Violins of Autumn (26 page)

He takes another long swig. “I killed Shepherd.”

The strength seems to drain from my legs. I sit in the other side chair.

“You killed him?” I cry. “What do you mean?”

“I shot him. He’s dead. There is no other meaning.”

“I don’t understand. Why did you have to shoot him?”

“What would you have had me do?”

“I thought he would be sent back to England. He’s only twenty-three, Pierre! It wasn’t necessary to kill him.”

“You can take that up with Bishop. He left it in my hands. I have to do what is right for me. I will defend my family, my farm, and my men at all costs. Had others in the Maquis found out about Shepherd’s dealings, his end would not have been so humane.”

I stare at Claire’s treasures in the cabinet, at a loss for words.

“But he was one of us,” I stammer.

“One of us? By that do you mean one of the good guys? There
are good guys and bad guys on all sides of this war. He was not one of us.”

“Oh my God,” I say, shielding my eyes. I can’t breathe. Can’t gather my thoughts. “This is my fault.”

“His greed is to blame, not you. Weeks ago, Bishop caught wind of suspicious behavior from an agent fitting his description. He was seen from here to Calais and as far south as Lyon, flaunting expensive jewelry and wads of crisp unused bills.”

I lounge against the backrest of the chair. “The agent was Shepherd? Please tell me you know that without a single doubt.”

“Yes, believe me.” Pierre glances at me out of the corner of his eye, and I know exactly what the look implies. “I have no doubt it was him.”

“Where did the money come from? Did he steal from the SOE?”

“The Germans were paying him for information. And he was selling them weapons and supplies from drops intended for the Resistance.”

I draw in a sharp breath. “No!”

“Yes,” Pierre says. “And he didn’t escape. He cracked and they let him go. Were you and Denise captured in Paris?”

“Yes, once. A van detected Denise’s radio transmissions.”

“Shepherd knew next to nothing of your whereabouts, but he knew right where to find Denise. They watched her there for some time.”

If Shepherd stood in front of me now, I wouldn’t think twice about wringing his disloyal neck with my own hands. My fist slams the tabletop. A glass candy dish jumps as if to seek a safer location. The curse that follows the thumping has such resonance I bet Madame LaRoche is clear on the opposite end of the farm, covering her ears.

“The no-good weasel! We would have gone to prison!”

“He wasn’t working alone, Adele. He had help.”

I lay my hand over my pounding heart.

“Shepherd knew his accomplice only by the name Henri.” Pierre sighs. “That man is still on the loose. Without knowing his identity there’s nothing we can do to find and stop him.”

It was shocking enough to uncover one traitor. I don’t want to believe that Shepherd had an accomplice. That proves there are others like him out there. Men like Henri. People may end up imprisoned, tortured, or dead because of him.

“Just wait till I tell Denise.”

“Please don’t,” he says. “Can we keep this between you, me, and Bishop?”

I don’t know how I can possibly keep the news from Denise, but I agree.

“Did he honestly think he’d get away scot-free?” I ask. “What was he thinking, coming here? He must have been out of his mind.”

“I don’t think he knew the two of you were here. The moment he walked in the door he saw Denise. He got an odd look, like he was about to be ill. I didn’t think much of it at the time.” His head drifts back to rest against the wall. “The power and money went to his head. He seemed genuinely surprised that we caught on to him.”

“I can’t believe this. It’s no wonder you knocked back a bottle of wine.”

“I’m not upset because I killed him.”

I straighten to look him in the face.

“I’m upset because I’ve become hardened to the things that should sicken me.” He stares out the window. “My life was never perfect, but it was peaceful. It was good. Our family was happy.
I’ve seen more misery in the past four years than I did in the eighteen years before them. I don’t know how I got from that time to this one, in which I’m willing to kill a man. What if when this part of my life is over, I’m unable to go back to the person I was? What if I’m damaged forever?”

His fingers intertwine with mine. I bring our palms together.

“I wonder about those same things,” I say. “I guess we’ll just have to trust that when this ends, we will be all right.”

I speed up the lane to the farm on my bicycle with two minutes to spare before Denise and I are to meet at her hidden radio behind the barn.

