Louise's Chance Read online

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  A Selection of Titles From Sarah R. Shaber

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  A Selection of Titles from Sarah R. Shaber

  The Professor Simon Shaw Series

  SIMON SAID

  SNIPE HUNT

  THE FUGITIVE KING

  THE BUG FUNERAL

  SHELL GAME

  The Louise Pearlie Series

  LOUISE’S WAR *

  LOUISE’S GAMBLE *

  LOUISE’S DILEMMA *

  LOUISE’S BLUNDER *

  LOUISE’S CHANCE *

  * available from Severn House

  LOUISE’S CHANCE

  Sarah R. Shaber

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  This first world edition published 2015

  in Great Britain and the USA by

  SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD of

  19 Cedar Road, Sutton, Surrey, England, SM2 5DA.

  Trade paperback edition first published 2015 in Great

  Britain and the USA by SEVERN HOUSE PUBLISHERS LTD.

  eBook edition first published in 2015 by Severn House Digital

  an imprint of Severn House Publishers Limited

  Copyright © 2015 by Sarah Shaber.

  The right of Sarah Shaber to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

  Shaber, Sarah R. author.

  Louise’s chance

  1. Pearlie, Louise (Fictitious character)–Fiction.

  2. United States. Office of Strategic Services–

  Employees-Fiction. 3. World War, 1939-1945-Prisoners

  and prisons–Fiction. 4. Suspense fiction.

  I. Title

  813.6-dc23

  ISBN-13: 978-07278-8552-4 (cased)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-84751-661-9 (trade paper)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-78010-715-8 (e-book)

  Except where actual historical events and characters are being described for the storyline of this novel, all situations in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to living persons is purely coincidental.

  This ebook produced by

  Palimpsest Book Production Limited, Falkirk,

  Stirlingshire, Scotland.

  In memory of Ken Tutterow, President and CEO of the Children’s Home Society of North Carolina from 1990 to 2014, beloved friend, leader and advocate for the children of North Carolina. It was his mission to promote the right of every child to a permanent, safe and loving family. Thousands of foster children, adopted children and adoptive parents are leading happy lives today because of his good work.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  With each new book I find myself thanking the same people for their support and encouragement. My husband, Steve, daughter, Katie and son, Sam, are my closest friends and the best cheering squad anyone could have. I can’t imagine my life without the friendship and advice of my writing buddies: Margaret Maron, Bren Witchger, Diane Chamberlain, Kathy Trocheck (Mary Kay Andrews), Katy Munger and Alexandra Sokoloff. My friend Vicky Bijur is the best agent in the world. And I am forever grateful that Quail Ridge Books and Music is my home bookstore.

  ONE

  I sensed the assault coming before it happened, throwing my arms out in front of me to deflect the impact. A big person, bigger than me, landed next to me on the bed. Yards of rayon washed over and covered me. ‘Louise!’ the heap said. ‘Help me!’

  It was Ada, home from her job as a clarinetist in the Statler Hotel house band. And I was in my own bed, startled from a deep sleep. Ada was late. She must have stayed to party with the band after their gig was over. Or with one of her many admirers, as she so often did.

  ‘Darn it, Ada,’ I said, reaching over to my bedside table and clicking on my lamp. I glanced at my clock. ‘It’s two in the morning!’

  She clung to me, her arms tight around me. Mascara trailed down her cheeks to her chin, and her bright red lipstick was smeared around her mouth. Her peroxide blond hair had fallen out of her snood and tangled at her shoulder. I put my arms around her. I could feel her trembling.

  ‘I’m so frightened!’ Ada said.

  ‘What on earth is the matter?’ I said. I pulled my bedcovers aside so Ada could slip into the warm bed with me. I could smell gin on her breath.

  ‘They’re bringing them here!’ she said. ‘What if he’s with them?’

  I gripped her arms, shaking her slightly.

  ‘Calm down,’ I said. ‘Who is bringing who here? Who is he?’

  Her breathing slowed a bit.

  ‘German prisoners of war,’ she said. ‘Thousands of them are coming to the States! The government is going to build camps for them all over the country!’

  ‘I know,’ I said. Most of Rommel’s army in North Africa had been captured four months ago. Hundreds of thousands of German prisoners of war waited in temporary camps and collection centers to be shipped to permanent Allied POW camps. Some of the temporary camps were no more than corrals, where hungry, thirsty and exhausted Axis prisoners lived surrounded by barbed wire under the desert sun. The Allies simply were not prepared to house them. They couldn’t all be shipped to Britain; the British could barely feed themselves.

  ‘What if Rein is one of them? A man I was with tonight said that fifty-eight German soldiers have already arrived at Fort Meade! Some of them are Luftwaffe!’

  Now I understood. Before the war Ada was married to Rein Hermann, a German airline pilot based in New York City. He flew the New York–Berlin route for Lufthansa. At first Ada and Rein’s marriage was a happy one, but then Rein became more and more intrigued by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. His interest grew into an obsession until the couple fought about politics constantly.

