more details—”
“No.” Back and forth, back and forth.
“You goddamn bitch, don’t you even want to get out from under all that guilt? Or will you just lie under it like a donkey in a harness?” Charlie thrust her sharp little face right into Eve’s and bellowed, “You didn’t do it!”
The tears spilled over Eve’s cheeks. This afternoon she had cried crocodile tears to get away from this girl, but these tears were real. She wept and wept, and for a moment Charlie held her, Eve sobbing into her sharp little shoulder.
But then Charlie was pushing and prodding, urging Eve up. “We can’t stay here. Lean on me, keep that pad pressed tight.”
Eve wanted to let it fall, let the blood fall out after it. Let the police find two curled corpses in the morning: source and spy, captor and captive, collaborator and betrayer, locked together till the bitter end. But—
You didn’t do it.
Blood trickled down Eve’s side as Charlie half-supported and half-dragged her down the corridor, back to the shadowy kitchen, out to the warm French night. Eve was still shaking with sobs, and the pain in her hand was shattering. “Stay here while I bring the car up,” Charlie said. “You can’t walk that quarter mile—”
But another set of headlights was showing down on the road, next to the Lagonda’s shadowy shape. Headlights bright enough to cut through even Eve’s pain-blurred, tear-blind vision. The police? “P—P—P—P—” Her tongue broke down completely; she couldn’t get out a single word. Clumsily, she wrenched at the linen pads over her wound. She’d bleed out before she went into another prison.
But Charlie cried, “Finn!” and soon a familiar Scottish burr was rattling furious words. A strong arm went around Eve’s waist, taking her weight. Eve slid toward unconsciousness, hoping it was death, hoping to be done.
But still thinking, in some reawakened part of her examining, questioning brain, You didn’t do it.
CHAPTER 45
CHARLIE
Twenty-four hours later, we were in Paris.
“Eve needs a doctor.” It was the first thing I’d said to Finn outside René’s villa, after the initial frenzy of explanations. “But if we take her to a hospital, she’ll be caught. Anyone with a gunshot wound will be looked at when they find—” A glance back at the house.
“I think I can patch her up long enough to get out of Grasse.” Finn soaked the makeshift bandages in more brandy and wrapped them tight around Eve, limp and unconscious in the Lagonda’s backseat. “The bullet doesn’t seem to have broken anything. She’s lost a lot of blood, but with enough strapping . . .”
Caught. It kept echoing through my head. We’ll be caught. As Finn worked on Eve, I’d run back into the blood-stinking study and, wrapping my shirttail around my hand and avoiding the blood so no one would see a woman’s small footprints, tipped the peacock-tail lamp and the gramophone over and yanked the drawers open like someone had ransacked for a cash box. Maybe it would look like a robbery gone bad. Maybe . . . Still using my shirttail, I fumbled in my pocket and found the photograph of René we had been showing all over Grasse, folded and clipped to show just his face. I unclipped it to show the line of swastika-wearing Nazis at his side, and dropped the photograph on the bullet-riddled corpse on the floor.
I’d felt a wave of sickness then, but Finn was shouting for me and there was no more time, so I stuffed both Lugers and the little bust of Baudelaire into Eve’s satchel, quickly wiped the door handles and anything else we might have touched, and ran. I drove the Lagonda back to the hotel with Eve stretched out in the backseat, and Finn followed in the car he had borrowed from the hotel manager to get here.
That first night was the worst. Eve revived long enough to get into the hotel with Finn’s coat hiding her bloodied shoulder, right past the yawning night clerk, but she fainted on the upper stairs. Finn put her to bed, washed and dressed the wound with some sheets swiped from the hotel linen closet, and then all we could do was watch through the night as she lay frighteningly still. I stared at her through blurring eyes, and Finn wrapped me in his arms.
“I could kill her,” he whispered. “Pulling you into danger—”
“I’m the one who followed her,” I whispered back. “I was trying to stop her. It went all wrong. Finn, she could be