The Baker's Secret(68)

Dabbing her chin with her sleeve, she reached for another bowl.



“What is your name?” Odette asked the boy.

He stiffened on the stool. “I am not to speak to you.”

“I am jailed and you have a gun. What danger are you in?”

As if her mention of it had reminded him, the boy stood the gun on its stock so that it aimed at the ceiling. With bayonet, it reached past his shoulder. “Kreutz told me you were a witch. He said you would put a spell on me.”

Odette sat up on her bunk. “Does this feel like a spell?”

“You are speaking my language. That makes me nervous.”

“I am from your country,” Odette said. “It is all a mistake that I am here.”

“You were arrested for spying.”

Odette let that one go. “Where is your home?”

Deliberating whether he should answer, the boy ran his thumb around the tip of the gun barrel. “Grainau.”

“At the foot of the Zugspitze?”

He stood. “You have been there?”

Odette shook her head. “I have only seen pictures.”

“It is the most beau—”

A bomb landed closer than any before, exploding in the street outside the town hall. The building shook and they both heard the sound of falling stone. Odette could not see the boy any longer. She rushed to the front of her cell, knowing that his injury meant her freedom. He was curled in a ball on the floor.

“Are you all right?” she called to him.

For more than a minute he did not answer. “I was conscripted,” the boy from Grainau said at last, and she could tell that he was crying. “I didn’t want to come. They made me. And now I am going to die here.”

Odette rolled up her sleeves. “Here is what you do,” she said. “Take your gun and get away from the village, and if anyone asks, you have a message to deliver to a major. No one will interfere. Once you reach the open fields, get rid of your rifle and present yourself at any farmhouse. They will give you work clothes to replace your uniform. Follow the river upstream to Caen, to the monastery of St. Stephen. It is easily found, watch for the six spires. They will hide you safely.”

“You see?” The boy stood, dusting himself off before lifting his rifle from the floor. “A spell, exactly as they warned me.”

“Don’t you understand, Private Zugspitze? I am not the danger. I am nothing at all. The thing you should fear is the order they gave you to stay, when they have all moved to somewhere safe. The thing to fear is out there, falling from the sky.”

As if she had conjured it, another shell struck, this time hitting the town hall directly. The northern half of the building was sheared away, caving into itself as though its ancient stones were cubes of sugar. The basement jail, located at the opposite end, nonetheless shook as if in an earthquake, flinging Odette to the floor. She lay there, arms shielding her skull, waiting whole minutes for debris to stop falling and the air to go still. When at last she found the nerve to lift her head, she saw that the explosion had bent the cell door, its base had gouged an arc in the cement floor. Now it stood wide open.

Odette considered it a favorable omen that the door would never close again. She poked her head into the damaged hallway, walls buckled and light fixtures shattered on the floor. The boy, her guard, her captor, was gone.





Chapter 33




“No,” Mémé said, arms crossed, feet planted in Emma’s path.

“People are expecting me,” Emma said, adjusting the wagon harnesses, her right arm now in a splint. She had given up on the bread that day, unable as she was to knead with one hand, but the Kommandant’s aide had not come for the loaves anyway. Still, there were eggs to be gathered and given. “I cannot sit idle while our neighbors go hungry.”

“No,” Mémé said.

“With respect,” Emma said, lowering her head, then raising it again with effort. “I understand the dangers. But Odette sits in the same jail that held your son-in-law, my father. We did not act to help him soon enough, and I will not repeat that mistake.”

Mémé scowled on, her face cragged with age and determination. “No.”

“Look at me,” Emma whispered. She could well imagine, with her closed eye and swollen lips, what her grandmother saw. “Would you have me wait here till the captain returns?”

Mémé’s lips began to tremble, but she pressed them hard together, wringing out any room for sorrow. “No Gypsy.”

“Dear one.” Emma laid her good hand on the old woman’s crossed arms. “I am stubborn, like they say my mother was. I am almost as stubborn as you. Helping others may keep me alive.”

Mémé turned away. “No.” But this time she said it quietly.

“I’ll return by midday.” Emma gave her grandmother a kiss on the cheek. “Noon, and no later. I promise.”

Mémé held still as Emma pulled the wagon around her and through the barnyard doorway. Though the straps chafed her shoulders, she felt a measure of relief. If she found the captain somewhere along her route, perhaps he would spare Mémé.

A few steps past the well, however, Emma stubbed her foot on a stone, and a whip of pain cracked from her heel to the back of her head. She stood reeling for a full minute before shuffling on again. Perhaps this plan was a mistake. Either way, she would not be suffering for much longer.