Edenville Owls

Chapter 35

I was with Joanie in the bowling alley, sitting in the back row of benches, having a Coke, watching them bowl.

“I went to see Miss Delaney,” she said.

“You did?”

“After school,” Joanie said. “The day after we found out about that guy Richard Krauss.”

“You didn’t say anything did you?”

“Nothing bad,” she said. “I told her I was starting to think about college.”

“College?” I said. “We’re in the eighth grade.”

Joanie ignored me.

“And she said that was wise, it was never too early.”

“Okay,” I said.

“So I told her I was wondering where she went,” Joanie said.

“Miss Delaney?”

“Yes, and she told me Colby College.”

“Where’s that?” I said.

“In Maine someplace,” Joanie said.

“Who wants to go to college in Maine?” I said.

“And I said did she have a yearbook or something I could look at, and she gave me hers. She brought it in the next day.”

“Her college yearbook?” I said.

Joanie reached into her book bag and pulled the yearbook out. It was white. On the cover in blue letters it said “ORACLE,” and down lower the year, 1942. We sat together on the leatherette bench in the bowling alley and read it. The student photographs were alphabetical, and there she was, Claudia Delaney. There was a list of things she’d been in, and some phrases that were probably funny if you knew, but didn’t mean anything to us.

“She looks the same,” I said.

“Yes,” Joanie said. “Except her hair’s different.”

“She would have been what, twenty-one, I guess.”

“Now look at this,” Joanie said, and turned to the K listings. There, between Kantor and Kroll, was Richard Krauss.

“It’s Tupper,” I said.

“Yes.”

“He’s from Lynn.”

“Yes.”

“Where’s Miss Delaney from?” I asked.

Joanie flipped back to Miss Delaney’s page and said without looking, “Marblehead.”

“They must have met in college,” I said.

Joanie flipped back to Krauss.

“He played football,” she said.

I nodded.

“If they graduated in June 1942,” Joanie said, “the war started during their senior year.”

“He probably went in the army after he graduated,” I said.

“And they probably got married before he went,” Joanie said.

“So the kid could be like three years old,” I said.

The alley bowled duck pins. Sometimes when I was broke I used to set pins in the alley. Sit on a little shelf behind the pins. Jump down, step on the pedal to raise the spikes. Set the pins on the spikes. Take your foot off the pedal, and jump back up on the shelf. Sometimes some jerk would bowl while you were still setting the pins, but if you kept your foot on the pedal, the ball just ran into the pins and stopped. Sometimes the pins would get bent and they’d have to close the alley, but that wasn’t my fault, and it was better than getting a bowling ball in the face.

There were mostly men in the bowling alley. Some grown-up women. Some guys our age. Not many girls. But Joanie didn’t seem to mind. She always seemed comfortable wherever she was.

“So why did he take somebody else’s name?” Joanie asked.

“Maybe he did something wrong,” I offered. “Maybe he knew the guy who died and he had done something bad, so he pretended to be him instead of who he was.”

“How would you do that?” Joanie said.

“I don’t know,” I said. “It was probably pretty confusing during the war.”

“What do you think he did?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It would have to be pretty bad.”

“How are we going to know?”

“We’ll figure it out,” I said.