!”

“You do that.” Ginger lifted her skirt and climbed into the cab beside Mrs. Richardson.

Merrow paused. “She's done you—you a favour. That wound she gave you is a Blighty one. You get to go home.”

Ah … the wound that every soldier seemed to yearn for. Just severe enough to get you shipped back to England. But she hadn't done it; Ben had. She was almost surprised he hadn't killed the man. Ginger looked at the gun she still held. She had no memory of firing it. Not as herself.

“There you go. Cpl. Patel, do you think there's space to drive around them?”

“Yes, ma'am.” He gave a jaunty grin beneath his thick black mustache. “Though I would not mind driving over him. He is a nasty man, that Johnson.”

“That's just what I said, dear.” Mrs. Richardson beamed over her knitting needles. “I'm so glad that you happened along.”

Ginger cleared her throat. “And … how did you two become acquainted?”

Cpl. Patel patted the grey muffler wrapped around his throat. “She made me a very kind gift. Most of the Indian Army was sent back home, because it is so terribly cold here. If we had a hundred Mrs. Richardsons, we would all have stayed, I think.”

“Such a dear.” Mrs. Richardson looked around to Merrow, who was crowded into the back of the truck. She leaned over to Ginger and murmured, “Did you get what you came for?”

Ginger shook her head.

“Mm. Well … where to now, then?”

Ben slid between and around them, mixing with the wind of their passing. “POWs.”

Ginger nodded. “To the POW camp next, I think. He came out to question them, so hopefully we can rebuild what he learned.”

If she could just rebuild Ben, that would be a start.

 

Chapter Thirteen

Cpl. Patel dropped them off just down the road from the POW camp, which was a bleak place surrounded by metal fences and barbed wire. British soldiers marched around the outside in crisp parade fashion, guns held at correct angles on their shoulders. By contrast, the Germans inside the wire were hunched and ragged men. Their shoulders stooped in a perfect match for the heather grey of defeat.

Ginger sat in the shade of a small shrubbery, holding hands with Merrow and Mrs. Richardson, so they could hear as she spoke to Ben. “And you have no recollection of who you spoke with?”

Ben stood in the middle of their tiny circle and flickered between standing at perfect attention and with his hands buried in his hair. “I don't remember … did I know their names?”

“You had a list, sir.” Merrow shifted, and his aura reeked of failure. “In—in your notebook. I'm sorry I never saw it.”

“Not your fault … gah.” Ben spun in place, all orange with frustration. “Who was it…?”

“Perhaps the guards will recall who you asked for?” Ginger looked down the lane to the camp. “If we begin querying people again, mightn't it jog your memory?”

“Maybe.” His face was drawn into a deep frown.

Thank heavens his ghost had a face again. He had lost energy after she had channelled him, but had not appeared to lose his sense of purpose as he had when he poltergeisted. She could only assume that using her corporeal form helped anchor him somewhat.

“Then let's give that a try.” She squeezed the hands of Merrow and Mrs. Richardson before releasing them.

Still in tune from being in the circle together, they stood as one—or, rather, they began to, but Mrs. Richardson struggled a bit getting up from the ground. Merrow put a hand under her arm and steadied her as she rose.

She patted his hand. “Thank you, dear. These old bones aren't as spry as they used to be.” She raised an eyebrow at Ginger. “Now, don't go looking all alarmed. I can chase after seven grandchildren at once, so I'm perfectly capable of this. Just a bit stiff is all.”

They walked down the middle of the lane to the POW camp. A guard spotted them almost at once, and spoke to his partner. “Pvt. Merrow! What're you doing back so soon?”

Ginger grimaced. Of course he would be recognised, since he'd been here with Ben.

Gesturing over his shoulder at Ginger and Mrs. Richardson, Merrow said, “I've been sent to—to escort these two ladies. Charity work.” He stepped forward, tugging at his muffler, and showed the guard one of the papers Merrow had taken from the hidden drawer in Ben's desk.

The guard barely glanced at it. He gave an odd whistle, and an officer emerged from the guard hut. “What? What? Oh! Um … ladies.”

Ginger took a step forward to meet him, but Mrs. Richardson murmured, “Best let me, dear. He'll think I'm in charge because I'm older.”

Biting her lip, Ginger let Mrs. Richardson toddle forward. “Good afternoon, Lt.…?”

“Thackeray, ma'am.” He wiped a handkerchief over his florid face.

“Lovely. I am Matron Appleton, and this is Miss Cowen.” She rattled off the pair of false names as if she had been born to spycraft. “We've been sent on a charity mission to visit your prisoners. Our idea is that a demonstration of English hospitality will make them think more kindly of us when it comes time to being questioned.”

He snorted and spat in the direction of the prisoners, and then flushed with embarrassment. “Sorry—sorry. That was coarse. Forget what it's like to be in the company of ladies. I was just thinking that what makes the Huns feel charitably toward us is that we didn't shoot them.” Thackeray barked a laugh. “Didn't shoot them, what?”

Mrs. Richardson cleared her throat, and the man's laughter wound down like a clockwork toy. Favouring him with a smile again, she held up her bag. “I suspect some good mufflers and socks would do more for them, don't you?”

“As to that, my boys could do with some clean socks.”

Ginger gave one of her society smiles. “But of course, we have some for them too. We mustn't forget our boys.”

After some more chat in which they were pressed to take tea with the lieutenant, who was nervous to the point of sweating about having ladies at his camp, Mrs. Richardson and Ginger were at last given leave to speak with the prisoners.

