Page 30

Chapter Thirty

Sandy Gilfoyle was standing. He was speaking. As if from the outside, June watched him rise; she watched him fold his arms around her. He was the young man she had raised from a small boy and she was the woman she had raised from an odd little orphan. His dusty tousled hair pressed to her sleek dark bob. He looked like a son back from war. She looked as if she had been assigned a puzzling task she did not yet know how to solve.

Sandy was laughing at her, hugging her tightly, as she babbled, “I talked to you and you didn’t blink an eye. Stella told the joke about the Pharisee and you didn’t move! You never ate! You looked out the window for hours!” June couldn’t seem to stop finding evidence against what was directly before her. “Agent Calloway spilt hot coffee on you, that’s what I heard, and you didn’t move!”

“That was necessary,” Tucker said. “Had to be done in front of the Germans so they believed in him.”

“Wasn’t easy,” Sandy admitted. “Especially because I knew it was coming. Itches were tough, too. And when that woman fell from the balcony…”

June’s heart just kept exploding; she could feel it trickling through her, tingling through every vein, down her arms, down her legs. This was what they meant when they said dance for joy, she thought. Sandy was well, Sandy was fine, Sandy was bright and dutiful and everything else she already knew about him. Sandy was fine . War had not ruined his wonderful mind. He was here and happy and gallant and oh she could leap from sofa to table to mantel in this cabin! He had stepped back but she had to hug him again, hard around his rib cage, good old wiry Sandy, no longer the small boy she had rescued, but still familiar and wonderful to embrace just the same.

“The training accident was real, of course,” Tucker said. “When I heard he was meant to come home to convalesce, I saw my opportunity.”

The shaved patch over Sandy’s ear had long since grown back, but one side of his face was still pocked with scars; he touched one of these lightly now. He said, “I’d already volunteered for special assignments, something to use my languages with, and I’d already heard Ed was working on getting the diplomats into the hotel and had mentioned me, so as soon as Agent Minnick asked me if I was up for something crazy, boy, June, I was on it.”

All at once, June put it together, what this must mean. The night at the bar. Gilfoyle’s hands on hers. No wonder Tucker had been out of his mind. “So Ed knows.”

Sandy flicked her ear with thumb and forefinger, just as he had as a child. “Of course. He was the one who told Minnick about my accident. He was in on it from the beginning.”

She held Tucker’s gaze. He shrugged a single shoulder. Nothing to be said.

“—no one looks at someone in a wheelchair, and he was right,” Sandy was saying. “You wouldn’t believe what people say in front of me.”

As Tucker picked up the phone and spoke a few low words into it, June collapsed back onto the ratty cabin sofa. No matter that Gilfoyle was a rat. The sun was out, and Sandy was fine, and Tucker wanted to be everything to her. The water needed to wash Hannelore away from Germany, and she knew she could do it, if she put her mind to it. Happiness and terror mingled inside her, closer to each other than she had previously suspected. If she had been a harpsichordist, she would have plunked herself down at the lobby piano to shout this feeling out, too.

“Minnick, Minnick,” Sandy said. There was familiarity in the way he said it; more than anything, it convinced June how closely the two men had been working together. “Listen. Before June showed up, I had come down here to say—can I say it in front of her? Good—I know what the code is.”

Tucker was immediately alert. With effort, he paused long enough to explain to June that Friedrich Wolfe had taught Hannelore Wolfe a sung code, thinking it might keep her alive in Germany. He and Sandy had been trying to figure out what the code might be for weeks. He asked Sandy, “How did you find out?”

“He told Liebe in the bar this morning. He’s getting nervous about what will happen to them now that it’s real. It’s a list of anti-Nazi individuals in German diplomatic circles.”

“Two birds, one stone,” Tucker said. “Makes Hannelore seem valuable and proves Friedrich’s loyalty. Did Liebe seem impressed?”

“Do you know what, I think he seemed a little disappointed. I suppose he thought Wolfe was the kind one. This is pretty ruthless.” Sandy scratched his head. “I am not sure their friendship will survive Nazi Germany. How luxurious, to scratch an itch! What will I do with myself when I am allowed to move during the day? Wolfe’s plan seems dead in the water to me. Encoding his daughter only proves her strangeness. She throws a fit while they are getting it out of her, and it’s worse than if he’d done nothing. Or, maybe worse, they find some use for her, and she spends the next few years singing code in war rooms. Why does he think it will work?”

“Desperation,” Tucker said. “Hard to feel sorry for him when he’s willing to get other people killed over it. I won’t mind taking his daughter from him.”

