I could even understand her not writing me about her dilemma. Why should she? I’d just been a little girl when we last met, someone to protect, not confide ugly things to. And shame could get to be a habit. I wasn’t sure I could have borne to write her about my Little Problem, even if I’d had an address. Face-to-face I could have cried it into her shoulder, but putting these things on paper meant you had to unpack your own disgrace in ugly black and white.
If she was alive, she might be living in Limoges now. Perhaps she had her child with her. A boy or a girl? I thought, and heard myself laugh tremulously. Rose with a baby. I looked down at my own stomach, flat and innocuous, alternately making me tired or nauseated, and my eyes blurred. “Oh, Rosie,” I whispered. “How did we mess up this badly?”
Well, I had messed up. Rose had found love, in the shape of a French bookshop clerk who had joined the Resistance. That sounded like the kind of boy Rose would like. I wondered if her étienne had been dark or fair, if he’d given his coloring to the baby. I wondered where he’d been taken after his arrest, if he was alive at all. Probably not. So many people disappeared and died, we were only starting to understand the horrifying scope of the losses. Rose’s boy was probably gone; if she was alive then she was alone. Left behind, as she’d been at the Proven?al café.
Not for long, Rose. I’m coming for you, I swear. I hadn’t been able to save my brother, but I could still save her.
“And then maybe I’ll know what to do about you,” I told my stomach. I didn’t want it, had no clue what to do about it. But the sickness of the last few days had brought home with painful clarity that just plain ignoring it was no longer an option.
The French night lay full and soft and warm outside my window. I crawled into bed, lids dropping. I wasn’t even aware I’d dropped off to sleep until a scream split the night.
That scream clawed me upright and out of bed. I was on my feet, heart galloping and mouth dry, and the terrible howl just went on and on. A woman’s scream, full of terror and agony, and I bolted out of my room.
Finn erupted into the hallway at the same moment, barefoot and bare armed. “What is that?” I gasped as other doors farther down the hall started to creak open. Finn didn’t answer, just went straight to the door between ours, the one showing a line of yellow light underneath. The scream came from inside. “Gardiner!” He rattled the handle. The scream cut off as though a knife had sliced through a taut throat. I heard the unmistakable click of the Luger being cocked.
“Gardiner, I’m coming in.” Finn jammed his shoulder against the door and shoved hard. The cheap bolt tore away from the wall with a sound of screeching nails, and light poured into the hall. Eve towered tall, gray-streaked hair streaming loose, her eyes two haunted sightless pits—and as she saw Finn in the doorway with me behind him, she raised the Luger and fired.
I screamed, dropping to the floor in a ball—but the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. Finn tore the Luger out of Eve’s hand, and she spat an obscenity and went for his eyes. He tossed the pistol on the bed, catching her gaunt wrists in both hands. As his eyes found mine, I saw in astonishment that he was quite calm.
“Find the night clerk and tell him everything is fine before someone summons the police,” he said, holding Eve hard. She was spitting curses in both French and German. “We don’t want to find a new hotel in the middle of the night.”
“But—” I couldn’t look away from the pistol on the bed. She fired on us. My arms, I realized, were wrapped tight around the Little Problem.
“Tell him she had a nightmare.” Finn looked down at Eve. She had stopped cursing, her breath coming in harsh, shallow bursts. Her eyes gazed blindly at the wall. Wherever she was, it wasn’t here.
I heard a peevish burst of French behind me, and looked around to see the auberge’s owner, shrill and sleepy. “Pardonnez-moi,” I said, quickly closing the door between her and the strange tableau. “Ma grandmère, elle a des cauchemars . . .”
I poured honey in my slangy American French until all indignation subsided, helped along by a handful of francs. At last the owner trailed off back to his own room, and I dared poke my head around the door again.
Finn had settled Eve, not in her bed but in the farthest corner—the one with the clearest view of the door and window. He’d dragged a chair aside so she could huddle against the wall, and dropped a blanket over her shoulders. He was hunkered down on his heels beside her, talking softly, moving slowly as he laid the whiskey flask in her lap.
She muttered something, a name. It sounded like René, and my skin prickled.
“René isna here,” Finn soothed.
“The beast is me,” she whispered.
“I know.” Finn offered her the Luger butt first.
“Are you crazy?” I whispered, but he made a demurring gesture at me behind his back. Eve never looked up. She was quiet now, but she still stared into nothing, her eyes jerking back and forth from the window to the doorway. Her warped fingers wrapped again around the pistol, and Finn released it.
He rose and padded barefoot toward me. I backed into the hall and he followed, gently tugging the door closed and letting out a long breath.
“Why did you give her that gun back?” I whispered. “If it had been loaded, one of us might be dead!”
“Who do you think took the bullets out in the first place?” He looked down at me. “I do it every night. She curses me a fair amount, but considering she nearly shot my ear off the first evening I came to work for her, she doesn’t have much of an argument.”
“Nearly shot your ear off?”
Finn looked at the door. “She’ll be all right now till morning.”
“How often does she do this?”
“Now and then. Something sets her off—she gets caught in a big crowd and panics, or hears some scaffolding collapse and thinks it’s an explosion. You can’t predict it.”
I realized my arms were still wrapped around my midsection. I could hardly think of the Little Problem as anything but, well, a problem—but my arms had flown to shield it as soon as I saw Eve’s gun. I dropped my hands, vibrating all over. I hadn’t felt so alive—alive over every shaky muscle, every prickling inch of skin, every hair standing on end—in a very long time. “I need a drink.”
“Me too.”
I followed Finn back to his room, which was not at all proper since I was halfway to naked in the nylon slip I’d been using for a nightgown. But I shut out the nasty, knowing voice in my head and closed the door as Finn switched on a lamp and fished inside his satchel. He offered me a flask, much smaller than Eve’s. “No glasses, sorry.”
No more miss now, of course. I shrugged, not expecting any different. I knew perfectly well what kind of equation was writing itself here. “Who needs a glass?” I bolted down a swallow of whiskey, relishing the fire. “All right, let’s hear it. René. Eve does know that name. If it’s the same one from the report, who Rose worked for—”
“I wouldn’t know. Only that she says that name a lot in these moods.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Because I work for her.” He took a swallow from the flask. “Not you.”
“You two are quite a pair,” I snorted. “Both barbed-wire knots made out of secrets.”