Read Chapter 14: The Scarred Man's Shadow

The barn smelled of rot even before Elise pushed the door open. She had come back to check the loose board at the back, the one André had lifted for her the night she first found him. The air inside was still, thick with hay dust and something sour she couldn't place.

She crouched beneath the collapsed rafter where he'd hidden his satchel. Gone. His pencil stub, the maps, the letters he'd been drafting — all gone. She pressed her palm to the packed dirt floor and found it smoothed over, freshly swept. Whoever had been here had left in a hurry, or had been taken in one.

Elise stood and surveyed the space. The stall where the horse had once lived was empty. The rusted bucket still sat in the corner. But the straw at her feet was disturbed, raked in neat rows as if someone had tried to conceal footprints. The Germans would have searched in the open, not bothered to tidy.

She moved toward the small window at the rear of the barn, its frame cracked and letting in a pale wedge of evening light. Something glinted in the dust there — a thin cylinder, pale against the packed earth. She picked it up between two fingers.

A cigarette stub. Filtered. The paper was stained at one end with a distinct crescent of red lipstick.

Elise turned it over. The tobacco was still faintly fragrant, not yet gone stale. Whoever had smoked it had done so within the last day. She knew of only a handful of women on the island who wore lipstick, and fewer still who could afford the luxury of cigarettes. The German officers' wives, a few of the wealthier women in St. Peter Port. Not the kind of woman who'd have any business in an abandoned barn on the outskirts.

Unless she was looking for André too.

Elise slipped the stub into her coat pocket. The barn offered nothing else — no torn fabric, no dropped papers, no sign of violence beyond the suspicious neatness of the floor. If André had been arrested, the Germans would have left the place in chaos. If he'd fled on his own, he would have taken his satchel and left boot prints in his haste. Someone had been here after him. Someone who cleaned up.

She stepped back outside into the salt wind, pulling her coat collar up against the chill coming off the sea. The light was failing fast, and she didn't want to be caught on this road after curfew. She swung a leg over her bicycle and pedaled hard toward town, the beach path ahead of her snaking along the harbor wall.

She took the long way, skirting the edge of the old town, when something made her slow. Ahead, near the stone steps leading down to the fishermen's moorings, stood a lone figure. He was facing the water, his coat dark and long, his silhouette sharp against the pale gray of the evening sea. He raised his right hand to cup his lighter — and in the flash of the flame, Elise saw it.

Scar tissue. Thick and pale, crawling from his knuckles down across the back of his hand and disappearing beneath his sleeve.

She braked hard, gravel crunching under her tires. The sound carried on the wind, and the figure turned.

She couldn't make out his features in the dusk. Just the shape of him — ordinary, medium build, a flat cap pulled low. But his hand had dropped to his side, and he was looking at her now, not moving. Not hostile. Just watching, like a man who had been expecting someone else.

Elise's mouth went dry. She thought of the list in her coat, the forty-some households, the names she'd memorized so she could burn the paper. She thought of Le Gallez's voice cracking when he said: ordinary-looking, scarred right hand. Just a man, he'd said, and Elise had thought he'd meant his appearance. But he'd meant the impossibility of naming him. There was nothing to hold onto.

The man took a single step toward her.

Elise pushed off, pedal hard, her wheels skidding on the loose stones as she rode past him, close enough to catch the smell of pipe tobacco and cold sweat. She didn't look back. She couldn't. If she saw his face, she would carry it with her, and there was a strange safety in the blur of it — the knowledge that she couldn't exactly identify him in a lineup, that the German officer would sneer at her description.

Ordinary. Scarred. A man.

She rode until her lungs burned, until the harbor was behind her and the lower town rose around her, empty of witnesses. Only then did she slow, coasting to a stop outside Dr. Jameson's surgery. The lights were off. He'd have been at the hospital, or out making calls to the families on the list, the ones he could reach before the Germans sealed them off.

She reached into her boot and ran her finger along the thin seam where the recovery signal lay stitched — a square of black felt she'd sewn under the leather's lip, invisible unless you knew to look. She pressed it once, twice, three times. A message in signal code: meeting urgent, same place.

The barn. He'd know. He'd always known.

But as she turned her bicycle toward home, her hand found the cigarette stub in her pocket. She drew it out again, feeling the weight of it. A woman. With red lipstick and expensive tobacco. A woman who had been in André's hiding place, days after he'd vanished — or perhaps before he'd vanished. Perhaps the very reason he'd vanished.

She thought of the widow Bourgault, whose son had been taken two nights ago. Madame Bourgault didn't wear lipstick. She wore widow's black and a permanent expression of grief. But there were others — the pharmacist's sister, who walked arm in arm with a junior German officer and kept her hair curled even at the height of the occupation. The female accountant at the German requisition office, who took her coffee in the same café every morning, always alone.

One of them had stood in André's barn and left her mark. One of them knew where he was.

Elise shoved the stub back into her pocket and biked faster into the gathering dark.

Behind her, where she could not see, a figure stepped out from the shadow of a garden wall and watched her go. His scarred hand rested lightly on the stone's edge, patient as a cat at a mouse hole.

He had been following her all along. And now he knew she had been to the barn.

It was only a matter of time, he thought, before she led him to the poet and the doctor and the whole nest of them. He smiled a little, turned, and walked in the opposite direction. He had a report to write, and a name to add to it.

Elise Martin.

She had been useful once. She would be even more useful now.