Moxie slinks out from the bushes into my path. While I swerve to avoid her, she leaps several feet in the air and spins away, tail puffed and fur on end. My back tire slides out from under me. Down I go, crashing first to one knee, then to my hands. The bike adds insult to injury, falling straight on top of me with a pedal to the kidney and a handlebar to the back of the head.

I scramble up, righting the bike and glancing around to make sure no one witnessed my clumsy fall. Of course, there’s Pierre, strolling out the barn door.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m fine.” I sweep my throbbing skinned knee clean with my hand. Wheeling the bike toward him, I say, “Can you do me a favor and tell Denise I’m running a little late? I’ll be around back in a few minutes.”

“Denise isn’t here.”

I lean my bike against the barn. “I have a crucial and
time-sensitive message for her to transmit to London. She’s waiting at her radio.”

“No, I have been in and out of this barn all day, and Denise isn’t here.”

“She must be with the cats then.”

“Once again, she is not here.”

“In the house?”

Pierre’s huffy exhale borders on a growl.

“All right, all right. Wait right there.” I cast my finger at his feet like a wand, as if that might freeze them in place.

I run around the barn. A crescent-shaped row of bushes buffers the fallen log from view. I round the first shrub. Our meeting place is empty. I drop to my scraped hands and knees to check the fallen log.

Both Denise and her transmitter are missing.

I race back to Pierre. Incredibly, he obeyed my command to stay.

“She wasn’t there.”

“Sorry, I should have told you that.”

“Pierre, something isn’t right. Her transmitter is gone. Where could she be?”

“The last time I saw her, she was going somewhere with that downed pilot, Frank.”

“Frank?” I cringe at the mention of him. “Where were they going?”

“I have no idea. What Denise does is none of my concern.”

“What did you see?”

“I have things to do, Adele.”

“Please, Pierre. Denise wouldn’t miss a transmission. Tell me what you saw. Any detail that sticks out in your mind.”

“They were going into the woods by the stream, looking rather friendly. Frank had his hand on Denise’s back.” Pierre’s ordinarily beautiful lips take on a leering smile. “It can be easy to lose track of time.”

“Get your mind out of the gutter. There is nothing romantic going on between them. She can hardly stand him.”

“I don’t blame her. He has only two things on his mind, automobiles and baseball. We could talk for hours about cars, if he weren’t so strange, but what do I know about baseball and his beloved Boston Yankees? I’ve taken to avoiding him.”

“I do know baseball,” I say. “And believe me, he did not combine the words ‘Boston’ and ‘Yankees’ in the same sentence. The Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees. He must have said either the Boston Red Sox or the New York Yankees.”

Pierre shrugs his shoulders, as if I spoke gibberish. “He said the Boston Yankees. The mistake isn’t mine. How could I jumble proper team names if I don’t know any?”

“But that makes no sense at all. There isn’t a self-respecting American boy or man alive who would make that mistake.”

Our heads snap up in unison.

“It makes sense if Frank is pretending to be an American pilot.”

“We have to find her!”

Pierre clutches my hand. I sprint alongside him.

“Did Shepherd bring him to the farm?” I cry.

“Yes, but Bishop questioned him about his squadron, air base, and personnel. He passed.”

“Bishop’s a Brit. He wouldn’t know the sorts of questions that might trip him up. Frank wouldn’t pass my test.”

At the stream, Pierre’s grip on my hand clamps down,
crushing my fingers, knuckle against knuckle. He pulls me to a stop. Pain shoots across my shoulder blade. Wrenching downward on my arm, he sends me earthbound like a sack of potatoes.

I had nearly burst straight into the clearing where Frank sits bent over Denise’s radio.

Pierre taps my chin to the left. A few paces in front of us, Denise is gagged and bound with rope to the opposite side of a tree.

“You take care of Denise, I’ll get Frank,” Pierre whispers.

That’s the extent of his plan. He leaps to his feet. All of a sudden, Frank and Pierre are entangled in a wrestling match on the ground.

I run to untie Denise.

Grunting through the torn fabric gag, she lifts her shoe. Eyes widening, foot swaying, she grunts louder, as if that might help me understand. Somehow it does.

