His aunt left for Paris the following morning and that afternoon after school, Bucky biked to the county library and asked the kindly librarian to help him locate information on the French occupation of the Rhineland in 1919. Also, he wanted to know what antifascism meant and what a marshal of France was. His questions had to do with World War I, the librarian said, leading him to shelves full of books on the subject since so many in the county had served in that global conflict. Was he researching for a history report? she asked.

“You could call it that,” Bucky said.

They found a book about the swift and brutal French suppression of German resistance in the Rhineland, which had originally been a German territory. The librarian, whose husband had been killed on the Maginot Line, read over his shoulder. “Served the Jerries right!” she declared.

That evening Bucky leaned in close to the bathroom mirror to study his eyes, a source of embarrassment when he was younger. They were thickly lashed—“girl’s eyes,” they were teasingly called in elementary school. Now the girls thought them sexy. They were hazel with flecks of blue and green that alternated in dominance depending on the color of his shirt. He wondered about the man from whom he’d inherited them. At fourteen, Bucky had already decided that, though Horace Barton was a good dad and he wouldn’t have traded him for anyone else’s in the world, he did not want to be like him. He loved him dearly and respected him, but he did not admire him. But Bucky thought he might wish to emulate the “strong, commanding” man who lived across the ocean and was opposed to dictators and fascism, the man who as a marshal of France wore seven stars on his shoulders and carried a blue baton…the man his mother saw when she looked into her son’s eyes.

Behind the wheel of the Cadillac, Bucky touched the breast pocket of his sport coat in which he had tucked the letter from the man at the Office of Strategic Services. He might need it as a form of identification when he met him at Kelly’s Coffee Shop Monday morning.

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER FIVE

Bridgette / Labrador

Stephens College, Missouri

Bridgette Loring stepped back to appraise her creation, displayed on the wire dress frame formed to match the measurements of her best friend and college roommate, Gladys Bradbury. “That gown is utterly breathtaking,” her friend said beside her. “God, I hope I don’t ruin it for you, Bridge.”

“The judges will be looking at the dress, not you,” Bridgette said, “so relax and enjoy the stroll down the runway.”

“I’m afraid I’ll lose my balance when the cameras pop,” Gladys said. “What if they blind me, and I fall?”