More blood. Now she was shaking all over. She moved a dead branch aside—and froze.

A man lay in the hollow. He was covered in dust and wore the uniform of a paratrooper, a battered helmet on his head. He was shivering so hard she could hear his teeth chatter. He held a sidearm steady on one drawn-up knee, pointed straight at her. “Don’t move,” he said. “Don’t make a sound. Don’t make me shoot you.”

Part 3

Bethany Bay

In photography there is a reality so subtle that it becomes more real than reality.

—ALFRED STIEGLITZ

Eleven

I’m confused about something,” Camille said to her father.

“Welcome to reality,” he said, puttering in the kitchen. Their regular Friday-night dinner would be a special one tonight. It was the end of the school year, and they were making Julie’s favorite—rustic pizza baked on the outdoor grill. The dough was resting on a tray, ready to spin into homemade crust, expertly blistered and crisped under her father’s watchful eye.

Camille had brought her tablet with the images and research she’d been collecting about Bellerive and Sauveterre.

“Do you recognize this?” She showed him the colorized portrait Finn had sent her. “It’s from the town archives, and apparently it’s a picture of Didier Palomar.”

Her father dusted the flour from his hands and put on his reading glasses. He flinched visibly as he focused on the picture. “I’ve never seen that photograph.”

“It’s the reason I’m confused. If the colorizing is accurate, then he was blond and blue-eyed.”

“He might well have been. His sister, Rotrude, was also fair and had pale eyes, as I recall.”

“Your mother, Lisette, was fair, too. I mean, that’s how it looks in the self-portrait she made.” Camille studied her father’s face, then looked at Didier again. “If he and his wife were both blond, how did you end up with curly black hair and brown eyes?”

He frowned. “I know nothing of my grandparents on either side. Perhaps the darker coloring is from them.”

“Well, I don’t know much about genetics, but I do know brown eyes are a dominant trait. Two blue-eyed people can’t make a baby with brown eyes, can they?”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning . . . Suppose Didier was not your father?”

“Ah, but he was. That is the reason I inherited Sauveterre. I was his only heir.”

“Could it be possible that your biological father was someone else?”

“Certainly. It all happened before my time, chérie. With foreign soldiers overrunning the village, taking whatever they wanted, women got pregnant and had their babies.”

“Don’t you want to be sure?”

A distant yearning softened his gaze. “If I found out for sure . . . mon dieu, it would change everything. But how would one determine that?”

“We could do a DNA test. It’s a simple procedure these days. I mean, it’s probably an unlikely possibility, but if there was something from Didier—a lock of hair, maybe?”

“He is seventy-three years gone, and after he was executed, he was buried in an unmarked grave.”