Billy Boyle (26 page)

I talked to her about my family, my kid brother, Dad, and Uncle Dan, and all their cop pals. I told her about being a cop—the real thing, not bragging about being a criminal detective or anything. I told her about the Boston neighborhoods, Southie, Back Bay, Chinatown, and the docks. I explained how I got here, Uncle Ike and everything. I didn’t even try to make myself sound like a big deal. It was so easy to talk with her that I never felt a need to lie or even dress things up.

We started out sitting with our legs up on the sofa. Soon we were stretched out with our legs intertwined. By the time Diana finished telling me about her life growing up at Seaton Manor, we were cuddled up together pretty good, my arm around her, her soft hair smelling like a warm summer day.

“It was a good place to grow up, but I missed having a mother. All my friends had mothers, and I couldn’t even remember what mine looked like. Father was wonderful, but there was always a missing piece, some part of me that felt like it could never grow up. I still wonder about her, what she was like, really, not what Father remembers or tells us.”

“I think I know,” I said.

“How could you?” Resentment crept into her voice, as if I had trespassed.

“You and Daphne. You’re both wonderful, special in your own way. Some of that comes from your father—how you were brought up, sure—but there has to be quite a bit of your mother in both of you. Look to the best of yourself.”

Diana was quiet for a minute, staring into space, thinking.

“Yes, I never thought about it that way. Does the best of you come from your father, Billy?”

“I think so. My best efforts, anyway. I don’t know if I can ever live up to him.”

“That’s the same mistake Thomas always makes. He thinks he needs to equal Father in everything. But that goes after it backward, don’t you see?”

“No, I don’t.”

“If you want to play that silly game of competition between father and son, think about what your father was doing when he was your age, not what he’s accomplished since then. What was your father doing when he was as old as you are?”

“Shipping out from the States in the last war,” I said, seeing where she was going.

“Was he an officer?”

“No. He ended up a sergeant.”

“See?”

I did. We laughed a bit, and I tried not to think about Dad’s time in the trenches, and how all the gold braid in the army wouldn’t make up for living through that. We talked some more about Seaton Manor, horses mostly.

“Then the war came,” she sighed, a sigh burdened with all the sadness the room could hold. Memories of childhood at the manor with Daphne and their brother, Thomas; growing up with horses and the peaceful English countryside all around them; replaced with bombing raids, defeat, and death.

“Thomas was the first to leave, when his Territorial Army unit was called up. The Essex Brigade.”

“He’s in North Africa now?”

“Yes, did Daphne tell you? Thank God he wasn’t at Tobruk. Twenty-five thousand boys captured, can you believe it?” Neither of us could. I tried to imagine what twenty-five thousand men marching into prison camps looked like, and failed.

“Did you and Daphne join at the same time?”

“No, you must know it’s always up to the oldest to break new ground. Daphne was quite smart about it, too, joining the WRENs. It appealed to Father, with his naval background, even though he was against it at first. When I joined, there was hardly a squabble.”

“Why didn’t you join the WRENs, too?”

She shrugged, dismissing the idea of following in the footsteps of her older sister. I knew the look.

“I wanted to do something on my own, to go to a place Daphne and Father never had been. I heard that FANY units were being trained as telephonists to serve at headquarters in the field. It seemed terribly romantic at the time, to free a man to fight and be at the front at the same time.”

“In my limited experience, HQ is never at the front.”

“Well, closer than anywhere in England, and closer than we ever thought it would be.”

“Blitzkrieg,” I said, sounding out the word the world had never even heard of just a few short years ago.

“Yes. I was with Lord Gort’s headquarters, as I said. We were in Belgium. It was May, and I remember there were flowers blooming everywhere. Warm days and sunshine greeted us. We had our communications all set up; everything was working perfectly. The Germans hadn’t attacked yet. They were to our front, the Belgians on our left, and the French to our right.”

“And then?”

“Then the Germans were everywhere. They hit us from the front and cut right through the French lines south of us. Panzers and Stukas, that’s all anyone talked about. We had to fall back, and at first it seemed just like a setback, that we’d take up new positions and stop them. But nothing stopped them. Telephone lines were all cut, we pulled out, and found ourselves on a road full of refugees. The Stukas came, making that awful screaming sound, almost worse than the bombs.”

