Chateau of Secrets: A Novel

by Melanie Dobson

  “My grandfather rescued people, but I—” His voice broke again as he pushed the rail. “I thought I’d killed my child.”

  My skin bristled.

  “I didn’t think I could forgive myself, but then—” His voice cracked. “Helena was killed in a house fire two years ago, outside Chicago. She died making sure her nine-year-old daughter wasn’t trapped in her bedroom.”

  I shivered. “She didn’t abort?”

  He shook his head.

  My arms slowly fell back to my sides, the wonder in his voice drawing me into his story.

  “She lied to me in the clinic and then after I left, she and her family moved away. Last year, my father got a call from Helena’s father. His wife had grown ill, and they couldn’t care for their granddaughter anymore. My parents didn’t tell me what happened, but they invited her to live with them.”

  I leaned back against a tree, trying to bear his burden like he had with Madame Calvez.

  “Last week, when I called home to ask about my grandfather’s video, my daughter answered the phone.”

  “What is her name?”

  “Abigail.” He pushed the merry-go-round again. “Her name means ‘the father’s joy.’ ”

  “Oh, Riley,” I pleaded. “You have to go home.”

  “I can’t go back now. I wanted to abort her.”

  I tugged at his sleeve until he looked back at me. “You are no longer that man. God has given you a second chance.”

  He sat back down on the merry-go-round.

  “Abigail needs her dad,” I said. “But even more, I think you need Abigail.”

  Chapter 57

  Gisèle tried to rub the pain out of her head. They’d been in the tunnel for more than four hours, and most of the children were asleep now on the floor. Adeline was at Lisette’s apartment, but what if the Germans took Adeline from her, thinking the child was Gisèle’s? Would they punish both Lisette and Adeline because Gisèle had disappeared?

  She had to sneak out to Lisette’s apartment and bring them both back here.

  Josef studied her as he picked up two of the canteens left on the floor. “I will get water for the children and another flashlight.”

  Gisèle motioned him farther down the path so they could speak without any of the children hearing. The flashlight they’d found in the tunnel was still glowing, but Josef was right. The batteries wouldn’t last much longer. Still, she didn’t want him to leave. “They’ll find you,” she whispered, terrified at what the Germans would do to him.

  “The children are safe,” he said, his eyes upon her, tenderness in his voice. “You are safe.”

  “Adeline isn’t safe.”

  “I will search for her.”

  How she wished she and Josef were both students at the university, five years ago. They could laugh and flirt and toast to tomorrow where neither of them had a care. The cares of today felt impossible. Overwhelming. They must find Adeline, but she did not want to lose Josef. It felt as if her heart would tear into two tattered pieces.

  “Michel will return soon,” she insisted. “He will help us find her.”

  He raked his hand through his hair, his voice sad again. “I fear your brother won’t be returning.”

  Her pulse quickened. “Why not?”

  “Major von Kluge was expecting another convoy today from Germany, but the resistance fighters blew up the tracks.”

  “What about Michel?”

  “The train was carrying hundreds of soldiers from the front and they jumped out when the train derailed.”

  When he hesitated, her stomach clenched. “Josef?”

  “Someone sent a wire to the major. It said that both Michel Duchant and Jean-Marc Rausch had been killed.”

  She clung to the side of the tunnel, the shell that had protected her brother for the past four years, gasping for breath. “Why didn’t you tell me before?”

  “The major wanted me to find these children, but even more, he wanted me to find you.”

  The realization sickened her. “He was going to hurt me.”

  “Your brother was found to be a leader of the resistance party and your husband was a member as well. You are guilty by association.”

  “Not by association, Josef. You know I am guilty, at least in their eyes.”

  “But innocent in the eyes of God.”

  She wanted to scream so loud that it would echo through the tunnel, all the way up through the wine cellar and shake the halls of the château. She wanted the men upstairs to feel her pain.

  She’d known it was coming, that Michel would join their parents soon. In her heart, she’d said good-bye long ago, but with the war so close to the end, she’d hoped, desperately, that perhaps he would survive.

  Josef clutched both of her hands and held them to his chest. “I will come back for you, Gisèle. For you and all of these children.”

  “Please find Adeline,” she begged before giving him directions to Lisette’s apartment. Then she slipped her rosary beads off her neck and placed the crucifix in his hand. “This is the key.”

  He held it to his own heart. “Indeed.”

  And as he left, her heart warred with itself. She knew she probably should say good-bye to him as well, but she couldn’t.

  • • •

  Gisèle sat at the base of the cellar in the darkness, clutching the neckline of her blouse as if it was her rosary beads. Josef had been gone for hours now, much too long for checking on Adeline and filling up the canteens. Had Major von Kluge or his men found him?

  She couldn’t think about what might happen if they did. Her brother was gone now, and if she lost Adeline and Josef too—

  She wouldn’t be able to survive.

  The roof of the cavern rumbled, the ground shuddering. Were the Germans bombing Saint-Lô, or was it the Allied forces who were trying to take it back from the Nazis? It didn’t matter, she supposed. A bomb from the good guys or the bad guys was still a bomb. The Allies wouldn’t want to kill the children like the Nazis did, but neither could they control precisely where their bombs fell. And they didn’t know there were children underground near the château.

