He had the strangest look on his face.
“What?” I asked when I got over being startled and got my breath back.
“Glenn DeMille,” he said.
“Okay?”
“I think I know that name.”
“That’s great,” I said, grinning. “But I kind of have to get to class right now, so maybe we can talk about it later.”
The ghost didn’t step out of the way, and I wasn’t about to see if I could just walk through him.
He looked at me, straight in the eyes, with that strange look still on his face. And then he said, “I think he might have been my best friend.”
It was four hours to Dooley, North Carolina. The only way we could convince Uncle Dex to drive was to tell him about the letter, the same as with Mom — but, of course, not about the ghost. Obviously, there was nothing Uncle Dex liked more than a historical mystery. Every piece of junk that came into his shop, he insisted on knowing the story behind it — who used to own it, where they lived, what happened to them, why the person was getting rid of whatever it was: rocking chair, picture frame, Confederate money, signed copy of The Phantom Tollbooth.
The ghost sat in the back of the van. Or he sort of sat there, anyway. He’d barely spoken to me, to any of us, since my conversation with Arlene DeMille. And now, sitting back there alone in Uncle Dex’s Econoline van, he kept flickering in and out of view. At least I guessed that was what was going on back there. The rest of us were pretty quiet, too — “unnerved” was probably the right word for how we felt.
Uncle Dex, on the other hand, babbled just about the whole time as he drove, and kept putting on different old songs, telling us we should do some songs by this band or that band, or “Never mind about these guys,” or “Whoa, didn’t remember how bad those dorks were.”
Somewhere south of Richmond, Greg asked Julie about her mom and dad, and that led to all of us talking about our families.
Julie’s Mom was American. Her dad was Japanese. “Everybody thinks my mom must have been a hippie,” she said. “One of those girls who graduates college and goes to Japan and teaches English and marries the serious Japanese man. But it was the opposite. My dad was the one with the guitar, always just wanting to play his music. When my mom visited Japan, she was on a business trip, but they met and fell in love anyway.
“I’m like my mom in my manner,” she added, sounding very formal. “I’m like my dad in my clothes and music.” She didn’t explain beyond that.
Greg told Julie about his mom and dad when she finished: “They’re divorced. I mostly live with my dad.”
What he didn’t mention was that his dad was older — old enough to be his grandfather — and his mother had moved to another state and only saw Greg for one month during the summer and every other Christmas. They talked on the phone sometimes, too, but not all that much.
“Anderson’s dad is a spy,” he said, quickly changing the subject. “Works in DC.”
“No he’s not,” I corrected Greg. “He just works for the government.”
“Doing what?” Julie asked.
“I don’t really know,” I said with a shrug. “He’s not allowed to talk about it.”
“Oh,” she said. “So he is a spy.”
“No,” I said, though the truth was I’d always wished that was the case, but I’d never known one way or another. Dad wouldn’t talk about it. Whenever I brought it up, he just said the same thing: He worked for the government and it wasn’t very interesting. End of story.
The conversation died there, and I turned my attention to the real mystery sitting in the far back of the van. I was worried about the ghost ever since we found out Betty had probably married his best friend, Glenn DeMille. He just seemed so sad after we heard that, though he didn’t say anything more about it — except that he needed to go down there, and the letter still had to be delivered.
I turned around to check on him, but the ghost flickered out just as I did. Greg and Julie saw it, too, and they both shivered. I must have shivered, too, because Uncle Dex asked if we were cold, and did we want him to roll up his window.
Arlene DeMille met us at the Dooley Retirement Home, which wasn’t hard to find, even though Uncle Dex didn’t have a GPS. He said he preferred a good, old-fashioned map. Apparently, the town of Dooley, North Carolina, hadn’t changed much since the 1980s, which was when Uncle Dex’s map was published.
It was a pretty tiny town, with a lot of trees, surrounded by rolling hills and acres and acres of peanut fields, hog farms, and tobacco crops.
