When We Were Enemies: A Novel(42)

I stare at Mac, my arms crossed at the mess we’ve stumbled into, but he’s still distant, watching. I make eye contact with Conrad off camera and Marty, but no one budges. Someone should say cut. We can’t keep sorting through this confusion on camera.

Mr. Christianson pipes up again, still scrolling through his phone.

“I still may be able to help. You said they met at Camp Atterbury? Do you know when?”

I wait for Mac to speak up with the “Gracelyn Branson approved” timeline, but he remains fully in observation mode, like a scientist watching his little lab mice run around the maze he’s placed them in and then recording their progress.

“Uh, I can estimate from what I’ve been told,” I respond when Mac fails to. I do the calculations from when my mom was born and the marriage dates and the tale of their romance. “Sometime in early ’43 I think.”

“Okay, that means he was in the Eighty-Third Infantry.” He’s back to his phone. “They trained at Atterbury and fought at the Bulge, which works with this being the ‘real’ date. It’s only more circumstantial evidence, but I can look him up on the AAD if that’d help.”

“The AAD?” I ask, unable to guess the meaning of the acronym.

“The National Archives has an AAD. Uh, Access to Archival Databases—I can look him up. An image of his headstone might even be linked. That would solve the mystery right there.”

Mr. Christianson scrolls through his phone, and I study the headstones.

“Um, Mr. Dorman, I think we have a problem.” Mr. Christianson holds up his device and looks past the cameras to where Mac stands with his hands behind his back. He walks toward the sexton with one raised eyebrow, obviously in his “in front of the camera” persona.

“How so?” he asks, nonchalantly, the frozen ground crunching under his shoes with each step.

“Uh, we should talk about this—you know—in private.” The middle-aged man darts his gaze between the cameras and then me before he returns his eyes to Mac.

“Whatever you have to say can be said in front of Elise, right?” Mac asks me directly. I can sense Mr. Christianson’s nervous energy in his tight grip on his phone and the slight tremble in his thick fingers. I do want to hear it, whatever it is. Especially since I have a sneaking suspicion that Mac already knows exactly what Mr. Christianson has to say.

“Of course,” I say, forcing my frozen knees to unlock so I can join the men looking at the phone.

“Well, if you insist.” He uses his neatly trimmed nail to point at a name on a website he’s pulled up on the phone. “He didn’t die in the Battle of the Bulge. If this is him—if this is in fact your grandfather—Thomas Highward of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Then, yes. There’s no military record of him dying in France or . . . anywhere else during the war for that matter. He was in the Eighty-Third Infantry, but he’s not listed among their casualties.” He tosses up his hands and gives me an apologetic look.

I glare at Mac as Mr. Christianson’s information sinks in, suspicion rising inside me.

“Did you know this?” I ask Mac, who doesn’t seem surprised in the slightest. In some effort to sensationalize this story, did he hold back important information? Some family secret that should’ve stayed in the family?

“Who, me?” he asks, his graying hair blowing across his face. “I’m as surprised as you are.” Then, without letting me rebut his only half-convincing denial, he turns to Mr. Christianson. “Is he even buried here, then?”

“That’s what I want to know,” I add, heat building up under my coat. I’ll have to tell my mom—something. As I wonder what I can possibly say to her, Mr. Christianson and Mac continue their conversation.

“I . . . I can look at the plot maps. But”—he holds up his antiquated phone—“you can request a copy of his military records. Might take a few weeks, but it would shed some light. Not all service records are available to the public. But for family, that’s a different story.”

“Yes. That’s perfect. Let’s do it.” Mac runs his manicured fingers through his hair and holds the unruly strands away from his face. “And what about the cemetery records? Can we take a look at the ones from 1944?”

“I have them in the office.” Mr. Christianson turns and weaves his way through the headstones without even a moment of hesitation.

I follow with more caution. Mac signals to the camera crew, and they hustle with all their equipment behind us. I’m not sure if they’re still rolling or not, but I don’t hold back when Mac catches up with me.

“What do you know that I don’t know?” I ask in a low voice, hoping that if Marty is recording our conversation, it won’t get picked up.

“Nothing. I swear. You can trust me, Elise,” he says, matching my pitch.

I don’t believe his denial. There’s no way Mac Dorman waltzed into this town without doing his research. He wanted this to happen. He set us up. I don’t know what the truth is, but I do know that Mac has found something salacious, and he wants the cameras focused on my face when I figure it out. I hope I’m wrong, that I’ve grown too skeptical in my years of PR and in the shadows of my family’s fame. But I doubt it.

We make our way to a small white building with a green roof and shutters. Mr. Christianson stops outside the door and rubs his feet on a black mat. The door jangles when he opens it, and the inner darkness swallows him up.