display either emotion to us.
The odd man lowered his hand. "Sometimes, I'm cold," he said.
The stranger turned and walked back across the raised railway bed, never saying another word. Descending down the riverbank into the woods, he finally disappeared from sight.
"I have an idea," I said. "Let's go home. And right now."
"I have a better idea," said Will. He started to run across the tracks. "Let's find out where he's going."
I wasn't about to chase the man. Sure, I was a paranormal investigator, but I rationalized that there was nothing paranormal about any of what had just happened. Just very weird.
"He's gone," said Will from atop the railway bed. He looked in every direction. "He's either amphibious and in the river, or he vanished into thin air.
The situation had just turned slightly paranormal.
Will and I headed back toward downtown via the wooded path, and, of course, Will was not convinced anything paranormal was afoot. He said the man obviously ran away as soon as he got into the woods, knowing he had committed the offense of first-degree stranger danger.
Just as we exited the woods, we heard the whistle of a train behind us as it traveled through town. Hopefully, our strange visitor had hopped it and was headed out of town in a boxcar.
This time we opted to take the brick-lined sidewalk toward the square downtown instead of cutting through the more deserted back alley behind the stores, which was fine with me.
"There is something more to this," I said, as we stopped at the Do Not Walk signal on Main Street. "Let me see that thing again." Will took it out of his pocket and handed it to me.
"May I see that, son?" An elderly gentleman was sitting on a park bench at the town square. I had seen the man sitting in that same place every day for as long as I could remember.
The worn wooden cane leaning against the bench must have convinced Will that the old-timer was not a threat to run off with our find, because he did not object when I handed it over.
"Just what I thought. This is a military dog tag," the man said. "Where'd you find it?"
"Over by the tracks," I said.
The man's fail body shuddered, so much that his cane crashed to the cement. "You said by the railroad tracks?"
"Yep," said Will. "Some weird homeless guy in beat-up clothes tried to take it away from us, but I'm glad we kept it. A real dog tag is pretty cool."
The man's mouth gaped open, and his eyes didn't move from Will for a full ten seconds, until he finally peered through his bifocals at the piece of metal. "I know whose this is."
Although we doubted the old man's claim at that moment, we didn't doubt it for long.
"This is David's," he said. "David Jefferson's."
Something unseen punched me in the gut, taking all the wind from me. It was not the invisible fist of an apparition but the invisible pang of acute shock.
"How did you know that name?" asked Will.
"Says right here," he said. His arthritic finger rubbed the first line of the inscription. "Jefferson, David."
We already knew the embossed letters were illegible, but somehow the man knew the name of the stranger we'd met. Will asked him how he knew, and here's what he told us:
David Jefferson was a young soldier, just a few years out of high school. He was killed in action in World War II in 1944. His remains were transported back to the states, at which point his casket was to be returned to his family's home in Bellville, a town just a few miles away and even smaller than ours. The train was set to be greeted at the station by half the village, the mayor, and the town band at exactly 3:00 p.m. But when the train reached the fallen warrior's final resting place in Bellville, the casket was gone. Police, bloodhounds, and relatives scoured the train, but it had simply vanished. Search parties formed, and on horseback, foot, and motorbike they backtracked tens of miles along the train route from Bellville, but nobody ever found a single trace of David Jefferson.
"Until now," finished the old man. His eyes were black and wet like the skin of a swamp. He handed the tag back to me and then blotted the perspiration from the wrinkles on the back of his leathery neck with a piece of tri-folded cloth from his breast pocket.
I convinced Will to return to the railroad tracks to investigate further. We had a real-life, true, unexplained phenomenon on our hands, for sure. Unfortunately, the being who had identified himself as "Jefferson" was nowhere to be found near the railroad tracks. Not a clue was to be found along the riverbanks or the underbrush either. We even took another look under the big square rock where we had found the dog tag. In all, we discovered nothing except umpteen supersize McDonald's cups, a sun-bleached Drake's Devil Dogs box, and a sack of dumb fries, none of which seemed pertinent to the case at first glance. We left the scene.