“Welcome,” Arlene said before we all even piled out of Uncle Dex’s van. We introduced ourselves all around and then she turned to me.
“Grandma Betty is just beside herself about the letter,” she said. “I already explained about how you found it in your uncle’s junk shop.”
“Antique store,” Uncle Dex corrected her. “ ‘Curio shop’ is okay, too.”
Arlene just smiled.
Five minutes later, we were standing outside the door to Betty Corbett’s room. Arlene said she thought it should just be her and me going in to deliver the letter. “It’s a very small room,” she explained. “And I don’t want her to get overwhelmed by too much company all at once.”
So everybody else stayed outside while we went in. Betty — Mrs. DeMille — was asleep in a stuffed recliner next to a window. The window was open and there were half a dozen birds in a bird feeder just outside. Mrs. DeMille had a bag of birdseed in her lap.
She nearly spilled it when Arlene woke her up.
“Grandma Betty,” she said softly. “This is the young man I was telling you about. His name is Anderson Carter, and he’s from Virginia.”
Mrs. DeMille smiled a warm, wrinkly smile. You could tell she was somebody who had always smiled a lot in her life. “All the way from Virginia!” she said. “Well, sit down, sit down.” She patted the bed next to her.
“I’m sorry I don’t have another chair to offer you,” she said. “But I’m afraid there’s just no room.”
“This is okay,” I said as Arlene and I sat on the bed. Then I held out the envelope. “Here’s the letter,” I said. “I hope it’s a good one.”
I didn’t see the ghost anywhere in the room. I kept glancing around, wondering if he would show up.
Mrs. DeMille didn’t mess around once she had the envelope. She picked up a silver letter opener and with one quick, neat slice had it open.
The letter inside was a piece of paper so thin it practically didn’t even exist. Mrs. DeMille lifted her glasses, which had been hanging on a string around her neck, up onto her nose. She didn’t say much, hardly even breathed as she read.
At one point, she touched her heart and said, “Oh.” And then, a little later, “Oh, dear.”
And then she started crying. The glasses slipped off her nose and dropped down in front of her. She reached for a tissue.
“What is it, Grandma Betty?” Arlene asked. “Who is it from? What does it say?”
I still didn’t see the ghost, although I had a feeling that he was in the room somewhere, just not visible. I felt one of those phantom breezes, like the one in the school bathroom when I hid in the stall to make the call to the Dooley Courthouse. It had to be him.
It took Mrs. DeMille a few minutes to compose herself and speak. “It’s from a boy I knew a long, long time ago,” she said. “A dear, sweet boy.”
“A boy, Grandma Betty?” Arlene encouraged her to continue.
“Yes,” Mrs. DeMille said. “He was my first boyfriend. It was before the war, and then the war started and he was determined to go.” She started crying again, but kept speaking. “He was just seventeen, but his parents let him enlist early, in the navy. He always loved the ocean. And he was your grandfather’s best friend. Those two — they were inseparable. Your granddaddy tried to enlist with him, but his parents wanted him to finish school first, so they didn’t let him go.”
I hadn’t said a word so far, but now I had to ask
because I was dying to know: “What was his name?”
Mrs. DeMille smiled a sad smile. “William Foxwell.”
Arlene asked her grandmother if she had been in love with this William Foxwell. “I mean, before Grandaddy,” she added.
Mrs. DeMille kept that sad smile on her face. “I suppose I was,” she said. “I know it broke my heart when we got the news. It broke all of our hearts.”
“What news?” I asked.
“Why, that he had died,” she said. “Well, actually not that. They said that he was missing in action and presumed to be dead. But I don’t suppose if you’re missing in action in the Pacific Ocean, and they can’t find you anywhere on your ship, that there’s any chance to survive.”
“What ship was he on, Grandma Betty?” she asked.
