Pastor Luc took her by the arm. “Come inside. Now!” he said firmly.

  Mademoiselle Petitjean refused. After pulling her arm free, she argued with the soldiers. “Let me go with them,” she asked. “They are my students, my children. I should go with them.”

  Some of the soldiers laughed in her face. Their leader did not. Sternly, he replied, “I advise against it, Fräulein.”

  Pastor Luc tried again to convince Mademoiselle Petitjean to go back inside with him. “I can’t let you do this,” he begged. They went round and round, Pastor Luc pleading with her to stay and Mademoiselle Petitjean stubbornly demanding that the soldiers not take her charges out of her sight.

  If any of them had looked up, they might have seen me. Because I could not take my eyes off them. I needed to know what would happen. Maybe, I desperately hoped, the Nazis would just give up and let the children stay. After all, Mademoiselle Petitjean was insistent: the children couldn’t go anywhere without her.

  And in the end, she got her way…sort of. They could not stop her from being with her students. So they took her onto the truck with them. And I watched, silently, from high above, as the truck drove away.

  * * *

  —

  “Then what happened?” asked Julian.

  Grandmère opened her mouth to answer, only to discover that she could not speak. She took a sip of water and tried again. “Years later, my friend Ruth told me where the truck went. The children were taken to the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande. But it was too crowded there, so they were marched through the countryside to Pithiviers, about twenty kilometers—that is, twelve or thirteen miles—away. Saul and some of the other young children could not keep up with the group. Mademoiselle Petitjean stayed behind with them.”

  Grandmère closed her eyes but was unable to shut out the image of her teacher’s face as the truck pulled away. With one arm protectively around little Saul’s shoulders and the other around Ruth, she projected strength and confidence. Looking back, Grandmère remembered how strong her teacher was able to be for the children. And she wondered what Mademoiselle Petitjean had actually felt in that moment.

  “And then?” Julian’s voice broke the silence.

  Even before Grandmère opened her eyes, she could tell that Julian was hoping for reassurance. She wanted to provide it, but it wouldn’t be the truth.

  “The snow kept falling. Night came,” she said. “Perhaps they lost their way in the woods. Or perhaps the Nazis did not want stragglers.” She shrugged sadly. “Either way, those little children never arrived in Pithiviers. In fact, Ruth was the only student that survived.”

  “But what about your teacher?” asked Julian.

  “I don’t know,” Grandmère admitted. “Whatever happened to those poor little children happened to her, too. No one ever saw her again.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  My red shoes. My stupid red shoes! I hugged my knees and looked down at them. How could I have fretted about something as frivolous as shoes when the world held real problems to worry about?

  A man was lying dead in the snow. My classmates had been taken away in a truck by armed soldiers. And poor Mademoiselle Petitjean was with them, without a coat or even a scarf. I buried my face in it, feeling horribly guilty. She was out there in the cold, on the back of an open truck. She certainly needed her scarf more than I did.

  But mostly I was thinking about Maman and Papa. Had they been taken? Where were they now? Were they safe? If they were hiding, how would I find them?

  At that moment, I realized that I could hear voices. I peeked out and saw that the gendarmes were still in the courtyard. They had stayed behind for some reason. They were gathered around, scrutinizing a piece of paper.

  “There were fifteen names on the list but only twelve children,” said one of them.

  Oh, mon Dieu. They were trying to locate the children who had not gotten on the truck—like me!

  “They’re hiding,” said another gendarme. He seemed to be in charge of the others. “Go find them!” he ordered.

  It was just a matter of time before they would find me. But what could I do? Where could I possibly go? The temptation to run home was strong. But even if I could do so without being seen, which seemed impossible, what would I find there? An empty house, with no sign of my parents? Or worse, Nazi soldiers sitting around our kitchen table, waiting to pounce on me?

