Newcastle, California * September 24, 1943
Having finally put the pieces together, Agent Bonner hurries out of Murphy’s Saloon and immediately jumps into the Bureau car parked out front, intent on racing over to the former Yamada residence as quickly as he possibly can. It is nighttime but not completely dark; the moon is full. It casts a ghostly silver glow over everything and cuts clear black shadows onto the ground of every structure, creature, and leaf. As Bonner pulls up the drive, he spots a single plume of smoke rising into the air. It, too, catches the moon’s light, undulating white, silver, and black as it rises up to the heavens in a column.
On instinct, Bonner knows the plume is Louis Thorn’s doing.
He kills the engine and steps out of the car. He can smell the burning. He does not bother approaching the house and knocking on the front door. Instead, he walks around the farmhouse to the source of the smoke, a short distance behind the barn. He wonders if he might find Louis and Ava together—and possibly Cleo Shaw, too. But when he rounds the corner of the barn, he sees only a single figure standing vigil over the flames that are steadily consuming the old wooden caravan.
“Agent Bonner,” Louis greets him.
Louis has his back to the F.B.I. agent, but it is plain he knows exactly who it is without having to turn around.
“Where is Miss Brooks?” Bonner asks. He stands beside Louis. Together they stare into the flames. The fire crackles as though it is breaking down the bones of the caravan—presumably the site of two deaths: Earl Shaw’s and Kenichi Yamada’s. There is something else in the flames, too, something that has been thrown in more recently than the rest of the burning mass. Bonner can just barely make out a letter, rapidly curling into blackened tar, and something else—perhaps a parachute.
“She’s gone,” Louis says, answering Bonner’s question. “She left with her mother.”
“I suppose you don’t know where she’s gone or when she’s coming back,” Bonner says.
“Don’t reckon she is coming back.”
Bonner points to the items burning in the caravan. “And I’m guessing she wrote a letter exonerating you . . . She left the parachute she used and explained how she did it.”
I figured it out before then, Louis thinks quietly to himself.
“You didn’t know she had learned how to fly the Stearman.”
“I should’ve figured Harry had been taking her up,” Louis answers, his voice far away, thoughtful. In the flickering light Bonner thinks he sees a shudder of pain cross Louis’s face.
“But they kept it a secret from you,” Bonner replies, recalling the letter he has just read, sitting at the bar—a personal love letter from Ava to Harry. In it, she confessed some of her fondest memories together, and Bonner was surprised to learn that Ava—who was supposedly afraid of flying—not only trusted Harry enough to go up with him, she also learned to fly herself.
“They kept a lot of things secret from me,” Louis says now.
Bonner looks at Louis’s face more closely and cocks his head. “Are you glad or disappointed to know that Harry is still alive?”
Bonner’s brain worked hard to put together the rest of it, but it came down to that photograph. The names painted in gold lettering on the two biplanes in the background, CASTOR and POLLUX: the twins. When he remembered an old astronomy lesson—the constellation Castor and Pollux, the two famous twins that made up Gemini—it unlocked something in Bonner’s brain. So did seeing Earl and Harry standing on either side, both of them about the same height and weight, both of them with black hair—not that the hair mattered so much; they had singed most of that away when they burned the body. They had still taken a huge risk, nonetheless. The coroner examined Kenichi Yamada’s body but hadn’t done much with the charred mess believed to be Harry Yamada’s body. Bonner knew a closer examination from a more seasoned coroner might have revealed the body’s racial identity—it possibly still could, although he also knew that was unlikely. In devising her plan, Ava counted on everyone to assume the second body was Harry’s. Moreover, she relied on the notion that no one would care enough about the deaths of two Japanese men to probe very deeply. She had been right about that: Bonner thought about his last conversation with Reed, and the order he’d been given to close the case without further ado.
Bonner guessed that Cleo Shaw had been the one to pull the trigger on Earl, and that accounted for why she was so jittery, so fragile and on edge. She had shot her husband—in self-defense possibly, but still, it was bound to shake a woman up.
Bonner’s mind lined up the rest of it. He’d had the bruises all wrong, but that was only because he’d been shown the wrong two sets of bruises: the ones on Louis’s face and the ones on Kenichi’s corpse. He’d assumed they’d gotten into a scuffle together, but that was utterly foolish. He knew now: The bruises on Louis’s face had come from a fight with Harry. Kenichi’s bruises had come from Earl.
And then there was Ava, who supposedly did not know how to fly the Stearman. Her letter to Harry—a letter he never had the privilege to read—was full of reminiscences of secret flying lessons. When her mother shot Earl, and Kenichi died, Ava knew exactly what she could do about it.
