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 rolled 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.”

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.