“Great-Great-Uncle’s friend?” Greg said.
Julie nodded, already speaking Japanese again over the phone.
I felt a weird chill for a second and found myself looking around, expecting to see William Foxwell.
Julie paused in her conversation to translate for us. “Mr. Yamaguchi asks us to please forgive him for being impolite.”
And then, a minute later: “Mr. Yamaguchi says Great-Great-Uncle gave him my telephone number, and he insisted on calling us himself instead of sending a message through Great-Great-Uncle.”
And another minute later: “He says he must tell us a truth he has kept hidden all these years. He says he was a young naval officer on the destroyer, searching for Japanese survivors from one of the Japanese aircraft carriers destroyed by the Americans in the Battle of Midway. That was how they came to find the lone American …”
I couldn’t believe it. None of us could. But we just kept standing there as the story kept pouring out, with Julie continuing to translate. Mr. Yamaguchi described the American, who he referred to as our “relative,” and from the description we knew it had to be William Foxwell. Mr. Yamaguchi explained that the senior officers on the destroyer were angry that they had been fooled, and defeated, by the Americans. They demanded to know the location of the young sailor’s aircraft carrier.
“But Mr. Yamaguchi says the American refused to tell,” Julie said. “Even when a pistol was drawn by one of the senior naval officers, even under the threat of death.”
Mr. Yamaguchi said he had great shame. He was afraid of his superiors. He said our relative was very brave. To the end he was very brave. A young man so brave deserved better than an anonymous burial at sea, with no record, no ceremony, nothing to mark his death.
Mr. Yamaguchi promised that he would write a formal letter to the U.S. Navy, and he would include the name Julie had given him for the young American sailor: William Foxwell. Perhaps even at this late date, honor would be restored, and William Foxwell’s sacrifice could be recognized by those who loved him.
None of us moved for a couple of minutes when Julie finally hung up her phone. Greg was the first to speak, but all he could say was, “Wow.”
And all I could say was, “Yeah.”
And all Julie could say was, “If only he could have been here, too.”
I felt that chill again, and a faint breeze, as if someone had just walked past me on the sidewalk, barely disturbing the air around me. Once again I looked to see if William Foxwell was there, and once again I didn’t see him.
“You know what, you guys?” I said to Julie and Greg. “I have this feeling that he is here. Or he was here, anyway, standing with us the whole time Julie was talking to Mr. Yamaguchi.”
Julie and Greg looked around, but, of course, nobody was there. They looked back at me expectantly.
“I know we can’t see him,” I said, “and I can’t exactly explain it, but something just tells me William knows the rest of the story now, and that he can find the peace he’s been looking for for the past seventy years.”
It was two days later, a Monday afternoon, when we met again for band practice. Some kids had made fun of us at school, just as I had predicted, but not that many. Belman kept on with the Harry Potter wisecracks and the third-grader jokes when he came over to our table at lunch, but we tried to just ignore him. There was going to be another All-Ages Open Mic Night soon, and this time we planned to be totally ready.
We had just set up our instruments and were in the middle of tuning when all of us suddenly stopped.
“Did you hear something?” I asked.
Greg nodded. “It sounds like a trumpet,” he said.
“But where is it coming from?” I asked. “It was really far off, but now it almost sounds like it’s right here in the room.”
Julie smiled and pointed behind us. We turned around quickly and nearly fell over. It was William Foxwell!
“Hey there,” he said, holding the beat-up old trumpet. “Hope I didn’t scare you with my playing. I’ve sort of been practicing.”
We all jumped up and down and shouted and stuff while he just stood there grinning. He seemed to be all there this time — no flickering or fading in and out, no faraway voice. It was like the first time he showed up in my room so many weeks ago.
“I just came to thank you again,” William said when we finally quieted down. “Only this time for solving the mystery.”
It was our turn to grin. “You’re welcome,” Greg said. “But you didn’t need to thank us. We should be thanking you for everything you did in the war and all.”
William might have actually blushed — it was hard to tell since he was still a ghost — and then he said he just had one more favor to ask, but it wasn’t a big one.
“I was wondering if I could try to play a song with you guys,” he said. “Kind of a farewell song. Before I have to go.”
“Sure!” Greg said. “Anything! You name it.”
“Well,” William Foxwell said, holding up the trumpet again. “There was this song that was popular back when Betty and I were first going out. They used to play it on the radio. You might say it was sort of our song. Every time I ever heard it after that, I’d think about her, and she said the same thing — that it always made her think about me. So I was hoping we could play that one.”
But then his face fell. “But I guess you probably wouldn’t know it, now that I think about it. Heck, you probably never even heard it before.”
“That’s not a problem,” Julie said brightly. “Tell me the name of it and I’ll find it on my iPhone. We can download it from YouTube, and I can find the lyrics and arrangement for piano and the chords for guitar online, too.”
