Paul glanced back over his shoulder at the spires of the cathedral reaching into the skyline as the Morris sped through the rain-slicked streets, swerving around other vehicles, toward the edge of the city.
If any of them made it back alive.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-SIX
PRESENT DAY
Acentury earlier Arras stood at the edge of the western front during World War I, and was reduced to little more than rubble. The infamous trenches became death traps for many and could still be seen a hundred years later, some filled in with sign posts to mark their location, others grown over in that way that nature reclaimed what was abandoned after the smoke of battle cleared.
In some remote locations, the barbed wire that had marked the narrow fields of battle that were all that separated Allied and German forces, and where so many had died, could still be found—rusted, broken in places, a reminder.
The war to end all wars.
Then in World War II, Arras had been occupied by the German army as part of the occupation forces determined to take France, eventually liberated by the British weeks before the Allied push against the Germans.
The scars remained. Buildings that had been razed either by bombing or fire in the first war had been rebuilt on the shell of centuries-old foundations, faint lines of newer construction seen in the stones and bricks on the walls of Flemish Baroque buildings in the town center.
The original Cathedral of Notre Dame had been built somewhere between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. Once the most beautiful cathedral in northern France, it had been destroyed during the French Revolution, rebuilt, then destroyed again by shelling during World War I.
After the war it was rebuilt in that previous Gothic design, and rose majestically into the skyline as they drove past the town square.
“Where?” James asked.
A single word, the first he'd spoken after the drive north in silence, anger between them like a wall. He didn't agree with her decision to continue, but he didn't try to talk her out of it again.
Where to search? Where to begin? Where to find records of a young woman who had once lived there and then gone off to fight the Germans in World War II?
The manager of the tourist office directed them to the public library.
“They have many books about the war,” he explained.
The library was one of the few buildings that had survived the war, a massive complex of baroque colonnaded buildings that had been updated through the years with new technology. There were reading rooms, computer kiosks, and political banners on the walls, along with life-sized photographs of famous authors of the twentieth century—Jean Paul Sartre, Camus, and Georges Simenon, juxtaposed with photographs of young twenty-first century authors.
She gave the young clerk at the main desk her business card and explained that she was interested in information about local history during World War II.
He provided directions to an area of the library with an extensive collection of books and periodicals about both world wars including an extensive computer archive.
Kris felt like they were starting over, searching for a needle in a haystack, one file after another, pages of information that only went back to the years after the war, other information that pre-dated the war. James sat across from her in front of another monitor, scrolling through archives of daily newspapers from the same period.
It was time-consuming, complicated by the language barrier. Hours later, she rubbed the headache that had begun from staring at the computer screen. Another file, and more documents. Then, an entry caught her attention. It was a reference to a newspaper announcement, from May 18, 1954.
“Where can I find this?” she asked the young student clerk at the desk in the department, and showed her the reference number she'd written down.
“That is a micro-filmed document,” the young woman explained. “Older documents that were archived many years ago. We have a microfilm reader over here.”
It had been years since she'd used a microfilm reader at Columbia, studying ancient texts that had been recorded on microfilm before computers, a system rarely used any longer with libraries updated with scanned and cross-referenced information capable of being accessed by hundreds of users at the touch of a computer screen.
She leaned over James' shoulder as he scrolled through dozens of archived newspaper pages from May 1954, then slowed on the 18th.
“There.” She pointed to the entry that came up. It was typewritten in French, a marriage announcement. One of the names leapt off the screen at her—Angeline Robillard.
1954. Almost ten years after the war. Was it possible they had found a member of Micheleine's family?
From what she already knew, Micheleine's father and two older brothers had died during the war, leaving behind hermother and a younger sister. If she was alive, her younger sister could have been in her early twenties in 1954.
“What about the other name—Marchand?”
