A Coming Evil

by Vivian Vande Velde

  "Let's play hide and seek," Cecile suggested before Aunt Josephine had pedaled to the bottom of the drive.

  "Your mother said we were supposed to clean our rooms," Lisette said.

  "My mother isn't here," Cecile pointed out. "You're it."

  The children scattered.

  "Three quick games," Lisette called after them. "And then the cleaning." Why did she have the feeling nobody was listening? "Then, the sooner we finish, the sooner we can play some more." To herself she thought, I'm beginning to sound like my own mother. It was a scary thought.

  But after three games, Cecile said, "I never get to be it, because I'm such a good hider. Please, please, please, let me be it!"

  "Oh, all right," Lisette said, because she'd thought of a good spot. She ran upstairs and hid in Aunt Josephine's armoire, crouched in the corner behind a long evening dress.

  After a while she heard Cecile enter the room. Anne was with her—apparently Cecile had found her first—and Lisette held her breath so that neither of them could hear her. Cecile opened the armoire but didn't look closely enough to find Lisette. "Bed?" Anne suggested, perhaps the first time Lisette had heard her say anything that wasn't a response to a direct question, and then they were gone. From the hallway, she heard Cecile call out shrilly, "I see Etienne behind the armchair." And then she found Emma under the bed in her room, where she'd hidden during each of the three previous games also. All four of them went running down the stairs, laughing and shouting. Lisette knew Louis Jerome was downstairs because he hadn't come up with her. She waited patiently for Cecile either to come back after finding him and conduct a more thorough search, or give up.

  After a while her back got tired, and she very carefully shifted position. Later, her knees got sore, so she stretched her legs out. She'd be sure to hear Cecile coming back up the stairs, and she could conceal herself better then. After more time passed, she got so tired of being in the armoire, she realized she was wishing Cecile would find her. She shifted position yet again, not taking care to be quiet. She sighed.

  Eventually Lisette opened the door of the armoire. No sign of Cecile, except that she had left the edge of the comforter up when she'd checked under the bed.

  Lisette moved quietly into the hallway—nobody there—and down the stairs. Still nobody.

  From the living room she could hear Rachel banging her rattle on the floor, which meant that someone had gotten her out of her bassinet.

  Stealthily Lisette eased around the corner. Emma was on the floor playing with the baby. Anne and Louis Jerome were attempting to construct a house of playing cards on the coffee table. And Cecile was arranging Etienne's hair. So far, she had it up in five little rubber-banded tufts topped with barrettes. Etienne didn't appear to be having nearly as much fun as Cecile was.

  Lisette cleared her throat.

  Cecile looked up. "Oh, there you are."

  "Why didn't anybody tell me the game was over?" Lisette demanded.

  "The game isn't over," Cecile said. "We just all got bored looking for you. You're it again."

  "I am not it," Lisette protested. "And you're supposed to be cleaning your rooms."

  "Oh, sure," Cecile said. "Get us to do your work while you play."

  "I am not—" Lisette started, but Etienne suddenly shouted, "Somebody's coming."

  Lisette ran to the window, knowing that if he was simply intent on getting away from Cecile, Etienne could have tried this long ago. Now she, too, could hear the clump of horse hooves on the driveway and the crunching of wheels on gravel. But it would take a few more seconds before the approaching vehicle made it around the curve in the driveway that would bring it into sight.

  Etienne put on his gas mask, pulled it down over his face, and headed for the kitchen and the basement door. He was the only one of the children who reacted according to Aunt Josephine's plan. "It's every man for himself!" his muffled voice proclaimed.

  A bicycle horn honked.

  "It's Monsieur Maurice and Maman," Cecile said as the battered cart pulled into view. "Don't bother with the basement. Everybody in the kitchen."

  "What if she invites him in for coffee?" Lisette asked as finally the children began to move.

  "She always invites him in," Cecile said. "He always says no."

  Maurice pulled up on the reins. Now Lisette and Cecile could see that Aunt Josephine's bicycle was in the back. Had she had some sort of accident? Maurice was lifting the bicycle out of the cart.

