“No. The Coral Sea.”
Joanna’s heart sank. The Coral Sea was all the way down by Australia. There was no way Mr. Wojakowski could have covered it in a native dugout. Or in a motorboat, for that matter. It was hundreds—no, thousands, she corrected, looking at the map’s scale—of miles away.
He had made it up—the coconuts and the jammed machine guns and the Katzenjammer Kids. Maybe there’s an explanation, she thought, bending over the map again. Maybe he meant another island, with a name like Malakula. Marakei. Or Maleolap. But neither of those was any closer to Midway than Malakula, and Midway was the only island for hundreds of miles in every direction that began with an M. But you said yourself there were dozens of unnamed islands. And it’s been sixty years since World War II. Maybe he got the names mixed up. I need to talk to Mr. Wojakowski, she thought.
She closed the book and stood up. “Thank you. You were a lot of help. You’re a very good researcher.”
“You can’t go yet,” Maisie said. “I have to tell you about the people at the circus. They all tried to go out the main entrance, but they couldn’t, ’cause of the animal run, and the Wallendas—”
“Maisie, I really have to go,” Joanna said.
“I know, but I have to tell you this one thing. The Flying Wallendas and everybody tried to get them to go out the performers’ entrance, but—”
“I promise I’ll come back so you can tell me all about the tent and the Flying Wallendas. Okay?” She started for the door.
“Okay,” Maisie said. “Does she die?”
Joanna stopped cold. “Who?”
“Pollyanna. When she falls out of the tree.”
“No,” Joanna said. She came back around the bed, picked up the remote, and turned the TV back on. She hit “play.” “It’s a Disney movie.”
“Oh,” Maisie said, disappointed.
“But she hurts her back and can’t walk,” Joanna said. She handed Maisie the remote. “And she’s very crabby about it.”
“Oh, good,” Maisie said. “Did somebody have an NDE about the Coral Sea?”
“No more questions,” Joanna said firmly. “Watch your movie,” and went back up to her office to listen to the tape again. He had definitely said Malakula and the Coral Sea. She called him and left a message for him to come in at three, and then went through the transcripts again, looking for some definitive discrepancy that would make the interview unnecessary. And, reading through his accounts, she became more and more convinced there had to be some mistake.
The naval terms—hatches, islands, flight decks—and the gratuitous details—not just a canoe, but a dugout, not just a soda fountain, but one that made cherry phosphates. Surely he couldn’t have made up the Katzenjammer Kids and the neighbor lady two doors down and the newsreel about Pearl Harbor. He had even known the name of the movie that was playing.
But he couldn’t have been on the Yorktown and in his hometown when Pearl Harbor was bombed. And the Norfolk story was full of believable details, too, from the PA system to Woody Pikeman asking, “Who’s the wiseguy?” I have to talk to Richard, she thought.
The phone rang. She picked it up, hoping it was him. It was Mrs. Haighton. “I got your message,” she said. “I’m afraid neither Tuesday nor Thursday will work. I’ve got a hospital board meeting Tuesday, and Thursday’s my afternoon to volunteer at the crisis center.”
We’ve got a crisis right here, Joanna thought. “How would Wednesday afternoon work?” she said. “Two? Four? Or we could do this in the evening.”
“Oh, no, evenings are even worse,” she said and launched into a litany of board and organizing committee meetings.
“Earlier then,” Joanna said doggedly. “I really need to schedule you this week, if possible. It’s important.” But this week was absolutely impossible. Maybe next week. No, that was the Women’s Center fundraiser. The week after.
And by then, we’ll have no volunteers at all, Joanna thought. She printed out the transcripts, and took them and the tapes to the lab to show Richard. “Hiya, Doc,” Mr. Wojakowski said. He was standing outside the door in the exact spot where she’d left him.
“What are you doing here?” Joanna asked, turning hastily away to open the door so he couldn’t see the stricken expression on her face.
“I figured I’d stick around till you got done with your meeting,” he said, following her into the lab. “I remembered what you said about talking about the stuff you saw while it was still fresh in your mind, and I didn’t have anyplace to go, so I thought, I’ll just wait till she comes back, so we can get it all down before my memory gets mixed up.” He sat down in the chair and leaned forward, his ruddy face eager, smiling, waiting for her to begin asking questions, and she thought again, there must be some mistake.
But how could she find out what it was? She couldn’t ask him directly, “Why did you tell me two different stories about where you were when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” or, “Do you have any proof you served on the Yorktown?” Not with him sitting there, his face eager and open.
“I was telling you about the peaceful feeling I had in the tunnel, like something was going to happen,” he said, “so I walked a little ways till I come to a door, and all of a sudden there was this bright light, and I mean bright. The only time I ever saw something that bright was when a bomb from an Aichi-99 went right through the hangar deck and blew up Repair 5. She took three hits that day.”
“Was that at the Battle of the Coral Sea?” Joanna asked, feeling like a traitor, like a Nazi grilling a spy, trying to trap him into a mistake, an inconsistency. And if he told her a different version this time, named a different island, a different kind of canoe, what would it prove? Only that his memory was fuzzy. The Battle of the Coral Sea had happened sixty years ago, and confabulations multiplied over time.
“One of the depth charges hit her in the port-side oil tanks,” Mr. Wojakowski was saying, “and oil was gushing out of her side. She woulda bled to death if we hadn’ta gotten her back to Pearl when we did. Boy, were we glad to see Diamond Head—”
“You went with the Yorktown back to Pearl Harbor?” Joanna blurted.
“Yep,” Mr. Wojakowski said, “and helped patch her up myself. We worked straight through, welding her boilers and patching up her hull. I worked on the crew fixing her watertight doors. We worked seventy-eight hours straight and were still working on ’em when we left Oahu. I tell ya, I was so tired when we got done, I slept all the way back to Midway.”
14
“Mother never reached me. if… anything happens… you must be prepared. Remember the message: Rosabelle, believe. When you hear those words… know it is Houdini speaking…”
“He made the whole thing up?” Richard said. “Even being on the Yorktown?”
“I don’t know,” Joanna said, pacing back and forth, her hands jammed in her cardigan pockets. “All I know is that he couldn’t have been in Pearl Harbor repairing the Yorktown and adrift at sea thousands of miles away at the same time.”
“But does it have to mean he’s lying?” Richard said. “Couldn’t it just be a memory lapse? He’s sixty-five, after all, and the war was over fifty years ago. He may have forgotten exactly where he was at a given time.”
“How do you forget being shot down and losing your copilot and your gunner? You heard him tell that story. It was the best damned day of his life.”