Jade dropped her peeler and turned to face him, her jaw set. “Dinner will be served in an hour,” she said.
“Fine—I’ll be in the foyer helping with the stone restoration. Might take my mind off the shakes and cold sweats. Thanks a lot for this sobriety thing.”
This time, Beck called the police. The previous nocturnal visits had caused no damage to the castle and had done more to entertain his imagination than to harm the building. But when Beck rose at the crack of dawn the day before the Fallons’ party and toured the castle looking for anything he might have overlooked in the last-minute rush to meet the deadline, he found a surprise waiting for him in the entryway that made calling law enforcement a no-brainer.
With Thérèse fully invested in a decorative frenzy, Fallon had taken it on himself to have all the doors of the castle replaced by new ones a local artisan had designed in conjunction with a security specialist. The doors matched the old ones nearly perfectly, but they also vastly improved the insulation and safety of the castle’s entrances. Even the half-dozen French doors that led from the château’s interior to the patios had been upgraded to modern, antique-looking replacements. The result, they all agreed, was stellar. Even more satisfying to Fallon than the antique appearance of the structures was the series of rods hidden inside each door that extended into the stone beneath and above it when the elaborate lock was turned.
The air grew cooler as Becker approached the foyer. He felt the hair on the back of his neck rising. He’d locked the doors himself the night before, and it was still too early for anyone else to have opened them. The first thing he registered as he reached the entryway was the glass lying on the floor just inside the front door. At some point during the night, someone had broken two vertical rows of the door’s windows and apparently tried to hacksaw through the wood that separated them, finding only too late that the veneer concealed a metal core. Whoever had attempted to forge a wide passageway through the front door and into the castle had found their efforts thwarted by Fallon’s fortified investment.
Beck turned to retrace his steps to the office and call his employer with the news, but he stumbled as he glanced into the sitting room Thérèse had installed in the circular space of the southeast tower. He’d been so focused on the front doors as he’d passed the room earlier that he hadn’t noticed the displaced furniture and severely damaged wall. The Louis XIV divans and chairs had been pushed away from the limestone, and an entire section of carved stone had been pried out of the wall. The blocks now lay on the newly renovated marble floor, most of them chipped and broken from the fall.
Beck shook his head, incomprehension a bullhorn in his mind. The uniqueness of the wall had been pointed out to him the week before by Jacques’s men. They’d discovered a section of smaller blocks that appeared to be chiseled sandstone. The contrast in size and color hadn’t been very obvious until the walls had been cleaned, the limestone of the rest of the entryway turning a much lighter shade than the sandstone. The anomaly was about six feet in height and three feet wide, projecting up from the floor in the shape of a doorway. And though there was no expedient way of proving if it was in fact a walled-off door and if it led anywhere, the general consensus had been to break through it and see what treasures lay beyond. It had taken all of Beck’s persuasive powers and the imminence of the looming deadline to talk the workers down.
Beck took a closer look at the damage. Most of the sandstone was still in place, but a chest-level section had been pried out, a couple feet wide and at least a foot deep. Though no larger than bags of sugar, the blocks of stone that now lay in a layer of their own dust on the castle floor must not have been easy to dislodge. Beck peered into the gap where they’d once been and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just the marks left by whatever metallic tool had been used to pry them loose. Beck had a flashback to the well’s cover and wondered if the castle’s nighttime intruder had a thing for crowbars.
Fallon arrived within five minutes of Beck’s call, entering the castle through the French doors in the dining room. The two men moved to the still-locked front doors and contemplated the damage.
“Well, they looked splendid for the few days we had them,” Fallon said, his humor somewhat forced in light of the setback. He leaned in to peer more closely at what remained of the windows. “Looks like our ghost tried to saw through the wood and widen the gap.”
“That’s what I figured,” Beck said. “And I’m pretty sure he wasn’t too happy when he found the security bar inside.”
