Excerpt from The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"What's the name?" Toni asked.

I suddenly didn't want to give her Mariko's name. It seemed too sacred to spill to someone who did not know her or what she had meant to me in another time, another place. And I still had no idea what Toni was attempting to show me, so I thought for a moment and decided on the name of a boy I knew in junior high whom other boys had liked to tease. I had felt sorry for him then, but I hadn't had one thought about him since.

"Artie Gibbs."

"Artie? An old boyfriend?" Toni smiled coyly.

"Heavens, no. He was definitely not that."

Toni laughed. "Okay, so his real name is probably Arthur, right?"

I nodded.

"I just type his name like this, but I put it in quotation marks so that Google doesn't look at all Arthurs, just Arthur Gibbs, and ... voilà!"

She handed the iPad back to me. A white screen that looked like a piece of paper stared back at me, with words all over it.

"All of those sentences in blue are links to articles or Web pages or directories that mention an Arthur Gibbs," she said. "A link is like a ... a place to go check without having to leave your house. Do you know how old he is?"

"He'd be eighty-one. Like me."

"Well, then you can eliminate any hit that refers to an Arthur Gibbs younger than that. Like this guy."

Toni tapped something and then showed me an arrest report for an Arthur K. Gibbs from Boise, Idaho. He had turned forty-two last summer. "That's not your Artie. See?"

"Any hit?"

"All of these are hits. But they are less likely to be anything you want the further out you go. Here's how you go back to the list of hits."

I watched as she tapped an arrow to go back to the screen with all the blue-lettered titles.

"How many of those ... hits are there?" I asked, peering at the screen and seeing a number that couldn't possibly be right. More than twenty thousand.

"Don't pay any attention to that. Just look at the results up front. The ones at the way back are never the ones you want." She pointed to the bottom of the screen. "This is just the first page of hits. Down here is the link for the second page and third page and so on. You just tap. It's like turning pages in a book. Like the other day when I was showing you how to tap through the articles on the Home and Garden Web site. Just like that. Okay?"

"All right." I reached for a yellow-lined notepad on the table and scribbled Google. Type name. Quotation marks. Hits. Pages in a book.

"Now, locating this gentleman might take a while, so don't lose heart if it doesn't happen today," Toni said. "You might need to try again tomorrow or the next day or the next if you get tired of looking. I've got to run but you'll let me know if you find him, won't you?"

For a second Agnes was all ready to say, Find who? But I jumped ahead of her, nearly tripping over my own mouth. "Certainly. Thank you, Toni."

She smiled at me. "You're one cool grandma, Miss Elsie. You've got an iPad and you know how to use it! Next thing you know you'll be on Facebook, posting pictures of your grandkids."

I didn't tell her I already had the Facebook. Teddy had put it on my iPad so that I could see pictures of the family. I didn't tell her because I very much wanted Toni to go on home so that I could use the Google to look for Mariko before Agnes found a way to make me forget how to do it, or that I even wanted to.

"Thank you, dear," I told her. "You have a nice rest of the day, now."

The second she was out the door I was typing Mariko Inoue Hayashi into that slim little space, with quotation marks.

The screen lit up with new blue-lettered titles. The first one took me to a feature article written five years earlier that had appeared in a San Francisco newspaper. The story was about a nisei woman, American-born of Japanese parents, who had finally returned home to the United States after six decades in Tokyo. Born in Los Angeles in 1929, this Mariko Inoue Hayashi had been repatriated with her family to a defeated Japan in September of 1945, after having been interned in Crystal City, Texas, along with thousands of other Japanese, German, and Italian families. At long last she'd come back to America following the death of her husband to live with a daughter in San Francisco.

Excerpted from The Last Year of the War by Susan Meissner. Copyright © 2019 by Susan Meissner. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.