Heart. Mary didn’t correct him. She was thinking about Amadeo.

“Okay, ready to go?” Mr. Milton patted the Toyota ’s roof, and though Mary could tell he was tiring, she couldn’t leave just yet.

“I don’t understand why Amadeo would come out here to kill himself. Why not do it in the camp?”

“I guess he’d a been stopped there. Too many people around. The internees slept a hundred to a room. They didn’t have any privacy.”

“Wonder how he did it, I mean logistically.”

“Easy. Climb the tree with the rope, tie it around your neck, tie it to the tree, and jump off the branch. It would snap your neck pretty good. Okay, good to go?”

No.

Mary blinked. That voice. Did she really hear it, or was it her? Maybe it was the wind. Her hair was blowing in the gusts, whipping around her face and ears. She stared past the Costco. “Where did he get the rope?”

“Always some rope layin’ around the truck. Tie the hoes together and such.”

“So when did they discover that he had done this?”

“Not ’til Sam came to pick ’ em up.” Mr. Milton shook his head. “Didn’t have no cell phones then.”

“So Amadeo lay there all afternoon, dead?” Mary shuddered, trying to picture the tableau. The spotless blue sky, a flat expanse of green crops, a man hanging from a tree. And another, with him. “Who was the other guy?”

“I don’t know.”

“But he was an Italian internee?”

“Yes.”

“A friend?”

“Yes.”

No. That voice. Mary didn’t know if it was the wind or not. Maybe she just had jet lag. She’d had to travel all day yesterday, with two takeoffs and landings. And she hadn’t slept well last night because the Clark Fork River ran right outside her hotel room, making annoying nature sounds. In fact, she hadn’t heard a single police siren all night and was considering filing a complaint.

“Are you okay, dear?” Mr. Milton’s eyes narrowed.

“Sure.”

“You’re not related to Mr. Brandolini, are you?”

“No, just the estate’s lawyer.” Mary shook it off. “Who would know who the other internee was?”

Mr. Milton shook his head. “Nobody left would know that, I would guess. Bert, he’s one a the internees, he might know, but he’s back visitin’ Italy. Maybe the director at the fort would know. He has those archives, upstairs.”

“Archives?” Mary’s ears pricked up. She should have guessed as much. Museums had archives. Even the Mario Lanza Museum.

“You gotta ask the director about it. He keeps it. Seen enough?” Mr. Milton asked again, and Mary took pity on him.

“Yes. May I treat you to a burger, to say thanks?”

“You sure can, if there’s a vanilla milkshake with it, too.”

“Done and done, sir!”

Mr. Milton ducked inside the car, but Mary waited a minute, looking at the place where the hanging tree had been, letting her hair blow. A voice was telling her that she had to know more about how Amadeo had committed suicide, and she didn’t know if the voice was hers or his.

But she was going to find out.

Sixteen

The words ST. MARY’S were chiseled into the stone pillars that flanked the cemetery entrance, but Mary barely noticed the coincidence, having understood long ago that her first name was the most marketable brand in the Catholic Church. She took a right onto a driveway of soft black gravel that ran down the center of the cemetery and was lined on both sides by tall shade trees, so old that their heavy branches made a leafy canopy. The grass covering the graves had been newly mowed, releasing a fresh, green scent, and a few old-fashioned verdigris sprinklers sprayed leaky arcs of water into the sunlight, saturating the air with an uncommon humidity.

Mary drove slowly up the road and raised the Toyota window to avoid being drenched. She scanned the cemetery, which had a small and humble feel, no more than one city block square. Brownish, tasteful tombstones dotted the damp lawn, which told Mary that it wasn’t an Italian Catholic cemetery. It lacked the requisite archangels with six-foot wingspans, chilly marble mausoleums, or fountain-ridden tombs. It’s no accident that Hadrian was Italian.

She glanced around for a cemetery office but didn’t see one, and there wasn’t a soul in sight, at least not living. The office had to be along the road, so she cruised slowly ahead. The Toyota ’s soft tires rumbled as she drove, and when she had passed the sprinkler, she lowered her window, eyeing the tombstones for Amadeo’s. She saw tombstones for SKAHAN, MURRAY, MERRICK, and one granite tombstone that was heartbreakingly smaller than the others, which read ELIZABETH, OUR BABY.

Mary felt a familiar pang, though she obviously hadn’t known the child. She felt for the parents. Grief connected people, made them part of the same unhappy but thoroughly human club. Suddenly, mourning for Mike blindsided her like a fresh body blow, knocking the wind out of her. The Toyota rolled to an unplanned stop, and Mary sat stalled. Trying to breathe. Watching the drops of water from another sprinkler dot her windshield. She had been so single-minded in her search for Amadeo’s grave, she hadn’t stopped to think that she’d be visiting graves. The sprinkler began its turn her way, like her own personal rain cloud.

Get it together, girl. You have a purpose.

She gritted her teeth, pressed the gas, and drove forward, turning on the windshield wiper. She eyed the tombstones, but none was Amadeo’s. She didn’t know why she sensed he was here; he couldn’t be, under church law, but still. Dappled sunshine shifted the shadows on the granite, and she drove around the perimeter of the cemetery, expecting to find an office. But after one circuit and row after row of tombstones, all she could find was a battered white pickup down by an exit gate. She made a beeline for it, parked the Toyota, and climbed out. An older black groundskeeper in baggy jeans was loading a Scott lawn mower onto the bed of the truck, and he smiled in a friendly way when Mary approached.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I’m trying to find out if someone is buried here, an Italian internee from Fort Missoula, but I don’t see an office. Isn’t there an office here?”

“Across the street,” the groundskeeper answered, extending a long finger, which Mary followed. Outside the cemetery, directly opposite the main gate, sat a white clapboard house trimmed with green, which she hadn’t noticed when she came in. She was about to thank the man when he said, “But you don’t have to go ask the office about that. I know where those fellas are buried. I been here twenty-three years.”

“Do you know if someone named Amadeo Brandolini is here?”

The man gestured, by way of response.

Mary stood alone, her hands linked in front of her, confronting the graves of the four internees. They had bronze memorial plaques, not tombstones like the other graves, different from the others even in death. The plaques, flush with the ground, were dusted with leftover blades of grass and sat in a solemn little row. They were identical, with an embossed depiction of the praying hands to the left of a name: Giuseppe Marchese, Born Catania Italy, 1913-1942. Aurelio Mariani, Born Genova Italy, 1914-1942. Giuseppe Marazzo, Born Torre Del Greco Italy, 1896-1943. And:

AMADEO BRANDOLINI

BORN ASCOLI-PICENO ITALY

1903-1942

Mary stood at the foot of his grave, in pain. Pain for the loss of Amadeo, pain for the loss of Mike; it was hopelessly bound up now. Maybe she hadn’t been right to come here. Maybe it would make everything worse. Her chest tightened and she bit her lip. Amadeo’s grave made his death real to her. He had died out west, far from his family, far from the city he had made his home, far even from the sea. It seemed so strange. And even though the cemetery was lovely by any measure, Mary couldn’t help an uneasy sensation that crept over her, standing there. A sense that Amadeo didn’t belong here at all. And it had nothing to do with the lack of Italian surnames or showy statuary.