“I need to speak with him directly,” Dot said. “It’s a matter of some personal urgency.”
“Please hold on a moment while I see where he is.”
“Come on, come on, come on,” Dot whispered, sitting on pins and needles. “Where are you, Pete?”
“You’re in luck,” the woman said a moment later. “He is here on base. I will put out a call for him then have him telephone you back. Your number, please?”
How could she be so stupid? She should have asked Frances that question. It wasn’t as if someone would have—
There it was, written on a card beside the telephone. She gave the number, then sat back to wait.
Twenty minutes later, the phone rang.
ffity-fourDASH— Somewhere near Sainte-Honorine, Northwest France —
The darkness was complete. It didn’t shift when Dash cracked her eyelids open, and fear rippled through her. She was afraid to move, but the only way she could sense what was happening was if she could shift her body. Just a little. Just enough. The greatest pressure, she realized, was around her torso, as if she were estrained. Needing to understand, she inhaled, expanding her chest as much as she could, and she felt movement beneath her. Just a bit. Her feet. Her legs. She was dangling.
Dread rushed in as she recalled the lightning, then the terrible angle of the plane plunging to earth, and the moment when she understood she was mortal after all. Her throat clogged with a new sort of panic. Where was she? What was it she couldn’t remember?
The tree!The shuddering impact, then nothing. Suddenly, she realized she hung from branches, kept alive by a tree, the suspension lines of the parachute, and possibly the chute itself.
A new pain, a burning, throbbing agony shot through her left arm. It felt as if a blade twisted from her shoulder to her elbow. Gritting her teeth, Dash moved her other hand across to find the source. Her left arm was hot, swollen, and tacky to her touch, and it… Her stomach rolled as her fingertips closed around a small branch, maybe a half inch thick,that had broken off the tree when she’d collided with it. The branch had passed all the way through her arm, back to front, leaving a splintered end sticking out either side.
Dash brought her right hand back where it belonged, thinking hard. She had to assume she was in France or Belgium, which put her in enemy territory. Someone might have seen her plane going down, and the bright white of her parachute would be a dead giveaway. She had no idea if anyone had heard the crash. All she heard was her own ragged breathing. Even the rain had stopped.
How long had she been unconscious? Long enough for the blood on her arm to have become sticky. The branch was blocking the flow. She wondered how badly it would bleed if she somehow managed to pull herself free of it.
If only she could think clearly.
Be smart, her mother had said, saying goodbye at Union Station.
Dash had never been good at that, she thought miserably.
Except that wasn’t entirely true. She was smart. It was just that her brain operated differently than Dot’s. The two had always relied on each other to make up for their weak points, to protect each other. What would Dot do in this situation? The question was laughable. Dot never would have gotten herself into it in the first place.
Dash’s eyes were adjusting to the night, softening the blackness so she could differentiate between the shadows, but she could not see the forest floor. How tall was this tree? Was she at the top of it? Was it forty feet? Fifteen? That made a big difference. If she cut herself loose, the discrepancy meant either a painful landing or a deadly one.
Count, she heard Dot say in her memory. Dash let her mind go back to that sunny day when they were so small, and Dot had timed the passage of rocks as Dash tossed them into a bucket. Afterward, Dot had asked their father how high the roof of the house was. Thirty-five feet, he had told her.
“And how tall is Dash’s tree?”
He squinted out the window, calculating. “I’d say the tree is about twenty feet, and she normally climbs about fifteen feet up.” He glancedsideways at Dash. “Which is, as your mother so rightly says, far too high for a little girl to be.”
Turning away from him, Dot had told Dash what she wanted her to do. Without questioning her, Dash dragged some boxes from her father’s shed so she could climb up to the window, then to the peak of the house. From there, she dropped a stone while Dot counted. She still remembered: the roof at thirty-five feet had gotten aOne-one-one-one Two-two.
The restraints around her chest dug in as she filled her lungs. She was cold, and the pain in her arm was so bad, so sharp, but she refused to cry.Figure this out now, cry later.
Her father had told them that Dash’s spot in her favourite tree was about fifteen feet off the ground, and she remembered Dot countingone-one-one-onefrom there—about a half second less than the rooftop.
Trying to ignore the pain, Dash reached around all the suspension lines looping down from the parachute then dug into her kit for her water bottle, still half full. She let out a breath, then she dropped it.
One-one-one-one—
Fifteen feet, give or take. She smiled, despite it all. It was hard not to appreciate the irony that she presently hung from the same height she’d always climbed to in her tree. It wasn’t great news, though. One time she had climbed down to about ten feet then jumped, with her mother’s coat flung out like wings, and she’d broken her arm. Another time she’d landed on top of a very young Gus.
Be smart.
Fifteen feet above the ground, maybe a little more. It was too high to drop, but closer than she’d initially feared. Maybe she’d be all right. If she curled herself into a ball she might not break anything.
