A Traitor to Memory

He worked through the place back to front, saying, “Dad?” as he opened a bedroom door and then a bathroom door. Libby followed. She was about to tell him it was sort of obvious that Richard wasn't at home, so why was Gideon yelling for him like he'd lost his hearing in the last twenty-four hours when he shoved on another door, swung it wide, and revealed the icing on the cake of the flat's overall weirdness.

Gideon ducked through the doorway, and she trailed him, saying, “Whoops! Oh, sorry,” when she first caught a glimpse of the uniformed soldier standing just inside. It took her a moment to realise the soldier wasn't Richard playing dress-up with the hope of spooking the hell out of them. It was, instead, a mannequin. She approached it gingerly and said, “Jeez. What the hell …?” and glanced at Gideon. But he was already at a desk at the far side of the room, and he had its fold-down front opened and was rooting through all its cubbyholes, looking so intense that she figured he wouldn't hear her even if she asked what she wanted to ask, which was what the hell Richard was doing with this weirdo piece of crap in his house and did Gid think Jill knew about it?

There were display cases as well, the kinds that you saw in museums. And these were filled with letters, medals, commendations, telegrams, and all sorts of junk that upon inspection appeared to have come from World War II. On the walls were pictures from the same era, all showing a dude in the Army. Here he was on his stomach, squinting down the barrel of a rifle like John Wayne in a war movie. There he was running alongside a tank. Next he was seated cross-legged on the ground, at the front of a pack of similar dudes with their weapons slung over their bodies all casual, like having an AK-47—or whatever it had been in those days—across your shoulder was pretty much par for the course. It wasn't what anyone with a grain of sense would show himself doing today. Not unless he was part of some neo-Nazi freedom fighter let's-get-rid-of-everyone-who's-not-a-WASP group.

Libby felt queasy. Getting out of this place in the next thirty seconds didn't seem like such a bad idea.

This thought was reinforced when she saw the last set of pictures, which showed the same guy as before but this time in completely different circumstances. He looked like someone from a Nazi death camp. He must have weighed about fifteen pounds, and his body was one big scab and approximately three million oozing sores. He was lying on a pallet in what looked like a jungle hut, and his eyes were so sunken into his head that it seemed they might burn right through his skull.

Behind Libby, drawers slammed shut and other drawers opened. Paperwork shuffled. Things flopped to the floor. She turned and watched what Gideon was doing, thinking, Richard's really going to blow a fuse over this one, but then, not much caring because Richard was reaping what Richard had spent a long time sowing.

She said, “Gideon. What are we looking for?”

“He's got her address. He has to have it.”

“That doesn't make sense.”

“He knows where she is. He's seen her.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“She's written to him. He knows.”

“Gid, did he tell you that?” Libby didn't think so. “Hey, why would she write to him? Why would she try to see him? Cresswell-White said she can't contact you guys. Her parole will be screwed up if she does. She's just spent twenty years in the joint, right? You think she wants to go back for three or four more?”

“He knows, Libby. And so do I.”

“Then what are we doing here? I mean, if you know …” Gideon was making less and less sense by the hour. Libby thought fleetingly of his psychiatrist. She knew the shrink's name, Dr. Something Rose, but that was all. She wondered if she should phone every Dr. Rose in the book—how many could there be?—and say, Look, I'm a friend of Gideon Davies’. I'm getting freaked out. He's acting too weird. Can you help out?

Did psychiatrists make house calls? And more to the point, did they take it seriously if a friend of a patient called and said it looked like things were getting out of hand? Or did they then think the friend of the patient should be the next patient? Shit. Hell. What should she do? Not call Richard, that's for sure. He wasn't exactly playing the r?le of Mr. Sympathy By The Bucketful.

Gideon had dumped out each of the desk drawers on the floor and had done a thorough job of searching through their contents. The only thing left was a letter holder on top of the desk, which for some bizarre reason—but by then, who was counting them?—he went for last, opening envelopes and throwing them onto the floor after glancing at their contents. But the fifth one he came to, he read. Libby could see it was a card with flowers on the front and a printed greeting inside along with a note. His hand dropped hard as he read the message.

She thought, He's found it. She crossed the room to him. She said, “What? She, like, wrote to your dad?”

He said, “Virginia.”

She said, “What? Who? Who's Virginia?”