Read Chapter 3: The Red Scarf

The post office sorting room smelled of damp paper and coal dust, a smell Elise had long associated with the ordinary rhythm of island life. Now even that seemed suspect.

She worked through the morning stack with mechanical efficiency, her fingers moving through envelopes and parcels while her mind circled the doctor's words. *No return address. No personal connections. Overly careful packaging.*

A package wrapped in brown paper and string stopped her hands.

The handwriting was unmistakable. The slant of the *E*, the way the *m* in Martin curled like a wave breaking. She had seen that hand a thousand times on birthday cards and hastily scrawled notes shoved under her bedroom door.

*Joseph.*

Her brother had been reported dead in June 1942, his fishing boat lost off the coast of Brittany. The official letter had come to their mother in a plain envelope, the kind that carried only grief. Elise had watched her mother age ten years in the space of an afternoon.

But this was his writing.

She turned the parcel over. The address was clean and precise: *Madame Catherine Bisset, Rue des Canonniers, St. Peter Port.*

The Bisset family had been on her route until three weeks ago. A husband, a wife, three children—French refugees who had managed to reach Guernsey before the occupation tightened its grip. Elise had delivered their mail regularly, small kindnesses from relatives still in France.

Then, one morning, she had arrived with letters to find the house empty. The furniture was gone. The landlord had been tight-lipped, which on this island meant he knew something he was afraid to say.

Elise had marked them as another disappeared family. Another name on the list of those who had tried to escape and failed.

Or succeeded.

She stared at the parcel in her hands. Joseph's parcel. Intended for people who no longer existed.

Her thumb pressed against the string, testing. The knot was simple, a fisherman's knot—Joseph had always tied his packages that way, refusing to learn anything else. She could untie it. She could re-tie it well enough that no one would notice, and she would know what her dead brother had sent across the sea to strangers.

The sorting room door creaked.

Elise slid the parcel into her canvas delivery bag with practiced ease, covering it with a stack of official correspondence.

Marguerite Pirot entered, shaking rain from her coat. The older woman ran the St. Peter Port post office with the efficiency of a drill sergeant and the warmth of a winter sea. Her eyes swept the room, cataloguing, always cataloguing.

"Running late today, Elise." It was not a question.

"The wind at the Ferry Road crossing. Had to walk the bicycle."

Marguerite grunted. She moved to the sorting table and began rifling through envelopes, her thick fingers surprisingly delicate as she examined each one. Watching her, Elise felt a new chill. Was this how the traitor worked? From inside the system itself?

She caught herself. Marguerite had delivered mail on this island for thirty years. Her son was in a German POW camp. She would sooner cut off her own hand than betray a refugee.

Wouldn't she?

"You look pale," Marguerite said without looking up. "Your mother worse?"

"No. She's the same." Elise forced lightness into her voice. "Just tired."

"You should see that doctor friend of yours. The English one. He's got medicines the Germans don't know about."

Elise blinked. "Dr. Jameson?"

"That's the one." Marguerite finally looked at her, eyes sharp. "He's been helping half the island with his little black bag. Good man. Shame about his patients."

"His patients?"

"A few of our vanished friends were on his list. The Bissets—the mother had a bad chest. He visited her twice a week before they disappeared."

Elise's hand tightened on her bag strap. The Bissets. Joseph's parcel was addressed to the Bissets. And Dr. Jameson had treated the Bisset mother.

Coincidence? Or was there a reason Jameson had asked her to watch the mail?

She forced herself to breathe. "I didn't know the Bissets knew Dr. Jameson."

"Everyone knows Dr. Jameson when they're sick enough." Marguerite shrugged. "Though I heard he's been asking questions about them since they left. Says the mother owed him money for the treatments."

Something in Marguerite's tone suggested she did not believe this explanation. Elise filed that away.

"I should get moving," Elise said. "The afternoon delivery won't wait."

Outside, the rain had softened to a grey drizzle that hung in the air like a veil. Elise pedalled slowly, the parcel burning against her back inside the delivery bag.

She should go to Dr. Jameson. That was the agreement. Any suspicious correspondence went to him first.

But this was not suspicious correspondence. This was her brother's handwriting, sent from a grave or from Lisbon or from God knew where, and it had been meant for a family that had vanished.

*Her brother, who was reported dead.*

The tide was low, exposing the sandflats near the harbour. Elise stopped her bicycle at the seawall and stared out at the water. Somewhere beyond that horizon lay France. Somewhere beyond that lay her brother, alive or dead, and she could not decide which possibility frightened her more.

If Joseph was alive, if he had escaped to Lisbon like Mrs. Le Roy's son Albert, then the official report was wrong. And if the official report was wrong, there were only two explanations: a bureaucratic error, so common in wartime it barely warranted thought, or someone had deliberately reported him dead.

Someone who did not want the Germans looking for Joseph Martin.

The red scarf waited inside the parcel.

Elise told herself she would only open it to check for contraband. The Germans inspected parcels at the harbour—everything arriving on the island passed through their hands first. If the parcel had been opened and resealed, it would already be compromised.

But the inspection seals were intact.

She worked the knot loose with trembling fingers. Inside, nestled in tissue paper that smelled faintly of salt and tobacco, was a red scarf.

Hand-knitted. The pattern was familiar—she had seen Joseph knitting it during the long blackout evenings of 1940, her mother teasing him that fishermen didn't need such fine things. He had laughed and said it was for a friend.

A friend. A French refugee girl he had met before the occupation tightened. Elise had never learned her name.

The scarf was soft and warm. Folded into it was a small slip of paper. The handwriting was Joseph's, but rushed, less careful than the address on the package:

*For Catherine. Tell her I remember my promise. The fishing is good here and I have found safe harbour. Wait for my signal.*

Wait for my signal.

Elise read the words three times, her heart pounding against her ribs. Safe harbour. Signal. These were the words of a man who was not dead, who was hiding, who was waiting for something.

Or the words of a man who was sending coded information to a woman who had vanished along with her entire family.

The doctor had said it: certain letters with peculiar markings were always seized. Certain packets were always intercepted. The traitor was methodical, patient, watching for specific patterns.

Was Elise holding the evidence of her brother's secret work—or the bait that had already drawn the trap shut?

Catherine Bisset was gone. If Joseph was waiting for a signal that would never come, he would send more letters. He would try again. And each attempt would put him at greater risk.

Or perhaps the signal had already been received by other hands. Perhaps the trap was already sprung.

Elise folded the note back into the scarf, wrapped the parcel precisely as it had been, and tucked it into the deepest pocket of her coat. She could not deliver it. She could not destroy it. She could not tell Dr. Jameson—not yet, not until she understood what her brother was involved in.

The rain began to fall harder. Elise mounted her bicycle and pedalled toward Les Canonniers, toward the empty Bisset house, toward whatever answers might be waiting behind its shuttered windows.

Behind her, on the harbour road, a dark car had pulled to a stop.

Hauptmann Weber sat behind the wheel, watching her through the rain-streaked glass. He made a note in his small leather book.

Then he followed.