For the first time it occurred to Emmy that Charlotte might have come back for Julia. Maybe that was why every search she had made on her own came up empty. Maybe Julia had been discovered by an ARP warden who managed to get her back to the foster home where she should have been all along.
But she had scoured as many evacuation and billeting records as she could since the night she and Julia returned to London. There was no record of a Julia Downtree being reevacuated to her foster home in Gloucestershire.
What she hadn’t checked was whether a certain Charlotte Havelock had reported her evacuees as having run away. Surely Charlotte had notified someone when she awoke the morning of September 7 and saw that Emmy and Julia were gone. There would be a paper trail for that. There—
“Isabel?”
Emmy snapped back to the present moment. “What?”
“No one else?”
“No...” But her mind was far away. She had to find out whether Julia was safe and sound with Charlotte. Surely that was where she was. That was why she couldn’t find any trace of her in London! Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Just because she had found no record of Julia being reunited with Charlotte at the beginning of her search didn’t mean that record didn’t exist now.
Emmy rose from her chair and nearly knocked it over. “I need to get back.”
Mac’s eyes widened in surprise. “Just like that? You—you haven’t even eaten your Danish.”
“I—I forgot to take care of something important. I—I need to go.”
Mac rose, too, unconvinced. “Did you remember something about your sister?”
“Yes... I mean, no. I mean, I need to go.”
Emmy made for the lobby doors and she could sense Mac was right behind her. He sprang ahead of her so that he could open the door before the bellman did.
“Can I see you later today? A drink after work perhaps?” he said.
“I—I don’t know.” Emmy couldn’t think about anything but her new task at hand.
“You don’t know?” Mac smiled and held the door open wide.
They emerged onto the street. A light drizzle was falling but the air still stank of fire, ash, and ruin. Emmy turned to Mac to say good-bye.
“Thank you,” she blurted, and stepped away from him.
“For what?” Mac called after her.
“For... the Danish!” she said.
“You didn’t even eat it!”
But Emmy just smiled stupidly and dashed away into the rain.
Twenty-five
AFTERso many weeks of frustration, the prospect of knowing that Julia had been rescued from the nightmare in which Emmy had left her was almost too much to take in. She nearly sprinted back to the local WVS office to revisit her inquiry into the evacuees who had been billeted with Charlotte Havelock.
Emmy did not have direct access to all the billeting records for the children of the East End but she knew where to go and whom to ask. Isabel Crofton’s reputation for fervently making sure every orphan with whom she came into contact was properly cared for had been made obvious to all, so it surely came as no surprise when Emmy appeared, breathless and rain soaked, at the offices where the East End billeting records were kept and announced she had a lead on an orphaned evacuee who might have been reported missing by her foster mother.
The WVS volunteer who was assisting the billeting officials offered to help Emmy, and together they pored over a pile of ledgers and files to see whether a Charlotte Havelock had reported weeks ago on September 7 that the two evacuees in her care had run away. After half an hour of careful searching, Emmy finally found a notation that Charlotte had called Mrs. Howell, the billeting official in Moreton-in-Marsh, who had notified the billeting headquarters in London that Emmeline and Julia Downtree had run away, supposedly back to their mother’s flat in London.
Emmy and her companion continued to peruse the paperwork from September 8 onward.
There was no new record of the Downtree evacuees having been returned to Mrs. Havelock.
“Are you sure that documentation wouldn’t be someplace else?” Emmy asked, a knot of dread rising in her throat.
“I don’t see why,” the WVS volunteer replied.