  The bombing had shaken the tunnel for hours, and she feared the roof might cave in, but still they couldn’t leave. As she waited, she prayed—for Josef and Adeline and for all the children in her care.

  A candle flickered in the tunnel, and she looked up to see the little boy whom she’d taken to the orphanage two years ago, the one who had clung to her hand all the way down the hill last night and snuggled beside her until he fell asleep.

  “What are you doing up?” she whispered.

  “I don’t like the bombs.”

  “Me neither.”

  He climbed into her lap.

  “What is your name?” she asked as she had in that alleyway so long ago.

  He leaned back against her, and this time he answered. “Michel.”

  “It is a good name,” she said softly, wondering if that was his real name or if he’d acquired it when Lisette said he looked like Michel. “Were your parents French?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He was so young. Like Adeline, he probably wouldn’t remember his parents when he grew up, but perhaps it was good that he couldn’t remember. Perhaps she should pray he did forget—the bombing and the hatred, the abandonment and the fear, the hunger and the grief.

  She pushed his hair back away from his eyes. “Do you know the story of Saint Michel?”

  “A little.”

  “I used to tell it to my brother when he was younger.”

  “He is an angel,” the boy said.

  “Not just any angel. Michel is a fierce archangel, and the leader of God’s army.” She swallowed. “He defeated evil once already and the Scriptures say that one day Michel and his army will fight this great dragon again and defeat it for good.”

  “I will fight too,” he told her. “Like Josef.”

  She prayed he would stand up against the evil in their world.
“Do you want to pray with me for Josef?”

  He closed his eyes. “Please help us fight,” the boy prayed. “Help us not to be scared.”

  Then he looked back up at her.

  “My brother once told me that courage doesn’t mean our fears are gone. It means we continue to fight, even when we are afraid.”

  She might be scared as well, but she could no longer hide in this tunnel while Adeline was out there. If Josef couldn’t find her, then she would have to.

  The hatch rattled above them, and as they leapt to their feet, her heart rejoiced, thinking Josef had returned. But then she realized someone with an ax or another weapon was hacking away at the lock on the door. There was so little fight left in her, and yet she had to protect Michel and the other children.

  She shoved him away from her. “Run!”

  She would tell the Germans she was the only one down here, that she was hiding alone. She would tell them—

  Michel edged back to her side. “I will fight them.”

  “Not now,” she said, chiding herself for telling him about the archangel. “When you are older, you can fight.”

  But still he didn’t move.

  A flashlight shone down on her face, and she covered her eyes. How was she supposed to protect the children now? The Germans had killed her father. Her brother. Major von Kluge and his commander would take her life in a heartbeat if they thought she’d helped the resistance and the Jews. But like Michel—her brother and the little boy beside her—she wouldn’t cower.

  “Gisèle,” the man above her called. She blinked in the light.

  “Who is it?” she asked.

  “Don’t tell me that you forgot me already.” The man dropped down beside her, and she could see his face, the sliver of a mustache over his upper lip. It was the pilot from the American plane. Eddie McAllister.

  And he was smiling.

  She dropped her arms to her sides, relief washing through her. It had been such a long time since she had seen anyone smile. “I told you not to tell anyone about this place,” she said.

  His grin grew a little wider. “I thought you might need a friend.”

  She pointed down the tunnel. “There are thirty children hiding back there. They all need a friend.”

  He shouted up to whoever was above him, and a group of soldiers flooded past her.

  “We’ll get them out.”

  They ran past her, and when she looked up, she saw the faint light of morning above.

  She hurried up the ladder.

  — CHAPTER 58 —

  The day the delivery truck arrived, Lisette Calvez was waiting by the window in the drawing room of the château, sipping a glass of red wine. “Chloe!” she called from the bed one of her grandsons had brought down when he visited from London.

  I rushed down the steps from my room.

  Riley had hoped the package would arrive yesterday, but it was held up at customs. Lisette and I had been watching for it all morning.

  After Lisette was discharged from the hospital, I asked her to stay at the château with me. At first she had balked at the idea of living here, but Monique told her grandmother she could not continue living on her own, so she finally agreed to join me, as long as she could sleep in one of the rooms on the first floor. She’d been living with me for more than a week now. When I returned to the States, she would go back to Paris with Monique and Isabelle.

  There was a story she wanted to tell me before she left, but the nurse who visited twice a day told her to stay away from stress. And the best way to avoid stress right now was to avoid talking about the past.

  But Riley said Lisette and I should watch his grandfather’s interview together. When I asked about stress, he thought it would bring healing instead. I figured he should know a little about healing. In the past five days, he’d texted me at least ten pictures of the most beautiful young lady smiling back at him. She had his green eyes and long honey-colored hair that she tucked back in colorful headbands.

  Outside I signed for the package and clutched it close to my chest. We’d discussed having him put the interview online, password protected, but he planned to use some of the footage for his documentary. The rest of it, he said, I probably wouldn’t want online either, even with a password.

