“It’s been a long day.”
“I keep forgetting that you woke up this morning in Florida. It’s no wonder you look exhausted. Well, your room’s all made up.”
My room.
She was referring to the guest cabin that Stacey had lived in years earlier, when she was newly returned to Maine and working as a wildlife biologist, back before she and I had started dating. I probably stayed there more than anyone else now, but I still felt uncomfortable when Ora called the place mine.
“There’s something I want to show you before you go,” she said.
I hadn’t noticed the cigar box on the table beside her until she lifted it with both hands. Long ago, maybe on the occasion of the birth of one of their two daughters, someone had presented Charley with a box of White Owls. I raised the lid.
Inside was a rattling collection of medals.
I counted three Purple Hearts, two Legions of Merit, a Silver Star, a Distinguished Flying Cross, a Prisoner of War Medal, and a Distinguished Service Cross, which he had somehow never mentioned having received. It was only the second-highest award given out by the U.S. military.
“He never told me he’d won all of these!”
Ora lowered her glass of whiskey. “Won isn’t the word Charley would have used. He keeps that box in the closet with his shoeshine kit. I can’t remember the last time he took it out. While you were outside, after you’d asked me about his past, I went to fetch it. I found this inside with the medals.”
From the pocket of her sweater, she produced a yellow Polaroid photograph. It showed a man who looked to be half-bear. His hair was long and black, and his beard grew high up on his cheeks. His dark eyes were narrowed, and his chapped lip was curled. The expression could only be described as murderous.
“Who is this?”
“I have no idea.”
“A friend from the army?”
“No friend of Charley’s could look that hateful.”
“Why would he keep this picture with his military decorations?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But my husband has always had conflicted feelings on the accolades he’s received. I’m not sure he cares about medals and honors. But they’re part of his story, and Charley doesn’t believe in airbrushing history. Look on the back.”
I flipped over the snapshot and saw, in Charley’s familiar bold hand, these words:
In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains, on the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows, In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame, The good deeds a man has done before defend him.
“I looked it up online,” Ora said. “It’s from the Bhagavad Gita.”
Despite having only a junior high education, the old pilot was a secret autodidact who read widely, especially history, and liked to conceal his learning beneath his folksy affect. Nevertheless, I couldn’t imagine the man quoting Sanskrit scripture.
“What do you think it means?” I asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Can I take this photo with me?”
“Of course.” When I leaned down to kiss her cheek, she whispered, “You’ll find him, won’t you?”
“I will.”
Afterward, I made my way down the boardwalk between the main building and the guesthouse. The entire property was connected by these raised ramps so that Ora could wheel herself to the woodshed to get kindling for the stove or even to the dock to cast White Wulff flies to those trout I had seen rising.
The cabin had electricity, provided by solar panels on the south-facing roof, but I lighted the propane lanterns mounted on the walls, in part because I preferred the smell and the white-hot intensity of their illumination.
I tossed my duffel on the bed and set the snapshot of the were-bear on the bureau.
In all likelihood, the monstrous man had nothing to do with the current crisis, but I would keep this photograph anyway in the hope of finding someone who could identify him. If nothing else, I needed to satisfy my curiosity about who he was.
It hadn’t escaped my notice that, in his letter, Charley hadn’t mentioned the badge that had precipitated his disappearance. The omission had been deliberate, because he knew it was a clue that I would follow. The Warden Service had stopped stamping identification numbers on its badges long before Charley had even joined the bureau.
Whose could it have been?
Charley had never mentioned a fellow officer from that era who had been a mentor to him.
The letter, then. What could it tell me?
I turned up the gas fueling the lamp beside the bed. In the hissing white glow, I examined the text for hidden meanings.
I may be a fool about my suspicions. I won’t know for certain until I talk to some folks I hoped never to meet again.
As I’d suspected, whatever this was about had happened years earlier, before Charley and I had become friends.
My fear is that I made the worst mistake a man can make in this life.
The “worst mistake a man can make” could mean only one thing to the Charley Stevens I knew: killing another human being.
As a reconnaissance pilot in Vietnam, he wouldn’t have engaged in direct combat, but he had called in the locations of enemy forces who would then have been subjected to air strikes and other bombardments. Depending upon how susceptible he was to guilt, a Bird Dog pilot could feel as if he had the blood of thousands on his hands.
There might also have been another wartime incident of which I was unaware, something that had happened after Charley had been shot down.
He seldom spoke of the experience, but he had spent nearly a year in Hỏa Lò Prison, better known as the Hanoi Hilton, where one of his fellow inmates was a future United States senator and presidential candidate. Torture had left him with burns and rope scars. He had suffered a broken leg in the crash that had healed badly and yet rarely revealed itself. The only time he showed any sign of a limp was in bitterly cold weather
