Home by Nightfall (2 page)

He had made a little home for himself here with Véronique and the pitiful Raineau farm. Although they were not married, they lived as man and wife. How could he marry a woman when he had no last name? Still, the arrangement worked for both of them. He didn’t know if he was in love with her but he was grateful to her for taking him in and saving his life.

“They will come back?”

“Yes, I think so.” She considered him for a moment. She must have heard the apprehension in his voice. “Your mind is better now, though. Better than when I found you.” Twiddling her big soup spoon, she sighed. “Maybe…maybe now the time is right.”

He looked at her, waiting for her to explain.

Putting down the spoon, she went to a small leather-bound chest that stood at the end of the bed. In there, he knew, she’d managed to keep a few prized family possessions and papers—her mother’s rosary, letters from her brothers before they were killed, a lock of someone’s hair. She lifted the lid, pulled out something, and carried it to the table. Then she sat in her chair and pushed it toward him, a little hinged picture frame. It might have been silver—it was hard to tell now because the metal was black with tarnish and dirt.

“Before I burned your uniform, I searched your pockets to see if I could learn who you are. It is true that I found nothing to identify you. But I did find this.”

With some hesitation, he reached for the frame and opened it. A photograph of a beautiful woman with dark, curly hair lay
within. There was no inscription, no indication of who she might be. Her features were so fine she looked as if a sculptor had coaxed her from a block of cool, white marble and brought her to life. But her eyes held warmth and tenderness.

“Do you know her?” Véronique asked.

If he was carrying her photograph, it was obvious that he should know her. But he didn’t. “No.” He dragged his gaze back to Véronique’s sturdy, sun-browned features. “Why didn’t you show this to me sooner?”

A shadow of guilt fluttered across her face. “I—I suppose I was afraid.”

He raised his brows.

She folded her work-roughened hands on the table in front of her. “I thought you might see her and…” She looked away, unable to finish the sentence. But subtlety was not one of her talents, and Christophe thought he knew what she’d feared.

“You worried that I’d remember her and want to leave.”

“I did.”

“She could be a sister or a cousin,” he offered.

She gave him a knowing look and shook her head. “This woman is so young and beautiful.”

“I have nowhere to go, Véronique. I don’t know anything that happened to me before I woke up here.”

“Still, she must be someone very dear to you that you carried her photograph into battle and saved it from being destroyed by bombs and rain.”

Bombs and rain. Sometimes when the subject of his military service came up, his vision narrowed and darkened, as if he were looking down a long, black tunnel.

L’étrangeté.

The Strangeness.

It happened now.

Véronique, the ramshackle room—everything in his immediate surroundings blurred and became indistinct, until his consciousness faded away completely.

• • •

“Christophe—”

He looked up at the woman calling him and recognized Véronique on the floor beside him. At first her form was hazy and thick, as if he needed eyeglasses. Then both she and the room sharpened, and he found himself sitting on the stone floor in a long rectangle of afternoon sun. His right hand made a fist, as if he were gripping something that wasn’t there. Anguish marked her handsome face.

“I passed out?” he asked in English.

But she only looked worried and puzzled. “
Comment? Je comprends pas.
”

He groped for the French words. “Did I faint?”

“No, it was as always—The Strangeness. Oh, God, your eyes were open, but you could not see or hear me. You made peculiar gestures and cried out.”

“What did I say?”

“The same thing every time this happens.
Wheep! Wheep!
”

Weep.
He still had no idea what that meant. “How long?”

“I don’t know. A few minutes.”

He looked at his fist, opening and closing, opening and closing. It was an odd, useless action he caught himself performing even at times when he was aware and alert.

He didn’t remember any of what had happened just now. But when these fits—and he could think of them no other way—over-took
him and he regained consciousness, he was overwhelmed by fatigue and had to lie down. Not only that, this time he had landed on his injured leg, and now it throbbed with pain.

“Come along, I’ll help you to the bed.”

Using his overturned chair and Véronique’s support to stand, he managed to limp to the bed they shared on the opposite side of the small room.

“Do you want a glass of brandy?” she asked, pulling the sheet over him.

But he was asleep before he could answer.

• • •

Late the next afternoon, Christophe sat on a weathered bench outside with his back resting against the warm wall of the house. His crutch leaned on a ragged trellis that was covered with some kind of flowering vine. The climbing plant provided a bit of shade, and the sun fell on him with a gentle, dappled hand.

A few reddish-brown chickens pecked at the ground in the yard, their low-voiced clucking a comfortable, homey sound.

He had recovered from yesterday’s fit, as much as a man in his condition could recover. Falling on his leg hadn’t done it any good, though, and made working in the field impossible today. He liked to stay busy—it kept his mind occupied. When it wasn’t occupied, all he could do was think, and now he had something new to ponder.

The photograph.

From time to time, he took the woman’s photograph out of his shirt pocket to look at it, wondering who she might be. Whenever he held the picture, if Véronique was nearby he’d feel her eyes on him.

During the night she had made love to him with a desperate urgency that surprised him. It had been nothing like the comfortable, companionable intimacy between them that he’d grown accustomed to. She had murmured, “
Je t’aime
,” but she’d said it right after her climax, and though his memory was nearly useless, he knew that people tended to make all sorts of declarations at such moments. She’d never told him she loved him before, so he wasn’t inclined to put much stock in it.

Now he rested here, his foot propped on a box, the photograph in his hand, and he watched Véronique through half-closed eyes as she hung the wash. Stringing the clothesline for her had been one of the first jobs he’d done here when he was well enough to get around. He’d run the line from the side of the house to a post he’d managed to set, and except for his clumsiness, he’d dug the posthole as if it were something he’d done all his life. Some other life.

