According to the article, Olivia had been residing at a house near Camford Mill. She was taken into custody on suspicion of treason, though she was never convicted of this charge. Several days after she arrived at London’s Holloway Prison, she hanged herself in her cell. No one knew how she obtained the rope.
Mr. Williams, the postman, said Mrs. Terrell had been living at the Mill House for approximately two years while her unnamed husband was soldiering for the British army. She received regular parcels, packaged with no return post. And he told investigators that, to his knowledge, she never sent any mail.
According to Mr. Williams, Mrs. Terrell had a daughter living with her, though upon inquiry, a child was never found. Police requested any additional information as to Mrs. Terrell’s activities be directed to them.
Perhaps Mrs. Douglas was confused, like Mr. Knight. Perhaps she’d remembered her mother’s story wrong, and it was actually Olivia who’d died instead of Eddie that year.
Yet Mrs. Douglas said that there were rumors Eddie had been murdered. And Lady Ricker, Quenby felt certain, would put up an ironclad curtain between her and the woman suspected of betraying Great Britain.
Did Olivia—like Virginia Woolf—really choose to kill herself, or had someone helped her along?
Quenby turned off the machine, rubbing the chill that crept up her arms.
Lady Ricker, it seemed, would do anything to keep her secrets. Would she also kill the German girl who had translated her words?
Fog veiled the River Ouse early the next morning as Quenby drove back up the road where she’d dodged Kyle Logan and his tractor.
Last night, the innkeeper had eyed her curiously when she walked into the lobby with two plastic bags, filled with a fresh change of clothes and toiletries from Boots chemist, and requested the same room she’d had two nights ago. But like all good innkeepers, the woman kept her questions to herself and handed over a key to the room.
Quenby waited in the SUV by the river until the fog lifted. When sunlight finally made its debut, she sprayed herself one more time to repel, she hoped, both bugs and men, though she kept her phone in hand as she trekked into the forest.
When she texted Lucas last night, he’d promised to keep his phone beside him this morning. Not that it would help if she slipped out of service again, but it made her feel better knowing that she could contact him near the river.
In and out of the trees. That’s all she had to do. The cemetery had been along one of the overgrown paths, and if she found the pasture for the Logans’ farm, on the other side of the woodlands, she’d turn back.
The running app on her phone traced her steps past the mill, along the winding path. When she got to the Kelmore crossroads, she hiked left instead of right. And about twenty minutes later, she found the cemetery.
Scraps of wooden gravestones were scattered in the weeds, but five slate stones were still intact. She brushed aside the weeds on the stone closest to her, a weathered gray slate engraved with a cross, to read the epitaph. It was the grave of a Kelmore man who’d died in 1882.
She ducked under the crawling branch of an elm tree and read the inscriptions on four more Kelmore family graves, each one including a Bible verse or kind sentiment in recognition of the man or woman buried there. But Lucas was right—there was no grave for Eddie Terrell.
And no marker among the trees for Brigitte, either. Not that Quenby expected the Terrells to put a stone on her grave, but she was still clinging to the hope, for Mr. Knight’s sake, that the girl’s life had extended far beyond the Mill House, blossoming into womanhood.
She snapped several pictures of the cemetery, of its raw beauty and isolation. Nature sprouting new life to replace what had been lost. Then she hiked back to the Mill House and took a panoramic picture encompassing the broken house, the limbs of beech trees, and what appeared to be an old garden nearby.
Something cracked in the branches behind her, and Quenby jumped. As she scanned the trees, Lucas’s words from yesterday seemed to hammer in her head. The ones he’d said about taking care.
She couldn’t tell what was in the forest. Perhaps one of the cows had wandered beyond the pasture. Or was it Kyle, watching for her?
At the moment, it didn’t particularly matter. She wasn’t staying here any longer.
Chapter 42
Mulberry Lane, April 1943
Baby girl had cried for hours last night. Rosalind’s body, Brigitte feared, wasn’t giving her the nourishment she needed, but they had no milk in the house or even a bottle. The baby sucked on Brigitte’s finger for comfort, but it didn’t soothe the pain in her belly.
When Brigitte was a child, Mama used to send her outside to play, saying the fresh air would do her some good. So she and baby girl went on a walk this morning, and as they strolled in the forest, Brigitte told her stories about her childhood in Germany, sang her the German songs that Mama used to sing.