Fragments of Light

by Michele Phoenix

  Sabine stopped mid-translation. “I’m sorry, the Corps of . . . ?”

  Cal tried for simple words. “The part of the army that helps to repair bridges and roads and builds hospitals and . . . lots of things. Pops was sent to France to do that, and before he left, my mother sewed this into the hem of his uniform.” Cal turned the coin over for Lise to see its design. “Can you tell who this is?”

  Lise leaned in, scrunching up her nose in concentration. Then her eyes widened. “La Statue de la Liberté?”

  Cal smiled at the awe on her face. “This coin is called Walking Liberty. My father brought it back from the war, and can you guess why my mom gave it to me too before I left?”

  Lise thought again, but it was Sabine who answered. “Because liberty can’t be stopped,” she said. Her eyes flickered up to Cal, then back to her sister. “Because when liberty starts walking, she will reach her destination. Lise”—she waited for her sister to look up at her—“this coin is hope. It tells us that Cal and—” She hesitated, glancing at the couch. “Cal and Buck and their friends will win.”

  “I want you to have this coin,” Cal said to the child. He smiled as her face lit up with excitement.

  “For me?”

  “Absolutely. Because things might still be hard for a bit, but liberty will win.” He held Walking Liberty out to the girl, but Sabine took it from him.

  When Lise protested, she said, “Just for now, Lise.” She wrapped the coin in a handkerchief and dropped it into the pocket of her apron. “Tomorrow or the day after, when this is all over, I will give it back to you. But for now, I don’t want you to show your American present to anyone.”

  “But I’ll get it back?” Lise asked, frowning.

  “You’ll get it back.”

  Cal looked from Lise to Sabine. “Your father would be proud of his daughters.”

  Sabine pulled Lise close and her little sister wrapped her arms around her waist. “We miss him now,” Sabine said simply. “But we will miss him much more when the war is over, if life must go back to normal without him.”

  Cal was about to say something about hope and resilience when he saw Sabine’s face go white. Her eyes were fixed on a spot in the field beyond the castle’s perimeter, where a stone wall intersected a pasture. Her body tensed as she leaned forward, her hands on the windowsill, to squint into the darkening night.

  Cal followed her gaze and felt his lungs freeze. Three soldiers, crouching low, were stealing toward the castle.

  Unaware of the danger, Lise leaned in close to the window and seemed to recognize something familiar among the silhouettes outlined against the still-reddened sky.

  Her face lit up. “Otto!” she yelled.

  Chapter 15

  A little over an hour later, we turned North off I-44 toward Kinley, Missouri. Wide-spaced farm houses stood well off the main road into town, the distance between them decreasing as we drew closer to the diminutive hub of the farming community.

  Main Street was a two-lane road with twentieth-century commercial buildings on both sides, their brick facades and flat roofs the epitome of small-town America. The occasional misfit structure interrupted the lineup of storefronts, some of which were boarded up. There was a barbershop, a Dollar General, a tavern, and just past the old mercantile, a wooden chapel that had seen better days.

  Judging by the cars parked along the town’s only street, it was safe to assume that at four p.m. in Kinley, the tavern was the place to be.

  “Two Yankee women walked into a bar in the far reaches of the Ozarks . . . ,” Darlene muttered under her breath as we approached the front door, making me laugh despite some nervousness.

  A dozen pairs of eyes shifted from the Nuggets game on TV as we entered. We paused long enough for our eyes to adjust to the darkness. Pulled shades covered tinted windows, and muted lighting only barely illuminated the tavern’s low ceiling and checkered, linoleum floor. There was one elderly man at the bar, stooped over a beer, his eyes unfocused and his expression vacant. Several other men sat at tables facing a large TV whose cables were duct-taped to the wall.

  Some of the patrons turned back to the game when I stepped up to the bartender, Darlene in tow, but others continued to openly stare. I heard a drawn-out, “Look what them cats dragged in” from somewhere in the back corner, while an ESPN announcer detailed the fast break that had resulted in an impressive dunk.

