And there was the smell. The smell of things burning. The unmistakable stench of chemical fires in wet vegetation. And bodies. Like scorched hair and rotted pork. Gaines knew the mind did not pick favorites, did not prefer one recollection over another. Some days he could recall the warm aroma of fresh popcorn, the ghost of some long-forgotten and too-brief childhood. But that was always fleeting—there, and then gone. The darker sense memories lingered for hours, and it was at such times that he began to worry for the stability of his own mind. He too was fragile, and he wondered how long it would be before the seams began their inevitable and irreparable divide.

And afterward, after he had returned home, luck became important, fate even, because there was no logical reason for having survived the war. Why had one man died and another lived?

There was no delineation or marker identifying those who would see home and those who would not. Did not matter where you had come from, whether you were born army, a volunteer, or a draftee. When it came, it came. It did not matter if you were loved or despised, whether you attended church for faith or simply to steal from the charity box, whether you worshipped your mother or cursed her blind, whether you lied and swindled, blasphemed, whether you reveled in each and every one of the seven deadly sins or adhered to the letter of each commandment as a point of personal law. War possessed no prejudice, no predetermination, no preference. War would take you as you were, no questions asked.

Why? How were such matters decided? And who did the deciding?

It was such questions that invaded the normalcy and routine of his life. It was such questions that he tried not to ask himself.

But then there were moments: moments of self-doubt, moments when he questioned his own humanity, moments when he questioned the human race itself, the things of which men were made, the things that drove them, their purposes, their aspirations, their rationale. Surely war was invented by man, and if man could invent war, then was there no level to which he could not stoop?

Gaines did not believe Webster, not for a moment. He could see the man with his hands around Nancy Denton’s throat. He could see the man choking the life out of the poor, defenseless, beautiful teenager. Perhaps Webster had earned a taste for killing in Guadalcanal, and he had needed to satiate that taste any way he could. Gaines did not believe that Webster had found a dead girl in a shack by the side of the road. He had taken her there, and he had taken her there to kill her.

They found the heart. The girl’s heart. Or they found what Gaines could only assume had once been her heart. Four yards east, twelve yards north, just as Webster had told them. It looked like a small, dark knot of something, like a fragment of wood, a chunk of dried leather, and even as they opened the metal box within which it had been contained, there was a certainty that it would stand no physical contact. It was nothing more than dust, in truth, and whatever cloth it might have been wrapped in was gossamer-thin, again little more than a memory of what it had once been, and the box itself, once sturdy, once capable of carrying nails and bolts and screws and suchlike, was rusted and frail, and it came apart in pieces as Gaines and Hagen tried to rescue it from the earth.

The simple truth was that they had followed Webster’s directions, and they had found something that could have been a sixteen-year-old girl’s heart in a metal box. Irrespective of the fact that it was no longer a heart at all, it was something, and it was where Webster had said it would be. That was all that Gaines had needed to confirm his worst fears and his most assured suspicions.

Standing there, his breath coming hard and fast, not only from the physical exertion of digging, but also the mental stress of what was happening, Gaines believed that the only mind he possessed was broken. Sometimes his certainty of this was intense, and it burned with the luminescence, the intensity, the smell of a heat tab beneath a makeshift stove.

Other times he believed he was the only who’d returned sane.

When he closed his eyes, he could still see the dead. He could see the pieces of the dead. He could see heaps of blood-soaked fatigues and flak jackets outside the makeshift triage tent. Almost as if to say, Hey boys, if the NVA don’t get getcha, we’ll finish the job pronto right here and now!

Only at such times could people look at one another and say all that needed to be said without uttering a single word.

Gaines possessed that same feeling then—right there in Whytesburg—as he and Hagen dug into the wet ground. They did not speak as they worked, and they did not speak when they found what they’d hoped they would not find.

The earth had given up Nancy Denton, and now it had given up her heart. The earth was a living thing, a thing with memory, with history, and releasing its secrets would perhaps permit the escape of other things, other darknesses, other memories that would have been best left buried.

What were they doing here? Were they bringing out the dead, and alongside them, the very madness that killed them in the first place?

And what would happen if they took Nancy Denton right now, carried her back to the river, and returned her to the grave that Webster had given her? Would the world return to how it had been before they found her? Was it better to hide what had happened all those years before? Was it better to let the dead go on being dead, to let the truth die with Michael Webster, to release Whytesburg from the ghosts it never knew it had?

Gaines was disturbed. He was cold, distracted, upset. Nevertheless, he went on with the business in front of him. He directed Hagen to put sawhorses around the scene. Together they roped it and taped it. Hagen took a dozen or more photographs from every angle, and each time the flash popped, Gaines started. Even when he knew the flash was coming, he still started. They took what they could of the box, the cloth within, the memory of a young girl’s heart, and they bagged it as carefully as they could. Hagen sat in the passenger seat with this strange cargo in his lap. He looked straight ahead, almost as if to look at the remnants directly was to somehow be cursed.

Hagen closed his eyes when the engine started, and he did not open them again until he and Gaines had reached the office.

Gaines and Hagen filled out paperwork, and then Gaines called Victor Powell. Powell told Gaines to meet him at the Coroner’s Office, to bring everything he had found. When Powell took these things from him, thanked Gaines, and put them in the same room as Nancy Denton’s body, it was late. Gaines looked exhausted, and Powell told him so.

“Go home now,” he said. “You need to rest, my friend, before you collapse.”

Gaines nodded. Powell was right. He went home. He looked in on his mother. She was out for the count. He closed her door silently, returned to the kitchen, and then he took the bottle of whiskey from the cupboard and he started drinking.

For an hour he tried to feel something other than the horror, and then for an hour he tried to feel nothing at all.

And then he lay down on his bed and closed his eyes.

Gaines knows he is dreaming, but he cannot bring himself awake. He stands in a secluded area, somehow clear of vegetation, yet around him and over him is the shroud and the canopy and the wilderness of impenetrable jungle. A thin and insubstantial light seeps into the fug as a misty, malodorous haze. He is not alone. Of this much he is certain. He is being watched, and whoever is watching him is as patient as Job. Gaines knows he has been there for some time—hours, perhaps days—and yet whoever is stalking him has made no attempt to challenge him. And yet Gaines knows this is what they wish to do. What they need to do. This is war, and if you are not an ally, a comrade, a friend, then you are an enemy. There is no middle ground.