What Labrador suggested, all agreed to and willingly, including Alistair. Still no bigger than a minute, but possessing managerial skills sharper than ever, she remained the undisputed leader of the group, taking it upon herself to arrange all their get-togethers and to serve as a source of cool advice the boys still consulted even as they neared middle age. Alistair would have expected their wives to be resentful of their dependence on her, but they adored her, as did their children. She was the one divorced dragonfly in the group with no children of her own, but she basked in her role as aunt to the boys’ progeny.

So it was she who had a few days before offered the opinion that they should go to Paris for the reunion after all, “Just in case there was something to John Peterson’s story.” Even after all these years, Bridgette still held a scrap of hope that the faint diagonal line somebody had drawn too late through the mural’s liverwort might have held meaning. If Liverwort were alive, she’d be there, she maintained. She wouldn’t have forgotten the rendezvous point, date, and time, and she’d show up at the book and tea shop on September 23, 1962, at four o’clock, no matter what. They could count on it.

If they decided to go, it would be just the four dragonflies and the major, all agreed. The occasion was not to be a family vacation to a city that held so many memories they would each just as soon forget. Would the Paris of today prove cathartic, a way to shake off the miasma of cobwebs that still clung, or would the visit revive nightmares long chased away by the joys of survival? To prevent the trip from being a total bust should Liverwort—Victoria Grayson—not appear, all but Bridgette would be arriving a few days early, staying in accommodations of their own choosing until they met up at the Hotel La Rose. The others had people they wished to look up from the occupation years who, like Alistair, had left France without arranging a means to stay in touch. For him, it was Henri Burrell, his man in Paris, but Bridgette had learned through Parisian fashion sources that her close contacts—Madame Jeanne Boucher and Sister Mary Frances—had died a number of years ago.

But Alistair had another mission as well. Within three days of contacting his former colleague at CIA headquarters in Langley, he received back a report on John Peterson. The man was deceased, but his common-law wife was still alive. Her name was Raina Desjardins, and she lived in a French village in Normandy called Lion-sur-Mer.