the bags into the trunk. “I may not need you, but I definitely need him. And I put the odds at fifty-fifty that wherever you go, he goes.”
I blinked. “What makes you say that?”
She touched a red mark on my throat that I’d seen in the mirror this morning and tried to cover with my loosened hair—a mark Finn’s mouth had left last night. “I know the difference between a mosquito bite and a love bite, Yank.”
“Done with your blethering, ladies?” Finn came around the driver’s side. “It’s a braw morning for a drive.”
“Yes,” I mumbled, ears burning. Eve grinned as she climbed into the backseat. Finn missed the grin, but he saw my red flush and paused after he slid behind the wheel.
“All right, lass?” he asked quietly.
There wasn’t really a word for what I was after the past day and night together. Grieving and hopeful, profoundly shocked and profoundly angry—angrier every time I looked at the photograph of the old man we had all agreed to track down. And if I looked at Finn my skin tingled with an all-over flash of what had passed between us not twelve hours ago. “I’m all right,” I said finally. He nodded, and I couldn’t tell how things stood between us, if he was sorry or not for what had happened. So I left him to put the car in gear, and turned to Eve in the backseat.
“One thing you haven’t told us: how do we find René Bordelon? He’s not going by that name anymore, or René du Malassis either. And we don’t know where he went when he fled Limoges. So how do we pick up his trail from here?”
Eve took a last drag off her cigarette and flicked the end into the street. “I have an idea about th-th—about that. He told me more than once that he intended to retire in Grasse, that he even had some dilapidated property there, an old villa he might restore someday. He’s seventy-three now; he won’t be starting another restaurant. Sounds like retired to me. I’ll wager he went to rebuild that villa, read his books, play his music, and enjoy the southern sunshine. I say we go to G-G-Grasse.”
“And do what?” I raised my eyebrows. “Drive around looking out the window?”
“Give me some credit, Yank. René never told me where his property in Grasse was, but I’ve got some good ideas of how to find it.”
“But what if he isn’t there at all?” Finn sounded doubtful. “All we have is a few chance remarks made more than thirty years ago.”
“Has anyone h-h-here got a better idea of where to start?”
Admittedly, I didn’t. I shrugged. Finn reached for the set of maps crumpled at my feet. “At an easy pace, we make Grasse in two days. Stop in Grenoble tonight . . .”
“Grenoble it is.” Eve tilted her head back, closing her eyes to the sky. “Step on it, Scotsman.”
The Lagonda hummed along southeast, the three of us each lost in our own thoughts. I found myself looking at the photograph of René again. I wondered what that SS officer had looked like, the one who gave the orders to massacre the village. I wondered what the German soldiers had looked like, the ones who could look at a girl fleeing a burning church with a baby in her arms, and be willing to pull a trigger. Anger flushed through me, slow and burning, and I thought of what Eve had said about those men, that I’d likely never find out which soldiers killed Rose.
Maybe I could, someday. Names had to exist, records. Maybe the German soldiers who survived could be brought to trial, not just for Rose but for Madame Rouffanche and her murdered village. Oradour-sur-Glane deserved justice for its dead as much as any of the atrocities investigated at Nuremburg.
But that was a problem for another day. Here, now, aimed for Grasse, the Nazis who had a hand in Rose’s death were out of my reach. But René Bordelon might not be.
As the car rolled through ever-rising hills and the gorgeous expanse of lakes and pastures, I pondered a new equation: Rose plus Lili, divided by Eve plus me, equaling René Bordelon. Four women with one man among us all. I stared at his face in the grainy photograph, looking for remorse, guilt, cruelty. But you couldn’t see those things in a picture. He was just an old man out to dinner.