  “Help ya?” the bartender asked. Not, “What can I serve you?” I guess we didn’t look like the happy-hour type.

  “I’m hoping you can.” I fished around in my purse for the brown folder that held Cal’s letters. “I’m a journalist with the Sentinel in Saint Charles, Illinois,” I began.

  The same voice from the dark corner of the tavern yelled, “Fake news!” loudly enough to startle me.

  The bartender cracked a bucktoothed smile. “Welcome to Kinley, population five hundred, social skills zero.”

  I squinted in the direction the voice had come from and heard a snort and a couple chuckles as a glass or two were raised in my direction. I reminded myself that I’d wanted an adventure that would take me outside my comfort zone. Kinley appeared to be mission accomplished.

  Turning back to the bartender, I tried for a more friendly approach and held out my hand. “My name is Cecelia, and this is my friend, Darlene.”

  “So nice to meet you,” Darlene said brightly, reaching across the bar to shake his hand.

  He wiped his palm on his faded jeans and shook. “Devon.”

  “Can I ask you a couple questions, Devon?”

  “Won’t even charge you for my answers.”

  “I’m doing a story on some letters that belonged to an American GI. They date back to the Second World War, and these two,” I said, opening the manila folder to reveal the letters, “were sent from Kinley. I’d love to find out if there are any relatives who still live here and might want to see them.”

  “What’s the name on ’em?” Devon asked.

  Things had gone quiet around the tavern and I sensed all eyes on me again. I cleared my throat. “Callum,” I said. “Callum McElway. The letters I have”—I picked one up and showed Devon the return address—“are from his mother, Lucy McElway. The address is Mud Creek Road, but I can’t find it on any maps, so . . .”

  I sensed movement to my right, caught a hint of beer breath, and turned to find a man craning his neck to see the letters. He was tall and gangly, and his gray hair lay flat on one side of his head. Pulling a pair of readers from the pocket of his denim shirt, he leaned in, his dentures clicking in his mouth. When he’d gotten a good look at the envelope, he held out a hand. “Jesse. Town historian.”

  Someone in the back corner guffawed and crowed, “Self-proclaimed and proud of it.”

  Jesse’s eyes were on me. “Callum, you said?”

  Something bright zinged along my veins. “Yes. Callum McElway.”

  Darlene leaned in close and whispered in my ear. “Warning, Will Rogers—this boy might be a half-bubble shy of plumb.”

  Jesse said, “Went by Cal, if I recall. Bit of a local hero to my pop’s generation.” The hairs on my arms rose. But my expectations sank again when he shrugged a shoulder and said, “Haven’t heard that name since I was a kid.” He looked over his shoulder. “What would it be—sixty, seventy years?” A couple of men grunted their agreement from the shadows. “The old McElway homestead is out past Foggy Acres. Not lookin’ very good, but standing.”

  “On Mud Creek Road?”

  “I’m guessin’ that’s just what the family called their laneway,” the bartender said. “Not someplace you’d find on your fancy phone maps.”

  Darlene stepped closer to the man named Jesse. “Does anyone still live there?” I heard the hope in her voice.

  “Nope. Not since I can remember. Ain’t nothin’ there now but the fallin’ down house and an overgrown yard. Last I saw it, the barn roof’d caved in too. Neighbors might be able to tell you more, though. Look for the yellow hous
e ’cross the creek from the McElway place.”

  Darlene looked at me and I nodded agreement to her unspoken question, shoving the letters back into the envelope. “The homestead,” I said to the bartender. “How far out of town is it?”

  “Just a click or two as the crow flies. But I wouldn’t go out there this time a day ’less I had a good reason and some snake repellent.”

  Darlene leaned in and turned up the wattage on her smile. “Devon, my friend.”

  “I’ll draw you a map,” he said.

  The bartender’s drawing and instructions were landmark-based and detailed. “Turn left past the shelter with the blue rain barrels. Then right again after you pass the Cooper house with the rusted-out windmill at the end of the lane.”

