It was Julie’s turn to ask a question, though I could tell she didn’t like not already knowing something. “And battleships?”
Uncle Dex jumped in on this one. “They’re designed for invasions from the sea,” he said. “They have long-range cannons to pound away at targets miles away, like usually on land. If your battleships can take them out first, then when you land your own troops on the beach for the invasion, they have a better chance of surviving and your invasion has a better chance of succeeding.”
Greg shook his head. “Too much to remember,” he said.
Uncle Dex and I just smiled.
“Well, anyway,” Uncle Dex said, “to get back to the story, the Japanese and American ships never actually fired on one another at Coral Sea. They never got close enough. Instead, they attacked each other’s ships with the planes from their aircraft carriers. Both sides had torpedo planes and dive-bombers in the air and there were ships everywhere and it was all very confusing. If I remember right, a bunch of American bombers mistakenly attacked some American ships during the battle, thinking they were bombing the Japanese. Neither side actually won the battle, but I guess you could say the Allies sort of won because the Japanese weren’t able to land their invasion forces in New Guinea. Plus, it was a major morale boost for the Allied forces since it was the first time they’d pushed back the Japanese.”
Even though I knew a lot about ships, I’d never heard about any of this Coral Sea stuff before — and neither had Greg or Julie. It was cool learning about it, though, especially since it might be taking us one step closer to solving the mystery of William Foxwell. Now we just had to find out which ship he’d been on, and what happened to him and to that particular ship afterward.
I had a hundred questions I wanted to ask William Foxwell besides stuff about the war, like how was he feeling about everything Mrs. DeMille had said. And about meeting her again after all these years — not that they actually got to meet. The last time he’d seen her she would have been really young, like seventeen — the same as him. And now there she was, an old woman.
And his best friend was dead.
I looked at Greg and just watched him for a while, wondering how I’d feel if it was him and me in place of William Foxwell and his friend Glenn DeMille. I couldn’t imagine Greg not being here anymore, though, and I bet William and Glenn felt the same way about each other, too.
A part of me actually relaxed on the drive home, figuring we’d pretty much done our job. We knew the ghost’s name now, and where he was from, and all about his old girlfriend. We knew he’d been in the war. There were a few more details we still needed to fill in for him, but that was about all. That’s what I thought, anyway.
But, boy, was I wrong.
We were just getting started — and if we were going to help William Foxwell, we were going to have to move fast.
I couldn’t sleep that night. No big surprise. So I was awake at midnight when William Foxwell showed up. Once again, one minute he wasn’t there, and then the next minute he was. There was still some flickering, but not too much, and this time at least I could follow what he was saying.
“I remembered why I wrote that part about the full moon,” he said, as if we’d been in the middle of a conversation, and that was the subject. “I used to drive by Betty’s house sometimes at night, hoping I might see her sitting on her porch, maybe, or taking out the trash for the next morning, or coming home from choir practice at her church. It was always the best on a full moon because we didn’t have streetlights or anything like that back then in Dooley, and when it was a full moon I could see her a lot better.”
“Would you stop and talk to her?” I asked.
William Foxwell shook his head. “Not usually. Not unless she happened to see me. Sometimes she would. She’d yell, ‘William Foxwell, what are you doing out so late?’ Like she was getting on me about breaking my curfew or something.” He laughed. “She’d make me come in and drink some lemonade. Her dad would give me a hard look, but I don’t think he meant anything by it. He was just being her dad, doing what dads do.”
He paused, then continued, “I figured one day I’d be doing the same thing if Betty and I got married and had kids and some boy kept driving by and sometimes stopping in.”
“That must have been pretty hard seeing her,” I said, “and hard hearing that she married your best friend.”
William Foxwell smiled. “I think she got to have a good life and I’m happy about that,” he said. “I think Glenn did, too. I always told him he was the luckiest guy I knew. If there was a dollar bill somebody’d dropped on the ground, you just knew Glenn DeMille would be the one to find it.”
Neither one of us said anything for a while. I settled back in bed and let my head drop onto my pillow, figuring we were through talking for the night. I had school in the morning. Those hundred other questions I had for William Foxwell could wait.
But he had other ideas — and more he wanted to say. The visit to Mrs. DeMille had shaken loose all sorts of memories, apparently, and not all of them pleasant.
“I ought to tell you something else I remembered,” William Foxwell said. “I didn’t want to, but I guess I owe you the truth whenever it comes to me. This ship I was on — I guess it could have been in the Battle of the Coral Sea like you all were talking about. Still not sure. Things are still fuzzy around the edges of that one. But what I remember is a bomb went right down through the middle of the ship. It was an armor-piercing bomb. Tore through everything going down like the ship was made of paper instead of steel, then exploded deep down in the bowels of the ship. Must have killed fifty guys. Maybe more. Probably more. I can’t explain how terrible it was. The twisted metal and the boys screaming in pain. The smoke and the fire. The sirens.” William paused, as though it hurt to remember that day. Which I guess it probably did.
