In the wait for the dogs, the men sat on the porch of Howard Reynolds’s home, drinking iced tea and coffee made by Eleanor, talking of where they had been, making quiet guesses of where Matthew could be. There was concern in their talk, in the way they wagged their heads, smoked their cigarettes, paced the yard near the porch. Soon their wives began to arrive, carrying trays of food they had prepared for their own suppers.

It was a practice Noah knew well from his own boyhood and from war—women appearing out of nowhere, or what seemed to be nowhere, food in their hands, looks of worry on their faces, their presence filling space that seemed empty without them.

The way the women were at Howard Reynolds’s home caused Noah to remember a girl in a small, bomb-damaged café in some German village he did not remember by name, though he knew it was where his unit had been a few days after the surrender. The girl had seemed to appear from shadows and to fade back into them as she served the table—her head kept down, her eyes never looking at anyone. Some of the men with him had made remarks to her about being German and probably a Nazi, telling her she could make up for things by coming around to their camp at night. Laughing the way they did, reaching to grope her, but missing as she dodged their hands, had caused anger to leap in him that he had never felt—before or since—and he had slapped the palm of his hand on the table and said in a hard voice, “Leave her alone,” and the men, surprised by his outburst, had stopped their toying with the girl. Later, one of them had told him, “You looked like you was ready to kill us. Nobody ever saw you like that.”

An image of the girl came back to Noah’s mind. Tall. Pretty. Reddish hair. Pale skin. He remembered a bandage on her right arm. He had seen her one other time—a day later, as his unit was leaving the village. She had been standing in the doorway of the café, watching the vehicles moving slowly on the street. When she recognized him, she lifted her hand shyly and waved. He had waved back. Later, he had dreamed about her several times—dreams from sleep and dreams that came to him when he was wide awake, but with a drifting mind. In the dreams, he had seen himself with the girl, the girl being his wife, making him warm with the way she smiled and with her body and with the gentle way she talked to him.

It was a dream worth remembering.

Whitlow Mayfield arrived as the day was losing the last of its light. He had with him two droopy-skin bloodhounds and lanterns, and was told of the area covered by the searchers. “Not much reason to look at them places again,” he said. “Not to start with at least.” There was a tone of fret in his voice. The natural smile he wore was missing, replaced by a furrow across his forehead and a tremor in his hands.