Mrs. DeMille couldn’t remember. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I never knew. It was so long ago, and I hated to think about it so much, about what might have happened to him. I do remember he had some sort of rank, though it wasn’t very high. A seaman second-class. Your granddaddy, he was heartbroken, too, of course. It was what you might say brought us together — trying to help each other through all that sadness and grief.”
I felt pretty bad for them, listening to Mrs. DeMille, and thinking about the ghost — William Foxwell, or the William Foxwell she knew seventy years ago.
Arlene asked her grandmother what the letter said. Miss Corbett handed it to her. “Oh, you two are welcome to read it. It’s as sweet a letter as could be, and I know I must look so sad, and I am, but it has also made me very, very happy.”
I looked over Arlene’s shoulder so I could see the letter, too, as she read it silently to herself. I was pretty sure, even though I still couldn’t see him, that William Foxwell was looking over my shoulder, too.
Hi, Betty —
I hope you’re well. I am well, too, or as well as can be expected under the circumstances. However, I can’t write much more than that in this letter. Just in case it fell into enemy hands. “Loose lips might sink ships,” and all that. Anyway, we’re up to something big is all I can tell you. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me or to any of us but I pray every night for everybody on board.
There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, about the first time I ever saw you, back in about the first grade. I knew right then that I wouldn’t ever even look at another girl. And I still feel that way, Betty. I really do. But I also know that things can happen to you. I mean, it is a war, and the Japanese mean business and don’t I know it from what happened to us back at Coral Sea.
So what this is all leading up to is this: If something happens to me — not that it will, of course, but JUST IN CASE — then I think you could do a whole lot worse than to take up with Glenn DeMille. You probably don’t know that he always had a big crush on you, too, but lucky me, I asked you out first and once I did that, he was too good of a friend to say anything. But some things you just kind of figure out as you go along and this is one of them.
Now, if I come through all in one piece, the way I plan to, this letter won’t even get mailed. I’m putting it in my coat where somebody will find it and give it to you if I don’t come back.
And in the meanwhile every time I see the moon is full, I will think about you, and will likely also do so even when the moon is not full.
Yours forever,
William
I found out a lot more before saying good-bye to Mrs. DeMille. Her husband — William’s best friend — passed away a couple of years ago. They had always lived in Dooley and raised all three of their children there. The youngest boy they actually named William, after William Foxwell. He was Arlene’s dad.
There didn’t seem to be any way to find out more about what happened to the ghost in the war because William Foxwell’s family was all gone now and none of his relatives still lived in Dooley. He never had any brothers or sisters.
Mrs. DeMille kept thanking me for finding the letter and delivering it to her. She said it brought her some peace of mind, to find out that William had wanted her to marry Glenn all along.
“I didn’t feel guilty when I started seeing Glenn,” she said. “But I did always wonder about how it might make William feel. And now I know.”
She said I should keep the navy peacoat, which I’d also brought to give her if she wanted it.
Of course, Greg and Julie and Uncle Dex wanted to know everything as soon as I stepped out of the room, but we waited until we got out to the van before I told them the whole story about the visit.
There were a lot of “Wows!” and “No ways!” as I recounted the conversation, until Uncle Dex spotted a church yard sale and pulled over to check it out.
William Foxwell showed up in the backseat almost as soon as he left.
He didn’t say anything at first, and I figured he was overwhelmed by emotion and all, the way anybody would be, of course. I mean, how often do you get to watch your old girlfriend from seventy years ago read a letter you wrote to her — also seventy years ago — telling her it’s okay to marry your best friend if something happens to you in the war?
I’m betting on just about never.
Then William Foxwell started talking. “Glenn and me,” he said, “we went out for the football team in high school, but neither one of us made it, which was kind of a surprise because our school was so small we almost didn’t have enough guys for a team in the first place. But we got cut anyway, which really stung.”
He paused and then continued, not looking at any of us, just sort of staring at nothing. “So we decided our game was baseball, and we started practicing every chance we could get. Betty came out and practiced with us, which a girl just about never did back then, but she didn’t care.”