He continued, “And more bombs falling all around. Antiaircraft guns firing away up at the Japanese planes. I remember I was belowdecks. Can’t remember what I was supposed to be doing, or what my job was. But there were officers yelling orders. And so much smoke. Thick black smoke. And awful heat, so strong you couldn’t hardly breathe.”
“Did you get wounded, or do you think that’s where you got, you know …” I trailed off.
“Killed?” he asked, finishing my sentence and shaking his head. “Neither one. And kind of worse.”
“How could it be worse than getting killed?” I asked.
He looked down. Stared at his hands. The static or whatever it was started up again and he began flickering in and out of view. I couldn’t tell if he was losing his voice, too, since he didn’t seem to be speaking. I strained to hear him.
“I froze,” he said finally.
“What do you mean?” I asked, for some reason thinking he meant that literally — that he turned into ice or something — even though just a minute before he’d been describing the intense heat, and the smoke and the flames from the bombing.
His voice got so soft, less than a whisper, that I could barely hear him. I had to sit up on my bed and lean way forward.
“I mean I froze. I couldn’t move. I was so scared when the bombing started that I forgot about everything I was supposed to be doing. It was like I turned deaf to any orders that were meant for me. One of my buddies, he was right next to me one minute, and then the next minute he was down on the floor. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I mean, he looked just fine at first, until I turned him over and saw … there was the jagged end of a metal pipe …” He didn’t finish.
I shuddered, just to imagine what that must have been like.
“So I hid under some stairs,” he went on. “I just curled up there and hid and put my hands over my ears to try to block out all the noise and screaming and bombs and shooting and everything. Only I couldn’t, no matter how hard I pressed my hands, until I thought I’d end up crushing my own skull. And maybe I wished I could do that, too.”
William Foxwell’s voice had grown ragged.
I couldn’t tell for sure, but he might have been crying, which I didn’t think ghosts would do. But there were a lot of things I’d learned about ghosts that didn’t fit whatever I might have expected. I wanted to say something to make him feel better, but there was nothing. It was all so terrible, and nothing would change that.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, but whether to me, or to his buddy who died, or to the other men on his ship — because he had gotten so afraid, and because he’d hid under the stairs while they were under attack — I couldn’t say.
It was hard concentrating at school the next day. Julie and I sat next to each other during math, in the back, which was a big step for Julie, who’d been a front-row kid ever since I was first aware that she existed. But there was so much we needed to talk about. I had to tell her what William Foxwell had told me the night before, and she had to tell me about her online research, which kept her up half the night. I wasn’t sure if it was just the excitement of trying to solve a mystery, or if we were both starting to actually care about the ghost.
“I finally found him,” she said excitedly. “William Foxwell. It has to be him because there was only one in the whole database.”
“Database of what?” I asked.
“Of casualties,” she said. “Or, rather, the part of the database that listed missing in action. They have them for the different wars, but most are World War II. And William Foxwell was in the database for MIA. Only not from the Battle of the Coral Sea. I looked that up, too. But he was MIA from the Battle of Midway. Which didn’t happen until a month after Coral Sea.”
Julie was so excited when she told me this, that I know it was a disappointment to her that I obviously didn’t know that what she’d just said was significant.
She sighed. I didn’t even have to ask. “The Battle of Midway was only the most important sea battle in the whole of World War II!” she exclaimed — loud enough, as it turned out, for the teacher to hear us, which got me an extra three sheets of math homework problems, but nothing for Julie, since I think the teacher was kind of afraid of her because she could be so intense and all.
“We’ll talk at lunch,” Julie said when the bell rang. “Save a table for you and me. And Greg.”
“Does he know about any of this?” I asked. “The battle MIA stuff?” I was feeling kind of dumb since I had never heard of the Battle of Midway.
“Oh yeah,” Julie said. “We talked last night.”
Then she took off for her next class. I just stood there in the hall for a minute, surprised that Julie and Greg were talking — without me. I wasn’t jealous, exactly. Just, I don’t know, annoyed. I mean, I was the one who found William and tracked down Betty and arranged the road trip to deliver the letter to her. And it was because of me that we had the band, and that Julie got to come along for the ride.
You’d think Julie would be calling me with whatever she found out. Not Greg.
“It totally checks out,” Greg said at lunch. None of us had touched the food on our lunch trays. He was talking about what William Foxwell had told me about his ship being hit. “And it was the Battle of the Coral Sea, like he mentioned in the letter. There was this ship — a giant aircraft carrier, the Yorktown. It got hit by three bombs that the Japanese dropped on them. Some other ships got sunk, but not that one.”
Julie practically jumped out of her chair. “That was the same ship he was on when he went missing at the next battle after that — the Battle of Midway!”
I’d never seen her so excited. Everything about Julie changed as she talked. Her face brightened. She even looked kind of pretty — a totally different person than the one I’d sort of known, at least from a distance, since elementary school.
“Wait a minute,” I said, turning my attention back to Greg, who had a big grin on his face, obviously pleased with himself. “You mean to tell me that you, Greg Troutman, were reading up on all this stuff last night? Greg Troutman who hates school? Greg Troutman who never met a homework assignment he didn’t try to bribe me into doing for him?”
His grin sagged. He looked annoyed. “Yeah,” he said. “That guy. So what?”
