Loud thuds arose. Furniture being overturned?
Gerrit grimaced. The wardrobe was too heavy to move, wasn’t it?
A door banged open. Bernardus’s room, and Gerrit willed himself as invisible as his ink.
“Traitors in the area are hiding our workers,” a man said in a gruff voice. “What do you know of this?”
“Only what I read in theEvening Post,” Opal said.
But they were hiding someone worse than a slave worker—a saboteur who was presumed dead. If Bernardus were found, he’d be executed, and Gerrit for being with him. What would happen to Arthur and Opal? To Ivy? Charlie?
He prayed in a long, disjointed, incoherent string.
Metal scraped on wood—a bedframe? And a soft thud.
“Who lives here?” the man said.
“This is our sons’ room. They’re in England.”
“Someone lived here recently.”
The wardrobe doors opened. Soft light penetrated the back panel and the compartment door, and Gerrit shrank back.
Opal huffed. “If you must know, my husband snores. Sometimes I come in here to sleep.”
Fabric rustled mere centimeters from Gerrit’s knees.
“I just folded those linens,” Opal said. “And look what you’ve done to the beds. Are you going to put this house back to rights before you leave?”
Her tone sounded irate enough for how any sane person would feel in her circumstances, but not irate enough to earn harsh treatment.
“I think not.” The German sounded just as irate. “If we find nothing, your reward is sleeping here tonight, not in prison.”
“As I told you at the door, there is nothing for you to find. Now, if you’re done, I suddenly find myself with a great deal of housekeeping.”
Two sets of footsteps pounded away, but more bangs and bumps resounded from downstairs.
Dust tickled Gerrit’s nose, and he pinched his nose shut. A single sneeze would be fatal.
Beside him, Bernardus didn’t stir. They’d remain hidden until the Germans left and Arthur or Opal gave them the signal.
Gerrit took long, slow breaths through his open mouth. Liberation couldn’t come soon enough.
chapter
33
St. Helier
Tuesday, June 6, 1944
Mrs. Le Huquet and Ivy sipped parsnip coffee in a drawing room crammed with stacks of books and papers.
Since Mrs. Le Huquet’s leg had been mangled in the accident a year ago, walking to La Bliue Brise with a cane was difficult for her, but Ivy didn’t mind visiting her charmingly cluttered home and listening to the widow describe the novels she was reading. Mrs. Le Huquet needed company more than care, but company was a form of care Ivy had the luxury of providing nowadays.
“Do you think this is it?” Mrs. Le Huquet stared up at her ceiling.
Airplanes droned overhead as they had without stop since late the night before. Hundreds of aircraft bound for France.
