Page 88 of Blood Game

“I'm going to fix something to eat,” Daenerys announced. “They will be hungry when they return.”

“Anthony was born here,” Innis said, watching her. “He knows his way around the city, the safe places, and the ones to stay away from.”

That was what she was afraid of. She looked at the antique clock on the large mantel. Late afternoon. It was getting dark out on the street, clouds lowering over the city skyline.

“I've sent you something...”

She forced herself to concentrate on something that had bothered her the night before, when she and James had found the wall in the Cloister where the Raveneau Tapestry had once hung.

“Do you still have access to Cate's files?”

Innis nodded. “I downloaded everything from the cloud before we left. I didn't want to leave anything that anyone else might find.”

“I want to take another look at the photographs Cate gave you for her father's exhibit.”

She spent the next several hours looking at those old images, taken in another time and place, over seventy years ago, faces of war-weary soldiers, the wounded, stark images of another war.

Similarities to the present day weren't lost on her, images of soldiers returning from Afghanistan and Iraq, flag-draped coffins, the faces of loved ones waiting. Most of the soldiers in those old photographs couldn't have been more than eighteen or nineteen years old. But they were already old men because of what they'd seen and experienced.

Paul Bennett hadn't been much older then, but he had an eye for capturing just the right moment, the right emotion that would reach across generations years later in those iconic images that stared back at her now.

Did it ever change? she thought. Or was Man doomed to keep repeating the mistakes of the past?

Poland, Czechoslovakia, Normandy, or Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Afghanistan decades later. Other times, other places, the same conflicts, people dying.

She pushed past those images, trying to find the reason Cate had sent that photograph—something important enough that she had left that last manuscript unfinished. She had Innis bring up the photograph of the tapestry.

What was she looking at? What did Cate want her to see?

The tapestry in Paul Bennett's photograph was a series of black-and-white images, while the images in the color plate that Diana Jodion had made for them were lighter, brighter, taken with the advantage of additional lighting at the abbey years earlier. Other than that, they were almost identical.

Not quite identical.

“Can you enlarge and enhance this photo?”

She had spent hundreds of hours studying color images for book covers, bent over a light table with the art director and the layout for the next advertising campaign for the next bestsellerat Ellison Publishing, looking for that visual hook that captured the reader's attention and translated into sales. Romance book covers, thrillers, murder mysteries, the next DaVinci novel where the image could make or break a sales ranking. In Cate's case, a simple cover with subtle images shaded into the background that told a story of their own had been the perfect hook to millions of sales.

She had him continue to scroll through other photographs that Paul Bennett had taken in the sequence with the photograph of the tapestry. There was a photograph of a young Paul Bennett in uniform, then a group shot in the next photograph.

“That one,” she pointed to the four young people, including Paul Bennett, and a younger version of Jonathan Callish. The other two people in the photograph, a woman, and a young man, were dressed in civilian clothes.

The woman was slender about the same height as the young man who appeared to be around fourteen or fifteen years old. He had that gawky appearance and thin, rangy build of adolescence, but by the look in his eyes as he stared into the camera, boyhood had been left behind long ago.

The woman appeared to be around twenty years old, although it was difficult to tell from the black-and-white image. She was dressed in oversized men's pants, gathered, and belted at a slender waist, with laced boots, her shirt buttoned up and tucked into the waist of those pants, and the too-large wool jacket with a rifle over one shoulder. The boy was dressed almost the same, right down to the rifle.

French partisans? Or possibly French Resistance?

Both had been heavily involved with the Allies during the war, and in the weeks and days leading up to the Normandy invasion. By the expressions on their faces, there was acamaraderie among the four young people from different parts of the world, caught up in a war.

Paul Bennett's photographs had been carried in all the prominent magazines after the war—Life, Time, the Saturday Evening Post. He had given only one interview over the years, on one of the anniversaries of the Normandy invasion.

She finally found the interview after a long search. There were several paragraphs about the invasion, along with a half-dozen of those iconic war-time photographs.

Paul Bennett had returned to France after the war the article went on to explain, in an attempt to find members of the Resistance he had come into contact with.

“We owed our lives to them,” he was quoted as saying in that article, with photographs that juxtaposed the destruction of the war alongside other photographs of the slow rebuilding of towns and cities throughout France.

“Without the information they provided, often at the risk of their own lives, there might have been a different outcome to the war.”