The flames licked the worn leather. Aimee grabbed a poker. Her attempts to retrieve the diary only pushed it deeper into the flames.

"But it could explain what's happening now-"

"All lies."

The fire smoked, crackled, swallowing the yellowed pages in moments. Renaud caught Aimee's arm. With a whoosh the old diary pages curled, turning a burnt orange. "Let the past go."

Too late now. And the guilty got away. Again.

Elise was gathering the photos, but Renaud stopped her. "Why throw these away, Elise? It won't change anything. You'll lose memories."

Elise bit her lip. "Bon, I'll keep the photos. Then I'll confront Dufard and Royant, the liars." She took a key ring from the bookcase. Swearing, she fumbled with the key until she'd unlocked the biggest drawer. "This will hold them. Keep them safe."

Elise pulled an old wood box with leather handles onto the desk. Her hands shaking, she set each black-and-white photo inside, one by one. Tears were streaming down her face. Renaud rubbed her back, trying to calm her.

"You've upset Elise enough," he said. "I think you should go."

Aimee's eye focused on the box. "What's that?" Aimee rubbed her fingers on the box's wood side. Dark soot, like charcoal, came off.

"What are you doing?" said Elise.

From this angle, in the slant of winter light, she'd seen something embossed. A design.

"It's dirty, let me clean it off for you." Aimee rubbed with her scarf. Spit on her scarf and rubbed again. Ancient black shoe polish, by the smell and smudge of it. "Your father's box, that right?" Aimee asked.

Elise nodded.

She turned the now semi-cleaned box to reveal what she'd scrubbed and found.

Swastika. Eigentum der Reichsbank.

"Nice size for gold bars."

On the Minitel in the Peltier's hallway, she looked up the number of the man in the newspaper article. Called and arranged to meet him at the train station. She shouldered her bag and walked through the damp lanes, avoiding puddles in ruts made by old horse carts. Breathed in the rain-freshened air to clear her mind, put her questions together.

A few shops were open. She passed the boulangerie in the town square, the one she'd seen in the photo. Little had changed in fifty years except for the posters of Johnny Hallyday headlining at Bourges, the Armistice ceremony commemorating the Great War. She envisioned the old guys with medals at the square, the doddering few veterans of la Grande Guerre, as they appeared every November. Sad, so sad-their eyes filled with memories and their numbers dwindling every year.

"Mademoiselle Leduc?"

"Oui?" She turned in the station hall to see a man peering over his newspaper as she stood in the ticket line. "Georges Ducray?"

He folded his newspaper, nodded.

"The reporter I spoke to had a lot more years on him than you."

She caught the implication-she was too young to take seriously. She'd lied and told him she was a freelancer from Le Parisien interested in his allegations in the article.

"But the reporter never followed up on my information," said Georges Ducray.

Good. Now she'd have an in.

"That's why I came, Monsieur Ducray. I appreciate you meeting me." She needed to question him before he asked why the story hadn't been picked up by a national paper like Le Parisien. Or complained how a big city ignored the provinces.

Think, she had to think like her father. Ask the right questions.

Ducray-short, barrel-chested-was fortyish, with tight, greying curls like a wire-brush helmet. A red-embroidered train club patch on his jacket lapel. "You'd be better off catching the 12:04 at Vierzon straight to Gare d'Austerlitz."

Mon Dieu, not one of those train enthusiasts. One of her father's colleagues, obsessed with railroad minutia and locomotives, had dragged her as a teenager to his model train club under the Gare de l'Est. Grown men, she'd thought in disgust, playing with toy trains.

"The Vierzon line's direct and quicker," said Ducray.

A slight hiccup-like sound ended his phrases. A drinker? This early in the morning? She groaned inside.

Maybe this had been a bad idea.

"Otherwise you'll wait forever," he said.

"Still, it gives us time to talk," she said, pulling out her anatomy notebook. She gestured to the benches. "I'll take notes."

