Chapter 4 - The Missing Flag
When Erin got home that evening, her front door was locked and her windows were shut and nothing was obviously out of place.
The flag was gone.
She had left it on the dining table under the lamp. She had taken a picture of the label with her phone. The flag itself was gone, and so was the white inventory tag, and so was the envelope she had written the case number on.
The lamp was still on. The chair she had sat in was pushed in.
She called the base security police and reported a break-in. A staff sergeant came out and took notes and asked what had been stolen and she said, "A folded American flag." He looked up.
"That's it? No electronics, no cash?"
"That's it."
"Ma'am, with respect, are you sure it's missing? Sometimes people—"
"It's missing."
He wrote it down. He gave her a case number. He told her someone would be in touch. She could tell from his voice that he thought she was a stressed-out captain who had misplaced a memento and would find it in a closet three days later.
After he left, she sat on her couch and stared at the empty lamp.
The next morning, her neighbor Mrs. Kavanagh caught her at the mailbox.
Mrs. Kavanagh was eighty-one and had lived in the house next door for forty years and had a way of knowing everything that happened on the block. She was in her robe with her hair in a net, holding a watering can she didn't need.
"Erin. I saw a car last night."
Erin's hand tightened on the mailbox door.
"What kind of car?"
"A dark one. Four doors. It was parked at the curb behind your driveway and there was a man sitting in it, and then there wasn't, and then a little while later it drove away." Mrs. Kavanagh frowned. "I didn't think anything of it until I saw the police car this morning. Was something stolen?"
"A flag."
"A flag."
"A folded American flag."
Mrs. Kavanagh looked at her for a long moment. "Your brother's flag."
"Yes."
"Then it wasn't a burglar." Mrs. Kavanagh set the watering can down. "Erin, I don't know what's going on and I don't need to know. But I've lived across from you for six years and I have never once seen a car parked there at night, and I've never once seen you look the way you looked this morning. If you need to talk to someone who isn't going to file a report, I'm in the house."
Erin's eyes stung. She blinked it away.
"Thank you, Mrs. Kavanagh."
"Don't thank me. Just tell me if I should be worried."
"I don't know yet."
"Then I'll keep the porch light on."
She should have hidden the flag. She knew that now. She had been so focused on the meaning of the label that she hadn't thought about the value of it.
Her phone rang. She looked at the screen. It was her commander.
"Erin," Colonel Diane Ferris said. "I heard about the break-in. Are you all right?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Good." A pause. "Listen. I've got orders on my desk that I don't entirely understand. You're being reassigned. To Creech. Effective in seventy-two hours."
Erin's breath caught. "Ma'am. That's a PCS on three days' notice."
"I know. I pushed back. I was told it was operational necessity and that I should be grateful it wasn't worse." Ferris's voice was careful, the way it got when there were people in the room she didn't want to be overheard by. "Erin. What's going on?"
"I don't know yet, ma'am."
"Be careful."
The line went dead.
Erin sat in the dark for a long time.
Then she went to her laptop and typed Michael Walsh into a search bar and looked at the same articles she had looked at three years ago. Air Force Times. A single local New Jersey paper. A press release from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, redacted.
She typed sealed return case into the search bar and got nothing useful. She typed Dover Port Mortuary sealed arrival and got a Wikipedia article about the facility and a Department of Defense fact sheet. She typed Kessler casualty liaison and got a LinkedIn profile photo of Nathan Kessler, a promotion announcement from four years ago, and a wedding announcement from eleven years before that.
She was about to close the laptop when she thought of something. She typed Nathan Kessler daughter.
The results that came back made her hands go still.
A human-interest story from a small paper in Delaware. A girl named Sophie Kessler, 12 years old, had been treated for leukemia at Walter Reed. There was a photo of her, thin and smiling, with a bald head and a teddy bear. The article was dated four years ago. It said her father was a major in the Air Force, stationed at Dover.
Erin read the article twice. Then she read the sentence she had somehow missed the first time.
"The family credited First Lieutenant Michael Walsh, who was stationed at Dover at the time, with helping arrange a last-minute wish trip through a program he volunteered with."
She stared at the screen.
Michael had been stationed at Dover four years ago. Michael had known Kessler's daughter. Michael had done something for Kessler's daughter, something that had mattered.
And then Michael had disappeared.
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And then Kessler had been assigned — fourteen months ago, according to the label — to a sealed ceremony at Dover.
Erin closed the laptop. She had a lead. She had a name. She had seventy-two hours.