At the fork in the road, where my street splits off from Route 24, Will and I entered the section of the Scott's cornfield that was wedged between their farmhouse and downtown. In the middle of the tall corn, we stopped at the rockpile, our hidden fort made from rocks Scott ancestors had hauled there from their crop fields for 150 years. I sat there for a long while, engraving a small stone with a sharp nail tip, while Will pretended to fight off invaders with a dry cornstalk rifle.
Just as I was finishing, Will announced, "I am victorious and hungry." He stabbed his crusty brown rifle into a mound of sand. "Bags of potato chips and Skittles await the victors at my house, Sergeant Sucker." I tried to convince him to return to the tracks with me, but he said he was not going to further participate in my ridiculous paranormal investigation. So I headed back by myself.
Although it had been over an hour since we'd left the town square, the old man still sat on the park bench. His hands were stacked on the handle of the cane as he watched the world go by.
"Tell me something." I asked him. "How do you know for sure our tag is David's?"
The man unbuttoned the top button of his starched flannel shirt, revealing a thin neck from which a long chain with a dog tag hung.
I held our dog tag next to his. Although I had harbored some doubt that our tag was really David Jefferson’s, when I compared the two, they were identical in size and material, and the shape and length of the engravings on them appeared the same.
"As soon as I saw that tag, I knew it was my David's," he said.
"What do you mean your David's?"
"David Jefferson was my eldest brother. The government sent us this one by post before David's body was shipped home. All soldiers are issued two identical dog tags they wear on a chain. If the soldier is killed, the second tag is collected, and the first remains with the body." The man tucked his dog tag back into his shirt and buttoned it. "When did you find that one?"
"Right before the train went through town this afternoon."
The old man held his stare on me but did not flinch. "The last train went through town four weeks ago, son. You kids didn't know that? They're going to tear up the tracks in a few months and start a pathways project for a walking trail, so they say."
I told him that was impossible. Will and I had both distinctly heard the train when we were walking back toward downtown.
"The Ghost Train to Bellville," he said. "Some say they've heard it come through town at 2:50 p.m. in the afternoon, the exact time David's body would have passed through here 68 years ago. Those few who have seen it claim all the windows in the train are empty, except for a young man looking out one window. They say it's David looking for his lost body. I've been coming here for six decades waiting to hear it myself."
In my business as a paranormal investigator, I've had to become pretty good at sizing up people to determine if they are telling the truth. There was nothing about this man that made me think he was being anything but 100% truthful.
"I want you to have this," I said and handed him the dog tag we'd found by the tracks.
The man accepted it in his wrinkled palm and laced it through his necklace chain.
"I'm going to put this rock down by the tracks,"
I said, showing him the special stone I'd just engraved at the rockpile. "It has some information on it, just in case David shows up again and wants to talk to me."
"May I have the honor?" he asked. "I am going away this week. It's a place far from here, but it's special. I can put it where only David will find it."
I knew Will would already be mad that I gave the man the dog tag he found, so I had hesitated to give him my stone too. Will would say I’m gullible. He'd tell me that there was a reasonable explanation for everything we'd experienced, and this geezer was just trying to trick us out of our cool stuff.
As I walked back to my house across the cornfield from the Scott farm that day, I still didn't know whether I believed the old man's whole story, but my parents confirmed later that the trains did, in fact, stop passing through town a month ago.
Although my parents had never heard of David Jefferson or the legend of the Ghost Train to Bellville, I believe the story the old man on the park bench told me. That's why I decided to give him my stone to hide somewhere where David would be able to find it.
It's been almost a month now, but Will is still mad that I gave the old man both the dog tag and my stone. But once a True Believer, always a True Believer, I guess. It's something neither Will nor Windy will ever understand.
If you want to try more CustardQuests and win more money by finding other hidden stones, visit https://www.custardquest.com.
Keep up with Custard and his