“I saw more heroism in those days than most men see in a lifetime, and I saw the bad stuff, too, the way men turned coward or turned cruel. Of the thirty-six in that initial platoon, only four of us came back alive. One killed himself a year later, Charlie Green, a corporal, a Kentucky boy. James Rapp robbed a bank, pulled eight years of hard time, then got out, stole a car the same day, and drove into a phone pole. Some said it was intentional, another suicide. No one really knows. The third survivor was from California, Alex Chopin, a good kid, a little flaky but solid in a fight. After the war, he lived rough for a while in LA, then disappeared into some kind of commune up the ass end of Humboldt County. As for me, number four…” Ken sat, his eyes dark and distant. “I lost my wife. I struggled.”

“You said there was a point.”

“People change. That’s the point. They change in wartime most of all.”

“Do you really think he killed her?”

“I think it’s possible.”

I put down the glass, and rose to my feet, dry-mouthed.

“Sit down, Gibby.”

“I think you’ve said enough.”

“You don’t have the facts, son, not about this case or your brother or what war can do to a man.”

“So give them to me.”

“I told you, kid. It’s not my place.”

“He couldn’t have changed that much.”

“War and prison and drugs.” Ken reached for my untouched glass, poured the whiskey into his, and leaned back. “You do the math.”

At home much later, I stayed awake for hours, afraid that if I slept, I would dream of a river and mud, and small men come for killing. I pictured Ken on a windswept hill—this friend of my father who’d fought young, and lost some piece of himself. He’d known war, as had my brothers; and without meaning to, he’d put some of that war inside me.

The Jason I’d known.

Jason as he might now be.

I didn’t know what to believe, so I twisted and turned, and each time I drifted, I started awake. Eventually, though, I slept, and the dreams that came were not of war or pain or prison but of Becky Collins, who smiled in the sun, her eyes like blue flowers.

Have faith, she said. Life is beautiful.

I woke in a sweat, hoping she was right.

18

Detective French rose early and left the house before the sun had cleared the trees. He’d spent most of the night wrestling with thoughts of his son and murder and a dead girl’s cloudy eye. It looked bad for Jason: the photos of Tyra’s torture and death, the bloody scalpel taped to the back of his son’s dresser.

But still the doubts lingered.

Still, these images of the boy he’d raised.