He had to admire her boldness—not only to mastermind the body switch, but also to pull it off. She had guts.
“Are you glad, or disappointed, to know that Harry is still alive?” Bonner repeats his question.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Louis says, his voice firm.
Bonner looks at Louis and smiles with quiet respect.
“I wondered,” Bonner remarks. “I wondered if you would protect them—both of them. I guess now I have my answer.”
Louis doesn’t say anything.
For a long time, both men stand together in silence, watching the caravan burn. Louis’s eyes fall on the parachute. He hadn’t really needed to burn that . . . it wasn’t proof of anything, really. But the parachute had always belonged with the plane, and now they were all united in fire.
Louis wonders which of them had used it. Ava, he thinks. It must have been Ava. She would have insisted Harry not be anywhere near the crash, which would inevitably draw more attention from law enforcement. Besides, Harry was not in top form; Louis thought he’d felt some ribs crack when he attacked Harry the night before. Louis’s shame deepens when he remembers the fight. He knows Harry held back, restrained himself, let Louis rage.
No; it had to have been Ava who’d flown the Stearman with its fuel line punctured. She was small enough and light enough to fit in the cockpit with the bodies loaded up. Just as dawn was breaking and the plane was nearly out of gas, she must’ve parachuted away, leaving the biplane flying at a high altitude, eventually to putter and run out of fuel and crash. She was lucky no one saw her. Louis tries to imagine the moment she jumped, the courage it demanded. He has always known Ava was strong, even belligerent in the face of fear, but even so, he is impressed.
“What will you do?” Louis asks Bonner.
“You mean, will I send the F.B.I. out looking for Haruto Yamada?” Bonner asks.
Louis doesn’t speak at first, then nods.
“No,” Bonner says. He lets out a sigh, and as he does, a pressure lifts from his shoulders. “My supervisor ordered me to close this case, and that’s what I intend to do.”
Louis turns to Bonner. In the firelight, their faces are mirrors—one half in shadow, one half glowing with the orange flames of the fire. But it is more than that. They bear the similarity of brothers.
“Why?” Louis finally asks.
“When I first took this case, I only came here because I wanted to meet you. I didn’t know anything about the Yamadas. I only noticed the name of the town, and your last name, Thorn. I figured, in the worst case—if you’d taken it upon yourself to hide some Japs, I’d help you by turning a blind eye.”
Louis starts in surprise. “I don’t understand,” he says.
Bonner looks at him. “There’s a reason your brother Guy and I might look alike,” he says, turning to take in the sight of the foothills in the moonlight. “My grandmother grew up here.”
Louis doesn’t speak, and Bonner can see he is struggling to make sense of it all.
“She didn’t talk about it much,” Bonner adds, “on account of the fact that her family hit a rough patch, and she fell into awful poverty here. She wound up working in a . . . well, shall we say, house of ill repute.” Bonner waits a beat. “She moved to San Francisco to have her son—my father. Much later in life, when he asked, the only things she told him was the name of the town where he’d been conceived, and the name of his father: Ennis Thorn.”
“We share a grandfather . . .” Louis murmurs. It is not entirely crazy to think such a thing is possible, but it is a fact that, in his wildest dreams, he never would’ve guessed.
“Yes,” Bonner answers quietly. Louis mulls this over. Finally he speaks.
“You have no idea what it was like, every time you came around asking questions, the fact that you look . . .” His throat catches and he pauses. “It was like having my brother’s dead ghost haunting me,” he finishes. His voice is frank, without a hint of melodrama.
“This case became something else for me, too,” Bonner says. He considers explaining—confessing, really—about the Minami family, about how it changed the way he felt about the camps, about the Yamadas, and about how badly he needed to know whether Louis had sabotaged that plane. But he realizes it doesn’t matter; Louis already feels the weight of these things. So instead Bonner simply stands beside Louis. Together they watch the caravan burn.
“You’ll really leave Harry alone?” Louis ventures, the first direct acknowledgment of the fact that Harry is still alive.
Bonner shrugs. “No one cared much about Haruto Yamada’s death,” he says. “I won’t concern the government with what remains of his life.”
They stand staring at the flames a little while longer. Finally, Bonner shoves his hands in his pockets and shakes his head. He walks away, heading back in the direction of his car. No handshake, no farewell. Louis knows Bonner is not coming back, that they will likely never see each other again. He hears the car engine starting up and shifting into gear, and then Bonner leaves, taking the ghost that has been haunting Louis along with him.
Dawn glows in the sky—not red, but a surreal, pure greenish blue. The sun will be up soon.
Satisfied, Louis goes to the well, fills a bucket, and begins to pour water on the fire, until slowly the charred remains of the caravan begin to let off a distinct hiss.