The Alice Network

  I peeled my gummy eyelids open with a groan. I’d gone to sleep on the broken-down old sofa in the sitting room, not daring to wander about the house looking for a bed when that crazy woman was on the loose with a Luger. I’d unhooked myself from my fluffy traveling suit, curled up under a threadbare knitted throw, and gone to sleep in my slip—and now it was apparently morning. A shaft of sunlight showed through a chink in the heavy curtains, and someone was staring at me from the door: a dark-haired man in a worn old jacket, resting his elbow up against the doorjamb.

  “Who are you?” I asked, still half stupefied from sleep.

  “I asked first.” His voice was deep, with a hint of a Scots burr to the vowels. “I’ve never known Gardiner to have visitors.”

  “She’s not up, is she?” I threw a frantic look behind him. “She threatened to shoot me if I was still here when she got up—”

  “Sounds like her,” the Scotsman commented.

  I wanted to start rummaging for my clothes, but I wasn’t standing up in my slip in front of a strange man. “I’ve got to get out of here—”

  And go where? Rose whispered, and the thought made my head pound. I didn’t know where to go from here; all I’d had was a scrap of paper with Eve’s name. What was left? My eyes burned.

  “Don’t bother scrambling,” the Scotsman said. “If Gardiner was right smashed last night, she likely won’t remember a thing.” He turned, shrugging out of his jacket. “I’ll make tea.”

  “Who are you?” I started to say, but the door swung shut. After a moment’s hesitation I tossed the blanket aside, my bare arms prickling in the cold. I looked at the mass of my crumpled traveling suit and wrinkled my nose. I had one more dress in my case, but it was just as fluffy and cinched and uncomfortable. So I slipped into an old sweater and a worn pair of dungarees my mother hated, and padded off in bare feet searching for the kitchen. I hadn’t eaten in twenty-four hours, and the roar of my stomach was fast overcoming everything else, even my fear of Eve’s pistol.

  The kitchen was surprisingly clean and bright. The teakettle had been put on, and the table laid. The Scotsman had tossed his worn jacket over a chair, and stood in equally worn shirtsleeves. “Who are you?” I asked, unable to help my own curiosity.

  “Finn Kilgore.” He took down a pan. “Gardiner’s man of all work. Help yourself to tea.”

  Curious, that he called her just “Gardiner” as though she were a man. “Man of all work?” I wondered, collecting a chipped mug from beside the sink. Aside from the kitchen it didn’t seem like much work was done around this house.

  He rummaged in the icebox and came out with eggs, bacon, mushrooms, half a loaf of bread. “Did you got a good gander at her hands?”

  “. . . yes.” The tea was strong and dark, just the way I liked it.

  “How much do you think she can do with hands like that?”

  I gave a little bark of a laugh. “From what I saw last night, she can cock a pistol and uncork the whiskey just fine.”

  “She manages those two things. For the rest, she hires me. I run her errands. I collect her post. I drive her when she goes out. I cook a wee bit. Though she won’t let me tidy up anything more than the kitchen.” He added rashers of bacon to the pan one by one. He was tall, rangy, moving with a casual loose-jointed grace. Perhaps twenty-nine or thirty, with a dark sheen of stubble in need of a razor, and rumpled dark hair that came to his collar and badly needed a barber. “What are you doing here, miss?”

  I hesitated. My mother would have said it was highly improper for a man of all work to be asking questions of a guest. But I wasn’t much of a guest, and he had more right to be in this kitchen than I did. “Charlie St. Clair,” I said, and as I sipped my tea I gave him an edited version of why I’d landed on Eve’s doorstep (and her couch). Without things like the screaming and the pistol pressed between my eyes. Not for the first time, I wondered just how my life had turned so thoroughly upside-down in barely twenty-four hours.

  Because you followed a ghost all the way from Southampton, Rose whispered. Because you are a little bit crazy.

  Not crazy, I shot back. I want to save you. That doesn’t make me crazy.

  You want to save everyone, Charlie my love. Me, James, every stray dog you ever saw in the street when we were little—

  James. I flinched, and the nasty inner voice of my conscience whispered, Didn’t do such a good job of saving him, did you?