She was wringing her hands, staring off into space, listening for the sound of dive-bombers. I had heard them, too. In newsreels. The Stuka dive-bomber had sirens built into their wings, so when they dove on a target it made a god-awful screaming noise. Maybe I had seen her in one of those newsreels, a haunted face in a truckload of FANYs, while I waited for the first reel of Charlie Chaplin in
The Great Dictator
.

“Pull back, pull back, that’s all we ever heard. The Germans started out in front of us, and then we couldn’t withdraw fast enough to keep them out of our rear areas. Headquarters actually was in the front lines, since we were nearly surrounded.” She laughed bitterly.

“But you got out OK? From Dunkirk?” I wanted this story to end well, but I knew there was something else, something that had happened to her there.

“Yes, I got out. On a destroyer. We had been pressed into service as nurses, since we all had some basic first-aid training. There were a lot of wounded. Quite a lot. We took doors from houses when we ran out of stretchers.”

Diana wasn’t talking to me anymore. Her voice was low as her eyes stared straight ahead and saw the ghosts of Dunkirk, long lines of men standing in the sand awaiting deliverance or death. Her cheeks were streaked with tears as she told of the wounded men being loaded onto the destroyer, and tending to them on decks slippery with blood.

“It was terrible, not while I was actually doing something, but as soon as I stopped moving for a minute, it would just all be too much. When we left the pier it was crowded with men, some yelling and screaming, but most silently waiting their turn. I thought I had seen the worst of it at that moment, sailing away aboard that destroyer, watching those faces on the shore disappear as we headed into the Channel.”

She shook her head, wiping tears from her eyes as she did so. I took her hand in mine, gently, to let her know I’d wait. I could hear the alarm clock on the nightstand ticking. Her hand slipped from mine as she spoke again.

“We heard aircraft, high above us, and we thought they were ours, since they didn’t attack. But they must have been German fighters, flying cover. Some of them dove down and strafed the smaller boats. I was standing at the rail on the stern deck, checking my life vest, when I heard them. Stukas.” She spat out the word, and pressed her hands to her ears.

“Everything was so loud,” she said, her eyes squeezed shut and her head bowed, as if she were taking cover. “The Stukas and those sirens, the guns on the destroyer firing up at them, some of the men screaming, everything happening while the ship was zigzagging at top speed. We had to hang on to the men on stretchers so they wouldn’t slide off the deck. There were men everywhere—below decks, on every surface above deck. Everyone wanted to get out. Isn’t that funny? They were the lucky ones!”

“You don’t have to—”

“The first group missed us. I could see their bombs as they let them go. Each one would dive, drop its bomb, and then zoom up, as if it was suddenly lighter than air. It was almost beautiful. I followed each bomb down, and each one missed, either to the side or behind us. We were drenched by the splashes, but it seemed we were charmed. Five planes, five misses.”

Diana looked up, as if those bombs were still falling above her. I wasn’t even there.

“But then five more came, right after those. The gunners were still firing at the last of them when the second wave came. The first bomb hit just forward of the bow, but it must have damaged the ship. We were all thrown forward, and it started to slow. The second hit square on the forward deck. There was a huge explosion, and I was thrown backward by the force of it. Black smoke was everywhere. I couldn’t see a thing. I could feel the heat, though, coming up from the bow. We were practically dead in the water, just our forward motion keeping us going. Then the ship started to list.”

“You went into the water?”

She looked at me as panic crept into her eyes. Her voice was shrill and I had to put my finger to my lips to get her to lower it, so her old man wouldn’t wake up and lower the boom.

“You know, even if there had been enough life vests, we couldn’t have put them on some of them wounded. They couldn’t have endured it. But there weren’t enough, not nearly.”

“No, there must’ve been hundreds of wounded. How could there have been enough?”

“Yes, yes, there couldn’t have been,” she said loudly, as if trying to convince herself. I put my finger to my lips again and listened for footsteps in the hallway.

“It wasn’t our fault,” she said in a lower voice. “But I didn’t know what to do!”

