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He could no longer hear the screaer hear the sound of rifle fire Ti, and ebbing

There was stillness He didn’t think that he had blacked out yet And he didn’t think that he had died

Yet

But still, tiht, drifted like a slow current

The stillness reain

Footsteps Walking Hard on the ground He tried to turn He felt soe that didn’t register in histo a tiny peephole surrounded by a haze of red and black

Yes, so to re that he would lose the battle any minute

Yet, there, yes a boot A ainst theshining despite the caking mud that spattered it

Just as his eyes closed conia on the boot

A swastika

The thought registered

Then there was no ht The world faded into a haze of cri but blackness

CHAPTER 1

"He has changed since you last saw hied" Ann waved her hand in the air as she spoke, the plu a swirl of smoke

Tara stared at her cousin blankly She was exhausted--she had ed to cross the Atlantic without even a catnap, despite the overnight duration of the flight when traveling eastward She wanted nothing randfather’s little chateau on the outskirts of Paris, but after picking her up at the airport, Ann had insisted they stop for petit dejeuner before heading out of the city

And now, though she wasn’t putting it in so randfather was senile, or suffering from Alzheimer’s disease

Tara narrowed her eyes, perplexed, as she watched Ann She shook her head, taking a long s of her cafe au lait "Ann, if Grandpapa is ill, then perhaps he should come back to the States--"

"Phui!" Ann wrinkled her nose, inching it higher in the air "Whybetter in the United States?"

"I didn’t reallyher lip The medical care in France was excellent She did have that tendency to think that the best of everything had to be in America

Except for croissants, perhaps And cafe au lait

She looked at Ann and gried

"But if you’re trying to tell hed deeply "No, no, it’s not that! Really, it’s not that at all"

"You think, though, that he is becoh to be allowed soain at that "Mais oui He claims he does not kno old he is himself He said that he was older than most of the boys in the Resistance, and lord, World War II ended in nineteen forty-five! So, yes, he is up there in years He has had the respiratory trouble, as I told you on the phone, but I’ve had hih I chide him and tell him he must be careful, he is up and about a bit each day But he sits in his library when he is up! He shuts hi that he calls the Alliance all the ti his war years"

Ann appeared troubled, drawn, and weary, which was not like her Tara had always thought her cousin was one of the most beautiful wo blue He hair was dark, her co and appealing She was tall and elegantly slim, with curves just where they should be

There had been times in Tara’s life when she had hated the visits of her French cousin She’d had too e who all but drooled openly when Ann came around She could admit to a certain amount of jealousy over the years, but she also loved her cousin, e were long in the past Ann had spent enough ti up to ht have shared--except that in Tara’s case, her "sister" had co an exotic foreigner Ann came to the United States frequently; Tara and her family went to Paris just three ti up Ann spoke both French and English perfectly, while Tara’s French was poor and her accent far too obviously Arandmother, Emily, an American nurse, at the end of the war The two had married, and moved to the United States Their son, David, had, in turn, fallen in love with a French artist, Sophie, during a sue in Paris He had rehter, Tara and her brother Mike’s eneration Irish American