Greg, who loved a good story more than anybody, interrupted. “So you guys turned out to be the stars of the baseball team?”
William Foxwell shook his head. “Not exactly. Turned out that even with all that practice only one of us was any good at baseball.”
“Was it you?” Greg asked.
“Was it Glenn?” Julie asked.
William Foxwell shook his head again, and smiled. “No. It was Betty.”
He didn’t say anything else for a while, just sat there, I guess busy remembering these things from when he was young.
“After Mama and Daddy signed to let me enlist,” he said, finally, “that’s about all I remember up to.”
“Not what ship you were on?” Julie asked.
“What about Coral Sea?” I asked. “You said something about Coral Sea in your letter to Betty. Do you remember anything about that?”
William Foxwell seemed to kind of flicker, as though there was some sort of interruption in the signal and we were getting a bad connection.
He started to say something else — I thought it was about Coral Sea, wherever that was — but we couldn’t follow what he said. Too much static.
Uncle Dex came back with an armload of junk from the yard sale just then. William Foxwell went silent when Dex pulled open the rear doors to toss it all in the van — still there with us for the rest of the trip home, but not quite.
Uncle Dex knew quite a bit about Coral Sea, as it turned out — or rather the Battle of the Coral Sea — which didn’t surprise me, knowing what a history nut he was, just like me.
“Oh yeah,” he said when I asked, once we were back on the interstate and heading north to Virginia. “Well, you guys know about the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, right? The one that destroyed half the U.S. naval fleet on December 7, 1941? President Roosevelt called it ‘a date which will live in infamy.’ ”
Uncle Dex glanced in the rearview mirror back at Julie. “No offense,” he added.
Julie didn’t say anything.
“Oh yeah,” Greg said to Julie. “I almost forgot you were, like, half Japanese.”
Julie gave him a withering look. “I am an American.”
Greg ducked as if he thought she might hit him. Julie rolle
d her eyes.
“So,” Uncle Dex continued, “as I was saying. A few months after Pearl Harbor, the Imperial Japanese Navy was all ready to invade New Guinea, another island in the Pacific Ocean.”
“Why New Guinea?” I asked. “And where is that exactly?”
Julie answered my second question. “It is north of Australia.”
“So what happened?” Greg asked, clearly glad the subject was no longer Julie’s ethnicity.
Uncle Dex fielded the question. “The Japanese had been kicking the Allies’ butt all over the Pacific for months, ever since Pearl Harbor. They already controlled most of the islands in the South Pacific and most of what’s called the Pacific Rim — China, Southeast Asia, the Philippines. If they captured New Guinea, they would have been able to isolate Australia, cutting them off from the war effort. And then probably attack Hawaii again. And maybe even the West Coast of the U.S. So we had to stop them.
“At first, the Battle of the Coral Sea was shaping up to be one of those huge naval battles,” he continued. “Aircraft carriers, battleships, cruisers, destroyers, submarines — the whole armada thing. Japan versus the U.S. and Australia.”
“Wait a minute,” Greg interrupted. “What’s the difference between all those ships you just listed?”
“I’ve got this,” I said to Uncle Dex. I had read all about World War II ships, and seen a lot of pictures in one of Pop Pop’s old books. “The aircraft carriers have big, long, open decks so planes can fly off them and attack their targets, like on land or other ships, and then the planes can come back and land on the aircraft carrier again. But carriers have a hard time defending themselves because they don’t have a lot of cannons and antiaircraft weapons and stuff, so they need the cruisers to protect them from anybody trying to attack them. The cruisers have a lot of big guns and stuff, but no planes.”
“What about destroyers?” Greg asked.
“You use those to find and try to destroy the submarines,” I said. “The submarines are busy trying to sink ships from under the water, using their torpedoes.”
The Secret of Midway Page 4