“You might,” I said desperately. “You might—if you’ll just talk to me.”

“That’s your plan, little Yank?” Her hooded storm-gray eyes surveyed me like a contemptuous bird of prey. “Burst into my house at nightfall, no plan, and I’m betting no money, on the chance I’d know something about your m-missing friend?”

“Yes.” Faced with her gun and her scorn I couldn’t explain why, why the chance to find Rose had turned suddenly all-consuming in my wrecked life. I couldn’t explain this strange savage desperation, or why I had let it drive me here. I could only state the truth: “I had to come.”

“Well.” Eve Gardiner lowered her pistol. “I suppose you’ll want t-tea.”

“Yes, tea would be—”

“I don’t have any.” She turned and made her way back down the dark hall, walking long-strided and careless. Her bare feet looked like an eagle’s claws. She weaved a little as she walked, the Luger swinging freely at her side, and I saw she still had a finger through the trigger. Crazy, I thought. The old cow is crazy.

And her hands—they were monstrous knobbed lumps, every knuckle misshapen and grotesque. They looked more like lobster claws than hands.

“Keep up,” she said without turning, and I scurried after her. She struck a door open and flicked on a light, and I saw a cold sitting room—a mess of a place, grate unlit, drapes drawn so no chink of light could come in off the street, old newspapers and dirty tea mugs lying everywhere.

“Mrs. Gardiner—”

“Miss.” She flung herself down in a shabby armchair overlooking the whole messy room, tossing her pistol down on the table beside it. I winced, but the thing didn’t go off. “And you can call me Eve. You’ve f-forced your way into my house, so that’s a level of intimacy I’m already disliking you for. What’s a name?”

“I didn’t mean to force my way—”

“Yes, you did. You want something, and you want it badly. What is it?”

I struggled out of my wet raincoat and sat down on a hassock, suddenly uncertain where to start. I’d been so focused on getting here, I hadn’t thought how exactly I should begin. Two girls times eleven summers, divided by one ocean and one war . . .

“G-get on with it.” Eve seemed to have a faint stutter, but I couldn’t tell if it was drink or some other impediment. She reached for a crystal decanter sitting beside the pistol, unstoppering it with some clumsy maneuvering of her mangled fingers, and I smelled whiskey. “I’ve got limited hours of sobriety left, so I suggest you don’t waste them.”

I sighed. Not just a crazy old bat, but a drunk old bat. With a name like Evelyn Gardiner, I’d been picturing someone with privet hedges and a rolled bun, not a decanter of whiskey and a loaded pistol. “Would you mind if I smoked?”

She tilted her bony shoulder in a shrug, and as I hauled out my Gauloises, she hunted for a glass. Nothing in arm’s length, so she sloshed a measure of amber liquid into a flowered teacup. God, I thought as I lit my cigarette, half fascinated and half appalled. Who are you?

“It’s rude to stare,” she said, staring back at me just as frankly. “Christ, all that ruffly stuff you’ve got on—is that what women are wearing these days?”

“Don’t you ever get out?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Not much.”

“It’s the New Look. Modeled after the latest from Paris.”

“It looks b-bloody uncomfortable.”

“It is.” I took a grim drag on my cigarette. “All right. I’m Charlie St. Clair, well, Charlotte, just arrived from New York—” My mother, what would she be thinking right now? She’d be furious and frantic and ready to scalp me. But I thrust that aside. “My father’s American, but my mother’s French. Before the war we spent summers in France, with my French cousins. They lived in Paris, and had a summer house outside Rouen.”

“Your childhood sounds like a Degas picnic.” Eve took a slug of her whiskey. “Make this m-more interesting, or I’m going to drink a lot faster.”

It was like a Degas painting. I could close my eyes and those summers blurred into one long hazy season: the narrow twisting streets, the old copies of Le Figaro lying about the big rambling summer house with its stuffed attics and worn sofas, the haze of greenery with the sun filtering through and lighting up all the dust motes.

“My cousin Rose Fournier—” I felt tears prick my eyes. “She’s my first cousin, but she’s like my older sister. She’s two years ahead of me, but she never shut me out. We shared everything, told each other everything.”

Two little girls in grass-stained summer dresses, playing tag and climbing trees and waging furious battle against our combined brothers. Then two older girls, Rose with the beginning of a bosom and me still scrape kneed and gangly, both of us warbling along with jazz records and sharing a giggly crush on Errol Flynn. Rose the daring one with one outlandish scheme after another, me the devoted shadow she shielded like a lioness when her schemes got us into trouble. Her voice came at me, so suddenly it was like she was standing in the room: “Charlie, hide in my room and I’ll stitch your dress up before your mother sees that rip. I shouldn’t have taken you climbing over those rocks—”

“Please don’t cry,” Eve Gardiner said. “I cannot stand crying women.”

“I can’t either.” I hadn’t cried a drop in weeks, I’d been too numb, but now my eyes burned. I blinked fiercely. “The last time I saw Rose was the summer of ’39. Everyone was worried about Germany—well, except us. Rose was thirteen and I was eleven; we just wanted to sneak out to the movies every afternoon, and that seemed a lot more important than anything happening in Germany. Poland got invaded right after I went back to the States. My parents wanted Rose’s family to come to America, but they kept dithering—” Rose’s mother, convinced she was too delicate to travel. “Before they could make the arrangements, France fell.”

Eve took another sip of whiskey, her hooded eyes unblinking. I took another steadying drag on my cigarette.

“I got letters,” I said. “Rose’s father was important, an industrialist—he had connections, so the family could get word out now and then. Rose sounded cheerful. Kept talking about when we’d see each other again. But we had the news, everybody knew what was happening there: swastikas flying over Paris, people getting carted off in trucks and never seen again. I’d write her begging to know if she was really all right, and she always said she was, but . . .” In the spring of ’43, we’d traded photographs since it had been so long since we’d seen each other—Rose had been seventeen and so pretty, striking a pin-up pose and grinning at the camera. I had the photograph in my pocketbook now, worn and soft at the edges.

“Rose’s last letter talked about a boy she’d been seeing on the sly. She said there had been much excitement.” I took a shaky breath. “That was early in ’43. I heard nothing from Rose after that, nothing from any of her family.”