I almost wished for Sir Richard to break down the door.

“There was nowhere to move them. The fire was coming toward us, and the ship was keeling over. I tried dragging one stretcher out of the fire, but we all slid toward the rail when the ship went over—”

“Oh no,” I couldn’t stop myself from saying. “Oh, no.”

“I wanted the ship to sink faster, to put out the fires, but it was so slow. So slow. The men on stretchers couldn’t move. Smoke rolled over them, enveloping them. Then they all went into the water, toppling over one another. It was so cold. I managed to swim away from the ship before she sank. But the wounded… they couldn’t.”

“You did your best,” I whispered. “You did everything you could; it wasn’t your fault.”

She leaned forward and thrust her face against my chest, sobbing from someplace deep inside, choking on her tears as she tried to suppress them. She needed a deep, angry screaming, crying jag, but all she could do was smother her tears on my chest. It lasted a long time, until she was whimpering, worn out by her agony. Then she was quiet. I looked at her, trying to imagine her slipping off that deck into the channel waters, the dead and dying all around her.

I held her. Finally, her breathing became regular. She had fallen asleep, like a baby. I lay awake, like any guy would whose arm was dead because a beautiful woman was lying on it. Very uncomfortable, glad, and confused. I struggled up off the sofa, picking her up, and carried her to the bed. She was half asleep when I pulled the covers over her. I headed back to the couch, ever the gentleman. Besides, I didn’t want another rap in the chest.

“Billy?”

“Yes?”

“Come hold me. Please.”

Her tears came again, softer this time. I held her until she fell asleep again and wondered at the way my life had changed in a day.

“I’ve got to leave, Billy.”

Her whisper, the warmth of her breath in my ear, woke me. My arm was still around her and the first rays of dawn were filtering through the curtains. I smiled, inside and out.

“Father will be up soon. I must get changed and feed the horses,” she said as she untangled herself from the sheets and me and got up.

“Can I help you?”

“You already have. Thank you, Billy. Thank you for listening.”

I shrugged. “Not a problem.”

“Well, I do appreciate it. Especially since you were a gentleman. I’m sorry if it was frustrating.” She smiled and I blushed, as I thought of her waking up snuggled next to me, with me in that… condition.

“I’ll take care of the horses,” Diana said, laughing, “and you take a cold shower. I’ll see you at breakfast.” She blew me a kiss, opened the door, and slipped out quietly.

I was a little embarrassed, but I figured, what the hell. It didn’t seem to bother Diana, so I wouldn’t let it bother me. I got up and stumbled sleepily into the bathroom, thinking about cold showers—they weren’t big on showers in England—she must’ve heard that expression in an American movie. I glanced at the tub in the bathroom and thought about how English guys must have to soak in a cold tub. Ha! That’d sure cure ’em.

I stopped in my tracks. Wait a minute. A cold shower… a cold tub… I reached down and turned on the faucet. Cold water poured from the tap. In a minute it was even colder, coming up from deep underground. Why does a love-crazed guy take a cold shower? What does cold water do? Lessen the flow of blood? Slow things down? Yeah.

Bingo. That was it. It answered everything. Well, everything except the maps, and a little thing called motive. And who. So maybe not everything, but now I knew how and when. The rest would come soon enough. Ideas were buzzing through my head as I washed, packed my kit, and thought about how smart the killer had been, and how maybe that was a clue. I was knotting my field scarf when there was a knock at the door. I sprinted over, hoping it was Diana. I opened the door and saw the captain. He must’ve read my face.

“Sorry to disappoint you, Lieutenant. May I come in?”

“Sure… of course.” I moved back into the room. He shut the door behind him. Not the best sign.

“I’ll come straight to the point, Lieutenant. I don’t wish to be rude, and I’m sure you’re a decent young man.…” He sort of trailed off, looking around the room as if he had forgotten something, then back at me. He didn’t sound like a strict father who knew his daughter had spent the night with me.

“What do you mean, captain?”

“I mean that you should stay away from Diana.” The words came out in a rush, and he took a deep breath. I couldn’t figure out why he was saying this. I struggled to find words to make some sense out of it.