Fallon stepped back. “How wide do you think that gap is?”
Becker pursed his lips. “Ten inches?”
Fallon nodded and cocked his head to the side. After a moment, he said, “Given the damage to the wall, we know that whoever did this actually made it into the castle.” He stepped forward and compared his paunch to the width of the opening in the door. “We can fairly safely assume that I’m not the one who squeezed through here,” he said with a chuckle. “And I suspect Sylvia’s out of contention too!”
“We need to call the police.”
Fallon nodded, taking a cell phone from his pocket. He got through to the operator at the police station and explained the situation in British-accented French. “Jojo? No, I don’t think it would have been him,” he said after a brief silence. “The old chap’s harmless.” He paused, listening. “We’ll be here,” he concluded, ending the call. “They’re on their way,” he said to Beck.
While they waited, the two men examined the gouged-out hole in the wall.
Becker shook his head. “This doesn’t look like something Jojo would do.” He was surprised at the defensiveness he felt for the old man. “I know he’s an odd character and all, but . . .”
“He’s not a criminal,” Fallon agreed.
“That why you haven’t kicked him off the grounds?”
“He’s part of the château’s lore, really. And the French have strict squatter’s rights that would make it illegal to evict him. As it is, I’m not sure he’d have anywhere else to go if I did force him to leave.”
“And he’d have to get used to life without Jade’s cooking.”
Fallon smiled. “She’s a bit of a saint, isn’t she?”
The men turned and exited through the dining room doors as they heard a car coming to a halt outside the castle. They joined the two gendarmes on the front steps and answered their questions as best they could. Becker had trouble taking the men seriously. They were dressed all in blue—navy-blue pants and a pale-blue button-down shirt under a navy vest—and wore on their heads the kind of hat Becker had thought only existed in old movies. Their képis were ridiculous pillbox hats with gold trim and a small, hard bill. It was all Becker could do not to stare.
Fallon introduced them to Becker as Officers Vivier and Maréchal, then informed the gendarmes that there had been a few other minor nighttime incidents in recent weeks. He was soundly reprimanded for not reporting them. After taking pictures of the damage and discussing possible motives, the only conclusion all four men could reach was that a better security system would need to be installed, including surveillance cameras, particularly as Thérèse’s antique furniture and decorative accents could potentially create more incentive for break-ins.
“We need to ask Jojo a few questions,” the older of the two gendarmes, Vivier, said after they’d covered all the bases.
“There’s no need for that,” Fallon told the man. “He’s never done any harm around here, and I doubt he’d be involved in this.”
Maréchal looked at Fallon in surprise. “You seem fairly sure of him.”
“I hardly know the old chap,” Fallon said. “But he’s lived here since Shakespeare was a child, so I can’t imagine that he’d choose last night to begin wreaking havoc in the castle.”
The gendarmes headed out of the castle and stowed their camera in the ridiculously common Renault they drove. Becker was certain he’d be able to outrun them on a moped. “We’ll just drop by and ask him a couple
questions,” Vivier said. “See if he heard anything last night.”
Becker had had enough. “He doesn’t talk,” he said, hoping the information would disarm the policemen’s plans.
Vivier smiled a little too confidently. “We’ll see,” he said.
Fallon and Becker watched them walk the short distance to the gatehouse.
“Barney Fife has nothing on them,” Beck said to Fallon, anger searing the edges of his consciousness.
“Barney Fife?”
“Never mind. American reference. But those guys are not the ones I’d call if I was in trouble.”
Vivier walked up to the front of Jojo’s gatehouse and pounded on the door. It took a second knock before it was opened. From where Becker and Fallon stood outside the castle, they couldn’t hear what was being said. Jojo stood on the threshold, disheveled and squinting, shaking his head occasionally. Beck couldn’t be sure, but he thought he saw Jojo’s lips moving a couple times. He couldn’t imagine what the old man’s voice might sound like and had to resist the urge to stroll over to the gatehouse for a closer listen.
