through Marguerite’s window after I wanted to give up. She had used me to gather information about the guns in the crypt. The thought made me feel small, and in a flash the sadness I felt for Claire’s unburied body drifting among the cattails vanished from my heart and my mind.
‘Now do you understand why you can’t go back?’
‘I understand.’
I watched the couple from the screen door as they argued over Philip’s body. The bald man traced the outline of a coffin in the dirt while the wife wiped sweat from her chest with a hanky she pulled from her cleavage. She shook her head from shoulder to shoulder and he threw his hands in the air. He laid down in the dirt next to the body, scooting close to it, ravens circling over both as the wife compared their sizes with a squinted eye.
‘Are they almost done?’ Marguerite said.
‘I think so.’
Marguerite walked a few steps away, her eyes welling with tears. Turning away seemed to help, and after a few moments of deep breathing, her face got straight again, though I could tell she wanted to weep, and weep good, but by the grace of God was somehow able to hold it in.
‘I’ll tell you when it’s done,’ I said, and she nodded.
The wife struggled to bend the man’s legs, which looked like they had started to stiffen. She grabbed him by the foot and made chopping motions with her hand. The bald man nodded and then disappeared into a shed.
Oh, Christ.
‘Adèle,’ she said, from the other side of the room. ‘There’s something else.’
I walked away from the screen door when the bald man reappeared from the shed with a hatchet in his hands, and went to zip up the duffle bag on the floor—something to keep my mind off what was going on outside. I swallowed hard.
‘What is it?’ I said.
‘Remember when Mother said there was a reason God had sent you to us?’ she said. ‘We need you somewhere else. Somewhere other than Lyon, this farm.’
I felt some relief—no farm. I thought maybe she’d say Paris or Calais, or maybe someplace very far away like Carcassonne. ‘Where?’
‘You’re going back to Vichy,’ she said, and I looked up.
‘What?’
‘And back to Gérard.’
I bolted to a stand. ‘You’re mad!’
Marguerite squeezed both my shoulders. ‘You must!’
‘I came to the convent to escape from Gérard,’ I huffed. ‘Now, I’m supposed to go straight back to him? Absolutely not. I thought the police came to the convent to drag me back.’
‘Be realistic, Adèle. You have the contacts. We need the connections.’
‘Contacts?’ I scoffed. ‘I have contacts in the hair business, if you can call them that. Other than that, I’m not sure what you mean.’
‘You don’t know…’
‘Know what?’
‘Gérard. He’s working for the regime at the Hotel du Parc.’
‘I already know he’s a collaborator. That’s one of the reasons why I didn’t marry him.’
‘He’s more than a collaborator, Adèle. We have word that he’s behind the recent overhaul of the regime’s witch-hunt on the Résistance. In some cases, he’s the one making decisions for the Vichy police.’
My shoulders had gotten tense when she put her hands on them and then got tenser when she told me of Gérard’s escapades. ‘You’re forgetting one thing, Marguerite. Gérard hates me. He must. I left him the day before our wedding to join a convent. Humiliation isn’t something Gérard takes lightly.’
A bird flew in from the wheat field and landed on the windowsill. He pecked at some crumbs that had flaked off an apple tart the wife had put there earlier to cool. Had the bird been any smarter he would have gone for the whole tart, which sat just inches away with no tea towel to cover it.
Marguerite used a delicate finger to scoot the tart closer to the window. ‘That’s your first test,’ she said, as the bird moved toward it. ‘Get him to trust you.’
I scoffed. ‘And forgive.’
‘Adèle, you must have a way about you that’s attractive to him. He won’t be able to resist you if you’re yourself.’ She looked at me just as the bird dug into the tart. ‘From what I heard, he’s a man who doesn’t like to lose, especially not to a woman. He’ll forgive you because he wants to win.’
Be myself. ‘You make it sound so simple,’ I said.
I thought about Gérard’s bulging muscles, his condescending voice and feeling hands. He had a taste for women, and if I’d learned anything from my time with him, it was that