“Stand back, everybody,” Big Jim ordered. “And let him have plenty of room.”
“Yeah, let him have plenty of room. It might explode,” Dragonfly said. I tore open the envelope in a hurry, and this is what I read:
“Members of the Sugar Creek Gang—Big Jim, Little Jim, Poetry, Circus, Dragonfly, Bill Collins, and Tom Till—as soon as you can, after reading this, make a beeline for Bumblebee Hill, climb through the barbed-wire fence at the top and stop at the tombstone of Sarah Paddler in the old abandoned cemetery. There you will find another letter giving you instructions what to do next. It is VERY IMPORTANT.
Signed ... (Guess Who)”
I read the letter out loud in a sort of trembling voice on account of I was a little bit scared, then I looked around at the different ones of us to see what we were thinking, but couldn’t tell.
“What’ll we do?” Little Jim piped up and said, and Little Tom Till swallowed real hard like he had taken too big a bite of something and was trying to swallow it without having chewed it long enough, then he sort of stuttered, “M-maybe a g-ghost wrote it.”
I looked quick at Dragonfly on account of he believes there is such a thing as a ghost on account his mother thinks there is such a thing, and right away he had a funny expression on his face. Dragonfly’s dragonfly-like eyes looked like they were even larger than they were. “My mother told me to stay out of that cemetery.”
“Aw, fraidy cat,” Poetry said, “there isn’t any such thing as a ghost. Besides, ghosts can’t write.”
“Oh yes, they can!” Dragonfly said. “I saw it in the newspaper once that a senator or something’s speech was written by a ghost writer and—”
“It’s crazy!” Poetry said. “A ghost writer is somebody nobody knows who writes something for somebody and nobody knows it, but it’s a real person and not a ghost, which isn’t.”
It sounded crazy, but Poetry read an awful lot of the many books his pop and mom were always buying for him, and he was as smart as anything.