The younger policeman, Maréchal, finally closed his notebook, and, after a few more words, the two gendarmes walked back to the castle.
“Says he was in the barn across the way tending to a sick horse all night,” Vivier said. “Didn’t hear a thing.”
Fallon nodded. “Probably true. He spends quite a bit of time over there, from what I’ve gathered. I can check with the owner if you’d like.”
“No need for that. We’ll swing by on our way back to the gendarmerie.”
“Did you actually get him to talk?” Becker asked.
The gendarme shrugged. “Some. It got easier when I started asking only questions that required one-word answers. He’s not much of a conversationalist, is he?” He crossed his arms and divided his attention between Becker and Fallon as he continued. “From what we’ve seen here, there’s very little we can do. We’ll keep our eyes open and make sure we send a car by at night. Are those gates always closed?” He pointed to the large wrought-iron gates that led into the castle grounds.
“I lock them every night after the workmen have gone and open them again in the morning before they arrive,” Becker said. “Unless Thérèse or Mr. Fallon gets here first.”
“And has it ever looked like someone had tampered with the lock?” Maréchal asked.
“Not that I remember. It’s just a padlock.”
“I’ll look into having a better lock installed, gentlemen,” Fallon offered. “And if you hear anything at all that might explain this break-in, do let me know. It’s the oddest thing, really—going to all that trouble to destroy a section of wall . . . and just a day before the opening festivities. The timing couldn’t be worse.”
“You call us if you see anything suspicious—anything at all,” Maréchal said, shaking Fallon and Becker’s hands. “And make sure you contact your insurance company before you start cleaning up. They might want to see the damage as it is.”
The two gendarmes folded themselves into their Renault and drove away, leaving Fallon and Becker no further ahead than when they had arrived.
“Well, my lad, it looks like I’ve got a couple calls to make. What do you think the chances are of having that door replaced by tomorrow?”
Becker hunched a shoulder. “It’s custom made. I’m guessing it’ll take longer than that.”
Fallon pursed his lips and nodded, turning back to look at the broken door again. “You didn’t hear anything last night?”
“Not a thing.” Becker had run himself to exhaustion just after midnight and had been dead to the world within minutes of crawling into bed. “But I can assure you that I won’t be sleeping so soundly tonight.”
Fallon chuckled. “Don’t lose too much sleep over it. If whoever broke in felt any animosity at all, it was clearly directed at inanimate objects.”
Becker’s mind was on the task ahead more than on his own safety. “We can’t adequately repair the hole in the wall in the time we’ve got left,” he said. “The best I can offer is to hang something over it for now, until we can get new sandstone blocks cut and installed.”
Fallon’s eyes lit up. “I’m sure Thérèse has something splendid that would look just stunning there.”
Becker smiled. “I’m sure she does.”
“That’s it, then. Though Thérèse is not going to be pleased.”
The mere thought of Thérèse’s reaction had Becker smiling more broadly. “Break it to her gently.”
“I’ll be the epitome of British diplomacy, my lad!”
AUGUST 1944
THOUGH THE EVACUATION of the manor had started as a slow and meticulous process, by midafternoon it had escalated into something approaching mayhem. Marie had spent a couple of hours packing up two of the residents, trying to keep them calm but knowing too little to truly assuage their fears. They wanted to know what was happening, when the Américains were going to reach Lamorlaye, and what would happen to them when they did. All Marie could tell them was that Kommandant Koch wouldn’t let any harm come to them. She wondered if the expectant mothers could hear the uncertainty in her voice.
It was just past 3 p.m. when an officer carrying a portable radio rushed across the lawn from the communications office and stormed up the stairs to Koch’s office. He hadn’t been there more than a minute before the Kommandant came out into the hallway and began barking orders. “Get the women into the cars! Pack the remaining boxes into the trucks and fill the rest of the space with whatever artwork you can take off the walls! You!” he yelled at Marie. She’d been helping a panic-stricken Elise down the stairs. “Leave her and fetch Frau Carpentier instead. She’s in the solarium. You can take care of your friend when the other women are out of harm’s way!”
