Read Chapter 4: Secret Signs

The Bisset house smelled of dust and something else—something sweet going bad in the kitchen. Elise stood in the doorway a moment too long, listening to the empty rooms breathe around her. She had no right to be here. If anyone saw her bicycle propped against the garden wall, if any of the neighbours spoke to their German contacts, she would be answering questions by nightfall.

But the parcel was in her bag. Her brother's scarf, folded around his coded words. *Safe harbour. Soon. Tell Catherine the signal will come.*

Catherine Bisset was gone. Her husband was gone. Their two boys were gone. And Dr. Jameson had been asking questions about them since the day they vanished, which Elise was not ready to think about.

She crossed the front room. A child's wooden boat sat on the windowsill, dust furring its sail. The curtains were still open. Whoever had left had not planned to be away long.

Elise climbed the stairs, her boots too loud on the treads. The bedrooms told her nothing—beds stripped bare, wardrobes empty. The Bissets had taken what they could carry. In the smallest room, she found a scrap of paper pinned to the wall: a child's drawing of a boat with a red sail, and beneath it, a word she recognised.

*Harbour.*

She pulled the pin free and folded the drawing into her coat pocket. She was stealing from a disappeared family. She was also holding the only thing that connected Joseph's message to the Bissets' flight. If the traitor had betrayed them mid-escape, and if Joseph had been their smuggler—her brother, the dead man who was not dead—then the drawing was evidence. Of what, she could not yet say.

A floorboard creaked below.

Elise froze. Her hand went to her coat pocket, fingers brushing the folded paper. She should not have come alone. Jameson had asked her to trust him, and she had agreed, sort mail, watch for patterns, report what she found. Instead she was in a dead family's house, holding secrets she had not shared.

Another creak. Then a voice, low and careful: "Elise. I know you're up there."

*Jameson.*

Relief and shame arrived together. She went down the stairs carefully, the way she had learned as a girl avoiding her father after he'd had too much cider. Jameson stood in the front room, hat in hand, his face unreadable in the grey light.

"The door was open," he said, though it had not been. "You should not be here."

"I found something." She held out the drawing. "Joseph was writing to Catherine Bisset. He says he's in a safe harbour and that a signal is coming. This was pinned in the boy's room."

Jameson took the paper, examined it, then returned it. "You should have brought this to me."

"I know. I meant to. I wanted to see—"

"Whether the Bissets left evidence of flight? Or whether they were taken?" His voice softened. "I understand the need to know. I share it. But this house is watched. Did you see Weber's car on your way?"

Elise thought of the narrow lane, the hedgerows, the sound of a motor she had dismissed as a farmer's van. "No."

"He was parked at the end of your delivery route this morning." Jameson's jaw tightened. "He is observing you, Elise. Whatever he saw at the harbour, whatever he suspects you of carrying, he has not closed that file."

"The parcel I took yesterday—"

"Is still in your possession?"

She nodded.

"Good. Keep it hidden. Do not mention it to anyone. Not your mother, not the girls at the sorting office, not me if you are in a place where you might be overheard." He paused. "Weber is not the only pair of eyes on this island. There are informers among us, and they are not always German."

The word hung between them. *Informer.* Elise thought of Marguerite Pirot, always cheerful, always knowing which family had taken in a cousin from the mainland, which fisherman had come back from a run to Sark with more than his nets. She hated herself for thinking it.

"I need a way to mark the letters," she said. "Something that tells us when I'm being watched, without anyone else knowing what it means."

Jameson considered her. The doctor's face was tired beneath his civilian hat, shadows bruising the skin under his eyes. Whatever he was doing beyond treating influenza and sewing wounds, it was costing him.

"There is an old code used by the French postal service before the war," he said. "A line placed beneath the postmark. If the line points to the left, the letter's sender is known to you—safe to trust. If it points to the right, the sender is unknown or suspect. If the line is crossed through, the letter is bait."

"Bait?"

