ALSO BY MAGGIE STIEFVATER

The Shiver Trilogy

The Raven Cycle

The Scorpio Races

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Set in Georgia

Designed by Nerylsa Dijol

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Stiefvater, Maggie, 1981– author.

Title: The listeners / Maggie Stiefvater.

Description: New York : Viking, 2025.

Identifiers: LCCN 2024039499 (print) | LCCN 2024039500 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593655504 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593655511 (ebook)

Subjects: LCGFT: Novels.

Classification: LCC PS3619.T535488 L57 2025 (print) | LCC PS3619.T535488 (ebook) | DDC 813/.6—dc23/eng/20240830

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024039499

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2024039500

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For Richard, who dreamt of the Avallon

“There’s one thing you’ll never find in a good hotel—an argument.”

—THE HOTEL MONTHLY, JANUARY 1940

December 7, 1961

Jillian Pennybacker

Lodge 3

William & Mary Campus

Dear Miss Pennybacker,

This is the story of the hotel I mentioned at the party, the magnificent building with the magical water beneath it. I thought you would appreciate your father’s role in it.

Chin up, see! Miracles do happen.

Warmly,

Eric Parnell

U.S. State Department

Washington, D.C.

January 1942

Part One

UPSTAIRS

ORDER, ROOM 411, 1/31/1942:

New York Times

Vogue

Britannia and Eve

Modes & Travaux

2 lemons

2 croissants

2 yards mustard wool (sample attached)

1 yard printed cotton (sample attached)

Frenchman’s Creek, Daphne du Maurier

The Sun Is My Undoing, Marguerite Steen

Windswept, Mary Ellen Chase

Grease pencil

Chapter One

The day the hotel changed forever began as any other.

June Porter Hudson woke before dawn in a basement apartment in the staff cottage closest to the hot springs. She climbed out of bed, displacing three dachshunds (two smooth, one wiry), who poured to the floor to follow her at a polite distance. She ducked beneath the clothesline hung across the room and unclipped her shirt and underwear before hanging her quilt in their place to air for the day.

By the light of a single bedside lamp, she dressed in her usual attire: waist-high wide-legged slacks, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up neatly, a delicate wristwatch, a swipe of lipstick. Her dark hair was bobbed just below her ears, and when she was working, she slicked it back elegantly with some grooming cream. The entire look was out of step with the formal pin curls and dresses found inside the hotel, but the Rockefellers and the Roosevelts didn’t expect her to look like them; she certainly didn’t sound the same, not with her holler-bred accent. They were used to their hoteliers having a French accent if they had any at all, and the only French June had was Vive l’empereur!, which one of her waiters used to hiss under his breath each time the chef came into view. It did not matter. The guests loved her anyway.

After she stepped into her low-heeled Mary Janes, June silently drank two full glasses of mineral water beside the kitchenette’s single window. In the summer, the small, eye-level porthole offered a gray morning view of the mulch and shrubs around the porch, but now, in the winter, the dark glass merely reflected her face (wide-set eyes, arched eyebrows, lips pragmatic as a pencil). Sweetwater, that was what the locals called it, although it tasted like a split lip and a mouthful of dust. The water wasn’t named for the taste—it was named for what it did to the body. What ailed you? Rheumatism, constipation, barrenness, grippe? Dyspepsia, malaria, biliousness, croup? Homesickness, homeliness, eczema, gout? Indigestion, inflammation, apoplexy, doubt? Medical journals and medical guests debated the springs’ potency, but June didn’t pay them much mind. She just started and finished her day the same way, never missing those four glasses of mineral water. After she’d drunk hers, she poured a glass into the dachshunds’ bowl, fed them some meat scraps from the icebox, and then got to work.

Work, work. It never ended. June oversaw 450 staff, 420 rooms, 418 acres, 212 Shropshire sheep, 110 Golden Delicious apple trees, sixty box stalls, twenty-one cottages, seven cabins, four bathhouses, three bottling rooms, and two mineral streams. Every day there was staff to organize, supplies to inventory, events to execute, each heaving breath of this expensive beast accounted to the penny, so that the Gilfoyles, who owned the hotel, were reassured that none of their fortune was having fun without them.

The business of luxury: the first thing on her mind when she woke, the last thing on her mind when she went to bed.

On that day, January 25, the Avallon was hosting a tartan ball in honor of Robert Burns, a long-dead but still-lauded Scottish poet. With her dachshunds in tow, June had joined her staff captain Griff Clemons on the ballroom balcony to observe a dress rehearsal of the technical components. The ballroom was impressive. At its center, a sweetwater fountain covered with carved rhododendron flowers filled the space with the scent of sweet earth and wildflowers. The ceiling far above bore a brilliant mural of West Virginia scenes by Susie M. Barstow, of the Hudson River School. On the north wall was an enormous stage where the glamorous Geraldine Farrar had once reprised her Met role as Madama Butterfly. On the south was a fireplace taken stone by stone from the ruins of the Battlesden House, gifted by the willing Duke of Bedford’s estate. During a presidential stay, Grace Coolidge had had a hand in selecting the parquet floor. Heiresses. Presidents. Royalty. This was the nature of the average Avallon guest: people so high on the social ladder they had to duck for the sun to go overhead.

“How are your girls doing, Griff?” June asked.

“Fine enough,” he replied.

“Your voice says otherwise.”

The Avallon’s general manager and staff captain were an unusual pair of employees for a hotel of this status—a smiling White mountain woman and a half-sighted Black man—but they’d both done it the honest way, working their way up from the bottom. Both had gotten as far as they could get. Neither of them was in any danger of seeing someone like themselves on a future guest list.

“One of them’s decided she’s in love,” Griff replied. “The other’s got her mind on revenge.”

Griff’s twin girls had only just turned five.

June said, “So times are tough in the Clemons household.”

“I thought girls were meant to be gentle.”

“Am I gentle?”

The staff captain gave one of his eyes a pensive rub, an unthinking gesture that often punctuated his conversations. Those big hazel peepers would spare him from the draft. The left was standard-issue, but the right had been merely decorative since he got kicked in the face by an irritable heifer at age six. She was grateful. The tall, wiry staff captain was her left hand, responsible for everything that happened back of house, out of guest sight. “I’m not answering that one, Hoss.”

Clunks, clatters, and jingling sounded from below as the sounds of feast preparation escaped from the Grotto. Trills and moans sounded from the orchestra pit. Most Burns Night parties were humble, sitting room ceilidhs of fiddle and pipes and haggis, but the Avallon’s would feature a full orchestra, hired pipe band from New York, five-course dinner, drinks deep as the ocean. The dancing would go on until four or five in the morning.

Ordinarily, it would be a modest off-season event, by Avallon standards. This year, of course, was different. This would be the first party since Mr. Francis Gilfoyle, the hotel’s owner and June’s mentor, had died on November 7, collapsing halfway in, halfway out, of an elevator on the fourth floor. And the first since the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, plunging America into war. That made the Burns Night ball more than a party. It made it a decision: Would parties still happen in these times? The Hotel Monthly, a publication by hoteliers, for hoteliers, had recently published a six-page feature (“Defining American Luxury”) presenting the Avallon as a standard most could not hope to achieve but would do well to emulate. Its position on wartime activities would be noted and aped.

And what June had decided was this: for decades, presidents, foreign dignitaries, tastemakers, and decision-makers had relied on the Avallon to be a place where past and future were erased, replaced by an immutable, carefree present. To hesitate was to break the spell forever.

The party would go on.

A voice came from below. “Hoss, is that you I hear?”

“I’m here,” June replied. “Who’s that I’m listening to—Johnny?”

“Yep. Can you see the anchors from where you’re at? They all look flush?”

She put a Scots twist into her voice, for Burns. “Aye, laddie.”

Johnny accepted the game. “Aye, lassie! We’ll be set in just a moment.”

The night before, at three a.m., when she’d finally managed to steal away into her humble office behind the front desk to take a crack at dinner (cold chicken, potatoes in lemon glaze, leftover pilaf), she’d approved thirty thousand dollars in linens, nylons, sheets, and rubber bands, all items she expected would soon become scarce, even if the war was over by summer, as some were saying. As she finalized the purchase orders, it had felt like she was officially signing the war into existence. She had tried to avoid thinking about it to this point: she couldn’t quite bear the image of Sandy, the baby of the Gilfoyle family, in uniform. Edgar David Gilfoyle, Mr. Francis’s debonair oldest son and heir to the Avallon, had told June that he didn’t think the hotel would really be affected. This had been just a few days after Pearl Harbor and just about a month after his father’s funeral. He and June had been in bed together—a situation that had happened before but was not meant to have happened again—and Gilfoyle was dragging a blown pink rose from the bedside arrangement on a journey beginning at a sweaty point between her breasts and ending at a sweaty point below her belly button. War is not coming to the Avallon, he’d told her. How could it even find us?

And so far he was right. War had only lightly rummaged through the mountains: the 150th Infantry of the West Virginia National Guard had been transferred to the Panama Canal Zone and draft offices had appeared on a few coal-stained main streets. This latter truth urged June to change how she mentally catalogued her staff. Previously irrelevant attributes became assets. Her best carpenter had a limp, her boiler repairman was short a few fingers, her kindest registrar thankfully had an old case of miliary tuberculosis. Griff had his one eye. Simple gifts.

“Here we go,” called Johnny (over forty, too old for the draft). “Hoss, shout if you see anything come free.”

“Aye.”

“Aye!”

June propped her elbows on the balcony, expectant. Griff, never so casual, drew close to observe with his spine straight as a railroad tie. Above them, the ceiling twitched to life. The dachshunds cowered as a dull roar thrummed—less like a machine, more like a rising storm.

“Is that all right?” Griff asked.

June said, “The bagpipes will cover it.”

What was luxury? Nimble. In a drought, it was a glass of water; in a flood, a dry place to stand. Whatever made the Avallon luxurious a year ago would not be what made it luxurious now. For Burns Night, a famous designer who also happened to be the Avallon’s most persistent guest had helped design a surprise meant to remind guests that, even in wartime, luxury persisted. June was opinionated about luxury and, earlier in her career, Mr. Francis, proud of and defensive about his working-class novitiate, would send challengers her way. The most recent had been a member of the Delafield family well-known in New England real estate, who cornered her in her office.

The battle went quickly:

Delafield: Frank says you have some sort of religious theory that luxury and wealth have nothing to do with one another.

June: Good afternoon to you, too, Mr. Delafield. It’s simple enough, isn’t it? Wealth is just security. Luxury is living carefree.

Delafield: I’m carefree.

June: Sure you are. What do you want to hear, Mr. Delafield? A sermon? All right, I’ll preach: Wealth doesn’t care who you are deep down, at night, when you can’t sleep. Luxury doesn’t care about anything else; that’s how we can guess what you jaspers need before you even realize you need it. Didn’t you notice your room is different this visit? The registrar made sure you wouldn’t ever have to share an elevator with Miss Q this visit; you’re welcome. Housekeeping moved your nightstand so you’d stop knocking your glasses behind it. And the stable boys know Commander’s your favorite, but he’s been a bit fresh with you the last few visits, hasn’t he, so they’ve been lunging him so he’ll be sweet as pie for you this week. Do you recall asking for any of that? I didn’t think so; it’s the Avallon’s pleasure to anticipate you. Now, I’d be happy to hear your thoughts on the matter, seeing as this is my business and I’m always looking to improve it, but truth is, I already know you agree with me. Because you’re standing here with our luxury instead of back in Connecticut with your wealth. That’s a fur piece to come if wealth and luxury are the same thing.

Delafield:

Delafield: Go to bed with me.

June: I don’t possibly have the time, Mr. Delafield, but I can recommend a good book or two.

She didn’t mistake it for meaningful attraction. She’d just taken him by surprise. Powerful people forget they can be surprised—she knew this firsthand now, because, wonder of wonders, she had become a powerful person. June Hudson, mountaineer, woman, general manager of the Avallon. It was a miracle, all those words existing together. At her first hotel conference, during the cocktail meet-and-greet, when she’d first spoken aloud, the men standing closest had laughed. Not cruelly, just from shock. This slender woman, this outrageous accent.

Oh, one fellow had said. You’re the Avallon’s GM.

God, she’d been happier than a pig in the sunshine. Three hundred miles away, and they’d heard of her. How do you come up with your strategies? they asked.

The sweetwater is full of ideas, she said, because even then, she’d known a thing or two about legend-making.

Now June’s staff worked several hand cranks to jerkily lower a custom-built apparatus from where it had been tucked close to the mural. Dangling from its long wooden arms were hundreds of sheets of thick Bristol paper, each displaying a poem by Robert Burns.

“The sweeping blast, the sky o’ercast,”

The joyless winter-day

“It’s like a dog shivering in the rain!” shouted Johnny. “More smoothly!”

The apparatus’s progress became more subtle. The pages no longer heaved to the ground, but rather drifted, flew, flapped. They seemed alive, organic, twisting and turning, flocking and floating.

The machinery fell silent.

The poetry bobbed just at eye level, looking like a children’s mobile. This was what luxury looked like right now, in this moment, before it would have to shift again. Nimble.

June and Griff murmured wordlessly. June had had her doubts, but now she could envision the partygoers wondering at the mobile’s descent, stilling a twirling poem to read to their companions, beginning to dance once more, making slow, dreamy loops through papery clouds. June knew how it felt when one’s blood turned to fizzy champagne, how strawberries tasted when someone else fed them to you on those pale leather sofas. She could pass for one of these partygoers, for a little while. Her fingers pinched lightly at her side, as if she were reaching up for one of the poems herself. She could taste the words in her mouth:

Ae fond kiss and then we sever

Ah! She should’ve never gone back to Gilfoyle’s room after the funeral. This stupid hope. She knew better. She had known better for years. The mind remembered, the body forgot.

“Watch out!”

A cry and a crash, in one.

An object had fallen from somewhere above June and Griff, missing one of the workers by only a few inches. It skittered across the parquet floor, coming to a stop at Johnny’s feet.

“Land sakes!” June said. She scanned the apparatus for obvious signs of failure. “What is it?”

But when Johnny brandished the missile, she saw that it was just a wooden rung from the balcony above them. She said, “Did the apparatus catch hold of it?”

Someone, out of sight, replied, “It was thrown!”

“What’s that on the end?” she asked.

“It’s rotted, Hoss,” replied Johnny.

The staff members muttered: no human actor was visible; everyone knew the rumors about the fourth floor; this was supernatural malice at work.

“Let’s not get carried away here,” June told them. The water damage was mysterious, but it proved how the apparatus could have so easily knocked it free. “Whoa, now, Griff, don’t you follow that rung down.” He was leaned over the railing, trying to get a better look at the floor above. The fourth floor was for the long-term guests, those who had both the fortune and the inclination to stay at the Avallon year-round. June knew them well—this was, in large part, why they stayed—and none were likely culprits for either mischief or clumsiness.

When June caught Griff’s expression, she said, “Not you, too!”

He rubbed his dud eye. “With Mr. Francis passing on, is it possible . . .”

She interrupted, “The water don’t work that way, Griff.”

Even if one never took a dip in the swimming or bathing pools, it was impossible to avoid the sweetwater at the Avallon. The volatile water flowed through pipes in the walls, filled up the fountains, and burst out of fonts on every floor. But it did not throw missiles from the fourth floor.

Or at least, it hadn’t.

“Hoss?” Here was Griff’s new runner boy, Theophilus Morse, who was just about the same age that June had been when she first came to the Avallon. Eleven, twelve. His backstory was tragic, but this was West Virginia, tragedy was cheap and plentiful. The boy was doing his best to emulate Griff’s immutable good posture, but his chest was heaving. He’d run here.

“What’s the fire, Theo?” June asked.

“Mister—” He gulped for air. “Mr. Gilfoyle called—”

Just his name was sufficient to warm June’s throat. She hadn’t seen him since that night. A month. An endless amount of time, a nothing amount of time. She could still feel the petals on her skin.

“Get yourself together, boy,” Griff said. He stood straight. Theo stood straight. Together they breathed in, out, mirrors of each other.

Theo got air enough in him to deliver the rest. “Mr. Gilfoyle called.” Inhale. “He’s leaving New York right now for a meeting here.” Inhale. “He got us the list of attendees.” Inhale. “He wants you at the meeting.”

Gilfoyle, coming here, to the Avallon, to her.

She asked, “Who’s the client?”

“It’s the Feds, Hoss. The State Department.”

Griff’s mouth went odd.

“What do the Feds want with us?” June asked.

Theo hesitated.

June had long ago discovered that most people were bad listeners; they thought listening was synonymous with hearing. But the spoken was only half a conversation. True needs, wants, fears, and hopes hid not in the words that were said, but in the ones that weren’t, and all these formed the core of luxury. June had become a good listener.

This was how she heard a single unspoken word between them. Clouding the truth with smoke and digging trenches into their hearts.

Theo said, “They’re taking the hotel. For the war effort.”

War.

Coming for her hotel.

War is not coming to the Avallon, Gilfoyle had told her. How could it even find us?

Turned out, it could just drive up the mountain, and he would open the front door.

Chapter Two

Special Agent Tucker Rye Minnick wasn’t allowed in the front door.

None of the agents were. When they arrived at the Avallon Hotel, the Feds had just a glimpse of the hotel’s wintry facade, perfect as a postcard, before uniformed, gloved attendants directed them away from it. The trip seemed interminable. They’d driven from Washington at forty miles an hour, the speed Roosevelt was supposedly about to propose to save rubber and gasoline, and now it felt as if they were being sent farther into the gray mountains. Around their vehicles, snow fell in unmotivated, meditative circles; mist rose from the ravines. January in West Virginia was raw, spare, objectively beautiful.

Tucker wondered why it was that humans were drawn to natural beauty. It wasn’t for them. Here, in fact, it actively opposed them. Everything that made the landscape beautiful—the remote location, the steeply pitched slopes, the rushing rapids—was dangerous. And yet, like mice before snakes, deer before hunters, a certain type of gentle woman before a certain type of brutal man, humans pined and longed for these vistas. Even he, with all his life experience and his training, saw loveliness in these surroundings. Everything logical in him was unnerved; everything else swooned.

His last post had been like this, too, albeit with vastly different aesthetics. Albino Ridge, Texas, a little border town with the poor fortune to serve as a point of operation for “Singing Joey” Puglisi, who ran opium through Mexico up to New York. The dry landscape outside the town had been barbed and venomous, ready to kill a man in a day or two . . . but the first few months of his post, he’d stood on the back porch every evening to watch the sunset glaze the Chisos Mountains red and then black. He’d reminded himself over and over that this brutal place wanted him dead, tried to talk himself out of being moved by the beauty.

But he was still out on that porch every night, wasn’t he?

Eventually, the track around the Avallon led to a staff entrance, where a gloved porter in the Avallon’s gray-and-gold uniform waited.

“Hello, hello, hello. Hello, young fellow, we have arrived.”

Thus entered Mr. Benjamin Pennybacker, the State Department representative leading the mission. The State Department was not exactly a rival agency to Tucker’s FBI, but they were not bosom colleagues, either. Technically the Bureau men were to refer to him as Agent Pennybacker or, even more appropriately, Special Agent Pennybacker, but in private, the three agents, by unspoken agreement, called him Mr. Pennyback, the first half said quickly, like winding up the pitch, and the second half thrown into the mud with energy. PennyBAAACK. Give me my PennyBAAACK. Currently, Pennybacker was greeting the porter while balancing on one foot, the better to flick gravel from his opposite shoe as he nattered on about the weather, golf, the local wildlife, the problem of stuck typewriter keys, fifteenth-century Welsh uprisings, each topic carrying the conversation’s participants further from the matter at hand, not closer.

The State Department! They weren’t agents. They were schoolboys who didn’t notice their shirts were untucked in the back, coming of age in a file cabinet while the Bureau men trained in the field.

Tucker broke in. “I was led to believe our meeting was in the main hotel.”

The porter replied, “We’ve been asked to park your vehicles back here to avoid disturbing the guests.”

“The guests are still here?”

“Sir?”

At this reveal, Pennybacker’s eyes beseeched first the porter and then Tucker. He did not seem to have the words for his disappointment; he was a kid pummeled for his candy.

Tucker asked the porter, “Is Mr. Gilfoyle still here to meet us?”

“Oh yes, sir.”

Well, then it would be made right, thought Tucker. He glanced over his shoulders at the other two FBI agents. “Wipe your shoes, fellas.”

With the mountains at their backs, they entered the hotel, scuffing the January slush off their soles. Benjamin Pennybacker, his jaw squared with brave new optimism; Special Agent Hugh Calloway, graceful as Astaire; Special Agent Pony Harris, grin like a crocodile. Special Agent Tucker Minnick, tight as a piston. Heads down, hats in hand. Scuff scuff scuff.

The porter asked, “Would you like to hang your coats?”

Pennybacker immediately relinquished his, revealing a rumpled shirt. The Bureau men, however, looked to Tucker. They all wore Bureau-issued .38 Colts beneath their jackets.

Tucker said, “We’ll keep them.”

Inside, the hotel was a gilded rabbit warren. Halls branched from halls. Stairways tunneled into the dark, some of them just six or eight stairs, younger stairways that seemed to be still growing. Doorways upon doorways in no predictable orientation. On the walls, stone bears and cougars, eagles and deer, choked mineral water into basins, their mouths stained dark. And still Pennybacker prattled on. Cruise ships, competitive harp playing, wool dying, saints in America.

Tucker interrupted, “Did you request the blueprints?”

“A good thought,” Pennybacker said. “An exemplary thought. Secret passageways. Men jumping from holes in walls. Women disappearing in the night. This place stirs the imagination.”

Tucker crooked a finger at one of the Bureau assistants behind them. “Make that happen.”

“I’ll do what I can, sir,” replied the assistant.

“No,” Tucker said. “Not good enough. Make it happen.”

“Yessir.”

Better.

Unlike Tucker, the assistant would head back to Washington after this meeting, free as a bird. The assistant, a young man so junior he probably still had pulled muscles from the academy, had years of grunt work in front of him before he’d earn any status, work Tucker had been eager to put behind him. But now he envied those days of surety, ambition, the feeling that the only way was up. Hoover had sent Tucker here as special agent in charge, two agents underneath him—on paper a lateral step, if not an upward one—but both he and Hoover knew it was an exile. He’d earned it.

Staff flowed in and out of the agents’ view to open and close doors, seeming less like employees and more like an extension of the hotel itself, a helping hand for those who faltered. Unsettling, yes, but not as unsettling as the hotel’s complicated odor: perfume, blood, fruit, dirt, caves, blossoms. The smell of the mineral springs.

He remembered that smell well.

You won’t be here long, Tucker thought. Just get the job done.

The staff were stealing discreet glances at Hugh. He wasn’t the only Black man there, but he was the only one starkly visible; every front-of-house staff member was White. Perhaps they were just curious; a G-man was unusual in this place, and a Black one even more so. Or maybe their attention signaled something darker. There were plenty of ugly things dressed in nice uniforms, weren’t there?

“Your pop never teach you to blink?” Pony asked a porter, who ducked his head swiftly.

Hugh told Pony, “You’re just jealous of my admirers.”

Pony tapped a salute off his forehead at a second staring staffer, showing them all his teeth.

“Hey,” Tucker said. “Tighten up.”

Admonished, the two other agents slunk into the library, leaving Tucker feeling even more unpleasant. He was perfectly at ease with the authority he wielded over the assistant, many years his junior, but he was less certain of how to approach his peers, Hugh and Pony. Hugh could have led this mission himself, except that Hoover would have never put a Black man in charge. And Pony . . . young Pete had informed him when they met that he’d gotten his nickname for a pony of whiskey, as if Tucker might have been impressed by the autobiographical note. Pony was a red-blooded young man in a way Tucker had never been, and the only role Tucker knew how to play with him was disappointed father. None of them were typical Bureau material, and it wasn’t difficult to imagine the other two agents were meant to be another part of Tucker’s exile, or he part of theirs.

Taking ahold of Pennybacker’s arm to stop him in the doorway, Tucker said, “We won’t be so informal again. The Bureau men, I mean.”

Pennybacker nervously straightened his bow tie, as if he were the one who’d been rebuked. “Ah, it’s all right, it’s just a hotel.”

“If it was only that,” Tucker replied, “we wouldn’t be here.”

In the Smith Library—the most intimate of the hotel’s three libraries, according to the staff, despite holding thousands of stiff-jacketed titles—the meeting began. In addition to the FBI and State Department, there was also local law enforcement, a mayor, two immigration officers, and Edgar David Gilfoyle, society playboy, seated at the head of a large executive table, the latter looking more professional than his reputation suggested, his tawny hair coifed and respectable, his long nose speaking of good breeding. The harsh winter light cast a keen-edged shadow behind him—behind everything, in fact. The huddled green leather chairs, the brass-shaded floor lamps, the brass whippet statuettes, the agents lowering themselves into their seats: everything had its dark mirror version. While Gilfoyle and Pennybacker conducted the sort of elliptical small talk that powerful, indirect men performed to take each other’s measure, an impeccable little cake, sticky with strawberry glaze, appeared before Tucker, a fairy gift. He frowned at it mistrustfully.

A waiter materialized at his elbow. “Agent Minnick, what would you like to drink?”

What a magic trick! Agent Minnick. Absurd that the hotel somehow knew Tucker’s name and yet had not completed the most essential prerequisite for this meeting: expelling its guests. He asked, “What do you have that’s not water?”

“Coffee, tea, lemonade, juice, Coca-Cola.”

Coffee brewed with water from the tap, tea steeped in water from the tap, lemonade made with water from the tap—he couldn’t avoid the sweetwater forever.

“A Coke will do me fine,” Tucker said.

He could avoid it for now.

“As you like,” the waiter said, and Tucker was interested in the—not the equality of it, because this man was taking his drink order, after all—but the dignity of it. All the waiters carried themselves with a good-humored bearing, as if only a stray turn of events had led to these elegant men being the ones delivering the food rather than receiving it, and that they did not in any way begrudge this fate. In this life, they served, in the next, perhaps, the seated men would. The atmosphere was not subservient. Instead, they were invited to play this guiltless game of luxury together.

Gilfoyle raised his voice. “Ah, here she is.”

The latecomer was the first woman they’d seen in the hotel. She was somewhat unconventionally dressed—slacks, wool jacket, short hair slicked back darkly—and she was followed by three dachshunds who, when she twitched a finger, sat themselves against the wall, as obedient as the staff. She was not outrageous, but she was confident, and in this room, the two concepts felt the same. It caught one’s gaze. Or perhaps just Tucker’s.

She asked, “How are you men enjoying your cake? Your drinks? You finding what you need?”

Her accent was as out of place here as her appearance, her woman-ness. It was a local mountaineer accent, voice high, vowels and verbs clipped short. Enjoyin’. Findin’. Not a house cat like Edgar Gilfoyle, but a mountain lion. A mountain lioness.

“This is June Hudson,” Gilfoyle said. “Our general manager.”

The room stirred palpably.

June Hudson wore a knowing expression that suggested she was used to the stir she caused.

“It’s very—it’s, ah—it’s very good!” Mr. Pennybacker was first to lead the charge into the silence. He prodded his cake with a fork. “Swell, really. I will miss treats like this when rationing arrives!”

June Hudson asked, “Would you like to know how that sweet little cake is accomplished? I have a whole squadron of young women who fly over the hotel and the town, collecting jam jars folks think they’re done with. Then the kitchen boils them, you see? Not the women, the jars. In a great big vat, all those jars give up that little bit of jammy goodness trapped in the bottom. Then another squadron of young men extracts the jars, and another still simmers the water right down to that glaze. Not an ounce of new sugar in those cakes, just sweetness others forgot. We might be a luxury hotel, but like everyone else, we learned a thing or two the last decade.”

She smiled. It was a cowboy’s smile, a crinkle of the eyes, a quirk of the mouth. Tucker felt he was once more standing on the porch of a Texas cabin, looking at the sun blazing a deadly landscape to gold.

But he could not afford to be fascinated.

Get in. Get out.

“That’s just neat as can be, Miss Hudson,” Pennybacker enthused. “Just the sort of innovation I like to see, exactly why the Avallon is the perfect choice to serve our great country.”

The January chill crept into June’s voice. “Mr. Gilfoyle only informed us last night that our great country had taken an interest in the Avallon.”

Gilfoyle studied the fireplace.

An old tension hung in the air, strong as the odor of the mineral water. Quite suddenly Tucker realized this was why the staff was ignorant of the mission; Gilfoyle wanted the Feds to break this news for him. Like meeting an informant in a public square. One rarely got gutshot in front of onlookers.

“Ah yes, that. There must have been a misunderstanding about the security needs!” Pennybacker was a child inserting himself between fighting parents. “We’ve lost a bit of time, but we do appreciate his discretion!”

Benjamin Pennybacker, State Department, slid a file across the table.

June Hudson, General Manager, did not open it.

She regarded the suits around her.

“No,” she said.

It was a no with some real heft, a no you could put ham and cheese on. The room went silent to appreciate its substantiality.

“. . . no?” echoed Pennybacker. “You haven’t even looked.”

“No,” she repeated. “The Avallon ain’t equipped to accommodate special requests right now, but there’s several hotels between here and Washington that would be glad to give you a hand. I’m owed favors up and down these mountains; I can make some calls.”

The fireplace popped. A pipe in the walls groaned. A staff member’s sharp heels tapped down the hall outside the closed door. Pennybacker cleared his throat three times, considered a fourth. His throat remained unclear. Tucker had not drunk anything, not even the Coke, but he already tasted the sweetwater’s ugly scour on the back of his tongue.

Gilfoyle said, “It’s not like that, Miss Hudson.”

God save us from men like them! Tucker thought. There was always someone like him ready to put a dustless shoe on West Virginia’s neck. Schooled men with soft hands and unmarked knuckles, men with stammering, wise voices, telling a ferocious, capable woman like this what to do. This was not what Tucker’s job was supposed to be. This state, this hotel, her accent, his past, these people—

“It’s not like what?” June asked.

Just get this done, Tucker thought. Get your life back.

But—

Pennybacker craned his neck. “Agent Minnick, are you standing? Are you speaking?”

Tucker saw himself as if from the outside, arms crossed, fingers hooked on the strap of his armpit holster. He saw June looking at him—more specifically, at his neck. Her gaze had found a mark nearly hidden by his collar, one most people didn’t notice and, if they did, didn’t identify: a coal tattoo. Children who played in houses powdered with coal and miners who survived tunnel collapses got them when coal dust permanently settled into their wounds. Already he was doubting this action of rising, of speaking; he was a man who found the unspoken word vastly more valuable than the spoken. But her gaze on his coal tattoo kept him on his feet, taut as a marionette.

