Chapter 16

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

H eartsick, Devon stood in the middle of the cottage, looking at his laptop, his pile of notes, his old-fashioned canvas notebook, thinking what a waste it all was with nobody to share it with. And how it had become, in a single moment, less important than it had been. He was tempted to take the whole mess and dump it in the nearest trash bin and just leave it all behind him. But that would be throwing away two years of work, which was ridiculous. What he needed to do now was to find Stanley.

The idea of a search was a distraction. He knew that. But he couldn't just sit there and keep working on his paper, not if Stanley needed to be found. The alternative was that he'd been dragged back in time and was now suffering through the war all over again. Devon didn't want to simply go on the internet and check the records because he was afraid that the truth of it would be more than he could bear. So he would search. But how?

He'd called les gendarmes, and they'd been worse than useless. The act had only brought Devon himself into a circle of interest, where he was the lunatic who escaped from the asylum, and Stanley, his imaginary friend. No, not imaginary .

With a sudden thought, Devon pulled out his phone, tapped the Photos file, and thumbed through the images. There were pictures of sunrises and sunsets, and of the stones of the cottage etched by the morning's frost. The expensive bottle of wine he'd bought when he'd first arrived. The shop window that contained every kind of cheese imaginable. A few selfies that he'd sent, embarrassed, to his old college buddies; he never did take a good selfie.

There were no images of Stanley, only black frames, one after the other. The most recent photo had a white blob in the middle. That could have been caused by anything, probably the flash from the phone, and it was no proof that Stanley had been there.

Devon turned off the phone, closed his eyes, and was instantly flooded with the memory of Stanley, so close and so warm, so sweet, the last dregs of innocence clinging to his smile like the act of a desperate man. War hadn't destroyed him completely, but his last mission had come close. Or maybe he was mentally incapacitated and lost, and all Devon needed to do was to find him.

He knew he was retreating into his old obsessive habits, letting one thought take over everything else. The urge to find Stanley held sway. His heart was breaking because it had been better to share things with Stanley than be on his own. Better to let someone else in his life than to always be buried in a book, better to find balance in Stanley's eyes.

He got his coat, still damp from his earlier walk, and his knitted cap. He put them on and brushed his fingers across the pea coat that Stanley had worn. It was bone dry, as if nobody had worn it in ages, with the second knitted cap sticking out of the pocket, also dry. With a shrug, Devon went out the door and began to walk along the trenches. It was raining, so the walk was instantly miserable, the cold drops going right into his eyes and down the back of his neck.

The ache of missing Stanley was almost choking him, but Stanley deserved better than to have Devon running around looking for him haphazardly, so Devon needed a plan. He needed a method to search so he could do it systematically, just like he'd do research for his paper. He needed to be able to cover a lot of ground quickly .

He walked along the blacktopped road into the village, now desolate with the rain coming down hard. The car rental place, which also doubled as a garage, was on the edge of the market square. The fellow seemed happy to rent Devon a car for a few days. He sold him extra insurance for way too much, only Devon didn't care.

Once behind the wheel, Devon was shielded from the weather, and drove around the village. Up and down back streets and alleys he drove, covering the whole of the area in under half an hour. Then he went out of the village and drove along the road that went by the side of the memorial. The green fields were now dark in the rain, the white crosses, row on row, gleaming in the low, gray light.

Devon pulled up in the little dirt parking lot and left the engine running. He left the wipers going as they made little French sounding noises, ksit-ksit , as they wiped the rain from the windshield. He could see the tall humps where the trenches began and, beyond that, all the way to the memorial. The cottage was concealed from view from this vantage point, though he could see the bit of smoke rise up from the chimney, as he'd left the heater on. The cottage would be quite warm when he got back, but it would be empty with no Stanley in residence. Unless Stanley had returned in his absence?

Devon raced the engine and drove through the village at too high a speed for safety in any weather. He tore along the road through the small wood and came to a screeching halt in front of the cottage. Leaving the engine running again, he bolted inside.

All was quiet, except for the rain on the windows, the hum of the radiator, and the slow, soft feeling that he was going quite crazy. Because he was. Nobody came forward in time, or went backwards through it, it simply wasn't possible.

He got back in the car, and drove around and around, squinting through the rain, looking for Stanley, for that shorn head and those straight shoulders. He pictured Stanley marching resolutely in the rain toward a destiny that would save his friends, regardless of the cost to himself.

Devon drove, searching always, only stopping once to fill up on gas. When it got too dark, he drove back to the cottage, parked the car, and turned off the engine.

He was tired, but he needed to take care of himself so he could search again in the morning, though he didn't know where he would look that he'd not already looked. Common wisdom said that insanity was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results, and if that were true, which it was, he was well on his way.

Once inside the cottage, he stripped out of his wet clothes. He took a hot shower and thought about eating. Though he couldn't really manage it, he had some toast and cheese, and sat at the kitchen table, staring at his laptop.

