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was confusing; he sounded confused. Tuck wasn’t one for pessimism, and he wasn’t prone to rambling. The only thing that was clear was that he was reaching out for help. The trouble was, she couldn’t for the life of her think what it was he wanted her to do. There was no Miss Van Effing to visit. There was nothing she could do at Raven Point. And what did he mean about the secret? And about Cher Ami?
    Juliet tried to imagine her brother there in her small dormitory room, seated in the wooden rocker. When he was seven, he had fallen from a tree in their yard, and she remembered now the wild and desperate look on his face as he’d shrieked for help.
    She sat down at her desk, pulled the chain on her lamp, and extracted a small envelope from her drawer. The birth certificate was soft, grayish; she stared at it for a moment and then, with an eraser, gently rubbed at the final digit in her birth date until enough of it had vanished so that with a pencil she could change the 6 to a 5 .
    Then she crouched beside her bed and pulled out her blue suitcase.

PART II
1944

CHAPTER 4
    JULIET STOOD PERFECTLY still, listening to the scrape of the saw; small metal teeth were tearing at brittle bone. The boy on the operating table couldn’t have been more than nineteen. His eyes were closed, his face as pale as alabaster. A beauty mark punctuated his right cheek.
    “The limb, Nurse Dufresne.”
    Juliet grabbed the leg by the ankle, where it was coldest—warm flesh still gave her the willies—and wrangled it across her forearms, making sure its hairs didn’t rub between her cuffs and gloves. She hurried to the corner and set the limb in a pail clogged with legs and feet. Jesus, when was someone going to empty the trash?
    Back at the operating table, she avoided looking at the boy. It seemed wrong to stare at a patient splayed so vulnerably unless her immediate task required it.
    “Blood,” pronounced Bernice, the nurse anesthetist, as she plucked the ether cloth from the patient. “These two pints won’t cut it.” Bernice watched supplies like a sailor watching weather. She was short and pale and kept her red hair cut like a man’s. The long-time nurse at a school for wayward boys, she had the rigid stare of a woman prepared, at any moment, to ruler-smack your knuckles.
    “I’ll go check the fridge,” said Juliet, peeling off her gloves. Outside, she loosened her mask to suck in the damp air. Another breath of gangrenous rot and she’d faint.
    She gazed out at the mud-splattered city of tents. The field hospital had been pitched thirty miles north of Rome. Having finally claimed the bottom half of Italy, the US Fifth Army was pushing north of the capital, toward the Arno. Along the mountainous route, the Germans had fortified nearly every church and farmhouse, fighting intensely. Further complicating matters were the Ombrone and Cecina—two small rivers—and an elaborate lattice of gulches and gullies, heavily mined.
    That morning, the 120-bed hospital had reached capacity, but casualties were still arriving. In the warm drizzle, a double row of litters snaked nearly a hundred yards beyond the receiving tent; Juliet groaned. On shift for more than forty-eight hours, she was about to collapse. Her back ached, her feet were blistered, and her arms were numb from shaking plasma and saline. And when had she last eaten? A deep hunger splintered her stomach, but breaks were only to change clothes (the sight of blood-soaked nurses panicked patients). Just as well. Anything in her stomach might come up during an amputation.
    Lowering her head against the rain, she trudged toward the Sterilizing Tent, where her tent mate, “Glenda Texas,” stood rattling a steaming pan of needles and scalpels. Over her mouth Glenda had knotted a red silk scarf, a shiny crimson triangle that lent her the appearance of a glamorous bandit. Glenda had taken acting classes and liked to refer to herself as an ingénue.
    “Sugar, you tell them they