He pointed toward the door. “Let us begin.”
His suitcase was propped up on the kitchen table, but instead of clothes inside, she saw knobs and the veins of black wire connected to a box.
“I assume you know how to read German.”
She nodded.
“Very good.” He passed over a piece of paper with four lines on it. Then he held out a small box and switched a lever.
With a tap of the paper, he signaled for her to read.
“Ich bin—” she began, her voice shaky.
She looked up at Roger, hovering over her. Would he shoot her if she messed up?
Roger’s lips pressed together, his eyes narrowing. He was angry at her.
Her eyes back on the paper, she continued reading.
I am safe with a friend and ready for guests. Will meet you next Friday.
Roger clicked off a button and checked his watch. “Right on time.”
“Will the British hear it?” Frau Terrell asked as he packed up his case.
“Perhaps, but they won’t know where I’m transmitting from. Or who is sending this message.”
“And your friends?”
“They heard it,” Roger said before he pointed at Brigitte. “Go back to bed.”
She slipped away from the table as Frau Terrell moved toward the kitchen, saying she would make tea.
Standing at the doorway into her room, she could see the spatter of blood on her wall, smell the stench that had settled over her cot. Instead of stepping inside, she eyed the front door of the cottage, on the other side of the table.
Lauf.
She could almost hear Dietmar telling her to run.
Somewhere close was the village they’d passed on their drive here. She could find food on her own. A place to sleep. Anyplace was better than this, even sleeping in a shed or on a barn floor. The rats could crawl on her if they wanted, as long as Roger and his gun didn’t threaten her again.
Roger swore when she rushed out the door, into the night. She ducked under tree limbs, plowed through the mud and muck, her legs burning. Not once did she look back.
A stream of light shone through the branches around her, but the torch wouldn’t find her. Dietmar had taught her how to dodge the evils of light.
CHAPTER 28
_____
“What are you doing up there?” Lucas asked, seemingly perplexed as he stepped out of his car, the headlamps on his Range Rover illuminating Quenby’s hiding place among the leaves.
She hopped off the limb. “Thinking.”
He leaned back against his car. “Does it help to sit in a tree?”
“People who are scared often do unexpected things,” she explained. “Sometimes it helps to do unexpected things as well when you’re piecing together their story.”
“There’s nothing expected about you, Quenby.”
She brushed off the seat of her jeans. “Taking that as a compliment.”
“As it was meant to be.” He opened the passenger door, and she climbed inside.
Fortunately, Kyle and his girlfriend had left earlier, speeding past Quenby’s nest in the tree. While she waited in the lamplight, she’d searched various websites for Olivia Terrell in the UK, hoping to find a descendant who could answer her questions about Brigitte.
But Quenby could find no information about the woman who’d once worked for Winston Churchill. So as she sat in that tree, she’d wondered—had Olivia disappeared like Brigitte? Or had she simply been forgotten in the record of time?
When Lucas reversed the car, light from his headlamps shot beyond the house, toward the forest. “Did you find the Mill House?”
She shook her head. “I found the road on an ordnance map, but it’s all bracken and bramble around the mill now.”
Dozens of cars sped by on the main road before they were able to turn.
“Did another investigator locate the house?” she asked.
“If they did, they never told Mr. Knight.”
“The Ricker family once owned Camford Mill.” She shifted in her seat. “Even if Brigitte was sent to Canada, I want to search the Mill House.”
“So we’ll try again in the morning?” he asked as they approached the town.
“If you really don’t have to go back to London—”
“I don’t.”
“Then we’ll search together.” She wouldn’t admit it to him, but she’d be grateful not only for his vehicle but for his company when she went back to explore the woods.
Her inn was full for the night, but Lucas found a motel room a few blocks away. They ate a late dinner of pollack encrusted with chorizo, in a café along a more civilized portion of the river. Lucas’s eyebrows furrowed when she ordered a bottle of Coke with her fish instead of a white wine, but he didn’t tease her about the selection.
Below them, ferries carted passengers between France and the coast of England, not far from where the Higgins boats launched for Normandy on D-Day.
“Does Mr. Knight own a boat as well as a plane?” Quenby asked as she watched a yacht cruise into the harbor.
“No. I think his channel crossing as a boy cured him of any interest.” Lucas took a bite of his spinach salad. “How did everything sort out at the Royal Institution?”
“I’m still working on the report—”
He stopped her. “I’m not angry.”
“Meribeth had the microscope waiting for me.” Quenby opened her iPad and found the pictures, turning the screen so he could see. “They’re photos of some sort of air base.”
He scrolled through them at first. Then he returned to look at them again, slowly. “Blast.”
“What is it?”
“That’s Biggin Hill. See the chapel?” He pointed at the screen before looking up at her. “Probably during World War II.”
She studied the screen, then leaned back in her wicker chair. “Biggin Hill was an RAF base,” she said, recalling the conversation with the Uber driver.
Lucas searched for more information on his phone. “The Germans bombed it twelve times between August 1940 and January 1941 alone. Took out a teleprinter network and the operations room.”