“The dagger!”

Denise’s eyes bulge. She screams incoherently through the gag.

I remove the blade from the shoe and hack at the rope. Denise strains against the bonds until the weakened cord frays to its breaking point. She rips the gag free.

Frank slugs his fist into Pierre’s stomach hard enough to stagger him. His punches connect again, pummeling Pierre’s ribcage. Pierre seems only seconds from collapse. Frank must think so too because he confidently drops his hands. Pierre pounces on the opening. His swinging fist plows into Frank’s jaw with an audible crack.

Frank’s entire body stiffens, hands clenched at his sides. Like a tree, he crashes to the ground, out for the count.

Denise doesn’t give up the opportunity to kick him while he’s down.

“That’s for thinking you could steal my radio.” Her foot deals his thigh another blow. “That’s for boring me to tears!”

Denise still holds the rope that bound her to the tree. With it, Pierre lashes Frank’s wrists behind his back.

“Adele, take Denise to the house.”

“I will.”

Denise seems perfectly fine until halfway to the farmhouse. Then between one glance and the next, her composure melts like hot candle wax.

“Want to take my arm?” I offer.

“No, no, I’ll be all right.”

I hold her arm to keep her on track.

“Denise, you’re really pale now.” Her hair, sopped with sweat, lays plastered to her cheeks. “We can rest. Do you want to sit a while?”

“No, no.” Her feet shuffle to a stop. “Well, all right.”

We take a break on the fallen log within our meeting place.

“I thought I was a goner. If it hadn’t been for you and Pierre—” She slaps her knee. “What a bloody fool I am. He nearly got my radio. He intended to impersonate me to communicate with SOE headquarters in London.”

Every radio operator has a personal style of hammering out the Morse code dots and dashes, called his or her “fist.”

“You showed him how to use your radio?”

“He had a gun on me. I did everything I could think of to make the transmission suspect. I even dropped my security check at the beginning. I thought that would tip them off. Do you know what they transmitted back to me?”

“I’m not sure I really want to know.”

“Their reply to my transmission under duress was, ‘You forgot to include your security check, dear. Next time be more careful.’ Can you believe that?”

“You’re joking.”

“If only,” she says. “Of course, then Frank realized I wasn’t being straight with him, which made him angry.” She shakes her head in pained disbelief. “The spelling error I deliberately insert into messages is supposed to prove to headquarters that I’m operating the radio. Any change to that error signals that I’m in danger and the radio has fallen into enemy hands. That’s
their
rule. And they not only completely ignored the rule, they told the enemy that our transmissions have a secret security check.”

If Frank had done his job slightly better he would have tapped into the flow of classified communication between Denise’s radio and SOE headquarters. And a mistake by headquarters would have helped him do just that.

To Frank, Denise was nothing more than a nuisance. Another meddling agent standing between him and a radio. Her life holds less value than an object. That she’s a good and caring person—that she’s my best friend—none of that matters.

Denise and I came into this mission as a duo. I can’t fathom us not leaving together. Or not leaving at all.

Denise lowers a spoonful of her breakfast porridge, listening to the creaks and groans of the staircase as someone descends to the kitchen.

When Bishop enters the room, suitcase in hand, she says, “Bishop, I want to blow something up!”

“Denise, you are one of the few transmitters in all of France who hasn’t been killed or imprisoned. We can’t lose you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a train to catch. With my rotten luck, they will blow the line to Caen before I even board. What will I do then?”

I munch on my bread, thinking,
Ride a bicycle, perhaps? Just a thought
.

Undeterred, Denise blocks his path. “It’s been four days since we were put on standby for D-day. The second line of the poem will be read in tonight’s messages. I feel it!”

Sidestepping her, he says, “You don’t know when the Allied
invasion is coming any better than the rest of us. I have it on good authority the weather along the Channel has been abysmal; heavy rain and pea-soup fog. If anything, there will be a delay. Consider for a moment how vital you are. Be logical about it now. You are the link between SOE operations in France and headquarters in London. Without you, without your transmissions, headquarters would be running blind. Take a moment to think about that.”