From the memoir of Thomas Davies

(for publication)

Iam sitting in the lodge of Camp Minnie HaHa (latitude/longitude TK) located on the Bone River, sitting on the floor in a corner of the room watching my family drink champagne out of paper cups. It is six in the morning. They are gathered at the end of the long table laughing and crying and hugging each other.

Roosevelt—whom I had expected to be either the hero or the villain of this story—is serving spinach omelets and waffles and blueberry muffins.

Nicolas, my disagreeable uncle, is honest-to-God singing.

Beside me, my cousin Oona, sensing that in this room I am the only sensible human (she says who-man), lies on my legs.

I simply do not understand adults.

We came on this journey, which has had its problems, to discover whether my great-grandfather William Grove murdered his wife at the Missing Lake campsite in 1941. Or not.

The answer as it has turned out is Roosevelt.

The news is that he isn’t the villain some of us were imagining him to be. Rather his mother, Clementine, the camp’s cook who never got to cook, was my great-grandfather’s girlfriend. Or lover, as Venus told me—whatever that means.

Now the question of who killed Georgie’s mother is no longer of any interest to the adults.

It is however still important to me.

I cannot imagine that the students at Alice Deal Junior High School off Nebraska Avenue in Washington, D.C., will have an interest in the story of my great-grandfather’s lover as a satisfactory replacement story for murder.

Therefore it falls to me to write the story of the murder as I imagine it might have happened.

These are the significant facts of the night of June 17, 1941, as far as I know.

1. William Grove’s village in Lithuania is about to be invaded by the Nazis. The chances are good that William’s father will be shot or sent to the gas chambers to die.

2. William had a love affair with Clementine—(passionate love affair was Georgie’s description this morning after a glass of champagne).

3. Josephine, William’s wife, does not like William because he is a Jew. The explanation Georgie gave us this morning had to do with anti-Semitism and the War and Josephine’s depression and Clementine coming on the trip with Roosevelt and nobody knowing the real identity of Clementine as girlfriend of my great-grandfather. Including Roosevelt.

4. There has been no mention today of the murder. That is the kind of craziness adults seem to enjoy.

5. So this trip we have taken to Missing Lake was to discover one thing. And now we arrive to discover another that seems to the adults even better than finding the answer to the first thing.

6. So you see my dilemma.