  And there it was. With daylight fading, the house seemed absorbed into the hills and fields behind it, a revenant barely visible from the end of the driveway.

  “You think this is it?” Darlene asked softly. I couldn’t tell whether the grit in her voice was fatigue or emotions.

  “Sure looks old enough to have been standing seventy-some years ago.”

  We bumped over the potholed, unpaved laneway that led down what I assumed was Mud Creek Road to the front of Lucy’s home and stopped a fair distance from the house, a fallen tree preventing us from driving any farther. The barn—what remained of it—stood just to the left of the house, a little farther back, its roof caved in. One broad door hung sideways on broken hinges, and I could see the grille of a tractor just inside.

  When we got out of the car, Darlene stood motionless for a while, her eyes on the home her father had likely lived in. I wondered about the thoughts running through her mind and should have known that my friend would speak them without my prompting.

  “What are the odds that he’s still living in there? A kindhearted recluse with a lapful of cats, maybe. Or an ornery old geezer with Jack Daniels in one hand and a rifle in the other?”

  I came around the car to stand by her, taking in the modest, two-story structure. Though the siding might have been a shade of white once, there was little left to show for it. Just the remnants of peeled and mildewed paint. Many of the windows were broken, some of them boarded over, and a tattered curtain rested across an upstairs sill.

  “Looks pretty deserted to me,” I said, an eerie feeling trickling up my spine.

  “I’m trying to picture it like it would have looked back then.”

  I let the silence stretch as Darlene slowly scanned the space from the house to the barn.

  “I bet there was a garden out there.” She pointed toward an overgrown patch where something that looked like the handle of a well’s pump rose above the weeds. “They’d have used that to water their vegetables, right? Green beans, carrots, pumpkins in the fall . . .” Her voice trailed off. “Can you picture a little boy playing in the yard right off the front steps? Lucy hanging the laundry over there.”

  “Yep,” I said softly. “I can picture all that.”

  She nodded. Then she shook her head. “Or maybe it was something entirely different. A derelict family on a derelict farm.”

  “The letters, though,” I hinted.

  Darlene looked at me. “Lucy loved him.” It was a statement of fact. “I just can’t picture in my mind how he went from being loved that way by his mother to—” She didn’t finish her sentence, but I knew what she meant. Callum’s abandonment of his only child seemed an offense to the idyllic scene she was envisioning.

  “Let’s get a bit closer,” I said. I picked up a stick with one hand and held an elbow out for Darlene to grasp.

  “What’s with the twig?” she asked.

  “Snake repellent.”

  She laughed at that. “City girl.”

  I walked carefully through the tall weeds between the car and the front door, swinging the stick like a divining rod and keeping Darlene close. When we got to the house, I put some weight on the bottom step leading up to the front door to test its solidity.

  “Follow my lead,” I said with a bit of trepidation, unwilling to see my friend get injured but fully aware that she would not be kept out of her father’s home. “Step where I step and if I fall through, stop moving.” I tried to infuse some laughter into the words, but there was something foreboding about the old McElway homestead and it was affecting my nerves.

  “Copy that,” Darlene said, adrenaline livening her words.

  I walked up the steps, testing each one, and she followed close behind, hugging the railing to avoid putting weight in the middle of each plank. A chair, its wicker seat long scavenged by animals, sat forlornly in a corner of the porch, and a smattering of weeds grew through the gaping spaces between rotted floorboards. I tried to gauge the distance between support beams and walked on those, conscious of Darlene, whose hands on my waist told me she was following instructions.

  By the look of the cobwebs spanning the doorframe, I assumed no one had entered the house in a while. The tattered screen door creaked as I pulled it open. The front door beyond it was locked, so I put my hand through its broken windowpane and found the deadbolt.

  When we stepped inside, a feeling of time standing still washed over me. It wasn’t completely dark yet, but I still pulled out my iPhone and turned on its flashlight.

  “Look over there,” Darlene whispered behind me.