Ben passed through the wire fence as though it weren't there and circled through the prisoners. Anyone watching would have only seen the eddy of dried leaves he left in his wake. “They don't look familiar. I think … he was tall. Yes. I should still be able to recognise who I questioned. Right?”

Ginger nodded. It would be so much easier if she could speak freely to him, but with the guards standing right there, it was not advisable, unless she wanted them to doubt her sanity. He saw her affirmation and sighed.

“Now then…” Mrs. Richardson eyed the air by Ginger's left shoulder as if Ben were there and gave a little wink. “Let's see who seems to be in the most need … Miss Cowen, what do you think?”

“I'm considering.” She bit her lower lip, watching Ben sift through the POWs. He stopped next to a tall man with a ratty scarf and greasy blond hair.

Ben looked over at her. “Thank God. This is the man—we talked … God. I can't—he knows. He knows about…” He fractured into five versions of himself, then came back into a single man. “I'm sorry. It's about the gas? I think—or, no … no, that's the man I'm supposed to meet in the trenches. This is … this is about the traitor.”

Ginger pointed at the man, who stood amid a cluster of other men, each with their shoulders hunched against the setting sun. “What about him?”

“Oh, yes!” Mrs. Richardson beckoned to Thackeray. “Do fetch that fellow out, if you would be so kind?”

“Peter Schmitt?” Thackeray shook his head. “Do you know him?”

“To be sure, I do not.”

“Oh.”

“Oh?” Ginger raised her eyebrows.

“Ah … um. It's just that he's a popular man this week. Guess it comes of being a defector. Fourth time he's been asked for an interview, as it were.”

“Really?” Ben had conflated things before. Might this be his contact from the trench? “Who else?”

“Eh … ma'am. I shouldn't say. Bit indiscreet, as it were, what?”

Ginger shared a glance with Mrs. Richardson, who gave a firm nod. “Well … we'll follow the lead of our betters. Let's definitely start with him.”

*   *   *

In the small interview room, Ben shifted in anxious eddies around Ginger, raising the hair on the back of her neck. He stopped in front of her while Mrs. Richardson got the German fellow seated. Ben's form fluctuated with tension. “I don't like this. I don't like you being in here with him.”

Mrs. Richardson beamed over her knitting needles. With her glasses halfway down her nose, she looked like someone's granny, which of course she was. The German fellow, a very tall and slender tow-haired man in his midtwenties, seemed to relax at this unexpected visitor. He had a heavy bruise over one eye, and his lip had been split. It made Ginger even more curious about who, besides Ben, had visited Peter Schmitt.

Schmitt glanced over to Ginger, and she smiled demurely at him. She had been spending so much time with her soul just past the surface of her skin that she had to make no adjustments to see his aura. He was plagued by despair and some fear, but a slight beam of amber satisfaction wound through it as he sat down.

“You poor thing.” Mrs. Richardson lowered her knitting needles and
tsk
ed. “Look at the state of your muffler.”

Merrow took up a position at her side to act as a translator. His work with Ben had required him to know German, for which Ginger was profoundly grateful. She had French, which had been useful in Le Havre, but was not here.

After Merrow repeated her words, Schmitt looked down at the knotted mass wrapped around his neck. “This?” he said through Merrow. “I made it myself from scraps.”

It was more poorly knitted than Merrow's, which, was impressive even to Ginger's eye. There was also something … off about his aura.

“Well … I admire your ingenuity, but why on earth did you have to resort to that?”

“They stopped outfitting us. It's why we deserted. Not enough food. Sick. All the time, we are sick.” He tugged on the scarf and grimaced. He wasn't lying about that, at least not if his aura was anything to judge by. “There is nothing noble about this war.”

“I completely agree.” Mrs. Richardson put her knitting down and reached into her carpet bag. She pulled out a grey muffler that would have gone well with Schmidt's uniform when it was new. “May I offer you another?”

He hesitated, fingering his own muffler. There was that flash of satisfaction again, and … why deceit? “Don't know why it feels like I'm betraying Germany, when they betrayed us first.”

Ben crouched next to Ginger. “This is different from what we talked about. Ask him why he felt betrayed.”

It might have been easier to just let Ben have her body again, but Ginger repeated his question to Merrow, who then repeated it to Schmitt.

“The entire war? Why? All of us dying to avenge the death of some nobleman who died in a country we're not even attacking. It's stupid.” He peeled off the muffler and flung it on the ground at Merrow's feet. “It's all stupid.”

“I suppose that's why you defected.”

“At least you feed us.”

Mrs. Richardson held the new muffler out to him. “I wish I had brought some cake instead.”

Schmitt glanced at Merrow for permission before he reached out to take the muffler. “That is very kind of you, madam.”

“But I hope your other visitors have brought you something to eat besides whatever dreadful thing they serve here.”

“Other visitors?”

“Lieutenant Thackeray told me that three other people have been by this week.” Mrs. Richardson took up her knitting needles again. “I thought we were being so original when we came to do some charity work.”

“The others … they were not exactly charity.” He tapped the bruise over his eye.

“Oh!” Mrs. Richardson nearly dropped her knitting. If Ginger hadn't been watching her aura, she would have thought the other woman was genuinely shocked and outraged. “That will not do. Not at all. There are conventions about how you should be treated. Tell me who did this to you, and I will make certain he is reprimanded.”

Amusement rippled across his aura. “I don't think you will, ma'am. No offense.”

Ben edged closer and slid his finger across the man's back. Schmitt shivered and glanced behind himself, then froze. His aura spiked with alarm.

Ben shot backward, arms spread wide. “Damn it all.”