  I cut that thought off before the inevitable surge of guilt hit, and waited for Eve’s man to ask questions because my story was, frankly, bizarre. But he stood silent over the pan, adding mushrooms and a can of beans. I’d never seen a man cook before; my father never so much as spread butter on toast. That was for my mother and me to do. But the Scotsman stood there stirring beans and crisping bacon perfectly deftly, not seeming to mind when the grease leaped out and sizzled on his forearms.

  “How long have you worked for Eve, Mr. Kilgore?”

  “Four months.” He started slicing the half loaf of bread.

  “And before that?”

  His knife hesitated. “Royal Artillery, 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment.”

  “And then to work for Eve; that’s a switch.” I wondered why he’d paused. Maybe he was ashamed, going from soldiering against Nazis to doing housework for a pistol-wielding madwoman. “How is she . . .”

  I trailed off, unsure where my question was going. How was she to work for? How did she get this way? “How did she injure her hands?” I asked finally.

  “She’s never told me.” He cracked eggs into the pan one by one. My stomach rumbled. “But I could take a guess.”

  “What would you guess?”

  “That she had every joint of every finger systematically smashed.”

  I shivered. “What kind of accident could do that?”

  Finn Kilgore looked me in the eye for the first time. He had dark eyes under straight black brows, both watchful and remote. “Who says it was an accident?”

  I wrapped my (whole, unbroken) fingers around my mug. The tea suddenly seemed cold.

  “English breakfast.” He lifted the hot pan off the stove, setting it next to the sliced bread. “I’ve got a leaky pipe to look at, but help yourself. Just leave plenty for Gardiner. She’ll come down with a foul headache, and a one-pan breakfast is the best hangover cure in the Isles. Eat it all, and she really will shoot you.”

  He sloped out without another glance. I took a plate and went to the sizzling pan, mouth watering. But as I stared into the delicious mess of eggs and bacon, beans and mushrooms, my stomach suddenly revolted. I clapped a hand over my mouth and turned away from the stove before I vomited all over the best hangover cure in the Isles.

  I knew what this was, even if I’d never experienced it before. I was still starving, but my stomach was rolling and heaving so hard I couldn’t have taken a bite if I’d had Eve’s Luger pointed at my head again. This was morning sickness. For the first time, my Little Problem had decided to make itself known.

  I felt sick, in more ways than a rolling stomach. My breath came short and my palms started to sweat. The Little Problem was three months along, but it had never seemed like more than a vague idea—I couldn’t feel it, couldn’t imagine it, couldn’t see any signs of it. It was just something that had barreled down the center of my life like a train. After my parents got involved it was simply a problem to be x’ed out like a bad equation. One Little Problem plus one trip to Swizerland equaled zero, zero, zero. Very simple.

  But now it felt like a lot more than a Little Problem, and not simple at all.

  “What am I going to do?” I said quietly. It was the first time I’d thought about that question in a long time. Not what was I going to do about Rose, or my parents, or going back to school—but what was I going to do about me?

  I don’t know how long I stood there before an acerbic voice broke my statue pose. “The American invasion is still here, I see.”

  I turned. Eve stood in the doorway in the same print hou
sedress she’d worn last night, her graying hair loose and wild, and her eyes bloodshot. I braced myself, but maybe Mr. Kilgore was right about her forgetting her threats of the previous night, because she seemed less interested in me than in massaging her own temples.

  “I’ve got the Four Horsemen of the apocalypse going hammer and tongs in my skull,” she said, “and my mouth tastes like a urinal in Chepstow. Tell me that goddamn Scotsman made b-breakfast.”

  I waved my hand, stomach still rolling sickly. “The one-pan miracle.”

  “Bless him.” Eve fished a fork out of a drawer and began eating straight out of the pan. “So, you’ve met Finn. He’s a dish, isn’t he? If I weren’t older than dirt and ugly as sin, I’d climb that like a French alp.”

  I pushed away from the stove. “I shouldn’t have come here. I’m sorry I forced my way in. I’ll just go—” What? Crawl back to my mother, face her fury, take the boat for my Appointment? What else was there? I felt the cotton-thick surge of numbness creeping back over me. I wanted to put my head on Rose’s shoulder and close my eyes; I wanted to curl over a toilet and vomit my insides out. I felt so sick, and so helpless.

