by Sarah Sundin
“Jean-Auguste? Oh, it is bad. Henri is dead.”
Jean-Auguste? Why would she call Jean-Auguste? Tess’s heart hiccupped. She squatted below the level of the counter in case the baker peeked out, and she held the door open a crack.
“No, no. Yvette—she survived. Oui, oui. I know. She is leaving town today.”
Tess strained to hear through the silence.
“I do not like that. You know I do not. Oh dear. I know, but she will not come. She does not want to be seen.”
Tess’s thoughts tumbled, and she squeezed her eyes shut against the dizziness. Madame Robillard? Jean-Auguste? What was going on?
“All right. Yes, I see. I’ll do that. Au revoir.”
Oh no! Tess had to leave, and she eased the door open, careful not to set the bells to jingling.
But the phone dial clicked again, and Tess stopped.
“Oh, Yvette! Quintessa told me about Henri. You poor thing. But you cannot leave town without saying good-bye.”
Tess braced her free hand on the wooden floor. She’d told Madame exactly why Yvette couldn’t come.
“I cannot leave the bakery. Solange is home sick, and it is so busy. So many customers. You understand.”
Tess understood one thing—Madame Robillard was a barefaced liar.
“Oui, I understand. But maybe . . . could you wear a disguise? Please? You are like my own daughter.” She sobbed. “You cannot . . . you cannot . . .”
Not just a liar, but a manipulator.
“Oh, merci. Merci, ma petite. You have made an old woman happy. Please come soon.”
Her heart thudding, Tess backed out the open door. Then she eased the door shut and stood. A mother with two young children stared at her.
She must have looked very strange indeed. Tess gave them a shaky smile and strode down the street, scanning for the nearest pay phone.
Madame Robillard was lying, and Yvette was falling into a trap.
Tess had to warn Yvette and call the FBI.
She couldn’t wait another minute.
42
South of Greenland
“I got him! He was straight up and down.” Ensign Stewart Doty ran his hand through his blond hair, enthusiasm shining on his too-young face.
Dan nodded, but he and the other officers had to pry under the enthusiasm for the facts. And the facts didn’t confirm a sinking yet. Doty had flown through a curtain of the U-boat’s antiaircraft fire to drop four depth bombs from sixty feet. Three missed, but one exploded under the sub and tipped her on her side. Leaking oil, she tilted up with her bow in the air. But then she regained control and dove.
The destroyer USS Osmond Ingram and two more Avengers were searching the area, but no reports had come in.
Dan asked questions until his form was complete. At least the U-boat had been damaged, which might keep her out of the battle.
After Doty’s crew departed, Dan tidied his report and Lt. Cdr. William Drane briefed two Avenger crews, preparing them to launch when needed.
Dan tucked his forms in his portfolio—impressive in its thickness, but not in success. If only he could bring home one confirmed sinking to catch Commander Lewis’s eye and validate his work in ASWU.
The phone buzzed, and a sailor answered. “Mr. Drane, it’s the CIC. Mr. Stearns attacked a sub, bearing three-four-zero, distance twenty-five.”
Dan darted to the chart on the wall. That position was close to where Doty had attacked.
“Very well. Inform conn and CIC that two TBFs are preparing to launch.” Mr. Drane showed the crews the new position on the chart.
The six men pulled on the rest of their flight gear and jogged to the ladder that went down to the hangar deck.
“I’m heading to the bridge,” Mr. Drane said in his Virginia accent.
Dan grabbed his portfolio. “I’ll go with you.”
“Have you had lunch yet, Mr. Avery?”
Dan motioned with his thumb to the table of sandwiches and coffee in the back of the ready room. “Sandwich.”
“And breakfast?”
“Doughnut.”
“Have you been on duty since we sounded flight quarters?”
“Yes, sir.” At 0350, bright and early.
“Take a break.”
“But sir, we’re in the middle—”
“I took a break this morning. My pilots take breaks. One hour. That’s an order.”
The lieutenant commander wasn’t Dan’s CO, but he did outrank him. And Stearns wouldn’t land for at least an hour. “Aye aye, sir.”