  I sat there, trying to think of a plan but falling deeper and deeper into despair. Why had I been so stupid? If I hadn’t been so vain about my red shoes, I might be with Mademoiselle Petitjean and the others. That seemed like a much better choice than sitting in the belfry like a mouse in a trap.

  Just then I heard footsteps on the stairs.

  Perfect, I thought. Not only am I trapped like a mouse, but the cat is arriving to finish me off.

  I watched the door slowly open. My heart was beating wildly. I closed my eyes, too afraid to look.

  “Sara?”

  I opened my eyes. And blinked repeatedly at this…apparition.

  “They will find you here,” said Tourteau, who was standing in the doorway. “But I know a way out.”

  I was too astonished to speak. He was the last person I expected to see, for so many reasons. I was fairly certain no one had seen me sneak back inside. Also, we were several flights of stairs up, at the highest point of the school. I would not have thought he could navigate so many stairs on his crutches. And he was offering to help me, which would obviously put him at great risk as well. Not to mention that I had never said more than two words to this boy, despite having sat next to him for years.

  “Come on!” he urged. “Follow me!”

  I did not ask where we were going. I just followed him.

  As we went down the stairs, we could hear the gendarmes yelling.

  “I got one!”

  “Let me go!” cried a panicked voice that clearly belonged to my friend Rachel, who was a year older than I was. I hesitated, wanting to run to her and help fight off her captors. But the urgency of Tourteau’s hasty and awkward descent of the stairs, which threatened to turn into free fall at any moment, kept my focus on him.

  Rachel’s screams echoed in my ears as we continued down flight after flight of stairs. I tried to shut out her pitiful cries as I followed Tourteau through the crypt beneath our school’s chapel, and lower still to the cellar. When we finally ran out of stairs, I tried to look around. The cellar was cold, clammy, and dark. And on top of all that, there was something else that was off-putting.

  “I’m sorry,” said Tourteau. In the dim light I saw him wrinkle his nose in a way that probably mirrored my own expression. He cringed, looking embarrassed. “I know it smells. But this was the only way out I could think of.”

  “Way…out?” I asked.

  Tourteau nodded, gesturing down a long hallway. “Through the sewer system. It connects everything, underground.”

  I followed him silently, and after some time we arrived at a passage. It was so narrow, we had to walk sideways to get through. Next, we stepped down and there we were: in the sewers. Literally, knee-deep in refuse. So much for my pretty red shoes! But taking them off was inconceivable. Everything that had happened had firmly shifted my concerns from style to survival.

  “Won’t they find us here?” I asked nervously.

  “Not if we hurry. At least, I hope not.” He began to hobble determinedly through the dark tunnel. For once, I was the slow one, holding back. The sewer water was dark and murky, with an oily slick surface that glimmered in the dwindling light. All around, I heard pipes dripping and echoing hauntingly.

  Tourteau turned to see what was keeping me. I must have looked like a fool, shuffling and splashing my way along, glancing around in fear that some kind of subterranean sea monster would rear up and bite me.

  “You must be freezing,” he said.

  “No,” I protested. “I’m f-f-fine.”

  “Here.” He took off his coat and held it out to me. It reminded me of the day before, when he had returned my sketchbook and my friends had whispered and laughed right in front of him. Even though I was terribly cold, I knew I didn’t deserve his kindness or his coat. Yet I didn’t know how to explain how awful I felt.

  “B-b-but…you will be cold,” I said instead.

  “I’ll be all right,” he replied, tipping his cap politely. “I have my hat to keep me warm. Now come on—let’s go.”

  He continued ahead of me, carefully plodding on his crutches through the dark, churning canal of filth. I had no choice but to scramble to stay on my feet and to keep up. The water was so frigid! I could barely feel my toes. I wrapped Tourteau’s coat tightly around me, grateful to have it. I tried to think of something to say to thank him for being so selfless. I watched his back as he led the way through the tunnels. He was very thin, and I had always assumed he was weak. It had never occurred to me that all those years of using his crutches had given him a different kind of strength.

