Page 119 of Mayhem and Minnie

The photo is from 1943, for fuck’s sake.

And no matter how much I’ve been toying with the idea of magic recently, the logical side of my brain refuses to believe there’s such a thing as immortality. Or time travel.

It’s scientifically impossible.

There must be an explanation for it. Like the fact that the photo could have been edited. Although, why someone would have gone to that extreme, I can’t say.

I mutter a string of curses under my breath. Although the entry has a short description, aside from the mention of the Red Cross, it doesn’t say who the individual nurses are.

“Come on, Marlowe,” I mumble to myself. “Maybe it’s just a case of a historical doppelgänger. It’s happened before, no?”

There are all sorts of articles circulating on the internet on celebrities and their historical doppelgängers. And those resemblances are quite uncanny too.

Convincing myself that it’s only a case of a look-alike, I click out of this entry and pull up the last result. The source is some obscure archive in French. There’s a short description attached to the photo, but it’s not in English.

I click on the photo. It’s black and white and it depicts the same woman from before. But she’s not alone. She’s accompanied by a man dressed in a military uniform. They’re posing for the camera. Behind them, there’s a monochrome background, which suggests this was a professional photo shoot.

The girl is no longer wearing her nurse uniform. Instead, she’s dressed in a long, dark cotton gown. Her hair flows down her back, long and luxurious. Although her outfit is rather simple, it does nothing to detract from her natural beauty, which is further emphasized by her wide, effusive smile. Around her neck is the same necklace with the cross pendant as before, confirming this is, indeed, the same person.

The man by her side looks to be around her age. He has a long scar running down the right side of his face, and what’s visible of his left hand appears to be riddled with scar tissue.

They’re standing close together. The man has his arm over her shoulder, holding her possessively by his side.

Are they lovers? Perhaps husband and wife?

Maybe these are Minnie’s relatives.

I nod to myself. That must be it.

Wanting to see if the description of the picture might give me more clues, I copy and paste it in a translator.

Lucien de Vitry with his fiancée, Mina Anyan, in Paris.

There it is. The same last name, or at least a variation of it. It must be her family, after all.

I end up going down a rabbit hole investigating both Lucien and Mina.

There isn’t any information on Mina Anyan, though I already anticipated that. There is, however, a small entry on Wikipedia on Lucien de Vitry. A first generation French American, he was a decorated B-17 commander of the Eighth Air Force of the U.S. Army Air Forces in World War II. He completed over forty-one missions before being shot down on German territory and becoming a POW.

But as I read on, I see that despite surviving the war camps, he died of tuberculosis right before the end of the war.

He was only twenty-four.

Damn.

If that’s the case, I wonder if he managed to marry Mina.

A little curious, I go back to the photo and zoom in to look at Mina’s face.

The woman is identical to Minnie, and just as beautiful.

Now that I have confirmation that they’re related, I feel more at ease.

I chuckle to myself. Of course that’s the only explanation. It’s not as if Mina is Minnie and she ended up time-traveling to the twenty-first century. It’s even more ludicrous to think of her being over a hundred years old. If anything, the girl barely looks eighteen.

But even as I convince myself about the impossibility of the matter, I can’t stop looking at Mina and seeing my Minnie.

Mina holds herself straight in front of the camera, but her gaze is directed at the man. She’s watching him intently. The corners of her mouth are slightly curled up in a smile, lighting up her entire face.

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