rounds from country hunting rifles either. Look how evenly they’re spaced. Soldiers fired these rounds.”
“But this is a village in the middle of nowhere. Who would—”
“Let’s get out of here.” He swung around with a white face. “We’ll ask at the next village, someone can tell us what happened—”
“No.” I pulled away. “Rose was here.”
“She’s not here now, Charlie lass.” His eyes flicked up and down the empty street. “No one is. Let’s get out of here.”
“No . . .” But my skin was prickling all over and the silence was driving me mad, and I was already taking a step in the direction of the Lagonda. I didn’t want to stay any more than he did.
That was when I saw a flicker of movement at the corner of my eye.
“Rose!” It burst out of me in a scream. I couldn’t see her face, but it was unmistakably a female figure, hunched and wrapped in an old coat despite the warmth, huddled on the grassy slope below the wall of the church. I tore away from Finn, sprinting around the lower wall, up the slope and around another wall, never taking my eyes off the figure. “Rose!” I shouted again, hearing Finn scrambling after me, but the figure at the church wall didn’t turn. “Rose,” I cried a third time like an incantation, like a prayer, and my desperate pleading hand fell on her shoulder.
She turned.
She was not Rose.
Eve? I almost asked, though the woman looked nothing like Eve. She was plump, grandmotherly, with gray hair brushed into a bun—why did she make me think of tall, gaunt Eve? Then her dark eyes found me blankly and I saw the resemblance. She had the same ravaged gaze of a woman who had been harrowed and clawed to the soul. Like Eve, she could have been any age from fifty to seventy. It was all the same to her: like the melted clock, she had stopped permanently at four in the afternoon. When this town had died . . . however it died.
“Who are you?” I whispered. “What happened here?”
“I am Madame Rouffanche.” Her voice was clear, no old-lady mumbling. “And they are all dead but me.”
Sunlight warming my head. The rustle of grass. Small everyday things made a backdrop for the quiet horror of Madame Rouffanche’s voice.
She wasn’t even faintly curious as to who Finn and I were, nor did she seem surprised to see us. She was like the chorus in a Shakespeare play: the curtain went up on a set so strange and horrific the audience could not comprehend it, at least not until she walked out and in a calm, dead voice explained the scene. What had happened. When it happened. How it happened.
Not why.
She did not know why. I suppose no one could.
“It was ’44,” she said as we stood beneath the eyeless socket windows of the half-burned church. “June tenth. That was the day they came.”
“Who?” I whispered.
“Germans. Since February, an SS Panzer division had been stationed north of Toulouse. After the Allies landed in June, the division headed north. On June tenth they came here.” Pause. “Later we learned that someone had reported Oradour-sur-Glane as sheltering resistance fighters . . . Or that Oradour-sur-Vayres was. I don’t know. It wasn’t ever clear.”
Finn took my hand, his fingers ice cold. “Go on,” I managed to say through stiff lips.
Madame Rouffanche did not need to be told. The story was begun; she would tell it until the end and then walk off the stage again. Her eyes saw past me and through me to the tenth of June 1944.
“It was about two in the afternoon. German soldiers burst into my home and ordered us—my husband, my son, my two girls, my granddaughter—to the fairground.” She pointed toward the square where we had seen the abandoned Peugeot. “A number from the village were already assembled. Men and women flocking in from all directions. All the women and children were herded inside the church.” She stroked the pocked smoke-streaked stone as though it were a corpse’s brow. “The mothers carrying their babies in their arms, or pushing them in prams. Several hundred of us.”
Not Rose, I thought sickly. Rose could not have been among them. She wasn’t a village woman; she was living and working in Limoges. I’d been so certain I’d find her here, but not like this. She couldn’t have been here on June the tenth.
“We waited for hours,” Madame Rouffanche continued calmly. “Speculating, whispering, growing