Dan checked his watch so he wouldn’t stay off-duty one minute longer than ordered, then he descended the long ladder to the hangar deck.
What was he supposed to do for an hour? A hot meal and a fresh cup of coffee sounded good but wouldn’t occupy him for fifty-eight more minutes.
The hangar deck bustled with activity. Aviation machinists repaired damage, performed maintenance, and fueled aircraft. Sailors pushed two TBFs to the forward elevator by the catapult.
Everyone had something important to do but Dan.
Reports and more reports.
His gut simmered, and he stepped into the hatch, scrambled down to the main deck, and strode to the wardroom.
Conversation drifted into the passageway. “I hope we ditch that bureaucrat in Argentia.”
Dan stopped outside the door. Bureaucrat? There weren’t any bureaucrats on board.
“No kidding,” said another man. “I’m sick of his reports. He wants even more information than Drane does. Waste of our time.”
They were talking about Dan, and his jaw clenched.
“Come on, be fair,” a third officer said. “He’s doing his duty. All that data will help the Navy work out better tactics.”
“Fine,” the first pilot said. “You help him fill out his stupid forms and keep him out of my way so I can fly.”
Dan’s stomach hardened around the flimsy sandwich. He turned on his heel, marched to his cabin, and slammed the door.
A bureaucrat with forms. That’s all he was now. If Randolph had his way, that’s all he’d ever be.
Enough. Dan slammed his portfolio on his desk and stood there, his fists opening and closing. He was meant to be at sea, created to command. And he was going to make it happen.
He sat at his desk, yanked open the drawer, and pulled out his letter to Commander Lewis.
An excellent letter, thorough and strong. He started with a diplomatic touch, stating that although he and Randolph had a bad history, Dan granted him mercy by allowing him to be judged on the present not the past. However, since Randolph insisted on enacting revenge, Dan insisted on revealing the truth.
Then he listed Randolph’s offenses on the Texas, which could be confirmed in Randolph’s personnel records. Dan detailed the man’s mistreatment of the sailors and how he silenced his junior officers by burying them with busywork.
On the next page, Dan listed all the snake’s offenses at ASWU, stating that Mr. Bentley and the other personnel would back him up.
Dan closed the letter with a bang. At best, Randolph was guilty of deliberate dereliction of duty, forcing his men not to perform their duties—work necessary for the war effort—all to satisfy his desire for revenge. At worst, he was a saboteur, a traitor, impeding the work of the United States Navy in time of war. Dan respectfully requested that Commander Lewis have Randolph court-martialed.
The letter was more than excellent. It was perfect. Dan would deliver it to Commander Lewis in person, and he couldn’t wait.
A sense of rightness burned inside, dark around the edges.
Dan opened the stationery box to return the letter. His notes from the train from Londonderry to Belfast sat on top, listing kind words Admiral Howard had spoken.
How he missed that man. Heaviness settled in his chest, and he picked up the sheet of paper.
A jolt of color bruised his eyes. A sailboat picture lay underneath, the one he’d drawn in his last period of forced rest. “Danny at
play,” lounging on a yacht, Tess’s whimsy polluting the simplicity of his sketch.
“Fine!” he said to the laughing blonde in his head. “You want me to draw? I’ll draw.”
He grabbed a blank sheet of paper and took his pen to it, slashing out a sailboat, all points and sharp edges, and he scribbled over the hull and made it as black as his life would be if he didn’t present that letter.
“A desk job in Washington?” His pen ripped a hole. Not only would Dan hate that kind of work, but he’d be bad at it. He endured the paperwork at ASWU because he saw the connection to combat.
But in supply or personnel? He’d be as useless as his father.
The pen stilled. That wasn’t true. Tess had helped him see. Sure, Dad was lousy at bookkeeping, but he was a first-rate craftsman, creating beautiful designs and bringing them to life with his hands and tools.
Now Dad had dedicated his workshop to the war. He didn’t want to build landing craft. He wanted to build sailboats. It was what he was created to do. But he built landing craft anyway.
