Lost Among the Living(76)

I was quiet for a moment. “And because it was a secret assignment, you couldn’t tell me,” I said.

“No,” Alex said softly. “I couldn’t.”

I found myself blinking away tears. He seemed not to notice, but continued to speak. “Aunt Dottie was agreeable to a visit. I was here for a week. I walked the woods and confirmed the vantage point of the drawings. Martin was in France, but I made conversation with Aunt Dottie and Uncle Robert, getting an idea of who had been in the area lately. I watched and I learned. I took a walk through the gardens with Frances and questioned her the best I could, but she was in one of her confused moods and couldn’t help. On the second day, I came to the village and talked to some of the locals. When I came back to the house that afternoon, I found that Franny had killed herself, a stranger was dead in the woods, and everything was in chaos.”

I bit my lip. If Alex had been in town when Franny died, it would be an easy story to verify. I couldn’t see how he could get away with a lie.

“None of it made any sense,” Alex continued. “If the man in the woods was the spy, why was he still in Sussex weeks after the drawings were sent? Why would Franny choose that day of all days to commit suicide? And what kind of animal lives in the Sussex woods that would tear a man apart in daylight? They were pieces of a puzzle, but they didn’t seem like pieces of the same puzzle. And I didn’t have much time to put them together before I had to go back to the Front.”

“The police didn’t pressure you to stay?”

“I was an enlisted man in the middle of war. I had my orders, Franny was a suicide, and I’d been in town, four miles from the woods when the man was killed. No, I was not pressured to stay. I tried to ask my own questions, but it was hopeless—all I got were wild rumors and sinister stories, tales of Dottie covering up Frances’s crimes with the help of David Wilde.” Bitterness crept into his voice. “I left no wiser than I was the day I came. Whoever had tried to send the sketches to the Germans was still free. I had failed my country.”

“You did not fail your country,” I said quietly. I realized something vital: Alex was good at everything because he was so very hard on himself. Striving for the highest thing, Martin had said of him, making the rest of us run to keep up with him. He had only shown me his carefree side. It had taken the war to make me see.

He continued talking. “After I’d left and thought it through, I began to see the sequence of things,” he said. “Franny liked to sketch, you see, and it’s possible she might have made sketches of the base and the coast. I’d thought of that already, before I arrived. So on that first evening I asked one of the servants whether Franny was still fond of sketching and what kinds of things she drew. And the next day, Frances was dead. It’s a loose end that doesn’t tie up. I couldn’t tell Mabry about my suspicions—what was there to tell? That I thought a mad fifteen-year-old girl was somehow the traitor? Without evidence, I couldn’t pursue it. I had to let it go, at least until I was free to take it up again.”

We had reached the end of the lane now, and we turned, heading back to High Street. I leaned on Alex’s arm, thinking, and said, “There is simply no way it was Frances who sent off the drawings, even if she was the one who drew them.”

“No. But someone could have taken them from her sketchbook and sent them off.”

I stopped on the street and looked at him, shocked. “Someone did.”

“What do you mean?” Alex looked down at me. “Are you saying you found the sketchbook? I never found it—I ran out of time.”

“I have it,” I said. “Frances gave it to me.”

Alex’s tone carried a hint of warning. “Jo.”

“She did,” I persisted. I was starting to feel excited as the pieces came together. “I found it under the covers of my bed. I’ve been staring at it and staring at it. I thought she wanted to show it to me because of—because of the sketches that were inside. But that wasn’t it at all. She wanted to show it to me because of the pages that had been torn out. That was what I was supposed to see.”

“Jo, anyone could have put the book in your bed. A living human, I mean.”

“I was sleeping in the bed at the time.”

Alex’s gaze darkened. “That’s unsettling, and I don’t much like the sound of it. But it still could have been a living person.”

“Are you denying what you experienced last night?” I asked, stung that he still disbelieved me. “What you heard?”

“I don’t quite know what I heard last night,” he said, “and I’m not sure I have the courage to explore it.”

He put his hand on my elbow, prompting me to walk again, but I stood still, which forced him to stay where he was, holding the umbrella over me. “Tell me one thing,” I said.

He looked wary. “What is it?”

“The fact that you failed to find the sketch artist,” I said. “That you felt you failed your country. That’s why you gave in to Colonel Mabry’s idea that you become a spy—why you became Hans Faber. Isn’t it?”

The look he gave me, pained with deep exhaustion, was all the answer I needed.

“Come,” he said, and touched my arm again. This time I let him lead me as we approached High Street.