  Cecile gave Lisette a worried look as Maurice approached the back door, which opened out onto the porch, which opened onto the kitchen. "Everybody in the basement," Cecile screamed, nearly shattering Lisette's eardrum.

  "Noise," Lisette told her. "We need to make noise to cover up the children's noise."

  The two of them headed for the porch.

  "Maman, Maman," Cecile called, at the same time Lisette shouted over her voice, "Aunt Josephine, are you all right?"

  "What happened?" Cecile asked.

  "Is the bicycle broken?" Lisette asked.

  "Hello, Monsieur Maurice," Cecile said. Then to her mother, "What's Monsieur Maurice doing here?"

  "Is it still raining?" Lisette asked, having run out of good questions.

  "Yes, yes," Aunt Josephine said. "Everything is fine. Just put the bicycle over there, Maurice. That's fine. Thank you. Cecile! Lisette! Please."

  Cecile and Lisette fell quiet at Aunt Josephine's tone of reprimand. There were no telltale noises from the stairs or the basement.

  "Let's have some coffee," Aunt Josephine said. "We're both soaked."

  "Well," Maurice said, "if you're sure it won't be inconvenient."

  Aunt Josephine seemed suddenly to realize the possibility that the children might be up out of the basement. "Sometimes the house is a bit messy with these two girls..." she said hesitantly.

  Maurice looked ready to leave then, but Cecile said, "We've spent all morning cleaning." Lisette could tell Aunt Josephine took this as a message that the children were safely hidden. "Come in," she insisted to Maurice.

  Lisette tugged Cecile aside. "She's going to see that we didn't clean," she hissed. "And then she'll be angry."

  Cecile shook her head. "If she complains that we didn't do a good job, I'll tell her she's always criticizing. She always feels guilty when I cry and tell her nothing I do pleases her."

  It wouldn't work with my mother, Lisette thought, but Cecile should know.

  In the kitchen, Aunt Josephine spooned the last of a package of coffee into the pot. "This is the good kind," Aunt Josephine said. "Real coffee, not ground acorns or beans. Just what we need to take the chill off after being caught in a downpour."

  But there was more to it than that, Lisette suspected. Aunt Josephine was shivering and Lisette doubted it was just the cold, because Maurice wasn't shaking.

  "You look like you've seen a ghost," Cecile said.

  Aunt Josephine whirled to face her. "Would you stop talking about ghosts?" she snapped shrilly.

  There was a moment of strained silence; the hiss of the gas burner was the only sound.

  Then Aunt Josephine said, "Cecile, get the cups out. I'm going to put on some dry clothes."

  While Cecile acted as hostess, Lisette followed Aunt Josephine into the hall.

  "I'm fine," Aunt Josephine told her. Then, lowering her voice, she said, "Have you been frightening Cecile with ghost stories?"

  "No," Lisette said. "Truly. It's Cecile who keeps mentioning gh—"

  "This business of a German ghoul with awful wounds and..." Aunt Josephine was for once at a loss for words.

  "Cecile was trying to scare me," Lisette protested. "I never said anything about ghosts at all."

  "The thing is," Aunt Josephine said, "I think ... never mind." She turned to go up the stairs.

  "There is a ghost," Lisette said so that her. aunt wouldn't be afraid, "but—"

  Aunt Josephine must have thought that Lisette was simply trying to finish the statement she had started. She
turned back with a sigh. "I thought I saw something, once. I don't know what it was, but it wasn't a ghost. And whatever it was, it wasn't the way Cecile described it. It looked like a young man—well, my age when your uncle and I were just married and we first moved in here. Up on that little hill beyond the barn—I thought I saw..." Aunt Josephine shook her head. "I don't know what I saw. But that's how ghost stories get started. There's nothing up there to be frightened of, Lisette."

  Aunt Josephine's age when she and Uncle Raymond first bought this house ten years ago. That would make the ghost about twenty. Either Gerard had a disconcerting number of companions or he himself had a disconcerting tendency to vary his age. Lisette stopped trying to figure it out when she realized Aunt Josephine was trying to set her mind at ease and was worried that she found the idea of a ghost frightening.

