Lost Among the Living

by Simone St. James

  “I told you,” he said finally, “that I turned down Colonel Mabry’s offers for most of the war. But in 1917, while I was at the Front, he contacted me about something he said affected me very closely. Something he thought I’d want to know.”

  “What was it?” I asked.

  “Military Intelligence had intercepted a set of plans that were on their way to the enemy. Specifically, it was a map of the Sussex coast near Wych Elm House, along with a detailed drawing of the base there. The Ministry of Fisheries installation had been repurposed for military use in 1915, for the repair and supplying of warships.” He glanced at me. “The drawings were skillfully rendered, I can say with authority, since I saw them myself.”

  “So the gunboats weren’t there by accident all those years ago,” I said.

  “As I said, I’m not told much. The place was taken up for the war effort, since it’s in a useful spot on our shipping routes. When Mabry intercepted the drawings on their way to the Germans, of course he knew what it was. The obvious conclusion was that someone either in or around Wych Elm House made the drawings for the enemy.”

  I was getting wet on one shoulder, so I looped my arm through his and leaned closer to him under the umbrella, frowning. “Why would the Germans want these drawings?”

  “To plan an attack on our ships. The inlet is perfectly wide and deep enough for U-boats to get in, if the Germans knew where to send them. The drawings were made from the vantage point I’d used as a boy.”

  I paused, digesting this in shock. “They were made on Forsyth property? You’re saying that the Germans could have used the drawings to attack the base? And someone from Wych Elm House supplied them?”

  “It certainly looked that way,” Alex replied. His hat was pulled down on his forehead, and he was staring ahead at the road, his long stride adjusted to my shorter one. The wool of his sleeve was warm through my glove. “It’s also possible the drawings were made by a visitor to the house, or someone passing through the area.”

  “The man in the woods,” I said immediately. “The stranger who died. You’re saying he was a—a spy?” Even as the word came out of my mouth, I could not believe I was walking in the calm, damp, peaceful English countryside, talking about spies.

  “I don’t know who that man was,” Alex admitted. “To this day, I have no idea. The drawings were intercepted long before that day. Intelligence had to send someone, and Colonel Mabry told me that if I did not go to Wych Elm House to investigate, he’d send another agent. I didn’t like the idea of some stranger bumbling through my family. So I accepted the assignment and came to my aunt’s house in Sussex for a visit.”

  I was quiet for a moment. “And because it was a secret assignment, you couldn’t tell me,” I said.

  “No,” Alex said softly. “I couldn’t.”

  I found myself blinking away tears. He seemed not to notice, but continued to speak. “Aunt Dottie was agreeable to a visit. I was here for a week. I walked the woods and confirmed the vantage point of the drawings. Martin was in France, but I made conversation with Aunt Dottie and Uncle Robert, getting an idea of who had been in the area lately. I watched and I learned. I took a walk through the gardens with Frances and questioned her the best I could, but she was in one of her confused moods and couldn’t help. On the second day, I came to the village and talked to some of the locals. When I came back to the house that afternoon, I found that Franny had killed herself, a stranger was dead in the woods, and everything was in chaos.”

  I bit my lip. If Alex had been in town when Franny died, it would be an easy story to verify. I couldn’t see how he could get away with a lie.

  “None of it made any sense,” Alex continued. “If the man in the woods was the spy, why was he still in Sussex weeks after the drawings were sent? Why would Franny choose that day of all days to commit suicide? And what kind of animal lives in the Sussex woods that would tear a man apart in daylight? They were pieces of a puzzle, but they didn’t seem like pieces of the same puzzle. And I didn’t have much time to put them together before I had to go back to the Front.”

  “The police didn’t pressure you to stay?”

  “I was an enlisted man in the middle of war. I had my orders, Franny was a suicide, and I’d been in town, four miles from the woods when the man was killed. No, I was not pressured to stay. I tried to ask my own questions, but it was hopeless—all I got were wild rumors and sinister stories, tales of Dottie covering up Frances’s crimes with the help of David Wilde.” Bitterness crept into his voice. “I left no wiser than I was the day I came. Whoever had tried to send the sketches to the Germans was still free. I had failed my country.”

  “You did not fail your country,” I said quietly. I realized something vital: Alex was good at everything because he was so very hard on himself. Striving for the highest thing, Martin had said of him, making the rest of us run to keep up with him. He had only shown me his carefree side. It had taken the war to make me see.

  He continued talking. “After I’d left and thought it through, I began to see the sequence of things,” he said. “Franny liked to sketch, you see, and it’s possible she might have made sketches of the base and the coast. I’d thought of that already, before I arrived. So on that first evening I asked one of the servants whether Franny was still fond of sketching and what kinds of things she drew. And the next day, Frances was dead. It’s a loose end that doesn’t tie up. I couldn’t tell Mabry about my suspicions—what was there to tell? That I thought a mad fifteen-year-old girl was somehow the traitor? Without evidence, I couldn’t pursue it. I had to let it go, at least until I was free to take it up again.”

