Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Seven

“I can do it,” Otto said.

“Did I hear you say something about a truck?” Emmy asked. It sounded as if her teeth were chattering. Genevieve didn’t think it was entirely due to the cold wind that swirled around them all. Shocked by Berthe’s death, frightened at the instability of the cable car, they were all struggling to stay strong, but the mood was grim and a pall hung over them all.

Max nodded. “I knew we’d have to get off where we’re going to be getting off, so the truck’s parked fairly close. We get to the truck, drive to the field where a plane is supposed to be waiting. If it’s there, everybody’s off to merry old England but me. I’m for France.” He gave Otto a crooked smile. “Looks like you just bought yourself a ticket out of the war.”

“I can’t go to England,” Lillian said. Her voice was breathy and weak, but there was no missing the determination in it. Like the rest of them, she was sitting on the floor of the cable car. Emmy was close by her side. “I have to go back to France. To Rocheford. I have to be there when the invasion comes. I have a mission.”

“Maman, you can’t,” Emmy said. “That’s over now.”

Lillian shook her head. “There’s no one else. I’m the only one who knows the way through the marsh. I have to do it.”

“I know the way through the marsh,” Genevieve said. “I can do whatever it is. Tell me.”

Lillian looked at her. Their eyes met, and the memory of the many hours they’d spent together exploring the marsh, observing its creatures, harvesting its plants, learning its secrets, passed between them. Always, the marsh had been their shared bond, and it was still.

“You can,” Lillian agreed, sounding as if the realization lifted a great weight from her shoulders. While the cable car slid through the night, creaking and groaning and rocking in the wind as it carried them over the seemingly bottomless crevasses that Genevieve refused to think about, Lillian told her, quickly but precisely, what she needed to do when the time came.

“She’s not an agent,” Max objected. “She’s not trained.”

“She’s trained in what she needs to know,” Lillian replied. “She’s trained in the marsh. She grew up in it.”

“Maman’s right. She can do it,” Emmy said. “Genny always was a little swamp rat.”

“I’m doing it,” Genevieve told him, while narrowing her eyes at her sister.

The fact that Max didn’t raise any more objections told her just how important this mission was.

Carefully Max stood up, grabbed the edge of the car to steady himself as the thing rocked, and looked below. “Just a few more minutes,” he warned the rest of them. Equally careful, Otto hauled himself up beside him.

The uneasy feeling Genevieve had been experiencing ever since she’d heard she was getting ready to be dropped into nothingness intensified. Telling herself those four meters were no distance at all didn’t help. Neither did the thought that she was probably safer out of the cable car than in it. Her pulse quickened, her stomach tightened and she sought a distraction. A glance at her mother, a flash of memory, and she had it.

“Maman, what did you mean when you said Wagner wasn’t the first evil bastard you’ve killed?” She kept her voice low so the conversation couldn’t be heard beyond the three of them. “You haven’t been going around murdering people, have you?”

“Only for my daughters,” Lillian replied, instantly riveting both daughters’ attention.

“Maman—” Emmy sounded both appalled and fascinated.

Lillian made an impatient gesture. “Alain—how do you think he died? It was the skullcaps. That night at dinner, in his beef bourguignonne.”

Genevieve was struck dumb. She was shocked to the core, stunned, but the second she thought about it, it made perfect sense. She knew what skullcaps could do.

“You poisoned him?” Emmy gasped.

“He was violently abusive toward you. He killed Phillippe, leaving Genevra, heartbroken, to bear a child alone. When your papa came home, when he found out either of those things, he would have killed the bastard himself, then probably would have had to stand trial and maybe even be hanged for it. Alain had already damaged our family badly. I wasn’t going to let him destroy us completely. So I did what I had to do.” Lillian’s voice was completely matter-of-fact.

Both girls gaped at her.

Then Emmy huffed a breath. “Maman. Well done.”

“All right, it’s almost time.” Max turned to them, and the topic had to be abandoned. “Everybody on their feet. Hold on to the side and be careful how you move. Genevieve, since you’re the only one who’s uninjured, I’m going to drop you first, so you can help the others.”

Genevieve’s stomach clenched, but she nodded and stood up.

“There it is,” Max said. Standing beside him now, gripping the edge against the swaying of the car, Genevieve saw the snowy hill looming in the darkness. Beyond it, Stuttgart was in sight, its church steeples and tall buildings distant dark shapes in the moonlight. A quick glance back told her that Eber Schloss still burned ferociously. Glimpses of barely visible moving lights racing up and down the mountain made her think that multiple vehicles were coming and going on that narrow access road.

“It’s time.” As he’d told her he meant to do, Max gripped her around the waist and lifted her up so that she perched on the lip of the car. It rocked dangerously. Heart leaping, she grabbed onto his forearms for dear life. The night fell away below.

Terror leaped into full-blown life inside her, cramping her stomach, freezing her blood, paralyzing her.

“I’ve got you,” Max said. While she clung to him, he shifted his grip so that his hands circled her wrists. She didn’t dare look back, or down. Instead she kept her gaze fixed on him. He was all that kept her from falling—and soon she would fall. At the thought, she started to shake. He must have seen the panic in her face, felt the tremor in her hands, because, in full view of the others, he leaned close to press a quick, hard kiss on her lips. Too terrified to close her eyes, she looked into his instead. Vivi, Pierre, now Berthe—all the memories, her horror of falling, the knowledge that she couldn’t, could not, do this, was laid bare for him to read.

“Trust me, angel,” he said, and she realized that she did, absolutely. Then, a command: “Swing your legs over.”

It was just about the hardest thing she’d ever done in her life. But she did it, and for a horrifying moment, with the cable car rocking like a cradle, suspended over nothing until the hill appeared beneath them, she waited.

She slid off the lip when he told her to and hung terrified from his hands. Then he let go and she fell.

She hurtled downward, hit and found herself tumbling unhurt through deep snow.

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