Into the Darkest Day: An emotional and totally gripping WW2 historical novel

by Kate Hewitt

  “Not that I know of. But, as I said in the email, he died when I was a very young child. I don’t remember him at all. Maybe my father…” She stopped, not wanting to give him more hope than was warranted. She doubted very much that her father wanted to stroll down memory lane with Simon Elliot.

  “Don’t be sorry.” Simon glanced out at the rolling lawns that led to the main road, everything lush and green this time of year, before the heat of the summer dried the grass out and turned it brown. “It’s so beautiful here, and I’ve always loved the States. I spent a year here after university, in Pennsylvania. I absolutely loved it.”

  “What were you doing?”

  “It was a teaching program for new graduates. I taught history to a bunch of students in inner-city Philadelphia.”

  “Goodness. That sounds challenging.”

  “Yes, but wonderful too.” He cocked his head. “What about you? Have you traveled?”

  “Not at all.” She tried to lighten her response with a smile. “I’ve been to a few places in America, but basically I’ve stayed here my whole life, helping on the farm.”

  “You must like it, then.”

  “Yes, I do.” She spoke firmly—maybe too firmly. Abby turned her head to gaze out towards the barns, their red-painted sides weathered and peeling under the bright summer sun. She squinted, trying to make out the familiar, slightly stooped figure of her father coming across the yard, but she didn’t see him. “Should I get my dad?” she asked. “You’ll want to meet him, and I suppose the medal belongs to him, really. He was my grandfather’s only child.”

  “Yes, I suppose it does. But I don’t want to trouble him—”

  “It’s no trouble. I’m sure he wants to meet you.” Abby hoped she sounded more convincing than she felt. “And see the medal, of course,” she added.

  “All right.” Simon’s gaze scanned her face, seeming to look for clues. Was he wondering why she wasn’t more interested, more engaged?

  Abby smiled back at him, trying to convey a level of interest she wasn’t sure she felt, and she knew her father didn’t.

  Sometimes the past was better buried.

  SIMON

  Simon watched Abby walk across the yard, towards the barn. The dog had raised her head as Abby had gone down the steps, and then dropped it down again with a tired sigh. A nuthatch trilled from its branch in the giant willow in front of the house that must have given the orchard its name. Simon recognized it as the orchard’s emblem on its website.

  He sat back in the rocking chair, taking a sip of lemonade as he tried to figure out what felt just a bit off about the whole situation. Abby Reese didn’t seem particularly interested in the Purple Heart, and Simon suspected her father was even less. He hadn’t been expecting unbridled enthusiasm, not like he felt, perhaps, but something.

  Instead, despite the bright beauty of the day, he felt a tangible sense of sorrow hanging over the whole house like an invisible mist, and emanating from Abby herself. He saw it in her dark eyes, her uncertain smile, the careful way she spoke. And he wondered.

  Of course everyone had sorrows in their life, as well as regrets. He had his fair share of both, and they could cripple him if he let them. But the Purple Heart medal was seventy-five years old. All the people involved were dead, Tom Reese for nearly thirty years. Why would his family not want to know?

  Or maybe he was presuming, taking a natural reticence and making it into something bigger. Maybe David Reese would come striding onto the porch, shake his hand, and exclaim over the medal resting in its little box in his pocket.

  Simon patted his trouser leg to make sure it was still there, and then he slid his phone and checked the screen for messages, although he knew better than to expect any. He saw that his message to Maggie, sent from Chicago with a picture of the Sears Tower from his hotel window, had been read, but not responded to. Par for the course, and sadly he didn’t blame her.

  A noise in the distance had him looking up, and as he slid his phone back into his pocket, he saw Abby coming back across the yard, followed by a tall, rangy man with a full head of gray hair and a craggy, weathered face. He wasn’t smiling.

  Simon stood up as they approached; he felt weirdly nervous. David Reese had to be six three at least, a loose-limbed man with a sense of restrained power in the way his arms swung at his sides, his long strides. He didn’t look angry, but he didn’t look friendly, either.

