It was the cross of every generation, Dolly supposed: boys who left and never came home. She knew that there were causes worth fighting and dying for, but she wished somehow that Chase would have been all right. That all of the boys could have been all right. That there was not such cruelty and terror in the world altogether. Like the death camps in Europe, for one thing, news of which her parents had tried to shield her from when it came out in 1945. They had thought she was too young to be faced with such horrors, though children much younger than herself had suffered through them, had died as a consequence. But Dolly had learned—only a little, but some—and then in the middle of the night one night in the first year of her marriage, Byron had awakened in a cold sweat, mumbling. It was only then she’d learned that he had seen one of the camps, had been present at its liberation. He would not say what he’d seen, but he held her so tightly that she almost couldn’t breathe, and they had never spoken of it since, not that next morning, not ever. She yearned to know what he had experienced—to really understand him—but she had been afraid to ask, afraid to try to knock down the walls he’d put up, visible in his otherwise inscrutable eyes.

She was relieved to see that JJ Mickelson’s name wasn’t on the World War II Honor Roll plaque. She walked home, determined that she would find out from the ladies what had happened to him.

The problem of finding out what had really happened to her own husband loomed larger. She believed she could be a better wife to him if he told her, but because she was trying to be a good wife, she hated to press him. It was one of those perplexing conundrums that seemed to present themselves often in her dealings with Byron.

Well, at least she was making tangible headway with the Mickelson house—once she had boosted herself up through the window and taken a look around the parlor, she began to feel better. The piano gleamed, the chandelier sparkled. She decided that it simply wasn’t possible that such a lovely place could be cursed.