“Papa and Monsieur Canale were partners at pétanque, playing their games in the park, nothing more,” she said, trying to hide her panic.

“You had best hope no new information about your father comes to light,” Didier said coldly. He caught her chin in his hand, his fingers biting into her. “If you don’t conceive a child soon, you’ll be as useless to me as your father. As useless as my first wife was, and look how she ended up.”

Lisette did not allow herself to flinch. “Are you threatening me?”

“Do I need to?”

In the silent cave of Toselli’s darkroom, Lisette lifted a strand of film from its chemical bath. These were the pictures she had taken of Didier’s induction into the Milice. Studying the grinning, smartly uniformed men posing in the garden of Sauveterre, she finally understood. She was hopelessly and inexorably tied to Palomar. He had absolute power over her.

She maintained her sanity by keeping a secret photo diary, taking pictures and making prints, captioning them and keeping them in wooden tobacco boxes carefully labeled with the date. She trimmed the prints with sewing scissors and carefully penned the captions with a pen dipped in turquoise ink. Her solitary marches through the vineyards and meadows, along the beaches and rivers, became a kind of solace.

Jean-Luc was gone. She did not know where. He was probably dead, but she didn’t want to think about that. Louis Picoche had gone underground. She heard he was a key figure in the Maquis de Var—a band of guerrilla warriors dedicated to winning the liberation of France by any means necessary.

It gave her a certain satisfaction to organize the prints. She savored the sense of order and control, false though it was, and it gave her something to do during her many sleepless nights. She carefully dated her latest print—17 May 1944—and placed it in a box. The pictures were a record of her days, good and bad. If she were blessed with a child, it would be a way to show him or her what the world was like during these frightening times. She refused to consider the idea that the child could turn out anything like Didier.

When she received a secret directive a few days later, she instantly incinerated the coded note and went about her business. The request was for a series of photographs of the coastline from the perspective of the church steeple.

Something was about to happen. That was all she knew.

“Where are you off to?” Didier demanded as she secured her market basket to her bicycle.

“Confession,” she said.

“What for? You stopped going to church.”

“Because everyone hates us for being collaborators. But I still need to be shriven, now more than ever.” She spoke in a low voice so only he could hear. His reaction was one of silent, stone-faced rage. She knew he wouldn’t hit her in view of the soldiers.

From the church tower, the landscape looked deceptively peaceful. She took the requested photographs and wound the roll of exposed film, leaving it in the designated spot. She was in no hurry to get home and took the long way to Sauveterre, past a beautiful forest that bordered the river. The light was too low for a good picture.

When she heard the sound of a plane overhead, she scarcely looked up. The sound was common these days—the Germans patrolling the region, the Allies looking to bomb key targets such as bridges and munitions warehouses. Something caught her eye, a scrap of fabric on the ground, half covered by dead leaves and underbrush. She picked it up, discovering a canvas packet with trailing, shredded strings. Her heart pounded as she recognized the stenciled words in English—first aid. Inside was a small carton labeled U.S. Army Carlisle Model. There were bandages and a syrette inside marked morphine.

Leaving the bicycle leaning against a tree, she did a slow turn around the area. A few other items littered the area—more scraps of canvas, a buckle, a metal pin of some sort. The underbrush had been trampled in places. She stood still, listening. The cold wind whistled through the trees and stirred the dry leaves and grasses. She noticed a dark smear on the trunk of a tree—blood?

Goose bumps prickled over her arms. Her breath came in quick, nervous puffs. She made out a vague trail that wound deeper into the woods and led toward a stream. Following this, she came to a sunken spot near the water, concealed by broken branches and leaves.

More blood. Now she was shaking all over. She moved a dead branch aside—and froze.

A man lay in the hollow. He was covered in dust and wore the uniform of a paratrooper, a battered helmet on his head. He was shivering so hard she could hear his teeth chatter. He held a sidearm steady on one drawn-up knee, pointed straight at her. “Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t make a sound. Don’t make me shoot you.”

Part 3

Bethany Bay

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

—Alfred Stieglitz

Eleven

“I’m confused about something,” Camille said to her father.

“Welcome to reality,” he said, puttering in the kitchen. Their regular Friday-night dinner would be a special one tonight. It was the end of the school year, and they were making Julie’s favorite—rustic pizza baked on the outdoor grill. The dough was resting on a tray, ready to spin into homemade crust, expertly blistered and crisped under her father’s watchful eye.

Camille had brought her tablet with the images and research she’d been collecting about Bellerive and Sauveterre.

“Do you recognize this?” She showed him the colorized portrait Finn had sent her. “It’s from the town archives, and apparently it’s a picture of Didier Palomar.”

Her father dusted the flour from his hands and put on his reading glasses. He flinched visibly as he focused on the picture. “I’ve never seen that photograph.”

“It’s the reason I’m confused. If the colorizing is accurate, then he was blond and blue-eyed.”

“He might well have been. His sister, Rotrude, was also fair and had pale eyes, as I recall.”

“Your mother, Lisette, was fair, too. I mean, that’s how it looks in the self-portrait she made.” Camille studied her father’s face, then looked at Didier again. “If he and his wife were both blond, how did you end up with curly black hair and brown eyes?”

He frowned. “I know nothing of my grandparents on either side. Perhaps the darker coloring is from them.”

“Well, I don’t know much about genetics, but I do know brown eyes are a dominant trait. Two blue-eyed people can’t make a baby with brown eyes, can they?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning . . . Suppose Didier was not your father?”

“Ah, but he was. That is the reason I inherited Sauveterre. I was his only heir.”

“Could it be possible that your biological father was someone else?”

“Certainly. It all happened before my time, chérie. With foreign soldiers overrunning the village, taking whatever they wanted, women got pregnant and had their babies.”

“Don’t you want to be sure?”

A distant yearning softened his gaze. “If I found out for sure . . . mon dieu, it would change everything. But how would one determine that?”

“We could do a DNA test. It’s a simple procedure these days. I mean, it’s probably an unlikely possibility, but if there was something from Didier—a lock of hair, maybe?”

“He is seventy-three years gone, and after he was executed, he was buried in an unmarked grave.”

“But . . . just suppose there was something . . . a personal item, maybe a hairbrush or an article of clothing . . .”

He shook his head. “It sounds quite impossible. How would we find a thing like that? And how would we know the material came from Didier? We could go to Sauveterre and find something,” he suggested, sending her a sly look.

That again. He was still determined to make the trip to France.

“Let’s call Madame Olivier and ask her to look in the storeroom where she found the trunk,” Camille suggested.

“It is the middle of the night there.”

She heard the rattle of Julie’s bike outside and went to greet her. “Hey there,” she said brightly. “Did you pass? Are you a tenth grader now—oh my God.” She opened the door wider and Julie walked in. “What happened? Did you fall off your bike?”