  Abby gave them both a fleeting smile. “Dad, this is Simon Elliot. Simon, this is my father David Reese.”

  David gave a nod as way of hello, and Simon smiled back.

  “Pleased to meet you, sir.” He had no idea where the “sir” came from, only that with a man like David Reese it felt right, and David didn’t question it.

  “Shall I get you some lemonade, Dad?” Abby asked. Her voice had an over-bright quality that Simon didn’t understand.

  “All right.”

  As Abby went into the house, David lowered himself into a rocking chair, giving the dog’s head a gentle pat before resting his large, callused hands on his thighs. He gave Simon a level look. “I’m sorry you came all this way, son. I’m not sure what I can tell you about these things.” His voice was a low rumble, and he seemed a man sparing with words. Simon tried to resist the urge to overcompensate, to crack jokes and keep things light and breezy, as was his usual nervous habit. He sensed in this case it would be a futile effort.

  “I realize that, but perhaps I can tell you some things,” he said with what he hoped was an easy smile. “If you’re interested.”

  “Not sure what the point is, bringing all this up now. Won’t make much difference to anything, and, as far as I’m concerned, the past is the past. Gone.”

  “True… but wouldn’t you like to know why my grandmother had your father’s Purple Heart?”

  David shrugged. “You don’t know, do you?”

  “No, but I’d like to find out.”

  David made no reply, and Simon felt as if he’d said the wrong thing.

  “At least, you must want it back,” he added with a little laugh.

  “If it’s here and you have it, I suppose, but I don’t see the point in anything else.” David shifted in his chair, and Simon thought he was going to say something else, but then he didn’t. The silence felt clumsy, and he struggled to know how to fill it.

  This was all decidedly odd. David Reese’s reticence was far more ingrained than he’d expected; it almost felt hostile, although maybe that was just the man himself. His attitude made Simon more curious, even as he felt a desire to hand over the medal and hightail it out of Willow Tree Orchards as soon as he could. Then Abby came back onto the porch.

  “Here you go, Dad.” She gave him the glass of lemonade and then took her own, leaning against the porch railing as they both waited for Simon to speak.

  Simon met her gaze before hers flitted away. She was, he couldn’t help but notice, very pretty, in a quiet sort of way. Thick, dark hair caught back in a ponytail, lovely dark eyes. A sense of contained stillness about her. Was it sorrow? Or maybe just shyness? She didn’t seem nervous, though. Just reserved.

  “So, why don’t I tell you what I know?” he said when the silence had stretched to several seconds, and threatened to become something seriously awkward. He tried to summon something of the cheerful tone he’d had with Abby earlier, but it was starting to feel forced.

  Unsurprisingly, David didn’t respond, but Abby raised her eyebrows expectantly, giving him a little smile. Lovely smile, too.

  Simon pushed the thought away as he began. “My grandmother Sophie Mather lived in London during the war. I think that’s where she must have met your father, Tom Reese.” He directed this towards David, but then glanced at Abby, who nodded encouragingly. “I don’t know the nature of their relationship, of course, but it seemed… close. My grandmother certainly spoke fondly of him before she died. She seemed to have seen quite a bit of him.”

  “My father never mentioned her to me.” D
avid moved his implacable gaze from the distance to Simon. “Not one word.” The reticence must have run in the family.

  “My grandmother never said anything to me either, or my mother, until she was diagnosed with terminal cancer last year,” he agreed. Not that his grandmother had had many opportunities to share such details; her relationship with her daughter, and her daughter’s family, had been complicated and often fraught. “These things… they’re difficult to speak about, aren’t they? The war, I mean, and all that happened then. My grandmother hardly ever mentioned it.”

  “There’s a reason for that.” David’s tone was flat.

  “What did she say about Grandad?” Abby asked. Simon could tell she was trying to pitch her tone somewhere between cheerful and cautious, and it wavered between the two.

