the raw ache that crept up on her every time she drove to the house and had to face the reality that her father was gone, she unlocked the door and stepped inside.
The proportions of the house were nice: a wide hall, large, spacious rooms, two bedrooms on the ground floor, four above and an attic. In a wild moment, just after the funeral six weeks ago, she had considered keeping it, but the house was just too far out of Shreveport. As pretty as the drive was into town, the daily commute to the library would add an extra hour onto her working day.
Besides that, much as she loved the history and connection of the house, it had been a family home. Her father had rattled around in it by himself, and so would she. It was designed for a large rambunctious family, and that was something she couldn’t see herself ever having. At thirty-four, with a short list of unsatisfactory and, quite frankly, disappointing relationships behind her—and no man in sight for the grand total of three years—clinging to the house was nothing short of pathetic.
The sun slanted through the sitting room, capturing the motes of dust she stirred up as she crossed the large, empty space. The furniture had gone already; there was just the piano left, which she was keeping. It wouldn’t fit comfortably in her apartment, so it would have to go into storage until she moved somewhere bigger, but that didn’t matter. She loved the piano and the memories that went with it: lazy summer days spent listening to her mother play classical pieces and jazz, hours spent in this room after school working her way through music books until she’d gone to college.
Reaching out, she lifted the keyboard cover and ran her fingers over the keys. The notes resonated through the empty house, clear and rich but definitely out of tune. Closing the cover, she continued up the stairs, opening windows in the empty bedrooms to let the heat out and stopping to check all the cupboards and wardrobes to make sure no personal items had been left behind.
She had already emptied the main rooms of the house, selling the furniture, taking trunkloads of her father’s clothes and kitchen equipment to the charity shops, and storing anything of a personal nature until she was ready to sort through the last fragments of Ben Fischer’s life, and face the unpalatable fact that, without his cheerful, no-nonsense presence, she was now utterly alone in the world. The only room left was the attic, and the urgency to clear that out had been spurred by a story that had been printed in the local newspaper.
The reporter had somehow gotten hold of photos of both Ben and his brother Todd when they had first joined the Navy. The article described the old scandal of Todd’s disappearance and the fact that, unwilling to believe that Todd was missing without a trace, Ben Fischer had gone down to Costa Rica to personally search for his brother. The story, apparently supplied by a source in Shreveport—which she read to mean one of her father’s old naval cronies—had gone on to rehash the subsequent dishonorable discharge of Todd’s naval team and the recent discovery of the mass grave in Juarez, Colombia.
The fact that Todd had finally been vindicated had stopped Sara from becoming too upset over the story. The investigation, which had resulted in the discovery of the mass grave, was now a matter of public record. What concerned her was that the story claimed her father had brought personal items back from Costa Rica.
She remembered him making the trip, but at no point had he mentioned to her that he had retrieved any of Todd’s personal effects. If he had, logically, they should have been passed on to Aunt Eleanor or Steve, but if that was the case, she was certain she would have heard about it. The Fischer family had been close, and the tragedy had pulled them even closer. A more likely scenario was that, with the media scandal still raging, her father had kept quiet and stored the items rather than upset Eleanor any further. Now, with both Eleanor and her father gone and Steve in the Witness Security Program, there was no one at hand to ask.
If the items were in the attic, she needed to find them. The last thing any of them needed was for some antique dealer or the purchaser of the house to stumble across possessions that were not only private to the Fischer family, but that were potentially newsworthy.
The staircase to the attic was dim and claustrophobic, and the attic itself was like an oven. By the time she threaded her way through old tea chests and boxes of books to one of the matching gable windows situated at either end of the room, perspiration beaded her upper lip and every pore had opened up. Working at the stiffened latch, she shoved the window open, leaned out and gulped in cool air.
Minutes later, she had the second window open, and a breeze was circulating as she began the task of sorting through the jumble of boxes.
Two hours later, sick of slapping at mosquitoes, she gave up on the idea of fresh air and closed both windows. With darkness blanking out the view and a single bulb her only illumination, she surveyed the junk.
She had gone through two-thirds of what was, mostly, burnable rubbish: old books that had warped and moldered, clothes that should have been thrown away twenty years ago and an assortment of mostly broken kitchen appliances and furniture. She hadn’t stumbled across anything that was connected to Todd, but the more she searched, the more certain she became that if Todd’s personal effects were anywhere, they had to be up here.
She sorted through another chest. Right at the bottom was a cardboard box labeled Fireworks.
Vivid memories of bonfires and Fourth of July barbecues punctuated with the high-pitched whine of skyrockets took her away from the dim, dusty attic.
One summer she and Steve had saved fireworks in order to make bombs. They had made a number of prototypes but had made the mistake of blowing up a small tree. Both sets of Fischer parents had gone crazy. She and Steve had been forced to divulge their hiding place, then watch as the remaining fireworks were dunked in water, rendering them useless. The hiding place was here, in the wall of the attic.
Pushing to her feet, she examined the area where the loose board had been, looking for prying marks that had been made by two kids more than twenty years ago. She found the marks. Holding her breath, she worked the board loose, breaking a nail in the process. Lowering the board along with its neighbor to the floor, she examined the shallow vertical cavity. Adrenaline pumped. She hadn’t expected to find anything, but there was something there.
Reaching in, she grabbed a package and the canvas strap of a knapsack. A cold tingle went down her spine when the weight and the bulk of the knapsack registered.
She carried both items into the center of the room, where the light from the single bulb was strongest. Unlatching the flap, she studied the bag’s contents. There was no doubt in her mind that these were the items her father had retrieved from Costa Rica; mementos too painful and too controversial at the time to keep in plain view or to hand on to either Eleanor or Steve.
Maybe it was because she still felt raw and emotional after her father’s death and funeral, but Sara could remember Todd’s disappearance as clearly as if those events had happened last week.
The fact that her uncle—a healthy, fit man in his prime—had died had been shocking to the nine-year-old girl she had been, and so had the circumstances surrounding his death. The entire family had been proud of the medals and honors Todd had won. Her father had steadfastly maintained that foul play must have been involved, that it hadn’t been a case of desertion, but when the scandal had leaked into the papers, the gossip had spread like wildfire. Sara could remember the whispered comments at school, the pointing fingers in the street, and her father refusing to let anyone answer the phone but him because of the crank calls.
With hands that weren’t quite steady, she unwrapped the package, which was only loosely bound, as if her father had inspected the item then wrapped it again before stowing it in the cavity. It was a camera. Any lingering doubt that the things stowed in the wall had belonged
