‘Oh yes,’ Elaine answered. ‘He was supposed to call me after he had arrived and gotten settled and everything, and when he didn’t by Sunday night, I contacted the Presidio. They said he had come in on the flight from Germany, but no one seemed to know where he went afterward. I talked to two of Roy’s friends, men who had been with him in Kitzingen and who had come over on the plane with him, and they didn’t know where he’d gone either.’

‘What did they say about his frame of mind?’

A pair of thin horizontal lines, like furrows in a meadow of snow, appeared on her forehead. ‘Frame of mind?’

‘Did these friends mention if he seemed happy, sad, apprehensive, nervous?’

‘They said he talked about me, and about our marriage.’ Her voice had a slight tremor in it now. ‘They said I shouldn’t worry, everything would be all right, but I don’t know. I can’t help feeling…’

I said, ‘Did you write to one another regularly while he was overseas?’

She gave herself a small shake. ‘Yes, we were in close correspondence the entire time.’ She took the engagement ring between the thumb and forefinger of her right hand and rotated it from side to side, caressing it in a way that told me she was not aware of what she was doing. ‘I wrote to him at least twice a week, and he wrote to me three or four times a month; men aren’t as ardent letter-writers as women, of course.’

‘He gave no indication in his letters of anything being wrong?’

‘Nothing at all.’

I wrote some more things on the pad. ‘Do you know where he’s from, originally?’

‘Kansas,’ she said. ‘Topeka.’

‘Would he still have family there?’

‘Oh no, Roy is an orphan. He has no family.’

‘Well, what about friends or acquaintances?’

‘You mean where he might be staying for some reason?’

‘Yes.’

‘The only friends he has are in the service,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t possibly know all of them, but he was stationed here in California for about three years before he was sent to Germany and he probably knew a lot of fellows who came and went.’