Page 129 of Blood Game

“This old property map lies along a single-track road twenty kilometers north past this village.”

She looked up when he made no comment, didn't even seem to be listening as he stared into the rear-view mirror.

“What is it?”

He saw it as they came out of the library, just a glimpse. He might have been wrong, but it was that other sense that had him watching out the side mirror, through the flow of late afternoon traffic, the glare of lights, and the rain that had begun.

A silver-gray car, late model, European, with the windows blacked out, at the curb on the adjacent street. When he looked again, it had pulled away and disappeared in traffic.

“Nothing,” he replied, tucking it away.

CHAPTER

THIRTY-SEVEN

Twenty kilometers was like stepping back in time as the road wound north through rolling countryside in shades of gold, amber, and brown with the season, dotted with cows with dark circular marks around their eyes, slipping through stands of ancient oaks, then emerging past orchards that spread to the edge of the forest.

Signs from another time marked the way for modern day tourists, scholars, the curious.

World War I trenches—2 km; Somme Battlefield—40 km; Dunkirk—just over 200 km.

Taking the traveler back in time, to battlefields, that desperate struggle, the age-old conflict of good against evil, the ghosts of the dead in fields with rows of white crosses.

The village of Montigny had no strategic importance, that distance from the larger city to the south, perched on the edge of that conflict, the whitewashed houses with slate roofs, sandstone foundations, the spire of the small stone church, picturesque in its quaintness, stark contrast to one of the bloodiest wars in human history.

Beyond the village, men had fought and died on both sides, the scars of World War I covered over by the forest for ahundred years, in that way that nature reclaimed its own. And then another war that had claimed the sons and daughters of the village—simple people, farmers, idealistic young men and women like Micheleine Robillard—Jehanne, as she became known to the people of France. Their very own Joan of Arc.

What was your secret? Kris thought, that note written on that slip of paper, then tucked away in a niche in a wall, hidden for almost four decades before it was found in that cellar almost by accident, a footnote from another time and place in a small museum in Normandy.

She thought of that fifteen-year-old girl when the war began. She'd lost her father and two brothers to the war, left alone in a world gone mad.

When Kris was fifteen, the most important thing in her world had been passing the college-level courses she took, beating out her school's rival in girls’ soccer and going on to the regional competition, that first serious flirtation with one of her brother's friends home from college at the time. It was serious on her part, excited when Patrick Brady promised to come down and watch one of her games.

He didn't make it to the game. No surprise now, looking back on it, but it had been important to her. One of those early infatuations that had been so unimportant in the scheme of things, but part of being fifteen years old and making that painful transition from adolescence.

“What was it like when you were fifteen?” she asked as James turned on the wipers, clearing the icy rain that had begun to pelt the windscreen.

She caught the quick sideways glance, the frown, and half expected some off-hand remark that her brother might have made about hanging out with friends, places he shouldn't have been, pushing back on that Catholic upbringing and other rules that most teenagers pushed back on, testing the limits, without acare in the world except whose parents were gone and where the next Friday night party was; certainly not living day-to-day with the enemy in every town, at your door.

He continued to stare down the roadway and she almost thought he hadn't heard or chose to ignore her.

“Bread-and-jam sandwiches,” he finally replied, then thoughtful again.

He'd thought about how to answer that—about the craziness, the wildness, the things he hoped Anne didn't know about but suspected she did, a comment here, a sideways look and a word dropped years later.

He thought he was so smart at fifteen. Didn't all adolescents? But there had been other things too, things that came with growing up without a father, suddenly aware how his mother struggled to make ends meet, living on welfare while going to school at night, with a pain-in-the-ass kid who thought only of himself until the day there was nothing in the small apartment to fix a sandwich for lunch, and he had complained that there was only bread and jam.

“Bread and jam make a fine sandwich,” Anne told him at the time, as she spread two slices of bread, then folded them together. She had hugged him then, and wiped a tear from her cheek that she thought at the time he hadn't noticed.

She'd started work with a management company—administrative assistant was the name of the position. More classes, more experience, and then her own business in property management, and no more jam sandwiches. Years later there were other things that had called, tapped into who he was and who he wanted to be.

And years after that, he stood across the kitchen in her townhouse on one of those trips back home and made himself a jam-and-bread sandwich. It was there in the expression on her face, the way her eyes softened.

“Aye,” she said at the time, almost a whisper. “It makes a fine sandwich.”

He'd forgotten that until now. But it had mattered at the time.

Things that mattered.