  We had reached the end of the lane now, and we turned, heading back to High Street. I leaned on Alex’s arm, thinking, and said, “There is simply no way it was Frances who sent off the drawings, even if she was the one who drew them.”

  “No. But someone could have taken them from her sketchbook and sent them off.”

  I stopped on the street and looked at him, shocked. “Someone did.”

  “What do you mean?” Alex looked down at me. “Are you saying you found the sketchbook? I never found it—I ran out of time.”

  “I have it,” I said. “Frances gave it to me.”

  Alex’s tone carried a hint of warning. “Jo.”

  “She did,” I persisted. I was starting to feel excited as the pieces came together. “I found it under the covers of my bed. I’ve been staring at it and staring at it. I thought she wanted to show it to me because of—because of the sketches that were inside. But that wasn’t it at all. She wanted to show it to me because of the pages that had been torn out. That was what I was supposed to see.”

  “Jo, anyone could have put the book in your bed. A living human, I mean.”

  “I was sleeping in the bed at the time.”

  Alex’s gaze darkened. “That’s unsettling, and I don’t much like the sound of it. But it still could have been a living person.”

  “Are you denying what you experienced last night?” I asked, stung that he still disbelieved me. “What you heard?”

  “I don’t quite know what I heard last night,” he said, “and I’m not sure I have the courage to explore it.”

  He put his hand on my elbow, prompting me to walk again, but I stood still, which forced him to stay where he was, holding the umbrella over me. “Tell me one thing,” I said.

  He looked wary. “What is it?”

  “The fact that you failed to find the sketch artist,” I said. “That you felt you failed your country. That’s why you gave in to Colonel Mabry’s idea that you become a spy—why you became Hans Faber. Isn’t it?”

  The look he gave me, pained with deep exhaustion, was all the answer I needed.

  “Come,” he said, and touched my arm again. This time I let him lead me as we approached High Street.

  The rain had thinned, but still i
t came down in cold drops that dripped from the trees and pelted the umbrella. There were a few people about in Anningley, and Alex made a stir—shopkeepers idling on their front steps nodded to him, women doing their shopping craned their necks, curtains in upper windows twitched. Alex ignored all of it. Instead, he leaned close so no one could hear him and spoke to me.

  “I told you Mabry plays a dirty game,” he said. “I couldn’t fight anymore, anyway—I’d pressed my luck as a pilot for too long. I applied to be sent back to England as an instructor, since the RAF was short on men who had lived long enough to gain the experience to teach. I was perfectly qualified to do it, but my request was stonewalled. I didn’t have to spend much time wondering why.”

  I closed my eyes briefly. Alex could have come home, could have instructed other pilots from the safety of England? “Go on,” I managed.

  “It was a death march,” Alex said softly as the rain pattered the umbrella. “Most pilots lived for two months—I had managed to live for two years. I could come home in a box and leave you a widow, or I could become Hans Faber. Those were my choices.”

  “So you agreed.”

  “In the original plan,” Alex said, “Hans Faber was to be a well-to-do traveling businessman with a heart condition that kept him from fighting. He would travel the country, ostensibly in the business of supplying cameras and film to the German army for use in reconnaissance and surveillance. He would carry a full set of identity papers, an authentic set of documentation for his heart condition, and a camera kit that was his sales sample. A German citizen, going about his business while quietly taking photographs for England.”

  “The camera,” I said, “and its expensive case.”

  “Yes. But by the time I agreed to the assignment, things were more difficult inside Germany, and the plan had to change. You were right, Jo. When I left you that last time, I went to Reims again, for more advanced training in undercover work. They gave me Hans Faber’s papers, though this time I didn’t have the heart condition. I went back into Germany in 1918 as an enlisted man.”

  I felt like every set of eyes in Anningley was watching us, starting with the people we passed. I began to wonder how many of them could hear us. We were passing the lending library, and I pulled his arm. “Inside,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  There was no one else here but the librarian at her desk. Alex folded the umbrella closed. “At least it’s out of the rain,” he whispered. “Do you actually want a book?”

  “This way,” I said, whispering myself. I led him to the back, to my favorite set of shelves—containing mostly lowbrow novels and melodramas—and pretended to browse.

  “Do you read these?” Alex asked curiously, looking over my shoulder.

  “None of your business,” I replied. “Keep talking.”

  He glanced at the librarian, who was napping soundly in her chair, and continued, pretending to look at books over my shoulder. “When we finally did the operation,” he said, “it went off without a hitch. I flew over enemy lines and parachuted from the plane with my papers and my German uniform in my pack. As the plane crashed, I landed and quickly changed sides. I walked out of the woods as Faber and hailed the first man I saw in flawless German, telling him I’d seen a plane go down while on the way to join my regiment. No one questioned me for a second.”

  I shuddered. “Alex, that was bloody dangerous,” I said. “You could have been killed.”

  He was silent for a moment, behind my shoulder, and then he placed a fingertip behind my ear, drawing it along the edge of my hairline. “I’ve made you use terrible language,” he said.

