Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille by James van Pelt Page A

cosigned the loan. Wife? Mother? Sister?
    A name search for Howard J.T. Shirley brought her to a Shirley genealogical site where she found he died in 1982. Margaret L. Shirley, his wife, died two years later. The site listed one child, Nathaniel Shirley, born January 15, 1929, died August 6, 1945. He was sixteen when he died, the same day the atomic age opened its awful eye over Hiroshima. Meadoe could hear her father’s voice, thickly accented, “Your grandfather dug all day for the rest of his friends. Dirt covered their faces. There were scars on his arms from broken glass in the rubble.”
    Nothing turned up on a search of Nathaniel’s name.
    The historical archives were in the basement. Turning on lights, Meadoe worked her way to the local history shelves. On the top row, Harriston High School annuals. Nathaniel smiled from the juniors section in the 1945 book, and the little hairs on her arms stood straight up as they had when she’d pulled down the wallpaper. She wished she’d brought a sweater.
    Nathaniel had light hair with a shiny, sculpted look that most of the boys sported. Glasses. He wore a dark tie, white shirt and dark jacket. Varsity track. Art club. She thumbed through the annual. Grainy black and white photos of football games and victory gardens. At the homecoming dance, several boys were in uniform. Some downtown Harriston buildings in the background of the homecoming parade were familiar.
    Prom pictures were in a copy of the school paper, The Lions Roar , stuck in the back of the book. On the second page, she found Nathaniel, his arm around a pretty girl with dark hair like her own, but curled instead of straight, hanging to her shoulders instead of trimmed to just under the ears. The caption read, “The Prom’s best couple: Junior Nathaniel Shirley and Senior Erica Weiss.”
    Meadoe went back to her computer. If Nathaniel did the wall art, he didn’t enjoy it long before he died. Why did people move in and out of her house so often? Thoughtfully she typed in a search for “ghosts and poltergeists.” Her research offered numerous explanations for ghosts and hauntings. One source suggested that ghosts wanted attention. That’s why so many of them threw things. Another argued that poltergeist phenomena was caused by the emotional upheaval of someone in the house, generally a pre-adolescent girl. Was she effectively pre-adolescent? Could her house be responding to her? One ghost hunter said ghosts recreated the circumstances that held them to the earth. Another maintained ghosts existed because they had unfinished business.
    In the August ’45 Harriston Independent , on the second to last page, she found Nathaniel under the headline, “Truck Strikes Local Youth.” He’d been crossing the intersection of Harriston Boulevard and Broadway when a milk truck hit him. The paper reported Nathaniel died at St. Joseph hospital that afternoon of head injuries. Beside the article was the same class picture she’d seen in the yearbook looking so formal, so young in his coat and tie.
    Before going home, she stopped at the video store.
    “Do you carry The Outlaw , with Jane Russel?” Meadoe asked.
    The teen cashier keyed the title into his computer and shook his head.
    “ Four Jills in a Jeep ?” On the wall beside her, Meadoe counted at least 60 copies of the latest release. “How about The Haunted Honeymoon or Destination Tokyo ?”
    “Nope.” He hit a key that brought up more information about the films. “Jeeze, those are old. You’d probably have to order them special.”
    “ Casablanca ?”
    “That we have. Two copies. The film’s in black and white though. I’m supposed to tell you that because some guy rented it last year and raised a stink because he thought it was defective.”
    At home she phoned Joan. “I’ve got curtains to put up you can help with, and a video to watch if you aren’t doing anything.”
    “I’ll bring wine,” Joan said.
    In the middle of the afternoon, the