Vanished Page 2

  When another coaching job came up, Tommy Doyle grabbed it. It was only junior high, but he figured that was a blessing in disguise. This was West Texas, after all. A varsity coach was never safe. A few bad seasons and he’d be packing. Tommy had been down that road before. He promised himself that he’d never put ambition over his kids. When the high school offered him a varsity coaching position, he took a JV spot instead. When another school offered to make him head coach, Tommy thanked them anyway. For twenty-five years, he stayed under the radar, mostly running the JV team and helping with varsity on the side. “He did that for us,” Casey said. “He did that for his family and he never said a word.”

  But inside, Tommy always wondered. Not about coaching, about everything else. He wondered what else might have been. What would have been, if his dad had come home. He wondered who he might have become, and what he could have given his own kids. He wondered if there was anything to those old family stories. Was it possible that his dad survived? If so, how long? Did he really come back? Why would he refuse to see Tommy? Was there any explanation that could make it all okay?

  Tommy pushed the questions down, but they were always there. The slightest mention of his dad would bring the old coach to tears. The doubt lingered inside Tommy like a weight. It was there when he drove to work in the morning, and when he came home at night, unfolding his long, sore body to watch a game tape. It was there when he called out drills on the football field, and when his kids opened their presents on Christmas morning. Sometimes it seemed to Tommy as though he’d spent his whole life waiting for something. Waiting for a future that never came. Waiting for answers to make sense of the past. Waiting for a sign of that twenty-five-year-old kid with the cocky grin and jaunty hat, the rascal eyes that stared back at Tommy from the one good portrait he’d ever seen. On weekends, his mother came to the house and played with the kids and helped in the kitchen, but she never mentioned Tommy’s dad. She never asked Tommy what he heard, or believed, never told him what she knew. Everything stayed packed up and locked away, pushed out of view like the trunk.

  —

  FOR NANCY, walking past the trunk was a kind of test. It was Tommy’s past and Tommy’s choice and she wanted to let him make it, but it wasn’t like Nancy to leave a closed door shut. She loved Tommy all the way through, but they were as different as they were in love. When something bothered Tommy, his voice would fade to a whisper and his whole laconic frame would settle into a cryogenic stillness. Not Nancy. She was just about half his size, but she seemed to occupy twice the space, with a high clear voice and biting wit that called out what she saw. When Nancy walked into a room, the lights got a little brighter. When something in the room upset her, the lights got brighter still.

  Nancy came from a conservative family, devout in the Church of Christ. Growing up, she’d always kept her faith, but she wore it her own way. She was the daughter who might turn up in town wearing a short skirt and go-go boots, the one who might miss curfew by a lot. When Nancy announced that she was heading off to study at Abilene Christian College, her parents prayed that she’d come home on the arm of a handsome preacher. Instead, she came home with Tommy—a Methodist, a football player, a kid from the West Texas nowhere. “It didn’t go over so well at first,” Casey Doyle said with a chuckle. But Nancy’s family knew better than to try to talk her out of something. They welcomed Tommy and watched him closely, and soon enough they loved him, too.

  Back in Snyder, Nancy set about sanding Tommy’s edges. They left his family church to attend the local Church of Christ three times a week. At home, there wasn’t any drinking or smoking or dancing or cursing, except that one time Tommy said, “Crap,” and if little Casey or his sister, Brandi, forgot the rules, well, Nancy helped them remember.

  But walking past the trunk involved a different kind of faith for Nancy. It meant leaving things in Tommy’s hands, and doing things Tommy’s way. For two years, Nancy followed that path. For two years, she walked past the trunk. Then two years began to seem like enough.

  One night after supper, they were settling into the living room and Nancy brought it up.

  “Tommy,” she said quietly, “is it okay if I open your mother’s trunk?”

  Tommy hesitated, then he whispered, “Sure.”

  So Nancy did.

