“There’s one other thing that makes me wonder,” Cassie said, shifting her papers and uncovering two of the articles she’d printed out. “The Bailey brothers were raided on this day in 1921, see?”
BAILEY BROTHERS’ BEST CLEANED OUT!
In broad daylight, police raided the warehouse of Misters John and Jeremiah Bailey of Windsor, where they seized every last drop of their illegal whisky cache.
“That happened two months before the article about Mr. Willoughby came out. And strangely, it is the last article I have found on Jeremiah and John Bailey. It’s like they disappeared from sight too, almost.”
Mrs. Allen was leaning over her, reading the article. “That is interesting. It could be purely coincidental, but then again, it might not. What a lovely puzzle you’ve come up with. I’ll see what I can find out.”
The mystery had existed for a century, so Cassie supposed it might be unrealistic for her to crack it in one day, but she was determined to get to the bottom of it. After all, it was her own family’s story. She’d always assumed the Bailey business had stopped along with the end of Prohibition, but with all this new information, she wondered if the raid could have had something to do with it. If only she had thought to ask her grandmother for more details. Alice had been born ten years after the raid, but she would have heard something about it from her parents, wouldn’t she? And shouldn’t she have known about the bottles in the wall?
Frustrated, Cassie turned off the microfiche and turned on her computer to research the value of the bottles, hoping to solve one thing today. She looked up an evaluator with whom they often dealt and gave him all the neccessary information about the bottles. He took everything down and said he would get back to her with an estimate as soon as he could.
When her phone rang, she saw the incoming number and her pulse quickened. “Hello, Matthew,” she said.
“Hi, Cassie. Listen, I hope you don’t mind my calling you like this, but something came up.”
“No trouble at all. How can I help you?”
“Uh,” he said, hesitating. “I think it’s the other way around. Did you tell me that Jeremiah Bailey, the guy that made the whisky, dug tunnels in the war?”
“I did.”
“Huh. Well, then I think I have found something you might want to see.”
nineteenADELE
— July 1921 —
At the sound of tires rolling on their drive, Adele’s heart skipped a beat. Jerry was here. She smoothed out the skirt of her favourite dress, a simple pink one that fell almost to the floor and was dotted by small bouquets of flowers. She was glad Jerry had mentioned he wanted to take her somewhere “nice” so she’d known how to dress.
“Do I look all right, Maman?” she asked.
Her mother tucked a strand of Adele’s hair inside her matching ribbon. “You look perfect. And if all he remembers is you in that uniform, he’s not going to believe this.”
“I’m so nervous,” she whispered.
Maman touched her cheek. “My, he must have made quite an impression on you.”
When Adele had mentioned to her mother that she had run into one of her wartime patients, and that he was taking her out for dinner, sheraised an eyebrow with interest. Right away she’d asked if it was the tunneller with the facial wounds.
Adele’s jaw had dropped with surprise. “How did you know?”
“Just a lucky guess. You were so adamant about keeping your distance from your patients, but you wrote about him more than the others. I always wondered if you were fond of him,” Maman replied, then she asked, “but what about the dashing Monsieur Willoughby?”
Adele looked away. “I’m not seeing him anymore. He wasn’t who I thought he was.”
Her mother tried to press her for details, but Guillaume stepped in.
“She served in a war,mon amour.” He winked at Adele. “She knows trouble when she sees it.”
He had no idea how right he was, she thought. In any case, it was better that they not know the full truth about Ernie, for their own safety. She’d had to be a little more up-front with Dr. Knowles, who had returned from lunch just as she was cleaning up the waiting room. She’d fibbed about the blood, claiming it was from a patient’s cut and looked worse than it was, but she did tell him that a man had been in, asking after Sammy. She suggested that if Dr. Knowles was right about the attack being gang-related, they might want to transfer Sammy to another doctor’s office. Dr. Knowles agreed, and they’d sent Sammy to Grace Hospital, just to be safe. To Adele’s great relief, Ernie hadn’t come back so far.
A few moments later, they heard a knock, and Adele flew to the door, trying to quell the butterflies in her stomach. When she opened it, the man who’d rescued her from Willoughby, the man she’d dreamed about for years, stood before her, looking far different from the last time she’d seen him. Instead of a bloodied face and sweaty shirt, he wore a gentleman’s short black coat and waistcoat over a white shirt. A silver watch chain hooked on his waistcoat glinted in the sun, and his face was shadowed by a black fedora.
His bruises were still evident, faded to a shallower colour, but theswelling was down. He wore a small white bandage on his cheek where she’d stitched him up, but that was all. To Adele, none of it mattered. To her, he would always be the thoughtful soldier who’d won her affections in a hospital tent in war-torn Belgium. And the most handsome man in the world.
He slipped off his fedora, his grey eyes soft on hers. “There she is,” he said. “The most beautiful woman in the world. I hope I’m presentable, Lieutenant Savard?”