• • •

THE FBI AGENT was standing. He was speaking. This was the dark-haired agent June had noticed the moment she arrived. If she were asked, she might have said the coal tattoo had drawn her eye, but that was untrue; she hadn’t seen it until he stood. It was his face that snagged her. There was a place on the property where the hot springs and the cold springs were so close that, lying on the moss between them, one could touch them both, marveling at the opposites. The agent’s face was like that: hard eyebrows, soft eyes, hard expression, soft mouth. Federal agent, coal tattoo.

He said, “I am Agent Tucker Rye Minnick of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Miss Hudson, I think it’s clear that no one has been straight with you or your staff. You’re not happy with the state of affairs; let me assure you the FBI is also unhappy. You would like this to be a decision-making meeting—it isn’t. Its only purpose is to tell you what needs to be done and let you alone to do it.”

“Now, that’s overstating a bit. I don’t think that’s the only purpose—” Pennybacker started.

Agent Minnick continued as if the State Department man hadn’t spoken, counting points on his fingers. “One. The current guests will need to go, immediately. The hotel must only contain staff, agency representatives, and the individuals listed in that file.

“Two. Forty Border Patrol agents will assemble temporary guard towers and provide perimeter security.

“Three. A Swiss liaison will act as a neutral intermediary between governments.

“Four. Agent Pennybacker and I need updated lists of every current employee. We will interview each and perform rigorous background checks. The staff must be advised that a failure to cooperate will result in termination of employment.

“Five. Three hundred foreign nationals will arrive at the station on Wednesday and will stay until the State Department negotiates a return to their home countries, estimated at the twenty-first of April.

“Six. Agent Calloway on my right, Agent Harris on my left, and I will remove all phones, radios, and newspapers from the guest areas and, on behalf of the Bureau, monitor all communication through the switchboard and mailroom.”

Gilfoyle looked a little angry; Pennybacker was in a state of high distress. The latter sputtered, “Agent Minnick, I really think you’re making Miss Hudson feel—”

Agent Minnick held up his hand. He finished, “These internees are coming; the clock is ticking; it began ticking before we arrived. You can’t say no, Miss Hudson, because no one asked you. Someone with more rank already said yes.”

Stretching across the table, he flipped open the file to the first document. He said nothing as June scanned it, all the way down to the bottom, to the president’s signature.

Several years before, June had accompanied Mr. Francis to a meeting with the dignitaries of Constancy, the closest town, to discuss a deal the Avallon had struck with the railway for local infrastructure improvements. She’d been young then, unpracticed, and she’d laid out the requirements for the project just as Agent Minnick had. Bullet-pointed. In order of necessity. After she’d finished, uncomfortable silence bruised the room. Mr. Francis had smoothly rescued her, making the list sound like it had mostly been the board’s idea and easing wounded egos. She knew better now, but she also knew, unlike the others, that Agent Minnick wasn’t being cruel. He was just boiling a jar down to the dregs.

“Turn the page,” Agent Minnick advised.

She turned the page. The next document shouted everything Agent Minnick had not. Minnick had called them foreign nationals, but these were no ordinary foreign nationals. They were diplomats.

Nazi diplomats.

Well, not all of them.

Another turn of the page revealed lists of Japanese names. Then Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian. Many languages, one unspoken word: the enemy. There were a lot of unspoken words in the file. Here was one that was never used: detention. Instead, the hotel was to be an “assembly point” for Axis diplomats and their families. The foreign nationals were held, contained, safeguarded. Border Patrol agents would be provided, like one might provide towels and robes. Communication would be tastefully managed, like a cocktail party. Diplomatic reciprocity: you feed them caviar on one side of the ocean, we’ll feed them caviar on the other.

She could hear Sandy Gilfoyle’s gently mocking voice: Welcome to the thin, rarefied air of high international law, Goon.

Protests pressed against her lips. Her head of housekeeping’s son had just been killed at Pearl Harbor. She could think of three Polish Jews in her dining room staff just off the top of her head. The draft was due to harvest brothers, husbands, sons. How grotesque to ask this of them.

Young Sandy was in uniform and she hadn’t heard from him for weeks.

How grotesque to ask this of her.

But Agent Minnick had said this wasn’t a decision-making meeting.

June lightly touched the words Takeo Nishimura. He was the Japanese envoy frequently seen in the company of Saburo Kurusu and Ambassador Nomura, who had promised peaceful solutions right until Pearl Harbor. Then Friedrich Wolfe, cultural attaché for Nazi Germany. Finally, Erich von Limburg-Stirum, a trick air-show pilot famous enough for even her to recognize his name. Not just diplomats, then. Journalists. Businessmen. Air-show pilots.

She murmured, “These fellas are all being run out of Washington?”

“Run out of,” Pennybacker repeated, and laughed a little, to ease the sentiment. “It’s an issue of protection from an overexcited American public. Any negative event would be, as you imagine, an international incident. It’s important to have the—what do you call it?—the high ground. We’re talking diplomatic reciprocity. Precedent. Excellence. The Avallon is one of the very best luxury resorts within arm’s reach of Washington. Look, Miss Hudson, the Greenbrier already took an initial group just before Christmas, and if they’re taking part, you—”

The Greenbrier! Was this why she hadn’t heard from Loren, the Greenbrier’s manager? It was strange to imagine that her only other real competitor in luxury had also wrestled these ethical questions. She asked, “How many do they have?”

Pennybacker shook his head ruefully, as if he’d caught her trying to trick him. “It’s best if we don’t share details from the other hotels.”

Hotels, plural. Gilfoyle must have known about this for days, possibly weeks. He’d robbed her of her most valuable asset, time, although it was hard to tell if he understood how grand a theft it was. For years, he’d made his home in other people’s homes, flitting from friend to friend, party to party, blazing through three countries’ society pages. Black tie and champagne, women and nightlife; for Gilfoyle, the twenties had never ceased their roaring. What was the Avallon to him? A building.

“Mr. Pennybacker, I’ll find out one way or another. What other hotels are we talking about?”

“The Homestead,” he said.

The Greenbrier and the Homestead were both grand hotels, capable of housing hundreds of guests. She regarded the list with new eyes. It had seemed enormous, but now she understood that it was abbreviated, partial. It was perfectly sized to fill the Avallon nearly to capacity because it was part of a much longer list cut into hotel-sized pieces. For the first time, June really believed the country had gone to war a month before.

She stood up. The dachshunds stood up. Agent Minnick nodded, satisfied in some way.

Gilfoyle was a man electric, his eyes wide and alarmed. He said, “Miss Hudson—you’re not going?”

Of course she was going. He had placed her in an elevator car with the cables cut. While she had been Mr. Francis’s general manager, he had allowed her to forget this wasn’t really her hotel. Every decision had been her decision. But it was Gilfoyle’s now, which meant he could say yes when she would have said no. Without calling her first. If she was waiting for a sign of whether their time together meant anything, she had it. The elevator car plummeted.

“As you just heard, Mr. Gilfoyle,” June said, “we have a lot of work to do.”

Chapter Three

At least the Burns Night décor wasn’t going to waste.

Because there were so many guests leaving at once, checkout took place in the ballroom. Poetry twirled as June moved up and down the line, delivering personal apologies. Waitstaff, still wearing tartan sashes for the aborted ball, delivered travel parcels of nibbles constructed from durable components of the Burns Night feast. Here and there, guests reached up to read from the dangling pages, just as June had imagined earlier that day. It was a memorable scene. An unsettling scene. To see people like this queued up for their coats and their cars—! People like this didn’t queue. People like this had other people to queue for them.

“‘Wi’ mony a vow, and lock’d embrace, / Our parting was fu’ tender; / And, pledging aft to meet again, / We tore oursel’s asunder!’” Mr. Astor (it was the Mr. Astor most people thought of when one said Mr. Astor, the one who was close friends with Roosevelt) (the Roosevelt most people thought of when one said Roosevelt) was one of the final guests in line. He was in one of his genial moods rather than his irascible one.

“Mr. Astor, I’m right sorry to be seeing you go,” June said. “Do you have any insider tips for me?”

Releasing the poem, he looked at her from beneath his big brows. “Avoid boats.”

“Dear pet!” broke in the final guest in line. “What an adventure this is.”

The final guest was actually four guests: the Morgan family. They had spent the last week of January at the Avallon for as long as June had been manager. The Avallon had saved one generation’s marriage, healed a fraternal rift, buried a grandmother, and seen the youngest generation happily married. A decade in a life. In an entire family’s life.

The two Morgan sons (who reminded June, poignantly, of Sandy) pet the dachshunds and shyly hugged June, an outlandish display of affection only possible because they had been much younger when she’d met them. This reticence was the mark of the upper class; Mr. Francis had tried to teach her. Remember what it means to transcend your class. This is the language of the lower class: immediacy, possession, lust, hunger, the obvious. This is the language of the ruling class: legacy, humor, artifice, generosity, subtlety. If you want someone to treat you above your station, most of what you want must remain unspoken. To say the thing is to prove your crassness. You are not crass, June Hudson. I am not crass, Mr. Francis. You are meant for great things, June Hudson. You can say that, I can’t; them are the rules, right? Ha. Those are the rules, June.

“Dearest Miss Hudson,” said Mother Morgan (wake-up call 9:50 a.m., have a Roman Punch waiting on the balcony at check-in, three spa treatments a week). The rumor was that she was a ruthless social shark outside this hotel, but here, she was the kindest of souls. “We’ve left a gift for you at the front desk.”

Guests often gave June pottery, jewelry, books, art. Gifts appropriate for a society lady, not for a hard-living general manager. Memorably, a newly divorced heiress had once sent her the gift of Sears and Roebuck’s finest Italian bees. The workers had come in one box, the queen in another, nothing else in the box but some royal jelly to sustain her, not even dachshunds for company. Those bees, at least, were still doing good work.

“John,” Mother Morgan said in her demure way, “tell Miss Hudson what she needs to know.”

“About—? Oh. Yes. Miss Hudson, I want you to say nothing and just listen to me,” said Father Morgan (left-handed Winnet enthusiast, occasional gambler, do not serve anchovies), who, outside this hotel, controlled the fates of thousands of men. Here, he was meekly grateful when the staff recalled his fondness for a hot toddy before bed. In a low voice, he described what was due to be rationed next, war legislation under discussion, current detention orders on the FBI’s desk, industries and cities likely to boom due to war production, his understanding of the State Department’s current power, and future draft plans as far as he or anyone else in his circle could see. It was the most meaningful gift the Morgans had ever offered her.

And then, just like that, they were gone. The ballroom was empty of everything but velvet-roped stanchions, drifting Burns Night poetry, and a handful of staff taking stock of what needed to happen next.

June had never emptied the entire hotel. Not even during the Depression, when both rivers and parties had dried up and men had jumped from windows, an egalitarian pastime, business magnates and head waiters united in regret. Other luxury hotels had transitioned to convention venues or to apartments to solidify their survival. But June had instead dug deep into the Gilfoyle coffers to renovate rooms and revamp menus. Pushing aside the dreadful past, the hopeless future, she encouraged the Avallon to offer a glorious present. Worthless money flowed out of the Gilfoyles’ bank accounts faster than sweetwater out of rock. Are you very sure of this, June? Mr. Francis had asked after news of a particularly precipitous financial outlay made its way to him in New York—one knew it was precipitous if it made Mr. Francis nervous. We gotta look unafraid, June said. Pay the bill and pray for rain. Quite a gamble for a new, young GM. A successful gamble. The hotel had entered the Depression an institution; it exited a legend.

Now the legend had expelled the cultural denizens who were its lifeblood.

All, that is, except one.

“Hoss, 411 . . .” Griff said, rubbing his eye.

“I know, I know.”

Up June went to the fourth floor; she had an elevator to herself. Every other elevator with guest access was manned by a well-trained elevator operator, but not this one. Mr. Francis was far from the first person to die in the hotel—how many elderly, moneyed guests had June had to swaddle in their own bedclothes and smuggle out on the lower rack of two room service carts tied together?—but he had been an institution in an institution. The Gilfoyles had vast holdings, most of them in New York State and Massachusetts, and most owners would have hired another general manager so they could enjoy their wealth as they liked. But Mr. Francis was in the trenches with the staffers, raising his children on the property, never leaving the hotel grounds for any stretch of time until June finally succeeded him. Even though it had been a decade since then, he was still a legend.

But June wasn’t afraid of ghosts. If only Mr. Francis could haunt this elevator.

In the dim, the carpet seemed to crawl down the fourth-floor hallway, dusky leaves and midnight-blue curls writhing beneath the animal-headed sweetwater fonts. Dark wood paneling absorbed the light from the ornate sconces. The doors, made intimidating simply by nature of being identical and numerous, stretched on and on. In the past, the maids had expressed fear that they would fling open, revealing ghosts. June, on the other hand, pictured the doors flinging open to reveal the living, all with urgent needs, none anticipated. Simple horrors.

June rapped a single knuckle on the door of room 411. Soft but audible, just as she’d been taught back in housekeeping.

Another defiant crash.

A voice came from within the room: “That was an end table. The feet were carved like lilies. I hope you’re happy! Go on, knock again, there’s plenty left to—”

June interrupted, “411.”

The door opened. Just wide enough for a brilliant green eye to peer out.

“GM Hudson,” said 411. “I expected you sooner.”

Most of the guests liked to be called by name, but not 411. She had been a guest for as long as June had been at the Avallon, and during that time, she had never, as far as anyone knew, stepped foot outside her suite. Meals, books, and other niceties of life were all delivered to her. Once every week, she confined herself in the bath, door locked, for a single staff member to clean, a maid who’d long since been promoted to head of housekeeping and was technically above such tasks. A long-standing legend held that 411 had been seen on her balcony during FDR’s presidential visit, but no one ever identified the employee who had seen her firsthand. This was what June knew about 411: she had been a high-profile designer, was a divorcée, had a wicked sense of humor, and had done a wonderful job conceiving the Burns Night poetry apparatus.

“Quite a lot of noise happening up here, 411.”

“I will tell you what was a lot of noise: Mr. Beekhof, last night,” 411 said. “Sounded like he released a hog in his room.”

“Mr. Beekhof has checked out.”

“What a coward. We were not done with our fight. Choose your next words carefully; I don’t want to make a bigger mess.”

Ever theatrical, 411 had told the staff that every time they tried to convince her to check out, she would throw something out the window. Like many small nation-states that relied heavily on imports, her power tended toward the crafty and manipulative. Guerillas. Shadow battalions. So on. What would become of her if she was ejected? Here, she had everything she needed and nothing she didn’t. Who knew if she still had the skills to live elsewhere.

“I ain’t some quaking porter, 411,” June told her. “It’ll take more than some poltergeist antics to drive me from your door.”

“You know whose phone number is on my account, don’t you? I don’t have to go anywhere.”

“The State Department is running this show, not me. What do they care about Francis Gilfoyle’s number on your account?”

411 laughed. It was a laugh like buttercream: sweet, rich, unhealthy in large amounts. “June Hudson, you possum farmer. You really do only understand status as it works inside this hotel, don’t you? Frank was not just the owner of the Avallon. Haven’t you seen his friends in the lobby? Hire me. The last flying monkey who came up here before you told me only federal agents and staff may stay. So put me on staff. I’m sure you’ll come up with a clever job description.”

June thought about kicking her out, rudely, via legal document, just to teach her some overdue humility. June thought about the night they never talked about, the night June had returned from New York. June thought about how 411, despite being awful, was her best friend in the hotel.

No, June would not be kicking her out.

“You are making yourself one of my life’s biggest obstacles,” June told her.

“Darling, if that’s true,” said 411, “your life isn’t that bad.”

The door closed; 411 assumed she had won. And hadn’t she? Because June was already making a writing gesture in the air to the staff, and one of them was galloping to codify June’s intentions.

“‘Consultant’!” June called after them, just before the service door closed. “Backdate the hire a month. And bring what’s left of her end table back upstairs.”

“Yes, Hoss.”

Chapter Four

That evening, the Burns Night ball preparations continued to be put to use as forty Border Patrol agents barreled into the Magnolia Dining Room to eat the feast intended for the previous guests. After this, they would be banished to the staff dormitories, but for now, this first night after a long journey, they were pampered. The largest and most formal of the hotel’s dining areas was adorned on every surface: heavy crown molding, paneled ceiling, brocade wallpaper, checkered Italian Carrara marble floor. June still treasured the letters she’d gotten from her peers (peers!)—men who had received certificates from the Cornell School of Hospitality!—over her decision to update it during the Depression.

A swarm of staff had prepared the dining room as always, wiping down tables, refreshing centerpieces, and using custom-cut rods to ensure each place setting was laid exactly the same distance from its neighbor and the table’s edge. Now the Border Patrol men laughed, boomed, shuffled, thundered, drowning out the sounds of the quartet—schoolboys or cattle, pick your metaphor, nothing like the Avallon’s mannered guests. They had dirty hands and dirty knees and dusty beards. These were men who’d been plucked from assignments on the wild Texas and remote Canadian borders, men who only remembered to remove their five-gallon hats when the host at the door of the dining room murmured, “Sirs, the Magnolia Dining Room has a dress code.”

The men adjusted their wilderness-sized guns to be able to sit at the tables, stored their hats beneath their upholstered chairs, and spread their legs wide. Waitstaff tactfully advised them on which fork should be deployed when.

June lingered in the doorway, observing the sight as the sight observed her. Unlike the men at the initial meeting in the Smith Library, these fellas didn’t bother hiding their interest. She returned each stare with her usual little smile, holding their gazes until they smiled, too.

When the three FBI men appeared in the room, they received hoots and whistles. Difficult to tell if this was due to their clean-shavenness, the color of Agent Calloway’s skin, or simply their austere manner in comparison to the Border Patrol agents. Agent Pony Harris showed the crowing Border Patrol agents all his crocodile teeth in a knowing sort of way; Agent Hugh Calloway smiled tightly, no teeth; Agent Tucker Rye Minnick said something low and sharp to the table of Border Patrol agents closest to him and they all stopped carrying on at once, expressions somber.

Unlike the Border Patrol agents, the Bureau men had status; they had been assigned rooms in the Avallon proper and given use of Gilfoyle’s handsome study upstairs for their paperwork and the Glass Studio for their interviews. They’d gotten to work directly after the meeting. Agent Calloway had begun staff interviews, Agent Harris had set up a mail sorting system, and Agent Minnick had collected radios. Possibly they had been up to other work, too, that June wasn’t privy to. Ordinarily, the hotel did not so much as twitch its tail without her knowing. The Bureau men crawled like intruders, fleas. Handsome fleas. On his way to an empty table, Agent Minnick’s frowning gaze found June where she stood, hands in pockets, leaning against the doorjamb. She smiled her small smile at him, but he could not be convinced to mirror her expression as easily as the Border Patrol agents.

“Hello hello hello, Miss Hudson.” Benjamin Pennybacker, the State Department agent, joined June, his bow tie, as ever, a bit askew, his coat shoulders rumpled.

“Hello hello, Mr. Pennybacker.”

Unlike the Border Patrol agents and the Bureau men, Pennybacker was the only one of his kind, and he didn’t seem to know what to do with himself. He was an ineffectual-seeming man, which June understood was part of what must make him effectual. His exterior, either by nature or design, suggested a pliable, affable man who would lend a sympathetic ear before being easily shoved aside. A flunky. But in this particular mission, he outranked everyone else, so June assumed all this personal softness covered—or was made allowable by—immense professional power. He probably had more in common with the usual Avallon guest than any of the other men there.

“Are they really getting caviar?” June asked him. “Our diplomats held overseas, I mean? Is that really what is at stake here?”

“War is not what it used to be. This is an ugly one.” Pennybacker tried to pet one of the dachshunds, who evaded him with a look of distaste; perhaps it, like June, was thinking that the last war had been hard on the eyes, too. “There are rules in war, you know, laws of human civility. We hope to shame the Axis countries into remembering them. You did not hear it from me but there are POWs starving right now. Women. Children.”

“I don’t need a propaganda poster.”

“Fine, then, men, too,” Pennybacker said. “Men are also starving. Ugly men, who cheat at cards, faces too unpleasant for posters.”

Taking pity on him, she nudged one of the friendlier smooth dachshunds in his direction. “Now we’re getting somewhere. How much did you say the govmint was paying for this?”

“Ten dollars a day for every adult! Ten dollars for every ugly man. Five dollars for each child. Does that seem fair?”

The chandeliers dripped from the ceiling. Rib roasts jutted from the plates. Crystal sparkled. The Magnolia Dining room was not simply luxurious by the standards of quality hotels; it could easily go toe to toe with a palace.

June replied, “Look around you and ask yourself: Does that seem fair?”

“You’ll feel differently when you have diplomats at these tables, Miss Hudson. You’ll see. They won’t be that different from what you’re used to,” Pennybacker said. “Now what’s this I hear about the bathhouses and demons? The valets were telling me the bathhouses are haunted and you’re the only one who can speak their language. They told me I was probably in danger. I do love these mountain stories.”

“It’s not a story,” June said. “And there’s no demons. Just the water.”

“Mayhap I could take a dip. I could use some magic. These are very good dogs. What are their names?”

“I don’t know. They were left here by a guest.”

Guests left all sorts of things behind. Books, sweaters, half-eaten boxes of chocolates, typewriters, board games, golf clubs, Winnet billies, fiancés, dogs. It was then the hotel’s job to determine—tactfully—if the object had been abandoned by accident or on purpose and, if appropriate, arrange for its return. It wouldn’t do to call a guest’s home and ask the wife about a found ring, for instance, only to discover it belonged to a different lady friend. Permanently abandoned items joined a collection called Good Behavior, which was parted out to exemplary staff members by Griff Clemons at the year-end staff celebration (canceled this year on account of Pearl Harbor; Good Behavior must be brimming). The dachshunds, however, were wanted by no one, including their old master, who had found them difficult. June didn’t find them difficult. They hadn’t trusted their previous management, that’s all.

Pennybacker asked, “However do you call them, then?”

“Like this.” She snapped her fingers; the dachshunds all looked at her attentively. “The staff call them the Pinta, the Niña, and the Santa María.”

He gratefully rubbed the dachshund’s head she had assigned him. “Is this the Santa María?”

“No.”

Both June and Pennybacker watched Sebastian Hepp, her best waiter, glide over. Even when balancing a heavy tray, his posture was steady. More than steady. Swanlike! Sebastian was one of the very best; it was troubling that June and the local Draft Board were probably in agreement on this, and for similar reasons. A good soldier would take well to training, become a good shot, keep himself clean and healthy, and follow orders. A great soldier would do all this, but with such pragmatic optimism that others would follow him into the dark. A very great soldier would do all this, but also realize the terrible game of war was always changing, and would spend his time innovating, not simply surviving.

This was true of waiters, too. June dreaded the day he was called up.

The dachshunds stood on their back legs all around Sebastian, begging. His tray did not so much as wobble as he stroked them. With his very slight German accent, he said, “Hoss, it’s Chef.”

Pennybacker, sensing he was about to be left to his own devices, cast a baleful glance at the Bureau men. On paper, the Feds had a lot in common. But in reality, the lean G-men seemed like they had to catch their dinners. Pennybacker seemed more like the thing they might catch.

She told him, “We can send dinner to your room if you need to take care of work.”

The sun came out in his expression. “Very good idea, Miss Hudson.”

“The only kind I have.” She thought about Gilfoyle, who had disappeared to the family apartment in the North Wing. He would be taking dinner in his room, too. Earlier, she had wanted him to send for her so she could refuse the request. Now, she wanted him to send for her so she could stop wondering if she would give in and go to his door.

“You’re very funny, Miss Hudson.”

“You’re not the first jasper to notice.”

“Ha!”

“Ha.”

• • •

JUNE WHISKED AWAY to Chef. She went alone, just as she had in the elevator earlier, not because the kitchen was haunted, but because the chef was. She was very proud of acquiring Chef Maurice Fortéscue. It was hard to lure highly skilled staff this far off the beaten path. Generally, she made do with the exiles (the troubled, the disenfranchised, the fallen from grace), the dreamers (the young, the newly brokenhearted, aspiring novelists), or the eccentrics (the crackpots, the poets, the listeners). Chef Maurice Fortéscue was a bit of all of them. Most chefs were known for their tempers—every member of a kitchen brigade, from the lowly plongeur to the rôtisseur to the commis, had their stories of apoplectic chefs—but Fortéscue wasn’t angry. He was gloomy.

Outside the Grotto, June told the kitchen staff huddled in the hall, “Take a smoke break, cats.”

The cats in question were coed, unsegregated, a mix of both imported European staff and locals, unlike the primarily French male brigades of most luxury hotel kitchens. Over her time as GM, June had directed sweeping changes to the claustrophobic Grotto. Carpenters tore out walls to expose the original stone arches. Engineers tunneled through bedrock to create windows. June herself reorganized the hotel’s three kitchen brigades. Fortéscue was hard enough to balance. The rest of the Grotto had to be in balance.

After June and the chef were alone, she strolled around, peering in pots and looking in ovens and investigating cutting stations. Fortéscue said nothing as she did; he simply stared into the steam rising from one of his stockpots as if scrying for his future.

“What is this?” she asked. “And that?”

The chef spoke in a dull voice. “It will be candied yam. And corn fritters.”

“This?”

“Fried oysters rémoulade.”

“Mmm. And this?”

“Stuffed peppers. And braised celery.”

Fortéscue had been a nonfunctioning drunk when he’d first arrived; that was part of how she had acquired him. It had not taken him long to begin missing shifts, just as he had at the Royal-Montague. With Griff Clemons and five of her room service waiters, June had pushed her way into Goldenrod Cottage without knocking. Inside, they’d found abandoned food swarming with ants, crates that hadn’t been touched at all since they’d come from Saint-Julien-lès-Metz to London to New York to West Virginia, empty bottles hidden under furniture as if there was anyone but the swing chef to see them, and Fortéscue himself half-conscious on the kitchen floor. At a nod from June, Griff and one of the waiters took Fortéscue to run him under cold water. Two waiters dragged trash down the stairs. One replaced the filthy linens on his despairing bed, another set up a cot in the hallway. That had left June to scrub, hang his clothing, shelve his French novels, set his carefully packed model airplanes on the mantel, and pin his air-show and airplane posters to the bedroom walls. June and the others hadn’t said a word, just left him to it—all, that is, except one minder, who slept on the cot every night for six weeks, until Fortéscue was good and dry.

June indicated a saucepan. “What is this?”

“Red wine and marrow sauce.”

“In here?”

“Baked tomatoes for the tenderloin and duchess potatoes.”

In the dining room, the Border Patrol agents called back and forth, chairs scraped, glasses clinked. It had been a long time since a meal at the Avallon was late.

June did not hurry. “What will this be?”

“Milk-fed chicken with smothered green peas.”

“What will this be?”

Instead of answering the question, Fortéscue said, “My sisters wrote me a letter about my village. It is such a boring village. Nothing ever changes. But they wrote that in the market the other day, there was a crowd around this young girl, fifteen or sixteen. Her head was shaved, like this, down to the bone, and she had a sign around her neck. It said she had been caught in a crime, and the crime was kissing her Jewish beau. They were spitting on her. I probably knew her mother, that is how small the village is, and the people spitting on her—they probably did, too. My sisters and Aubert and Pourciau wrote that they made some trouble for them, and I am sure they did, but that does not change that I am here and they are there, where people are spitting on young girls for who they love.”

What he meant was, I don’t want to serve these people.

She said, “It is only for a short time, Chef.”

In a low voice, he said, “How will I do it, Hoss?”

Fury raged through June, not at Fortéscue, but at Gilfoyle. She knew her staff would rise to the occasion. Not because they wanted to, but because she, June Hudson, Hoss, had asked them to, and because she had made all of them whole at one point or another. Because they trusted her. But it wasn’t her decision they were trusting this time. It was Gilfoyle’s.

“Fourteen hundred forty eggs,” June said. “Twelve hundred dinner rolls, 800 pounds of meat, 600 pounds of potatoes, 120 pounds of vegetables, 92 pounds of fish, 80 loaves of bread, 72 pounds of butter, 50 pounds of coffee, 40 pies and cakes, 24 cases of fruit, and 16 gallons of ice cream. Then you’ll go to sleep, and the next day, you’ll do that again.”

What she meant was, I know I’m asking a lot of you.

As Fortéscue raked a hand through his hair, she softened it for him. She said, “Erich von Limburg-Stirum is coming.”

“Erich von Limburg-Stirum?” Fortéscue echoed. In his expression, she saw planes looping, wings scraping the clouds, skimming the treetops. Erich von Limburg-Stirum, ladies and gentlemen. Is there anyone better in the air? Betrayed, he asked, “Is he a Nazi?”

“There’s all sorts of fish caught in the Feds’ net, Chef,” she said. “It ain’t our job to untangle it, just feed them.”

Fortéscue’s eyes found the sweetwater font on the wall. A cunning carving, two songbirds singing water into a basin.

“Leave the water to me,” June said.

“They say it’s turning.”

“It’s not turning.”

“The fourth floor—”

“Do I tell you how to make a rémoulade?”

Fortéscue said, “That word sounds ridiculous when you say it.”

“That’s how you sound, talking about the water.”

The two of them regarded each other.

June asked, “What say you?”

With a sigh, Fortéscue tightened his apron strings. “I say viva l’Avallon, Hoss.”

Chapter Five

But she went to look at the water anyway.

After the Border Patrol had been sent to the staff dormitories to make beds in the hallways, June left the dachshunds behind the front desk (I’m taking a gander at the waters, don’t let them out), put on her fur coat (a gift, like the bees), and headed into the frigid January night. Outside, the swiftly installed floodlights rendered the Avallon’s landscape strange and heightened. Long, precise shadows of skeleton trees marbled the frostbitten lawns in all directions. The temporary guard towers muttered her name as she walked beneath them; she remembered, too late, that Griff had mentioned something about an identification badge being left on her desk. Something living and fluttery (A bat? It was too cold for bats) capered through the air above her. Ah, but it was cold. Every breath scraped her throat on its way in and dampened her scarf on its way out.

The floodlights did not quite reach as far as June was going, but it did not matter. She knew the entire property like the back of her hand.

