Catching the Wind(6)

Before she answered the knock, she stumbled into the bathroom and replaced her nightshirt with a pair of running shorts and a paint-splattered T-shirt. Then she brushed her fingers through the layers of her cropped hair and swished Listerine around in her mouth. With a glance at her ragged T-shirt in the mirror, she reevaluated her attire but decided there was no reason to attempt to impress this Mr. Hough.

Mr. Hough was clearly not impressed. “You were supposed to be ready by seven,” he snapped when she opened the door.

“I never agreed to go with you.” She looked him straight in the eyes, undeterred by their espresso color that was steaming hot—in the precise Oxford Dictionary definition of the word.

He glanced at the time on his phone and then at the floor beside her like a suitcase might suddenly appear. As if he didn’t have time to waste on someone like her. “We’re going to be late.”

“Late for what?” She stepped out into the alcove, closing the door behind her. Mr. Hough towered over her by at least six inches and smelled like sandalwood and soap. Blast Chandler for making her look at his picture online. Lucas Hough was even more handsome in person.

“Perhaps I should have given you more information.”

She crossed her arms. “Starting right about now.”

If he was willing to answer a few questions, she might go with him—for Chandler’s sake—to hear Mr. Knight’s story in person.

“I can’t say much, Miss Vaughn. It’s my job to protect my clients.”

A brick wall, that’s what he reminded her of. A fortress of pride and aristocracy that had blocked out the lower classes for centuries, as if the lowers might corrupt them.

“Is your client’s friend a man or a woman?” she asked.

“A woman.”

“His lover?”

When Mr. Hough shook his head, Quenby leaned back, propping her bare foot on the trim behind her. “You don’t think I can find her, do you?”

Doubt flickered in his eyes. “I think the best investigators in London have tried for decades to no avail.”

“Is she hiding from your client?”

He glanced at his phone again. “Her last known address was near Tonbridge, on the property of Lord and Lady Ricker.”

Goose bumps prickled her arms. No one knew what she was working on except the syndicate and her contact at the archives. Had Mr. Hough somehow discovered her secret, or was it mere coincidence that Mr. Knight’s friend lived at Breydon Court?

“Did your client know the Rickers?”

The man’s phone vibrated. Instead of answering her question, he checked his text, then glanced back up. “The plane is ready.”

She tilted her head, her cool demeanor waning. “What plane?”

Finally he smiled. “You didn’t think we were driving, did you?”





Chapter 4




Belgium, August 1940

Cowbells echoed through the valley, somewhere along the border between Germany and Belgium—at least that’s where Dietmar thought they were. The evening smelled of wild chamomile, and phlox painted the narrow path a pale-pink color that reminded him of the flowers along the Elzbach near his home.

Brigitte stumbled on a rock, and he reached out to catch her. But she kept walking, her bare toes crushing the summer blooms. The sun had freckled her cheeks, burnt her nose. Her eyes were often red too, tears blurring her vision as they trekked west together.

In her thin arms, Brigitte clutched a cookie tin filled with gold and silver coins. Dietmar carried her shoes and kerchief in the makeshift knapsack he’d tied together from a sheet, but she refused to let him carry her father’s box or even to hide it when they slept on the forest floor. The toy princess she kept in the pocket of her cardigan.

The cache of coins in the cookie tin had been useless on their journey, but the box wasn’t really about money for Brigitte. It was a piece of her parents, the only piece she had left. He would never ask her to leave it behind.

Dietmar kept telling her that they would see their parents again soon. That it was all a terrible misunderstanding. And as they plodded west, he kept trying to believe his words were true. That one day they would all return to Moselkern.

Herr Berthold had been arrested that same afternoon as his parents, their family’s cottage ransacked like the Roths’ sitting room. The scene scrolled painfully through Dietmar’s head again and again as they walked in silence through the fields and forest.

He never should have coaxed Brigitte away from their tree house that terrible day, back to her home. He’d never imagined that the Gestapo had come for her father too.

He’d wiped up the blood in her kitchen while she was upstairs, calling for her father, but even though she was young, Brigitte was smart. Smart enough to know where her father had hidden their family’s money from the Nazis. While Dietmar gathered blankets and a bit of food from the house, she dug up the tin box with a trowel. Herr Berthold had buried it under the pink stars flowering on a magnolia tree, hidden among the threads of roots that crept away from the trunk.

Dietmar had taken Brigitte to his classmate Heinz’s house on the other side of Moselkern. After Heinz hid them in the back shed, he explained that the Gestapo was rounding up anyone suspected of feeding the Jewish people still hidden in the area. Someone thought Brigitte’s father—a Lutheran minister—was helping them. While Heinz didn’t have any information about Dietmar’s parents, villagers knew Herr Roth was once an outspoken critic of Hitler and his party of Nazis.