Clement careened past the spurting marble fountain. She wished he'd take it easy.

"Almost there." Clement honked at a dog. "It's just around the corner."

The corner happened to sit at the edge of the village, down a stone-walled sliver of an alley. Maybe wide enough for a horse cart, Aimee thought. Fat drops of rain splattered the windshield, multiplied, turned the dirt into muddy rivulets. A downpour. Several times the car door scraped the old stone walls as Clement maneuvered, cursing under his breath. Finally he jumped out to pull open a pair of metal gates, which grated over the cobblestones.

Bare wisteria branches climbed the tidy two-story stone farmhouse-modest compared to the Peltiers' Paris apartment. Aimee caught dark-green shutters being pulled closed from inside. The rain poured as Clement hefted her bag out. Panting, muddy, and wet, they stood scraping their shoes on the mat until the carved wooden door opened.

A dark-haired woman, handsome although her face was webbed with fine wrinkles, shook Aimee's hand. Bony and thin, the woman had a surprisingly strong grip. "What are you waiting for, Clement?" she boomed. "No need for formality when you're being drenched. Come in!"

The woman pulled Aimee into the sitting room, stuffed with aging upholstered furniture. The cramped room, small and lived in, was lined with oil paintings-mostly pastoral scenes, amateur but skillful.

Provincial, all right. Who was this-the Peltiers' country housekeeper?

"Call me Honorine. I'm Clement's mother. Elise asked me to settle you in," she said. "Some warm milk before bed?"

Treating her like a baby? What in the world had Elise told them?

"Non, Maman, she'd prefer a tisane." Clement winked and left for the kitchen.

Aimee sank into a sagging armchair. "I'm confused. Elise called and insisted I come at once. And she's not even here." She looked askance at Honorine, hoping the woman liked to talk.

She did.

Over herbal tisane, Honorine recounted how she'd come to visit this afternoon and discovered an immobile Madame Peltier by the cellar stairs. "Quelle horreur."

With more probing, Honorine continued: Mais oui, such a tragedy, Monsieur Peltier. Oui, Royant and Dufard had family homes here in the village but lived somewhere else. Rarely saw them, but of course, when Elise returned, there was time to visit.

Time? Not in Aimee's schedule. Her own life was on the line. She needed answers.

The dull throb in her head wouldn't go away. Rain beat against the shutters.

"How far away are their houses?" she asked.

"Monsieur Royant's family house is next door and Dufard's is down the street," said Honorine. "Like I said, they don't live here."

"Where's poor Monsieur Baret's house?"

"Ah, that's not occupied much, either. He never comes."

Aimee stowed that fact away. Honorine seemed to be forthcoming. Time to amp up her questions.

"Does Monsieur Baret have relatives here?"

Honorine shrugged. Stuck her large hands in the loose pockets of her black cardigan.

"Alors," said Aimee, "I thought maybe his murder the other night was the reason Elise and her mother came here."

"What?" Shock painted the woman's face.

"Terrible. Shot on the quai, in the same spot as Monsieur Peltier."

Fear, almost palpable, emanated from Honorine. What was she afraid of?

"You didn't know?"

"Why would I know?" Honorine said, trying to sound dismissive. "He's a neighbor I haven't seen in ages."

The woman was hiding something. Aimee could smell it, as her father would say.

"But he and Monsieur Peltier were in business together, non?" She was going on a hunch, based on the meeting agenda she'd seen at the bookstore. "As well as the other two, Royant and Dufard?"

Honorine stiffened.

"Good friends, weren't they?" Aimee pressed. "They all got together in Paris every month to have dinner at their favorite restaurant."

Why was Honorine so quiet all of a sudden?

"But you must know about les affaires," said Aimee, nudging. "Do you know what kind of business it was?"

"You're tired." Honorine had shut down tight as a clamshell. She went to the door and pulled out an umbrella. "Clement will show you to your room."

Clement led her up polished wood stairs, down a hallway, and then down another before he opened a creaking door. Faded floral wallpaper, floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the rain-drenched garden. A sunflower-print duvet covered the low wooden bed.

Aimee wondered if she looked as uncomfortable as she felt. Or as spitting mad. She'd come on a job, not on holiday, pressured by Elise, who wasn't even here. Elise, who stonewalled her at every turn.

And her head hurt.

"Clement, did Elise give you a message for me? The information I asked her about?"

"Me?"

Aimee's rain-soaked travel bag, which Clement set down, dripped on the wood floor. She grabbed a hand towel from the marble-topped dresser and wiped the floorboards. "Clement, I need your help. Can you tell me why Elise called me here? Or anything about the Peltiers' family business?"

He drummed his sausage fingers together. Shrugged.

Exasperated, she said, "Listen, this is important. Elise's father and another man, a Monsieur Baret, were murdered in Paris. The same way."

"He who pees in the wind wets his teeth." Clement's voice was so low she almost didn't catch it.

Her pulse jumped. She was wide awake now as the insinuation took hold. The answer lay in this village.

"How's that?"

"Everything's so complicated." Clement raked his thick fingers through greying hair. He was tongue-tied by indecision, she thought.

Aimee watched him, waiting. Don't fill the silence during questioning, her father advised, let them speak first.