She still recalled the first time she’d climbed the drive to the Avallon, her mother long gone, nothing but a paper sack of walnuts to her name. The window trim and roofs of the bathhouses glowed white against the dark green mountain gloom. Beyond them, the century-old hotel seemed to grow from the mountains, constructed from the same stone it was built on. Roofs steep as the surrounding peaks pitched every which way. Nothing was symmetrical. Architecturally, the hotel’s form didn’t make sense, but if one thought of it as a living entity—? The walls climbed the velveted lawns as organically and opportunistically as honeysuckle. Wings, conservatories, porches, and turrets jutted anywhere the land seemed gentle enough to support more growth. Instinctively, June had known it was a place that had to be fought for.

It called her; she listened.

They say it’s turning.

June used her enormous ring of keys to let herself into the first of the bathhouses. The Avallon had four of them: Avallon I, Avallon II, Avallon III, and Avallon IV, named for their proximity to the hotel itself, rather than their age. The brochure boasted their attributes:

House physician

Full-time nurses

Live music

Mud baths

Mineral treatments

Electric cabinets

Detoxification

Purification

Intoxication

Inside, the scent of the Avallon I was both metallic and medicinal, the latter associated with the electric cabinets—a bleachlike smell that was not bleach, invoking the sterile efficacy of an operating room. Unlike the other bathhouses, it was a clinical place. One came for procedures. For regimens. Avallon I was for men of science, not men of magic; it shrank the sweetwater to something logical.

June had been raised to be both respectful and afraid of the sweetwater. Afraid was perhaps twisting it too tight. Superstitious. That was the word. Like many of the children of the holler, June absorbed a set of beliefs about the sweetwater. The water would give you good if you gave it good, and it would give you ill if you gave it ill. The water took a liking to some people and a hating to some others, but mostly kept to itself. If the water turned, a place would be ruined for years. Everyone knew a ruined town. In her younger days, she used to imagine that the sweetwater housed person-shaped entities. Mermaids. Nymphs. When her mother wasn’t looking, she would whisper sweetly to the water’s surface, cajoling them: Show yourselves, please! She knew better now. Only children and pedants tried to put human faces on the ineffable.

Could her mother have imagined that June would one day be Hoss, in good part because of the sweetwater? Surely not. When June looked back at herself, she remembered a blank person, an empty mirror. Other children loudly explored the world to discover who they wanted to be, but June had been as silent and featureless as the surface of a mountain lake. She just listened.

In the dim light, the Avallon I’s two vast electric cabinets looked like coffins. A poster on the wall exhorted one to please be careful when the floor was wet; another asked bathers to dry themselves completely before climbing beneath the bright lights of the electric cabinets.

June spidered her fingers above the mirrored surface of the soaking pool. As the wind rattled under the eaves of Avallon I, the water murmured fleeting impressions against her skin. Staffers shaking out tablecloths. Landscapers trimming dormant branches. A convoy of dark cars gliding up the drive. Bagpipers playing a single rendition of “Amazing Grace” before heading back to New York so June felt she’d gotten something for her money. It was difficult to tell which of these were her thoughts and which belonged to the entities in the water; they were shaped exactly the same.

She heard no signs of trouble.

On to the next.

The Avallon II was the second-oldest bathhouse, just a minute’s walk from the Avallon I. On the outside, the small, delicate building was charming as a wedding cake tier, but inside, it was an intimate tropical dream in the Appalachians. Potted ferns and berry-toned Moroccan tiles surrounded two circular pools. One, steaming, was called the Simmer; the second, the temperature of the cold spring, was the Soak. Guests were encouraged to climb from the Simmer to the Soak, as navigating the contrast between two opposing extremes was more life-changing than simply enduring one—as with many things in life. June loved the Avallon II. How many times had she come to these pools after-hours with the Gilfoyle siblings, kicking legs in the water and playing poker with cards stuck together from damp?

Outside, the sky had begun to spit freezing precipitation—not snow, but something a little meaner, a little ruder. As she dipped her fingers into the Simmer, Mr. Francis’s death suddenly struck her fresh; the reality of it kept coming in and out of focus like something floating just beneath the waves. He had had the greatest laugh, the most inclusive laugh, that always sounded as if it was for you rather than about you. The moment she’d heard it, she’d known that was what she’d wanted her own laugh to sound like. June had first met him during one of his biweekly lunches in the staff canteen, a ritual that had helped him earn “Mr. Francis” instead of “Mr. Gilfoyle”; when he joined them at the housekeeping table, it had felt as if God had personally come to hobnob with his priests and nuns. Casually, he’d mentioned how instrumental housekeeping was to the Avallon—pass the salt, Miss Hudson—and she had glowed with the sense of being part of something bigger than herself.

(Later, Mr. Francis had confessed that he didn’t remember this meeting. Unlike June, who was able to remember each staff member, Mr. Francis had to hastily memorize the names of the relevant parties right before sitting. June Hudson, he would have recited before sitting. Hudson like the river, June not Jane.)

Her staff thinking he was haunting the place! But why not? Belief was contagious. When you believed in one intangible thing, why not a second, why not a third. If God, then why not the listeners in the water, if the listeners in the water, why not ghosts, if ghosts, why not unicorns—

With a sigh, she shook the untroubled water from her hand. Time to go.

The Avallon III was located inside a copse of coyly draped weeping willows. It was the most audacious of the bathhouses. The most romantic. The most sensual. Pick your descriptor; what did you want from your lover? For the right price, one could enjoy the stimulating embrace of both the cold spring and a scantily clad loved one, a titillating encounter shielded by thousands of shielding blossoms cascading from planters and vases.

The water here showed June a rippled memory, imperfectly reflected.

Head of housekeeping: June Hudson, you think you’re a Rockefeller, is that it? Why do I keep catching you in guest areas?

June: The water told me to, ma’am.

Head of housekeeping: The water, eh? I knew you took a shine to Mr. Francis.

June: Ma’am?

Head of housekeeping: Never mind. You so eager for the guests to see you, go beg at Slater’s door.

June had gone to Slater, who managed the elevator operators, once, twice, three times. Each time he heard her mountain accent, he said no. She would never be front of house. Did she hear what he was saying? She would never be front of house. June had heard what he was saying; she had just heard the water more clearly. She had given up working on Slater, used the cover of one of the infamous Napkin Raids to pinch an operator uniform, and ridden the elevators before and after her cleaning shifts. For months, she’d accompanied the regulars. The older operators, hired before the Great War, were all men; the newer operators, all women, were hired when male labor had been drafted. Slater must have figured it out pretty quickly, but he didn’t interfere. After the Sandy incident, word had gone round that the water had taken a liking to one of the little maids. You didn’t come between the water and the hotel.

As sleet rapped fitfully against the windows, June lifted her fingers from the silky water of the Avallon III. All that remained was the Avallon IV, which was only barely visible from the windows of the Avallon III, and only then because she knew to look for it. It would be a cold walk to an inhospitable destination. Unlike the other bathhouses, the Avallon IV was a rough, dark green building the size of a pantry. The only indication of its contents was a nearby boulder covered with snail-shaped spirals; the carvings predated the hotel itself. The inside was rustic, unadorned, unheated. The pool was a small square opening in the wood floor. When June lowered herself into it, feet first, there was just a hand’s breadth between her body and the sheer straight walls. If she kicked her legs in the column of warm water (she wouldn’t dare), she could feel that it opened up after just four or five feet, but who knew how much. Anyone who saw what it looked like down there wouldn’t be telling the tale anytime soon.

After the incident with Sandy, June’s relationship with the Avallon IV developed alongside her relationship with hotel operations. Shadowing the elevator operators, she’d learned quickly that they did not merely say Which floor, sir? They judged whether a guest wanted the silence preserved or broken, whether the guest wanted the gap between their social classes emphasized or erased. How natural their patter seemed! And yet, June heard the operators recycle conversational pieces, swapping out this phrase here or this topic there for something more suited to their current carload. A script for the play of life. This was allowed? Every trip in the elevator scribbled words onto blank, silent June. They let her try her voice, and she realized that if she made a performance of her accent, the guests didn’t mind hearing that she was from the mountains; in fact, it made sense, someone like her, serving someone like them. She was improving herself; they liked being part of it.

(It had not occurred to her then that this might have been exactly the lesson the head of housekeeping and the water alike had hoped she would learn, but it certainly did later.)

Slater offered her an official position, but it was too late. The hotel called her; she listened.

Now, in the dark, bitter cold, June hesitated. She had not decided if she would visit the Avallon IV when she saw headlights at the top of the hill.

Under these circumstances, the vehicle could have belonged to anyone, but June simply knew it was Gilfoyle. His headlights were illuminating the low, dark cloud cover as he reached a steep section of driveway the Gilfoyle children had always called the Widowmaker as they panted up it on foot to the main hotel entrance. He was leaving the family wing under the cover of darkness, without a word to her.

June did not think; she just hitched up her fur coat like a dress and ran. Adrenaline lent purpose to her strides, and she reached the circular drive just as Gilfoyle’s Auburn looped around it. The car was striking, yards and yards of cream and chrome, gliding through the Avallon’s lamplight like a postcard for the high life. For a moment she thought he did not see her lift her hand, and for another moment, she thought he would see and carry on as if he hadn’t, but then the car stopped.

Gilfoyle lowered the window. Illuminated by the unsparing light of the new floodlights, he was a carved stone version of himself, handsome and immutable, playboy hair sculpted, hollow cheeks chiseled. The air that came from the automobile’s interior smelled of the spicy Dunhill he often wore, more strongly than he himself ever did, as if he stored the essence of himself here, in a space no one else ever shared.

He said, “Don’t be cross with me.”

She was out of breath, like when they used to chase each other as kids. “I’m not cross. I’m strung out like a pack of hounds at the end of an eight-day week. You’re leaving? Not even a goodbye?”

“That sounds cross.”

“Give me a moment to get cross and you’ll hear the difference straight off, Mr. Gilfoyle.”

In this context, the formality made him wince.

“Look,” he said. “Look. Sit in the car; it’s sleeting.”

“I don’t have the time.”

“You have a minute.”

“You don’t know how many minutes I have.”

“For crying out loud. You have a minute.”

She would not glance at the hotel to see if this was theater; there were members of staff who would make hay with it no matter what. She simply passed through the headlights and opened the passenger-side door. Inside, it was humid, warmer, closer. How strange it was that Gilfoyle the boy had grown up into Gilfoyle the man, that she had grown up from June the girl to June the woman. The time since she had first come to the Avallon felt compressed, folded on itself like an invitation. It had been ages since she had seen him; no time had passed. How monstrous he was; how much she missed him, how much she missed them all. There had been an era when it had been every day with the Gilfoyles, dawn to dusk, June as one of them. How much time had it taken to crush this complex feeling into something small enough to swallow in the morning with her two glasses of sweetwater?

“See, you’re shivering,” Gilfoyle said. “I brought you something.”

“Was I meant to run after the car to receive it?”

“I was waiting for you to be in good temper. Look, it’s there. You moved it off the seat when you got in.”

“What is it? Don’t give me something you bought for one of the others and say it was for me.”

He looked wounded, but June did not believe for a moment that this large, light parcel had been meant for her. He had already been leaving when she caught him now, on his way to somewhere—someone—else. She knew who Gilfoyle was outside this hotel. She felt a fool even opening the parcel, playing along with the charade, but she did, carefully unfolding the paper and tucking it down in the footwell.

“Oh,” she said.

“You’re size seven, right?” he said.

“Yes.”

“That’s mink.”

“Is it?”

“And they’re made of velveteen rubber. They said you won’t be able to get that anymore now, with rationing.”

“I imagine not.”

“They’re overboots,” he said. “I thought for your walk into the hotel each day—”

“I know what they are.”

“Do you like them?”

The overboots, like all of their species, were designed for the wearer to slip their entire shoe inside for protection from the mud. But these were deliciously indulgent. Unlike the clear plastic or homely plain rubber of other offerings, these were marvelously finished to look like suede. They were trimmed not with faux fur but rather with sleek black mink. Practical. Beautiful.

“I’m going to try them on,” she said.

“Past time for that, really,” he said.

The boots fit so perfectly around her Mary Janes that it seemed likely he had considered not only the size of her feet but what she always wore upon them. The mink was soft, delicate, warm against her cold ankles. Already she could imagine her daily walks to and from her apartment with them; she could picture the silhouette of them, so much nicer than the bread bags some of her staff used or her own neglected basic plastic galoshes. She was unused to receiving a gift she wanted.

She had convinced herself so thoroughly that the night had meant nothing to him.

He said, “Like a glove!”

“Like a boot.”

“I thought they looked like a thing you would want,” Gilfoyle said. “Why didn’t you call me?”

“Why didn’t you call me?”

“And reach the switchboard girls? Put me through to Miss Hudson,” he said. “I want to whisper to her about her marvelous body.”

June’s marvelous body warmed. Gilfoyle, at a distance, had no particular magnetism, but Gilfoyle, in close quarters, had a certain mannered eroticism that affected most people. Something in the intensity of his gaze, the balletic gestures of his hands—it all formed a subconscious promise of a physical experience that would be both worldly and tasteful. Of course, for June, it was no mere promise; it was memory. That foolish, wonderful moment after the funeral, when the others gave up and went to bed, but she and Gilfoyle stayed up talking at the bar; when Gilfoyle lightly pressed his thumb into the very center of her palm; when she asked, What happens to us now?, and Gilfoyle said, Thank God for you, June, and then they had gone to bed, with a sense of inevitability, of recursiveness. It did not matter how long it had been. The mind forgot; the body didn’t.

She said, “You would have left without giving these boots to me if I hadn’t already been out in the rain.”

“I didn’t think you’d speak with me.”

“It ain’t right for me to take fire for a version of me you’ve invented. Of course I would’ve spoken with you. We have unfinished business, don’t you think?”

Gilfoyle reached for her.

“—not in front of the children,” she said, even as her skin thrilled at the suggestion. “I ain’t ready to forgive you. And I have to face them in the morning. Them, and several hundred Germans, it seems.”

“And some Italians,” he added.

“I ain’t ready to laugh at your jokes, either,” she said. “Maybe the hotel’s a toy to you, but it’s my life.”

He sobered. When he spoke again, his voice was different from before. “I’m too old to be shot at, June.”

“What are you worried about—the draft? They won’t take you.”

“They will. It’s coming. I talk to people. It’s not going to be as easy as they say.”

“Who is they?” But June knew who. Everyone. The radio, the kitchen chatter, the talk down in Constancy. The war had dragged on for years, but now that America was involved, they thought this thing would be over by St. Patrick’s Day.

“I know who I am,” Gilfoyle said. He was dead serious, unusual for him. “I knew I couldn’t do it. Father knew it as well. I did what I had to do.”

June began to put it together even before he finished the sentence; the unspoken words between his spoken words were noisy. A bargain. The hotel and everyone in it to keep him out of the war. Sandy, his little brother, was already in it. She remembered, quite suddenly, 411 saying with absolute assurance that a man like Francis Gilfoyle mattered to the State Department.

“You gave up the Avallon, is that what you’re saying? You offered it to them? Horsefeathers, are we doing all this to save your skin? You Judas!” Somewhere, Sandy was already in the thick of it, having joined the navy far in advance of Pearl Harbor. Mr. Francis had told June that at the very least, Sandy would have rank, which was safer than if he’d just been drafted or enlisted without any college. When Sandy heard him say this, he’d said, contemptuously, It isn’t about that! Then he’d said something in Greek, which Mr. Francis didn’t understand, and then in French, which Mr. Francis did, and there’d been yet another fight.

“Don’t be hyperbolic. I know what you can do.”

“Now’s not the time to pretend you know what I do.” Gilfoyle had never understood the hotel, much less the water. Not like his father, not like June. He didn’t know how delicate the Avallon really was. “What if you’d told me? What if I’d had time to prepare for that meeting? Springing a surprise party with the State Department just makes me feel like the help.”

He jerked. Physically. Left to right, chin seizing toward his shoulder. He’d done this as a child, too. Neither Mr. Francis nor Madeline could chastise him about leaving crackers on his bedside table for the ants, or for lazily done school papers, not without him doing that signature twitch. “You’re not the help.”

June wanted to ask, Then what am I? Was this a courtship? Was she meant to run, to chase? She didn’t want to be naïve, but the boots fit her and only her. Out the car window, the Avallon’s innumerable yellow windows glowed with anticipation. It had been one thing to gaze up at it as a little foundling from the holler, in awe of everything it stood for. Quite another to look at it as a woman who made it what it was. She recalled how, after some time riding the elevators, one of the guests left her a gray-jacketed ledger book with a handwritten inscription: One day, you will run this place. —E. R. Norvell.

And here she was.

“I would do it differently. If I had to do it again. Regarding the State Department business,” Gilfoyle said. He picked restlessly at one of his hands. Perhaps he was right to avoid the draft, she thought; it was impossible to imagine him on the front, unbuilt as he was for suffering. Hadn’t he been the one to bury the dead chipmunk they’d found as children? He’d gotten damp-eyed as he laid the roses on its grave. What would he do when the chipmunk was a man, ten men, one hundred men? Kindness was a virtue, but in evil places, empathy punished the wearer. Edgar David Gilfoyle was a snowball that, when crushed tight into a weapon, would turn to dusty powder. War would scatter him forever. “I don’t know how to be my father. You and he made it look so easy, working together.”

“I don’t need to be managed, Goyle.”

Relief whispered across his face when she used Sandy’s old name for him. He said, “I wouldn’t know how to manage you.”

Finally, she gave him a smile.

“Ah, Junebug!” Gilfoyle slapped her thigh, boyishly. The conversation was no longer a prison, he no longer had to work pins in the lock hoping it would come loose. “When this is over . . . you and I . . .”

The pause dragged out; she refused the temptation to fill it.

“. . . let’s have a drink next time I’m here,” he finished. “Or you should come to me. Away from the hotel. We can’t talk properly here.”

She could feel her heartbeat in her wrists, at her throat, but she spoke quite calmly. “Not with the children watching.”

“Not with the children watching,” he agreed.

After the funeral, they’d come together on neutral ground, in the small but excellent Gallimore Hotel in New York, where they were simply two mourners, a man and a woman, Edgar Gilfoyle and June Hudson. Here, at the Avallon, it was very difficult to forget that they were two mountains with no roads between them.

Or at least that was what she had thought. But tonight, out of sight of any curious eyes, he reached for her wrist to simply, agonizingly, run a finger along the edge of her watchband, a cunning analog for fingers teasing more dangerous hemlines. A road, perhaps, could be found.

Gilfoyle blinked up. “Are those your dogs? They’re eerie as hell.”

The dachshunds had found her. They clustered in the headlights, their eyes flat, gleaming disks. They did not look eerie to her. They looked like three shivering little dogs. They served to remind her that time was passing; the shift at the front desk had turned from day to night. She did not want to go, but nothing that had happened in this car changed the truth of three hundred Axis diplomats.

She opened the door. Gilfoyle, solicitous, moved the empty boot box out of her way.

“I will get rid of it later,” he said. He knew as well as she did that leaving the car with an obvious gift would be a source of gossip for weeks.

“They’re very good boots, Ed,” she admitted. “Good job. I ain’t easy to please.”

This nearly made him twitch again; genuine compliments used to make him jerk nearly as badly as criticisms, but he’d worked hard in his college years to suppress this. Only June, who knew him so well, saw the spasm in his jaw.

“I know,” he said.

She remembered that long-ago gift, the gray ledger book. At first, she had not known what to write onto its first blank page. Eventually, she had written a little poem, mysterious even to her:

Upstairs

Downstairs

Inside

Out

She had not yet been Hoss—that was so many years in the future—but she was on her way.

Gilfoyle said, “You know I think the world of you, June.”

Chapter Six

That first night, Tucker Rye Minnick slept badly. No fault of his room—it was impeccable. Substantial chairs, sleek curtains, plush rug, custom-built mattress. In the bathroom, soaps and a plush robe. But he couldn’t stop smelling the mineral water; each floor of the hotel had a font, and the fourth floor’s was directly outside his door. The mountains peered in the window at him. Every time he closed his eyes, he dreamt of a man speaking in the high, slanted mountain accent, saying over and over, Whitedamp will kill you slow. Firedamp, that will take you fast. Stinkdamp, that’s the one that smells of eggs, and that means you’re done for in three hours. Afterdamp, you won’t even know you’re dead.

He woke, coughing, drowning, lungs full of the gases that linger in the mines of West Virginia.

He was only halfway alert, and in this state, he thought, he would take the Bureau car, he would drive to Charlottesville—he could make it that far by midnight—and he could sleep in the lot of that motel where he’d once done battle with bedbugs because it was the only place he could afford with the Bureau per diem. He could find a telephone to call his SAC. He would tell them—he would tell them—

I can’t stay.

But of course he would stay. He had to stay; he had to excel. His memos had to be so thorough and numerous that the cases of paperwork could build a fort around his SAC back at the SOG, seat of government. His solutions to the Avallon’s porous communication system had to be so inventive that they would be taught in the academy as examples of creative agenting. He had to turn one, two, three staff members and diplomats into informants, demonstrating to Hoover himself why the Bureau kept an agent with ten years’ experience. If there was a spy among the diplomats, that would be even better. The agency had just busted a German spy ring of thirty men trained in invisible inks and explosives, now destined to be electrocuted in the chair the DC locals called Sparky, and it had been very good for public opinion to see the Bureau doing such unimpeachable work. It was too easy for an intelligence agency to be feared, suspected. Public arrests of obviously bad men went a long way. If Tucker could give Hoover another spy, he’d be forgiven, surely.

Surely.

It was still very dark when he gave up trying to sleep. He directed his attention to the small, tactile details of dressing, the unfolding of his trousers, the buttoning of his shirt, the knotting of his tie, taking care not to poke a toe through his threadbare sock. Important to focus on the real here, in this unreal place, where, as he stepped out of his room, the stretching length of the hall and the sound of unseen water made it seem he was in a ship’s corridor, a train, a mining shaft lit by lanterns.

One of the doors creaked open as he passed. Just a crack. Room 411.

“Agent Minnick.”

He recognized this number. Yesterday, the agents had begun the herculean task of conducting over four hundred staff interviews, probing the hotel for security risks. A recent change to the staff list had caught Tucker’s eye as he looked over Hugh’s notes. Consultant—411.

Tucker stopped. “Ma’am, we need to talk.”

“A patently untrue statement,” said 411. She was unseen, like the water dripping into the fonts. Her voice sounded like how drinking brandy felt. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“You opened the door,” Tucker said.

The door shut on his face.

This place, he thought.

Someone had set a chair in front of the closest fourth-floor elevator door, marking it off-limits, so Tucker went downstairs by way of a staff stairwell, bare apart from graffiti that said simply LISTEN, TOM! The musty smell reminded him quite sharply of the first time he’d nearly died doing this job. Following a weak tip, he’d been greeted at the door of a decaying mansion by a group of disturbingly young girls, some clearly strung out on substances Tucker had only recently learned about at the academy. In a whisper, they’d confided that their captor was sleeping, they’d drugged him, could Tucker come arrest him. Yes, said Tucker. But it had gone sideways at once. The captor was enormous; they’d given him not drugs but moonshine; the girls had never expected Tucker to succeed, but hoped that the disappearance of one FBI agent would at least bring more agents who would. The house was all stairs; Tucker was the quarry, not the hunter. Sorry, whispered the girls from doorways, as he scrambled from room to room. Run, whispered the girls as they helped him stay just ahead of the hulking, superhuman pimp. The pimp just kept laughing. He knew the girls were prisoners even without walls, and he wasn’t afraid of one youthful G-man. A breathless gallop down a stairwell that looked not unlike the Avallon’s. Steps taken three and four at a time. Misjudged. When Tucker fell, his service pistol skidded out of his hand; one of his teeth skidded out of his mouth. He saw red. Behind him, the laughter at the top of the stairs told him his mistake was fatal. The distinctive pow of a gun. Six times. This was what it felt like to know you were dying.

He sometimes dreamt those six percussive taps. Over and over. A gunshot is the loudest and softest sound.

At the bottom of the Avallon’s LISTEN, TOM! stairwell, Tucker found himself in a service corridor echoing with the sweet, domestic strings of Xavier Cugat’s “Perfidia.” The music originated from a workroom adjacent, where a half dozen kitchen staff were already at work, dicing vegetables, cubing fruits, rolling out pie crusts. It did not look like a commercial hotel kitchen. The simmering gloom was lit here and there by crevices of extraordinary brilliance, as if God’s fist split rock to reveal hellfire. Each staff member was a gilded silhouette, just a piece of the hotel molded into a purpose-made body.

Beyond a worktable covered with raw joints of meat was a sweetwater font; carved songbirds spit water into a basin. A woman was whispering something to the surface of the water, hands cupped around her mouth, a stage secret. After her, another woman did the same. Then a man, who chuckled as he did. Another man, who swore. This one was cuffed as he walked away; he returned to whisper something that mollified the others.

Tucker was not sure if this was a staff ritual or if it was his own feelings about the sweetwater that made it seem like one. Perhaps there was no queue, perhaps they were not whispering to the water, perhaps it was an ordinary gathering of employees drinking from a fountain to ease the heat from the ovens. Dawn would erase such confusion, but dawn felt far away.

In any case, Tucker had been seen; one of the men strode to him. René Durand. Tucker recognized him from Hugh’s interview notes; Durand had a red birthmark under his chin. Durand had come from the Waldorf-Astoria’s kitchen after a fight with a coworker. The term was loaned. The Waldorf-Astoria had loaned him to Hoss, to get his feet back under him. Now he had been at the Avallon for three years and did not think he would leave; Hoss made it clear he would not have to.

Durand got right up to him, close enough for Tucker to smell the herbs he’d been mincing.

“What are you after, G-man?” he asked. It was funny how he said G-man with his French accent. It was American slang, but Durand delivered it with both the confidence and derision of a native.

“Coffee,” Tucker said.

“Upstairs,” Durand replied. He pushed the door shut in Tucker’s face, making this the second time that had happened to him inside an hour.

No one liked Bureau men, not until they needed them.

Tucker wondered how those girls in that long-ago brothel remembered him. Because of course he hadn’t died at the end of the chase; he hadn’t even been hit. One of the girls had used Tucker’s fallen gun to shoot her captor. Six times. Pow-pow-pow-pow-pow-pow. By the time the pimp tumbled down the stairs to land directly on Tucker, mouth to mouth, like lovers, the bastard was dead, looking surprised. The killer-girl promptly threw up and began to sob—mostly in fear, but also with grief and guilt. After rolling the corpse off himself, Tucker had calmed her, made her show him where the cleaning supplies were, wiped her prints from the gun and the residue from her hands and face, burned the clothing she was wearing, and coached her on the story: she saw Tucker trip on the stairs, he seemed to be a goner, he rolled onto his back and shot the pimp six times. A lucky turn of affairs. The girl avoided trial and interrogation about her complicated feelings and motive; Tucker got a commendation. He wondered what happened to her. She didn’t remember her last name, so there was no way of looking her up. Mary. Mary who? There were thousands of Marys. Who was he to her? A man in a suit. Thousands of them, too.

• • •

AT DAWN, Tucker began the staff interviews anew in the light-filled Glass Studio. The office area was mundane and administrative, but the adjacent hot zone was filled with strange shapes and technical objects: ovens, torches, lathes, tubes, pincers, electromagnets, waterworks. This was where they made the glass snails Tucker had seen about the hotel. The snails were just the size to fit inside a child’s almost-closed fist, the antennae pressed back against the whorl of the shell to prevent unpracticed hands from snapping them free.

“Please state your full name and your position.”

He addressed an expansive middle-aged woman with equally expansive curls, the former largely hidden behind the apron of her uniform and the latter only barely hidden beneath the most insolently positioned maid’s cap Tucker had ever seen. She did not sit in her chair so much as she commanded it, slouching back, arms crossed over her aproned bosom. The chair would not be leaving without her permission, that was for sure.

“Toad Blankenship. Head of housekeeping.”

Tucker’s pen, prepared for a perfunctory check mark, paused. “My records have ‘Gladys Vance.’”

The head of housekeeping gave him a pitying look, as if he were a little slow. “Vance is my married name.”

“Ma’am, the Bureau needs your current legal name for its records.”

“Close enough to legal,” she grunted.

“Are you in the process of a divorce?”

“Why, you looking?”

He said, “Ma’am, I’m just trying to address the discrepancy.”

The head of housekeeping said, “Our boy Norm was killed on the Houston. My husband’s just signed up to fight in the Pacific to get his revenge. There was a write-up in the Charleston newspaper ’bout him. He’s forty-seven. Going yander to those yellow islands? By my reckoning, he’s like to be killed, too, and that’ll make me Blankenship again. Might as well get used to hearing it again; that’s what I told him and it’s also what I’m telling you.”

Pearl Harbor was a phrase that had already come to dominate whatever conversation it appeared in. The news came as twenty-five thousand people were watching the Redskins lose a game, frowning journalists silently leaving the stands one after another, and at first, everyone believed it was a hoax. A popular Orson Welles radio broadcast had recently dramatized a science-fictional war between worlds, and Pearl Harbor’s early details felt equally fictional. The Japanese attack had been both audacious and successful, two concepts Americans had come to believe they had ownership of. Tucker remembered exactly where he had been that day: downtown San Francisco, getting ready to do the hard work of finding lodging for his latest post. He had noticed a neatly dressed Japanese man openly weeping on the sun-bright sidewalk. Do you need any help? Tears were caught in the man’s eyelashes. They’ve ruined everything.

The agency had been expecting something for months, so Tucker remembered his first thought: finally.

“I’m sorry for the loss of your boy,” Tucker told the head of housekeeping. He was going to add Mrs. but found himself unable to decide on Vance or Blankenship. “I tell you what I’ll do; I’ll put both surnames on our record. Now what’s all this about ‘Toad’?”

Toad Blankenship leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her mass, and drew her head back into her neck to frown at him. She had become so compellingly toad-shaped that he couldn’t decide if she was demonstrating the origin of her nickname; it seemed dangerous to assume such humor and self-awareness.

“You look familiar,” she replied.

“I have a familiar face.”

“No,” she said, “you don’t.”

“How long have you been the head of housekeeping?”

She seemed to expect him to change the subject. “Hoss just got me this gold pin for twenty-five years of good service; that’s how long it’s been since Mr. Francis retired my mama and put me in her place. Hoss told me in five years she’s retiring me and putting my daughter in my place, but I say good luck to her; that girl’s not very work brickle.”

She let him hold her gold apple-shaped pin. That’s right, he was back in West Virginia, home of the Golden Delicious apple. It had taken a long time for him to be able to bite into a yellow apple without thinking about that day: accepting the gift of new shoes, stuffing his belongings into a rucksack, feeling a thickness in his throat as he tucked school papers with the name TUCKER RYE MINNICK in with the money, the only evidence of his identity (West Virginia hadn’t begun issuing vital records with any regularity until Tucker was already six or seven years old).

