Page 10

She swiped her fingers on a dish towel, reached into the pocket of her dress, and fished out a cigarette. She lit up with a long, slow drag. “First fag of the day,” she said, exhaling. “Always tastes the best. Almost makes up for the bloody hangover. What was your cousin’s n-n-name again?”

“Rose.” My heart began to pound. “Rose Fournier. She—”

“Tell me something,” Eve interrupted. “Girls like you have rich mummies and daddies. Why aren’t your parents beating the bushes for their little lost lamb of a niece?”

“They tried. They made inquiries.” Even when I was angry with my parents, I knew they’d tried their best. “After two years of nothing, my father said Rose surely must be dead.”

“Sounds like a smart man, your father.”

He was. And as a lawyer specializing in international law, he’d known the channels and byways through which to conduct his overseas inquiries. He’d done what he could, but when no one had gotten so much as a telegram from Rose—even me, the one she loved best of our whole family—my father had drawn the logical conclusion: that she was dead. I’d been trying to get used to that idea, trying to convince myself. At least until six months ago.

“My big brother came home from Tarawa with only half a leg, and six months ago he shot himself.” I heard my own voice crack. James and I had never been close when little; I’d just been the younger sister he could bully. But once he grew out of the hair-pulling stage, the teasing gentled; he joked about putting a scare into any boy who came to date me, and I teased him about his terrible haircut once he joined the marines. He was my brother; I loved him and my parents thought he hung the moon. And then he was dead, and right around that time Rose started to step out of my memory and into my field of vision. Every little girl running past turned into Rose at six or eight or eleven; every blonde sauntering ahead of me across a campus green became the older Rose, tall and just beginning to curve . . . A dozen times a day my heart knocked and then crashed as my memory played merciless tricks.

“I know it’s probably hopeless.” I looked Eve in the eye, willing her to understand. “I know my cousin is probably . . . I know what the odds are. Believe me, I could calculate them out to the last decimal. But I have to try. I have to follow every trail to the end, no matter how small. If there’s even the faintest possibility she’s still out there—”

I choked up again before I could finish it. I’d lost my brother to this war. If there was even the smallest chance of getting Rose back from oblivion, I had to pursue it.

“Help me,” I repeated to Eve. “Please. If I don’t look for her, no one else will.”

Eve exhaled slowly. “And she worked at a restaurant called Le Lethe—where?”

“Limoges.”

“Mmm. Owned by?”

“A Monsieur René something. I made some more telephone calls, but no one could find a surname.”

Her lips thinned. And for a few moments she just stared at nothing, those horrendous fingers curling and flexing, curling and flexing at her side. At last she looked at me, her eyes impenetrable as flat glass. “I might be able to help you after all.”

Eve’s telephone call did not seem to be going well. I could only hear half of the conversation as she shouted into the receiver, pacing up and down the bare hall with her cigarette flicking back and forth like the tail of an enraged cat, but half the conversation was enough to get the gist. “I don’t care what it costs to put a call through to France, you desk-bound secretarial cow, just put me through.”

“Who are you trying to reach?” I asked for the third time, but she ignored me like she had the first two, and kept on haranguing the operator.

“Oh, stop ma’aming me before you choke on it and put the call through to the major . . .”

I could still hear her through the panels of the front door as I slipped out of the house. The gray wetness of yesterday had disappeared; London had dressed up today in blue skies and scudding clouds and bright sunshine. I shaded my eyes against the sun, looking for the shape I thought I’d seen on the corner through last night’s taxi window—there. One of those bright red phone boxes so iconically English it looked faintly ridiculous. I aimed for it, stomach rolling again. I’d forced some dry toast down after Eve began her telephone call to this mysterious major, and that had calmed the queasy pangs of my Little Problem, but this was a different kind of sickness. I had a telephone call of my own to make, and I didn’t think it would be any easier than Eve’s.

A wrangle with the operator, and then another wrangle with the desk clerk at the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton, giving my name. And then: “Charlotte? ’Allo, ’allo?”

I pulled the receiver away from my ear and stared at it, suddenly irked. My mother never answered the telephone that way unless there was someone around to hear her. You’d think that with her knocked-up daughter doing an overnight bolt into London, she’d be worrying about something other than impressing the Dolphin’s desk clerk.

The receiver was still squawking. I put it back to my ear. “Hello, Maman,” I said briskly. “I haven’t been kidnapped, and I’m clearly not dead. I’m in London, perfectly safe.”

“Ma petite, have you gone mad? Disappearing like that, the fright you gave me!” A little sniff and then a murmured merci; clearly the desk clerk had offered her a handkerchief to dab her eyes. I doubted very much that her eye makeup ran. Catty of me, perhaps, but I couldn’t help it. “Tell me where you are in London, Charlotte. At once.”

“No,” I said, and something expanded in my stomach besides the nausea. “I’m sorry, but no.”

“Don’t be absurd. You have to come home.”

“I will,” I said. “When I’ve found out once and for all what happened to Rose.”

“Rose? What in—”

“I’ll telephone again soon, I promise.” And I replaced the receiver.

Finn Kilgore turned to look at me as I came back through Eve’s front door and then the kitchen. “Hand me a dish towel, miss?” He gestured with his chin, up to his elbows scrubbing the breakfast pan. That made me stare again. My father thought dirty coffee cups miraculously cleaned themselves.

“She’s on another call,” Finn said, nodding toward the hall as he took the towel. “Tried to get through to some English officer in France, but he’s on holiday. Now she’s shouting down the telephone at a woman, I don’t ken who.”

I hesitated. “Mr. Kilgore, you said you were Eve’s driver. Could you—could you possibly take me somewhere? I don’t know London well enough to walk, and I don’t have the fare for a cab.”

I thought he’d object, considering he didn’t know me from Uncle Sam, but he shrugged, scrubbing his hands dry. “I’ll pull the car up.”