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knew—he was too reserved for that—and so she pecked him onthe cheek. The air filled with the squeal of brakes as the train pulled into the station. “I know I’ve never called you ‘Father,’” she said, “but you have been one to me.”
    His eyes looked damp. “You’d better hurry. Get yourself a decent seat.”
    She joined the crush of passengers boarding the train. Once she’d found a third-class seat, she watched Alfred through the window. He walked back and forth on the platform, shoulders hunched beneath his overcoat, head downcast. Miserable. Gretchen had to hug her purse to her chest, so she had something to hold onto. The train lurched forward, picking up speed until Alfred was only a dot in the distance and then he was nothing at all.

5

    BY FIRST LIGHT, SHE WAS ON A SHIP BOUND FOR Calais, standing on the deck and squinting in the sunshine that bounced off the steel-gray waters of the English Channel. France was a brown line on the horizon. From behind her, she heard the low murmurs of the other passengers braving the cold in their heaviest overcoats as she was, eager to taste the salt-scented air and hear the waves slapping against the belly of the boat.
    She leaned on the ship’s railing, staring at the growing shape in the distance until her eyes ached. After so long, she was about to step back onto the same piece of land that contained Germany. Where Daniel might still be alive, and her brother and father softened to dust beneath the ground, and, as far as she knew, her mother lived among the marshlands of Dachau. She shaded her eyes from the glare with her hand, so none of the other passengers could see her tears before she blinked them away.
    For the hundredth time since she’d left Oxford the previous night, she wondered what had happened to Daniel. Was he safe and in hiding somewhere? Who was this mysterious victim he was supposed to have killed, and what secrets had been concealed by the real murderer?
    For she had no doubt that there had been a real crime, a real victim; the National Socialists weren’t stupid and their power was limited. They needed a body lying in the morgue—a body they had put there, so there wasn’t a possibility of the true killer being caught and destroying their case against Daniel—and evidence they had manufactured, to convince Berlin’s police force to issue a warrant for Daniel’s arrest. If the National Socialists wanted a legal-looking means of getting rid of Daniel, they’d hit upon a clever one: murder was a crime punishable by execution.
    Gretchen shuddered, watching the vast docks of Calais rise above the sea. She’d have to be smarter and faster than the National Socialists and the police combined, if she wanted to get to Daniel first.

    Before midafternoon, she had boarded a train, where she sat in a crowded third-class compartment with a harried-looking mother and three small children. At one of the station stops, she wired a telegram to the Whitestones, saying she had reached France. After that, there could be no more communication between them, she knew, not until she was out of Germany again and on her way back to them.
    The trains were slow and some didn’t run at night, so after switching her pounds for marks at a public exchange, she slept in a grubby hotel down the street from the station. In the morning,she left on a train headed for the border. As the hours passed, she watched sunlight glimmer on the fields flickering past, trying not to think, for thought would only bring fear.
    That night, she curled in a corner of her seat, clutching her purse. When she woke in the gray dawn, the people sharing her compartment were still asleep, sprawled in their seats. Out of habit, she touched the gold hooked charm on her necklace; the Hakenkreuz had been her sixteenth birthday present from Hitler, and the metal felt warm against her fingers. She’d been wearing it when she’d fled from Germany. For reasons she couldn’t understand, she hadn’t