Camille
Camille ran all the way back to the house, keeping away from the streetlights. She moved quickly, ignoring the sting in her lungs. The back door stood ajar, just as she’d left it.
Vivian and von Bauer were still inside. Camille feared what she would find in the basement. She knew it would not be pleasant. She lingered a moment, her heartbeat heavy in her ears. A surge of dread shook through her.
She suddenly felt numb all over. She couldn’t feel her fingers, or her toes. She searched for some hint of deeper feeling, but nothing came. Maybe a twinge of something, a faint wish for things to have gone differently tonight. That the plan she and Vivian had developed so carefully would have gone off without a hitch.
The garden shears weighed heavy in her grip. A deadly weapon, if used properly. Camille entered the house. The mudroom was absent of sound. Still, she paused and listened for some sign of what she would find in the basement. The door stood open. There was no use for it. She would have to go down. Clutching the shears tight, she pushed forward and took the stairs one at a time. An unpleasant odor met her halfway down, metallic and sharp.
Blood. She’d smelled it before, in another basement. Images flooded her vision, urging her to turn around and play the coward. Was this moment real, or another nightmare?
A muffled groan brought the answer, the sound exceptionally female.
This was no dream. And Vivian needed Camille’s courage, as her sister had once needed it. Down, she went down the steps, into cement and dust and...death. Those were the scents she smelled, blood and death. Her grip slipped, and the garden shears clattered to the floor.
Two bodies lay on the basement floor, side by side, blood pooling around them.
Everything went dark in Camille’s mind. The room took a slow, sickly spin, and what little light was cast from the single bulb faded to gray. She shook her head, viciously, forcing her vision to clear. She moved in closer. Von Bauer lay on his back, his eyes blank, a hole in his head, one more in his chest.
Camille took a wide circle, stopping next to the other body, careful to avoid the thick red liquid spreading across the cement. A dark stain of blood spooled at Vivian’s waist. Don’t be dead. Don’t be dead.
“Vivian.” Don’t be dead. Camille reached down and shook her friend’s shoulder. “Wake up. Please, please wake up.”
No response. Nothing.
“Vivian,” she said again, her voice softer, calmer.
A small movement, slight and nearly nonexistent, then the lifting of a perfectly manicured hand, the nails lacquered the same color as the liquid spreading across the cement.
“Camille?” The sound of her name seemed to come from a great distance. “Are they safely away?”
“They are safely away.”
Vivian tried to lift her head. A centimeter, perhaps less, that was all she could manage before collapsing back against the cement with a thud. “Von Bauer?”
Camille didn’t need to look twice. “Dead.”
“Good,” she whispered.
Camille knelt beside her friend, and took her cold hand, so cold, too cold. “Don’t move,” she said. “I’m going to get you help.”
But...where? Who? Who could she trust?
“Too late,” Vivian wheezed.
The need to argue came fast, but Vivian’s eyes opened again, and something passed between them, a silent knowledge that her injuries were too great to survive, and even if she overcame the bullet wound in her stomach, she would not defeat a Nazi’s inquisition. Vivian would be executed for shooting an SS officer.
“Run.” The word gurgled from Vivian’s throat. “Run, Camille.”
“I can’t leave you.” I can’t let you die alone. Without thinking about the blood, Camille cradled Vivian’s head in her lap. “I’ll stay with you until—” she shut her eyes “—the end.”
Vivian shifted. The movement instigated a coughing fit so hard Camille feared it would bring the end sooner. “Shh,” Camille soothed. “Don’t talk.”
“I’m sorry. I...I...thought to blackmail him. I—” she pulled in a shaky breath “—I miscalculated. He...von Bauer. Bad man. Evil in his heart.” She reached up, touched Camille’s cheek where he’d hit her. “I thought it was the only way to save us all.”
To save yourself. No matter how Camille turned Vivian’s actions in her mind, she always came back to that. The woman had acted out of self-preservation first, then honor.
“Not for me. I did it for you. For Rachel and her mother.” Her French had an American accent now, the words barely distinguishable. “One day, you’ll see that.”
There had been other ways to protect their secret.
“Miscalculated,” she wheezed. “Forgive me.”
Camille wanted to offer Vivian redemption. She couldn’t say the words.
“Leave me, Camille. It’s too late. Save yourself. They can’t find you here.”
They. The Gestapo.
Run. The word was in her head now. Urgent. Echoing. Vivian gripped her arm with a show of strength that seemed to surprise them both. “Run!”
Camille watched the color drain from Vivian’s face and her body go limp. And then, she was gone. Run. She took only enough time to change into clean clothes and sort out her route. She knew where she would go, had always known from their first meeting that he would be a haven. For her sister, and for her.
There was only one thing left to do. She ran.
Unable to stop herself, she looked over her shoulder, not once, but again and again. The house loomed large at first, sinister, the windows like cavernous eyes full of judgment and condemnation. She hadn’t abandoned Vivian, but the relief of leaving her behind was similar to how Camille had felt when she’d first arrived in Paris.
Much had changed since then. Her sister was better, her own guilt far less heavy to bear. She glanced at the house a few more times. The structure eventually receded in the distance, smaller, less menacing. When it was but a dot on the horizon, Camille faced forward, knowing she wouldn’t look back ever again. She felt a hard tug of sorrow for the woman lying in the basement beside her lover. A woman who’d betrayed Camille and Rachel, and then had atoned for her duplicity in a single act of sacrifice.
Camille would forgive Vivian. One day.
