She nodded, her thumbs slowly stroking the label. She knew how much he’d probably paid for the house. How often had she held that price tag up against her bank balance, only to admit defeat once again?
“Aren’t you gonna write the address down?”
“Of course,” she said. She grabbed a pen and wrote the familiar address on her notepad underneath her latest to-do list. “Can I get your contact info as well?”
“Matthew. Matthew Flaherty,” he said, then recited his phone number. It was a 780 area code, which she didn’t recognize. “I just moved here from Alberta,” he explained.
With effort, she attempted nonchalance. “I’m Cassie Simmons, the museum’s assistant curator. Would you like to leave the bottle with me so I can research it?”
“That would be terrific. Should I bring the rest over? I don’t know what to do with them.”
“Could you leave them in the wall for now? I’d like to see where youfound them, maybe take some photos for the archives. Then I can bring them back here for safe storage.”
“Fine by me. I’ll just work in a different room.”
After they arranged that she would come by in the morning, Matthew started to leave.
“Mr. Flaherty?”
He turned back. “Yeah?”
She hesitated. “Have you told anyone else about this?”
“About finding the bottle? No, why?”
“I think that this bottle might actually be a pretty special piece of local history.” She chose her words carefully, uncomfortably aware she was crossing a professional line. She had already decided to make this her pet project. No need for Mrs. Allen, the museum’s curator, to trouble herself over it. “But we won’t know its significance—if there is any—until I’ve done some research.”
He nodded conspiratorially. “This is just between you and me, then.”
She locked the door behind him then returned to her desk and stared at the bottle, still stunned.
She knew the stories. She’d heard them since she was a little kid on her grandmother Alice’s knee as she leafed through the family scrapbook with its peeling pages, telling her about the two generations of brothers who had gone off to fight in both world wars. But Cassie’s favourite tales were the ones that included Model Ts, flapper dresses, and bootlegged whisky. Her grandmother knew that as well, and she would give Cassie a guileful smile whenever she began.Prohibition was a wild age, she would say,and my father and his brother were right in the thick of it, or so the stories go. She would gather Cassie closer.Now, where should I start?Then she’d recite the stories she’d learned in her own childhood and fill Cassie’s world with tales of whisky and money, adventure, and love.
But there’d never been any talk about bottles being hidden in a wall.
All the questions from her childhood bubbled up like she’d poppeda cork from a bottle of champagne as she studied the label, with its neat typeset and a sweet illustration of a bird in the top right corner. Bailey Brothers’ Best, founded by Jeremiah Alexander Bailey and John Joseph Bailey, former World War I tunnellers turned bootleggers.
And Cassie’s ancestors.
The bubbles fizzed in her chest. “What else did you hide, boys?”
PART– one –
oneADELE
— June 1918 —
No. 1 Canadian Casualty Clearing Station, near Adinkerke, Belgium
Adele focused on the tips of her fingers, numb from being clamped around a metal surgical bowl for so long, then she shifted her attention to the wrists supporting them and silently demanded they stop shaking.
“Lieutenant?”
She held out the bowl. “I’m sorry, Dr. Bertrand.”
Tink. A tiny sound of victory as a metal fragment dropped in. Adele steeled herself, determined to remain still as stone. Dr. Bertrand’s use of her rank had that kind of effect. She’d never felt entirely deserving of the official title, but every one of the Canadian nurses had been given the same one upon enlisting. “Lieutenant Savard” gave Adele a perceived position of authority, which came in handy around some of the soldiers she tended.
Adele had never assisted with a trepanning before, an ancient procedure where a hole was cut into a patient’s skull to relieve pressure and gain access to any foreign matter lodged within. What was throwing her off wasn’t the sight of the poor man’s exposed brain or the blood. That rarely bothered Adele anymore. It was the exhaustion that rattled through her bones like a train. She’d been on her feet for sixteen hours today, eighteen yesterday. In between, she’d curled up in the nurses’ tent, grabbing a few hours of sleep before returning to duty. For the past ninety minutes, she’d been standing next to Dr. Bertrand, holding the bowl as he fished bits of shrapnel out of the soldier’s brain. She couldn’t understand how he managed to stay awake long enough to do it.