  Her father shot her a quelling look that brought a faint flush to her cheeks. Abby had to be thirty years old, at least. What was she doing, living at home, under her father’s thumb? Or was he imagining the unhealthy dynamic, reading too much into a single look?

  Simon directed his reply to David. “Not all that much, to be honest. Just that he was an American soldier stationed near London before D-Day, and they’d become… friends. She said they’d parted badly and he’d given her his medal as a keepsake. She felt it was time to give it back.” He paused. “She also said she should have given it back a long time ago, and she hoped that he could forgive her.” Another pause as he let that information sink in. “She gave me the address of your place. She said she’d lost touch with your father right after the war, but she told me she looked him up on the internet. She was surprisingly savvy, that way.” If Simon had been hoping for a small smile at that, he didn’t get one. He felt ridiculous, as if he were in a play, pretending this was a fun, friendly conversation when it was anything but. David wasn’t overtly hostile, not exactly, but close enough. “She wanted him—or his descendants—to have the medal back.” He looked between Abby and David, trying to gage Abby’s mood. Was she interested in the medal, despite her father’s determined lack of interest? “Do you… do you want to see it?”

  David rose from the rocking chair with a creak of both joints and rockers. “I don’t need to see it.”

  “Dad,” Abby protested quietly. “What’s the harm—”

  “I already knew he was wounded.”

  Abby’s eyes widened. “You never told me that—”

  “There was never any reason to. He didn’t like talking about it, and it wasn’t too serious, anyway.” He turned to Simon. “I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m not interested in digging up the past, finding out what my father had to do with your grandmother. He was happily married to my mother for forty years. He made his life here. No good will ever come of poking around in the past, digging up things people don’t want to talk about.” He nodded towards Simon as he thrust his barely touched glass of lemonade onto the porch railing. “I appreciate your interest and concern, and I thank you for your time, going out of your way to bring back this medal, but this is the end of it,” he stated, and then, giving the dog one last pat, he stepped off the porch and started walking back towards the barn.

  ABBY

  Wow. That had gone even worse than Abby could have possibly expected, which was saying something. She felt herself flush as the ensuing silence stretched and stretched between them. Simon looked bemused, staring after her father’s retreating back. Bailey lifted her head, looking between them, and then pressed her head against Abby’s knee, as she so often did when she sensed tension.

  “I’m sorry,” Abby said at last as she fondled Bailey’s ears, her gaze lowered. “I know what it sounded like, but he really doesn’t mean to be rude.”

  Simon turned to her, eyebrows raised, a wry smile quirking his mouth. “Are you sure about that?”

  “It’s just… he doesn’t like talking about the past.” Which was rather obvious.

  Simon nodded and sighed. “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I don’t mean to cause trouble.” He smiled ruefully. “But I have, haven’t I? For whatever reason, your father does not want this medal back, or for anyone to talk about Tom Reese.”

  “It doesn’t have to be such a mystery,” Abby felt compelled to say, although she wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was a mystery. “It’s just… my father doesn’t like anything to change.”

  “But this wouldn’t change things, would it? If anything happened, it was almost eighty years ago. Surely it couldn’t matter now.”

  “I know.” She gazed at her father’s retreating back as he headed into the barn, noting his heavy tread, his stooped shoulders, before dropping into the seat he’d just left. “It might change his opinion of his father, I suppose, if he got up to something…” She trailed off, unsure what she was implying, especially of Simon’s grandmother. The truth was, she had no idea why her father was so reluctant to receive the medal, or know about Simon’s grandmother. Was it just his natural reticence to talk about the past, or something deeper?

  “Got up to something?” Simon repeated, sounding skeptical. “It’s true he might have had a wartime romance, years before he was married. That hardly seems scandalous.” Simon sounded gently incredulous, and Abby shrugged again, spreading her hands in a gesture of helpless apology.

  “Honestly, I don’t know.”

  “Do you want to see it?”

  She blinked, a little startled. “The medal?”

  “It belongs to your family. I need to give it back, whether you want it or not. It was my grandmother’s wish.”

