“Of course I grew out of it. I’m not exactly the romantic type, am I? But I always had a soft spot for him. I always wondered what happened to him. As you know, he didn’t so much vanish, like you did, as—I don’t know—fade away? Like when somebody leaves a dinner party without saying good-bye, and nobody can remember when she saw him last.” I stub out the cigarette. “Time marched on. I went to college for a bit, traveled for a bit, started selling my photographs, ended up with the Associated Press. Then the war. I got to Europe in ’44, a couple of months before the invasion, and managed to land on Omaha with the second wave. Carried on through to Paris, as close to the action as I could get. Then I got to talking with this fellow who’d flown with the Republican air force in Spain, during the civil war. We had a few drinks and so on. And he told me the strangest thing, right out of the blue.”

Now, I’ve been watching Foster’s face throughout this little biographical sketch. I want to see how she reacts to my assessment of Mallory, how she reads the story of my life, abridged edition, and whether she notices all the little spaces between the lines. And of course, the last part. The Spanish air force. The war. The thing about war, if you’ve been in one, you never really leave it, even when it’s all over and everybody goes home. A piece of you remains behind, buried in the blooded earth, and when somebody calls it back—as I just did—that piece sort of jumps to attention, if you know what I mean. And you can’t hide a thing like that.

But maybe this woman isn’t like everyone else, after all. Maybe Irene Foster has been hiding from the world so long, she’s just buried too deep beneath her own skin for anyone to discover in some flicker of eyebrow or quiver of chin. Maybe this woman has become a Lindquist after all. She listens to me, strokes her cat with one hand and her coffee cup with the other, and when I pause, as I do now, she takes a sip and asks me to continue. What strange thing, Miss Everett? What did the Spanish fellow tell you?

“He told me that he knew Sam Mallory in Spain, that he’d helped the Republicans during the civil war. And he knew when and where Mallory’s plane went down, in May of 1937.”

Lindquist bends her head to snuggle the cat on her lap.

“Well?” I say.

“Well, what?”

“Well, aren’t you fascinated to learn how Mallory died? Don’t you want to know the rest of the story? How we found the wreckage?”

She lifts her head, and her eyes are wet. The lashes are stuck together.