William Foxwell gave her a blank look. He obviously had no idea what she was talking about.
“Never mind,” Julie said quickly. “Give us a minute and we’ll figure it out. Just tell me the name of the song.”
William Foxwell smiled. “ ‘All This and Heaven Too.’ ”
We raced upstairs to get cell phone reception and Julie did all the things she’d told William Foxwell she would do so we could figure out how to play it. She even used Uncle Dex’s printer and printed everything out for us.
“What’s all this for?” Uncle Dex asked.
“No time to explain,” I said, hoping that would be sufficient.
Uncle Dex shrugged and turned his attention to another customer walking into the store. “Okay,” he said. “Catch you kids later.”
Julie led us through the arrangement a couple of times until we sort of got it. William Foxwell joined in on the trumpet, pretty rusty at the beginning, trying to play the melody, but after a while, he got it and kept going. We followed along on our instruments, grinning at one another, not quite believing this was happening — playing music with a ghost!
It was kind of a goofy old song, the kind nobody listened to anymore, not even my parents, or probably even my grandparents. But the more we played it, the sweeter it seemed to be. I mean, still corny and all that, but it made you feel good inside. I closed my eyes and I strummed my guitar, for once not having any problem remembering the chords to a song. I don’t know if Julie and Greg closed their eyes, too, but we all seemed to be in a sort of trance, playing on and on, with William Foxwell’s trumpet getting stronger, and clearer, and, yes, sweeter.
And then, I realized, the song was over, and William Foxwell was gone, the trumpet lay carefully on the floor next to that old trunk where I’d found his navy peacoat and the letter to Miss Betty Corbett.
Everybody was quiet for a moment as the last haunting strains of “All This and Heaven Too” echoed in our little basement practice room — none of us quite knowing what to think, but all of us happy that William Foxwell had found his peace at last.
And then Greg asked me, “Hey, what else do you think is in that old trunk?”
Band practice wasn’t going well — again. Two weeks after we totally stunk at the All-Ages Open Mic Night, Julie Kobayashi was still t
rying to convince our friend Greg Troutman that he couldn’t sing, and that he definitely shouldn’t be the front man, or front boy, for our band the Ghosts of War. She was right, of course. Once your voice starts to crack — which was exactly what happened to Greg right in the middle of our first-ever public performance — you need to step away from the microphone already and let somebody else have a turn.
The only problem — besides Greg’s cracking voice — was Julie also kept trying to convince us that we should let her be the one on the mic. Unfortunately, Julie can’t sing, either. Even more unfortunately, she has what my mom calls a tin ear and can’t hear herself when she’s singing off-key. What’s even more unfortunate is she actually thinks she’s a great singer. Probably since she’s a musical genius in every other way, her parents never had the heart to tell her the truth — that her singing is awful times ten.
Halfway through our third song that day, with Greg still on vocals, Julie suddenly stopped playing, turned off her keyboard, and threw her hands up.
“That sounded like squeaking, not singing,” she said, before turning to me and adding, “You tell him, Anderson. He won’t listen to me.”
I set my guitar down and retreated to the back of our practice room in the basement of my uncle Dex’s junk shop, the Kitchen Sink. No way did I want to get in the middle of those two.
Greg bent his guitar pick in half and then tried to bend it straight again. It wouldn’t go. “That’s just how I sing,” he snapped at Julie. “It’s my style.”
“No, it’s not,” she snapped back. “It’s your hormones.”
I retreated even farther as they argued back and forth about Greg’s “style,” until I bumped into something. It was a footlocker. I looked down at it, confused. Just the week before I had moved it to a storage room next door to where we practiced, to get it out of the way and so I wouldn’t have to see it all the time and be reminded of what was in there. I had no idea how it got back here. Maybe Uncle Dex moved it . . .
A few weeks earlier, I found a World War II navy peacoat in the locker, along with a mysterious letter, setting in motion a pretty crazy adventure involving a guy named William Foxwell — or rather the ghost of William Foxwell. Greg, Julie, and I had to solve the mystery of how he went missing in action at the Battle of Midway, which was the most important navy battle of World War II.
I wrote all about it in a notebook that I keep hidden under my mattress at home. I even gave it a title — “The Secret of Midway” — though I doubt I’ll ever let anybody read it besides Julie and Greg.
Anyway, I knew there was a lot of other stuff in the locker that looked like it was from other wars, but so far I’d only glanced inside. Greg kept asking me if we could check out what was in there, but I didn’t want to go messing around with anything else that might have a ghost attached to it. I was still recovering from the Secret of Midway, and missing William Foxwell, who sort of became our friend but disappeared once we solved the mystery.
