Susan Wiggs - Map of the Heart

“We’ll talk about it,” she said at last.

“Meaning we won’t.”

“Meaning we’re both going to try to do better. I’m sorry I’ve been so buried in work, and—” A horrid thought crash-landed into the moment.

“What?” Julie asked.

“A work thing.” She glanced over at her daughter. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll deal.” Her stomach clenched as she thought about the project she’d been working on for Professor Finnemore. The moment the ER had called, Camille had dropped everything and burst out of the darkness—thus ruining her client’s rare, found film forever.

Great. The one-of-a-kind negatives, which might have offered never-before-seen images nearly half a century old, were completely destroyed.

Professor Finnemore was not going to be happy.

Every time he came back to the States from his teaching post overseas, Finn made a stop at Arlington Cemetery. He walked between the endless white rows of alabaster markers etched with black lettering, nearly a half million of them, aligned with such flawless precision that they outlined the undulations of the grassy terrain. Somewhere in the distance, a set of unseen pipes was playing—one of the thirty or so funerals that took place here each week.

He paused at a headstone upon which was perched a small rubber bathtub duck. On the back of the toy, someone had written Hi, Grandpa in childish scrawl.

Finn paused before taking out his camera. The messages from little kids always got to him. He shut his eyes and murmured a thank-you to the soldier. Then he photographed the marker and added the memento to his bag. As a volunteer for the Military History Center, he visited Arlington whenever he was in town, recovering items that had been left on headstones. With his fellow volunteers, he helped catalog the items for a database so each remembrance, no matter how small, would be preserved.

Moving on, he made a detour to view the markers of his first bittersweet accomplishment. Working with a group of villagers in the highlands of Vietnam, he’d discovered the crash site of four U.S. soldiers who had gone missing fifty years before. The soldiers—an aircraft commander, a pilot, a door gunner, and a gunner—had been hit with enemy fire, and their chopper had crashed into a mountainside. For decades, the men had been lost. Finn had talked to their families, hearing echoes of his own family’s story. With no way of knowing what had become of their loved ones, there was no place for the grief to go, no closure. It lingered like a fog, impenetrable on some days, lifting on others, but it was always present.

The remains had been interred in a group burial service with horse-drawn caissons and a white-gloved honor guard, while their families looked on, clinging together like survivors from a storm. One of the daughters had written Finn a note of gratitude, telling him that despite the revived grief, there was also a sense of relief that she was finally able to lay her father to rest.

More than a thousand veterans still remained unaccounted for, and his father, Richard Arthur Finnemore, was one of them. For years, Finn had searched for his father’s likeness in the faces of panhandlers outside veterans’ halls, wondering if torture had left him impaired and unable to make his way back to his family.

Finn picked up a small scrap of paper from a marker in Section 60, where the recently fallen were laid to rest. The handwritten note said, I have to leave you here. You should be home playing with our kids and laughing with us. But this is where you’ll stay. Forever. I guess in that sense, I’ll never lose you. Despite the summer heat, Finn felt a chill as he dutifully photographed the marker and added the note to his collection.

Finally, he consulted an app on his phone and located the new marker of a very old casualty—army air forces first lieutenant Robert McClintock. Finn had scoured the countryside around Aix-en-Provence, where he was living and teaching. His research had led him to the crash site of a single-seat P-38 aircraft, piloted by McClintock on a strafing mission against an enemy airfield in 1944. Combing through archives, Finn had discovered that on the day in question, poor weather conditions had impaired visibility. A scrap of news on a microfiche had reported that McClintock’s aircraft had dived through the clouds and seemingly disappeared.

With a group of private citizens, Finn had worked with a recovery team, finding teeth and bone fragments, all that was left of the twenty-one-year-old airman. The Armed Forces DNA Identification Laboratory matched three sisters from Bethesda, and last year, Lieutenant McClintock had been repatriated here at Arlington. Finn had not attended the burial, but now he stood looking at the freshly etched marker. Again, there had been letters of gratitude from the family.

He appreciated the kind words, but that wasn’t the reason he did what he did. He let people think he was looking for accolades and recognition in his academic work, because it was easier to explain than admitting that he was really looking for his father.

Standing amid the sea of alabaster headstones, Finn felt a breeze on his neck, redolent of fresh-cut grass and newly turned earth. Where’d you go, Dad? he wondered. We’d all love to know.

The roll of film his sister had found, with his father’s initials on the small yellow can, was the best hope of finding out. The film expert, Camille Adams, was finally going to reveal his father’s last images, taken somewhere in Cambodia decades before.

The thought made him lengthen his strides as he headed for his rental car. Maybe the courier charged with picking up the processed film would be back already. Finn got in and grabbed his mobile phone from the console. It indicated multiple voice mails from the courier company. As he tapped the phone to play the messages, Finn thought, Please, Camille Adams. Don’t let me down.

“You don’t sound happy,” said Margaret Ann Finnemore, her voice coming through the speakers of the rental car.

Finn stared at the road ahead as he drove across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, heading for the Delmarva Peninsula. Delaware-Maryland-Virginia. He had to cross state lines just to find Camille Adams.

“That’s because I’m not happy,” he said to his sister. “The film was supposed to be ready today, and the courier company can’t even locate the woman responsible for developing it. She totally flaked out on us.

Stopped answering her phone, isn’t reading text messages or checking e-mail.”

“Maybe something came up,” Margaret Ann suggested reasonably. In the Finnemore family, she was known as the reasonable sister.

“Yeah, she blew me off. That’s what came up.”

“She came so highly recommended. Billy Church—the guy at the National Archives—gave her such a strong recommendation. Didn’t he say she’s done work for the Smithsonian and the FBI?”

“He did. But he didn’t say we’d need the FBI to find her. I should’ve called her references instead of just checking her website.” The site for Adams Photographic Services had featured dramatic examples of photos she’d rescued or restored. It had also displayed a picture of Camille Adams, which had caught his attention. She was a beauty, with dark curly hair and faraway eyes—but apparently, no sense of responsibility.

“I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

“I don’t need an explanation. I need to see what was on that roll of film, and I need to see it before the ceremony.”

“You couldn’t have sent someone else all the way out there?”

“The courier bailed after waiting around for an hour. Everybody else in the family has a job to do, so I decided to track her down myself.”