  —

  SHE WAITED UNTIL he was out of the house, then she cleared off the top of the box and pried open the lid, embarrassed by her own racing heart. There was an old blanket on top, and she set it aside, then another blanket, some sweaters, a photo album, and a handmade coat. But near the bottom of the trunk, Nancy spotted an old shoe box. It was worn and separating at the seams, and somehow she knew instantly that she’d found what she wanted. She raised it gingerly to her lap, and lifted the cover.

  The envelopes were stacked in tidy rows and Nancy felt her hands trembling as she pulled them out, one by one, the airmail paper as thin as tissue, with red and blue checks around the edges and Jimmie’s loose cursive spilled across the pages inside. Line after line of his thoughts and dreams, all written to Tommy’s mom.

  “My Dearest,” he wrote in one of the first, from May 1944. “At last I can write a few lines, but of course there isn’t so very much I can tell you except I’m okay and a long ways from home. I’m in the South Pacific, but can’t say just where. It’s a pretty place, but Lord, it sure is hot. There are worlds of vegetation that I have never seen before, and I would be as well satisfied if I never had. But the nights are really beautiful. We are south of the equator and there are thousands of new stars, and they seem to be a lot closer. There is a lot to do tomorrow, so I will have to stop for now, but I’ll write again soon. Tell the folks hello, and kiss Tommy for me. Keep our home and our baby safe, and maybe in the not too distant future, we can be together again. Write as often as possible, and remember I love you very, very much. Forever, Jimmie.”

  A few days later, he wrote again: “My Precious, sure am ready for bed tonight. Have been swimming in the ocean today, and eating coconuts, and trying to find some ripe bananas. Sure wish you could be with me, what a lot of fun we could have, finding all these new things together. Gee, I sure do miss you, and of course you know you are the sweetest wife in the world. I am sending you a necklace and bracelet, made from shells from the sea. I hope you like them, and later on, maybe I can send one to Mother. As I can, I will try to send you different things from this part of the world. Take care of yourself and Tommy, and write often, and know I love you with all my heart. Forever, Jimmie.”

  Nancy stopped reading and stared forward, trying to grasp what it meant. There seemed to be a new letter almost every day, most of them several pages long, but Tommy’s mom had never shown them to anyone or even hinted that she had them. When Tommy got home, Nancy found herself crying as she said, “Oh, Tommy, just look,” but Tommy turned away, his eyes welling up and his big hands shaking. So Nancy came back to the box for a few hours each night, curled up on the sofa to drift through Jimmie’s words. She read V-mail cards from training in Nevada, and eight-page descriptions of the islands and the ocean, and long professions of his love signed with that word, Forever.

  “Darling,” he wrote at the end of his first week, “there aren’t any words to tell you how much I love you. But you know that our love can stand this being apart.” A few weeks later, he wrote from the combat zone, “It gives me a feeling of serenity knowing there will be a place waiting for me, a place where I can settle for good, and try to make up to you in part for all of the things you have had to put up with. There are times when I get to feeling pretty low about the whole business, but then when I realize that it is tough for you too, and how uncomplaining you have been about it all, it makes me feel pretty cheap.”

  The more Nancy read, the more bewildering the letters seemed. Looking at them, it was impossible to imagine that Jimmie had abandoned Tommy and his mom—but then, why did Jimmie’s brothers insist that he had? Why d
id they swear he’d called them from California, and that they’d driven out to see him, arriving at Jimmie’s apartment just as he slipped away—leaving his neighbors to confirm that he was alive?

  Nancy tried to ask Tommy what else he knew, but Tommy just winced and shook his head. He knew nothing, he said. He wished he knew less. He wasn’t even sure of his dad’s rank, let alone what sort of man he was. Every time Tommy saw the letters, his throat closed up.

  “I just couldn’t look at them,” he said. As the months went by, he never did.

  Neither did Casey. “I was against my mother bringing all this up,” he said later. “You just didn’t talk about this. You didn’t talk about it because Dad didn’t want to. So when Mom started reading all the letters, I was like, ‘Mom, please don’t bring it up. Dad doesn’t like it.’”

