When he wasn’t pacing, he was sitting on the edge of the porch, very much like he had as a boy, keeping lookout for a nondescript sedan to pull up after he’d been directed to wait outside his latest foster home, only to be taken away to another, and another, until he started thinking maybe he was better off in that Mennonite orphanage. And then he had started thinking that maybe he didn’t need another of their homes or institutions or even a high school like the regular kids from regular homes had—that maybe what he really needed was to strike out on his own, and for good, and so he would dream of hopping on a train or fighting in Spain or later of a room in a boarding house that he could call his very own while he saved for night school. And then the war came. At least the Army would want him, or so Lett thought. Only death and desertion wanted him in the end. That thought made him want to pull up all the planks off the bungalow porch and smash them over a rock and light the fragments and splinters into a bonfire before ripping off the plain fatigues they’d given them and tossing them on the fire.

He wasn’t done. He had more in him. He needed more.

Selfer had promised to get a letter to Heloise. He needed that, too. That had to be done.

He walked more laps around his bungalow, his fists balling up. Then he shot inside, grabbed the letter he’d written, came back out, and bounded down the middle lane of the clearing. He made his way through camp using various trails and cut-throughs, the clearings he passed like so many compartments, drawers, cells. He followed the signs. A longer, bending trail through forest delivered him to the area holding what was called the Main House—Lansdale had mentioned it in their conversations as being Selfer’s quarters. It stood on a ridge, open to a horizon made up of three layers—the green island coastline, the gray-blue sea, the azure sky spotted with white puffs.

The well-groomed house grounds resembled those of an upscale country club, with shrubs like sculptures and a lawn like a putting green and palm trees in rows like giant sentries. He’d expected to find guards. He saw no one, not even a gardener. In the circular driveway before the house stood a couple brand-new jeeps and gleaming postwar sedans, a DeSoto convertible, a Chrysler four-door. The Main House wasn’t that imposing in itself—a ranch style in an L shape with white walls and a modest swimming pool nestled in the L’s angle. Not quite modern but with clean lines, one of those homes owned by people who made it rich at a rapid rate and liked to pretend they were still homespun and ordered out of the Sears catalog.