habit she had formed in New York, strolling great swaths of the city, block after block, when she was sad or wanted to think things through.
He smiled. “I’d love to. Have you ever seen the monuments at night?” She shook her head. “You must.” She wanted to protest—it seemed too far, too late. More than she had intended. But the air was crisp and lovely and the Washington Monument beckoned in the distance. “I did this all the time in law school,” he added, as they walked past the darkened government buildings. “But then with the blackout and curfew, I wasn’t able to for years.” He led her south on Fifteenth Street along the edge of the Ellipse. “So, was talking to Annie helpful?”
“In a sense. She confirmed what we thought from the archives—Eleanor ran the women’s unit for SOE. But there was something else.” Grace stopped, turning to Mark. “She said that someone betrayed the girls.”
“Betrayed how?”
“She didn’t know.”
“That seems fairly incredible,” Mark replied.
“Maybe, but she seemed quite sure about it. And she said Eleanor came to see her sister, asking questions because she was convinced of the same thing. You don’t believe it?”
Mark shrugged. “I don’t know. I mean, everyone loves a good conspiracy theory, right? For those who lost loved ones, like Annie’s sister or even Eleanor, it might be easier to accept than the truth.”
“The girls disappeared during the war,” Grace mused, a picture beginning to form in her mind. “And Eleanor, who had recruited them, went looking for answers.” She had surely found, as they had, that the girls had died in Nacht und Nebel. But she had learned something else, too, that made her suspect a betrayal. That was the piece they were missing.
“In New York?” Mark asked, with more than a note of doubt in his voice. They skirted the edge of the temporary government buildings erected on the West Mall to accommodate the influx of workers during the war. Mark took her elbow to help her around a broken curb. “It doesn’t seem terribly likely that she’d find what she was looking for in New York.”
“It’s as likely as us finding what we are looking for in Washington.” Nothing, it seemed, was where it should be anymore. “Anyway, it might have not been her first stop.”
They were on the edge of the Mall now. Mark held out his arm and she took it, the scratchy wool of his overcoat brushing against the back of her hand. He led her to the right, toward the Lincoln Memorial.
“You don’t want to leave it alone, do you?” he asked.
Grace shook her head. “I can’t.” Somewhere along the way it had gone from curiosity to quest. It had become personal.
“What is it exactly that you want to know? The girls died. Isn’t that enough?”
“That’s the thing. Eleanor knew that, too, and it wasn’t enough for her. She kept searching. She wasn’t just looking for what happened to them. She was looking for why.”
“Does the ‘why’ matter?”
“Those girls never came home to their families, Mark,” Grace said, her voice rising. She pulled her arm from his. “Of course it matters. Maybe there’s more to the story, something important or even heroic. If we could tell even one of these families what led to their daughter’s death or that her life was not lost in vain, well, then, that would be something, wouldn’t it?”
“You wish that about Tom, don’t you?” Mark asked. “That someone could tell you his death wasn’t for nothing.” Mark’s words cut through her like a knife.
Frustrated, Grace turned and started away from him, up the stairs of the Lincoln Memorial. She reached the massive statue of the president seated at the top, seeming to watch sentry over the capital and the nation. Her lungs burned from the climb.
A moment later Mark caught up with her. Grace turned away, taking in the panorama of the Mall below, the long stretch of the Reflecting Pool leading to the Washington Monument, the Jefferson smaller but visible just to the south. Neither of them spoke. Mark stepped close behind her, his coat brushing hers, and put his arms around her lightly. Grace shivered. But didn’t step away. She liked him, she admitted to herself—more than she should for the short time they had spent together and more than she wanted. There was a calmness about him that seemed to center her. But there wasn’t space in her life for that now.
“I was still in school during the war,”