  I followed her pointing finger. To our left was a living room. A green corduroy sofa and a delicate, floral upholstered chair stood against two walls. Stuffing protruded from holes in the couch’s cushions, wounds I presumed had been inflicted by nesting rodents. The faded print of a sunset over water hung askew above a long radio cabinet that doubled as a sideboard. Just a few odds and ends were scattered around the room—a candle bent sideways from the heat of past summers, a newspaper holder, a curio cabinet—vestiges of the life that had once been the beating heart of the McElway home.

  “What’s with you fancy folks and trespassing?”

  The sharp voice barked at us from just outside the front door, making my heart skip a beat before it began to race. I thought Darlene might have torn a muscle twisting toward the sound like a thief caught red-handed. A middle-aged woman in rubber boots and a coat pulled on over green-striped pajamas stood just outside the door. The flashlight she held in one hand was trained on us, but it was the old pistol in her other hand that brought me up short.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said hurriedly. “We were told this was the McElway home and we were . . .” The details seemed too lengthy to explain. “I’m so sorry,” I said again. She was pointing the pistol at the ground, and I didn’t want to give her any reason to raise it.

  I looked over to see Darlene squinting toward the doorway with a hand over her heart. Ever the peacemaker, she attempted a smile, but it was more strained than she probably realized. “You nearly gave me a heart attack sneaking up on us like that!” she said.

  “Darlene.” She clearly hadn’t seen the gun.

  “I’ve called the police,” the woman said gruffly, her voice like muddy gravel. “It ain’t right for people to go snooping around somebody else’s property.” She raised the pistol to waist level, trained in our general direction. That got Darlene’s attention.

  Her hands shot up like she was trapped in an old western. “I’m his daughter,” she blustered, her smile slipping. “I’m Cal McElway’s daughter.” She cleared her throat and added more persuasively. “We’re not trespassing, we’re . . . we’re visiting.”

  “Say that again?” the woman said, the grit in her voice ominous.

  “We think my friend’s father grew up in this house.” I tried to sound calm and reassuring. “We were hoping—”

  She cut me off. “You don’t say.”

  “We went by the Kinley Tavern and—what was his name?” Darlene looked at me.

  “Jesse.”

  “Yes, Jesse. He told us this is where my father’s family lived before I was born.”

  The pajama-clad woman lowered her pistol as a delighted s
mile spread across her face. Then, in a voice that sounded an octave higher and a decade younger than it had moments before, she said, “You don’t say.”

  I stepped toward her. “Do you know anything about Cal?”

  “I do,” she answered, smiling at Darlene. “But it’s gettin’ awful dark out here. Why don’t we hop over the crick to my place and chat about your daddy over a cup of tea?”

  Chapter 16

  “Get down!” Cal barked, grabbing Sabine and Lise’s arms and pulling them into a crouch. Aubry-en-Douve’s residents appeared to shrink into themselves, fear and defeat on their faces.

  An elderly woman began to walk in circles, her hands on her head, looking upward and wailing in a broken voice. When two of the younger women tried to calm her, she started to scream, a shrill flurry of words Cal couldn’t understand. Other villagers spoke up, pleading with her to be quiet.

  “Arrêtez!” Sabine yelled, taking a couple steps forward. The people crowded into the living room’s far corner instantly fell silent. The fourteen-year-old spoke in rapid-fire, terse syllables, her voice low. Cal could see the fear in her eyes, but her expression was intense and persuasive.

  “Tous d’accord?” she finally asked. Cal had learned in his few hours in the castle that d’accord was an expression of agreement. The woman who had been wailing moments before said something combative and a couple of the villagers spoke up to silence her.

  “Tous d’accord?” Sabine asked again, more firmly this time. There were nods and murmurs, some of them hesitant, from the people of Aubry-en-Douve.

  Sabine blew out a breath and seemed to brace herself before turning to Cal. “Otto is with them,” she said. “If I speak to him, I might be able to . . .”

  But Cal wasn’t listening. “Get the women and children somewhere safe,” he interjected before she’d finished her sentence. Then he turned to the couch, where Buck lay in an inebriated stupor. He picked up his friend’s Garand.