“I never knew him either,” he told Julie. “My father was killed at the very end of the war in Europe.”

“He was killed in the war, then? He was a soldier?”

“He was in fact the maire of the town of Bellerive.”

“You never told me he was the mayor,” Camille said.

“So what’s in the trunk?” Julie asked.

“I have not opened it yet. I have been waiting for you.”

“Oh my God, I can’t believe you waited. Let’s open it.” Julie was all over the trunk. She and Camille tipped the cardboard crate on its side and slid the trunk out onto the floor. It was old and battered, the kind of thing people stored in the attic or basement and then forgot. “Is it locked? How does it open?”

He held out a letter in shaky handwriting. “Madame says the key was long lost. We’ll have to break in like thieves.”

“Cool.” Julie was all over that, too.

Camille stood back, deeply intrigued. It was the same feeling she had in the darkroom the moment an image came to light. Anticipation. Discovery. A twinge of fear.

They cut the rusty lock in the center of the lid, then pried open the latches on the side. The lid was stuck, and it took the three of them and several sprays of lubricant to get it open. Finally, the lid yielded with a rusty grind of hinges.

The smell of dust and age and dried lavender filled the air. The trunk was lined with peeling paper, raining dry flakes onto the floor. There was a tray in the top section, which was filled with a collection of the ordinary and the prosaic—yellowed linens, hand-embroidered with floral sprigs and edged with lace, wrapped around a matching vanity set of a hand mirror, comb, and brush.

Julie took each item out and set it aside. “Papi, do you recognize any of this stuff?”

“No.” Henry shut his eyes. “That scent—the lavender. It takes me back. My aunt Rotrude used to sprinkle the linens with lavender water as she was ironing them.”

“Rotrude? That’s a weird name,” said Julie.

“She was my father’s sister. She’s the one who raised me at Sauveterre. By the end of the war, it was just the three of us—Rotrude, her daughter Petra, and myself.”

Through the years, he’d given Camille only snippets of his boyhood. His aunt, he’d said, was not a pleasant person. His cousin Petra was ten years older than he was, and after he left France, they had lost touch. Both women were long gone by now.

They went through the items one by one—old clothing, books and maps, a few tools, French magazines from the 1940s, a handmade knife from Opinel. Camille studied a cloth badge of some sort. It was a torch with wings, frayed at the edges as if it had been sewn to something else. There were three ancient volumes of Sherlock Holmes stories in English.

“Did someone speak English in the house where you grew up?” Julie asked.