  Eve mopped up a glob of egg yolk with a hunk of bread. “Sit d-down, Yank.”

  That raspy voice had authority, stammer or not. I sat.

  She swiped her fingers on a dish towel, reached into the pocket of her dress, and fished out a cigarette. She lit up with a long, slow drag. “First fag of the day,” she said, exhaling. “Always tastes the best. Almost makes up for the bloody hangover. What was your cousin’s n-n-name again?”

  “Rose.” My heart began to pound. “Rose Fournier. She—”

  “Tell me something,” Eve interrupted. “Girls like you have rich mummies and daddies. Why aren’t your parents beating the bushes for their little lost lamb of a niece?”

  “They tried. They made inquiries.” Even when I was angry with my parents, I knew they’d tried their best. “After two years of nothing, my father said Rose surely must be dead.”

  “Sounds like a smart man, your father.”

  He was. And as a lawyer specializing in international law, he’d known the channels and byways through which to conduct his overseas inquiries. He’d done what he could, but when no one had gotten so much as a telegram from Rose—even me, the one she loved best of our whole family—my father had drawn the logical conclusion: that she was dead. I’d been trying to get used to that idea, trying to convince myself. At least until six months ago.

  “My big brother came home from Tarawa with only half a leg, and six months ago he shot himself.” I heard my own voice crack. James and I had never been close when little; I’d just been the younger sister he could bully. But once he grew out of the hair-pulling stage, the teasing gentled; he joked about putting a scare into any boy who came to date me, and I teased him about his terrible haircut once he joined the marines. He was my brother; I loved him and my parents thought he hung the moon. And then he was dead, and right around that time Rose started to step out of my memory and into my field of vision. Every little girl running past turned into Rose at six or eight or eleven; every blonde sauntering ahead of me across a campus green became the older Rose, tall and just beginning to curve . . . A dozen times a day my heart knocked and then crashed as my memory played merciless tricks.

  “I know it’s probably hopeless.” I looked Eve in the eye, willing her to understand. “I know my cousin is probably . . . I know what the odds are. Believe me, I could calculate them out to the last decimal. But I have to try. I have to follow every trail to the end, no matter how small. If there’s even the faintest possibility she’s still out there—”

  I choked up again before I could finish it. I’d lost my brother to this war. If there was even the smallest chance of getting Rose back from oblivion, I had to pursue it.

  “Help me,” I repeated to Eve. “Please. If I don’t look for her, no one else will.”

  Eve exhaled slowly. “And she worked at a restaurant called Le Lethe—where?”

  “Limoges.”

  “Mmm. Owned by?”

  “A Monsieur René something. I made some more telephone calls, but no one could find a surname.”

  Her lips thinned. And for a few moments she just stared at nothing, those horrendous fingers curling and flexing, curling and flexing at her side. At last she looked at me, her eyes impenetrable as flat glass. “I might be able to help you after all.”

  Eve’s telephone call did not seem to be going well. I could only hear half of the conversation as she shouted into the receiver, pacing up and down the bare hall with her cigarette flicking back and forth like the tail of an enraged cat, but half the conversation was enough to get the gist. “I don’t care what it costs to put a call through to France, you desk-bound secretarial cow, just put me through.”

  “Who are you trying to reach?” I asked for the third time, but she ignored me like she had the first two, and kept on haranguing the operator.

  “Oh, stop ma’aming me before you choke on it and put the call through to the major . . .”

  I could still hear her through the panels of the front door as I slipped out of the house. The gray wetness of yesterday had disappeared; London had dressed up today in blue skies and scudding clouds and bright sunshine. I shaded my eyes against the sun, looking for the shape I thought I’d seen on the corner through last night’s taxi window—there. One of those bright red phone boxes so iconically English it looked faintly ridiculous. I aimed for it, stomach rolling again. I’d forced some dry toast down after Eve began her telephone call to this mysterious major, and that had calmed the queasy pangs of my Little Problem, but this was a different kind of sickness. I had a telephone call of my own to make, and I didn’t think it would be any easier than Eve’s.

