Lying there in the suds, gazing at her pink toes poking through the bubbles, she wished she could just wash away her worries, but they persisted. As an American, she took a lot for granted, she thought. It wasn’t as if she was an innocent who’d never been touched by crime. She was a newspaper reporter, and she’d been involved in numerous investigations back home in Tinker’s Cove. But there the system was quite different. Chief Kirwan didn’t detain random suspects for hours at a time, the Tinker’s Cove Police Department didn’t toss people’s homes in pointless searches, and suspects were presumed innocent until proven guilty. And in America they didn’t grab your passport, not unless you were actually indicted on a very serious charge. She wasn’t actually positive about this—it hadn’t really come up in Tinker’s Cove—but she had read about high-profile cases in which the defendants were ordered to surrender their passports, and the news reports always made much of it.

Her thoughts turned to a favorite old movie that she and Bill had watched a few weeks ago, Casablanca. She remembered the European refugees who gathered in Rick’s café during World War II, waiting desperately for letters of transit that would allow them to leave Morocco for someplace safer, like America. They were like those frantic refugees, she thought, scrubbing her face with a terry-cloth bath mitt. They were stuck in Paris until the French police decided to return their passports.

She was beginning to think Elizabeth was right: France was a horrible place. She thought of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and their two children, chased out of their beautiful palace at Versailles and dragged to prison in Paris. She could understand why the common people detested the aristocrats, but it was possible to see the royal family and their circle as victims of circumstance, unaware of the poverty and suffering taking place outside the palace gates. Mob rule was terrifying. She’d read of the September Massacres, when the queen’s friend, the beautiful princesse de Lamballe, was literally torn limb from limb. And when they’d finished, Lucy recalled, they stuck her head on a pole and paraded it back and forth beneath Marie Antoinette’s prison window.

Poor Marie Antoinette. What a dreadful end. Stuck in jail for years, cruelly separated from her children, then carted through the streets of Paris to the guillotine. And the guillotine . . . How horrible was that? And to think it wasn’t mothballed until 1981, which really wasn’t very long ago. Suddenly cold, Lucy climbed out of the tub and wrapped herself in a towel. All she really wanted, she realized with a shiver, was to go home.