  We walked for hours.

  I don’t know how he did it. I was so exhausted, I felt tempted to drop to my knees and cry. I can’t imagine how tiring it must have been for him. But he never slowed down. And that helped, because I told myself that as long as he kept moving, so would I.

  There were some lights in the tunnels, but no signs to speak of. And yet whenever we reached a turn or a crossroads, he seemed to know which way to go. Finally, after a long silence, I called out to ask something I had been wondering from the start.

  “How do you know where we are?”

  “I’ve been down here before,” he told me, “helping my father with his work. Up ahead there’s a tunnel that leads to the storm drains. We can take that all the way to Dannevilliers, where I live.”

  Dannevilliers? I imagined what I might have done, the day before, if someone had suggested a visit to Dannevilliers. I would have made a face or worse. But no one would have ever suggested such a thing in the first place. Dannevilliers was the butt of my friends’ and my jokes, even though I’d never been there—and if Mariann and Sophie had, they’d never have admitted it. It was a tiny village about fifteen kilometers from my town. It had shops, like Aubervilliers-aux-Bois, but everyone said the goods sold there were cheaper and shoddier. Like many of our neighbors, Maman and Papa avoided this town because of its infamous smell. According to them, the sewers from Paris drained onto the farmland there. When I went grocery shopping with Maman, she would often admire a vendor’s shiny red apples and ask where they were grown. If the answer was “Dannevilliers, madame!” she would reply politely, yet we would somehow end up purchasing our fruit from a different vendor.

  “I was hoping for one of those pretty apples,” I confessed on the way home after one such incident.

  She made a face. “They might be nice to look at, but their taste won’t be so sweet.” She and Papa claimed anything grown in Dannevilliers tasted like sewage, and I of course took their word for it.

  “Is something wrong?” asked Tourteau.

  I shook my head. I was in no position to take issue with our destination, no matter how wretched it might smell. Besides, I was used to the smell of the sewers already.

  We plodded along. It was getting dark by the time we arrived. A slim column of waning light reached us where we stood at the stairs up to the ground-level exit. I stayed below while Tourteau climbed out and checked to make sure no one was around. He returned quickly and called down.

  “The coast is clear.”

  I climbed up to join him on the street. My dress had absorbed so much raw sewage, it felt like it weighed a thousand pounds. I couldn’t feel my calves or feet. And despite having Tourteau’s coat, I was shaking from the cold.

  “My house is at the end of this road,” said Tourteau.

  I was relieved to be out of the sewers and on dry land again. The chill wind made every step painful, but I was determined to keep moving. I’d come this far—it would be terrible to collapse now. I willed my legs to just keep moving. I began counting my steps in a desperate attempt to have something to focus on. Forty-eight…forty-nine…fifty…fifty-one…

  We walked to the outskirts of the village, Tourteau leading the way through back alleys and tiny one-way streets. I figured he was probably trying to avoid the main road, which made sense.

  He was talking to me the whole way. I wondered if he had been talking to me in the sewers, too, and I just couldn’t hear anything over the water and pipe noises. “Unfortunately, you won’t be able to come inside my house,” he said. “We have crazy old neighbors who are very nosy. We think they’re Nazi collaborators. It’s too risky.”

  I felt nausea rising in my throat. Nazi collaborators in tiny, run-down Dannevilliers? Was there anywhere in this world that was safe anymore?

  Tourteau glanced at me. I must have looked terrified, because he began talking faster, trying to reassure me. “But there’s a barn across the field. It has a hayloft. You’ll be safe there for the night. After we get you settled in, I’ll bring you some soup and blankets. Oh, and dry clothes. Your feet must be frozen in those shoes!”

  “Yeah, they are,” I admitted, deeply regretting my choice. “I should have worn my…”

  I could not finish my sentence. If only I had worn my boots, like I’d told Papa I would. And now who knew if I would ever have the chance to apologize to him for breaking my promise? Who knew if I would even see him again?

