Coughing, he stared up at the blue sky, then pushed himself up to his knees. He’d done pretty well. Only a third of the men remained in the pit, and it had taken two men to remove Clay.

But would a middle-of-the-road performance be enough to stay in the Rangers?

6

CAMP FORREST
THURSDAY, JULY 8, 1943

“Good night, gentlemen. We’ll open tomorrow morning at eight.” Leah let out the last three soldiers and flipped the sign on the library door to read “closed.”

Leaning back against the closed door, she grinned at her domain. Darlene said she was crazy to enjoy being alone in a library late at night, but it was heavenly.

After she turned off unneeded lights, she retrieved her purse from behind the circulation desk and headed to the stacks. Tonight she was up to the 280s in the Dewey decimal system, and she pulled out a volume about the Orthodox Church.

At a table she pulled a composition book and pen from her purse. Perhaps this book would yield a picture of the ornately decorated church in her memory or of a Greek surname.

No pictures graced the pages, but Leah transcribed a few names. None sounded right.

The ink flowed so smoothly from her new pen. She’d purchased a celluloid pen with a swirl of greens that reminded her of a mountain brook, but it wasn’t the gold pen of her dreams, the sort of pen her classmates had received from family for high school graduation.

What would it be like to have family to love her and give her a personal gift? Since she and her sisters had been sent to an orphanage when their parents died, their other family members must have been dead or in Greece.

Leah had spoken Greek well enough to assume her parents were immigrants, but she’d spoken English well enough to conclude the immigration wasn’t recent. She’d clung to the Greek language, but Mr. and Mrs. Jones had beaten her every time she used “that foreign heathen talk.”

With a shudder, Leah riffled through another chapter. It was for the best that she’d fallen ill and they’d abandoned her in Des Moines.

If only they’d given the orphanage more information about her background. Leah had been allowed to read her report before she left Iowa, which had been both painful and futile.

Mr. and Mrs. Jones claimed to have lost her birth certificate and adoption papers. They said her name was Leah Jones and not to let her say otherwise—she was a lying, storytelling kind, always making up silly names for herself. Like “Thalia.”

They’d only adopted her to help in their store one day, but when they lost the store in the Depression, they had no more need for Leah.