  "I think it best that you try to put all this supernatural nonsense out of your mind." Aunt Josephine was saying, still not convinced that Lisette hadn't been telling Cecile stories.

  And she never would be, Lisette realized. So she said, "I'll try."

  "Good," Aunt Josephine said and once more started up the stairs.

  "But if it wasn't the ghost that scared you," said Cecile, standing behind them in the hall that led from the kitchen, where neither of them had noticed her, "then what did frighten you?"

  Aunt Josephine glanced at Lisette before answering Cecile, and in that glance, Lisette knew. "There was just this German officer who was making me nervous."

  "Do you think he knows?" Cecile asked.

  Aunt Josephine shook her head. "No."

  Before she could say anything else, Cecile said, "We shouldn't have taken them in. They'll get us all killed."

  "Cecile!" Aunt Josephine sounded genuinely shocked. "I don't think he suspects anything. I think he's just interested—" She stopped, as though Lisette and Cecile were too young to understand. But Lisette had seen the look that officer had given her, and she suspected she knew exactly what he was interested in.

  Cecile didn't look convinced.

  "You come upstairs," Aunt Josephine told Cecile. To Lisette she said, "You entertain Monsieur Maurice."

  In the kitchen, Lisette saw that Cecile had set out cups, napkins, a bowl with a tiny bit of sugar and another with milk, and even a plate of biscuits, everything ready so that there was nothing for Lisette to do except sit there and wait, with nothing to say to Maurice.

  After a while, Maurice said, "So, how do you like Sibourne?"

  "Very much, thank you," Lisette lied.

  "You must be looking forward to school—next week, isn't it?"

  Obviously Maurice knew nothing about being thirteen. Lisette just smiled politely.

  After another while, Maurice said, "That cousin of yours, she's a very lively girl."

  "Yes," Lisette said.

  "My wife and I, we've watched her grow up every summer since she was born."

  Lisette continued to smile.

  "Seen the ghost, have you?"

  "Excuse me?" Lisette said.

  "Your cousin, she mentioned the ghost. I thought he'd gone away, but apparently he's come back."

  "Gone away?" Lisette asked. "Come back?"

  "I've lived here all my life," Maurice said. "As you can imagine, that's quite a long time."

  Lisette found her polite smile again.

  "As a boy, I used to climb all over these hills. Got myself lost in the woods more than once. Came nearer to drowning than my mother ever suspected. But that hill by the new bam, between my property and your uncle's—this was when the land belonged to the Martinage family, before your family ever moved in..." Maurice nodded, having either lost track of his sentence or getting caught up in his memories of the former owners.

  "What about the hill?" Lisette asked. Maurice was obviously the kind of person who was not particular and would talk to anybody on any subject.

  "Haunted. By a ghost my own age."

  "Parage?" Lisette asked.

  Maurice chuckled. "My age back when I first was old enough to be on my own—five, six years old."

  Personally, Lisette didn't think that five or six was old enough to be on your own in the country, but she didn't say so.

  "We grew up together," Maurice said, "that ghost and me. Not that we ever talked, mind you. But I'd catch glimpses of him. Oh, sometimes I wouldn't go up that particular way for a year or two at a time. And sometimes I'd go up there and wouldn't see him. But when I did, it always turned out he'd kept apace of me. Ten, twelve years old. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, twenty."

  "But then he went away?" Lisette asked.

  "About the time I was in my mid-twenties, I didn't see him anymore." Maurice winked at her. "Probably because I finally reached the age of reason. Finally realized I was too old to believe in ghosts." He winked again.

  Aunt Josephine came down then, wearing a dry dress, fussing about pouring the coffee. Cecile passed the plate of biscuits after taking two for herself.

  Lisette nibbled on a biscuit and tried to keep a polite look on her face as though she were listening while Aunt Josephine and Maurice talked about neighbors and weather and food prices. Mid-twenties, Maurice had said. Maurice thought the ghost had disappeared because Maurice had stopped believing in him.

  Lisette wondered if Gerard had really disappeared because he'd reached the age at which he'd died.

  12.