  Then one day when Ava met Rein’s usual Lufthansa flight at LaGuardia Field an unfamiliar pilot disembarked from the airplane. Rein had remained behind in Germany. He wrote Ada that he’d joined the Luftwaffe. He pleaded with her to move to Germany, but of course she refused. Since then she’d lived in terror that someone would discover she was the wife of a Nazi officer. She dropped the second ‘n’ from her last name and moved from New York City to Washington DC. Ada couldn’t even divorce Rein for fear of attracting attention to herself. I understood her fear. It was likely she’d be interned in a camp for German-Americans, if her marriage was discovered. Ada had told me her story during a weak moment and I swore to keep her secret. And I would, even if hell froze over.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ Ada asked. ‘What if Rein is here and tells the FBI about me?’

  ‘Dearie,’ I said, throwing back the covers and struggling past Ada to get out of the bed, ‘it’s not very likely that Rein would be one of just fifty-eight prisoners, is it? Out of, what, thousands of Luftwaff
e pilots? If he is a POW he could be imprisoned at some other camp. Or in Europe. You don’t know if he was captured at all; you don’t even know, if he was stationed in North Africa.’

  ‘Rein would inform on me if he had the chance,’ Ada said, sitting up on my bed and dangling her long legs over the edge. ‘He would relish ruining my life in return for not joining him in Germany. God, I wish he was dead!’

  A sentiment I had heard her express many times. I didn’t blame her. I pulled on my dressing gown.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Ada asked. ‘Don’t leave me!’

  ‘Getting a tablet for you from Phoebe,’ I said. Phoebe Holcombe was our landlady.

  I tiptoed down the second-floor hall of our boarding house to Phoebe’s room and tapped on her bedroom door.

  ‘Phoebe,’ I called out. ‘I’m sorry to bother you. Can I come in?’

  Her sleepy voice answered me. ‘What is it, Louise?’ she asked. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, slipping into her room. ‘But Ada came home from work terribly upset. Can I give her one of your tablets?’

  ‘Of course,’ Phoebe said, raising her head from her silk-covered pillow. Her grey hair was done up in old-fashioned pin curls. A nightlight glowed next to her bed. ‘Tell her I hope she feels better.’ She lowered her head back on to her pillow and appeared to fall right back to sleep. She must have taken a sleep aid herself.

  I found the Nembutal in her medicine cabinet next to a glass bottle of laudanum. I shook a tablet into my hand, briefly considered taking one myself and decided against it for fear I’d be sleepy all day tomorrow.

  Back in my room I found Ada right where I’d left her, curled up in my bed like a child.

  ‘Here,’ I said, pulling her to a seating position. I handed her the tablet and the tumbler of water I kept on my bedside table. ‘Take this; you’ll feel better and be able to sleep.’

  Ada swallowed the pill and handed the empty tumbler back to me.

  ‘What do you think?’ she asked. ‘About Rein?’

  I sat on the edge of the bed and took her hand.

  ‘I think it’s unlikely that Rein would be in that group of German prisoners sent to Fort Meade, even if he’s been captured. Dozens of POW camps are being built all over the country. Besides, if Rein had been captured wouldn’t he disclose that he was married to an American woman right away? I mean, if he was going to use it to his advantage? You haven’t heard anything, have you?’

  ‘No,’ Ada said. ‘I haven’t. Not a thing.’

  She gripped me hand hard, her eyes pleading. ‘Can you find out? If Rein is a prisoner of war here in the States?’

  ‘What?’ I said, taken aback. ‘How can I do that? I’m just a file clerk.’

  ‘I’m not deaf and blind. You know things most of us don’t,’ Ada said. ‘You must work for some important government agency. I bet you can find out if Rein is in the country.’

  Maybe I could, I thought. I worked for the Office of Strategic Services, the United States’ spy agency. If there was a list of the names of German POWs floating around the office I might be able to locate it. I wasn’t going to promise Ada that, though.

  ‘I’ll try,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have a high security clearance. Mostly I move paper around and shove it into file cabinets to turn yellow with age, that’s all.’ I patted her hand. ‘Look, go wash your face and go to bed. I’ve got to get some more sack time. Some people work mornings, you know.’

  ‘They should just put all of them on a rusty ship, send it out into the middle of the ocean and torpedo it,’ Henry said, tossing the morning Washington Times-Herald on to the sideboard as he came into the breakfast room.

  ‘Who?’ I asked. If someone didn’t ask Henry what he meant by one of his rhetorical statements we would just have to listen to him try again to get our attention.

  ‘Those prisoners of war they’re bringing over here,’ Henry said. ‘Germans and Italians. Hey, do you know what the Italian salute is?’ When he got no response, he raised both hands in the air and grinned.

  Milt, Phoebe’s oldest son, who was adding raisins and milk to his oatmeal with one hand, his empty left sleeve hanging from his side, grimaced and took Henry’s bait. ‘We have to abide by the Geneva Convention,’ he said. ‘If we don’t the Germans have an excuse to treat Allied prisoners badly.’

  ‘Milt Senior and I went to Italy on our honeymoon,’ Phoebe said, trying to steer the conversation away from the war. ‘Lovely country, lovely people.’