She whistled. “They must have known what to bomb on the base.”
“Probably from photographs like these.”
Her skin tingled. “So the Terrells or someone else in the cottage might have been helping the Germans?”
“Perhaps, but that would be almost impossible to prove now, especially since the Terrells seem to have vanished along with Brigitte.” He watched another yacht cruise into the waterway, rope lights strung from stern to bow. “Then again, I suppose adults leave more of a trail than children, however faint.”
“Not all adults leave a trail.” The words slipped out, too late to retract. Her mother might have left a trail, but Quenby had never searched for it.
Before Lucas questioned her statement, she changed the subject. “Do you still want me to e-mail a report tonight?”
His eyebrows slid up. “Breaking the contract already?”
“It seems the lawyer who wrote the contract could give me permission to break it, especially since I already told you everything I found.”
He sipped his wine. “Mr. Knight will want to read your report.”
“Then I’ll write up something from yesterday and today.”
“You can wait until morning.”
“Rule breaker,” she teased. “Why don’t I dictate it to you right now?”
He laughed as he reached for his phone. “I’ll try and keep up.”
“Bullet point number one,” she began. “I reviewed microphotographs found at 12 Mulberry Lane. They appear to be of the RAF station at Biggin Hill.”
She poured Coke into her glass. “Number two, searched for the Mill House on Kelmore Street where Olivia Terrell presumably resided but have located neither a house nor the designated street.
“Number three, received confirmation from an evacuee record that the Terrells did indeed house Brigitt
e but she left about five months after she arrived, purportedly for Canada. And number four, had dinner with an irritating attorney who—”
“Who rescued you from spending the night in a tree.”
“True,” she said. “Scratch number four.”
He tapped on the screen. “Expunged from the record.”
“It’s like a superpower,” she said, pushing her hair back over her ear.
He laughed again. “The ability to use big words?”
“No—” she rolled her eyes—“the power to expunge. Just think of it. You could expunge anything. Every stupid decision you’ve ever made or the memories of when someone else has done something wrong to you.”
He leaned into the table, searching her face. “If you could erase anything from your past, what would you expunge?”
“I’m pretty sure that’s none of your business.”
“Said in the nicest way possible,” he said, shifting back again at her rebuke.
She took a sip of her Coke. “What would you erase?”
His eyebrows climbed. “And that’s your business?”
“You’re right.” Both hands rose like a shield in front of her. “You don’t have to answer that.”
“I actually don’t mind answering,” he said. “I’d erase years eighteen to twenty-two.”
She lowered her hands. “Not pretty?”
“Downright ugly.” He glanced at the lights along the moorings again, at the white forest of sailboat masts. “Fortunately, I’m learning that God’s grace covers even the worst of my sins.”
“You believe in a God who forgives and forgets?”
“I believe in a God who forgives when I ask. I’m not convinced that He forgets.”
She crossed her arms over her chest. “An almighty being should be able to forget if He chooses.”
“It almost makes the grace cheap if He forgets it all. I like thinking, at least in my limited understanding, that in His great love, He remembers and still forgives. Just like we remember when people hurt us, but we can forgive them too.”
She’d tried to forget what happened with her mother, many times, but the memories kept flooding back. Was it really possible to forgive even if she couldn’t forget?
“Forgiveness is the only thing that truly frees us,” he said. “A supernatural power.”
That’s what she wanted more than anything. To be free of her anger. Wounds.
But she couldn’t forgive Jocelyn Vaughn, not after what she had done.
The nightmare woke Quenby and she bolted upright from the lumpy mattress, covered in sweat. In the darkness, all she could see was the blonde-haired girl from her dream, standing by herself. Hungry. Scared.
People had been moving around—even through—the girl, hundreds of them, but not one of them stopped. The girl cried out but no one heard. She was like a ghost. An apparition. And the invisibility hurt to her core.
Quenby turned on the sconce light beside her bed.
She’d had nightmares about this girl before, but she’d never seen her face. This time she saw her eyes, lonely and afraid.
Was it her as a child? Or was this girl Brigitte, lost and alone?
In her mind, their stories were bleeding together.
If only she did have the power to expunge her past, at least part of it, from her mental record. The files in her brain that stuffed things away in a most unorderly fashion, then spilled them out late at night, when she was trying to sleep.
Perhaps finding Brigitte would help put to rest these dreams that plagued her.
She pulled the pillow to her chest, memories that she wanted to forget flooding back to her again.
Twenty-one years ago, when her mother disappeared, the police had searched Orlando. Or so Grammy Vaughn had said. They probably didn’t search for long. After her husband died, Jocelyn had a sad history of walking away, leaving Quenby home alone, until child welfare stepped in. When Quenby was six, she and Jocelyn both went to live with Grammy in Tennessee so an adult would be present on those days her mother didn’t feel like mothering anymore.
Jocelyn had tried repeatedly to get a job at the Magic Kingdom. She’d wanted to be Snow White, as if she could snap her fingers and become a princess. In hindsight, she was probably wanting to hide behind a costume and makeup, but when Quenby was a little girl, she thought it magical that her mother wanted to be someone else.