"Elise is a good person," he said, finally. "I remember her as a little girl. She's stayed that way-sweet, innocent. Her parents sent her to school in Montreal-she's been away for years. Now she appears, scared and asking me for a favor."

She read it in his eyes: Clement was sweet on Elise.

She heard her father's voice-Do whatever you have to do: cajole, flirt, empathize. Intimidate as the last resort. Just find what they're hiding. They're always hiding something.

"Something happened here during the war, didn't it, Clement? That's what Peltier's and Baret's murder have in common, non?"

This was the first time she'd seen a man's mouth drop open in surprise. He nodded. "No one talks about it."

Score! she almost shouted. She was getting somewhere.

"What? What was it that happened, Clement?"

"You seem awfully curious for someone your age."

"Two men have been murdered, Clement. Men from this village."

Aimee saw a struggle in Clement's face. He'd picked up a polished stone shaped like an arrowhead from a collection on the shelf. Prehistoric silex stone tools-she remembered from a lycee history class. The Loire Valley had been populated long before the Romans arrived, before the Gauls were even tribes.

"Anything you tell me stays within these four walls," she coaxed, hoping she came across as trustworthy and confident. What would it take to reach this stubborn peasant?

Clement fingered the silex, a mottled greenish brown. His wariness seemed to get the upper hand and he silently shook his head. "You're a kid playing detective. And like all Parisians, you expect the world."

"Alors, Elise is family. My cousin. Can't you trust me? I'm useless to her if I don't know more background."

Clement hesitated. She needed to make up his mind for him.

She reached for her handbag on the old burl wood desk and took a big breath. "I'm sorry for what I'm about to show you. Does it strike a chord?"

Clement stared at the photo of Baret's bound body against the quai. His big hands shook.

"Where did you get this?"

"More to the point, what if Elise is in danger, too?"

Perspiration beaded Clement's upper lip. That got to him.

"What is it, Clement? What are you thinking about?"

An intake of breath. "The old nightmare."

That's all he could say? Here she was, clutching at straws-so close she could smell it.

"What do you mean?"

He averted his gaze. Well, he wasn't going to open up. Time to try something else.

"Call me a taxi, Clement," she said. "I'm going to Vierzon."

She was leaning down to grab her wet bag when Clement spoke. "Wait." He pointed outside the window, to the rain-distorted mercury of the river. "It was Christmas, 1942. I was eight. I went down to the river and found the mayor shot in the head. There."

"Mon Dieu." Wide-eyed, Aimee sat down on the lumpy bed. Winced as her shoulder hit the wall.

She'd been eight when her mother left. It had marked her for life. How had his discovery marked Clement?

"Thought it was a dead animal at first . . . I'll never forget the smell. And the black flies. That day had turned warm for December, his body had been lying in the sun."

Aimee nodded, never taking her eyes off Clement.

"Later Papa yelled at me," he said. "He was mad that I had followed the men who found the body. They didn't know I'd tagged along to fish." Clement's jaw quivered. "I never understood why he got so angry. But it was the four men you've mentioned-Bruno Peltier, Alain Dufard, Philbert Royant, and the jeweler, Baret."

Aimee suppressed a gasp.

"And there was a fifth man, too, the blacksmith, Minou. He died at Liberation."

Aimee nodded in encouragement. "What happened when you found the body?"

"The men told me that Gaubert, the mayor, was un tratre. That he'd been shot by the Resistance. After that, my parents wouldn't let me go out," he said. "Not even to school. Or to see my friends."

"So Gaubert was a traitor-why does that matter now?"

Clement shook his head. "Who says it does? Terrible things happened then. We'd hear shots at night, machine guns across the river in Givaray." His eyes moistened. "The Germans executed sixty villagers one morning." Clement shrugged. "My parents never talked about it. No one did."

"Sixty people executed, the mayor shot, and what-everyone goes silent?" She shook her head in disbelief. "I've heard villages are like fishbowls; everyone knows everyone's business."

"Don't you understand? Times were different. People shut up, kept their heads down. No one wanted to be next."

"Next?"

Clement shrugged again. His whole generation had such chips on their shoulders-always talking about how they'd gone hungry, worn wooden shoes stuffed with newspaper, how her generation wouldn't understand, blah blah, on and on. If she asked questions, she'd get a long sigh and a hooded look, a murmured you wouldn't understand. Their past only dribbled out in unguarded moments-a detail here or there when memory took over. Move on, she wanted to shout, the war ended more than forty years ago.

She would try again-ask him specific questions.

"Were messieurs Peltier, Royant, Dufard, and Baret involved in the Resistance?"

"I was a kid. What would I know?"

A kid, but not dumb or mute.

"But didn't you say they told you the mayor had been a traitor? That the Resistance had shot him?"

"Like I said, I was a kid."

She needed to ask him something more specific, try to draw him out. She thought back to Baret's hand, those prosthetic fingers. "Do you remember Baret? Would he have lost his hand or arm in the war?"

"Came from the next village, a jeweler. Lost his arm at the Somme, like my uncle. The villages were full of war-wounded when I grew up."

"What about after the war? Has something come out recently?"

Clement paused in thought. "There were things the grown-ups talked about when they didn't think we could hear."