  I made a pot of vanilla almond tea for Lisette and me, and we sat on two upholstered chairs in the drawing room, the cups of tea between us. My heart began to race as I inserted the DVD into the laptop I’d borrowed from Pierre.

  On the screen emerged a picture of the man I assumed to be Eddie McAllister, wearing a decorated hat and coat from World War II. His face was wrinkled with age, but I could see Riley in the sharpness of his eyes and, as he began to speak, the confidence in his voice. The girls must have swarmed around him in France after the war as they did Riley in New York.

  At first, Eddie spoke about his early years growing up outside Detroit and about training to become a pilot for the U.S. Air Force. Then he talked about the night his plane crashed into a valley near Saint-Lô.

  I leaned forward.

  “My navigator and I were rescued by a lovely gal named Gisèle,” he said with a smile. “She hid us—well, I promised her I wouldn’t say exactly where, but she took Daniel and me to her brother and then she helped us get identity cards. Her brother Michel got us on what they called the line, and we were escorted by another lady all the way down to Spain, where our boys flew in to pick us up.”

  A voice off camera asked him what happened to the rest of his crew. “Two were shot by the Germans, but four others were hidden by farmers and eventually sent back to England too.” He straightened his hat. “After D-Day, I came back to Saint-Lô. The Germans refused to leave that city, and the fighting was atrocious, but I owed it to Gisèle to help her. I had no idea what I would find there . . .

  “I asked Gisèle to marry me.” He laughed. “But she turned me down. It seemed she was in love with another chap, a German officer.”

  I stared at the screen, my head struggling to sort out his words. My grandmother, in love with a Nazi?

  That wasn’t right. She loved Henri Sauver.

  Was this German her first husband? No, that didn’t seem right either. Marguerite had said that the Germans were friendly in the beginning of the war, but my grandmother had never been in love with one . . .

  She’d married Henri Sauver in 1944 after the war, but my grandfather was French. He’d resisted the Germans.

  Eddie continued. “The officer was part Jewish, and he’d been the one to make us the identity papers. And I remember this little boy with us the day we went back. An orphan. He wouldn’t let go of Gisèle’s hand.

  “The world was crashing down around her, but Gisèle refused to leave France without him. She also wanted us to find a woman named Lisette and another child, a little girl.” He paused. “I can’t remember the girl’s name, but it was too late. They’d already been deported. It was one of my biggest regrets of the war, not being able to find them.”

  The voice off camera asked what happened to Gisèle. “I don’t know,” he said, sadness heavy in his voice. “The airplane took her to England, and I never saw her again. But I owe my life to her and Josef.”

  “Stop,” Lisette whispered.

  I turned off the DVD.

  Chapter 59

  Saint-Lô was on fire.

  Buildings burned around Gisèle, the hedgerows flattened and charred by the bombs. Townspeople were screaming. Fleeing. The nightmare of the blitzkrieg returned, except this time the Allied forces were fighting back.

  Planes blazed overhead. Gunfire echoed through the streets. The shadows of Nazi soldiers shifted among the flames.

  Gisèle took no care for herself. She had to find Lisette and Adeline and Josef. There was still time to flee in the confusion.

  She wouldn’t tell Lisette about Michel’s death, not until they were safe in the tunnel.

  The door to the apartment building had been torn from its hinges, and she rushed toward
it.

  “Bonjour, Gisèle.”

  She whirled around, and Philippe stepped out of the shadows.

  “There are a lot of people searching for you,” he said.

  “I don’t know why—”

  “Are you looking for your daughter?” His voice was cruel. Malice wrapped around every word.

  Her heart froze. “Where is she?”

  “Far away.” He clicked his tongue. “You shouldn’t keep secrets from me.”

  She glanced wildly around them. Where had Adeline gone? Perhaps she could catch whoever had taken her.

  But she couldn’t move, couldn’t run. The Nazis had taken everything from her. Everyone she loved. She’d done all she could to protect them and yet it wasn’t enough. The dragon was still crushing them.

  “The château is mine, Gisèle.”

  She felt sick. After all this, he wanted the house. “You can have it.”

  “Thank you.” She saw the muzzle of his gun, pointed at her, and then the glint of a diamond on the end of his cuff, surrounded by black onyx and gold. She flashed back to the night she’d found her father in the tunnel. Her brother showing her what he’d found in the cave. The cuff link she’d thought a German officer left behind.

  “Philippe—” She clutched the sides of her skirt. “When did you replace that?”

  He lowered the gun a few centimeters. “Replace what?”

  “Your cuff link.”

  He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

  Her resolve hardened. “You went back to the château, didn’t you? The night we got stopped in Saint-Lô.”

  “Perhaps—”

  “Did you kill my father?”

  In his silence, she knew. The Germans hadn’t killed her father that night. It was her cousin who’d beaten him up by the lake. And then pulled the trigger. Michel was right—Philippe would do anything to get the Duchant property.

  A child cried for her mother, and Gisèle’s heart clenched. She had fought as hard as she could and she had lost. She had pushed through her fears, but still she’d failed.