On that fateful day, Quenby’s seventh birthday, Jocelyn had awakened her after midnight and made a game out of their escape. They’d snuck down the steps, Jocelyn’s hand over her mouth, trying not to laugh. Even as a child, Quenby hadn’t thought her mother’s games were funny, but she’d tried to play along. Anything she could do to please the woman she wanted to love her. The woman who didn’t seem to know how to love.
Grammy had done the best she could after Jocelyn left, trying to help Quenby heal. She’d taken Quenby to church and spent a chunk of her retirement fund on a counselor who threw around words like abandonment and attachment disorder. Words that made Quenby feel as if she could never break free of the cage that adults around her called circumstances. At times, it seemed Quenby and the counselor were playing dodgeball. She tried to duck when these words were thrown her way, but sometimes they hit. When they did, they stung.
She rose from her bed and opened the patio door, overlooking the bay.
Did Mr. Knight know where her mother was? Perhaps when he had researched Quenby, he’d found Jocelyn Vaughn as well. Perhaps he would give her the information if she asked.
She had spent much of her life searching for people, but she’d never even searched Google for Jocelyn. Part of her still wanted to find her mother and ask why. Why hadn’t she left her in the safety of her grandmother’s care instead of leaving her alone at Disney? Why hadn’t she even said good-bye?
But she’d been too scared to inquire, afraid perhaps that this incident that rocked her world hadn’t affected her mother at all. That after the Dumbo ride, Jocelyn had gone on with her life freely, relieved she no longer had to care for her daughter. Grateful, even, that Quenby was gone as she started a new family, birthing new children to replace the old one who’d never been able to make her happy.
Brandon might have thought her obsessed with her work, but the truth was she was scared to get close to anyone, man or woman, thinking if they really got to know her, they would be gone too. It was crazy, of course, but it was her own version of crazy. During high school, she’d tried to remake herself into someone much more cool and smart. Likable. Someone different from who she was at the core. Someone people enjoyed being with.
She no longer tried to evolve into someone people liked. Instead she focused all her efforts on her stories. People seemed to enjoy her writing. It didn’t matter if they knew or even liked her.
Had Brigitte tried to change her identity as well, stepping into a new one that didn’t include the horrible memories of her childhood? Which begged the question—did Brigitte deliberately hide from Dietmar after the war, or was she detained?
Perhaps, after four years as a refugee, Brigitte joined a new family, like Dietmar had done. She could have stayed in Canada, under a new name, or been relocated to the United States, Australia, or even South Africa. Or she could have traveled back to Germany, not knowing whether her father was dead or alive, and stayed there.
Or had Brigitte died, like her father, before the war ended?
The task before Quenby seemed more than daunting. It seemed impossible.
But Brigitte had carved her initials in that wall back on Mulberry Lane. If she wanted Dietmar to find her, at least while she was with the Terrells, perhaps she’d continued to leave a trail along the way. Quenby could only hope time hadn’t erased anything else she’d left behind.
For now, like Mr. Knight, she would cling to the hope that Brigitte was still alive.
There were three long hours before she was supposed to meet Lucas for breakfast. She returned to her bed, yearning for peaceful sleep, but the lo
nely girl swept back into her mind.
Sitting up, she flipped on the light again and reached for the Gideon Bible in the drawer beside her bed. When she was a child, her grandmother liked to read to her from Proverbs. And Jesus’ words in the Gospels.
She found the verse in Matthew.
“For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.”
Quenby pulled her knees up to her chest, praying quietly as she’d done over the years that Jesus would do more than help her carry the heavy load of her past. That He would take it away.
She rocked back and forth a few times before resting back against the pillows. As she fell asleep, the pain from her childhood seemed to swallow her again. Rejection. Loneliness. Fear. But this time when she dreamed, there was someone beside the girl. A warm presence. An elderly man holding out his hand. And the girl wasn’t scared of him at all.
The man led her through the crowd, and he must have been invisible as well for no one looked at him either.
He guided her to the grassy banks of a stream, to a picnic awaiting them on a crimson blanket. The girl ate the cold cucumber sandwiches prepared for her, gulped the lemonade. Then she swam in the clear waters by the waterfall. Safe. Her stomach full.
The man watched over her while she slept, and when she woke, he held out his hand again.
The alarm woke Quenby, but this time she wished she could slip back into her dream, to see where the girl went. To make sure the man didn’t abandon her.
It seemed, in her dream, that he wanted to rescue the girl from her fear and her loneliness. It seemed that perhaps he understood what it was like to be rejected too.
Morning light warmed her room as she leaned back against the headboard. Outside the window, a sailboat drifted toward the channel, preparing to dance with the wind.
Perhaps God did want peace for her and for Brigitte. Not sadness or despair.
Perhaps He didn’t want any of His children to be alone.
Chapter 29
Mill House, April 1941
One minute. That’s how long it took for Olivia to begin accosting him after he stepped through the cottage door. Instead of greeting him with a kiss, Olivia stood by the kitchen sink, her lips pressed in a firm line. “You said you’d come every weekend.”
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