He hadn't wanted to do any kind of internet search, but perhaps it was time and, besides, he was desperate. He reached for the laptop and flipped it open to turn it on. His fingers were faster than his thoughts, and he typed in the combination of words to bring up the list of the soldiers in the 44 th Battalion.

It was a list he'd found over the summer while idly looking for the names of scouts. Apparently, it had been a scout who'd discovered Commander Helmer's body in a ditch near the village where he'd been shot by the Germans. The scout, who'd had the unhappy responsibility of reporting this to Lt. Billings, had lived a long and happy life. He'd gone on to own a garage in Memphis and had eventually made a web page about it.

For an elderly man who'd been born so long ago, his web page design skills had been admirable. However, the list had the look of having been done without any sense of clean web design. The page had a splotchy brown background that reminded Devon of the color of the uniforms; the links were a faded green and hard to see.

The page displayed a list that was alphabetical but was not marked in any other way; it was just a list of names. Thus, there was no way to narrow his focus to the lance corporals or anything like that. He had to scan the list and went straight to the S's. There was a Sullivan, but it was Wilifred Sullivan, not Stanley Sullivan. Could he be Devon's Stanley? There was no proof either way, as some of the names had links attached to them, but those led off to descriptions of the function of that soldier and contained nothing personal about them. The list was almost useless.

Devon scanned the list again and found an Isaac. Was this Stanley's friend? The name didn't have a link from anywhere else, so Devon couldn't do any further checks except to note that Isaac and Wilifred and the other soldiers had been part of the 44 th Battalion.

Devon wrote down Isaac's full name in his canvas notebook, and wrote down Wilifred Sullivan as well, though there didn't seem to be much point in it or anything. He buried his face in his hands, a gusty sigh punctuating his sense of futility, of loss.

He'd not had breakfast with a phantom, nor talked and walked and drunk coffee with a ghost. Stanley had been there, in the cottage with Devon. Otherwise, the only alternative was that Devon was going crazy. He most certainly was not going to do that because he had a paper to finish. He shut down the search engine, opened his paper and grimly began to type, determined to focus on what needed to be done, rather than on Stanley, who might never have existed at all.

His eyes kept going to the door, his ears cocked for any sound of Stanley coming home. He started to type slower and slower, and finally, when it grew truly dark out, and his eyes were too tired to focus, Devon put his work away. He realized that this was with the half hope that Stanley would come to the door, and they'd need the table cleared in order to eat on it. To have something sweet to share afterwards.

But the only person who came and sat at the table for dinner was Devon. Though he tried to eat, every act was tinged with sadness, every motion he went through with loneliness. When he gave up eating, he cleaned up and built a small fire in the fireplace. He poured himself a small whiskey, sat on the couch, and stared at the flames that leaped orange and gold and flickered long shadows across the walls.

If only he'd taken a chance and told Stanley how he felt, how he was drawn to Stanley not just because he was, or might be, an American doughboy, but because of Stanley himself. Stanley listened when Devon talked and seemed to care about what Devon cared about.

Stanley had actually been in the war. Or maybe he'd been nice to Devon because Stanley was a shyster. Maybe he was crazy. Maybe none of that mattered, because it had come down to the point where Devon didn't care. It was literally a dark and stormy night, and Stanley was out in it. And whether he was halfway to Paris, or he was huddled in a trench in the rain with mud up to his ass in 1917, Devon just wanted him back.

If Stanley came back to him by some fluke of time, or a burst of consciousness where he confessed his game, Devon would take that chance. He would stand up and tell Stanley how he felt, and wrap him in a hug so warm and safe that Stanley would never want to leave. Then he'd get Stanley the help he needed, or the papers required to get him into the States.

He wanted Stanley with him, and if Stanley was shy about being with another man, then Devon would be patient, though he didn't think it would be that hard to convince Stanley that it was okay. There'd been an expression in those whiskey-colored eyes, a sparkle of hope that what Devon had said about being gay in the future was true. Besides, Stanley had gone on and on about Isaac, protesting too much when Devon had asked about it. Stanley had cared about his fellow soldier, but had never dared do more than that, it seemed. And if Isaac was left behind in the past—

Devon made himself stop thinking this way because it was cruel to hope that Stanley would never have Isaac, just so that Devon could have Stanley. It was selfish, and it was single-minded and downright creepy. Here Devon was sitting on his couch watching the dying embers of a pitiful fire, wishing Isaac, a dead soldier, would stay dead in the past so that Stanley could come home to him.

He had the suspicion that Wilifred Sullivan was his Stanley, and didn't wonder that he went by another name. War was full of nicknames, some which were intended to hide deadly weapons of mass destruction, others of which were merely whimsy, meant to inject humor into a humorless situation.

And if he was analyzing his thoughts to this degree, it was beyond the point where he could make any sense of any conclusion, so he needed to go to bed. He would search for Stanley in the morning. When he went to the front door, he made sure the porch light was on, in case Stanley found himself in the middle of the memorial and needed to see which way was home.