“So nothing,” I said. “I’m just surprised is all.” I hadn’t meant to make Greg feel bad. Thankfully, Julie jumped in.
“Never mind him,” she said to Greg. “What else did you find out?”
He scowled at me, then spoke very pointedly to Julie, practically elbowing me out of the conversation. “Three bombs, like I said. The Japanese actually thought they’d sunk the Yorktown. The worst bomb was just like Anderson said William Foxwell described it. It hit the flight deck and went straight down nearly four decks deep into the ship before it went off. It killed a bunch of the sailors on its way down and when it exploded, but somehow it didn’t sink the ship. The Yorktown was still in pretty bad shape. There were fires everywhere, and everything was all torn up, all that metal got twisted and ripped apart and stuff.”
“What happened then?” I asked. I had decided not to tell them about how William Foxwell said he froze during the battle, after the bomb hit.
Greg shrugged. “Don’t know,” he said. “That’s as far as I got. Maybe we can ask him — William Foxwell. Where is he, anyway? I thought he’d be here.”
We all looked around. I still wasn’t sure when to expect him to appear, besides, apparently, every night in my bedroom. That didn’t stop me from making a guess, though.
“I think he gets tired,” I said. “Like, showing himself to us, talking and stuff, trying to remember stuff, it all tires him out. He gets all flickery. And then he disappears and doesn’t come around for a while. It’s kind of like he has to go recharge his batteries or whatever. Anyway, that’s what I think is going on.”
“Right,” Greg said, not sounding at all sincere. “So you’re the ghost expert now?”
“Not an expert,” I said, “but I guess I do know him the best of anybody here. I mean, I was the one he showed himself to first, and I’m the one he talks to the most.”
Julie sniffed. “Don’t be such a snob about this,” she said.
“I’m not a snob,” I protested. “I’m just trying to help. Anyway, it’s not like I can go around telling people I’m friends with a ghost, and that’s how I’m going to suddenly be popular in middle school.”
“He’s right,” Greg said, changing his tune. “That’s what the band is for, remember?”
“Right,” I echoed. “The band.”
Julie raised her eyebrows. “The Ghosts of War,” she said in a voice that sounded like she was correcting us. I let it go.
“Sure,” I said. “Whatever. The Ghosts of War. Rock and roll.”
Greg picked up his fork. “We better eat,” he said. “We’re going to need all our strength for this.”
Julie and I both looked at him, waiting for him to elaborate. He shoveled in a mouthful of potatoes and formerly frozen corn.
“Mmgrmm,” he said. That was the sound that came out, anyway.
“Gross,” Julie said.
Greg’s face fell a little as he kept chewing.
“Okay, then,” I said. “Band practice this afternoon at Uncle Dex’s. Hopefully, William Foxwell will show back up and we can see what else he remembers.”
Greg choked through half his carton of milk, washing down all the potatoes and corn in the process. “That’s what I was trying to say in the first place,” he said once he could actually talk.
Julie blinked at him. “You really should take smaller bites, you know,” she said.
Greg — who just minutes before had seemed like her new best friend or whatever — winced.
Julie was just about to say something else when somebody pulled out a chair next to her and threw himself down in it. It was this eighth grader who everybody just called Belman. I wasn’t sure if that was his first name or his last name or what.
Two of his friends dragged out chairs, too. “I’m sorry,” Belman said, “but aren’t you third graders supposed to be in elementary school? You mus
t have taken the wrong bus. This is middle school. And that’s middle school food you’re eating.”
“Yeah,” said one of his friends, reaching for my Jell-O. “And it’s for middle school kids only.”
The other friend tried to grab Julie’s lunch box, but she pulled it away from him.
Greg snatched my Jell-O back from the first guy. “We’re not third graders,” he said. “And you can’t take people’s food.”
Belman kept this big, weird grin on his face the whole time. “Now, now,” he said. “No need to get upset and start crying. Just because you got on the wrong bus this morning.”
“Poor little third graders,” his first friend said. “Let’s let them finish their lunch.”
And just like that they got up and moved on to another table where some other sixth graders were sitting. Apparently, they were doing this to everybody who had just started middle school.
“Jerks,” Greg said.
“Remember when we used to say that stood for Junior Educated Rich Kids?” I said to him.
Julie sniffed. “Well, it doesn’t anymore.”
“At least they’re doing it to everybody else and not just us,” I pointed out, trying to look on the plus side.
Julie brightened. “Well, at least they didn’t get these,” she said, pulling a small plastic container out of her lunch box. She opened it and handed each of us a cupcake. “I made these last night.” She hesitated, and then added, “For you guys.”
“Wow,” said Greg, as surprised as I was — that Julie would do something nice like that.
We both did our best to thank her but were too busy shoving the cupcakes in our mouths to do it properly. I couldn’t be sure about Greg, but I didn’t want to risk Belman coming back and stealing mine.
William Foxwell didn’t show up when we gathered that afternoon for band practice. We’d tortured several songs the week before, and pretty much took up where we’d left off. Julie got frustrated with Greg and me after about ten minutes.
The Secret of Midway Page 5