The Librarian Spy(36)

Another familiar figure entered the café, one with prominent ears. Ava waved to Alfie and slid over so he might join them.

He rushed forward, his face paler than usual as he thunked into the vacated seat. “I just heard...”

“What’s happened?” James asked.

Alfie put his palm to his brow, his long fingers curling like marble against his red hair. “Leslie Howard is dead.”

“Leslie Howard?” Ava repeated the familiar name and the recognition quickly followed. The actor who had played Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind. She hadn’t seen the movie herself, but all of its stars had been plastered on every newspaper and magazine for months before and after the film’s release.

Alfie’s hand slid down his face and fell into his lap. “It happened just this morning.” His chin quivered, and Ava couldn’t help but notice how very young he looked in that vulnerable moment. “In the most awful way.”

“Alfie,” James said, his voice level and confident. Much in the way he had spoken her name to her the day they’d gone out for capilé, when he had promised to look into her neighbor’s disappearance. “What’s happened?”

“His plane,” Alfie croaked.

Chills skittered across Ava’s skin. “What about his plane?”

“The Germans...they shot it out of the sky.” Alfie swiped at his large, brown eyes. “They attacked a civilian aircraft as it was flying over the Atlantic.”

James’s cheeks went red. “That’s a war crime.”

Ava held on to the table, both hands gripping the edge as if it might be the only thing keeping her tethered to the earth. Though her physical person was locked in place, her emotions spun her into another time when her parents had not returned from France.

That could have been her plane when she flew to Lisbon. That could be one of Daniel’s at any moment.

Cold sweat prickled at her brow.

“Can you imagine?” Alfie said, his voice choked.

She could. She had. A countless number of times, transporting herself to the cloud-dotted expanse of endless blue sky when the turbulence gave way to violent, unforgiving jerks, that drop of the stomach as a rapid descent began. The screams. The terror.

“Enough.” James’s voice cut through her thoughts, and he gave her a concerned look.

Alfie touched her hand and she leaped.

“Forgive me, Miss Harper,” he said in his gentle manner. “I didn’t mean to upset you.”

“Go back to the embassy,” James said to his young colleague. “I’ll join you soon.”

Alfie nodded and cast another worried glance toward Ava. “I truly am sorry.”

Any attempt to carve a smile on her wooden face to set him at ease was impossible.

“Ava,” James said softly. “Are you well? Shall I call Peggy?”

The thought of Peggy seeing her thus was enough to snap Ava from her trance. She shook her head and swallowed the thick ache that swelled in the back of her throat. “Those poor people.”

“Alfie shouldn’t have been so detailed.” James stood up and took the chair beside Ava. He rested a warm hand over hers where she still clutched the table. Her grip loosened under his touch and released the hard ledge.

“Are you sure you’re well?” he asked again.

“My parents were killed in a plane crash when I was a girl.” It was the first time she’d said those words aloud to anyone: killed in a plane crash. It was such a violent and terrible death, a wound in her soul that had never fully healed. “And my brother is a soldier, parachuting out of them all the time. Hearing about the attack today, thinking it could at any time be him...” Her throat tightened around the words, cutting them off.

“Ava, I’m so sorry.” James didn’t say it in that way most people did when they found out she was an orphan, in a detached, “sorry something bad happened to you years ago” sort of way. His eyes met hers with sincerity, and he spoke as though her parents’ deaths had just occurred along with the doomed aircraft that morning.

The clatter of dishes and murmurs of conversation filled the space between them.

“Thank you,” she said. “My brother took me in after. We’d never been close as he was eight years older than me. We are now though.”

“Yes, I imagine you would be.”

“I am here for him,” Ava said. “To do what I can to end this war. He’s sacrificed so much for me. Too much.” She touched her hand to her brow and found it damp with perspiration. “He always wanted to go to college, to be an engineer, but he had to take on a job to care for me. I wanted to go to college too, and when I finished high school, he told me he had enough savings for both of us to enroll.”

Tears burned in her eyes. She didn’t know why she was telling James all of this, or why she was even putting words to the ache inside her after all these years. However, once started, she couldn’t seem to stop.

“When I left for Pratt, he joined the Army.” Ava sniffed, and a handkerchief appeared in front of her. “There wasn’t enough for the two of us. Only one.”

She accepted it from James and wiped her nose. The cloth was warm from his pocket and held the faint familiar scent of him. “My brother is in this war because he sent me to pursue the dream we both wanted.” She stared at the table, noting a small dark crack in one corner. “At that point, it was too late to undo any of it, so I continued on. Now I want to use everything I learned in college and after to help bring him home.” She released a shaky exhale. “That’s why I’m here.”