George Avery was a good man, doing good work with integrity.
Integrity? Horror thudded in Dan’s gut. He snatched up his list of Admiral Howard’s compliments. “Daniel Avery is known for his integrity. Even as an ensign, he exhibits a noble sort of compassion, bearing grievances with a stoicism befitting the greatest admiral.”
Bearing grievances? When had that stopped?
When the grievances threatened his greatest goal.
Dan’s breath came shallow. Admiral Howard had written those words in a letter of recommendation in 1935, after the first incident with Randolph.
“A noble sort of compassion?” Dan’s words grated on his throat, and he sifted through the desk drawer to find his Bible. Where was that passage? The one he’d forced himself to read every week in the Academy at his mother’s urging. She and Dan were so alike, and she knew Dan needed more than talent and brains and fortitude. He needed balance.
Colossians 3:12–13. When was the last time he’d read it? “Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering; Forbearing one another, and forgiving one another, if any man have a quarrel against any: even as Christ forgave you, so also do ye.”
Dan rested his forehead on his fists and screwed his eyes shut. Every word in his letter to Commander Lewis was true. But where was the humility? Longsuffering? Forgiveness? Where was that noble compassion he’d cultivated and Admiral Howard had praised?
More importantly, where was the image of the merciful Savior he claimed to love?
His fingernails dug into his palms. “Lord, help me get back on course. Not my career, but my character.”
A new sense of rightness filled him, tinged with light and sadness. His father built landing craft with integrity. Dan would rather be a desk jockey with integrity than an admiral with vengeance in his heart.
If he handed that letter to Commander Lewis, he’d be no better than Randolph.
Dan picked it up, gritted his teeth, and shredded his last hope of command into bits.
Boston
Tess hurried to the pay phone on the corner, flung open her purse, and inserted a nickel.
Dead silence.
“No, no, no.” She clicked the switch in the phone cradle, but no dial tone. Broken.
She stepped out of the phone booth and gazed around. There! At the end of the next block.
Tess crossed the street, dodged a taxi, and strode down the sidewalk.
Madame Robillard was involved in Henri’s murder. Sweet, motherly Celeste Robillard. No matter how hard Tess tried to deny it, she couldn’t. The baker had put the story together too quickly, as if she already knew the details—the red beret, the cyanide, even the fact that Tess’s bad news concerned Yvette.
Raindrops struck her nose, and she pulled up the collar of her raincoat.
Madame Robillard had lied to Yvette about the bakery being busy. Why? To entice Yvette to the bakery. It was a trap.
And Jean-Auguste was behind it. Why would Madame Robillard call him first when she heard about Henri’s death? Why not Solange as Yvette and Henri’s old friend? Why not Professor Arnaud as the leader of the group?
Jean-Auguste was the murderer, and somehow he’d drawn the baker into his plot. Was he the spy too? The bomber?
But he was out of town the day of the bombing, and Madame Robillard was inside the bakery.
Pierre had accused Jean-Auguste of disguising himself as a woman. He did have the right build. Could he have been the pastry delivery girl? The bomber? If so, how had he fooled the FBI with his alibi?
A middle-aged man occupied the next phone booth. When he saw Tess, he turned his back to her.
She groaned. She didn’t have time to wait. Yvette’s life was at stake.
Tess shielded her eyes from the rain and located another phone booth.
Dan thought Jean-Auguste was the spy. Tess’s chest caved in. He was right. He was right about so many things.
If Jean-Auguste was a spy, he’d want to extract information. He’d done that. He’d had contacts in France arrested by the Gestapo.
A spy would want to crush groups that supported the French Resistance. Jean-Auguste had eviscerated the group in Boston with the bomb and his collaborationist rhetoric.
Tess’s steps slowed and her mouth hung open. The bomber had tried to frame Yvette and Henri. For months, Madame Robillard and Jean-Auguste raised suspicions about Yvette and Henri.
They were the targets from the start.
“Lord, protect her.” Tess picked up the pace toward the phone booth.
What if Henri and Yvette had been training with the OSS? Wouldn’t a Nazi spy want to eliminate them before they landed on French soil?
