Curious glances are cast our way, and Sam steps closer to me, settling his hand at the small of my back, hovering there reassuringly.

I search for my brother’s face among these men, for a glimmer of recognition on their faces, but none stares back at me.

“How many men are down here working?” I murmur to Sam.

“Several hundred.”

It’s a small enough island that it seems like everyone knows everyone around here, even if there’s a tension between the veterans and locals. And still—it’s been years since my brother and I last saw each other, the picture I carry with me hopelessly outdated, the face of a boy before he went to war.

“Stay close,” Sam urges. “I’m going to see if I can find someone who’s in charge.”

I wrap my arm around his, bringing my body against his side. Sam stiffens against me in surprise, and for an awkward moment, I think he’s going to pull away, but he doesn’t.

The camp is far rougher than I ever imagined; men loll about intoxicated, their sly glances and nudges making it clear that they are unused to many women in their presence. The stench in the air I can’t quite place—and surely, don’t wish to: fish, sea, sweat, and rot, and the sweet sickness that so frequently accompanies any number of maladies. I surreptitiously press my nose to my fist. I search for my brother, try to envision how his features might have changed, how the passage of time would have altered him.

Sam tenses beside me. “This was a bad idea.”

We walk around the camp for a couple of minutes before Sam locates a man who appears to be in charge. Along the way I show the old photo to a few people, but no one recognizes him, or is even sober enough to notice.

“We’re trying to find this man,” Sam says, showing the photo to the man in charge.

He barely glances at the picture. “There’s a storm coming. This isn’t a real good time for a social visit. I gotta get these men taken care of.”

“I’m searching for my brother,” I interject.

“You see him here? There are other camps, though. Maybe he’s on one of them. A lot of guys are gone for the holiday weekend. Down in Key West getting drunk or up in Miami doing the same. Besides, plenty of people come down here and then they stop showing up.”

“My brother’s not like that.”

The look the man gives me is almost pitying. “They’re all like that, darling.”

“They were heroes once,” I retort. “It seems like the least you could do is show them some respect.”

“Sure. They’ll tell you the same if you get enough drink in them. That was a long time ago. Those men who went to war—you wouldn’t recognize them in the men who work here.”

“How could I?” I snap as I gesture around the camp, my arm arcing out farther than I intended and nearly hitting Sam in the process. “Who would thrive in an environment like this?”

“Now, you listen here. We run a fine camp up here.”

“A clean, orderly one,” I say sarcastically.

“You want clean? Orderly? We do the best we can with what we’ve got here. We’ve got storms and mosquitoes, men getting up to all sorts of trouble, and right now, my hands are full. I shouldn’t be a glorified governess to grown men, but I might as well be. Your brother isn’t here, and unless I miss my guess, the fact that you’re searching for him means he doesn’t want to be found.”

He leaves me and Sam standing in the middle of the camp without so much as a good-bye.

“Should we talk to more workers?” I ask Sam.

“It’s a small enough camp that if someone had seen him, we would have heard about it.”

“It’s an outdated photo. Maybe his appearance has changed.”

“Still. No one here recognized him.”

“That man said a lot of people are out of town for the weekend.” Should I have stayed in Key West? It seemed more likely for me to find him here, but at the moment, he’s so far away.

He could be dead.

I try to dismiss the thought, but now that I’ve seen the conditions down here, I can’t ignore that it’s a distinct possibility. The living is hard, and I’m not sure he would have been equipped for something like this.

“We can come back another day,” Sam says, the sympathy in his voice unmistakable.

“You think this is a fool’s errand, don’t you?”

“It could be, yes. I didn’t like that man more than you did, but he wasn’t lying to you. Some people come down here and disappear. Either by choice or not. I’m not saying your brother is one of those people, but you have to be prepared for that possibility.”

“How do you know so much about life down here, anyway?”

“Work, mostly.”

“What about your work? The man you’re chasing?”

“I’ve put some feelers out at the inn. He’ll turn up. They always do. Right now, let’s focus on your brother.”

We drive down to Camp Five on Matecumbe Key. It’s smaller than Camp One, but still filthy, the same mosquitoes swarming around, the same indistinguishable stench in the air.

Bile rises in my throat. “How can they treat people like this? We wouldn’t even treat our animals like this.”

“This is what happens when you have a problem you don’t want to deal with. You put it out of people’s sight, out of their minds, get them out of Washington with the hope that they won’t cause trouble anymore.”

I was too young to care when the Bonus Army marched on Washington D.C., too full of my own drama and life to consider people so far removed from my own reality. It wasn’t my problem, and even though my brother fought in the war, it was easy to view him as separate from all of this. Seeing what has become of so many of the soldiers now, I cannot help but wonder how many people made the same mistake I did, how many turned their backs on the veterans once the war drifted from their minds and they had their own problems to worry about.

We walk through the camp silently, eyes on us once more—mostly me, rather. Not that Sam doesn’t attract his share of gazes, though, too. I get the impression that many of the men view anyone connected with the government with mistrust—not that I can blame them considering their experiences—and Sam in his somber suit and hat looks like the quintessential government man.

We meet another man similar to the official we spoke to at Camp One—impatient and brusque, his mind on the coming storm. He doesn’t recognize my brother’s photograph; nor do the dozen or so other men we ask. With each person we approach, I sink lower and lower, tears threatening, my voice wavering until Sam wraps an arm around my waist and takes over, directing his questions toward the men in a manner that makes me think he must be quite a good investigator indeed. I wouldn’t say he has a way of putting people at ease, but he naturally commands respect seemingly without making an effort to do so. The men I’m used to throw their wealth around as though by virtue of it they are entitled to having the world spread before them. Sam is simply direct, lacking in pretense or artifice, and I watch, fascinated by the skill.