He wasn’t insulted. He shrugged and with a stubbornness that hinted at pride he said, “I never had to.”

“You have to now,” Olive said, edging toward him. He was so big when she was near him, her head below the scorpion tattoo on his biceps. But her anger gave her courage. “If you don’t, you might never surf Waimea again. Or anywhere.”

She could see that he was intimidated by this, or at least daunted by the prospect. And so she walked past him and went to the first pile, then lifted the folder and slid out a formal document that looked like a diploma, framed with a blue ornamental border.

“Birth certificate,” she said, pinching it. “Forget the other names—this is our man. Max Mulgrave, born in 1950, Floristan County, Arkansas. A southerner. I looked up Floristan. It’s somewhere in the Ozarks. And here’s his diploma: Floristan, the Crusaders.”

“Class of ’69,” Sharkey said. “I was lifeguarding then. What was his sport?”

“No mention of sports here,” she said. “But Stickney did the donkey work by getting all these documents.”

“What’s this pile?”

“Military.”

Hearing the word, Sharkey involuntarily came to attention. He saw the Colonel. He hadn’t thought of him in years. As a father, yes, but not the man in uniform, peering down at him, a cigarette burning in his fingers. Stand up straight and Elbows off the table and You need a haircut. The smoker’s growl.

“He was a soldier,” Sharkey said in a wondering way, his voice trailing off, daunted again but this time by the fleeting apparition of a stranger in uniform, faceless, looming a little, a shadow, someone like his father. He looked aside, wincing.

“So it says. Stickney must have got his records through the Freedom of Information Act—or probably his department applied.” She was holding a manila folder. Opening it, she said, “This is all public domain stuff, but it’s something.” And she read, “Official Military Personnel File—service number, dates of service—July 1969 to May 1971. Branch—Unit C-Troop. Final Rank E 7, Gunnery Sergeant—Staff Noncommissioned Officer. Place of entrance, Fayetteville, Arkansas. Place of separation, Fort Irwin, California.”

“And what does that tell us, other than he was a grunt?”

“Look at the dates. He enlisted at eighteen, at the height of the Vietnam War.”

“My father’s war,” Sharkey said, and saw the man again, his severe face and upright posture, reeking of cigarette smoke, implacable in his order-giving.

“Straight from high school.”

“What was his outfit?”

“Says here Eleventh Armored Calvary Regiment. Look,” she said, passing the file to Sharkey, “a kind of insignia.”

“They call that a patch. Black Horse. What was his rank, did you say?”

“Gunnery sergeant.”

“Not all these guys went to Vietnam. He might have spent the war driving a desk in Omaha.”

“Turn the page,” she said. “Look at ‘Assignments and Geographical Location.’”

“You read this already?”