  Tuesday, September 3, 1940

  By the time Maurice left and the children were back upstairs, Lisette was determined to see Gerard after all, to learn if she was right. The rain had finally stopped, but the grass and trees were dripping. Mud glistened on the side of the hill, and Lisette knew better than to ask if she could go out to play. Still, the perfect opportunity presented itself after lunch, when Aunt Josephine announced that she had a headache and was going to take a nap.

  Before Aunt Josephine had made it to the top of the stairs, Cecile sidled up to Lisette. "I know what you're planning," she whispered. "And you better not, or I'll tell."

  Lisette forced an I-couldn't-begin-to-imagine-what-you're-talking-about smile. "I was just going to suggest a nice game of hide and seek. I'll be it."

  "Oh no you don't," Cecile said. "Hide and seek gets played inside."

  "Well, I'm going outside, for a few minutes," Lisette hissed. There was no telling how long Aunt Josephine's nap would last. Lisette fought the impulse to push Cecile out of the way.

  Cecile took a step toward the stairs, and Lisette clamped her hand over Cecile's mouth. Just then Emma came around the corner from the living room.

  "What are you doing?" Emma asked as Cecile tried to bite and Lisette tried not to yell.

  "Go away," Lisette told her. Then, to Cecile she offered, "I'll brush your hair."

  Cecile kept struggling.

  Lisette took a deep breath and said, "I'll let you brush my hair."

  Emma shook her head. "Don't let her brush your hair," she warned with a shiver.

  But Cecile had stopped struggling.

  "All right?" Lisette asked. "You let me go out for a little while and you don't tell your mother, then we'll brush each other's hair?"

  Cecile nodded and Lisette removed her hand from her mouth. Cecile said, "Except that we'll brush first, and then you'll go out."

  "No," Lisette said. "If your mother decides to get up after only fifteen minutes or so, we can still brush while she's up, but I can't go out. That's the whole point. And I'll brush for as long as I was out. You can time me."

  "I'll time you," Emma volunteered, as though she could tell time.

  "Go away," Cecile told her. Then, to Lisette she said, "Brush first."

  "Why do we always have to do everything your way?" Lisette asked.

  "Because this is my house."

  "Yes," Lisette said, "but whenever you stay at my house, you say we have to do what you want because you're my guest."

  "You're not my guest," Cecile said. "You're a refugee."

  "You little beast." Lisette
grabbed for Cecile's hair.

  "Fight! Fight!" Emma cried.

  "Shhh!" Both Lisette and Cecile hovered over the little girl.

  "Lisette!" Aunt Josephine called down from her room. "Get the children to play more quietly."

  "Yes, Aunt Josephine," Lisette said at the same time Cecile said, "Yes, Maman." To Emma—and to Louis Jerome and Anne who had come running in from the living room—Lisette said, "We're not going to fight." She glowered at Cecile. "Five minutes," she said.

  "You said for as long as—"

  "That's only if I go out first."

  "Brush first, and however long you brush, if you're gone longer than that, I'm going straight upstairs and telling."

  "Fine," Lisette said. "Beast."

  Ten minutes of brushing was all Lisette dared—five minutes of her brushing Cecile's hair, and five long minutes of Cecile brushing hers. Louis Jerome timed.

  "Where are you going?" Etienne asked as she put on her boots afterwards.

  "To check on the rabbits," Lisette told him.

  "I fed them already this morning."

  "I'm not feeding them, I'm checking them."

  Emma asked, "Are you going to eat one?"

  Lisette sighed. "No, I'm not going to eat one. I'm checking them."

  "Checking for what?" Louis Jerome asked. "Is there something wrong with them? If they get sick—"

  "Louis Jerome," Lisette said, "the rabbits are fine, I'm fine, everything is fine. Please keep the children from disturbing Aunt Josephine, all right?"

  She could tell that he was certain she was keeping dire news from him, but he nodded.

  "You're wasting time," Cecile said as Lisette tied on a kerchief to cover the dozen or so barrettes Cecile had fastened in her hair. Cecile was leaning on the doorway, making a show of looking at the clock.