If exploring Camp Hero makes him happy, then I’ll keep my mouth shut and pretend that I’m a believer.
“Look what I found.” He hands me a wrinkled black-and-white photograph of a tall, slim man standing next to an old car. He’s wearing an army uniform with a tucked-in shirt, high, almost baggy pants, and a cap that sits at an angle on his head. He’s scowling at the camera, his face half hidden in shadow. “This is my father.”
I finger the crumpled edges of the photo. I’ve never seen a picture of my great-grandfather before. “He looks serious.”
Grandpa smiles and leans forward in his chair. “He was serious. But he was a good father and a good husband. He was a first lieutenant in the army, and he commanded a lot of men. He was stationed on the Western Front through the fall of forty-three. After the Allies invaded Sicily, he was sent to Camp Hero to work on a secret project. He writes about it in his journal, though he never says what it was.”
His green eyes go cloudy and soft. “When he disappeared, we had no idea what happened. It was June fifth, nineteen forty-four. He went to the base that morning and never came back. His officers told us there was a training accident, that a gun went off by mistake and he died. But they wouldn’t let us see the body, and we could never find any soldiers who were there when it happened. I knew, even then, that something wasn’t right.”
I nod. I’ve heard this story dozens of times before, and I know when to nod, when to murmur my agreement. My grandpa has a compulsive need to constantly rehash the details of what happened to his father, and I never have the heart to stop him.
“As I got older I started to investigate.” He leans forward, and I recognize the excited look on his face. I stare down at the photo in my hands. I hate it when my grandfather gets this worked up—it reminds me of when I was ten, sitting outside the bunker, a sinking feeling growing in my stomach as Grandpa frantically shoved the journal at me.
“I realized that other people knew something wasn’t right about Camp Hero too. People started coming forward about their experiences with the Montauk Project, and all the facts started to fit together like a puzzle. My father disappeared at Hero right as the Project was getting off the ground and was never seen again.”
I avoid his gaze and turn the photo over, examining the writing on the back: Dean Bentley at House, May 11th, 1944. Only a few weeks before he disappeared.
“Everything changed after.” Grandpa turns back to his desk and is still, his lined hands resting on the papers in front of him. “Mother got so quiet. It was my father’s parents who really raised me. And my aunt Mary for a while. But she married young and moved away not long after my father disappeared.”
I look up, startled. While my grandfather repeats the story of his father over and over, he rarely talks about the rest of the family. I know almost nothing about my great-aunt Mary or what his mother, my great-grandmother, was like.
“Mary painted the picture that’s hanging in the hallway near the dining room, right?” It’s a landscape of Montauk during fall, bright red and yellow splashes, the trees reaching out toward the edge of the canvas. Just looking at it makes me feel restless.
“Yep.” Grandpa turns to face me. “She was a wild one. She eloped with a soldier from the base not long after my father left, and they moved back to his family farm as soon as the war was over. I think it was in South Carolina? Maybe Georgia. We didn’t see much of her after that. It was so expensive to travel, and it’s a hard life, farming, especially in those days. She came back a few times to visit, and we wrote letters. There was no email then.” He chuckles softly.
“Do you have any photos of you from when you were a kid?” I hand the photograph back to him.
He carefully slips it into the pages of a notebook on his desk. “Most of the family photos were lost after the fire that took my grandparents’ house in sixty-eight. I just found this one in my old treasure chest.”
He picks up a battered red tin box from his desk and hands it to me. It’s small and rusted, with a faded image of a bear on the top. I run my finger over the chipped paint.
“I used to put special knickknacks and things in there when I was little,” he says.
I pry the lid off. It’s warped with time, and the metal scrapes together before popping open. Inside are a bunch of random things: marbles, a small toy soldier, some string, an old bullet. “Why haven’t you shown me this before?”
He takes the box back from my hands. “I had forgotten all about it. I hid it in a loose board underneath my bed decades ago. Yesterday I was down there looking for my slippers and the board came up in my hand. There was the box. After all those years.”
“That’s so cool.”
“You’re telling me. I never told anyone about my treasures. No wait, that’s not true.” His face falls as he clutches the box tightly in both hands. “I told my father. It was a few weeks before he disappeared. I remember he gave me the photo and told me to put it in a safe place. So I showed him my hiding spot. He was the only one who ever knew.”
I lean forward and place my hands over his. “It’s a good thing you found it.” I squeeze his hands gently.