He stepped casually on to his request. “That’s an impressive length of service. Of course, I’ll need you, as head of housekeeping, to have your department report any suspicious items or activity in the guest rooms.”

“No,” Toad said.

“Was that a no?”

“Son, we don’t go rummaging through our guests’ things at the Avallon.”

It had been a great number of years since anyone had dared to call Tucker Rye Minnick son. He was learning something about how power worked here. Edgar Gilfoyle at the top of the heap. Then June Hudson: Hoss. Then the rulers of the lower kingdoms. Toad, this battle-ax, Crown Princess of Housekeeping. Chef Fortéscue, Duke of the Grotto. Griff Clemons, King of Staff. Rulers could not be intimidated. They would need to be treated as equal opponents, with respect, not brute force.

Tucker said, “I might take this opportunity to remind you that your husband isn’t the only one with an opportunity to serve his country.”

Toad compressed her neck from two chins to three. “There’s one big difference between my husband and me, Agent Minnick.”

She wanted him to ask what it was, so he did. “And what is it?”

“He’s an idiot. Guests are guests, as Hoss says.”

How June Hudson had managed to convince a hotel full of working-class West Virginians and recent immigrants that their wealthy guests’ happiness was sanctified was quite beyond Tucker. “And is Miss Hudson always right?”

Toad gave him a knowing, toady look. She asked, “Where were you born, son? My woman Marlene tells me Minnick’s a West Virginia name.”

“Maybe if you have more curiosity about your guests’ things, I’ll tell you,” Tucker said.

“Craigsville,” guessed Toad. “Beckley. Welch. Pennington Gap.”

Tucker held her gaze, unsmiling.

“How much are you worth a year? The girls have a bet. Is it thirty-eight hundred? Four thousand? Single fellas like you and that big-smiling G-man you brought could make a run of the place, you know. Bradshaw? Logan?”

Tucker asked, “What was your son like?”

This stopped her.

No one ever asked after the dead. Only the living. How’s your mother, how’s your sister, how’s your cousin. Unless someone achieved fame or infamy, their story stopped when their heart did. How was your mother, how was your sister, how was your cousin? Tell me a funny story about them. No, folks were afraid of other people’s dead. It was why Tucker told everyone his entire family had passed; it stopped all questions in their tracks. But that meant the only time the living got to remember was in the land of insomnia and nightmares. It was often a kindness to ask after the dead, to let folks cry.

Tucker was not being kind.

“He was a right frantic little mite,” Toad said.

She launched into a description of a young man of ceaseless trouble, a real hell-raiser. Never a day without woe with that one. She’d slapped Norm the day before he went to training. She’d slapped him lots of times, she said, but this particular slap was the one she remembered every night before she went to sleep, every morning when she got up in the wee dawn to make the cold journey up to the Avallon. She couldn’t remember why she’d slapped him, and she was sure he’d deserved it, but the feel of it wouldn’t leave her. Didn’t seem fair to be haunted by a completely earned act.

Toad showed Tucker a photo.

He said, “He doesn’t look anything like you.”

“He had my feet.”

Tucker asked, “Do you believe he would think it was worth it?”

Toad gave him a very specific look. She was cannier than she seemed at first blush, this Toad. “We ain’t going through rooms for you, G-man.”

In the academy’s practice interviews, the instructors applied a dollop of sensitive information from the wannabe agents’ pasts and watched them squirm. Tucker, though—Tucker had impressed them. No matter how they applied Tucker Rye Minnick’s past, he remained a cool customer. Easy enough, really, if your file was full of someone else’s past. The Avallon’s head of housekeeping probably would have impressed them, too.

He told Toad, “We’ll talk again.”

“I sure can’t stop you,” she said.

• • •

TOAD BLANKENSHIP STUCK in his thoughts long after he left the Glass Studio; she put him in mind of a mother. Not his mother, who he found to his dull disappointment he could not quite remember as an individual, but rather the mother, the universal West Virginia woman who had raised him and all of his boyhood acquaintances. Tough-as-nails-soft-as-leather, not just surviving in the mountains, but thriving in them, carving community out of bluestone. Toad Blankenship represented this sort of woman, a woman who used to like him but no longer did. Tucker didn’t need to be liked, but he had been liked, once upon a time—in fact, liked well enough that several people put their necks on the block for him. Friends, sisters, strangers.

These days, though, he stood outside the flock, keeping them safe, as they eyed him resentfully. This was the job. The suit. The Bureau. He had known that even before finishing the academy, and in some ways, that distance had been part of the appeal.

Partway through the day, Tucker was called to the switchboard, where he met the supervisor Ulcie Leta Crites, a woman with the body and charm of a walking stick. Unlike her charges, who were—according to tradition—unmarried young women, their manager Ulcie was a towering woman in her midforties, free of both lipstick and humor. She introduced him to her kingdom in the perfunctory way one might describe a potato storeroom or a slaughterhouse. Tucker, though, was impressed. Outside calls came in over twenty-five trunk lines, before being directed to one of over four hundred extensions—Constancy probably had one-twentieth the number of phone lines. The switchboard was a thirty-foot-long repeating map of dark cables and color-coded plugs operated by more than a dozen hello girls, all piping in smooth, identical voices, Avallon Hotel and Spa, how may I direct your call? Hold the line, please.

In the switchboard room, Tucker kept his expression professionally neutral as Ulcie Leta Crites spoke her mind, at length. At his desk, Hugh Calloway kept his head down, studiously attending to call logs. Every so often, Tucker murmured, “The FBI cannot accommodate you at this time,” and Ulcie launched into a new tirade. It was unclear how long this would have gone on if not for June Hudson, who arrived with the dachshunds close behind, the dogs tripping in their eagerness to be the first in line behind her heels. The two closest hello girls stretched their hands up to her. June tapped their fingers, a soundless greeting of some sort.

Hoss. How many times had she been invoked in that morning’s interviews? Dozens of times.

June regarded the charged space between Hugh and Ulcie Leta Crites. “Which of you wants to tell me what happened?”

“Nothing happened,” Tucker replied. “Agent Calloway is an impeccable professional. It is not his behavior Mrs. Crites objects to.”

Ulcie shot him a withering look. “Can’t expect some Yankee to say the hard truths about a wolf among the lambs. My girls are good, loyal girls, real Americans. Shouldn’t these G-men be waving their pistols at the gate instead?”

Yankee, Tucker thought. He had lost his accent. “That would be the Border Patrol, ma’am. The FBI is only here to monitor communications.”

June Hudson eyed the lambs: the dozen young women in their neat pencil skirts and checked blouses. And then she eyed the wolf: Agent Hugh Calloway. He was dressed just as neatly as them. Unlike them, however, he was Black. A slight shadow passed briefly over June’s expression. “Agent Minnick, let’s you and I have a little one-two step over here to crack these eggs so we can see what’s inside them. Mrs. Crites, give us a minute.”

The conversation moved to the room adjacent, a sound booth, whose glass window offered a full view of the switchboard. The wallpaper, desk, and chairs were all in red, gold, deep walnut. As the door closed behind them, June produced a handkerchief to wipe the slightly dusty amplifier and microphone. It was an automatic gesture; for a brief moment, he saw the maid she had started out as.

She said, “Right snazzy, isn’t it? The Waldorf-Astoria has a centralized radio system that cost two hundred thousand dollars; they use it for radio broadcasts inside the hotel and the surrounding boroughs in New York. I reckon Mr. Francis must have thought this one would delight one of his children. He didn’t tend toward grandiosity, Mr. Francis.”

She clearly meant to thaw the atmosphere. Tucker remained chilly.

June said, “Can Agent Calloway switch places with the agent in the post office?”

“I wouldn’t recommend that.”

“Do you have a reason beyond principle?”

“Principle isn’t enough?”

She gave him that pleasant smile.

“I have placed my men in the positions I felt most effective. Agent Calloway is an excellent agent and a very good fit for a room full of young women.”

“Mm. Do you think we need to mince words here, Agent Minnick?”

One of the dachshunds braced its front legs on his pant leg, striving toward his hand. He neither encouraged nor discouraged it. “Pony’s a terrible womanizer. By the end of the month, he will have been through that room twice.”

“Will it ruin the work?”

“How do you mean?”

“This place is full of bad choices, Agent. I’ve got four hundred men and women working for me and there’s babies and more babies and wandering wives and gambling and drinking and smoking and cousins loving cousins and brothers hating brothers and all kinds of things you don’t want to know about. My job’s keeping this hotel moving smoothly, not being everyone’s mama. You worried they’ll make bad choices about your Agent Goodbody? The only question is: Will it ruin the work? If not, it ain’t my place. Meddling and moralizing aren’t my job. I’m running a business, not a church.”

“A business where your switchboard manager can make decisions for you?”

“I’ve wanted to fire Ulcie Leta Crites for ten years. Longer than ten years. I wanted Mr. Francis to fire her before I even became GM. I’ve moved her from the Crystal Room to the guest history department and finally here, where she never has to see someone who don’t look like her, not even Mr. Clemons, if she don’t get in trouble. Her daughter is an elevator manager. Her son’s a sign painter. Mr. Francis says—said—firing her would cause a stir far bigger than it was worth. I don’t know if that’s true, but I do know that businesses—unlike churches—are full of compromise. The Bureau can compromise, too.”

Tucker knocked this sentiment away with a swipe of his hand through the air. “Miss Hudson, the Avallon is currently a government installation, and it’s past time you got next to the war effort.”

“If I were any closer to the war effort,” June said, “I’d need to take its last name.”

Through the sound booth glass, they watched Ulcie pass Hugh’s desk. Ignoring him, she settled herself in her roost beside her hello girls, pleased as punch, certain June was siding with her.

The entire situation suddenly infuriated him. The Bureau did not need to do anything for Ulcie Leta Crites. The Bureau was not going to do anything for Ulcie Leta Crites.

“There is nothing stopping you from firing anyone in this place,” Tucker said. “Francis Gilfoyle is dead.”

Loyalty and anger and guilt and grief darted across her face; he’d pushed her into some complex territory still unmapped in her heart, and himself into an offensive he couldn’t possibly sustain.

He retreated: “You won’t like having Agent Harris down here.”

Then he let himself out of the sound booth. Muscles twitching with fury and misgiving, he went straight to Hugh, who was already gathering up his paperwork, having guessed the outcome.

“Tighten up,” Hugh said, in an imitation of Tucker on the first day.

The two of them glanced at Ulcie, neither agent disguising their contempt, and then Tucker cast a last look at June Hudson, who still stood on the other side of the sound booth glass, her fingers resting against her lips, eyes closed. It didn’t bother him; he didn’t need to be liked. In a year, five years, what would this place be to him? A job well done. In a year, five years, what would he be to them? A man in a suit. They had seen plenty.

Chapter Seven

That evening, while dusty snowflakes made shifting bright patterns against the dark, June and Griff Clemons accompanied Pennybacker to the final task before the diplomats’ arrival the following day, a town hall meeting. Lewis B. (too old to draft) took them in one of the Avallon’s three house Cadillacs; Griff moved his newspaper from the passenger seat to join him up front. June and Pennybacker sat in the back like dignitaries.

They descended into Constancy, a mountain settlement made sweet and comfortable and pretty by the money flowing downhill from the hotel. It was a company town, like many in the state, but the Avallon was a gentler company than most. Pennybacker fretted with paperwork, clearly uncomfortable. Not with being driven—June was right, he was used to power, to having a chauffeur—but with his upcoming address to the locals.

June said, “Mr. Pennybacker, you’re making the angels nervous. Why the fidgeting? You don’t strike me a shy public speaker.”

The Cadillac cleaved the crowd in front of the town hall; Pennybacker tugged his disgruntled bow tie, which only gruntled it further. “I had a run-in with the locals when I first set up this meeting. We didn’t get along.”

They wouldn’t have, would they? Wealthy intruders had been interfering with West Virginia for as long as the state could remember. Pennybacker exemplified the Outsider. The man from Washington imposing his will in exchange for ten dollars a head a day.

As Lewis B. ducked into the harsh mountain wind to get Pennybacker’s door for him, June advised, “Don’t take it personal. I didn’t like you, either, when I met you.”

Griff laughed.

Inside, at the podium, Pennybacker delivered a speech that would have roused other Pennybackers. A healthy diplomatic trade, he declaimed, represented an intention among participating countries to find solutions in language rather than violence. To obey international rules of warfare, to strive toward an ever more civilized and peaceful world. June had too recently received a version of this speech to remain attentive; her mind drifted instead to Ulcie Leta Crites. How infuriating it had been to find the roles reversed in the sound booth. Agent Minnick felt like a champion sent to provoke her, just like Mr. Delafield, only this time she had failed to get across the most basic truths:

What June believed and what needed to be done were not always the same thing.

What she wanted and what the hotel needed were not always the same thing.

Who she was and who she had to be were not always the same thing.

Every day she drank four glasses of that dissonance and swallowed it.

Could she fire Ulcie? Francis Gilfoyle was so recently deceased; it didn’t yet feel right to dismantle what he’d built. She still kept waiting for the switchboard to patch through a call, to hear the familiar voice saying, June, you terrific thing, how’s the hotel? She wasn’t even sure what she could dismantle. She had lost the opportunity to ask him which of his policies were meant to please the guests, which to please the staff, and which to please the water.

“No way, mister!”

Pennybacker’s speechifying was going badly. Tough, loyal, hardheaded, suspicious, unsentimental, these mountaineers had no patience with or fondness for the sheltered guests at the Avallon, even when they weren’t enemy aliens. The locals were survivors. Not just survivors of harsh conditions, but also survivors of the sort of people who came to the Avallon and the sort of people who came to West Virginia to build factories or mines. Or to deliver Axis diplomats.

The speaker clarified for Pennybacker, raising his voice to be sure everyone else heard, too: “I ain’t delivering groceries to Krauts or Japs.”

This fellow wasn’t the only one to feel this way, just the first to say it. The room hummed with raised voices. Pennybacker appealed this one, and the next, and the next, with humor, kindness, and then, finally, with a smile at half-mast. But his manners only hindered him; every bit of gentleness was a weakness. His principles belonged to an America this audience would never see, one where people starved to death less often.

“You gonna rescue him, Hoss?” Griff whispered to June.

Relations with Constancy and those who lived in the hidden hollers around it had become more productive but more complicated when June took over as GM. Mr. Francis, a wealthy Outsider disinterested in local traditions, had presided over an unpleasant but familiar dynamic: a one-way flow of luxury and power. It was not what the locals would have chosen, but they knew how it worked. June Hudson, on the other hand, understood them in a way Mr. Francis could never; she empathized in a way Mr. Francis could not. The agreements she negotiated between town and hotel were more nuanced and equitable, but when feelings did get hurt, the hurt was deeper. It was always a betrayal when circumstances forced the locals to remember that the flow of power had not been reversed. No matter what June sounded like, she belonged to the Avallon first, the mountains second.

June asked, “Should I?”

Griff said, “I’ll hold your coat.”

So it was to be dinner and a show.

(Every social situation has a social cost, June. In a good conversation, everyone takes turns paying it. In a bad one, one or two unlucky fellows have to keep paying out the nose while everyone else has a good time for free. Who do you think pays the social bill at the Avallon?

Us, Mr. Francis.

Yes. Every party must be the best they have ever attended. You see someone being made to pay up, you rescue him in any way you know how.)

Without warning, June climbed onto the town board’s table. One foot was perilously close to a cup of coffee, another an inch away from a pile of documents. John Stackpole, the town undertaker, gazed up at her; she smiled her small smile down at him.

She had their attention.

To the newly silent room, she said, “The Avallon is the best.”

Click, click, click, click went June’s Mary Janes as she paced the length of the table to the mayor. She asked him, “Gary, has your daughter had her baby yet?”

Gary Foglesong’s chin was tipped up to look at her. “Last night. A boy.”

“What’s his name?”

“Gene Ray.”

June addressed the entire town hall: “Gene Ray!”

The hall seethed with congratulations, a few hip hip hoorays, some he’s a jolly good fellow. Gary Foglesong’s back was pounded. Gene Ray.

Lightly, June jumped off this first table. One, two, three strides took her to another along the wall; the occupants pounded the surface in time with her steps. On this new stage, she stood above men whose sons and brothers and fathers worked at her hotel, men who could not be made to tolerate the Avallon’s ideals, but who were part of its story nonetheless. She stood straight as Griff, as if her knees weren’t shouting after two days on her feet, and she wore an easy smile, as if she were not longing for sleep.

Pennybacker, now invisible, collapsed against the podium, exhausted from holding the weight of the room’s attention.

June carried it all now.

“We are the best,” she repeated. “We’re also Americans.”

A whistle from the back of the room. Someone else called, “SAME THING.”

June nodded, allowing it. She stepped to the table’s edge, where, magically, an empty chair was shoved into place for her to step onto, and then another, and another, keeping her in the air. When she ran out of empty chairs, a row of locals rose to their feet, their seats an offering. She crossed the room without touching the floor.

This wasn’t the first time she’d addressed them this way. They’d heard her speak in more ordinary formats, sitting with the board, pen poised over contracts. But they knew that when she climbed onto a table, it was theater. She was not June Hudson in these moments; she was Hoss, something bigger than June Hudson. And they were not simply passive listeners; they were penitents, ready to be flayed or lifted. They performed together. There was a direct line between June’s early days at the Avallon and what she was doing tonight.

This was just a bigger elevator, and a slightly longer ride between floors.

June went on, “As Americans, we have lived with blood and dirt and hunger and cold and the devils that live in the mountains to make it the best. Y’all say yes if you agree.”

Y’all said yes, noisily. “Take us to church, Hoss!” They hooted, they hollered. Pennybacker couldn’t help it if he’d never been to a mountain service, if he’d never had to bury a child, if he had never been hungry for more than a day. He couldn’t help that he was too soft for this. As he sagged against the podium, his face held both wonder and gratitude. There was no ego. This was another reason he was opposite to these people; humility cost him nothing. Pride was all these folks had, some years.

June said, “Now I want you to forget everything this State Department jasper’s just told you. Listen to me. I know you don’t want these people here, but I need you all to look at them when they get here and think this: we are the best.”

She leapt to a table on the west wall, scattering bulletins. The locals whooped. When she had first become GM at the Avallon, this was how she addressed the staff, too. Now, she didn’t need to. You didn’t need theater when you had trust. The locals didn’t trust her, and they shouldn’t.

She loved her staff. She respected the locals. Everyone involved could tell the difference.

June went on, “I want you to think about how we up there at the Avallon are going to give these people the best time they’ve ever had in their lives. The best food. The best drink. The best music. The best beds. The best of everything. Americans are the best, and the Avallon is the best American hotel. We’re going ruin them with the best, do you hear? We’re going to make them miss us. Make ’em talk for the rest of their life about the best hotel in the world, an American hotel they’ll never see again. Who is the best? People will ask them. America. Chew on that.”

The head of housekeeping had once taken the maids to a circus all the way in Lewisburg (I’m putting my neck out for you girls, don’t get knocked up) and June had been captivated. Not by the acrobats—by the audience. They were impressed not by the most dangerous or technical moves, but by the most deftly packaged, a lesson June had never forgotten.

She leapt from the last row of chairs to a wide window ledge; she knew she was silhouetted against the streetlight-bright snow outside. She raised her voice one last time. “We can’t control who they are, but we can control who we are. We are the best, and we are—tell me what you are. You are—”

“AMERICANS!”

Every voice in unison. It buzzed all through her, a chord perfectly struck. As the locals began to bluster to each other about their upcoming role, she told Griff, “Get Pennybacker out to the car before he says something right foolish and ruins my work.”

Behind Griff was Gary Foglesong, the mayor; he drew close and shook her hand. For a moment they talked about his new grandson, tire rationing, and the weather, but they were really talking about what she’d just said, unspoken words jammed in tight among the spoken. Finally, he said, “Don’t get cocky, Hoss.”

June was well aware the people of Constancy would be something she’d have to balance again and again, a challenge that would only grow as the war intensified. These mountaineers would give you good if you gave them good, and they gave you ill if you gave them ill. They took a liking to some people and a hating to some others, but mostly kept to themselves. If they turned, a place would be ruined for years.

No, she wouldn’t get cocky.

“Remember 1937,” the mayor said. His small eyes glittered. “1922.”

He was talking about the great floods of 1922 and 1937, but both of them had been far away, different sweetwater with different problems. Well, the flood of 1937 had been far away. 1922 was a different matter altogether, but it still hadn’t had a thing to do with the sweetwater running beneath the Avallon.

“That hotel was a ruin when Francis Gilfoyle bought it all those years ago,” he added. He opened his mouth as if he wanted to add something else, something that might qualify how he felt about the Gilfoyles resurrecting the hotel and, by extension, the town, but instead, he busied himself running a thumb along his suspender, and then said, reproachfully, “You know my wife heard it laugh the other day.”

“That ain’t how the water works, Gary,” June told him.

“And you know everything there is to know about it?”

“Yes,” she said.

• • •

SHE DIDN’T SLEEP that night.

She tossed and turned and then got dressed and sat at the table with two of her ledger books. June had dozens of these enormous gray-jacketed volumes from over the years—the first, of course, the gift with the handwritten inscription. Each contained observations of the Avallon’s guests, assembled by various departments. Individually, the details were meaningless, but collectively, they painted a useful portrait. How did one delight the rich, who could so easily delight themselves? By having the room set up just as they liked it last time; by recalling their favorite drink; by prompting them to tell a favorite joke or anecdote. By knowing them. Luxury. The ledgers belonging to the Avallon’s usual guests were dense with detail, years of detail, some of them old enough that the edges were yellowed. These two ledgers, however, were brand new. Empty.

They were for the diplomats.

Luxury felt like a different game when the people involved were officially enemies of the state. Good morning, sir, here’s your coffee just as you like it, did you know they were going to bomb Pearl Harbor? Good evening, ma’am, the quartet will be playing the Liszt piece you commented on yesterday, does your husband by any chance know where my Polish waiter’s missing mother might be? But June knew, deep down, that it was still the same game. The Avallon had never been for those who deserved it. The Avallon had to present itself the same to everyone who came, or the entire illusion collapsed.

In the dim kitchen, June entered the diplomatic legations—one page for each name—and then, since she still had room, added the three FBI agents, Pennybacker, and the two Swiss fellows due to arrive later in the week. Through the doorway, the dachshunds watched black-eyed from the bed, having ebbed back into the warm place she’d left.

The diplomats were coming. Gary Foglesong’s wife had heard a laugh. Agent Tucker Minnick had said, Francis Gilfoyle is dead. Edgar Gilfoyle had pressed his finger against her wrist.

She was not going to sleep.

She put on her coat.

She walked through the floodlit night to the Lily House, what the Gilfoyle family called the dower house. It was the grandest of the Avallon’s cottages, which were not truly cottages but rather small homes, most as sumptuous and precise as the layers of wedding cakes. Unlike the others, cladded with bright white wood, Lily House was built of the same stone as the hotel. Its steeply pitched roof was curiously assembled just like the Avallon’s, so that it looked like a piece of the hotel, or like a child of the hotel, one that hadn’t made it very far from home. Unlike the other cottages, which housed the hotel pharmacist, the head gardener, the head of housekeeping, the physician, the dentist, the shop owners, the Lily House was meant to house family, specifically the oldest Gilfoyle daughter and her family. But Carrie had marched her smart shoes toward Chicago’s wide avenues, and sweet Stella Gilfoyle would never be married or have a family.

At the bright blue back door, June scuffed her feet on the mat and put the key in the lock. She was about to press her hand against the door to push it open when she saw there was already a faint, oily handprint there, barely visible in the diffuse glow of the floodlights. The print was exactly the same size as the one she was about to make. She should have wiped it off last time, but she hadn’t, and she knew she wouldn’t this time, either. Instead, she fit her hand carefully over the top of the print, fingers splayed. She held her palm there for a second, prayerfully, and then she let herself in.

As she stepped into the wide, high-ceilinged hall, the dachshunds capering in before her, she thought that it had begun to have the feel of an unoccupied building. It smelled not quite of mold, but the potential of mold. The air was not quite cold, but still cooler than one would choose. It had a raw edge, despite the mannered furniture; a house too long without people became a little feral.

In the hallway opposite the stairs hung a family portrait, taken just at the time June had first been invited to dinner with them, after the incident with Sandy. She remembered how, at that first dinner, Mr. Francis had asked her a series of gentle questions, each light and undangerous, allowing her to make small talk if she liked, but also allowing her an escape hatch if any of the answers would be unpleasant. Madeline, Mr. Francis’s second wife (she had been a second wife for so long that most people didn’t remember to say second before wife anymore), had listened to June use her newfound elevator operator skills to answer each with a pocket-sized anecdote designed to delight her listeners rather than provide information, and had said, Why, Frank, I think you’ve found your equal.

Carrie, the aggressive and capable middle child, had seen her father and June locked in an amiable game of stories and hospitality and, instead of defusing it, had done her best to enable June’s victory by offering loaded prompts: June, were you ever terrified when you went with your father on his calls? Who is the oldest person you’ve ever met? When did you first notice you had an accent?

Stella, the eldest daughter, had been persuaded to leave off singing at her parakeet in order to share dinner with the rest of the family, and she’d laughed at the stories flying fast and thick, but before long, she slipped off again, unpunished, to play with the bird.

Sandy, the dutiful and noble baby of the family, had demanded to sit beside June. Every so often, he’d reached over to pat her hand, as if making certain she was still there. Even as a toddler, he was already on the inevitable, principled path that took him straight from university to the navy to a risky, voluntary deployment just after Pearl Harbor (a path that pained June more than she could say. Gentle Sandy! Going to war? But what of his gentleness?). He had years before he became the teenager locked in eternal battle with Mr. Francis.

And of course Edgar had been there. She had been petrified at the idea of this dinner invitation with the hotel owner and his family, but as she’d been seated, she’d seen him for the first time. The eldest Gilfoyle son had had a book open at the dinner table, his elbow propped beside it, and a small relief had run all the way to her fingertips. It would be all right, she thought. Mr. Francis was her boss, breathtakingly above her station, but he was a boss whose son read books at dinner.

One of June’s earliest ledgers, from the 1930s, had a page about Edgar Gilfoyle. It was not in her handwriting, but rather in a tall, eager script:

Edgar Gilfoyle

Likes it very hot when he sleeps

Wants books by his bed, but only history books, and he will only read the first forty-two pages of each

Coffee is a must

Suit pants need frequent mending in knees

Hairbrush will never get used

Must have gramophone at all costs

A folded piece of notepaper was tucked in the ledger at this page. In the same handwriting as the list, the note said only: I think about you all the time.

Leaving the photograph behind, June walked through the Lily House as if it were new to her. Turning on only the lights she needed, she let her fingers linger over the carved snail hidden in the delicate stair railing. Stroked the heavy curtains in the living room. Took in the view of the glowing hotel windows from the upstairs sitting room windows. Put her hands on the back of the rocker in the unoccupied nursery. Knelt by the hip-high dollhouse in the twin bedroom. Nestled in the padded window seat in the hall, just wide enough for two people to read or to kiss. Stood at the top of the stairs and looked out at the mountains she knew were there, even if she could not see them in the dark. She considered each of Lily House’s attributes as if for the first time, weighing merits and flaws.

In the bathroom, she plugged the big-footed tub and turned on the tap (the dachshunds huddled in the hall, not wanting baths, but not wanting her to go where they could not follow, either). As the tub filled with the strongly scented mineral water, she let herself imagine a future where her days ended like this, climbing the stairs to the bedroom and turning down the sheets of the pretty four-poster. Waking with the sun bold on her face instead of in the dim half-light of her basement quarters. She had wanted to be part of the Gilfoyle family for so long. The Lily House had been waiting for so long. For her.

But everything was different now. It had been different even before the State Department arrived. The funeral, the war.

What was it Gilfoyle had said? I know what you can do.

It was true, she thought. She knew how to guide the Avallon through this.

June undressed, storing each item of clothing neatly as she did. Coat hung on the back of the padded chair in the corner of the room. Trousers and socks folded crisp as a shop display. Blouse unbuttoned and hung on the light fixture’s brass scroll to let out the wrinkles. Brassiere stretched on the back of the commode. Underwear slid off and draped over the sink’s edge.

She stood naked next to a mirror that looked only at her body, next to the uncurtained window that looked out only to the dark mountains, next to the sweetwater in the tub that listened only to her.

God, she wanted, she wanted, she wanted—

June cleared her mind of all the unpleasant things she wouldn’t want to give the water. She thought only of being June Hudson. The satisfaction of being June Hudson. The humanness of being June Hudson. How excellent and wonderful her staff was at the staff meeting. How lucky she was to have found herself here on that day long ago.

She did her best not to think about a hotel full of Nazis. Mr. Francis’s laugh. Agent Minnick’s coal tattoo. Gilfoyle and the gift of the boots. She especially did not linger on I think the world of you, June. The feeling his words had left her with would have been a dangerous gift for the water.

She thought of nothing but the best things. Of the first time she had seen the Avallon, looming above her, of the moment she’d fallen in love with this beautiful behemoth that could only survive with hundreds of hands supporting it. Of the staff’s genuine pleasure when they pulled off a particularly difficult event. Of the decades of thank-yous and smiles and embraces she’d enabled here in this place. She thought of everything the Avallon would need to remember about itself to endure what was about to come.

“Be gentle,” she told the Avallon.

Then she sank into the water and let it fill her.

Part Two

DOWNSTAIRS

ORDER, ROOM 411, 2/01/1942:

House Beautiful

Landscape Architecture Magazine

2 lemons

2 croissants

3 composition books

1 dozen white roses

Side table

2 yards dark gray rayon crepe (sample attached)

1 yard ivory silk (sample attached)

2 yards flowered rayon taffeta (sample attached)

Type bar, Smith-Corona

The Timeless Land, Eleanor Dark

The Family, Nina Fedorova

Chapter Eight

Hannelore Wolfe hadn’t spoken a word in her life, but she was a good listener.

She knew her mother was afraid.

The train ride had been long, but not as long as it had felt. She knew this because she had developed a system to keep herself from getting frustrated: she counted in her head. That way she knew how many seconds a task took. It was shocking how different her feeling of a task’s length was from the reality of it.

For instance: It took 1,340 seconds for her mother to put in her pin curls before coming to listen to the radio with Hannelore.

It took 180 seconds for a cup of tea to steep.

660 for Citizen to find a good place to lift his leg.

7,200 for Hannelore’s favorite sweater to dry on the line.