Henri and Yvette had been planning to leave Boston in June. Had they finished training? Were they preparing to head overseas? If so, Jean-Auguste had run out of time.
So had Henri.
Tess shoved open the phone booth door, poked a nickel into the slot, praised the Lord for a dial tone, and dialed the apartment.
It rang. And rang. And rang.
“I’m too late.” Tess would have to intercept Yvette before she reached the bakery.
She put in another nickel and dialed Agent Sheffield’s office. Thank goodness he was there.
Tess told him everything as quickly as possible—Henri’s death, Yvette’s plan to leave town, Madame Robillard’s call to Jean-Auguste, and their plot to lure Yvette to the bakery.
Jean-Auguste had intended to kill both Henri and Yvette. Except Yvette had survived. He wouldn’t let her survive this time.
After she spilled the story in one long sentence, Agent Sheffield put her on hold for an hour-long minute. When he returned, he asked more questions, listening with maddening calmness. He kept slowing her down to ask for unimportant details or to make Tess repeat what she’d already made plain. Couldn’t he see this was an emergency and they couldn’t waste a precious second?
And he wouldn’t confirm or deny any of Tess’s theories. None. He revealed absolutely nothing, and Tess wanted to scream in frustration.
“All right, Miss Beaumont. Thank you for calling. The FBI will take care of everything. You need to go home, stay out of the way, and let us do our job.”
“You’ll stop Yvette?”
The pause. That was not a comforting pause. “We have everything under control. Now please leave the area and go home.”
“I—I will. Thank you.” Tess hung up. He hadn’t promised to stop Yvette. What if the FBI didn’t arrive in time? Tess would indeed go home, but not until she’d warned her friend.
She jogged down the street, rain stinging her cheeks and tears prickling her eyes. How could she have suspected her friend of being a spy? Of betraying both her native country and her adopted one? Why had she let Madame Robillard fill her ears with words as poisonous as those pastries?
Tess had failed Yvette this past year, but
she wouldn’t fail her now.
She rounded the corner. The bakery was in sight a block and a half away. A man stood by the door, his head bent over a newspaper. Why would he read outside on a day like this, even with an awning overhead?
Tess broke into a run. A blonde woman approached the bakery from the other direction. She paused by the door and tilted her head at the “closed” sign. Was that Yvette? Wearing the disguise she’d worn to the Cocoanut Grove?
“Yvette!” Tess’s voice was drowned by the shush of taxi tires on the rain-soaked street. “Yvette! Stop!”
The man with the newspaper rapped his fist on the window behind him. The bakery door flew open, and Madame Robillard hugged the blonde woman, drawing her into her venomous web.
“Yvette! Stop! It’s a trap!” Tess stepped off the curb to cross the street.
A horn blared, and a bus barreled toward Tess.
She screeched and jumped back onto the curb.
When the bus finally passed, Tess glimpsed the man lowering his newspaper and ducking into the bakery.
Jean-Auguste.
Tess was too late.
43
South of Greenland
“We came out of the clouds at the coordinates at 1200 feet, and there she was, five miles away.” Lt. Robert Stearns rubbed his mustache. “We immediately attacked.”
“She put up a lot of flak,” his gunner said, “but that didn’t stop us.”
Dan made his notes. This was the same sub Doty had attacked earlier. U-boats always dove under aerial attack. Had Admiral Dönitz changed tactics to encourage shooting back?
Stearns described his attack—four depth bombs dropped from 125 feet, which exploded close to the sub. Then the U-boat submerged. Due to damage? Or to evade Stearns’s guns?
Dan studied his diagram. The U-boat was farther north now, farther from the convoy, indicating she’d been damaged. At least this sub wouldn’t attack the merchantmen.
Captain Short had attended the debriefing, and afterward he talked to Mr. Drane and the air officer, Commander Monroe.
When Dan completed his report, he clasped his hands behind his head to stretch his shoulders.
They didn’t ache. He’d lost his dream, surrendered his goal, resigned himself to his fate, and a curious sad peace filled his mind.