Page 68

“Mmm.” I ran my hand along the Lagonda’s wheel, feeling the soft cloth of Finn’s sleeve pressed against my arm. The sun was warm on my head, and as I steered the convertible along the rutted road, I started humming “La Vie en Rose.” I never wanted to leave this car.

Look.” Finn pointed, but I’d already seen it. The looming shape of a church tower. “That should be it.”

My blood fizzed as though it had turned to champagne. We’d traded places again as we got closer to Oradour-sur-Glane, since I was too keyed up to focus on driving. The road ahead wound toward the south end of the village, over the river Glane—I could see a church tower, low squat shapes of stone buildings around it, telephone poles. I wondered why the roofs canted at odd angles.

“It’s quiet,” Finn commented. No barking dogs, no rumble of tram cars, no bicycle horns sounding as we motored into the town’s outskirts. Finn slowed the Lagonda, but there were no children playing in the streets. I was more puzzled than anything else, but then I noticed the nearest house had black smoke marks streaking the stone walls. And the roof had fallen in. “There must have been a fire,” I said, but the marks looked old, washed by rain.

Finn eased off the gas even more, moving the car at a near idle. The Lagonda’s engine whined as though she were uneasy. I looked from side to side across the street. Still no people. More marks of smoke, of fire. I saw a clock lying on a sidewalk as though it had been dropped and abandoned. The face was half melted, but I could see the hands had stopped at four.

“Not a single one of these houses has a roof.” Finn pointed and I saw more blackened timbers, more destroyed shingles. No wonder the silhouettes had looked strange from a distance. It had to have been a fire, but these were stone buildings, sturdy and well spaced. How could fire jump between buildings like this?

My fizzing blood had gone very, very heavy in my veins.

The church loomed on our left, massive, built also from the heavy local stone. It too had no roof. “Why hasn’t anyone rebuilt?” I whispered. “Even if there was a fire, why hasn’t anyone come back?”

The thought came at me like a shrieking train: maybe there isn’t anyone left.

“No,” I said aloud as though arguing with myself. “A whole town doesn’t die in a fire.” People would have fled. And work had obviously been done in Oradour-sur-Glane after the fire, whenever it happened—there was no rubble, no debris. People had come to clear the buildings and the streets.

So why didn’t they stay? Why didn’t they rebuild?

The Lagonda crept through the center of town, past an abandoned post office, a tram station. The tracks looked as good as new, as if a tram would be rumbling around the bend at any moment. But it was so silent, not a footstep or the meow of a cat to be heard anywhere. Why were there no birds singing? “Stop,” I said unsteadily. “I need to get out—I need to—”

Finn halted the Lagonda in the middle of the cobbled street. Who would honk a horn at him here to make him move? There was no traffic. I scrambled out, nearly falling, and Finn steadied me with a hand on my arm. “No wonder the man at the shop gave me an odd look.”

“What happened here?” This was like a ghost ship abandoned at sea with a meal still on the table. It was like a toy village with no dolls. Rose, where are you?

We wandered back the way we’d come. I peered through the window of a burned-out hotel, and saw furniture inside—small tables thick with dust, chaises for waiting guests, abandoned countertops where desk clerks must have presided. If I went in, I’d probably find the half-melted bell on the counter, waiting to summon bellboys long gone.

“Do you want to go in?” Finn asked. I gave a violent shake of my head.

An empty market square or fairground loomed to our left. A car sat abandoned, rust showing around the doors. Finn ran a hand over the peeling fender. “A Peugeot,” he said. “Model 202. Someone’s pride and joy.”

“So why would he leave it here?”

Neither of us had any answers. But the fear inside me rose higher with every echoing footstep we took.

The church again, rising up behind the stone wall at the road and a farther steep grass slope. A trio of arched windows loomed, looking like eyeless sockets gaping at us. Finn ran a hand over the lower wall, freezing in place. “Charlie,” he said. “Bullet holes.”

“Bullet holes?”

He passed a hand over the set of pocked marks. “Not rounds from country hunting rifles either. Look how evenly they’re spaced. Soldiers fired these rounds.”

“But this is a village in the middle of nowhere. Who would—”

“Let’s get out of here.” He swung around with a white face. “We’ll ask at the next village, someone can tell us what happened—”

“No.” I pulled away. “Rose was here.”

“She’s not here now, Charlie lass.” His eyes flicked up and down the empty street. “No one is. Let’s get out of here.”

“No . . .” But my skin was prickling all over and the silence was driving me mad, and I was already taking a step in the direction of the Lagonda. I didn’t want to stay any more than he did.

That was when I saw a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye.

“Rose!” It burst out of me in a scream. I couldn’t see her face, but it was unmistakably a female figure, hunched and wrapped in an old coat despite the warmth, huddled on the grassy slope below the wall of the church. I tore away from Finn, sprinting around the lower wall, up the slope and around another wall, never taking my eyes off the figure. “Rose!” I shouted again, hearing Finn scrambling after me, but the figure at the church wall didn’t turn. “Rose,” I cried a third time like an incantation, like a prayer, and my desperate pleading hand fell on her shoulder.

She turned.

She was not Rose.

Eve? I almost asked, though the woman looked nothing like Eve. She was plump, grandmotherly, with gray hair brushed into a bun—why did she make me think of tall, gaunt Eve? Then her dark eyes found me blankly and I saw the resemblance. She had the same ravaged gaze of a woman who had been harrowed and clawed to the soul. Like Eve, she could have been any age from fifty to seventy. It was all the same to her: like the melted clock, she had stopped permanently at four in the afternoon. When this town had died . . . however it died.

“Who are you?” I whispered. “What happened here?”

“I am Madame Rouffanche.” Her voice was clear, no old-lady mumbling. “And they are all dead but me.”

Sunlight warming my head. The rustle of grass. Small everyday things made a backdrop for the quiet horror of Madame Rouffanche’s voice.

She wasn’t even faintly curious as to who Finn and I were, nor did she seem surprised to see us. She was like the chorus in a Shakespeare play: the curtain went up on a set so strange and horrific the audience could not comprehend it, at least not until she walked out and in a calm, dead voice explained the scene. What had happened. When it happened. How it happened.

Not why.

She did not know why. I suppose no one could.

“It was ’44,” she said as we stood beneath the eyeless socket windows of the half-burned church. “June tenth. That was the day they came.”