2,700 for social studies class to run its course (2,100 if one began counting after the Pledge of Allegiance and other morning announcements).

14,400 for her parents to return from embassy dinners.

Before the counting, she’d lost her temper far more often.

“We are getting close,” her father Friedrich murmured. “I better go speak with Lothar.”

Her mother, Sabine, in the seat opposite Hannelore, gripped squat Citizen in his knitted dog sweater. “I would rather you didn’t leave us.”

“It will be all right. Hannelore, will you be good for your mother?”

“Friedrich. Do not leave us.”

Hannelore counted in her head, of course, not out loud, and she did it even while knitting or drawing, or—and she was proud of this—while people were talking to her. She would nod, but part of her was thinking, Two thousand two hundred and twenty-four; two thousand two hundred and twenty-five . . .

28,870 seconds to take a train from Washington, DC, to West Virginia.

At supper, she’d learned they were moving. By bedtime, she’d packed a nice leather-sided suitcase and a less nice cardboard suitcase she did not want Mutti to throw away because the clasp looked like a slightly serious, slightly smiling face. She was ten years old and had moved many more times than that. Sometimes adults wondered aloud if Hannelore hated it. What did she hate? Bedtime. It took so many seconds to fall asleep: 4,000 on a good night, 5,500 if it was too hot to be comfortable, 7,400 if she couldn’t stop frightening thoughts.

That morning, journalists had lined the sidewalk outside the embassy. The air still smelled like smoke; all night, aides had burned every piece of paper, even party invitations. Flashbulbs exploded as the Wolfes hurried to the waiting car.

Now, hours later, as the train slowed, her mother muttered in German, “Why is there a crowd?”

“Because we are special,” her father answered. “People are always curious about special things.”

“Will they be violent?” Sabine asked Friedrich. She hadn’t meant for Hannelore to understand—she’d asked in a language that wasn’t German, English, or French—but Hannelore found languages easy to pick up. One just had to listen.

Hannelore looked to her father for his answer.

“Violently interested,” replied her father in English, knowing full well Hannelore had understood. Casting a jaunty smile at his daughter, he put on his hat at a rakish angle he would never assume outside on the street. Hannelore smiled, less because she was amused than because she knew she was supposed to be amused. “Just like the journalists were. It will be an adventure.”

But instead of journalists, uniformed officers stood several men deep. Behind them, dozens of necks craned for a better view as the train squealed to a halt.

Hannelore’s stomach twisted. In her imagination, the crowd sprang claws, tore the doors from the train, leapt upon her parents, destroyed her father’s jaunty hat—

Her father was gone. She hadn’t seen him go. Where had he gone?

“Once there was a girl named Hannelore,” Sabine said quickly. “Who traveled on a train to a magical land. It was deep in the woods and very beautiful, and she found a friend there no one else could see.”

Pulling out her sketchbook, Hannelore began to draw the train engine, as well as she could remember it. Her pen was packed away, so she just pressed the pad of her finger lightly against the paper. She had lost track of her count. It shouldn’t have mattered, because it had done its job of occupying her mind, but it seemed like a terrible shame to not know how long the journey had really taken.

A woman in the seat behind them spoke to Sabine in German. “You’d think they would have asked them not to congregate so near the train.”

Sabine’s tone was arch. “If any of us are harmed, it will be an international incident.”

“We are living an international incident. Do you know anything about where they are taking us? I have heard others were sent to a camp in Texas. Camps where—”

Sabine shot a glance at Hannelore. “My husband says it is an acceptable place, where we are to stay. He knows of it.”

“And then what?”

Sabine stood. “Ich weiss es nicht.” I do not know.

1,260 seconds later, Friedrich Wolfe reappeared, his cheeks bright pink with cold and knowledge. It was a mile to the hotel; they would send cars for the women and children. The men would walk ahead.

Hannelore leapt to her feet, seizing his arm.

“It will be nicer to wait,” her father told her. “It’s very cold.”

Hannelore could feel a fit building. All that counting for nothing!

Friedrich and Sabine looked at each other, and then Friedrich said, “The walk will do Citizen good.”

Outside, there was no proper station, just a covered waiting area with ornate metal benches. A cold mountain wind cut straight through to Hannelore’s bones, a shock after the close, cigarette-clouded train. The air here smelled like smoke, as it had at the embassy, though it was not the acrid scent of burning files, but the more elemental scent of woodsmoke. Rhythmic thumping punctuated the air; porters were heaving luggage from the train.

Hannelore traced the shape of the engine in the air; Sabine wordlessly pressed Hannelore’s hand down until she put it in her pocket.

“Stop!”

Close by, a knot of passengers faced down several uniformed guards. Hackles were raised. One of the guards even had his hand resting on his pistol at his waist.

“Wait,” Friedrich called. “They don’t understand what you are telling them. They are Hungarian.”

“I thought everyone on this train was a heinie,” a guard replied.

“I do not know everyone on it,” Friedrich said, “but I do know they are speaking Hungarian.”

“Great, Fritz. Do you speak Hungarian?”

Friedrich turned to his wife, who transformed before Hannelore’s eyes. Stepping forward, Sabine became a subtly smiling queen, her red-gold hair a crown. Behind her, Friedrich was an authoritative disciplinarian. And in turn, Hannelore felt herself becoming their perfect daughter, afraid of nothing, never giving in to a fit.

This was who the Wolfes were in public. Cultural Attaché Wolfe and his family.

For a school project, Hannelore once had to write, in carefully punctuated English, a description of her father’s occupation. My father, Friedrich Wolfe, helps other countries understand German culture by introducing them to German art, music, and athletics. His family helps him with his occupation. Together we demonstrate what a German family looks like.

Hannelore could not remember Germany, but she very much enjoyed being German.

“They are the husbands of the Hungarian legation’s maids,” Sabine told the guard, after conferencing briefly with the Hungarian men. “They were worried about being separated from their wives. I reassured them we were all going to the same place.”

There was a question mark at the end of the last sentence.

“Danke schoen,” said the guard. “Now scram.”

As soon as they were out of hearing range, Friedrich muttered to Hannelore, “Both his accent and his attitude were terrible.”

Hannelore couldn’t find a smile for him. She was only unafraid on the outside.

As they climbed past a stone sign saying THE AVALLON HOTEL & SPA, the Wolfes were joined by two of her father’s oldest friends, the big-chested Dr. Otto Kirsch, and the handsome ex-engineer the women whispered about, Lothar Liebe. Today they were somber, although Hannelore couldn’t quite understand what they were talking about. Repatriation wasn’t a word she knew.

Sabine’s nose was red, either with cold or from being near tears. “What is it like there now?”

“Ich weiss es nicht,” Dr. Kirsch replied. I don’t know.

Her father caught Hannelore attending to the conversation. He said, “Liebchen, do you still remember the song we sang together?”

She nodded.

“Well enough to sing it for Dr. Kirsch and Herr Liebe?”

Of course she did. The song was a game that Friedrich had invented one rainy afternoon after he found her copying the encyclopedia backward to entertain herself. It was sung to the tune of “Muss i denn,” but instead of

Muss i denn, muss i denn

Zum Städtele hinaus, Städtele hinaus

Und du, mein Schatz, bleibst hier?

she sang a random series of letters and numbers that her father had sung first.

H 1 6 8 9 L

R Y W 1 2

Q U 49 A 12, P I 24 L M

T U E F M P?

He had made each round longer, trying to stump her, and each time, she had kept right up with him. It was no harder than the counting. The first game had been cut short by her mother, who had said, Do you really think you should be doing such a thing? After that, they only played the game when she was out.

In a high, pure tone—she had received voice training at the previous post—Hannelore sang, “H 1 6 89 L / R Y W 1 2 / Q U 49—”

“It is remarkable that she hasn’t ever spoken a word, but she sings,” Lothar Liebe said.

“And hears everything you say,” Sabine said in a cold voice.

Dr. Kirsch laughed gently. “Sabine, you tigress. She knows she is an unusual child.”

Sabine did not smile.

“Did you get an answer before you left?” Friedrich asked Lothar.

Lothar said, “Even if I had, we burned the codebooks. I say what I said before, you have no cause to worry—”

Dr. Kirsch said, “Hannelore, sweet girl, I think Comrade needs to go for a walk!”

“Citizen,” Friedrich corrected, as Lothar Liebe laughed in a breathless, shocked way, as if Dr. Kirsch had sworn in front of Sabine.

Hannelore’s cheeks colored. She had not been chastised directly, but she felt chastised. It was often difficult for her to understand why people said the things they did, harder still to understand why they laughed.

Letting the terrier pull her toward the naked winter trees, Hannelore told herself to let go of the bad feeling, but it lingered. Citizen stopped short, ears pricked, tail curled intensely. He’d found something. A snake? A snail. It was larger than any she’d ever seen, with a beautifully varied shell in all sorts of browns and oranges. Its antennae were plump and curious. The snail wasn’t the only thing out of place in this colorless January world. Beneath it was summer-green moss, utterly touchable.

It was warm! When Hannelore pressed her palm into it, the moss was several degrees warmer than the frozen turf around it, and when she pulled her hand away, her skin was damp and smelled like old nails or blood. Instead of being unpleasant, it put her in mind of the first day of spring. The smell of blossoms, the feeling of fresh lawn against bare feet, the deep-seated contentedness that came from being warm with no effort.

Hannelore was happy.

A very small part of Hannelore studied this unexpected joy with an analytical and suspicious eye. She spread her palm open wide, regarding the mineral water still glistening there.

It felt like magic.

“Hello, miss, can I help you up?”

Three staff members dressed smartly in gray-and-gold uniforms surrounded her. One clasped Hannelore’s hand; the second retrieved Citizen’s dragging leash. The third, a young man who moved with acrobatic grace despite carrying a tray laden with carafes and mugs, gave her a winsome grin.

“Coffee? Tea? Hot chocolate?” he asked her. When she didn’t reply, he switched into German at once: “Sprechen Sie Englisch? Nein? Möchten Sie einen Kaffee trinken? Tee? Trinkschokolade?”

They did not seem to mind that Hannelore didn’t reply. They gave Citizen a biscuit and Hannelore a little paper sack tied shut with a thin, shiny ribbon. Inside was a Golden Delicious apple wrapped in a delicate cut-paper lace sleeve, a glass snail just big enough to fit in her fist, a pencil, and instructions for a scavenger hunt inside the hotel. While they wooed her in English and in German, the hotel grounds transformed. Live music began to play. An unseen bonfire crackled, the sound and smell unmistakable. Unexpectedly, she heard her mother’s tactful laugh. Somehow, the atmosphere of the train was slowly drifting away like smoke in the air.

More magic.

That was when she had the distinct feeling of being watched. Hannelore lifted her gaze to the top of the drive, where a hotel with many pitched rooftops was just visible. A woman stood there, slim and intense, three dachshunds at her feet. The woman was looking directly at Hannelore. She did not avert her gaze when she saw that Hannelore had noticed, either, but simply smiled in a small, knowing way. Like Sabine and the women Hannelore had encountered through her father’s work, the woman on the hill was intentionally dressed, with her overcoat and scarf and heeled Mary Janes, but her expression was somehow uncivilized. Wild. Hannelore had not known a woman could look like that. Something about the woman put Hannelore in mind of the damp moss she’d just touched. Water wasn’t just one thing; it could be rain, snow, ice, and rivers.

“Hoss,” called a voice, and the woman turned away. A word Hannelore hadn’t ever heard before for a woman unlike any she’d ever seen.

“Come on, now,” said a staff member, taking Hannelore’s hand. “Let’s go see the Avallon.”

Chapter Nine

In they came. The Germans, the Japanese, the Italians, the miscellaneous smaller factions that had little in common with each other besides not being German, Japanese, or Italian. After frenzied days of preparation, it was finally real. The Germans had just taken Benghazi; the Argyll Sutherlanders had bagpiped the British retreat from the Malay Peninsula; Royal Air Force flying ace R. R. S. Tuck—the luckiest pilot alive—had finally been shot down by the Nazis; prison workers in Wheeling, West Virginia, had found a mammoth skeleton while digging a new road for troops. And June Hudson had a hotel full of Axis diplomats.

The men came first, by foot, and lined up in the lobby to receive instructions and keys as the house Cadillacs left to make the first of many trips to retrieve wives, children, and luggage.

“Welcome to the Avallon,” Basil Pemberton addressed the gathered men. He had been nominated for the task of delivering the parameters of the stay for the same reason that June had hired him to do telephone registration. He had a round, plummy voice to match his round, plummy name (say it: PemmmBurrrTohn!). It classed up every conversation. “It is our pleasure to provide your lodging during this difficult time.”

Pennybacker had said June would feel better once they arrived, as they would be more like her usual guests than she thought, but, leaning back against the front desk, observing, she could see this was not entirely the case. About half the men standing, red-cheeked and clutching coffee cups, had the look of diplomats or foreign nationals with executive or elite status. The other half, who hung back tactfully, were clearly support staff. Drivers. Butlers. Cooks. Husbands of maids, secretaries, nannies. The first group paid close attention to Basil. The second group could not help but gawp at their surroundings. They tilted their heads back to look at the chandelier several stories overhead. They glanced over their shoulders at the rich paneling along the length of the front desk. They touched the shivering fronds of the royal palms beside the white sofas. They made eye contact with the quintet playing in the alcove. They started in surprise when her waitstaff moved quietly among them, refilling drinks and taking discarded glasses.

It put June in mind of when she’d first arrived at the Avallon; of when any new staff member came to the Avallon. Seeing the hotel for the first time was pleasurable for those who were already accustomed to indulgence. But for those who had come from ordinary lives—the Avallon was a religious experience. Several hours of each new staff member’s first day were dedicated to a thorough tour, so that they could ogle and gasp and, like June, fall in love.

June had expected to merely tolerate these enemy usurpers, but seeing these men marveling over the hotel just like all her new back-of-house arrivals made her unexpectedly tender toward them.

Yes, she thought, meet the Avallon.

Basil said, “After this little talk, you will check in with Mr. Benjamin Pennybacker, this gentleman to my left, and receive the keys to your suites, and our porters will be at your disposal. I apologize in advance for the inefficiency; unfortunately, there is only one of Mr. Pennybacker and many of you!”

Pemberton gave a plummy laugh. The diplomats knew they were meant to smile or laugh with him, so they did. The support staff did not, except for a few who realized too late and laughed too loud. Do you see that? Mr. Francis’s voice asked June. These are the subtle social transactions that keep those men firmly in their class. Is it that they didn’t find the joke funny? It wasn’t funny. It is not about that. It is about what was appropriate. A reciprocal smile or laugh was appropriate. The smile indicates they are grateful for him taking the time to explain the situation in a way that honors their status. The smile indicates this entire situation is a joke they are in on. The smile says they still have control. The men who didn’t smile have no control, so they will always have to serve those who do.

“While you are waiting,” Basil went on, “please check your pockets to make sure they are free of the items prohibited by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Radios, weapons, and of course, any sensitive documents. It will be our pleasure to secure these items, and any other valuables you prefer to safekeep in our security boxes.”

Two members of the collected party weren’t men: a woman with shoulder-length red-gold hair and a girl with straight blonde hair all the way down her back to the tops of her thighs. The woman must have been a diplomat’s wife. She had a regal bearing, which June knew from experience did not necessarily mean imperious, but rather elegant, tactful, mannered, warm. These days, kings and queens and princes and princesses were becoming diplomats themselves, representing the reticent ideal Mr. Francis tried to teach her.

The woman’s daughter (because she was clearly her daughter) did not quite match her. The girl stood quietly, but her gaze was too sharp when it landed on other people’s faces. She studied rather than observed, a difference the subject of such a gaze feels immediately. The girl had directed this stare at June in the driveway; she directed it at everyone around her now, eyebrows furrowed.

“The State Department asks that you limit your exploration to the areas indicated on the maps provided at Mr. Pennybacker’s table,” Basil went on. “All meals will be served in our world-famous Magnolia Dining Room, but you may also make use of our exceptional room service staff. The Avallon also has two tearooms and a pub available for refreshments outside mealtimes, although please do note that the State Department has asked everyone to be on their floors for the night by ten p.m. I also invite you to inspect the Avallon’s high-quality shopping arcade on the first floor; the shops will be open during normal business hours to serve you.”

The absurdity of this! In ordinary circumstances, diplomats were supposed to have complete immunity from both criminal and administrative interference, were not to be imprisoned, and were supposed to be free to travel, to hither, to thither. In these circumstances: they could shop.

“What hours are the bathhouses open?”

June did not catch which of the diplomats had asked the question.

Basil answered immediately, “I’m afraid the bathhouses are not currently open at this time. They are undergoing winter maintenance.”

He made eye contact with her. Pennybacker had said the bathhouses could remain off-limits as long as the Americans detained in Germany weren’t allowed to use the spa services there. Reciprocity. Of course, June’s diplomats already had access to the water; they had the fonts, bathtubs, and fountains. But that felt limited. Let the sweetwater have a minute or two to see how it felt about these people before she baptized them right at the potent springheads.

Basil continued: “The Federal Bureau of Investigation is permitting one newspaper; I encourage you to consider which publication you would prefer. For any questions related to your stay, I invite you to reach out to either Mr. Pennybacker or the two members of the Swiss liaison, who I understand will be here later today. For service-related questions, you may of course ask any of the fellows in gray and gold you see, and I would also like to take the opportunity to introduce you to June Hudson, our general manager; she is over there, waving at us. We are all privileged to make your stay a memorable one; again, welcome, welcome, enjoy yourselves!”

As the diplomats began to queue for Pennybacker, head waiter Sebastian Hepp sidled up to June, silently sliding his tray onto the front desk. His face was mottled from the winter cold, but his pleasant smile was still in place and would remain for his entire shift. In a very low voice, he asked, “How is it going so far, Hoss?”

June twitched her chin toward the woman with the red-gold hair. “Who is that woman, do you know?”

Most general managers would not have expected a waiter to know the identities of guests who had only just walked up the driveway, but at the Avallon, June had emphasized again and again the power of the guests’ names. Although she didn’t expect them to remember the names of everyone on the property as she did, she expected them to try. It turned out that this was a muscle that could be successfully trained; her staff impressed her every day.

“Sabine Wolfe,” Sebastian said. “The wife of Friedrich Wolfe, the German cultural attaché. And their daughter, Hannelore.”

Hannelore was a poetic name, even more poetic when Sebastian said it in his faint German accent.

“She’s unusual?”

Sebastian said, “She does not speak.”

“At all?”

“Her mother apologized for it. She says the girl has never said a word, but she does sing.”

June looked at the girl with new interest. Her keen study of other people felt different in light of this information. Her blue eyes took in everything about them, and for what? Not to use as social capital or in conversation. June was reminded a little of her own youth. She had been a listener, too, after all.

“Did you know Erich von Limburg-Stirum is here?” Sebastian added, boyish enthusiasm nearly breaking his whisper.

The celebrated trick pilot Erich von Limburg-Stirum stood in line with the other diplomats, a tall, tow-headed young man with a face so inviting that one could be forgiven for thinking he was handsome. He seemed more American than the Germans around him; it took June a moment to realize it was because he smiled with his teeth. Pennybacker had told June that it was the pilot’s VIP status that had grounded him here; he had been invited on too many backstage tours of important airfields. Overnight, war had made this knowledge fraught. It was a story that stuck with her. Unlike the diplomats, who had knowingly chosen to represent their countries’ interests, Erich von Limburg-Stirum couldn’t have known he was flying directly into this fate.

The Avallon was not used to holding people against their will, or to unfairness. The sweetwater was very, very fair.

She said, “Don’t you fellas pester him.”

“Paul and I will be under the crack of his door in the night for his autograph,” Sebastian said, and she lightly hit him with the back of her hand.

“Get back to work, scoundrel,” June said. “Do you need anything from me?”

“For the Japs to tip. The Deutsch are laying it on like high rollers, but not a penny from the Pacific front.”

“Don’t pester them, either.”

“Hoss.” Sebastian put his hand to his chest, pretending to be wounded, and then whirled away with his tray.

The lobby was filling up with wives and children. The diplomats received their keys, shrugged off fur coats, and handed dog leashes to the runner boys. Three well-dressed members of the German legation observed some hooting lower-class Italian children with antipathy, a Japanese man and one of June’s waiters carried on an interminable bowing match in a social ouroboros neither seemed to know how to end, and an Italian maid wailed as porters tried to take her coat—unfamiliar with both English and upper-class hotels, she thought they were trying to confiscate it. It was chaos.

June resisted the temptation to dive in and deliver suggestions. She had trained them in this, after all, her beloved staff. She trusted them; they trusted her.

She gave to them: She ate with them each day in the canteen. She took part in the training of even the humblest of positions their first week. She made sure they were fed and well-slept, offering on-site barracks for the single staff and transportation from the town below for everyone else. She let them page through her ledgers full of task and guest lists and scan the accounts for waste. She was not coy about what it took to balance the waters beneath the hotel.

And they gave to her: their skills and energy, their loyalty, their acceptance of her principles. They proved over and over that, together, they accomplished something bigger than they could on their own. They let her be the Avallon with them. She was the mind and they were her arms and hands and fingers and legs and feet and toes. A single proud entity.

“Miss Hudson, good morning.”

A short Japanese woman addressed her. She was middle-aged but dressed like an older woman, in a cape and beret. She seemed to be the spokesperson for a trio of Japanese women; the other two stood off a few yards, pretending not to be watching June intently.

“Good morning,” June said.

“I am Sachiko Nishimura.”

Just like that, June found herself facing the wife of Takeo Nishimura, the now-infamous Japanese consul. Debate still raged in the staff canteen and the newspapers about whether the Japanese diplomats had been hoodwinked by their home country or whether they had been colluding with it, knowingly peddling lies of peace to a gullible America until Pearl Harbor. June hadn’t bothered formulating an opinion on the matter, but it was different when she was breathing the same air as someone directly involved.

“This is a beautiful hotel,” said Sachiko Nishimura.

“Thank you.”

“They did not tell us where we were going.” Sachiko’s accent was heavy, but her English was as effective as her fashion. “My husband, Takeo, was worried it would be a terrible place.”

She did not say because of what Japan has done, but of course that was the reason. Because of what her husband had done, possibly. Possibly, as June was lying in bed with Gilfoyle, murmuring about what sort of future they might have together, Sachiko and Takeo Nishimura were lying on two twin beds facing each other, murmuring about whose future they were about to destroy, planning the death of Toad’s hellion son.

June wasn’t supposed to know this much about Sachiko. It was, in fact, one of Mr. Francis’s most central and seemingly contradictory tenets: the staff was to thoroughly know the guests; the staff wasn’t to know the guests at all. This had been particularly important during the Depression, when people starved in town squares and a nickel sometimes literally represented the difference between life and death. If a wealthy couple known for their patronage of the arts came to the Avallon, it was appropriate for the staff to know that they were, say, benefactors of the American Numismatic Society and four wildlife preserves, and to engage them in small talk about rare coins and rarer bison. It was not appropriate to use this knowledge to solicit ordinary coins or to sell a painting one had done of bison. These notable guests had to feel both known and anonymous, freed from the envy and ulterior motives that existed for them outside the hotel. To have achieved notability but not be asked to perform it: that was a kind of luxury, too.

The tenet was just as important for notorious guests, of which the Avallon had its share, well before the Nishimuras arrived. June wasn’t a fool. The perfect guest was not necessarily the perfect human. Mr. Francis explained all this to her, but he hadn’t even finished before she understood the truth behind it. The Avallon simply couldn’t run without this division between identity and soul. The world cared about the guests’ identities. The Avallon could only care about everything else. The hotel wasn’t for those who deserved it. It was for those who came. The moment that illusion was broken, so, too, was the staff.

June schooled her thoughts.

Sachiko said, “We did not know we would be asked to leave the embassy on such short notice. We did not expect it to be such”—she faded a little—“a grand place. We did not bring everything we might need for such a place.”

Her eyes searched the gilded mirrors lining the walls, avoiding June’s gaze. Something was troubling her, something unspoken. Something that her status would not permit her to say directly. Not easily, anyway, not comfortably. It couldn’t be as simple as needing a hairbrush, a coat. Requests like that would be spoken as an order to one of the staff members. No, this was a matter that had to go to someone like June, someone with power of her own, someone who understood the language of discretion.

June listened to this silence between the words, testing it and then, all at once, put it together with Sebastian’s earlier comments. “Is there an issue with the tips?”

Sachiko’s expression lightened; thank goodness June had said it first, so she didn’t have to. “My husband has informed me that, in a beautiful hotel like this, there is a tradition of tips. Handsome tips. But our accounts have been frozen.”

June imagined the other woman’s relief when she realized they were not being taken to a prison or camp. Then she imagined the embarrassment that took its place once Takeo, well-traveled and well-versed in American ways, recognized the kind of hotel the Avallon was. Better for the staff to believe the Japanese knew about tipping, but weren’t able to, or for the staff to believe the Japanese were too ignorant to understand such an American expectation? Both options were humiliating.

June’s schooled empathy became more genuine.

“The staff know these are strange times, Mrs. Nishimura,” she said. “You won’t offend them. I’ll make sure they know the circumstances. And I reckon those Swiss fellers who are on their way can give you a hand with the accounts; they’re supposed to help with settling matters at the embassies.”

This was sufficient to clear all uncertainty from Sachiko’s face. She bowed to June. Behind her, when June caught the eyes of the other two women, they bowed, too.

Sachiko said, “I am not sure why, but it is very comforting to be cared for by a woman at one of these places, even though it is also surprising. Takeo thought—are you Francis Gilfoyle’s daughter?”

June was astonished.

No one had ever made that mistake before.

But then it dawned on her: Sachiko Nishimura, despite speaking very good English, couldn’t hear June’s accent. Her mountaineer turns of phrase, her clipped vowels—they were just acceptable variations in a second language, not damning class markers audible from across a cocktail party. Was June Francis Gilfoyle’s daughter? Why not? In a world where her voice did not give her away immediately, she could have passed as a Gilfoyle for a very long time.

For a brief, luminescent moment, June imagined what these unspoken words would sound like spoken: Daughter-in-law, yes. I married Edgar, the eldest, but I was running the hotel before that. He handles the holdings in New York; I handle the hotel. We work well together; we grew up together.

Edgar’s fingers on her wrist. I think the world of you, June. God, this wanting.

“No,” June said. “I belong to the Avallon.”

Chapter Ten

Just a few rooms away, Agent Tucker Rye Minnick was surrounded by Nazi underwear. Bullet bras suggesting breasts that pointed true north, garter belts that went places hands seldom followed, stockings slinky as youthful promises. Longline bras that armored rib cages as well as busts, rubber girdles with breathing holes, can-do garments designed for industry, not for admiration. Delicate bandeaus, voluminous bloomers, cotton knit step-in panties that went from imagined belly buttons to midthigh, silk and rayon slips that made Tucker think of how long it had been since he had touched a woman. Full-length winter weight underwear, shaped like its owner had pulled off her skin and tucked it into a case for travel. Corsets, smelling of musty roses, with boning. Did women still wear these? They must, they were packed neatly into the suitcases filling the first-floor luggage storage room of the Avallon.

Turned out the Axis wanted to strap things down and haul them up in much the same way as the Allied. Technology seemed to have taken a leap forward since the last time he’d seen these things in action.

Tucker and his fellow agent Hugh Calloway had spent the first hours of the diplomats’ detention searching their luggage. The storage room must have been quite pleasing to look at in other circumstances, not unlike the underwear. Two skylights allowed bright shafts of winter sun to glow across a wall of safe deposit boxes, all identically decorated with artful brass detail. The ceiling featured a mural of hunting horses; currently, the painted horses leapt directly into the mismatched cases stacked high as a man. Although this room, like everything at the Avallon, was enormous, it had not been designed to hold every guest’s luggage at once.

Hugh asked, “You ever think about what we’d be doing if we weren’t here?”

“No,” Tucker replied.

“We’d be drafted. You’re a good-looking White fella so you’d probably be in the back of the pack, but fellows like me are cannon fodder. They stack us this way and that so you guys can crawl over puddles with dry feet.”

Tucker squinted at a small booklet that turned out to be a calorie-counting guide. Could it hide code? Better safe than sorry; it joined the other confiscated material, destined for the hotel’s own large safe in the basement until the detention was over. “You think I’m good-looking?”

“In low light. I got an offer to get out, you know. The last factory I was investigating, they offered me head of security. Wad of George Washingtons attached, too. And no more moving around.”

Tucker already knew about the offer; he’d read Hugh’s file before arriving, wanting to see what he’d been up to since their shared time in the academy. Hugh had been posted in Los Angeles (where he’d been stabbed), Minneapolis (where he’d met his fiancée), Cleveland (where he got married and welcomed his first child), and Chicago (where he’d had his second child, and TaylorRight Trucking Company had offered him twice his current Bureau salary to become their new director of security). Tucker suspected this disloyalty was Hugh’s sin; that was why he was here, under Tucker, at a mission the Bureau clearly regarded as something between babysitting and due diligence. Whatever had brought the lanky agent to Tucker’s case, he was glad of it. Imagine doing this with a complete stranger. Imagine doing it with two Pony Harrises. Tucker had already caught Pony soliciting a hello girl that morning, and had taken him aside to explain that the behavior of each agent represented the Bureau and that it seemed inappropriate for the Bureau to say God-knew-what to girls in order to get them into bed. Pony had nodded and agreed, but after only a week and a half in his company, Tucker had the certainty of a weary priest that he’d catch him at it again. If the FBI had been any other kind of outfit, he would have assumed nepotism had gotten Pony his position. But Hoover had crafted his Bureau because of the nepotism and corruption of local organizations. At some point, Pony Harris had earned his way into the job.

Tucker realized he hadn’t replied to Hugh. He wasn’t gifted at conversation, but he wanted Hugh to like him, to remember he liked Tucker. It had been years, but they’d been easy together at the academy. “But you’d have to get shot at first.”

“I get shot at as it is. It’s the traveling I object to. Never cared to see France.” Hugh unzipped a toiletry kit, examined its contents, found it uneventful. “But maybe I will. Just maybe I will. You and I are old, Tuck, old school. The Bureau ain’t the same. Last time I saw my SAC, I thought, might as well be facing Jerry.”

Tucker felt uneasy criticizing the Bureau, even here in this luggage storeroom, even in a joking tone. “Jerry doesn’t come with a company car.”

“You haven’t changed a bit.” Hugh’s expression was knowing. In a low, radio voice, he said, “Meet Mr. Minnick, the Bureau’s most loyal soldier.”