  But Nancy wouldn’t stop. She wasn’t even sure she could. There had to be an answer, some way to make it all make sense. She started placing phone calls to learn more about Jimmie. She called the Department of Veterans Affairs to see if they knew his combat history. She called the Army’s human resources office to request his service records. She even called a local Army recruiter to find out if there was anything left from his enlistment—some scrap of paper or hidden detail that might point toward an answer. But no matter where Nancy looked, she came up empty. The Army didn’t have a personnel file, they said. They had no record of his enlistment, no file on his missions, no information on his squadron or his crash. In fact, they didn’t have much more than his name in a database. Everything else about Jimmie Doyle, they said, had disappeared—probably burned up in a fire in Saint Louis.

  “I was skeptical,” Nancy said. “I kept telling them to look, but they kept telling me everything burned. I thought, Everything?”

  A year passed, then another, and Nancy’s hunt trailed off. She knew only fragments, and they didn’t add up. From the letters, she could see that Jimmie’s unit moved across several islands in the South Pacific, and she gathered from Tommy that Jimmie had been a tail gunner on a B-24 bomber, manning a machine gun at the back of the plane. But where did he fly? What targets did he hit? How much combat did he see? And why did his return address show a promotion to sergeant in midsummer? Nothing in the letters explained what Jimmie might have done to earn the rank. There were only vague references to the war. “I can’t tell you any details,” he would write, “but the Japs are sorry I’m here.”

  Nancy found a few other letters in the trunk, written by Jimmie’s friends after he disappeared. But those letters brought up more questions than answers. “I have talked to some of the fellows who flew the same day and saw what happened,” one man wrote. “I’m sorry I can’t tell you now the whole story. But when I return to the States, I am coming to see you.” There was no sign he’d ever come.

  As Nancy’s search faltered, so did her confidence. Maybe it had been a mistake to read the letters. Maybe Tommy and Casey were right. Maybe it was better to live with the scar than to reopen the wound. She’d wanted to make sense of Tommy’s past, but now it made less sense than ever.

  By May 2000, six years had passed since Nancy first opened the trunk. She’d stopped making calls and asking questions about Jimmie, but she was always on the watch. As she skimmed through the newspaper over Memorial Day weekend, she spotted an article in Parade magazine. Some doctor in California named Pat Scannon was searching for missing airplanes. He was tracking down men like Jimmie who disappeared in Palau. There was a picture of Scannon on the opening page, a leathery figure with a gray beard, who stood before a vintage bomber with a climbing rope tossed over his shoulder. The article described him as “the Indiana Jones of military archaeology,” and Nancy practically ran to the computer to find his phone number. She left a message at his office, and a few days later, Scannon called back. His voice sounded weary. He’d been flooded with calls, he said. He wanted to get back to everyone, but it was hard.

  Nancy swallowed. “Well,” she said, “I just wanted you to know that my husband’s name is Tommy Doyle and his father was Jimmie Doyle . . .”

  Scannon’s voice perked up. “And his plane went down on September 1, 1944,” he said, “and the tail number ended in 453, and the pilot was Jack Arnett, and . . .”

  Nancy listened in disbelief as Scannon rattled off a dozen details she’d never heard. When he paused, she whispered, “But how did you know all that?”

  “Because,” Pat Scannon said, “I’ve been searching for that plane for six years.”

  TWO

  WRECKAGE

  The first time Pat Scannon went to Palau, he wasn’t sure what he was searching for. He wasn’t even sure why he’d come. Officially, he was part of a scuba expedition looking for a sunken Japanese ship, but Scannon wasn’t a very good scuba diver, he didn’t know much about the ship, and he hadn’t even heard of Palau until a few months earlier.

