Alistair had done a lot of thinking since reading John Peterson’s last chapter of facts or fiction. The doodles on his desk proved it. If the execution had indeed been a ruse designed to fool the SS, the only person in command who could have pulled it off was the head of the counterintelligence division of the SD, none other than the notorious Colonel Derrick Albrecht. Had he fallen for Victoria Grayson and orchestrated her mock death to save her life? The world would never know. John Peterson had not mentioned the name of her savior in the book, and Colonel Derrick Albrecht had been tried in a French court for the murder of France’s contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature and executed by guillotine in late 1945.

*  *  *

Over their rods and reels and fishing lines cast into the White River, Bucky and Chris and Brad had met to discuss the validity of John Peterson’s claim and to consider Bridgette’s suggestion that they go to Paris. With Alistair, they routinely got together for a weekend in Meeker during trout season, the date marked on the calendar months beforehand, but this meeting was slipped in on a moment’s notice because Bridgette had to know their decision to make the appropriate reservations. Alistair, his lungs no longer able to abide the high altitudes, could not be with them. He had been coming to Meeker for the group’s get-together since Joanna and Jared, now in their sixties, moved to Florida to relieve their arthritis and left Brad with the company and the new house.

Their wives and children had given them flak for even considering going to Paris, especially without them. The trip would mean canceling the Hilton Head plans, and the time wasn’t convenient for the men to be away for so long from their jobs. Brad would have to cancel a trip to East Texas to oversee a crucial logging operation. Bucky was working under a deadline for an engineering project that if successful would mean a bulge in his company Christmas stocking, and Chris had appointments with master’s degree candidates for whom a delay in discussing their thesis topics would sorely affect the completion of their graduate work.

In other words, a lot of people were going to be pissed if they went to Paris. Were the sacrifices worth it on the off chance that a woman they had not seen for eighteen years, who was most likely dead, would keep an appointment made twenty years ago? After all this time, would she remember it—or them, for that matter—even though her image was as indelibly imprinted in their memories as a carving on stone?