Tucker had once gotten a letter from J. Edgar Hoover himself. The director of the FBI sent the letter of commendation for Tucker’s part in stopping E. R. R. Dixon, a bank robber. Tucker’s part was this: shooting E. R. R. Dixon, an act he remained somewhat haunted by, on account of E. R. R. Dixon’s last words (“But what about Barbara Jo?”). Hoover’s letter concluded: We are very proud of you!!! You are Bureau-minded. The three exclamation points had surprised Tucker; he hadn’t thought Hoover was the type.

Bureau-minded, though, that was high praise. J. Edgar Hoover’s new army, made up of ex-lawyers and ex–police chiefs, had to be the best in all things. Whatever the enemies of the Bureau could do, the Bureau men had to do better. If the villains could exist in rudimentary west Texas cabins, free of running water, so could the Bureau agents, staked out in the dusty brush without a change of clothing. If the villains could shoot tommy guns upside down from a moving train window, so must the Bureau agents, training on base alongside army men. If the villains could investigate everyone’s childhood to discover their secret weaknesses, so could the Bureau agents, amassing enormous files on everyone they met.

But Bureau-minded meant more than excellence. It meant you did what your special agent in charge ordered, even if you didn’t fully understand why you were doing it. You stayed until the job got done, even as other men donned their hats at five p.m. You avoided the temptation to make allies among your peers. You stayed single, or, if you got married, gratefully accepted three hours off on a slow afternoon for the honeymoon. You wanted nothing more than to be a useful cog in that glorious and intentional machine, fighting corruption until your last breath.

Tucker was as Bureau-minded as they came.

No, he hadn’t changed a bit.

“Still not much of a talker, either,” Hugh said.

“I said something, didn’t I?” Tucker tried to remember if he had.

The other agent had a laugh like a rooster cut off midcry; he crowed now. He held up a girdle and panty combination, clipped and strapped together so that, even empty, it provided a compelling portrait of its owner. Hugh said, “How about that GM, by the way?”

June Hudson. Tucker wondered which of these undergarments she wore. Something that did what she told it to do, no doubt. Tossing a fish-shaped cigarette lighter back into a suitcase, he looked up to see Hugh regarding him slyly. “Put that face away, Calloway.”

“What would J. Edgar think?”

“He’d think you should get back to that pile of cases behind you so you can finally get your ass to the post office.”

“Did you know she’s set to inherit? The old man, the Gilfoyle who just died, he left her one of the houses here.” When Tucker raised an eyebrow, Hugh went on. “Yeah, the postmaster was telling me. The Lily House. That big ol’ dame right by the hotel, looks halfway to a mansion itself.”

“Why?”

“She deserves it, maybe.”

Tucker gave him a look. People like the Gilfoyles didn’t split up their properties for the help. He thought it probably had more to do with the intimate hostility between the GM and Edgar Gilfoyle at the initial meeting. An affair, then. With him? With his father? A house for the mistress. But that didn’t sit quite right. On paper, maybe. But in person, it seemed more complicated. He paused. “Whose suitcase is this?”

The case in front of him, a large, hard-sided green one, had no name tag, and no identifying marks on any of its sides. The contents were likewise anonymous. Some men’s trousers, a sweater, suspenders, toiletries kit. An extra bar of soap.

Hugh knew his business; wordlessly, he stood, unfolding like a crane standing, to search the rest of the luggage for a matching piece. While he did, Tucker retrieved the shipping manifest, comparing the list of human cargo and luggage with what was before them. When the case’s owner did not immediately declare itself, Tucker did a quick, cursory look through the German legation’s luggage, looking for any suitcase containing men’s clothing but no toiletries case. Ah. Success. He said, “Get me that Gestapo man.”

This was how Tucker, Hugh, and Lothar Liebe came to be standing over a suitcase with a snub-nosed machine gun sewn into a hidden panel beneath the clothing compartment. An MP40, to be precise, a weapon that could only belong to one of the Germans.

Lothar Liebe, who had snazzy looks to match his snazzy name, his hair sleek and aerodynamic, blue eyes asmolder, and rosebud mouth for either pouting or cigarettes, opted for the latter as he blew smoke up at the hunting horses. He shrugged. “I had to try.”

Tucker asked, “Why didn’t you declare it?”

“Would you have let me keep it?”

“Possibly. But now I know you are the kind of man who sews weapons into luggage.”

Liebe gave him an amused look. “Genau. It is not mine, anyway. It is Friedrich’s.”

“Wolfe? Why did he bring a machine gun to the States?”

“It has personal value. You’d have to ask him for the stories.”

Tucker and Hugh exchanged a glance; they didn’t want these stories. Tucker said, “I still don’t understand why he brought a gun like this to America.”

“I don’t think he expected to be hurriedly collected by the United States government when he brought it over in the first place, and”—Liebe lit a second cigarette with the stub of the one he’d come with—“I don’t really believe he thought he would be going back.”

Tucker had a feeling this information was transactional; later in the conversation, he assumed Liebe would expect a trade for something else. “Why were you the one smuggling it back?”

“He was just going to leave it at the embassy; he’s distressingly honest. We have been friends since we were boys. What wouldn’t we do for each other? Tell me something, have the Swiss arrived yet? I would like to speak to them before anyone else.”

And there it was. Tucker said, “A bold request from a man caught with a weapon.”

“Ah, what did you think we would do with it anyway? Shoot our way out of here? Did you notice there was no ammunition?”

“I haven’t yet looked in the lining of your other case. Or Friedrich Wolfe’s, now that I know of your friendship.”

“What a full and meaningless day you have ahead of you,” Liebe said. He gestured to them both with the cigarette. “Did you choose this boring post, Agents? Somewhere far away from the action? Or were you sent here so that other men could have their time in the sun? Why are you even here? We are just waiting to go home. I see you writing in your little book, but you and I are the same person, we do the same thing; I know you have nothing to write there. Lothar Liebe, brought a gun without bullets, presented no argument. Schaumschläger, that’s what we call it when someone is filling pages with meaningless information. Hot air merchant.”

Tucker merely handed him a receipt with a description of his suitcase written on it. “Good day, Mr. Liebe.”

• • •

ONCE TUCKER HAD TALKED to Lothar Liebe’s face, it was time to listen to him behind his back. Time to listen to all the Germans, actually—indeed all the members of the legations deemed most likely to discuss information useful to the United States government. After the luggage was sorted, Hugh disappeared to the Glass Studio to conduct more staff interviews, and Tucker folded himself into a blue satin chair in a small closet, his knees pressed against the door, his ears sweating inside a heavy headset. A few inches away, a recording device turn-turn-turned, winding up sounds from the Portrait Gallery on the other side of the wall. He’d placed the microphones and recording devices the day before, guessing where the new guests might congregate to discuss sensitive politics.

“Die sing draussen den Hund ausführen,” he heard in his ear.

Tucker didn’t speak a lick of German, of course, or Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, so on. In an ideal world, the Bureau would have populated the hotels with agents who did, but in the real world, they didn’t have the manpower. Each hotel got three agents equipped with their service weapons, a handful of dubiously legal listening devices, and their own common sense. This was typical, though. One of the things Tucker liked about the job. G-men were expected to operate with both extreme paucity and extreme autonomy. He was proud of his ability to cobble together a plan from just a location and a vague assignment.

In his ear, a barely audible conversation droned on, mostly in German, then briefly in English. He thought a staff member had come in. Did they want drinks? Was that the question? The microphone was placed badly; he’d need to get in there after curfew and move it. The one in the pub, though—he was proud of that one. He’d come up from the floor below to place the microphone right underneath the bar. The sound was perfect. How long would it take to translate the recordings? Ordinarily, it could take weeks for the lab to process evidence, but this was wartime; he didn’t know what to expect. These war assignments were new ground for the Bureau. Washington had long squabbled over which federal agency handled which crime, but when the war broke out, the answer became obvious: all hands on deck. Agents were called in from the field, given fresh background checks, then pushed through training in the latest intelligence techniques. Tucker had spent the days after Pearl Harbor studying harder than he had in law school. Invisible inks. Secret codes. Microdots. Dead drops.

But this part, mechanical surveillance, was the same old, same old. Where there was a wall, there was a G-man with an ear pressed up against it. How many closets, motel bathrooms, and crawl spaces had Tucker folded himself into on behalf of the Bureau?

German faded in and out, in and out. They were leaving, making a lot of noise. A final snatch of German came to him. “. . . guck mas dal . . .”

Tucker had immediately disliked the language barrier. The Bureau was satisfied to simply collect intel, not caring whether the heads containing that intel were already back in Germany by the time it was translated, even if it did make Tucker feel like he was just a recording device himself. This was what Lothar had been talking about. But he didn’t know Tucker, that inventive Schaumschläger. There was a reason Hoover hadn’t just fired him outright; he had all kinds of tricks up his sleeve.

There was no sound in the closet but Tucker’s breathing, close against the unseen walls. Now that the Germans had left, perhaps he could risk adjusting the Portrait Gallery microphones instead of after curfew. But he knew he was simply trying to justify avoiding moving around the hotel at night, when the smell of the sweetwater on every single floor turned the hallways into subterranean tunnels. The secretive animal-headed fonts dared him to accidentally dip his fingers into their basins while reaching for light switches. And oh, lord, the stairway that led down to the swimming pools. Tucker had unknowingly stepped in there earlier that day and—the scent. The humidity. Suffocation pressed down his throat; for a full minute, he was overcome by the mindless insect panic of drowning. The worst part had been the sense of being perceived. The water tensely exploring his exterior, testing him for familiarity, unfooled by everything he’d done for two decades—

Tucker heard a laugh.

He froze. He couldn’t be sure if he’d heard it with his own ears, in the room outside the closet, or if he had heard it in his headphones, from the Portrait Gallery. He also wasn’t entirely sure, now that it was silent once more, that it had been a laugh. It could have been a sob. That was the sound E. R. R. Dixon, the bank robber, had made when Tucker shot him. Tucker recalled it with razor-sharp clarity; he couldn’t forget how pain and humor were so tightly aligned that, in a moment of mortal revelation, they were indistinguishable.

The laugh came again.

This time he reeled back. He would have keeled right over in his chair had there been room enough. Instead, the chair wedged against the doorjamb, front legs askance, Tucker flailing—first to catch himself, second to stop the chair from making an audible sound as it fell with him in it. Secrecy was instinctual.

The laugh had sounded directly into the microphone. A warm, inclusive laugh, deeply amused.

There was no other noise. No footsteps. No door closing. No breathing. If someone had remained behind in the Portrait Gallery, they were being as silent as Tucker, apart from the laugh.

It wasn’t a German.

The microphone was hidden in a light fixture twelve feet off the ground.

Slowly, Tucker removed the headset. He stopped the recording device. He gently braced his hands against the wall to set the chair upright. His heart was slamming in his ears. That stink. The sweetwater.

He pushed open the closet door, half-afraid something would be standing on the other side. But of course it was simply an empty sitting room, vaguely stale-scented from being shut away from guests for the winter.

Tucker hated this place; he hated the water, he hated feeling this sliding sense that the water was getting inside him, infecting his thoughts, making him reckless, making him uncontrollable, after all these years.

Get in, get out, get the job done.

Chapter Eleven

Swiss diplomats would obviously be the preferred party for diplomatic neutrality, but in this imperfect world,” Pennybacker confided to June, “it’s challenging to find Swiss diplomats. It’s challenging to find Swiss citizens at all. There’s not as many of them as you would think! Only four million, even in Switzerland. And they already gave up two of them to the Greenbrier for their liaison.”

Midway through the first week, the Avallon welcomed four new arrivals at the station, blustering into the lobby with dry flakes of snow swirling in their wake. Pennybacker knew the first two: Rudolf Reiff, a chiseled harpsichordist whose salt-and-pepper hair rendered his age impossible to fathom, and Felix Rufenacht, a boy-faced conductor with sculptural hair, two members of a chamber orchestra whose return to Europe had become unpleasant to contemplate after Pearl Harbor. They had just finished a five-day crash course in diplomacy in Washington, DC, making them only slightly more informed than June.

Pennybacker said, “So old Rudy and Rufey it is!”

The Swiss men had brought twenty-five thousand dollars in a briefcase chained to Felix’s wrist; this was to be distributed to the Japanese nationals while they dealt with the matter of their frozen bank accounts. They accepted their room keys, claimed the Glass Room (not to be mistaken with the Glass Studio; the latter producing the objects filling the former) for their office hours, and told Pennybacker they were looking forward to catching up.

That left the other arrivals: two members of the Gilfoyle family.

Stella, the eldest Gilfoyle daughter, stomped in with her droopy smile and a caged parakeet who filled the entire lobby with its urgent, repetitive cheek cheek cheek cheek. It had been months since June had seen her, but she was as she always was: earnest, messy, scented with lavender and sweat. She had gotten right to the edge of childhood’s country and then somehow remained at the end of the dock, waving as others left her behind.

“Goon,” Stella said, flinging the parakeet down in order to damply press herself against June. “The train was so hot.”

“Stella, what are you doing here now?” June asked. It was disorienting to be facing a Gilfoyle without warning. Ordinarily their arrival would have been something of a state affair. She felt a sudden twist of misgiving; the eldest Gilfoyle daughter would not ordinarily set off alone. “Is Madeline with you?”

Stella plucked at an identification badge that had been hung around her neck. “Do you have one of these?”

June did. “Stella, surely you didn’t come alone.”

“Of course not,” Stella said. “I came with Sandy.”

Sandy?

As June remained fixed in place, her hands clasped together as permanently as a gravestone angel, she watched the regular drivers of the house Caddies bring the youngest Gilfoyle inside. He had not been able to return in time for the funeral (Able? Or willing? He and Mr. Francis had been fighting until the end), so the last time she had seen him was in a photograph he’d sent of himself in uniform (Goon—Look at these shabby rags! All my love, Sandy). In it, she’d been shocked to see that he’d finally completed that conjurer’s trick that young men perform, one day a lanky, large-headed boy, the next a man with sinewy arms and mountainous shoulders. He had always been a friendly-looking boy, his eyes curved as if he was smiling even if he wasn’t smiling, his thick blond eyebrows tilted into a question even if he wasn’t asking a question, and he had grown into a friendly-looking young man.

Today, he reentered his father’s hotel in a wheelchair. Above his left ear, a one-by-three-inch area had been recently shaved close and a line of sutures was visible. That side of his face was also pebbled with red, healing abrasions. Although she was ordinarily undeterred by blood, June’s stomach clenched; it was one thing to see wounds, it was another thing to see Sandy with them. And the most devastating one of all was his affect. Sandy didn’t move. As T. J. and Lewis B. carried the chair up the stairs with a slow crab-shuffle, he sat motionless, wearing a mildly perplexed frown, hands resting on his knees. His ears were red with the cold, but he didn’t seem to notice the weather. The dachshunds implored him to no avail.

Three hundred Axis internees had come through June’s door the day before, but that was nothing compared to this.

Something had thrown a balcony rung to the ballroom floor; something had laughed within the mayor’s wife’s earshot. June had said it wasn’t the water, because the water didn’t work that way, but what did she know? Francis Gilfoyle dead in a box and Edgar Gilfoyle alive in bed with her and Sandy Gilfoyle robbed of his smile—all these things were true now, so anything could be true. For just one moment, small enough to fit between breaths, June thought she would never be happy ever again. This alien thought was both pure and painless. She had been happy yesterday, but she would not be happy tomorrow. Or tomorrow. Or tomorrow. The version of her who grinned was in the past.

It was a feeling that would have been terrible for anyone to experience inside the Avallon, but was especially terrible for June—June, who listened to the sweetwater, who the sweetwater listened to.

The staff watched her.

June swallowed it down.

“I couldn’t push him up the stairs,” Stella babbled, as June automatically reached into Stella’s jacket pocket to find a few dollars to tip T. J. and Lewis B. on her behalf. Stella lifted her arms, the better for June to pickpocket, saying only, “Poor Sandy Dandy.”

Poor Sandy Dandy had an envelope addressed to JUNE HUDSON tucked into the lapel of his wool jacket. Inside was a typed letter from Ernest Schwartz, the Gilfoyles’ family physician, explaining that Sandy had been the victim of a training accident. The explosion had given Sandy the obvious physical injuries, which Dr. Schwartz was sure would still be in evidence by the time June read this letter, but had also left Sandy with the symptoms of shell shock, as he had been unresponsive ever since. Treatment had been attempted—sodium amytal, sedatives, and counseling—to no avail, and after discussion with Madeline, it was determined the best course of action was to send him to his childhood home to recuperate. Dr. Schwartz was aware the Avallon was serving their country at present, but arrangements had been made with the appropriate federal agencies for Sandy to spend his days inside the hotel itself, as the stimulation would be better for his condition than being alone in the family apartment. Stella would care for him; at the time of the letter-writing they were still trying to get ahold of Edgar, but he would be informed as soon as possible. Yours truly, regards, my condolences, I miss the Avallon every day I am not there, Ernie Schwartz.

June tried, “Sandy?”

His eyes remained fixed beyond her.

That Stella had been sent to care for Sandy was a mark of how little anyone felt could be done for him. Nothing to do but wait. June thought about how her mother and she had waited for her father when he returned from the Great War. But he had never really returned, his last burst of feeling a self-inflicted gunshot. Those greedy Germans, her mother had snarled. They can’t help themselves, taught from birth to take the world, to chew it up, to spit it out. They don’t care a lick about their own sons and husbands so of course they don’t care about anyone else’s. Fully a quarter of June’s father’s patients had been German immigrants, and despite growing anti-German sentiment, her mother had never said a word against them. But that day, standing over the fresh square of soil that contained her husband’s body, June’s mother had gone on and on. There’s no cure for that, the lot of them need to be shot. Give that land to all the mothers and wives whose hearts they’ve broken!

“It’s all right, Sandy-O,” Stella said, voice agreeable. She patted her brother’s motionless shoulder. “Don’t worry about a thing. Junebug’s not mad, is she?”

“I ain’t mad.”

June didn’t know what she was. Something raw and unpracticed. Like the sweetwater, she had become durable, rarely startled, but Sandy had followed different rules in her heart since the day she’d met him. He’d been drowning in the Avallon IV. She’d opened the door to the scent of sulfur and the sight of a single hand emerging from the square of black water. Many years later, when Sandy was old enough to talk properly, he’d told her that for quite some time, it had been two hands, not one. Two hands were required to hold a little boy’s head above water. But it was just the one by the time June arrived, and when she pulled him free, sodden and motionless, head-lolled like a slaughtered pig, that single hand was the only thing that convinced her he wasn’t already dead. Dead little boys couldn’t cling, surely. Luckily for them both, she had just read about the Schafer method of artificial respiration—demonstrated in a cigarette advertisement designed to both save lives and sell Ogden’s cigarettes—and there was a wheelbarrow leaning against a nearby outbuilding. This was how she, a young maid with a nearly incomprehensible mountain accent, came to be wheeling Sandy Gilfoyle, the beloved baby of the Gilfoyle family, up to the Avallon. When the head of housekeeping demanded to know why she was all the way out at Avallon IV, June said, I told you I could hear the water.

They hadn’t ever asked Sandy why he was out there. But June knew.

That day changed both of their lives, didn’t it?

June whispered that incident in Sandy’s ear now, looking to see if it provoked a response. It did not.

From the other side of the room, she heard a spattering of German as two of the internees walked to the dining room. Deep inside her, something scratched and clawed, an unpleasant instinct to blame and to rage. The greedy Germans—

She pressed this thought down at once. She had been caught by surprise earlier, but it wouldn’t happen again. If Toad could clean these folks’ rooms, she could stand straight and get on with her own work.

June delivered the order: “Please get the Gilfoyles settled.”

All the nearby staff leapt into motion, but for one. In a low voice, Griff said, “I’m so sorry, Hoss.”

• • •

JUNE DID HER best to push Sandy out of her mind over the next few days, throwing herself into her work. There was plenty of it, both the ordinary (“spills ’n bills,” as Griff called it) and, thanks to the peculiar nature of their guests, the not so ordinary.

The stress of the journey had provoked appendicitis in a German consular secretary, a condition too severe for the benevolent old hotel physician to treat. June had to fight with the local ambulance men before they would agree to transport him to Malden, the closest hospital, and she already knew by the time they’d left—accompanied by a contingent of Border Patrol agents—that the altercation would invite press to their door later.

Toad summoned June to find out if she had more sheets hidden somewhere in the hotel; several of the senior-most officials had demanded to swap suites when they found out a few of their maids and butlers had ended up with larger sitting rooms or better views. Laundry was working overtime to clean all the sheets to turn over the rooms to their new masters. June, grudgingly, released some of her secret wartime stock from the storeroom and had the Grotto send mints to the ejected maids and butlers.

One of the Italian diplomats accidentally set fire to his bathroom while trying to destroy an embassy document he had forgotten he’d hidden in his shoe. When June delivered the wet, blackened paper to Agent Hugh Calloway at the office, he determined it had been a list of Washington families who had hosted the Italian diplomats during their stay. “I meant to send them thank-you letters,” the Italian pleaded.

Griff Clemons said the boys in the Grotto were desperate to get Erich von Limburg-Stirum in a plane, in a car, on a bicycle, on a horse, anywhere he could demonstrate his derring-do. June said it was not her job to keep the Grotto boys in line; it was Chef Fortéscue’s. With a sigh, Griff admitted that it was Fortéscue leading the charge.

And Angela Bickenbach, wife of the German commercial attaché, asked to leave the hotel. She was an American citizen, she said, and could not be forced to go back to Germany with her German husband. They had talked it over and decided to separate so that she could return to her American life. “Is that possible?” June asked Pennybacker. He replied, “It’s going to take a lot of paperwork.”

But as the days passed, her thoughts kept returning to Sandy Gilfoyle, whom she kept seeing out of the corner of her eye, parked in various sitting rooms in his wheelchair. Like Mr. Francis, she hadn’t wanted him to join the navy at all; she didn’t want his faith in humanity ruined. He’d just finished university, they were still at peace, there was no whisper of a draft. You don’t want me to do the right thing, Goon? Ironically, she’d suggested he go into diplomacy; he’d continued his intent study of foreign languages all through college and was fluent in several. But he was obsessed about joining. He and Carrie and Mr. Francis were all quite obsessive, actually, unable to put down a thought—the opposite of Edgar and Stella, who had to work hard to hold one for very long at all. Specifically, Sandy had recently become fixated on the story of a German immigrant, Robert Prager, who had been lynched by a mob in Illinois during the Great War. He’d written to June about it—they wrapped him in an American flag, June, they made him walk down the street on broken glass, they thought he was a spy—and then he’d told her more about it when he’d come back to the Avallon, how the mayor had tried to stop them, how they’d made him lift himself up to the noose, how they’d asked him if he wanted to write a final letter to his parents and he had. June could tell the gruesome story had taken roost in his mind, and that he wouldn’t be rid of it without action. When June had pointed out that he’d be fighting the Germans, which seemed the opposite of the point of the story, he’d leveled that earnest expression at her.

“This will be a war about how we mete justice, June,” he’d said. “This is a war about the collective will. What do we do with the power of the many? Are we better or worse when we all move together? Do we wield justice? Do we wield vengeance? Do we give a handful of folks a really nice summer holiday? Prager tried to join our navy, but he had a bum eye; he believed in the collective will used for good. Yes, I’ll be fighting Germans. The right way. So would he have been.”

June had a feeling a lot of this talk was to needle Mr. Francis rather than convince her, but she didn’t know how to defuse the tension between them; neither of them argued with anyone else in the world but each other. Instead, she told Sandy she was right proud of how he’d turned out, and he had told her he’d stay if she absolutely wanted him to—a generous offer he had not previously extended to a frustrated Mr. Francis. But June wasn’t about to stop him. This was the agony of trust, wasn’t it? If Sandy believed it was the right thing to do, it probably was.

By the end of the week, June gave up and let herself have a little wallow. Leaving the dachshunds behind the front desk, she told the clerk on duty she’d be back in an hour. At first, her feet started taking her to 411, but she wasn’t sure that the designer’s brand of searing comfort was what she wanted, so she veered to the ballroom. She had a thought she would hide away in the orchestra alcove and just take a moment to collect herself.

She unlocked the grand doors, stepped inside, and locked them behind her. The poetry had not yet been dismantled; the pages spun lightly in response to the current of her entrance. She crossed the floor to the fountain and sat on the edge. Gently touching the rim of one of the carved rhododendrons, she let out a long, long, long breath. That rotten balcony rung had fallen just a few feet from here. She thought about the laugh the mayor’s wife had heard.

She put her hand into the water.

Comfort seeped through her, a decade of comfort. Two decades. Her entire adult life. Ordinarily, when June put her hand into the water, really put her hand in, she was balancing some negativity. Putting in comfort of her own to counteract some ill a guest was experiencing. But today, she used it like a guest would, selfishly. Soaking away her bad feeling, letting the sweetwater heal her.

The hotel was doing well, wasn’t it? Better, even, than she had hoped. This old barge had seen a lot, she thought fondly, and even some wobbling on the part of its general manager wasn’t enough to shake it, not after a decade of pleasure and contentment. The Avallon was in the habit of happiness. How funny, she thought, that Gilfoyle had been right; this assignment was within her capability. They would tend to the diplomatic legations, then put them on a train and get ready for a spring season of war weddings and tasteful parties. The surveyor would finish his work of parting off the Lily House and June would receive a deed. Sandy, young and strong, would recover; unlike her father, he had the healing joy of the Avallon in his sails. And maybe, just maybe, the next time Gilfoyle took her hand, he wouldn’t let go.

Whhhhhsssssst!

June startled as something skidded across the stone and right into the fountain. Something light and bright and slowly sinking. When she pulled it from the water, she discovered it was a paper airplane, folded out of a piece of poetry.

She shielded her eyes against the bright cold sunlight coming through the huge windows and, through the twisting sheets of paper, spotted three figures on the balcony above.

One of them let out an abbreviated yelp. Another said: “Achtung! Hoss!”

Then came a further spattering of German.

“Do not move an inch,” June told the figures.

The balcony dwellers had plenty of time to make a clean getaway as June crossed to the hidden staff staircase in the corner, but she didn’t expect them to disobey her, and she was right. On the third-floor balcony, she discovered two of her waiters, Sebastian Hepp and Paul Eidenmüller, and one celebrity trick air-show pilot, Erich von Limburg-Stirum. Littered around them were squadrons of paper airplanes and stacks of stolen poems still waiting to be folded into service.

All three blinked up like raccoons under a car.

None of them were supposed to be there. Sebastian and Paul should have been getting the dining room ready for service. Erich von Limburg-Stirum, an internee (Pennybacker had wheeled back when June had called them “detainees,” which they were not allowed to be under international law), was forbidden from both the ballroom and the balcony.

June gazed upon them—large-eyed Sebastian, sitting cross-legged with a poem in his hands; gaunt, gawky Paul, kneeling prayerfully for leverage as he sharpened a wing crease; generous-faced Erich, who sprawled propped up on one elbow—before tugging her linen pant legs to more easily join them on the floor. She held out a hand, and Sebastian put a poem in it.

Gin a body meet a body

Coming thro’ the rye,

Gin a body kiss a body—

Need a body cry?

“Is this what you’re trained in?” she asked Erich as she began to fold. The thick paper turned from one kind of art to another beneath her fingers; as the words folded partially out of sight, the poem said first one thing and then another.

“Yes, of course,” Erich said. He had a surprisingly deep voice. “This is what I am famous for.”

“Don’t copy that one,” Sebastian protested when he saw how closely she was modeling her plane on its neighbor. “That is a failed model. Deeply flawed. Never intended to see the sky.”

Paul muttered something in German, and they all laughed, and then Paul realized his mistake and said, in English, for June, “I told them not to make fun of my plane.”

When she was done, Erich inspected the plane, his light eyebrows furrowed deeply, as if there was nothing more important to him than its functionality. He folded some stabilizers into the wings and bent the nose downward.

“Permission to launch?” he asked.

“I think as general manager, I better,” June said.

She sent the plane over the balcony railing. It flew straight and true for a dozen yards before taking a sharp turn for the floor. From up here, its collision was soundless. It looked like a dead swan.

“Should have let the expert do it,” Sebastian murmured.

“Expertise performs better than rank,” Paul added.

Erich said kindly, “It was a good first effort.”

June ducked her head in acknowledgment. “How are you enjoying the Avallon, Mr. von Limburg-Stirum? Herr von Limburg-Stirum?”

(Her two waiters delighted at this, immediately mimicking to each other her pronunciation: hairrrrrrrrrr. Hairrrrr vond Limburg steeerum.)

“It is very nice, it is very good,” Erich said. He ticked off his fingers. “I enjoy the coffee, I enjoy the very comfortable bed, I enjoy the hospitable service.” When she raised her eyebrows at him, he admitted, “I have been told, they have told me, that it is appropriate at a new location, to tell your host three aspects of their care that you enjoy, and they will find that very satisfying.”

“I find it very satisfying.”

He nodded, pleased.

Her next question was probably not very polite, but she had wanted the answer since she’d learned he was coming. “Are you angry that you’re here?”

“I knew I was taking a risk, staying in America,” Erich said. “I did not know that our countries would find themselves at war, but it was clear relations—this is how you say it, yes? Relations? It was clear relations were not good. But I love to fly like this”—he piloted his hand acrobatically above the floorboards, like an air-show ace—“not for fighting, but for happiness. And I love my country, but America has been my new home.” At this his easy face broke into a faraway smile, as if picturing the crowds he had impressed here. Then, just as quickly, it vanished. “In Germany, I will be dropping bombs. This is very difficult for me.”

Sebastian and Paul studied their fingers and their poetry stacks pending manufacture. This was obviously not conversational ground they had tread before June arrived, and they didn’t know how to reconcile it with their bombastic hero.

Erich began a new plane, but after just two folds, he crushed it flat again. He didn’t lift his eyes from his hand pressed hard on the paper.

Good manners, said Mr. Francis in June’s head, are about making the world a more beautiful place. Sometimes that means you have an unbeautiful thought, but you don’t say it. Sometimes it means you have an unbeautiful need, but you don’t ask for it. The moment it leaves your head, it makes the world less beautiful, do you understand? The well-mannered will go to all kinds of trouble to make sure their unbeautiful thoughts are well hidden. They train in this skill for their entire lives.

June: You’re going to tell me now it’s our job to guess what other fellers’ unbeautiful thoughts are so they don’t have to say them, is that it?

Mr. Francis: Very good, June.

She prodded at Erich’s unbeautiful thoughts. “There’s something else. Isn’t there?”