  I’d gotten where I was today by keeping my mouth shut. I did my best not to join in conversations about the war with anyone, much less Henry. I had Top Secret clearance, and I didn’t even want to give myself an opportunity to say something I shouldn’t. But ridiculing the Italians was unfair. Yes, their soldiers threw down their weapons and deserted in droves. Yes, the Italian government surrendered to the Allies the day before the Allies landed in Salerno. But that was because most Italians despised Mussolini and Hitler and refused to die for them, not because they were cowards.

  Milt reached across the table for the spoon in the bowl of oatmeal. ‘Can I finish this?’ he asked.

  ‘Ada hasn’t eaten yet,’ Phoebe said.

  ‘I doubt she’ll be downstairs to breakfast,’ I said. ‘She came in very late last night.’

  Milt scraped out the rest of the oatmeal into his bowl. It had been several months since he came home from the Pacific without his left arm and moved into the attic bedroom with Henry. He hadn’t fully recovered from his ordeal, but had found a job and had begun to go out with old friends. He wasn’t drinking as much lately, either.

  I stood up from the table. ‘I’m off, then,’ I said. ‘Everyone have a good day. I’ll see you tonight. Henry, if you’re finished with your paper, could I have it?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said.

  I slipped Henry’s newspaper off the sideboard and took it with me to the bus stop.

  The heat of summer lingered. I walked to the bus stop wearing my dark glasses, a khaki dress styled much like a military uniform (as was the fashion among civilian war workers) and a straw fedora. But every now and then I noticed a gold or scarlet leaf peeking out between green tree branches. A welcome breeze wafted inland from the Potomac. Autumn was coming. It would bring relief from the awful heat and monster mosquitos of summer, thank God, but then winter would inevitably follow. If heating oil was rationed again, as I was sure it would be, the second floor of ‘Two Trees’, our boarding house, would be cold as a witch’s tit, as my grandfather used to say.

  I found an empty seat on the bus next to a middle-aged man who wore a sash with the triangular emblem of the Civil Defense and held a helmet in his lap. He was sound asleep, his head resting on the seat back, snoring lightly. I opened my newspaper with minimal rustling so as not to disturb him.

  The front page was full of news about the Italian government’s surrender. But it also quoted General Eisenhower, who said that the Allies faced a ‘bitter battle’ against the Germans in Italy. Field Marshal General Albert Kesselring, as ‘commander in chief in the South’, declared martial law in all of German-occupied Italy. German-controlled radio broadcast a grim warning that all Italians who did not comply with Nazi rule would be executed. Even the Vatican prepared for the worst. The Pope’s Swiss Guard was reported to have changed from ceremonial garb to ‘full war uniform’.

  On page three the news shifted to the aftermath of the Allied victory in North Africa. I found an article about the first German and Italian prisoners of war sent to Fort Meade. They’d arrived yesterday – 1,632 Italians and 58 Germans.

  Fort Meade was one of the first POW camps ready to accept Axis prisoners of war. The base was situated halfway between Washington and Baltimore just off Highway Fifty, less than an hour’s drive away from Washington DC if one drove at the government-mandated speed limit of thirty-five miles per hour.

  The article went on to say that Fort Meade had been a holding center for German-American internees,
who were sent to other camps to make room for the prisoners of war.

  My stomach clutched. German-American internees! Ada’s fears weren’t exaggerated. I couldn’t imagine her living behind a barbed wire fence. It would be a nightmare for her.

  My bus braked to a stop at a renovated apartment house on ‘E’ Street. The building housed the Research and Analysis branch and the Registry of the Office of Strategic Services, where I had worked since early 1942. My job was often tedious, interrupted occasionally by an interesting assignment, but it was important. Better yet it paid well, and for the first time in my life I was independent. I had no intention of giving that freedom up, even if I had to file and type the rest of my life. Anything to avoid going back to Wilmington, North Carolina, to work at my parents’ fish camp. I’d fried up enough fish and hushpuppies to last a lifetime already. But perhaps I didn’t need to worry so much about that anymore. A couple of girls I knew passed by my window and I waved at them, trying to keep the glee and delight off my face. The bus jolted forward, and I remained in my seat.

  This was the first day of my new job. I’d been promised more challenging work when Major Angus Wicker, whom I had met during a special assignment a few months ago, recruited me for a new OSS branch. I intended to learn new skills there that might help me stay employed after the war, when most of us government girls would lose our jobs.

  The bus moved south and halted at the corner of 23rd and Constitution near the southern gate of the OSS complex.

  I hopped off the bus and walked the few steps to the gate, showed my OSS ID to the guard and entered the compound. My new office was in Que building, immediately to the right of me, in one of the wooden ‘tempos’ built on the grounds of the compound.

  Tempos were the temporary buildings thrown up quickly to house our rapidly expanding government. Roosevelt had ordered that they be built so poorly that they’d be quickly demolished once the war was over. World War I tempos had remained on the National Mall and surrounding the Reflecting Pool for years after that war ended and Roosevelt didn’t want that to happen again. I didn’t look forward to working in a tempo, but I sure was pleased with the move otherwise.