  It was 1993, and Scannon was not the kind of guy who typically disappeared on exotic vacations. He was a medical researcher in his midforties who worked for a small biotech company in a suburban office park in California, and he was sufficiently disinterested in the great outdoors that his wife, Susan, had long since given up asking for his help in the garden—where instead of pruning or planting or weeding he tended to stare into the distance, thinking about work. Though he was licensed as a physician, held a PhD in chemistry, and had actually founded the company where he worked, Scannon also had little interest in corporate affairs. Years earlier, he’d given up control of the company to a team of experienced executives, preferring to focus his own attention on esoteric research into therapeutic monoclonal antibodies. He sometimes confessed to his friends that he’d only built the Xoma Corporation because he wanted a job there, and having built it, he arrived for work each morning with his plastic ID tag dangling from a lanyard around his neck, disappearing inside his office to spend ten or twelve hours under the fluorescent lights. A typical workweek for Scannon consisted of sixty hours at Xoma, plus the hour’s drive to and from his stucco home on a dead-end street in town.

  Like most things in Scannon’s life, the invitation to Palau came while he was at work. One of his colleagues at Xoma was a man named Chip Lambert, who ran the company’s infectious disease program. Like Scannon, Lambert had spent his career studying the intersection of chemistry and medicine, but their similarities ended there. Where Scannon was shy and unassuming, with a light, airy voice that tended to wash away in a crowd, Lambert was tall and burly and strode the hallways of Xoma with a gruff exuberance. He had a mop of curly hair and a brushy mustache that danced above a mischievous grin, and he was a world-class scuba diver who’d spent much of the 1970s tooling around the Middle East—working for the king’s hospital in Saudi Arabia, then briefly at the World Health Organization, while zipping away each weekend to dive the earth’s finest waters, from Scotland to New Zealand and throughout the Red Sea. Now that Lambert was back in California, he and his wife, Pam, ran a small scuba shop on the weekends. When Lambert offered diving classes to his colleagues at Xoma, Scannon was among the first to sign up. Over a few weekends, he earned a basic scuba certification, but mostly enjoyed soaking up Lambert’s stories about Cyprus, Vanuatu, and the Poor Knights Islands, a world that Scannon could hardly imagine. Then Lambert started talking about Palau, and Scannon wondered if they were both imagining it.

  There was gold on the islands, Lambert said. Hidden gold, mountains of it, stolen by the Japanese during World War II and buried in secret hideaways throughout the Pacific. For half a century, treasure hunters had been tracking down various deposits. They called it “Yamashita’s gold,” after a notorious Japanese general, and the total value was said to be $100 billion. There were books on the treasure, and lawsuits over it, and more than a few ruined lives. A year earlier, Imelda Marcos of the Philippines confessed that most of her own fortune came from the gold, but a man named Rogelio Roxas claimed that Marcos had stolen it from him, after he uncove
red a secret bunker in the Philippine hills full of gems and swords and a golden Buddha whose head was stuffed with diamonds. That case was making its way through the US courts, which would soon award Roxas $22 billion in damages.

  Meanwhile, several of Lambert’s friends were tracking another deposit of the gold. They had sources in the Japanese government who said that a hospital ship had been sunk in 1945 while ferrying some of the treasure past Palau. By studying old maps and documents, Lambert and his friends hoped to find the ship and bring home the gold. But first they were planning a preliminary trip to generate publicity and funds.

  Scannon listened with his jaw hanging open. It sounded like something from a serial film, or a comic he might have read as a child. Tintin and the Golden Buddha. But Lambert was just beginning. The preliminary trip, he explained, was a search for the first combat kill of President George H. W. Bush. During the summer of 1944, Bush was a young naval aviator flying photographic reconnaissance missions over the islands. One day in July, he sank his first enemy vessel, a 150-foot trawler. The mission report placed that strike on a northern atoll called Kayangel (kayh-ang-el'), but after half a century of diving and fishing in the area, no one had found the trawler. Now Lambert’s team had come across photos taken during the mission, which showed the ship going down beside a distinctive patch of coral. They planned to bring the photos to Palau, locate the patch of coral, and drag a magnetometer through the water to pinpoint the ship’s metal. Then they would shoot underwater video of the sunken wreck, and produce a documentary on the forty-first American president’s virgin kill. They would use all the money and publicity from the documentary to fund the search for Yamashita’s gold.