It was funny about that locker, though: The more I stayed away from it, the more I couldn’t stop thinking about it, like it had some kind of gravitational pull on my brain — even after I shoved it in that storage room next door. And now here it was, somehow back in the practice room.
Not only that, but as I stood there staring at it, the footlocker started to sort of glow. Then the latch fell open all on its own. Then, the next thing I knew, I was bending down without even thinking about it, opening the lid, and looking inside.
Greg and Julie were still arguing about who squeaked and who squawked when they sang, and so that’s what was happening when I found the hand grenade.
I didn’t know what it was at first because it was round and smooth, not like the pineapple-looking hand grenades you see in movies. More like a big olive-green lemon. Then I noticed the plunger and safety clip.
There was something written on it, too, scratched into the metal, and I had to take it closer to the front of the practice room to read what it said.
That put a quick end to Julie and Greg squabbling.
“Whoa!” Greg said. “Where did you get that?”
“You shouldn’t have that,” Julie said before I could answer. “It could be dangerous.”
I held the hand grenade up toward the light so Greg and I could read what was on there.
The writing on the grenade said Z & Fish and underneath somebody had also written, or scratched, DMZ 68.
Greg took off his beanie, which he wore all the time because he said they made us look cool. Or at least less uncool. “What is that supposed to mean?” he asked.
“Beats me,” I said. “Maybe we should take it upstairs and ask Uncle Dex.”
Julie stomped her foot. “Maybe we should take ourselves upstairs and get away from that bomb before something happens,” she said. She was already heading for the stairs.
“It’s not a bomb, Julie,” Greg said. “It’s a hand grenade.”
She stopped. “And what is a hand grenade, exactly?”
“Well,” said Greg, pulling his beanie back on over his wild red hair, “it’s, um, well, I guess it’s a bomb. But you throw it. You don’t shoot it out of a cannon or whatever.”
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s all go upstairs.”
“Leave it down here,” Julie said again. “It could blow up and kill us. We have to get out of here.”
I couldn’t leave the grenade, though. It felt like my fingers were glued to it or something.
And then, as if somebody was standing right behind me, reading over my shoulder, I heard a whispery voice.
“That looks like my lucky grenade.”
I whirled around and collided with Greg. Nobody else was there.
“Did you hear that just now?” I asked him.
“Heck, yeah!” he said.
We both looked around for a second, then bolted up the stairs behind Julie.
I still had the grenade.
The Battle of Midway, which took place from June 4–7, 1942, was the most important naval battle of World War II, considered by many to be the turning point in the fight for control of the Pacific. Six months after the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, with the U.S. fleet still mostly in ruins, the Japanese planned to attack a key U.S. air base on Midway Atoll in the middle of the Pacific. Their intention was to lure the rest of the American fleet from Hawaii out to defend Midway and into what was supposed to be a final battle — with the much smaller and vulnerable U.S. force sure to go down in defeat.
With control of Midway, and destruction of the U.S. Navy, the Japanese would then be free to launch attacks against other key Pacific islands, including Hawaii, and perhaps even the West Coast of the United States.
Instead, after breaking the Japanese radio-communication code and discovering the Imperial Navy’s plan, the U.S. fleet set its own ambush. Despite overwhelming odds, they succeeded in destroying four Japanese aircraft carriers and winning a desperately needed victory in what one military historian called “the most stunning and decisive blow in the history of naval warfare.” The Imperial Japanese Navy never recovered from the defeat.
Though the present-day story and characters — Anderson, Greg, Julie, their families, and William Foxwell and his friends — are fictional, all other historical events and characters in The Secret of Midway are real and accurate, drawn from a number of published accounts about the Battle of Midway and the brave men who fought there, far too many of whom gave up their lives defending our country.
Readers interested in learning more about the Battle of Midway, the Battle of the Coral Sea, the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the war in the Pacific can find a number of excellent sources online and in the library, just as Anderson, Greg, and Julie did. Miracle at Midway, by Gordon W. Prange, with Donald M. Goldstein and Katherine V. Dillon, is a highly regarded and accessible account of the battle, with numerous sources providing both the American and Japanese perspectives. The 1976 feature film Midway, a blockbuster at the time of its releas
e, contains a significant amount of actual film footage from the Battle of Midway as well.
Steve Watkins is the acclaimed author of Down Sand Mountain, winner of the Golden Kite Award; What Comes After; and Juvie; as well as the Ghosts of War books. Steve also writes as a freelance journalist and teaches yoga. His website is www.stevewatkinsbooks.com.
Copyright © 2015 by Steve Watkins
All rights reserved. Published by Scholastic Inc. SCHOLASTIC and associated logos are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of Scholastic Inc.
First printing, January 2015
Cover art by Alejandro Colucci
Cover design by Yaffa Jaskoll
e-ISBN 978-0-545-66586-5
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
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