"Something planted by the Germans to catch couriers. Or by the traitor, to catch us." He held her gaze. "You will see such letters eventually. You must not deliver them. Bring them to me."

"And if I cannot reach you?"

"Then place the letter in the second drawer of your mother's bureau. I check it when I make my weekly call." He paused. "Your mother does not know. If she finds it, tell her it is a supply of quinine I have been too afraid to ration properly."

Elise nodded. The code was simple enough, easy to remember, easy to apply with a fingernail or the edge of a pencil. She would need to test it, refine it, find the places where the censors' stamps made it invisible.

"I'll start today," she said.

Back at the Philatelic Exchange—Guernsey's postal sorting office, a high-windowed stone building that had once been a warehouse for tobacco—Elise took her place at the sorting table. The morning's mail lay in canvas sacks, oily from sea air, stamped with German censorship marks in heavy black ink.

She worked quickly, sorting letters into their distribution piles. Mrs. Le Roy's name surfaced twice: one letter from Lisbon in her son's hand, another from a niece in Leicester, forwarded through the Red Cross. Elise set them aside, permitting the first because she could vouch for the handwriting, and marking the second with a small line beneath the postmark, pointing left.

Beside her, Marguerite Pirot hummed a tune Elise didn't recognise. She was sorting the parcel post, her red hair pinned beneath a scarf, her fingers moving with practised speed.

"You're quiet today," Marguerite said. "Still thinking about that parcel for the Bissets?"

Elise's chest tightened. "Parcel?"

"The one you handled yesterday. I saw you pick it up, then the list got changed and someone else took the delivery." Marguerite shrugged. "The Bissets left, didn't they? Probably went to the mainland before the occupation tightened. Shame about the scarf, though. Pretty knitting."

Elise forced a smile. "What did you do with it?"

"Me? Nothing. It went back to the undeliverable pile. The Germans will open it eventually, I suppose." Marguerite's eyes flickered with something too quick to catch. "Unless you know something about it."

"Only that it's a shame to waste good wool."

Marguerite laughed and returned to her sorting. Elise kept her face neutral, but her hands were cold. Marguerite had not only noticed the parcel—she had noticed Elise's reaction to it. She had been watching the sorting table the way a cat watches a bird.

The afternoon post brought a second wave of letters. Elise worked through them, applying Jameson's code where she could. She was halfway through a bundle of letters from the occupied mainland when she saw it.

The letter was addressed to a farm outside St. Martin's, a family named Le Huray. No return address. No personal mark. And beneath the German censorship stamp, almost invisible against the ink, was a small black dot.

She turned the letter over. The paper was heavy, expensive—the kind used by military administration, not family correspondence. The handwriting was neat, anonymous, trained to be unmemorable.

She did not need to open it to know. If Jameson was right, this was a letter from the traitor.

"Everything all right, Elise?"

Marguerite again. She had come up behind Elise so quietly that Elise had not heard her approach. Her eyes were fixed on the letter in Elise's hands.

"Just checking the postmark," Elise said. "The censors have been sloppy lately."

"Mm." Marguerite leaned in, too close, her breath warm on Elise's cheek. "That one's for Le Huray, isn't it? The old woman with the goats. She won't get much more mail, I think. Her grandson was arrested last week—running messages for the resistance in Alderney."

"Was he?"

"Word travels." Marguerite straightened and smiled. "You should be careful with those letters from Lisbon, Elise. The censors open those first. You would not want to lose a friend's last letter for the sake of a carelessly placed stamp."

She walked back to her station. Elise stood frozen, the dot-marked letter heavy in her hands. Marguerite had known about the Lisbon letters. She had known about the Le Huray boy's arrest before Elise did. And she had watched Elise's sorting with the patience of a woman waiting for a trap to spring.

Elise slid the traitor's letter into her apron pocket and marked the delivery sheet with a crossed line, pointing right. Then she finished the day's sorting with numb fingers, thinking of Marguerite Pirot's humming, her watchful eyes, her casual knowledge of every family on the island.

The traitor was not outside the postal service.

The traitor was inside it.