"What if I give you a lift, show you something en route?"

A few tipples of vin rouge and keen to get her in a car?

As if sensing her hesitation, he pointed to his chest. "Asthma sufferer. Side effect of my new medication gives me the hiccups."

No whiff of vin rouge and he seemed steady on his feet.

She pulled out the newspaper clipping. "I've got a story to write," she said, lying her heart out. "A story my editor won't accept without facts. These theories you're quoted saying-every little thing requires backup evidence." At least that's what Martine, who was studying journalism at the Sorbonne, complained about.

"Driving to Vierzon takes thirty minutes, give or take." He pulled out an old rail map with X's marked in red. "I can show you everything I've researched. The German truck recovery site, the river's course then and now, logistical problems."

She snapped her bag shut and stepped out of the ticket line. "Lead the way." An odd tour guide, but it worked for her. "Any basis to support your allegation that the sixty villagers executed in 1942 were related to a German truck bound for Portugal?"

"I thought you'd never ask," said Ducray, lifting the glasses hanging from a string around his neck onto his face. They got into his old Peugeot. He handed her the map, ground the car into first, and shot out of the parking lot. "Hold on, Mademoiselle Leduc."

After crossing the bridge to Givaray, Ducray turned onto a muddy road and let the engine idle on a small bluff. Across the river lay Chambly-sur-Cher, and a stone's throw away, a crumbling water mill. Aimee caught a whiff of damp manure drifting from over the river.

"Let me set the scene, that's how you say it, non?"

She winced. A crackpot? "In the movies maybe, Monsieur Ducray. Unless you've got facts, I haven't got a story."

Or a suspect who'd murder old men with shady links to Nazi gold.

Shouldn't she feel like an imposter, playing two roles, neither one very well? But she enjoyed playing reporter, giving herself a script and getting this train obsessive to cough up real details. Better than in the movies.

"Why are you so interested in this?" she said. "What's driving you?"

"I was a baby when my father was executed with the others," he said in a flat voice, emotionless.

The car engine idled. Ducks in a V formation rippled the river's gunmetal-grey surface. Georges Ducray had the perfect motive for revenge.

"When the war ended, I was two or three, but I still remember the German's black boots. We didn't go hungry, because this was farmland, and my mother ran a cheese shop. But I was never full."

She understood the difference. Nodded.

Ducray pulled over, reached in the back seat for a folder. He showed her photos; one titled La ligne de demarcation douaniers with a sentry booth at the bridge crossing, the French border guards wearing kepis, a pregnant woman, a beret-wearing man with her pushing a bicycle.

"Our only family portrait," Ducray said, a sliver of emotion.

He continued, matter-of-fact. "My uncle was a cheminot at Vierzon station. I've loved trains since I was a kid, gobbled up everything to do with them."

She nodded again, praying this went somewhere. That she could make Ducray's story come out.

"He always said the rail lines were bombed the night before my father and the villagers were shot."

She hadn't heard that before. Maybe it was in the damn diary Elise burned. "Go on."

"The Germans routed trains to Spain and Portugal via Vierzon-it's still a hub between north and south," said Ducray. "Because of the bomb damage on the tracks, the Germans deployed troop trucks to recover stock from stranded rail cars. The commandant requisitioned the trucks from the garage where my uncle worked." He paused. "There was a flash flood that night of the bombing. The river overflowed the banks there-in Chambly-sur-Cher. Where the missing truck was found, in the deepest part of the river, by the mill."

She looked around. "Wasn't this the demarcation? Are you saying the truck was in the unoccupied zone-illegally?"

"You're quick." Hiccup. "There's no access from our side. See?" He pulled out another map from his pocket. "Here's the river now. I marked in yellow the old course of the river in the late thirties from an agricultural map, and the barge routes. See, it's changed course-that was after the flash flood in 1942. The only way the truck could have ended up in the river by the mill was from the Chambly-sur-Cher side. There's no other way. Not even the mill has access."