  “All right.” Bailey flopped on the floor again as Abby held out her hand and Simon reached into his pocket. Abby’s breath caught as he gently, and almost reverently, opened a little box and then deposited the little heart with its faded purple ribbon into her palm.

  “The Purple Heart,” he stated, his tone solemn. “Awarded to men wounded in combat. That’s George Washington on the front.”

  “Yes…”

  “Oldest medal in American history,” Simon continued. “Awarded to members of the military who were wounded or killed in combat, and nowadays also anyone wounded or killed in a terrorist attack.”

  Abby turned the battered little heart over, to read the inscription on the other side. For Military Merit Thomas Reese. The heart felt strangely heavy resting in the palm of her hand, laden with significance. “It couldn’t… it couldn’t be some other Tom Reese, could it?” she asked suddenly. “I know my dad said my grandfather was wounded, but maybe he still has his medal somewhere, and this is a different one. It’s a common name.”

  “And yet my grandmother had this address? There’s a photo of your grandparents on the website. She sounded very certain, when I spoke to her.”

  “Do you think she really saw our website?”

  “I’m sure of it. Granny was quite internet-savvy, right up until the end. Wouldn’t go anywhere without her iPad. I used to play Candy Crush with her.”

  Abby smiled faintly. “She sounds like a character.”

  “She was. I wish I knew her better. My mother had a… tumultuous… relationship with her. They were both emotional people.” He grimaced slightly. “So we didn’t see her—or that side of the family—very often. And my mother died before my grandmother, about ten years ago.” He stopped suddenly, as if he’d said enough. Too much, maybe.

  Abby searched his face and saw a certain blankness come into his eyes before he looked away.

  “Families can be tricky,” she said, which was a gross understatement, really.

  “Yes.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss.” The words could have been rote, but Abby meant them genuinely. Losing family was hard, a grief that went on and on, without end. She knew that all too well.

  “Thank you.” Simon nodded his acknowledgment before leaning forward to peer at the medal still resting in the palm of her hand. “Aren’t you at least a little intrigued?” he asked, lowering his voice conspiratorially, although her father was far away, back in the barn. “About what mi
ght have happened between your grandfather and my grandmother, during the war? Some tragic romance? Or maybe something completely different and surprising? Wouldn’t it be… fun… to find out?”

  She looked up, meeting his friendly, open gaze, the blankness gone, replaced by a glint of interest that made some sort of strange feeling shoot through her, a little bolt of electricity that felt entirely unexpected. Unfamiliar, even—or at least forgotten. It flashed through her, jolting her awake, and she had the urge to shake her head, as if to clear it.

  “What do you think happened?” she asked. “You said you spoke to your grandmother about it?”

  “Yes, before she died a few months ago.” He sighed as he relaxed back into his chair and Abby did the same, the medal still in her hand. “She didn’t say much more than I’ve already told you, but there was a certain tone to her voice… I could tell she’d held him in affection, that she felt some sort of regret about what had—or hadn’t—happened between them. She said she hoped he could forgive her, after all. So they must have had some sort of relationship, and she must have felt she’d done something wrong.”

  “It sounds as if she didn’t know he had died.”

  “I don’t know whether she did or not. I would have assumed so, considering how long ago it happened, but who can say? Maybe she felt returning the medal to his family would atone for something.”

  “Maybe.” Abby’s fingers closed around the medal, the small ridges digging into her fingers. “It’s all very strange, isn’t it? I’m sorry we can’t give you more information.”

  “That’s all right.” Simon smiled wryly. “Perhaps something will come to mind? I’m staying in the area for a few weeks, if you think of anything.”

  “You are?” Abby looked at him in surprise. Although he’d said he was staying in America for a few weeks, she hadn’t thought the whole time would be in Wisconsin.

  “Yes, I’ve rented a little cabin on Lake Geneva, about twenty minutes from here. I’m a history teacher, and I’ve got six weeks of summer break.” His smile was wide and easy as he scanned her face, trying to gage her reaction. “I couldn’t think of a better place to spend it while I work on my book.”