Immediately, he replied, “Yes, but . . . I have already told the State Department man, so that is all I can do. I do not think my fiancée knows that I am here; it is possible she thinks I have just disappeared. I do not know if I can expect her to come back with me, but it is hard to think about . . . I do not like her thinking I went on a tour and simply left her.”

(Why do you say “unbeautiful” instead of “ugly”?

Just because something isn’t beautiful doesn’t make it ugly. The necessary is very rarely beautiful.)

“What did Pennybacker say?”

“He is working on it. Patience, he says. Everything is slow,” Erich said. He suddenly grew tired of not being the blustering hero, too, because he plucked up one of the discarded planes, put his easy grin back on, and declared, “If not for that, I would be quite happy here at the Avallon; you can keep me until next year and beyond.”

June had learned from Gilfoyle how important it was to give people exits from conversations. With deliberate cheer, she said, “I will keep on him. Short sheets for him until you get satisfaction, how about that?”

Quite abruptly, all three smiles slid from their faces. The mood was so thoroughly chilled that June turned to look behind her.

There stood Agent Tucker Rye Minnick. This was not Coal Tattoo Tucker Rye Minnick. This was Federal Agent Tucker Rye Minnick, the law personified, this-area-is-forbidden personified.

He said, “Out.”

The Germans were on their feet at once. The presence of an outsider immediately transmuted Sebastian and Paul from hooligans into waiters. Ingratiating smiles, graceful movements, demure gazes. They glided from the room, boyishness erased. Erich von Limburg-Stirum was once again the air-show pilot in an enemy country. He gave Minnick a wry smile and a sincere apology, then offered him the plane in his hands.

Agent Minnick took it like it was evidence.

Once Erich had left, Agent Minnick, his voice heavy with disappointment, said, “Miss Hudson.”

She was aware of their aloneness, their proximity, his maleness. He stood like a boxer, arms crossed, hands tucked in armpits, legs spread, a posture somewhat at odds with his suit. (This was not Federal Agent Minnick, but rather Coal Tattoo Minnick.) He seemed to take up more space on this balcony than the other three young men combined. She had not thought about the space between herself and them when she sat folding paper. She thought about the space between herself and Agent Minnick.

“They were just making airplanes,” she said.

He regarded the plane in his hand and then said, unsmiling, “Come with me.”

Just a few short yards down the hall, he pressed open a door to reveal that the sitting room desk on the other side was covered with technical equipment. June saw a headset, cables, a receiver.

“Is that—”

“Mr. Pennybacker would not say it in so many words,” Agent Minnick said, “but quite a few of the foreign nationals currently calling the Avallon home had wide access to important pieces of America’s infrastructure before Pearl Harbor. Some of them may have made intentional efforts to research that information for their governments back home. Discovering how much of a threat these individuals are before they leave this place is one of my jobs here.”

“They were just making airplanes,” she said again.

“Erich von Limburg-Stirum’s older brother is an SS-Gruppenführer back in Germany. Do you know what that means?”

She knew what it meant.

“If he came in here first, if he saw my listening equipment, then my entire surveillance is compromised. They might shut up altogether or they might feed me false information, knowing I was sending it back to Washington.”

“Unless they were just making airplanes.”

He peered at her until he saw that she took his point but was being difficult. “Is it true you hired a guest instead of sending her away?”

“Just one.”

“That feels like a deliberate circumvention of the rules.”

“You’re feeling correctly, then.”

“Miss Hudson, it is hard to believe you’re taking this seriously.”

In June’s gray ledgers, the staff had noted that Tucker Rye Minnick had taped a collection of tin can labels to the shaving mirror in his suite. Some of the can labels were years old, housekeeping noted, faded and retaped several times over. A few had notes written on them, but nothing that made sense to the maids. (One of the maids had also noted, with a certain emphatic press to her handwriting, that he had no wedding ring; this handwriting matched a similar observation on Agent Harris’s page.) It was difficult for June to reconcile a man with a collection of tin can labels with the man before her now.

June said, “I am taking my job seriously. My job is to keep this hotel running smoothly. My job is to make sure my staff’s morale stays good. My job is to make sure my guests are happy. It’s my job to ask them what they want, and give it to them. It’s your job to think of them as the enemy. You keep to your business. I’ll do mine.”

“I can’t agree to that. Sometimes your business will be my business.” Opening his jacket—how startling to see a man wearing a gun in her hotel—he pulled out a document and consulted it. She just had time to see that it was a handwritten call log before he tucked it back away and asked, “What does 6CRW stand for?”

“It’s a cloakroom in the west wing of sixth floor. Do you know what, Agent Minnick, folks normally find me right charming.”

He narrowed his eyes. “Why is there is a phone in a cloakroom?”

“We’ve got event space on the sixth floor. You ever discovered partway through the governor’s birthday party you’re short on pistachio ice cream? It’s a bad feeling, Agent.”

“Who has access?”

“People who need to call the Grotto for pistachio ice cream.” He did not smile. She went on. “It ain’t locked. Anyone could get up there. But it’s not a guest space; there shouldn’t be anyone there at all. Why?”

Agent Minnick merely buttoned up his jacket, hiding away his service weapon. Where did he put it, she wondered, when he slept? On the bedside table, beside the lamp; on the desk blotter, occluding the complimentary notepad; on the bathroom counter, next to the slots to discard used razor blades; beneath his pillow, dreaming violent dreams?

“Try to remember there’s a war on,” he said.

Chapter Twelve

Remember there’s a war on? Remember there’s a war on? How could June forget! In addition to having a hotel full of enemy aliens, her day-to-day work was now increasingly complicated by issues that would have never come up in peacetime. The day before the diplomats’ arrival, the Grotto’s butter-pat machine had broken (ordinarily it made one hundred pats of butter a minute, but it quite suddenly began to only produce one extruded pat roughly in the shape of California). It would have to stay broken. It seemed to require a special part that was in high demand due to also being useful to some instrument of war, an unhappy coincidence that put the Avallon on the low side of priority. It was only the first. Her entire desk, in fact, was quickly covered with sloping stacks of PD-1-A forms rejected by the War Production Board, leaving an increasing number of vacuums, tractors, and elevators without replacement parts. Three of her porters were drafted at once, forcing Griff to hastily promote and train three junior valets. They’d have a valet shortage later, but currently, so few people were allowed cars on the property that it was a problem for the future. In the staff canteen, staffers busily passed around images of legal versus illegal fashions. Anticipating shortages, the WPB had just set its sights on clothing. Hemlines, cuffs, balloon sleeves, belts: they all had to shrink for the war effort. Skirts with twelve pleats became skirts with eight. Five-inch wool belts became one-inch leather. Overcoats with gathered, waspish silhouettes became plainer and more dutiful. Pocket flaps atrophied. Dresses ebbed upward, knees coming into view with the change of tide. One-piece swimsuits became two, the precious inches of fabric previously covering midriffs now covering America’s fighting men.

“Pity the children!” said a maid.

“Baby clothes are exempt, Verna,” June told her. To the cafeteria worker: “Fruit salad, please.”

“Poor Zara’s wedding!” exclaimed a laundress.

“Wedding dresses are exempt, Bertha Mae.” To the next cafeteria worker: “One egg will do me fine, thanks. Oh I don’t mind if it’s sunny side. Whatever you have that no one else is eating.”

“Our uniforms aren’t in compliance!” said her guest history manager.

June tried to reassure them that the WPB wasn’t interested in existing uniforms or home-sewn clothes, which was what most of them were wearing anyway, but she could tell that soothing wasn’t what they wanted. They wanted to tug this rope back and forth until both ends were frayed. Energy was slowly building in the mountains. War fever.

June said, “There’s no law against mending, Luellen, only making.”

“I thought you said meddling,” said Luellen.

“You’d better hope there’s no law against that, either,” June said, “or they’d come for you tonight.”

Remember there’s a war on! Wretchedly, the diplomats were already getting bored. At the Avallon, boredom, like many maladies, generally only afflicted the young and the weak. Everyone else battled it with a robust schedule full of physical and mental stimulation. Winnet and tennis, horseback riding and swimming, taking in the mountains, taking in the water. All these were forbidden to the diplomats. And even if they were not, the diplomats had not chosen the Avallon. They could not forget this truth. Border Patrol agents swarmed the grounds. Avoiding the word detainees didn’t make the Avallon any less of a detention center.

A week into March, Angela Bickenbach said goodbye to Gerhard Bickenbach, the commercial attaché, on the Avallon’s front steps; her paperwork had finally been approved for her to take advantage of her American citizenship. When June had asked her how her husband felt about being repatriated to Germany without her, Angela had said, Obviously, he’s crushed, but she had sounded pleased. June had felt a little sorry for the future Angela Bickenbach. Present-day Angela was too overwhelmed by the intoxicating discovery that her husband still loved her enough to weep at losing her, combined with the lurching, chaotic joy of making a big, sweeping choice in a situation that had taken away most of them. Later, when her commercial attaché was in a different country and letters did not get delivered with reliability and news from the front sounded grim and the war dragged on over years and she began to dully realize she would never see Gerhard again, future Angela would perhaps wish that she’d lingered longer in the farewell.

Two other American wives were leaving that day with their children; June found these littles hard to watch. During their stay, the youngest members of the Japanese legation had been uncannily well-behaved, but on the front steps of the Avallon, these five mewled just as much as any American child might have. Even if the children had received a fairy-tale version of that day’s events, they could still see their luggage was leaving the Avallon and their fathers were not.

One of the Japanese husbands, dry-eyed but gray-faced, formally shook the hand of his weeping son.

“I never thought I’d be feeling sympathy for the Nazis and the Japs,” Griff said, “but this is a pretty rough deal.”

The windows of the hotel, including the one in room 411, were dark with watchers. In the closest faces, June saw both empathy and envy. How terrible to divide a family, they thought. How wonderful to fly the coop, they thought.

These weren’t lessons June wanted the sweetwater to learn.

After the American wives had departed, June begged the Swiss legation to find out if there were any new activities the Germans and Japanese were allowing the American diplomats to do (praying that “visiting hot springs” was not the answer). To her relief, she received a useful reply a few days later: they were allowing the Americans to read Approved Printed Material. One newspaper. Selected novels.

Yes! Novels! Stories! If Gilfoyle had lingered, he might have already suggested it; as a boy, he had always had a book on his person. When they played games on the back lawn, he stood like a flamingo, one foot on the ground, one leg crooked into a triangle, foot braced against his own knee, a book in his hand. After he and June had kissed their lips red and raw, he lay hidden away with her on his chest, a book in one hand while he absently stroked her hair with the other. He read the dullest possible texts, nonfiction and fiction alike groaning with naval encounters and military hardships and economic dalliances. Without these volumes, he became irritable and neurotic. He wouldn’t have lasted a day at the Avallon without them, much less a week or more.

What needed to be Approved about the Printed Materials? The Swiss conductor told June that it was less about what was Approved than what was Disapproved.

DISAPPROVED:

Information about American infrastructure

Themes of extreme nationalism

Narratives about rising up against captors

Narratives about running away into the mountains

Generalized espionage

June mobilized a unit of staff members to search the hotel for suitable texts. Although most of the Avallon’s catalogue was nonfiction—law, geography, geometry, dead politics governing dead men—it had a respectable collection of fiction left behind by guests who only had time for stories while they were in the suspended landscape of the Avallon. After only a few hours, her staff had assembled a pile of Approved Printed Materials.

They would not present the books in a pile, of course. No, this was an excuse to let the Avallon do what the Avallon did best. A literary event, complete with music and themed refreshments, was exactly what was needed.

The water had cheered her up in the ballroom. It was time to return the favor.

Pull out all the stops, June told her staff. Remind the diplomats they are at the Avallon Hotel & Spa.

Remind the water what happiness looks like.

• • •

“THIS IS FOR US?” asked Emmi Polk as she hesitated in the Tapestry Room’s doorway, tangled in an invisible social net. Frau Polk was one of the German nannies. Nanny was better than maid but was also worlds away from consular secretary. Unlike the legation maids who had been evicted from their nicer rooms, she was senior enough to keep her suite with its nice view, but still too lowly to be invited to the cocktail parties the German legation had been holding in Dr. Kirsch’s suite each night.

The nanny who had let Sandy Gilfoyle wander all the way to the Avallon IV all those years ago had been sacked without so much as her uniform stockings to her name; June sometimes wondered about her. At the time, the new attention from the Gilfoyle family had been all that odd young June could ponder, but older June wondered what circumstances had led to Sandy, an obedient and expensive child, getting away from his nanny. Sandy only barely remembered the day himself; there was no centralized head of nannies to ask. Unlike June, who had gained Toad as a guardian the moment she donned a maid uniform, the hotel’s nannies had neither direct managers nor advocates. All the autonomy and responsibility of the hotel physicians with none of the power.

What was her name?

June, there’s no way I will remember that after all this time.

She was watching your son when he nearly died. Who was watching her? What if that had been one of the guests’ children?

Mr. Francis had laughed, both amused and disbelieving. Are you trying to say it was my fault?

She was on the Avallon’s payroll, June had replied. It was.

When June became staff captain, she set her sights on orphan positions. Nannies, sign painters, gatekeepers. Before, there had been no one between them and Mr. Francis apart from staff captain, a position that oversaw hundreds of people. June’s reorganization meant gatekeepers reported to the front desk manager. Sign painters reported to advertising. Nannies reported to Toad. The head of housekeeping had protested bitterly, but June had replied, Who knows more about lost children than you?

These days, staff could only get into as much trouble as their status allowed. Sandy’s nanny would still have her job; Sandy would have never been lured to the Avallon IV; June would have never saved him; Mr. Francis would have never seen her; she would have never saved the Avallon during the Depression. Where would they both be now if not for that nameless nanny?

“This is for everyone,” June told Emmi Polk, the German nanny. “Have yourself a grand time.”

Emmi’s eyes moved over the room, awed. June could tell the bookish affair in the Tapestry Room still had a forbidden air. “It is so beautiful.”

It was so beautiful. The octagon-shaped Tapestry Room was tucked in an intersection of hotel wings. Each of its eight walls was covered with a historical tapestry. The club chairs were patched in ancient tapestries too damaged to make sense anymore. Persian rugs covered the floor. Hand-dyed silks twice as long as June were hung freely from the ceiling; they could also be knotted to decorative brass anchors positioned to make a view break. It was a sensual, unusual room only made possible by the fortuitous but rare combination of money and artist. It was just as groundbreaking and successful as when 411 had installed it, twenty years before.

June and some repurposed elevator operators handed out novel after novel as the diplomats murmured and laughed and mingled. Happiness radiated from them. This was the power of surprise; before their detainment at the hotel, this would have been just another party. Here, where they did not expect to be feted, it was the height of luxury. Amazing how combining the same ingredients in different proportions created an entirely new dish.

The Keys of the Kingdom, How Green Was My Valley, Mr. Skeffington. How long had it been since June had picked up a novel for herself? Thanks to her father’s insistence on five years of school, she was literate, unlike her mother, but it had been nearly two decades since she’d had time to read Madeline and Carrie’s cast-off titles during the slow winter months. For an idle few seconds, she thought about what it might be like, curling up in the Lily House’s sitting room, her novel lit by the golden light of the Tiffany lamp. Gilfoyle at the other end of the sofa with one of his terrible books, her feet in his lap. Could she imagine it? It was hard enough to conjure the Lily House as hers. The fictions were even more difficult: Gilfoyle pausing his frantic adult life long enough that his mail no longer had to chase him from city to city. June finding someone who could take on more of her duties. Not just someone who could, but someone who would. Impossible. It had taken Mr. Francis nearly forty years to find her, after all.

June had handed out probably twenty books when she came across one (Lamb in His Bosom, by Caroline Miller) that wasn’t quite square. Someone had inserted a flat paper airplane—folded from a piece of Burns Night poetry—between its pages. Beneath the typed poem (“The honest man, tho’ e’er sae poor, / Is king o’ men for a’ that”), a man’s cramped handwriting said: JH—This is how easy it is to pass communications in printed materials, which is why we have discouraged them. Meet me in the Smith Library.—TRM

She snapped the book shut. She had not so much as glimpsed the FBI agent that day, although it seemed their paths must have crossed in order for the note to find its way to her. How else could Agent Minnick have been certain that June, and not one of her other two helpers, would intercept this novel? How did he know she would find the note rather than simply hand the book to a diplomat? How did he know how long it would take her to find it?

And what did he want?

Before June could excuse herself, a piercing scream froze the room.

Aaaaaaaaaaaah

Before she could even identify the scream’s owner, there was another, identical to the first.

Aaaaaaaaaaaah

Then another.

Aaaaaaaaaaaah

They were evenly spaced. Machine perfect.

June heard someone say, softly, mysteriously, “Not again.”

Aaaaaaaaaaaah

The source: Hannelore, Sabine Wolfe’s observant daughter. The girl stood in the center of the partygoers, face blank, hands fisted, screaming. It was astonishing. An infant would scream; a toddler might throw a fit. To see an older girl such as Hannelore red-faced and apoplectic was to upend the natural order of the upper class. It called to mind the sort of charged words that were whispered rather than spoken, in order to prevent them from accidentally coming to pass: possession, hysteria.

June’s first thought was: Did the water turn without me knowing?

Sabine Wolfe addressed the room with the gentle regret of a hostess calling an event for bad weather. “I’m so sorry.”

She made no effort to rebuke Hannelore; it was clear she felt her daughter’s behavior was immutable. This had happened before. This would happen again. Apart from the girl’s age, this was nothing extraordinary. It was a good old-fashioned tantrum.

As the dachshunds cowered behind June’s legs, she was reminded of a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow:

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

June’s father, Doc, used to recite this to her mother as a way of talking about their odd daughter; June hadn’t realized it was a poem, not a song, until long after he was dead. She wasn’t sure her father even knew. He had been like that, always collecting phrases and habits from the families and farms they visited on his house calls. As a child, she had taken it for granted that his title, Doc, was a legal one, but as an adult, she was fairly certain he’d acquired his medical knowledge the same way he picked up anything else. Perhaps a year or two of study had formed the foundation, but otherwise, he just worked with what he had. Pluck and charm. Mr. Francis would have liked him, too.

Aaaaaaaaaaaah

Hannelore continued to scream.

“Do you mind if I try talking to her?” June asked.

She just had time to see Sabine’s contemptuous expression when they were joined by Friedrich Wolfe, Lothar Liebe, and Dr. Otto Kirsch. So far, every request from the German legation had come through one of them. When the Germans wanted to know if they could swim in the indoor pools (no), have access to more newspapers (the Americans could have one newspaper, so the Germans would have to be content with The New York Times), or have permission to use the Conservatory as a temporary schoolroom (of course, with the understanding that no additional text books could enter the hotel)—one of these three men was the one to ask. They had a commanding and comradely way about them. June recognized the shape between them; it was similar to the one between her and Griff and Toad Vance.

As the screaming continued, Friedrich lifted a hand, as if hailing a cab or drowning. All the Germans immediately took their leave, new books in hand. The tactful Japanese followed suit. The Italians, who had been waiting in the hall for the other Axis powers to leave before they could enjoy themselves, simply dispersed.

Lothar Liebe asked Sabine, “What was it this time?”

Sabine’s voice was low. “I explained she could only have one book.”

Dr. Kirsch set a small bag on a polished side table. “How are you doing, Sabine?”

Friedrich Wolfe took his wife by the shoulders and turned her around so that she was not facing Hannelore.

“It is a pity,” Dr. Kirsch said to June as he sorted through his bag, calmly and methodically, as if preparing to tune a piano or shoe a horse. “Hannelore is such a beautiful girl. So very smart. I have never seen a young woman as smart as her. She hears something once and she remembers it forever; she picks up knowledge like other children pick up pebbles. Of course you would never know if you did not see her writings, because she does not speak. It is a tragedy she was born this way. This is her curse; she will fight her entire life against it. Imagine if she did not have such a handicap on her incredible intellect.” He was drawing up a syringe. “I dream of a world where no one has to live like this. In the future, we will have found ways to put a stop to it.”

June was surprised first by his words and then by the presence of the syringe. It seemed like the political circumstance that called for federal agents to open everyone’s mail would also be a circumstance that disallowed syringes. She wondered if the Feds knew of its existence. Surely they must. All the diplomats’ sidearms currently languished in a safe in Gilfoyle’s office; it felt like a syringe was of the same class of object. But Dr. Kirsch made no effort to hide it as he went about his business, just as he had made no effort to hide his thoughts on how to put a stop to girls like Hannelore in the future.

She asked, “What is that?”

“This is a mild sedative,” the doctor said.

Sabine’s nails clawed into her wrist, but she did not turn around. Hannelore was going hoarse.

Principles warred mightily inside June. She was not there to parent her staff; she was not there to parent her guests. But drugging a child? Particularly a child like Hannelore, who had reminded June so strikingly of herself as she stared owlishly around the lobby on the first day—

The screaming faded.

Hannelore Wolfe hung in her father’s arms. Dr. Kirsch stepped back, shaking his head, tucking away the empty syringe. The new silence in the room felt scabbed and malevolent.

“You’re doing well, Sabine,” Lothar Liebe said. “We are all very impressed with you.”

“Thank you, Lothar,” she replied, barely audible.

“I will put her to bed,” Friedrich said.

They spoke so naturally of it, not minding June’s presence, assuming she saw no fault in the process. She felt complicit in the actions of these men. These guests. Friedrich Wolfe, cultural attaché to Nazi Germany. Dr. Kirsch, member of the Nazi Party. Lothar Liebe, Gestapo man. June was not supposed to know so much about who they were outside the hotel. America was at war? Her heart was at war.

That syringe.

With effort, June put all this away. It was not as easy as when she had swallowed her reservations before. She reminded herself that the Avallon was for everyone who came, not just those who deserved it. She reminded herself this was what it meant to be front of house. What it meant to be Hoss.

When she had been worried the staff wouldn’t be able to handle this assignment, she had forgotten to be worried for herself.

She asked, “Can I—is there anything I can do?”

Sabine’s voice was frosty. She said, “There is absolutely nothing you can do, Miss Hudson.”

Chapter Thirteen

Tucker waited for June Hudson in the Smith Library for the better part of an hour, watching the staff children in the garden below. Bundled up in coats, laps covered with paperwork, they were arrayed in an uneven pattern around the sundial at the heart of the garden. Every so often, they squinted up at the winter sun, expressions serious. Out at sea, the Civil Air Patrol scouted for increasingly deadly wolf packs of German U-boats. Here on land, the Office of Civilian Defense recruited private citizens—including children, it seemed—to identify aircraft silhouettes from the ground. A gray-uniformed woman knitted on a nearby bench, keeping an eye on them while their parents worked inside the Avallon. June Hudson had said that she was running a business, not a church, but only a church cared for each of its members so thoroughly.

He glanced at the door. No sign of June Hudson.

Earlier that day, he’d received a telegram from SOG. They were impressed, they said. His proposed solution for the translation delay was inventive, bold. Hoover had noticed, they said. Memos had been written, they said. The SOG telegram was not the same as a letter from Hoover himself, and it did not say Tucker’s efforts were enough to preserve his position, but it was positive enough that Tucker had had to take the letter out to the Bureau car and sit alone for a few minutes. Ever since he’d discovered that his position was in danger, he’d felt just like he did when he stepped into that humid stairwell in the Avallon. Drowning. For months, he’d been drowning.

But now he could finally get a breath. And now, with lungs full of air once more, he could see that he’d been draconian. He needed to make things right with June Hudson.

An hour and a half had passed; June Hudson had not appeared. Perhaps she had not gotten the note, perhaps she could not be summoned thusly, perhaps she could not be summoned thusly by him, who had dressed her down at their last two meetings. In the hall, chattering voices let him know that the book club party had ended. He gave it another five minutes, then another two, then another one, then he counted thirty seconds, and then he was out of excuses. Outside the window, the children had left.

Just as well, he thought. He was relieved and disappointed in equal measure.

In the bright, high-ceilinged seafoam tearoom with magnificent mountain views, Tucker sought out Sandy Gilfoyle and his sister, Stella, while the other patrons glanced up with curious discretion. Stella was having a loud, undirected conversation with one of the senior staff members, giggling like a little girl while the staffer smiled indulgently. Handsome Sandy sat in his wheelchair just as he had for weeks, no more animated than when he had first arrived.

“Good morning, Miss Gilfoyle,” Tucker said. “I need to take your brother’s wheelchair for examination. Protocol.”

“Which one are you? Is it Marty?” Stella asked. She smiled sloppily at him. This was what money had done to the Gilfoyle siblings; gave them the freedom to be soft, to be carefree, to be messy. They did not need to hustle or to charm. Or, in Stella’s case, to be penalized for being unable to learn how.

“Minnick. Agent Tucker Minnick, from the Bureau,” Tucker said. “I’ll just take the chair with your brother in it. Agent Calloway and I will inspect it and one of us will bring him back to you here.”

“Sandy-O, is that okay?” Stella asked the motionless young man. She stroked his hair. She did not question the logic in Tucker’s request. “I don’t think they mean anything by it, don’t feel bad.”

Sandy made no protest, so Tucker navigated him past Germans railing at the Swiss, room service waiters muttering in French, and Italians comparing their new books. Sandy Gilfoyle’s file noted that he spoke all these languages. With his pedigree and those skills, he could have gone into diplomacy himself, but every choice he’d made after university had taken him farther from the world hosted in his childhood home. But look at him now.

In the post office’s back room, Hugh Calloway was steaming open a letter while holding a black marker between his teeth. Because of the low ceiling, he looked like a lanky giant imprisoned by walls of boxes, crates, and bundles of letters.

“What’s cooking, Calloway?” Tucker asked.

Hugh selected a letter from the table and read: “‘The yellow fellows caused a big fuss the first day. The most important one, I think he is an ambassador, complained there was no rug beneath his table while he ate and that only cheap hotels had no rugs. They all hurried to get him one so he could feel properly pampered. He didn’t need a rug, he needed a bullet.’”

“So you’re having a good day, is what you’re saying.”

Hugh jerked his chin toward Sandy. “Did you find that wandering the halls?”

“Forlorn without a collar.” Tucker ran his fingers lightly beneath the counter, looked at the closed door to the hallway, and glanced up at the light fixture, thinking of his own microphones. He was not the only one capable of surveillance. “Don’t forget that we’re not the only ones in this hotel with eyes and ears everywhere. Best behavior always, yes?”

The other agent looked at him over his letter, eyebrows raised meaningfully, before selecting another. Instead of answering, he read, “‘Mother, I miss you but I will be sending money back soon. The Huns tip well.’”

Kneeling by the wheelchair, Tucker removed one of the hubcaps in order to insert a tightly rolled note from his pocket into the axle. He would have loved to have a recording device that would fit in along with it, but one didn’t always get what they loved. “Anything of interest?”

“These staff interviews are like bailing water with a sieve. They keep getting drafted. Nothing like spending an hour questioning a fellow up and down and left and right to find out if he’s got Nazi sympathies only to have him shipped out to shoot at them before you can type his ID badge.” Hugh selected another letter. “‘It makes me sick to give them sugar knowing you do not have any at home but Hoss says this is our way of helping.’”

“Have you seen the GM go by?”

“She’s giving the Nazis books, isn’t she? ‘These folks are worse than those damn Yankees every summer’—damn isn’t spelled out, though; it’s got a dash in it already.”

Tucker replaced the hubcap, making sure it bore no obvious sign of tampering. “Someone else doing your work for you.”

Hugh selected another letter. “‘Friend, I have never been so horny.’”

He and Tucker burst into laughter.

Sandy Gilfoyle sat motionless, staring past the boxes.

Hugh broke off. He started to say one thing, glanced at the light fixture, the closed door, and instead said, “He’s really something, ain’t he?”

“I better get him back to Stella.”

They were a powerful family, the Gilfoyles. The FBI dealt with mob cases, so Tucker was not unfamiliar with dynastic might, but the Gilfoyles’ power was subtle. Indirect. They were a family of whisperers and listeners, adjacent to thrones rather than sitting in them. Kings and presidents could be ousted, after all, but the Gilfoyles could always simply fade into the background for a little while, collecting the properties dropped by fallen champions. It wasn’t difficult to see their influence at the Avallon. As a young man, Francis had fallen in love with the ruined hotel, brought his family, brought his friends. He had done such a good job, in fact, that the Avallon lived even now that he didn’t. No thanks to the heir, Tucker thought. All thanks to June Hudson.

He still wanted to find her. To explain to her—well, not explain about the telegram, obviously he would not explain about the telegram—but to explain that he wanted things to be different between the hotel and the Bureau, between her and him. Hopefulness made this generosity clear to him. He heard the word Hoss one hundred times a day. He had dreamt of her the night before. She was standing in the place of the sweetwater font outside his door, as if one was the same as the other. Hair slicked back and tucked behind her ears. Hands in her pockets, casual, confident, permanent. He asked, Who are you really? She smiled her little, powerful smile, and said, with the exact same inflection, Who are you really?

On the second floor, in Toad Blankenship’s cluttered office, he didn’t find June Hudson, but he found her dachshunds. Two slick-coated, one wire-coated, all beady-eyed in the handsomest housekeeping office one might ever hope to see, with oak cabinets and a leather desk chair generously sized for Toad’s posterior. Inside, Toad herself was in the process of chewing out a junior, a redheaded young thing who did not yet look sorry enough for Toad’s satisfaction.

“Mrs. Vance,” he interrupted. “Those Miss Hudson’s dogs?”

The dogs blinked up at him, panting in a way that normally signaled either anxiety or the need to vomit. The junior getting her ass handed to her blinked at him, too, panting only a little less.

“Agent Minnick,” Toad replied, “you here to be a menace?”

“I am looking for the general manager.”

“She’s taking a private hour,” Toad said.

The junior maid found her voice to reply, with some satisfaction, “She’s probably crying over Sandy Gilfoyle.”

Toad let out a righteous, reptilian snort. “Does that gossip taste delicious to you, Martha? How would a slap taste? How about—”

Tucker cut this off. “What is her meaning?”

“Hoss took Sandy Gilfoyle’s return hard, as you can imagine.” Toad must have had a taste for gossip herself, because when she saw his blank face, she added immediately, “Oh, you don’t know everything, do you, G-man? She raised Sandy, and not just out of that hole in Avallon IV. She and Edgar played house with that boy.”

He didn’t care for the feeling inside himself. “Do the Gilfoyles generally entertain such close relationships with staff?”

“She wasn’t just staff. She was one of them. She went everywhere with them.”

“How did that make the rest of the staff feel?”

Toad produced a second chin and a frown to go with. “What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean. Were they jealous?”

