Author's Note: Story is rated M for content about depression, suicide, and religious belief.
BACK TO THE LIGHT – PART ONE
Lenni woke up early to a ball of light spinning above her bed. She squinted at it and rubbed her eyes.
"Ghostwriter?" she muttered. "What's up with you?"
Knowing the ghost couldn't hear her, as he could only communicate through writing, she got up and went into the living room. She turned on the computer and typed out a question.
What's wrong Ghostwriter?
The white circle appeared and wrote back to her.
Something's happened to Rob.
Lenni's eyes popped open as she became fully awake. Rob was a friend who had moved to Australia several years prior. Lenni often got letters and poems from him, although she hadn't received any recently. She typed quickly to Ghostwriter.
What happened?
Lenni bit her lip as the ghost answered.
I don't know. Rob isn't writing to me.
Lenni grew terribly worried at this. Ghostwriter could sense feelings, so he always knew when his friends were suffering. And something was definitely wrong if Rob wouldn't, or couldn't, write to him. Lenni gave a nod and typed again.
Rally L
Even though it was pretty early for a rally, Lenni knew it was urgent. She got dressed quickly, as Alex and Gaby Fernandez lived right downstairs. Sure enough, she had barely finished getting ready when they knocked on the door.
"Awfully early for a rally, isn't it?" Gaby asked.
"It's an emergency," Lenni said.
"What happened?" Alex asked.
"I don't know what," Lenni said. "I only know who and where."
"Huh?" Gaby asked.
"I'll explain when the others get here."
A while later, Jamal Jenkins came over with his cousin Casey. Then Hector Carrero arrived with Tina Nguyen and Lenni explained what had happened that morning.
"Rob?" Casey asked.
"You know," Hector said. "Rob is my pen-pal in Australia. He was on the team before he moved there."
"So whatever has happened to Rob is keeping him from writing to Ghostwriter?" Alex asked.
"Sure sounds like it," Lenni said. "Rob wouldn't stop writing unless something really serious is going on."
"He may also be sick," Jamal said. "When Gaby got sick, Ghostwriter could tell, and was asking us what was wrong with her."
"And I wasn't able to write to Ghostwriter myself," Gaby said. "I was too dizzy and nauseous."
"But Rob doesn't have any of us with him," Hector said. "How's he going to find out what's wrong if Rob can't write to him?"
"Maybe he can read something around him," Tina suggested. "If he's sick, there might be medicine…or a medical report."
"Or he may have written something in his journal," Jamal said.
"Ghostwriter doesn't read personal stuff," Gaby told him.
"Yeah," said Alex. "And Rob is super touchy about people reading things that he hasn't finished working on yet. He even got after Ghostwriter for reading his poems without permission."
"He might if it's an emergency," Jamal said.
Lenni nodded and typed out a message.
Can you read anything around Rob?
Ghostwriter zipped away and the team waited. It took a while, but then he appeared again with a message.
FRIENDS ARE FOREVER
Love,
Lenni
"Hey," Lenni said. "That's what I wrote in the notebook I gave to Rob. This next part must be something he wrote in it."
When uniforms appear in the doorway,
They never come with good news.
The voice behind the badges says the words,
Words that should never be spoken,
Not to me.
My world comes crashing down,
And darkness has consumed me.
I am lost in a tunnel.
I may never see the sun again.
"Woah," Jamal said. "That's some dark stuff."
"Yeah," Lenni said. "Rob isn't hurt physically. He's upset about something."
"It seems he got some bad news," Alex said. "Uniforms appear in the doorway. He could be talking about the police coming to his house."
"Yeah," said Tina. "And that's never a good sign."
"Are you sure it was police?" asked Gaby. "Other people wear uniforms too."
"True," said Alex. "But he also mentions badges. Police wear badges and uniforms."
"And they don't bring good news," Casey whimpered. "I never liked it when the police would come to my house. They were always there to say my mom was drunk again…or in the hospital…and I had to go stay somewhere else."
"So Rob got bad news from the police," Lenni sighed. "But…he doesn't say what it is."
"It might have been too upsetting to write down," Jamal said.
"Well…if he got bad news from the police," Tina said, "maybe there's a police report."
Lenni nodded and typed to Ghostwriter, specifically asking about a police report. Ghostwriter came back fairly quickly with one.
"That's a police report, all right," Alex said. "Looks like it's from today."
"But…it says 1730," Casey said. "Did they make a mistake?"
"No Casey," Jamal said. "Police usually use military time, so am and pm don't get mixed up. This report is about something that happened at 5:30 pm."
"And Australia is in a different time zone, so it's already evening there," Lenni said.
"Looks like this is about a traffic accident that happened at 5:30 pm," said Alex. "It has the makes and models of two cars."
"Uh oh," said Tina, who was writing the information in a casebook. "It's changing."
"Casualties," Alex sighed. "Oh no."
"Casualties?" asked Gaby. "Isn't that…dead people?"
"You mean Rob died?" Casey gasped.
"He wouldn't be writing poems if he died, Casey," Jamal assured her. "But he probably got news that someone else died."
"Yeah," said Alex. "And look at their names. Colonel James A. Baker…and Eileen Baker."
"Oh no," Lenni cried.
"But…are those the names…of his parents?" Gaby gasped.
"We didn't know their names," Jamal said. "But Rob's dad…was a colonel."
"This is why Rob is so upset," Lenni moaned. "He just found out…that he's an orphan."