Silence for the Dead(69)

“Oh, yes.”

He searched my face for another long moment. My heartbeat began the slow process of returning to its normal rhythm. I found I was looking for disgust in his expression, but I found none. He only nodded. “All right.”

He turned away and picked up the lamp. I followed him, remembering—barely—to watch my step. “What about you?” I said.

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think—?” Suddenly I could barely choke out the words. “Do you think you could ever leave here? Do you think you are still sick?”

“I don’t know.” He sighed. “It was bad, Kitty.”

“What happened?”

“I told you what happened. What room is this, do you suppose?”

“A powder room,” I said. “And that’s a bathroom over there, and if you think I’m going near it after what I’ve seen in the bathrooms in this house, you’ll have to think again. So answer my question. The real one. What happened, Jack?”

He turned in the doorway and looked at me again. It seemed to be his turn to be reluctant, but finally he shrugged, one-shouldered. “My men died.”

“Which men?”

“All of them.”

He turned away again, and I followed. “So you sat in the tent with the general,” I said, “or whoever he was. And they sent you home.”

“Yes. And the men I’d led, the ones I’d saved, were reassigned. And while I made speeches, all of them died. Not together, of course. Separately. The last one died in the spring of 1918, of influenza. He was one of forty-eight men who died in a single hospital that day. And then it was over.”

Dear God. “That isn’t your fault, Jack. You must know that.”

“I was home, Kitty,” he replied. “Staying in hotels and meeting politicians. Sending more men to the Front. They died.” His voice had grown as rough as a scrape of gravel. “I never asked to be sent home. But I agreed to it, didn’t I? I agreed to all of it. When the Armistice came—and I realized I’d actually lived through the damned thing—I suddenly saw that I’d have to go about the rest of my life. And the thought was completely beyond bearing.”

I haven’t had my chance to die, he’d told the general. “You went over there to die.” My voice was almost accusing. “You wanted it.”

“No. At least, not exactly. I thought I would die, and I was resigned to it. I expected it. That isn’t the same as a wish. But later . . . Later it became a wish. More than that, a desire. I just wanted everything to stop. I was so goddamned tired.” His voice was raw with grief. “After I woke up, I came here and I told them to lock me in a room, and in my room I stayed.”

I felt sick. “But the pills.”

“I wanted a way out. An exit if I needed it. Thornton is practical. I paid him quite a bit of money, after all. And I would take them, sometimes, just to feel nothing for a while. Until you arrived, and you took them from me.”

We’d been picking our way along corridors, poking into room after room. Water stains dripped down the walls; plaster had fallen in almost all of them, paint had peeled, and in one broken window a very comfortable bird’s nest had been built. It was the ruin of a house that has been abandoned for a decade, not for less than a year. The smell made my head hurt.

And then, ahead of me, Jack stopped. “We’ve found it,” he said.

I looked over his shoulder. He stood before a door that was closed and locked, the first locked door we’d seen. The lock looked much newer than the door did.

“Give me your keys,” he said.

I traded him the keys for the lantern and held the light as he tried each key in turn. I wondered whether I would feel a breath of cold at the back of my neck at any moment. “What if he comes?” I whispered.

Jack’s hands paused. “There’s nothing we can do about that,” he finally answered. “If he comes, he comes. There’s no stopping him. There never is.”

One of the keys hit home, and Jack swung open the door.

It was a long, high room, made perhaps to display portraits or sculptures, the things rich people collected to show to other rich people. It was a room that would have overwhelmed and echoed, but it didn’t do so now. It was full to the rafters, items piled and stacked along the walls, covered in sheets and jumbled everywhere. Only a narrow passage had been kept clear down the center of the room, between the monstrous stacks. I jumped as something fluttered against the far window, a bird or a bat.

We moved down the center walkway, Jack holding the lantern aloft. Under one sheet was a grand piano; under another was a thick stack of framed paintings leaning against the wall. Chairs, bookcases, mattresses, bed frames: an entire home, dismantled and stacked. If the Gersbachs had left this house, they’d gone as gypsies, with nothing except what they could carry on their backs.

“My God,” Jack said softly.

Boxes were shoved between the legs of the piano, stacked in the corners in toppling piles, placed atop chairs and sheet-covered love seats. Dozens, hundreds of boxes. Jack slid a trunk out from under a table, the scraping sound loud in the silence. In the circle of lamplight, he hesitated, glanced at me. Then he threw open the lid.

The first trunk contained dishes, carelessly stacked and tumbled, the edges of the expensive china plates chipped, the handles of the teacups cracked. We opened a box full of papers—receipts, half-written letters, tradesman’s bills, pages ripped from notebooks, old albums. The letters were signed in the bold hand of a man, the writing strong and clear: NILS GERSBACH. Anna and Mikael’s father.