  Tourteau held me back at the edge of a house. He leaned on his crutches and peeked around it, gesturing for me to look while pointing to a dark shape on the horizon. “There’s the barn. See it? But let’s wait till my neighbors turn off their lights. Then it’ll be safe to cross the field.”

  We waited silently as clouds slid over the moon. My stomach ached from hunger, and I had to hold my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering too loudly. Finally, we slipped across the road and into the tall grass of a field separating us from the barn.

  “Watch your step,” called Tourteau, pointing out hidden holes and grass-covered rocks. He seemed to know every inch of the field by heart. Meanwhile, I stumbled more on my two supposedly functional legs than he did on his crutches.

  “I can’t see a thing,” I muttered as I banged into yet another disguised boulder. I probably should have slowed down, but I was in such a hurry to get inside, where I hoped I would finally warm up. And where I hoped I might finally be able to stop running.

  CHAPTER NINE

  “You’ll be safe in here,” said Tourteau.

  “Really?” I asked, looking around.

  It probably sounded rude, and that wasn’t my intention. But the barn we were standing in was a crumbling old disaster of a building, in terrible disrepair. It was for the best that it was dark out, so I did not get a good look at the outside of the barn when we arrived. I might have been too scared to enter if I had! But now that we were inside, I could see that there were cobwebs everywhere. And I could hear mice scurrying to move out of the way, too. When Tourteau used the word “safe,” I wasn’t thinking about Nazis. I was worrying about the roof of the barn collapsing and flattening me, with the walls falling down soon after, like a house of cards.

  “Really,” Tourteau assured me. “See the hayloft up there?” He pointed above our heads. Inside the barn, it should have been pitch black. But there were holes and gaping spots in the roof, walls, and boarded-up windows that let some slivers of moonlight in. “That’s where you can hide.”

  I tentatively stepped out into the barn’s main open space. I could see dark shapes in all directions. Many were clearly bales of hay, stacked and abandoned. There also appeared to be a broken-down, rusty old car. Some of its tires were flat and others were missing entirely. Then I looked up and realized something else was missing.

  “I can’t get up there,” I said. “There’s no ladder.”

  A look of panic crossed Tourteau’s face, followed by one of inspiration. He set aside his crutches and carefully kneeled down.

  “I can’t…step on you,” I said, horrified.

  “It’s fine,” he insisted. “I’m strong, really. I’ll help you up and you can pull me up after.”

  I glanced around in the dark, trying to find another option. But there was nothing I could see, so finally I took a deep breath and gingerly put my foot on his shoulder. He was right—like I saw in the sewers, his upper body strength was impressive, and my weight didn’t seem to faze him in the least. I reached up, grabbed the edge of the loft, and pulled myself up the rest of the way.

  In the hayloft, I kneeled and peered down. Finding Tourteau’s hands in the dark, I accepted his crutches, then pulled him up to join me. Despite his strength, he was light, so I was able to do it easily.

  “You’ll be safe up here for tonight,” he told me. “Cover yourself with the hay. It will keep you warm.” He showed me how to gather it. “I used to play up here when I was little, before I got polio.” He looked around, smiling for the first time since our journey began. The barn, as spooky and unfamiliar as it was to me, seemed to be a comforting place for him. “Don’t worry,” he added, “you’ll get used to the smell.”

  It did smell, but it wasn’t really a bad smell. Certainly not the kind of smell I had always imagined would exist in Dannevilliers. It smelled like hay, and like cows or horses, though the cobwebs suggested that livestock hadn’t been kept in the barn for quite some time. I was going to tell him that it didn’t smell that bad, but an odd chirping noise and some shuffling above our heads distracted me.

  “What is that sound, coming from over there?” I asked, pointing up and toward the far corner.

  “Oh, those are just the bats roosting in the rafters. If you leave them alone, they’ll leave you alone. Otherwise, it’s a great place, right?”