“You don’t sound happy,” said Margaret Ann Finnemore, her voice coming through the speakers of the rental car.

Finn stared at the road ahead as he drove across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, heading for the Delmarva Peninsula. Delaware-Maryland-Virginia. He had to cross state lines just to find Camille Adams.

“That’s because I’m not happy,” he said to his sister. “The film was supposed to be ready today, and the courier company can’t even locate the woman responsible for developing it. She totally flaked out on us. Stopped answering her phone, isn’t reading text messages or checking e-mail.”

“Maybe something came up,” Margaret Ann suggested reasonably. In the Finnemore family, she was known as the reasonable sister.

“Yeah, she blew me off. That’s what came up.”

“She came so highly recommended. Billy Church—the guy at the National Archives—gave her such a strong recommendation. Didn’t he say she’s done work for the Smithsonian and the FBI?”

“He did. But he didn’t say we’d need the FBI to find her. I should’ve called her references instead of just checking her website.” The site for Adams Photographic Services had featured dramatic examples of photos she’d rescued or restored. It had also displayed a picture of Camille Adams, which had caught his attention. She was a beauty, with dark curly hair and faraway eyes—but apparently, no sense of responsibility.

“I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“I don’t need an explanation. I need to see what was on that roll of film, and I need to see it before the ceremony.”

“You couldn’t have sent someone else all the way out there?”

“The courier bailed after waiting around for an hour. Everybody else in the family has a job to do, so I decided to track her down myself.”

“Wouldn’t it be great if there were pictures of Dad?” Margaret Ann sounded wistful. As the eldest of the Finnemore siblings, she had the most vivid memories of their father. Finn had none of his own, which was probably why each surviving photo meant so much to him. “If there are any shots of him, they’d be the last ever taken. We could add them to the display at the White House.”

Finn tempered his expectations. “He shot that roll long before selfies were a thing.”

“Maybe one of his fellow officers or men took a picture of him.”

Finn had about a dozen things he could be doing instead of driving out to the edge of the known world, but he wanted to get his hands on those pictures. He hated the idea of letting his family down. The tightly knit clan consisted of steps and halves in every combination, and somehow it all worked. The somehow was his mom. They all revolved around her wellspring of strength and love.

Tomorrow would have been his father’s seventieth birthday. On the night before Richard Arthur Finnemore had been deployed on a mission to Cambodia, he had kissed his children good night, and then made love to his wife one last time. Nine months to the day after that, Finn was born to a woman who had recently been informed that her husband was missing in action. Sergeant Major Richard Arthur Finnemore had performed an act of heroism, surrendering his position to the enemy in order to protect a group of men involved in a covert operation.