Marie froze. She couldn’t just abandon Elise, not while she shook with fear, pale-faced, terrified of what the next twenty-four hours would hold. “But—” Marie began.
“Now!” Kommandant Koch bellowed, making Elise whimper and Marie start.
“I’ll be quick,” she whispered. “Can you make it to the couch? You go sit there while I find Frau Carpentier, and I’ll be right back. Okay?” Elise didn’t respond. She just stood immobile, three steps up from the bottom of the stairs, slightly bent and clutching Marie’s arm. “Elise?”
The eyes she turned on Marie were glassy. “I think . . .” She couldn’t formulate the words, but when Marie’s eyes traveled down to her friend’s feet, she instantly understood. Elise stood in a small pool of fluid.
“Oh no,” Marie said, her own panic rising at the sight. “Elise . . .”
“It’s too soon,” Elise murmured, her voice tremulous, one hand protectively covering her belly. “What if . . . ?”
“Fräulein!” Kommandant Koch yelled from the top of the stairs. “I’ve given you an order!”
“But Elise is—”
“Now!”
Marie stood immobile for another couple of seconds before launching into action. Her legs felt wobbly and her mind was numb with the riot of thoughts clashing in it, but she knew she’d have to be the one making decisions for her friend. “Elise,” she finally said, her voice as firm as the hand that gripped her stricken friend’s arm. “Go sit on that couch. Right now. Your water broke, but you still probably have hours before the baby arrives, and the sooner I get the other residents squared away, the sooner we can get you to the castle!”
Elise didn’t budge.
“Elise!” At her wits’ end, Marie half dragged Elise down the last few stairs and to the sofa near the window. “I’ll run upstairs and get some fresh clothes for you. Change into them and stay here. You hear me? Stay here until I come back.”
Elise’s eyes were filled with tears when she looked up. “Are they going to take my baby?” she asked, the words barely above a whisper. “Are they going to take my baby, Marie?”
“Fräulein!” came the Kommandant’s voice again.
“No,” Marie said h
astily. “They’re not.”
“But—”
“We’ll figure something out, Elise.” She grabbed the terrified young woman’s chin and forced her to make eye contact, hoping her gaze held little of the panic she felt. “We’ll figure something out,” she repeated.
This time, Elise nodded.
“I’ll be back with your clothes,” Marie said, backing toward the stairs. “Just take deep breaths, okay?”
While the remaining residents prepared for their departure, the military personnel gathered every document they could find and filled large boxes to the brim with the paperwork of the twelve months of the Lebensborn’s existence. There was no organization to their methods. They threw the documents into boxes pell-mell and carted them out to the front of the manor as quickly as they could. This was not the rigorously metronomed labor Marie had come to expect from the Germans, and their haphazard efforts to vacate the manor only accentuated her conviction that something was terribly wrong.
An hour later, the last of the expectant mothers had been helped into a limousine and sent off to the château. When Marie reentered, she found Elise still sitting on the sofa where she had left her, a look of abject despair mixed with surprised pain on her face.
“Elise, are you all right?” she asked, hurrying over to her friend’s side.
“I think I’m in labor,” Elise said, wide eyes begging Marie to contradict her statement.
“You probably are.”
“Fräulein!” Kommandant Koch barked from the library’s entrance. “You will finish emptying the library before tending to your friend.”
Marie bristled. Though she’d been a willing employee for over a year, the imminent liberation of her town gave her courage. “No, Kommandant Koch,” she answered calmly, standing to face him. “I will not empty the library. Not until I’ve taken my friend outside for some fresh air. She’s in the process of giving birth to the Führer’s child, and the least you can do is allow me to walk her out the door and find a place to sit.”
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