Cruel. Blunt. But she knew why he said it. She’d read about the Wolfes’ Nazi politics in their file, of course, but this—the willingness to give up unwitting associates in exchange for Hannelore—was an even more intimate violence. Yes, Hannelore was their daughter, but whoever Friedrich was willing to give up was someone’s son, someone’s daughter. People as bargaining chips, just like Lieselotte Berger and Hertha and Sebastian.

“Ah, Mr. Clemons,” said Sandy. “Take a chair; it’s revelation day.”

Griff Clemons, June’s trustworthy staff captain, stepped into the cabin. When he saw June’s shocked expression, he rubbed his bum eye apologetically; he clearly wasn’t at all surprised to see Sandy alert and cheerful. Tersely, Tucker explained to June that Sandy, thinking he was alone, had scratched his ear the day after he arrived; the watchful and suspicious staff captain had to be folded into the plan at once.

“Sure was hard to keep you in the dark, Hoss,” Griff said.

The moment seemed to deserve a handshake. She and her staff captain shook hands, as if they’d been separated for a long time, and then they went to business.

“June intends to keep Hannelore off that train,” Tucker said.

Sandy regarded her with frank admiration. Griff said, Whssssssst , a noise that usually indicated June had asked for something far outside of budget. She realized that Tucker had been right to summon him; Griff needed to know that June was the one causing the commotion, or else he would have done his best to put a stop to it. For a moment the men were silent, and she knew they were thinking the same things she had been thinking since last night. Every room full of people. The Border Patrol agents waiting to escort the diplomats to the train. State Department passenger lists demanding accuracy. June would need to get Hannelore away, making sure that no one saw her, or, if they did, making sure it had happened in a manner easily explained away, nothing that would be an international incident, nothing that would result in June spending a long time accounting for sins in a courtroom. Hannelore would have to be hidden for as many days as it took for the boat to plunge out to sea with the diplomats.

“There’s more,” Tucker said. “Sebastian Hepp.”

“Minnick, no,” Sandy broke in immediately. “Bridge too far. He’s under lock and key.”

“The water will be a distraction,” June said. “If it’s enough to cover what we’re doing with Hannelore, it’s enough to cover that.”

“They’ll know you opened the door,” Griff told Tucker. “You or Calloway. You want him to take the blame for it? Hoss, what happens to the child after you get her out?”

“I’ll take her,” Sandy interrupted. “June gets her out of the hotel, and then I’ll take her. No one has been looking at me. They all expect me to convalesce forever. No one will suspect I was the one to whisk her away in broad daylight. I’ll keep her hidden until the boat’s gone, and then I’ll take her to Pennybacker. In the pub today, he said he would take her. I’ll do it on one condition.”

June could not remember the last time Sandy had asked anything of her.

“You leave this place,” Sandy said. “Get your affairs in order over the next few days, so no one thinks you had a whit to do with it, then get as far away from the Avallon IV as you can.”

“That’s the end of the hotel,” she told him. “If I leave, it’s over.”

He didn’t answer. He knew it was.

How bitter it had been at the end. Mr. Francis had finally given up trying to explain luxury and intention to a young man who had no need of it, and Sandy had long since stopped trying to describe how that world was already dead to an older man who was still living in it. In the middle was Edgar, of course, who had never shown the slightest interest in running the hotel. Carrie was already married and had no interest in signing herself into a second prison. And Madeline—well, she couldn’t even talk about the water. Who was left?

“June,” Sandy said, voice earnest, “I died every time you went in there.”

He meant the Avallon IV.

He had dangled in there for hours. He knew what it could be like.

He said, “I never forgave him for convincing you to be GM.”

Ten years of her life, intentionally curating joy for anyone who came. Leaving her thumbprints on every person who came. Learning society so thoroughly that Sachiko Nishimura, who couldn’t hear her accent, had mistaken her for a Gilfoyle. Changing the lives of the hundreds of staff who worked here, some of them who couldn’t have survived anywhere else—including June herself. She’d given away so much to the Avallon IV, and she was ready to stop, but it didn’t change all the good that had come before this moment.

She did not regret it. But she was ready to go.

She held Griff’s gaze. His life was all bound up in the Avallon, too, after all, and who knew what was to come after this. Who knew what the Avallon was without her. They’d both gotten as high up as they could get here on this mountain, neither able to do it without the other.

Her staff captain said, “Everything’s got to change eventually, Hoss.”

The cabin was silent. It had its rainwater cistern, so there was no sweetwater to hear the feeling inside her. It would soon enough.

Outside, they heard the sounds of staff calling to one another; the porters were starting the herculean task of putting the luggage into delivery trucks. It was almost over.