  A wrangle with the operator, and then another wrangle with the desk clerk at the Dolphin Hotel in Southampton, giving my name. And then: “Charlotte? ’Allo, ’allo?”

  I pulled the receiver away from my ear and stared at it, suddenly irked. My mother never answered the telephone that way unless there was someone around to hear her. You’d think that with her knocked-up daughter doing an overnight bolt into London, she’d be worrying about something other than impressing the Dolphin’s desk clerk.

  The receiver was still squawking. I put it back to my ear. “Hello, Maman,” I said briskly. “I haven’t been kidnapped, and I’m clearly not dead. I’m in London, perfectly safe.”

  “Ma petite, have you gone mad? Disappearing like that, the fright you gave me!” A little sniff and then a murmured merci; clearly the desk clerk had offered her a handkerchief to dab her eyes. I doubted very much that her eye makeup ran. Catty of me, perhaps, but I couldn’t help it. “Tell me where you are in London, Charlotte. At once.”

  “No,” I said, and something expanded in my stomach besides the nausea. “I’m sorry, but no.”

  “Don’t be absurd. You have to come home.”

  “I will,” I said. “When I’ve found out once and for all what happened to Rose.”

  “Rose? What in—”

  “I’ll telephone again soon, I promise.” And I replaced the receiver.

  Finn Kilgore turned to look at me as I came back through Eve’s front door and then the kitchen. “Hand me a dish towel, miss?” He gestured with his chin, up to his elbows scrubbing the breakfast pan. That made me stare again. My father thought dirty coffee cups miraculously cleaned themselves.

  “She’s on another call,” Finn said, nodding toward the hall as he took the towel. “Tried to get through to some English officer in France, but he’s on holiday. Now she’s shouting down the telephone at a woman, I don’t ken who.”

  I hesitated. “Mr. Kilgore, you said you were Eve’s driver. Could you—could you possibly take me somewhere? I don’t know London well enough to walk, and I don’t have the fare for a cab.”

  I thought he’d object, considering he didn’t know me from Uncle Sam, but he shrugged, scrubbing his hands dry. “I’
ll pull the car up.”

  I looked down at my old dungarees and sweater. “I’ll need to change.”

  By the time I was ready, Finn was standing in the open doorway, tapping his boot as he stared out at the street. He looked back over one lean shoulder as he heard the clack of my heels, and not just one but both of those straight black brows rose. I didn’t mistake it for admiration. The ensemble was the only clean change of clothes I had in my traveling case, and it made me look like a china shepherdess: a fluffy white skirt over layers and layers of crinoline; pink hat with a half veil; spotless gloves; and a tight pink jacket that would have molded to every curve, if I’d had a single curve to mold to. I lifted my chin and flicked the silly veil down over my eyes. “It’s one of the international banks,” I said, and handed him an address. “Thank you.”

  “Lasses in that many petticoats don’t usually bother thanking the driver,” Finn advised, holding the door open so I could walk under his arm and outside. Even in heels, I cleared his elbow without needing to duck.

  Eve’s voice came from the end of the hall as I reached to close the door. “You bat-blind bloody French cow, don’t you dare hang up on me . . .”

  I hesitated, wanting to ask her why she was helping me. She’d been dead set against it last night. But I didn’t press for details yet, for all that I wanted to shake her bony shoulders till she coughed up what she knew. I didn’t dare anger her or put her off, because she knew something. Of that I was certain.

  So I left her to it and followed Finn outside. The car surprised me: a dark blue convertible with the top pulled up, old, but buffed shiny as a new dime. “Nice wheels. Eve’s?”

  “Mine.” The car didn’t match his disreputable stubble and patched elbows.

  “What is it, a Bentley?” My father had a Ford, but he liked English cars, and he was always pointing them out whenever we came to Europe.

  “A Lagonda LG6.” Finn opened the door for me. “Hop in, miss.”

  I smiled as he took his seat behind the wheel and reached for the gearshift half buried in my spreading skirts. It was rather nice to be among strangers who didn’t know my soiled recent history. I liked looking into someone’s eyes and seeing myself reflected as someone who deserved a respectful miss. All I’d seen when I looked into my parents’ eyes the past few weeks was whore—disappointment—failure.