She saw that. Her gaze caught on water grass under the surface, waving hypnotically like a woman's long hair.

"But that could have happened any time during the war. How could you match it to the requisitioned trucks?"

"All the records exist in the train station cellar," he said. "I know it like the lines in my hand. The logs, the garage requisitions." He handed her a stapled bunch of photocopied pages. "The recovered truck engine number matches one of the trucks that was requisitioned that night," said Ducray.

It made her think. "But given your scenario, okay, the passing truck would have been seen by the border guards."

"Just ask the retired butcher," said Ducray. "All hands were busy sandbagging the banks. Still, the wheat fields flooded. Guards were busy in the storm and with the RAF bombing."

An answer for everything, this Ducray. She wondered about him-his thoroughness raised red flags for her. His eagerness to set the record straight bordered on obsession. Besides, he had a potential motive for murder-revenge for his father, if he'd linked the German reprisals to the men who'd seemed to profit from the missing gold.

But he was a trove of information. She might as well see what else she could get out of him.

"The four German soldiers who were murdered-were they ever identified?"

"We know the serial numbers had been taken off their uniforms," said Ducray. "Presumably the Germans have identified them in their records."

"Have you checked that out, too?"

He hiccuped. "Non, that's all in Paris. I don't go to Paris."

"Why's that?"

"One time on a school trip, I got lost for hours in the Louvre." He gave another shrug. "Call me provincial, but it frightened the hair off me. Never want to go back."

True or not, she stashed that thought for later. Didn't want to burst that suspect theory yet. She nodded and smiled. "You're not the only one. I've gotten lost in the Louvre, too. And I'm Parisienne."

He started back toward town. "We need to get moving for you to make the train."

In the back of her mind something niggled. Ducray braked to avoid a mud-spattered spaniel. She wondered how Miles Davis was doing.

As he flashed his signal to pass a tractor, her eyes scanned the Chambly-sur-Cher riverbank, the bridge, the old mill. She remembered Bertrand's words. "Is that the mayor's barn over there? It's for sale?"

"It's abandoned. The sale sign's been there for years."

But it was so close, literally a stone's throw from the river. She used her kohl eye pencil to sketch the scene before her.

"I'll take you through Givaray," Ducray said, "past my shop."

It was an old-fashioned cheese shop, train set in the window.

"Does the window in back overlook the river?" she asked.

"Like to see?"

She nodded.

Inside, the young woman behind the counter smiled at her as Ducray spread the beaded curtain to lead Aimee through to the living quarters. Bare-bones, clean; worn, functional furniture-so unlike the Peltiers' luxurious house, or Madame Jagametti's quarters with its tins of foie gras and truffles.

"May I?" she opened the window to the damp but fresh air. The warble of a bird carried over the gurgle of the river. She heard the tractor engine turn off, the farmer in conversation with his neighbor.

Amazing. But whatever Georges Ducray's mother or father had heard from over the water had died with them.

Back in the car, they passed a limestone wall with a memorial plaque to the sixty villagers who had been executed. "Shot right there?"

Ducray nodded. "They only put the memorial up a few years ago. I don't know why. Gone is gone, my mother said. After it was finished, people didn't talk about the war-it wasn't something they wanted to relive."

But Therese Jagametti's words-how Alain and the others were afraid of Givaray-sounded in her head. "People would want revenge, I'd think, after a massacre of innocents."

"Move on with life or the past haunts you, the priest would say."

"But look at Chambly-sur-Cher. It's almost deserted, lifeless. Were those people broken by the war, when Givaray has somehow moved on, despite the tragedy?"

Ducray expelled air, shook his head.

"Any theories about who killed the German soldiers? Rumors?"

"If so, I didn't listen."

"Mais soldiers murdered, reprisals taken out on your village-bien sr, people must have talked. Any gossip? Anyone ever find out?"

"I thought journalists couldn't use hearsay. Facts and evidence, you said." He grinned, throwing the words back in her face.