The sky turned purple overhead, and the first signs of dawn colored the horizon. Camille moved deeper into the woods, staying undercover while the sun shone. When night fell, she ventured closer to the road. By day two, the rain blew in from the west, soaking her to the bone. With the rain came mud and treacherous divots in the slippery dirt. Camille had been wise to don her boots, but she’d dressed for the heat. Not the cold, wet rain.
I did it for you, Vivian had said. One day, you’ll see that.
Now there were divots in her heart as well as underfoot. But her eyes remained dry. The sky cried for her, for the rest of the afternoon and deep into the night.
For days, Camille wove in and out of the wooded areas that ran parallel to the road. Countless hours of fearing that every unknown noise meant she’d been discovered by a German patrol. She slept, but rarely. Sometime in the middle of the third, fourth, possibly fifth night, she arrived at the address in Rennes that Pierre had made her memorize. She’d studied a map of the city months ago and, as she’d insisted with Rachel and her mother, had gone over every twist and turn until she knew the route by heart.
Light shone from within the little house, making it look cozy and warm. Tired and thirsty, her energy spent, Camille stumbled up the walk, and somehow found the strength to scratch at the door.
Twenty seconds, that’s all it took, and Pierre Garnier opened the door. He stood with the light at his back, the soft glow caressing his dark hair. He was fully dressed, as if he’d been waiting for her arrival for some time. His smile was as inviting as his home. “Camille.” He peered around her. “You are alone?”
She managed a nod, more a lifting and lowering of her chin. She blinked away the need to cry and then, suddenly, she was inside the house, the door shut behind her. A heartbeat later, his arms wrapped her in a long, desperate hug. She clung, shamelessly, but so did he, and as he held her just as fiercely as she held him, every terrible fear she’d harbored during her journey washed away.
Eventually, Pierre shifted. He held her a little bit away, his gaze running over her face, then from her head to her toes. “You’re hurt. Come, let me check your injuries.”
The request was from a man of medicine, but his voice was filled with a personal intimacy that superseded his profession. “It’s not my blood.”
He visibly relaxed. Then his spine stiffened again. “The SS officer?”
“Dead. He... Oh, Pierre, he’s dead. I didn’t kill him,” she rushed on to say. “But they...the Gestapo, they will think I had a hand in his death. So, I ran. I came here.”
“On foot?”
“It took me five days, I think. Maybe it was a week. I have lost track of time, and I—”
He gave her no chance to say more. She was back in his arms, surrounded by his heat, relishing his strength. The tears fell at last, big, bone-rattling sobs.
“It’s okay,” he assured her, rubbing her back in slow, easy strokes. “You’re safe, Camille. You’re safe now.” He repeated the words until they were as real to Camille as the air in her lungs.
Her sobbing eventually turned to hiccups, and slowly, she put space between them. She looked into the eyes that had always drawn her in. Now they promised everything she’d forgotten how to want and things she’d never known could be hers.
“When was the last time you ate?”
The doctor was back, and she found herself smiling. “Three days ago, possibly longer.”
“Food first. And then you will rest.”
She would remember the next hour as the warmest, safest of her life. Pierre wrapped her in a blanket, started a fire, then served her a cup of hot, watered-down tea. No sugar, no lemon, yet it was the sweetest brew she’d ever tasted. Because he’d made it for her. He served her a piece of bread and some soft cheese, a meal fit for a queen. That’s how it went down. How she would remember the taste.
“Thank you for coming to me,” he said, sitting across from her, his eyes full of questions she could tell he wanted to ask, but he was too polite to push the conversation on her after her ordeal.
Why was he so kind? She didn’t know what to do with all that kindness. “I didn’t kill him,” she blubbered through another onslaught of tears.
“I believe you.” He took her hand, held it nestled between his larger ones. “Can you tell me what happened?”
She did. Every bit of it.
He put his hand to her cheek. She could feel his heartbeat in his palm, like a balm to the bruise von Bauer had inflicted, no doubt an ugly greenish color by now. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he said. “But I’m glad you listened to your American friend. She was right. They will think you are to blame and are probably searching for you as we speak.”
“I know.”
He dropped his hand and moved to sit beside her. “I won’t let them find you.” He kissed her forehead, her cheek, and ended with the lightest touch to her lips. “Am I scaring you?”
“You’re really not.” In his slow, soft smile she saw the quiet integrity that had always drawn her to him, so different from the man intent on killing her.
She swallowed away the sudden sensation of hands wrapped around her neck, but it was as if Pierre could read her mind. His fingertips touched the tender spot on her throat. “I will protect you, Camille. No matter how long this war lasts, I will hide you in this house, and keep you safe. You and your sister, you are both safe in my care.”
Lost for words in the face of such integrity, more sincere than any wedding vows, Camille couldn’t speak. But she could smile. Oh, how she smiled.
He smiled back.
The last of her apprehension wore away. Something new took its place, something wholesome and good. Everything she’d done—all her mistakes, the years of guilt—they were being washed away with each new breath. Camille felt swept clean by this man, her story rewritten. A different, hopeful tale that didn’t include tragedy and failure.
They spoke a little longer, but now that her stomach was full, a languid flowering of warmth seeped through her, and she couldn’t keep up her end of the conversation.
“That’s it. Bed for you.” He scooped her up and set her down on a soft mattress, then pulled the covers up to her chin. “Sleep now, ma charmante fille.” He kissed her forehead. “We’ll talk more in the morning.”
“I’d like that.”
He smiled that beautiful, pure smile of his, and she was flooded with a sense of peace. There would be no nightmares tonight, not with Pierre watching over her, and as she looked deep into his eyes, eyes that held hers with unwavering faithfulness, Camille knew she would spend the rest of her life with this man.