Eve watched me, her ravaged face like a mask. I couldn’t tell if she pitied me, had contempt for me, or didn’t care at all.
My cigarette was almost down to the nub. I took a last deep drag, and stubbed it out in a tea saucer already overflowing with ash. “I knew it didn’t mean anything, Rose not writing. Wartime mail is hell. We just had to wait for the war to be over, and then the letters would start getting through. But the war ended, and—nothing.”
More silence. It was harder than I’d thought it would be, saying all this. “We made inquiries. It took forever, but we got some answers. My French uncle had died in ’44, shot while trying to get black market medicine for my aunt. Rose’s two brothers died in late ’43, a bomb. My aunt’s still alive—my mother wanted her to come live with us, but she wouldn’t, just walled herself up in the house outside Rouen. And Rose—”
I swallowed. Rose sauntering ahead of me through the green haze of trees. Rose cursing in French, yanking a brush through her unruly curls. Rose at that Proven?al café, on the happiest day of my whole life . . .
“Rose vanished. She left her family in ’43. I don’t even know why. My father put out inquiries, but Rose’s trail after the spring of ’44 came to a dead end. Nothing.”
“A lot of dead ends in that war,” Eve said, and I was surprised to hear her gravelly voice after speaking myself for so long. “Lots of people disappeared. You surely don’t think she’s still alive? It’s been two years since the bloody w-war ended.”
I gritted my teeth. My parents had long concluded Rose must be dead, lost in the chaos of war, and the odds were they were right, but— “We don’t know for sure.”
Eve rolled her eyes. “Don’t tell me you’d have f-felt it if she died.”
“You don’t have to believe me. Just help me.”
“Why? What the hell has all this got to do with m-me?”
“Because my father’s last inquiry was to London, seeing if Rose might have emigrated here from France. There was a bureau helping to locate refugees.” I took a deep breath. “You worked there.”
“In ’45 and ’46.” Eve tipped more whiskey into her flowered teacup. “I was fired last Christmas.”
“Why?”
“Maybe because I came to work sloshed. Maybe because I told my supervisor she was a spiteful old cunt.”
I couldn’t help recoiling. I’d never in my life heard anyone swear like Eve Gardiner, much less a woman.
“So—” She swirled her whiskey. “I’m guessing the file on your cousin crossed my desk? I d-don’t remember. As I said, I came to work sloshed a fair amount.”
I’d never seen a woman drink like this either. My mother’s drink was sherry, two tiny glasses at most. Eve was knocking straight whiskey back like water, and her voice was starting to slur. Maybe the faint stammer was just drink.
“I got a copy of the report on Rose,” I said desperately before I lost her for good, either to disinterest or whiskey. “It had your signature. That’s how I got your name. I telephoned pretending I was your niece from America. They gave me your address. I was going to write you, but—” Well, my Little Problem had seeded itself in my belly right about then. “Are you sure you don’t remember if there were any other findings on Rose? It could be—”
“Look, girl. I cannot help you.”
“—anything! She was out of Paris by ’43, the following spring she went to Limoges. We got that much from her mother—”
“I said, I can’t help you.”
“You have to!” I was on my feet, but I didn’t remember standing. Desperation was building in my middle, a solid ball far denser than the insubstantial shadow that was my baby. “You have to help! I am not leaving without help!” I’d never shouted at an adult in my life, but I was shouting now. “Rose Fournier, she was in Limoges, seventeen years old—”
Eve was on her feet too, far taller than I, jabbing one of her unspeakable fingers into my breastbone, her voice deadly quiet. “Do not shriek at me in my own house.”
“—she’d be twenty-one now, she’s blond and beautiful and funny—”
“I don’t care if she was Saint Joan of Arc, she’s not my business and neither are you!”
“—she was working at a restaurant called Le Lethe owned by a Monsieur René, and after that no one knows—”
Something happened to Eve’s face then. Nothing in it moved, but something still happened. It was like something moving at the bottom of a deep lake, sending the very faintest surge to the surface. Not even a ripple—but you still knew something was moving down there. She looked at me, and her eyes glittered.
“What?” My chest was heaving as though I’d run a mile, my cheeks hot with emotion and my ribs pressing against the iron grip of my waist cincher.
“Le Lethe,” she said softly. “I know that name. Who did you s-say owned the restaurant?”
I scrambled for my traveling case, pushing aside the spare clothes, seeking the pocket in the liner. Two folded sheets of paper; I handed them over.
Eve looked at the short-form report on top, her own name across the bottom. “There’s nothing here about the restaurant’s name.”
“I found that out later—look at the second page, my notes. I telephoned the bureau hoping to talk to you, but you were gone by then. I talked the clerk into hunting down the original tip in their files; it gave the name Le Lethe, owned by a Monsieur René, no last name. It was hopelessly garbled, so maybe that’s why it wasn’t typed into the report. But I assumed if you signed that report, you’d have seen the original tip.”
“I didn’t. If I had, I wouldn’t have s-signed off.” Eve looked at the second page, and kept looking. “Le Lethe . . . that’s a name I know.”
Hope was such a painful thing, far more painful than rage. “How?”
Eve turned and scrabbled for the whiskey bottle again. She sloshed more into her teacup and drank it all down. She filled the cup again, and then she stood there with her eyes staring past me at nothing.
“Get out of my house.”
“But—”
“Sleep here if you haven’t anywhere else to g-g-g—to go. But you’d better be gone by morning, Yank.”
“But—but you know something.” She picked up her pistol and moved past me. I grabbed her bony arm. “Please—”
Eve’s maimed hand whipped up faster than I could follow it, and for the second time that night I had a gun pointed at me. I recoiled, but she advanced half a step and pressed the barrel right between my eyes. The cold circle of it made my skin tingle.
“You crazy old cow,” I whispered.
“Yes,” she rasped. “And I will shoot you if you are not gone when I wake up.”
She moved off unsteadily, out of the sitting room and down the uncarpeted hall.
CHAPTER 2
EVE
May 1915
London
Opportunity walked into Eve Gardiner’s life dressed in tweed.