Valentine looked over at them.
“The quarry.”
CHAPTER
FORTY-ONE
“Iwas very young, before the war,” Albert explained. “Micheleine's brothers, they were older. They didn't want me with them, a nuisance they said.” A smile at the memory in spite of the late hour of the night.
“But I followed them anyway.” Ju-Ju lay curled at his feet as he continued to reminisce.
“No one was supposed to go near the quarry—too dangerous they said.” He winked at them.
“I threatened to tell their father if they didn't take me with them.”
A boy on an adventure, like most boys, before the war, Kris thought. Over seventy years ago.
Vilette, Micheleine, and Albert Marchand, their lives divided into two time frames—before the war and after. An event that had changed the lives of so many, and ended so many others.
As he described that day long ago, two teenagers and a young tagalong on an adventure, Kris thought of pictures she had seen of quarries around the world in online articles about changing ecosystems, natural resources that had either played out or were shut down because of environmental hazards. Places that were huge open wounds carved out of the earth, enormous earthmovers scraping away layer after layer, leaving scars on the landscape, with photographs of mine workers from places like South Africa, in search of diamonds or other precious metals, squinting as they emerged from dark holes in the ground.
“It was closed for many years,” Albert continued. “Since before the first war, too dangerous to go there, the old ones who once worked there said—explosives left behind, cave-ins, tunnels where one could get lost. But we were determined to go, perhaps because it was forbidden.” That boyish smile appeared.
She could imagine the young boy he had once been, as the memory took hold and he told them about the long ride in the farm wagon, almost bounced off more than once on the dusty road on that long-ago summer day. When they could drive no farther, the road blocked by enormous boulders that had been rolled into place to block others from continuing on, they had all piled out of the wagon and continued on foot, down through the heavily wooded forest that eventually opened at the edge of the limestone quarry.
“It was like a building carved out of the stone. There were windows, some of them broken, and steel doors that rolled back,” he continued.
“Etienne and Edouard finally pushed one door open, and we went inside. A tree had grown from the floor through the ceiling over the years,” Albert continued.
“Dirt and debris covered everything. “We walked down a long tunnel. It was dark, but they had brought lanterns. There were marks carved into the walls. I tried to remember them so that we could find our way back.”
Clever boy, Kris thought. And years later, clever enough to elude the Germans during the war.
“The tunnel went in many directions. Etienne decided that we should each go a different way to see what we could find thenmeet back at the entrance. I went with Edouard. We followed a rail track into another part of the quarry.
“There were several rooms cut into the stone walls, one with a table, another larger one with cots lined up along a wall, more cots in another room, rolls of old cloth, utensils, and a long wood table.
“It was said that the English had taken their wounded there during the first war. We found marks on the walls, days marked off, carvings, and crosses.”
A place where the English had taken their wounded during World War I, the tunnels and walls of the quarry mine, refuge in the midst of slaughter and dying. Cots lined up against a wall, tables, rolls of cloth. A hospital?
Was that what Micheleine had meant in that letter?
She looked at the copy of the letter, then handed it to Albert.
“Did you see anything that looked like these marks?”
“I remember a carving of a woman with a scarf tied around her head, and she wore an apron. I remember thinking she was so beautiful in such an ugly place.”
A carving of a woman wearing an apron.
If the quarry had been used a as a hospital, with wounded soldiers on those cots, was it possible what he had seen was a carving of a nurse made all those years ago by some young soldier recovering from his wounds?
“There was talk many years ago about reopening the quarry,” he continued. “But nothing came of it.”
A forgotten place from another century. Forgotten, and possibly the perfect place to hide something that someone didn't want found.
But places like that didn't just disappear, Kris thought. Over the years, using modern technology, satellite images from outer space, infrared equipment, numerous old temples and artifactshidden or buried, had been discovered that decades earlier would have been impossible.
