The slightly smaller cottage next door was home in the summers to the Howard family from Chicago. The oldest girl, Mary, was eighteen, two years younger than Chase would have been this summer. The middle girl, Stacy, was fifteen now, a year younger than Harry; and the youngest, Alice, was just Jinny’s age—thirteen.

As far as Harry could tell, the trouble started one afternoon down on the dock. The two families had barely been in Stone Harbor a week, and Harry was with Stacy, watching Jack swim, when Mary came down, spreading out her towel near Harry, sitting down.

“You’d never know he’d been shot, would you?” Harry said, watching Jack’s arms slice through the water.

“Do you know what happened, Harry?” Mary said.

Harry shrugged. “It was after Chase got killed, that’s all I know. A few months after, I mean. They were in the same regiment, but I guess Jack’s company stayed behind when Chase’s went over the top that day at Belleau Wood. They stayed there for days, just shooting at anything that moved in their direction through the wheat field. That’s all I know. That’s all he’ll say about any of it.”

Mary sat there with her arms crossed over her drawn-up knees, chin resting on her arm. “Oh, poor Chasey,” she said, finally, like a sigh.

Stacy shot Mary a look. Harry said nothing, though he knew that the last summer the two families had been in Stone Harbor—1916—Chase and Mary had been sneaking around and falling in love or something. Seventeen and fifteen at the time, they had done their best to keep their relationship a secret—particularly from Wilma, who had a tendency to get angry if Chase paid too much attention to any one girl. Harry had seen signs of it, though, including the letters that had arrived from Mary that fall and all the way through when Chase had left for the Marines in the spring of 1917. Harry had tried asking Chase about it several times, teasing, cajoling, trying to figure out how serious things were between the two of them. But trying to get personal information out of Chase had been like trying to get a pearl out of a sunfish—it just wasn’t going to happen. And Harry wasn’t about to ask Mary now and bring up something that did no good to talk about now that Chase was dead.

“You’d have to ask Jack about it, though,” Harry said finally. “Maybe he’d tell you, you never know.”