  Flustered, I grabbed a book called Molly of the Plains from the shelf. It seemed to be about a young girl kidnapped by Indians. “Hans Faber wasn’t in a real regiment,” I said. “How did you do it?”

  “There is chaos on the ground in war,” Alex said in my ear. “There are giant masses of men being moved this way and that. My cover was as a messenger, so I was always on the move. I pretended I always had to be on my way to one place or another, urgently. With enough plausible details, I made it work. And when I had the chance, I radioed information back to England about who was moving where, using which supply lines and which routes.”

  I couldn’t imagine it, living like that from day to day. “Was it better than being in the RAF?” I asked. “Or worse?”

  He was quiet so long that I didn’t think he’d answer. Then he said, “It was both better and worse, I suppose. Worse, because I had to keep the story straight and sleep rough most of the time—I barely slept for months. Because I knew you were home thinking I was missing in action. Better, because instead of being blown into bloody pieces, I had a shadow of a chance to come home.”

  I bowed my head and stared blindly at the book in my hands. “It worked too well, didn’t it?” I said. “That’s why you didn’t come home.”

  Ever so gently, he put his palm on the back of my neck, touching my hair almost with reverence. “Yes,” he admitted. “After the war, they wouldn’t let me go. Hans Faber became a traveling businessman again. He traveled Germany, Austria, Serbia, Belgium. They needed information to pass to the diplomats at the Treaty of Versailles. They needed to know what was happening to the Kaiser in Berlin. They needed to know what was happening in Italy. They always needed something, one thing after another. It was important work, they said. Work that influenced the lives of thousands of people, instead of the life of one man who wanted to go home to his wife.”

  I could have kissed him then. I had done it a million times, as easily as breathing. I could have turned and pressed my lips to his, felt everything he was thinking, understood everything in his soul. Right there in the Anningley library, with the librarian asleep in her chair. But when I turned around and looked up at him, his expression was marked with pain.

  “I thought it would be easier, coming back,” he said. “But I can see now that I was naive. I have to find the traitor—I cannot stop until I find him. And I have to find Franny’s killer.”

  Yes, of course. He hadn’t come home for me, not completely. I folded my book under my arm and turned away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  We left the lending library and Alex unfolded the umbrella again. “I knew Franny all of her life,” he said. “Aside from your mother, Jo, she was the most tormented person I’ve ever met. Her grasp on reality was tenuous, and she saw hallucinations. But there was a sort of vitality about her—it’s hard to explain. She was very intelligent, very alive, and sometimes very determined. She was not suicidal.”

  “That’s why you believe it was murder?” I asked.

  “That, and the timing of it.” He shook his head. “Something was not right about that day. I knew it from the minute I came home to find her dead.” He glanced at me. “If I believed in such things, I would say that it doesn’t surprise me that she haunts the house.”

  “She wears a dark gray dress and a string of pearls,” I said. “Her hair is tied back and held with pins.”

  He was silent, and I knew that I’d just described what Frances had been wearing the day she died.

  “I’m not hallucinating, Alex,” I said. “I found photographs in her room—one of them was of me. The one of me as an artist’s model. It was in my trunk when I arrived, but I found it folded with two others, with a message on the back. One of the other pictures showed Wych Elm House, and there is a shadow in the window—”

  “Enough.” He sighed quietly, still unwilling to believe. “We agree that Frances was murdered at least,” he said. “Let us agree on our list of suspects.”

  “Very well,” I said. “It must begin with the people in the house that day. So the list starts with Dottie.”

  “Add the servants, though I’m not sure what the motive would be.”

  Something about those words triggered a thought in the back of my mind, a memory like an itch, but I could not recall it. “Th
e man in the woods,” I added.

  “He wasn’t in the house,” Alex reminded me.

  “We don’t know that. It isn’t impossible, especially if he had an accomplice in either the family or the servants. Was Robert home that day?”

  “Yes,” Alex replied. “He wasn’t in the house when it happened, but he arrived home soon after. He’d been at a neighbor’s.”

  “Did he take the motorcar?”

  “No, he walked. He was visiting the Astleys, half a mile away.”

  “Does he usually walk to the Astleys’?” Robert had taken the motorcar every time he’d visited friends since we’d been home.

  “I have no idea what Robert usually does.”

  “Did anyone ask the Astleys about it?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did,” Alex said. “I thought it rather convenient that he came walking up the back lane from the trees barely twenty minutes after his daughter died. So I visited the Astleys myself. Robert was there. You’re not the only one with a basely suspicious line of thinking.”

  I ignored that. “Did the Astleys recall exactly what time he left?”

  “No, not exactly.”

  “So he could have done it, left the house, and come back twenty minutes later as if innocent.”

  “Yes. I don’t like to think it, but without a firm timeline, it’s possible.”

  “And you?” I asked. “Where were you exactly when it happened?”

  “In the motorcar, on my way home from this very village,” Alex replied. “I arrived only minutes after it happened. One of the maids saw her fall, and was screaming.” He glanced away, his jaw hard. “It was me who took charge of the body.”