He looked at the photograph again. Who was she? How did she know him, this alabaster beauty captured by the photographer’s skill? More importantly, who was she to
him
?

Honeybees buzzed among the flowers on the vine, and the smell of supper cooking floated to him from the open door. Véronique’s hips swayed with the motion of her work as she bent to pick up the clean, wet laundry from her basket and drape it on the line. Her russet hair, braided today, swung from side to side in a soothing rhythm. Peace did not come easily to Christophe, but this was a peaceful moment.

Except for his right hand flexing on his thigh.

He made a conscious effort to relax his hand and then let his eyes close. As soon as he did, he heard the sound of a car trundling down the pale road that led to the house. He looked up and saw a dusty vehicle with a red cross painted on its side, the same one that had been here yesterday. Behind the windshield sat two
people, a man and a woman, maybe the same ones Véronique had talked with. He glanced at Véronique, who’d stopped her work to watch the car, and he was gripped again by a sense of foreboding.

The vehicle, a rattling, noisy machine disrupting the countryside quiet, pulled up to the house not more than thirty feet from him, scattering the chickens. The man and woman got out. They both lifted a hand in greeting.

“
Bonjour, encore
,” the man said to Véronique.

“
Oui, bonjour
.” The woman repeated the greeting. They were both dressed in well-made work clothes, the quality of which Christophe was not used to seeing around here.

The man approached him. “You are the one called Christophe?” he asked in French. His accent marked him as a foreigner, just as Christophe’s own probably did. This one sounded like he was from the Midwest.

“I am.”

“You are an American,” he said, this time in English. He was a homely man but had a kind face that reminded Christophe of a reliable old dog.

Still, he eyed the old dog with suspicion. “
Oui, pourquoi?
”

“I’m John Bennett and this is Miss Poppy Weidler,” he said, indicating his companion. Miss Weidler smiled at him and came a step or two closer. “We’re with the American Red Cross, and since we’re working in this area, we’ve been asked to be on the lookout for an American soldier whose family is trying to find him. He vanished during the last days of the war and no one is sure what happened to him, not even the army. The family is very anxious about him.”

Christophe shaded his eyes with one hand and replied in English too. “There are probably a lot of soldiers missing. Are you searching for all of them?”

Bennett looked a little uncomfortable. “No, but this man’s father has, well, connections in Washington, DC, so it was easier to get word of him to us.”

“Maybe he’s dead.”

“Of course, that’s an unfortunate possibility,” Miss Weidler agreed. “But we heard about you from some of the local farmers and thought we might check as long as we were out this way.”

Véronique had stopped her work and now listened intently to this conversation, although Christophe wasn’t sure if she could understand it. She’d been so stubborn about refusing to learn English; he didn’t know how much she’d picked up from him. But he sensed her anxiety as she stood there, a wet pillowcase clutched in her hands.

Bennett said, “Ma’m’selle Raineau, here, said your name is Christophe. Is that your given name?”

“You might say that. She gave it to me.”

“But what
is
your name, then?”

“I don’t know. I have no memory of it. I arrived here in that.” He pointed at the remains of the ambulance sitting off the road. “I had a slash in my temple and a bad leg wound. I don’t remember anything.”

“So your family doesn’t know where you are,” Bennett affirmed.

Christophe shifted on the bench. “I don’t know that I have a family.”

Miss Weidler came closer now and gestured at the photograph in his hand. “Who is that? She’s lovely.”

Christophe had forgotten that he’d been holding it when they drove up. He snapped the frame shut, beginning to resent their questions and their intrusion. Why had they come to upset the
fragile equilibrium he’d worked so hard to grasp and hold on to here?

“May I look at it?” Miss Weidler asked.

“No.”

“I’m sorry, I know it seems rude.”

He tightened his grip on the tarnished frame. “Not just
seems
.”

Miss Weidler persisted. “I don’t mean to be nosy, really I don’t. But sometimes photographers put an imprint on their work, their name, a town,” she replied, extending her hand.

“There is nothing printed on it.”

“Please.”

If he humored her, maybe they’d both go and leave him in peace. With a deep sigh and some reluctance, he handed her the photograph.

She took it and studied the picture. “Hmm, no inscription that I can see.” He expected her to give it back. Instead, with prying fingers she removed the fragile, water-stained image from its holder.

Christophe lurched to his feet, his injured leg giving a tremendous throb. “Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

Véronique rushed forward, now wringing the pillowcase as if she wished it were Poppy Weidler’s neck. “
Vache stupide!
”

Bennett glared at Véronique but Miss Weidler ignored the insult and said to Christophe, “It might help you—and us.” She turned the picture over and from her expression, a person would have thought she’d discovered the key to the Rosetta Stone. “Ah, here we go.” Bennett crowded in. She peered at the writing, her thin, pale brows raised. “‘To my beloved—’”

Christophe snatched the photograph away from her and read the rest of the fine, elaborate script written in brown ink. Then he turned it over to study the face again. Oh, God… 

“
Tsk
, too bad. It isn’t the name of the man we’re looking for. But is this
your
name?” Miss Weidler asked, pointing at the dedication.

He looked up at the efficient, self-satisfied Red Cross workers, then shifted his gaze to chalk-pale Véronique. His throat turned as dry as sand and he swallowed hard. “I don’t know.”

Susannah Braddock Grenfell poured a big pitcher of hot water into a galvanized tub that sat on the bench on her back porch and laid out two towels with a piece of soap.