She produced a third chin. “I can’t speak for anybody else, but I was glad to see Mr. Francis take notice of someone else who could handle the water. Only a fool’d be jealous of someone being trained up to go down into Avallon IV. And in any case, you’ve met her, haven’t you?”

He had.

“No one works harder than Hoss, and that was always true,” Toad said. “So what if they spent every day with her? Let them play house with her, too, for a while.”

“What changed?”

“Why, they grew up, Agent Minnick,” Toad said, clearly surprised he had to ask. “They grew up and moved away. She’s only one of them when she’s here at the Avallon. Not out there. You’ve heard her. But this brat here’s wrong. That ain’t what got Hoss cooking right now, though; it’s Jerry. Martha Hughes, come out into the hall with me, we’re gonna go polish the doorknobs with your smirk.”

“Mrs. Vance, wait,” Tucker said. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to her; he just felt the need to command her to stop, to listen, to prove that he had some sort of authority. She had once again managed to make him feel like a boy.

Toad, paused in the doorway, gave him a knowing look. “I don’t have time to solve your problems, Agent. You and I both got dogs we need to be kicking.”

Then she hauled Martha out by her upper arm.

After she had gone, Tucker went through all her drawers, mostly out of habit, slightly out of indignation. He found nothing out of the ordinary but an unsmoked cigar, a love letter with no names on it (I don’t think of Indiana at all when I’m with you), and, in the back of one of the drawers, a live snail with an odd, horizontally oriented shell. This final find, so unexpected that it raised goose bumps on his arms, made him shut the drawer quietly and leave the room at once.

• • •

THAT SNAIL, that snail. Tucker had seen its kind before. They had some funny name. The threetooth. Was that it? The Cheat threetooth? He might have been misremembering, but he remembered that flat, horizontal shell. It was a mountain dweller, a West Virginia native, and it liked the rivers, and it especially liked the sweetwater. It especially liked the sweetwater when the water turned. He had forgotten about that. They’d been everywhere, hadn’t they? After the water turned in his youth, they’d covered the ground so thickly you couldn’t walk for crushing them. The snails must have been already lurking underground or under leaves, but it was hard not to think they were made of the sweetwater itself, so quickly and thoroughly did they arrive. So many shells, the sort of thing children would delight to collect, except that there were no children after the water turned.

“Agent Minnick,” June Hudson said. “Toad said you were looking for me.”

She stood in front of the font by his room, eclipsing it from sight, both her posture and the hall lighting uncannily similar to his dream. All the things he’d thought to say to her now felt bald and foolish.

Instead, he heard himself saying, “Is there any water in this place that isn’t sweetwater?”

She considered him. “That’s right. The staff says you avoid it. Tucker Rye Minnick. Bottled drinks only. Do not serve water. Sleeps on right side of bed. Likes onions and garlic. Strawberry desserts. Light or no dinner. Displays tin can wrappers on mirror. No wedding ring.”

It was a thorough demonstration of authority. Some part of him felt this was a game that had been happening forever between the two of them, each party taking turns demonstrating to the other how they had gotten to this place in their life. No, although this hallway felt timeless and dream-ridden, the game had not been going on forever, because he could remember the first move. It had been hers, before she even knew her opponent. The first move was this: Tucker being directed endlessly around the main building by her gray-and-gold proxies, being forced to tunnel his way in through the staff entrance to get to her. He was still tunneling; she ran circles around him on this board.

June was pleased with herself. Pleased with his reaction. She said, “You’re not the only one with ears in these walls, Agent Minnick.”

“I don’t sleep on the right side of the bed,” he said.

“You sure of that?”

“I don’t sleep. The smell of the water keeps me awake.”

Her eyes found his coal tattoo. She did not say, But you’re from here. Instead, she said, “One of the staff cabins has a rainwater cistern, no sweetwater. They might let you drag a cot in there, if you asked them.” A pause. “Or you could just order them to let you stay there.”

Ah. Yes. Here. This was what he had meant to say; she’d brought him back to it. He said, “I want to apologize. My priorities as an agent are not always the same as my priorities as an individual.”

“Do you recognize my words coming out of your mouth?” she asked. “What was I trying to tell you about Ulcie Crites?”

He put his hand on his doorknob. He did not intend to retreat, but he wanted the implication that he might, if things got unproductive. Unprofessional. “I was apologizing. I’m still apologizing. I want things to be different between us . . . between the Bureau and the hotel.”

June considered this. She was wearing a button-down the texture of a forest mushroom, velvety and touchable, and it was open three buttons’ worth of skin. Her neck held a drippy gold necklace that disappeared inside her blouse. She was unthinkingly (or perhaps thinkingly; he was not certain she did anything by accident) lightly tapping one of her fingers against her breastbone. Finally, she said, “What does the Bureau know about Sabine Wolfe?”

Tucker was tempted to recite back exactly what the Bureau knew, just as she had recited facts about him. Sabine Wolfe: watercolor painter; mother of Hannelore; friends with Lothar Liebe, the Gestapo man, and Dr. Otto Kirsch, the physician who had written several opinion pieces in favor of the Nazi Party; wife of the cultural attaché who the FBI thought had taken far too many sightseeing trips during his time in Washington. But he just said, “She has unpleasant friends.”

“I just watched that doctor friend of hers drug her screaming child in the middle of my book club party,” June said. “Needle this long. Put the girl down like an elephant.”

“Is there a question in that statement?”

“I don’t know. I just know I didn’t like it.”

He said, “Would you like the Bureau to add the needle and the drug to the confiscated list?”

Her mouth tightened.

“It’s done,” he said. It felt good to grant her something so easily. He would make a new rule. Of course the diplomats could not have sedatives. They couldn’t even have two newspapers. “How is Agent Harris doing in your switchboard?”

“Toad says all her housekeeping girls will be fighting to be promoted into all the empty positions I’ll have there in nine months,” June said. “I say, if those girls want to have babies with his face, that’s their business.”

“Do you like shocking people, Miss Hudson?”

Her eyes glittered with amusement.

He wanted to give her something else then, something more valuable, something that proved that, although his priorities as an agent were not always the same as his priorities as an individual, they were not entirely divorced, and that she could expect to address either at will. He felt expansive and breathless; he realized he was shielding his eyes a little, as if from that Texas sunset.

He asked, “Can I ask the hotel a question? Someone has placed three calls from that sixth-floor cloakroom. The switchboard says each time they’ve called and then hung up without saying anything. Is this something your staff might do?”

“No. But I can find out who it was.”

All at once, he regretted asking. It all felt too real, too reckless; this was why he’d been a little relieved when she hadn’t appeared at the library. He could not trust himself to make good decisions. Not with this sweetwater running up and down every wall around him, slowly displacing the blood in his veins. He was wild on the sweetwater; Federal Agent Tucker Rye Minnick could not be wild.

He could not take it back, so he just said, “Don’t tip my hand, Miss Hudson. This is delicate business.”

She gave him a very knowing smile. “Welcome to hotel work.”

Chapter Fourteen

Over the past several weeks, Hannelore Wolfe had been exploring the Avallon as thoroughly as diplomatic rules would allow. So far, she had found one hundred and ninety-nine snails.

According to the talk the children had all received upon check-in, the Avallon was known for them. Long-ago craftsmen had celebrated these small creatures by carving, painting, and welding six hundred snails into the Avallon’s trim, walls, and railings, and now, these small idols were the subject of an ongoing scavenger hunt. Youthful guests were to report their cochlear finds to the front desk, where this information could be traded for lemon drops. At the current exchange rate, Hannelore could have traded in her snail location list for seven lemon drops (twenty-five snails = one lemon drop), but she had made a personal pact to wait until she had found all (six hundred snails = twenty-four lemon drops). Hannelore didn’t much like the taste of lemon. She did, however, like a job well done.

“We are going shopping,” Sabine said. “Put your fülltätigkeiten down.”

Hannelore blinked up from her lists. She had many of them. She had lists of snail locations. Musical instruments in the hotel. Animals that had come with the diplomats. English words she had heard but didn’t understand. Menu items she liked; children she did not. She kept this last list hidden behind the others, as it was titled very strongly (“HATE LIST”), and she was sure she would get in trouble if her mother spied it.

She did not want to go shopping. When they first arrived, she had gone once to look around the glittering, endless shopping arcade. She’d found clothing stores, pharmacies, toy stores, and even a post office for mailing all of it home, if they had been allowed to mail anything. It was too much. Hidden speakers barked music. High-traffic carpets reeked of perfumed soap. Shoppers cawed to one another. Children, nothing like Hannelore, romped around.

No. She did not want to go shopping.

“She is not bothering me,” Friedrich said. He was at the desk in the Wolfes’ suite, Citizen lying on his feet, his pen moving swiftly across stationery. Beside him was a glass of apple juice the staff had brought him, unasked, as well as a plate of biscuits. “She doesn’t have to go if she does not want to.”

“She does,” her mother said. “She is going to come with me and she is going to be very good. She can look for more snails on the way.”

Hannelore turned an imploring look upon her mother.

Sabine said, “We may not have another opportunity.”

Ah yes, the rumors of a possible exodus had managed to reach even Hannelore. Although she would have liked to swap suites because the mountain lion font on her room’s balcony frightened her, she was not otherwise excited to move again. She was better than she used to be, but a change of scenery always provoked her. Food tasted loud. Clothing sang at her skin. Perfumes screamed in living color. Voices braided during conversations, seeming to be in the wrong language no matter what was being said. Poor Behavior loomed inside her, waiting for an opportunity to explode out of her.

She would not explode. She would be good.

“Get your shoes,” Sabine said.

Hearing the steel in her mother’s voice, Hannelore climbed to her feet. She had to go into her room for her shoes, which meant she had to creep past the French doors to the balcony. Through them was a view of the gardens’ elaborate, deliberate shapes of boxwoods and holly, and beyond that, the mountains. And, of course, the mountain lion–headed font. Hannelore would have had to press her face right against the glass to catch a glimpse of it affixed to the hotel’s outside wall, which was exactly what she’d done the first night. In the gloom, she’d seen it move. On second thought, she could not remember if she had seen it move or just imagined how terrible it would have been if it had. Or how wonderful. Wonder, horror. Hannelore had a hard time telling feelings apart.

When Hannelore scurried back from her room, she heard Sabine telling Friedrich, “Please find out the truth while I am gone.”

There was a strangeness to her voice. Hannelore had noticed this happened sometimes with grown-ups. It was as if they were trying out the way someone else would say things, or as if their words got squished before they could get them out. At their posting in Brazil, she had created a list of times she had heard adults have strange voices, but it must have gotten lost because she had not seen it in DC.

“I will talk to Lothar,” Friedrich replied.

Shopping was every bit as dreadful as Hannelore had imagined. She had to count to keep herself good, especially when Frau Hof joined them, talking the entire time about the departure rumor. 579 seconds to purchase nylons (the store would only allow the women to purchase three pairs each). 411 seconds to buy nails (one box each, not including Hannelore). 550 seconds to find and buy rubber bands (“Get them while you can!” said this shop owner), 300 seconds to buy more soap than Hannelore could ever imagine needing, and an excruciating 1,111 seconds to purchase three pairs of shoes, with her mother and Frau Hof indecisively picking up one pair and then another, turning them over to examine the soles. Finally they spent 300 seconds purchasing a new winter coat for Hannelore, a fur-lined hat for Sabine, and a stole for Frau Hof.

The two women assessed their finds in the hallway. Hannelore could tell that her mother felt satisfied, a hunter with her skinned rabbits, exhausted but proud in her heels.

“Vitamin tablets!” exclaimed Sabine. “Wherever did you find those?”

Frau Hof replied, “I got the last one from the pharmacy counter.”

The two women broke off conversation to stare at a trio of Japanese women in the pavilion. The frisson of distaste between the trios was palpable even to Hannelore.

Frau Hof wrinkled her nose and said, in a very different tone, “Bis später, Frau Wolfe. Tell me if you hear anything about leaving.”

“Genau. Später.”

In the elevator, the operator asked which floor they were going to before obediently falling silent. The operator’s stillness was uncomfortable; it reminded Hannelore of the mountain lion–headed font. Hannelore distracted herself by drawing in the air with her finger, sketching a portrait of Citizen only she could see.

The operator’s head moved slightly. She seemed to want to say or ask something.

Sabine gently pressed Hannelore’s hand down. Then, as the door opened, she told the operator, “I appreciate your discretion,” and tipped her.

As mother and daughter were walking down the hall alone, Sabine asked, “What do you think about possibly staying in America, Hannelore?”

An easy question, an easy answer. Hannelore had liked her room in Washington, DC, and she already knew what the train journey would be like.

“What if you had to stay here alone for a while, and wait for our return?”

Hannelore turned a betrayed face to her mother.

Sabine said, “Germany has been at war for longer than America, Hannelore. It will not be as easy. There will be many conveniences we will have to do without once we get there. That is why I was buying those shoes.”

Hannelore stared at her mother’s feet. The shoes had not been in her size, or Hannelore’s, or her father’s.

Sabine seemed to guess her thinking. “But they had the best soles.”

Hannelore knew her mother wanted her to understand something without having to spell it out, but Hannelore didn’t want to understand. She lifted her hand to continue the drawing in the air. Her mother seized her wrist.

“Hannelore,” she hissed, “don’t. I’m trying to talk to you about something important.”

The physical contact was so unusual. It was as if both Hannelore and Sabine became different people through it. Sabine, someone who would grab someone; Hannelore, someone who would be touched. They both looked at Sabine’s hand on Hannelore’s skin. Slowly, Hannelore understood that this contact was because Hannelore had done a Poor Behavior without even realizing it. She was supposed to want to stay here in the hotel by herself. Other girls probably would have realized this. Hannelore, who could not tell horror and wonder apart, had mixed things up. With her free hand, she hit herself.

“No,” Sabine said. “Do not start that.”

The Poor Behavior demanded punishment, though, so, even as Sabine used Hannelore’s wrist to propel her toward their suite, Hannelore kept hitting the heel of her other hand against her temple. Each time she did, she groaned, “Ahh.” Her mother fumbled with her key at the door while trying to keep Hannelore from sinking to the ground.

“Not again,” her father said, from the other end of the hall. He strode quickly to the door and unlocked it for Sabine, then helped bundle Hannelore inside, all the way to her room. “What happened?”

Sabine just let out a helpless little sound.

Friedrich sounded angry as he caught the hand Hannelore was using to hit herself. “Stop this at once.”

“Friedrich, don’t, it’ll just—”

Hannelore’s ahhs became AHHs. Her body went rigid. Her father released her wrist, but she just sank to the ground and carried on hitting and squalling.

“You only made it worse,” Sabine said.

“And you are an expert? Curse that meddling general manager; I knew she would not understand. They took Otto’s barbiturates.”

“I hate when he uses them anyway.”

Friedrich leaned in close to Sabine. “Do not mistake me: I don’t like it, either. But Lothar is on his way here. Is this what you want him to see of her?”

Fear rippled from her mother; anger rippled from her father. Neither of her parents seemed to realize that Hannelore was doing this for them. Again and again, she hit the heel of her hand against her own temple, punishing herself for the Poor Behavior. When they didn’t acknowledge her, she got louder. She knew she was not supposed to draw in the air. She knew she was supposed to want to stay here in America by herself. She wanted them to know.

Miserably, she hit herself.

Her parents had drawn into the sitting room, where they spoke in low, urgent voices; Hannelore heard snatches of it.

Sabine said, “—we should do it my way.”

“Your way sees us blacklisted. Lothar says—being too skittish—”

“—the consequence for misplaced optimism—”

“Don’t hector me!”

“She is my daughter, too—”

“—Lothar has heard her sing; she is the only way they will get what they want.”

“And after they have gotten what they want?”

“Sabine, I don’t know. Stop asking me questions. I do not know. I do not know.”

Ich weiss es nicht.

Hannelore rolled onto her side. As she did, her cheek squelched on the mat in front of the balcony doors. She smelled the metallic scent of the hot springs. The mineral water coated her face. Calm coated her, too, as thorough a sensation as the surprising joy she’d experienced when she pressed her hand into the damp moss on the first day. Calm. And control. She was quite suddenly put in mind of that woman she’d seen the first day, June Hudson, the general manager who had vexed her father. It was as if she could not stop remembering how it had felt to see her. The way it had felt to think, A woman can look like that? I could look like that?

“Hannelore, are you done—oh, what is that?” Crouching, Sabine started to touch the doormat but recoiled. “Get up from there; Friedrich, I think the door is leaking or something has been spilled.”

But what if, Hannelore thought, no one had spilled anything? What if the mountain lion had poured words out of its mouth in a language that only she could understand? What if Hannelore was not meant to be terrified but delighted? Wonder, horror. One of the most difficult challenges about this world, Hannelore thought, was how tightly feelings were entwined. It was so difficult to choose the right one.

A gentle rapping sound made her mother freeze.

Her father opened the door.

“Lothar,” he said, “we were expecting you.”

Chapter Fifteen

Despite the diplomats, the staff remembered June’s birthday; in the morning, the dachshunds bounded right into a tray of baked goods and apple juice outside her door. As they backed away apologetically, one tentatively mincing through spilled juice, June said, “You’re all right, keep your shirt on now,” and used the cloth napkin to wipe the juice from the pads of their paws and a piece of Avallon stationery that said HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HOSS. The latter was embossed by her old friends from the print shop (after she’d saved Sandy, Mr. Francis had moved her there as a clerk) and signed by the staff—a handful simply marked with an X, since they had never been taught to write. The offering would be the first of many; June rarely paused for a proper birthday celebration, so her staff tucked innumerable little fairy gifts into nooks and crannies they hoped she’d come across throughout the course of the day.

“Happy birthday,” Basil Pemberton said, plummily, as she entered the bright lobby.

“Thank you, Mr. Pemberton.”

“I rescued some mail for you from the post office.”

Even before she saw the return address, she recognized Gilfoyle’s handwriting on the square envelope.

“Oh,” she said, “how old-fashioned of him.”

She didn’t know what she meant by that, only that she needed to say something offhanded so Basil Pemberton would not think this card was particularly especial to her. But she knew even as she did that it was farce, because Basil Pemberton had already known to “rescue” the envelope. The staff might not know what was between June and Gilfoyle any more than June did, but, like her, they knew it was something.

She blustered, “Just put it on my desk with the rest of the mail, would you? I won’t have time for any of that until later.”

Basil allowed her the dignity. “Of course.”

She had a thought she might reward herself with it at the day’s end; in her apartment, she would undress for bed and sit on her mattress with a little whiskey and whatever birthday sweet the kitchen would have found for her, because she knew they would, and then she would run her finger beneath the envelope flap and let his words cover her. A prize, a release—

—a wise decision, it turned out, because the day quickly filled with sour things. The first: a journalist who had blown up against the gatehouse like a bit of tumbleweed or trash. The hollow-cheeked fellow in a suit introduced himself as Mr. Forester from The New York Herald-Tribune and flapped a little notepad at her.

He said, “It could be about the hotel, really, more than the foreign nationals. For instance, here is an easy question to start: What do you think the war should be called? Are you in favor of any of these: War of World Freedom, Right Against Might, The People’s War, Franklin’s Folly, Rich Man’s War, Anti-dictator War, War of Liberty . . .”

None of the proposed names bore the artifice or hope of the last war’s: The War to End All Wars. So far, the moniker June had heard most people use—Second World War—seemed right. Dragging even the remote Avallon onto the global battleground.

“Mr. Forester,” June interrupted. “The only thing I can offer you is the official statement the govmint gave me. I ain’t gonna insult your smarts by assuming you don’t already have it.”

He twitched the notebook. “But, see, I already got some interviews in Constancy. One of your elevator operators is marrying one of the Japs. Shocking. And that swastika discovered in your chef’s quarters? Outrageous. The Pearl Harbor party held in your ballroom?”

She couldn’t be baited. Mr. Forester of The New York Herald-Tribune was just a mortal penning folklore about gods. Her guests didn’t care what the papers printed about their favorite vacation spot. They owned the papers.

The journalist added, “Not to mention what people are saying about Francis Gilfoyle.”

She’d underestimated him.

He’d known to leave this statement for last, for impact. He wanted her to ask, What are people saying about Francis Gilfoyle? Did she already know the answer, if she considered hard enough? Mr. Francis had taught her everything she knew about this hotel, nearly everything she knew about society, had raised her alongside his own children.

But she did not know the man he had been outside this hotel.

“The locals told me you inherited the hotel,” Mr. Forester said. A deliberate exaggeration, demanding refutation. When she said nothing, he asked, “Why did a man like him leave a part of the hotel to someone like you?”

Someone like you.

In the gatehouse, Stan Fairhope (sixty-five, white-haired, safe from the draft) clucked his tongue and averted his eyes, as if the journalist had sworn.

“Give me your hand, Mr. Forester.” June didn’t wait. She took it. She held it in both of hers. Earnestly, she said, “I think what’d be best is for the State Department and the FBI to come down for a complete background check. You understand, I can tell you do. You’re a patriot. This is a matter of national security. I’ve got a full house of G-men up there who could make sure you don’t have any anti-American sympathies, that this piece won’t endanger any American lives. I’m guessing there’ll be interviews. Of your family. Friends. They’ll need your photo, your mother’s name, your father’s name. They’ll need to see where you live. You wouldn’t object to a temporary wiretap, would you? Those Feds are right anxious about fascism. Communism. Mr. Fairhope, could you see if Special Agent Pennybacker is available? Mr. Forester, what’s your full name and place of birth? We can get started.”

The journalist removed his hand from hers. It had gone quite warm.

Stan Fairhope leaned from the gatehouse, a phone against his ear. “Front desk says they can get Special Agent Minnick down here in five, Hoss. He’s finishing his breakfast.”

Mr. Forester put his little notebook away. “I wouldn’t want to endanger the war effort.”

“No.”

“I can place a few calls to make sure this proposed piece really is good for America.”

“Of course.”

“I’ll probably return.”

“I’d be shocked if you didn’t. Would you like a ham biscuit for the road?”

He would not.

As Mr. Forester’s car departed, Stan hung up the phone without a word; calls that were never patched through required no goodbyes. She was worried he would say something about Mr. Francis, but instead, Stan retrieved another fairy gift: a corsage. He gestured as if to pin it in her buttonhole himself before thinking better of it and merely passing it over. As she smelled the hothouse blossoms, he said, “Happy birthday, Hoss.”

• • •

THE NEXT SOUR THING happened just outside Toad’s office, when Ovid Persinger intercepted her. June already knew what Toad would give her, because it was the same each year: a kiss on the temple and a potent hug, squashed in Toad’s bosoms. In June’s memories, all these birthday hugs had become one hug, except for the first—June’s first birthday alone—when Toad had found June tearlessly gazing into the basement swimming pool.

“I hear you’re letting the press run roughshod over us.”

Ovid Persinger was slight but powerful, like a coal pony, soft-spoken but forceful, like a dying preacher. As the food controller, he tracked every purchase, issue, and food sale. No one ordered room service without him knowing how many eggs were beneath the lid; if an onion or a saltshaker left the storeroom, he wanted it itemized, dated, signed. Every curl of lettuce, can of peas, ounce of gelatin—his mind was constantly updating prices, adding, subtracting, multiplying these figures. Even now, standing before June, he was probably scheming. Did people leave portions of potato salad on their plates? Could the canned peaches be substituted? Could a leg be served instead of a breast? He was awful; he kept the hotel profitable. Both these facts were true, although he only knew one of them.

“Why don’t you tell me how your week is going, Mr. Persinger,” June said.

“My boy needs a new pair of shoes, but we used our stamp already, so he’s flapping until summer. The Nazis—not the ones in our dining room eating butter, the rest of them—are giving Cuba a hell of a time. Why aren’t we using margarine?”

She said, “Until margarine tastes like butter, upstairs gets butter; try margarine in the canteen and see how it goes. I think Mrs. Surbaugh can find your boy a pair of shoes. I can’t fix Cuba.”

“Give him a pair of shoes? This is why we bleed money!” Ovid was delighted to have caught June in unprofessional generosity. “Now, look here, see here. Jerry hates our menu and the Swiss say we have to kowtow. Fortéscue wrote a new one that’ll have us bankrupt by August and he won’t budge a carrot. I just came up here to find out if that’s what you wanted? Bankruptcy by August? Is that right?”

“I was hoping it would take less time than that.” Not a hint of a smile from Ovid. “Gut the menu, tell Chef I am behind you. I didn’t think you could be bullied.”

“Hold your britches, I wasn’t being bullied. Fortéscue made it sound as if this was your idea. I understand now it is just to pamper that pilot. Celebrity is very close to idolatry, Miss Hudson, but I would not expect a Frenchman to understand that. He says you needed a picnic for your birthday; I found room in the budget for that, too.”

Surprised, she said, “Thank you.”

“Don’t thank me, thank the child whose mouth you took a sandwich out of.”

Long ago, after an unpleasant exchange June hadn’t been present for, Mr. Francis had suggested firing Ovid.

Didn’t you tell me it was about what the hotel wanted, not what I want? she’d asked him. They could find someone more pleasant than Ovid, sure. They couldn’t find someone as good, though.

I think you’ve learned just about everything I can teach you, June.

With a sigh, June asked, “Ovid, do you think you’re like to be drafted?”

“Flat feet.” Of course. He added, “I hear tell Sebastian Hepp got marching orders.”

June stilled.

“From whom?”

“‘Whom!’ Forget what they say about the fourth floor, Mr. Francis lives in you. Mrs. Parton heard he got the telegram. Got a few months until induction, but won’t matter, the Nazis here used up the last of peacetime.”

She knew what he meant. Even after the diplomats departed, there would be ration cards and draft boards, women stepping into vacant positions and men with limps averting their eyes. Already the Burns Night ball belonged to another time. What was on the other side? Sebastian’s paper airplane traded for a gun. Erich von Limburg-Stirum saying that, in Germany, he’d be dropping bombs.

June forced herself to remember the letter from Gilfoyle. The envelope, she had noticed, still smelled like him, that spicy Dunhill. In only a few hours, she’d let herself open it.

“Now, Miss Hudson, the Lord saw fit to give you another birthday,” Ovid said. “I’d advise you to humbly meditate on those He didn’t grant the same clemency.”

• • •

THE FINAL SOUR THING happened at the picnic.

Pennybacker had requested a meeting, so he and the Swiss took June’s birthday picnic in the Avallon II. Inside, greenhouse flowers transformed the interior to summer glory; the feast was spread out beside the cold Soak. The Grotto had done itself proud: deviled ham and egg spread, garnished with radishes, with white toast, potage mongole with croutons, chef’s salad special, homemade Russian dressing, Golden Delicious Apple and alligator pear salad, horseradish and green pepper sandwiches on day-old Boston brown bread so they would hold their shape, and butter cake, with fig filling and seven-minute frosting. The last was June’s favorite. Good old Fortéscue.

“I thought there was a war on,” Pennybacker said, but happily. He was eighty percent immersed in the water, one hundred percent immersed in the experience. The grizzled Swiss conductor sat with his trousers rolled up and feet in the pool, frowning at the wiry Swiss harpsichordist, who was submerged in both the water and a jellied dessert. June sat cross-legged beside the Simmer, trailing her fingers in the water.

Pennybacker said, “It’s joke time, gentlemen. And lady. Here’s one I read yesterday: Hitler asks a fortune teller, ‘What day will I die?’ She says, ‘On a Jewish holiday.’ He says, ‘Are you sure?’ She says, ‘Very sure.’ He says—wait, I might be telling this wrong; no, I got it—Hitler says, ‘How can you be so sure I’ll die on a Jewish holiday?’ She says, ‘Any day you die will be a Jewish holiday!’”

A pause. June frowned. The harpsichordist laughed.

The conductor said, “I think it is in very poor taste.”

“That is where the humor lies,” the harpsichordist pressed. “In the shock.”

“I can think of many shocking events lacking humor,” the conductor said.

She could tell that they were fighting about something else; the joke was just a convenient vehicle. She said, “Don’t quarrel in my sweetwater.”

“Don’t tempt Miss Hudson’s demon water,” agreed Pennybacker. “Now, Miss Hudson, time for good news. I have my eye on a boat to put these diplomats on! Don’t get your hopes up. But it could all come together very, very quickly, if the negotiations don’t fall through.”

June’s hopes didn’t have enough information to go up. She asked, “What do these negotiations entail?”

“It’s a hostage mathematics, I’m afraid,” he replied. “For every American citizen we want back from Germany, we must give them a German citizen. For every American we want back from Japan, we must give them a Japanese citizen. The names on those lists are negotiable. If we do our jobs right—if I do my job right—the lists will be the same length at the end, and it’ll be only happy faces setting out of the Avallon. It has been a tricky business. Angela Bickenbach put a real hitch in my stride. Her staying here means an American has to stay in Germany.”

“That seems like a devil’s game.”

“It is a devil’s game, Miss Hudson,” Pennybacker said. “And I am forced to be a—what is the word?—a minor devil. What’s the word for that?”

“State Department agent,” said the conductor, and the men all had a convivial laugh at Pennybacker’s expense.

June supposed she needed to spend her evening looking at personnel. She needed to figure out how to run the hotel with far fewer men. Someone would have to be promoted to Sebastian Hepp’s position; she and Griff had not even begun to talk about solutions for the gutted valet department. It wouldn’t be as simple as training women for the front-of-house positions typically held by men, either. June would have to train the guests, too, to associate women besides herself with luxury. The journalist’s words rattled around in her head: Someone like you.

She took her fingers out of the water.

June asked, “Mr. Pennybacker, do you mind if I ask you a personal question?”

“For you, Miss Hudson, and these two fine gentlemen, I am a book with pages sprawled open.”

“You’re really sure?”

“Miss Hudson, please. Nothing is too intimate when I am among such good company.”

“How long ago did your wife leave you?” she asked Pennybacker.

His mouth tightened. The conductor busied himself with the food on his plate. The water chuckled beneath the harpsichordist’s elbows as he fidgeted. The dachshunds fought, made up.

“Who told you?”

“My demon water.”

The truth was that Pennybacker was a loyal sort of fellow; he had a steady job with a fine salary, and he wasn’t the worst thing to look at, so unless he preferred the company of men, he must have been married, even though he was not wearing a ring. But he was not agitating for leave time with his family, or accepting any of the staff’s flirtations, or receiving letters from a wife or lover. So the only choices were married to a dead wife or to an estranged one, and recent widowers slept around more.

Pennybacker admitted, “There was a younger fellow. Less soft around the thorax than I. He’s not in the picture anymore, though. She has gotten an apartment near her mother. Peoria. She’s a decisive woman. We were married in a month, wartime speed, without the war. I was lucky I was one of her choices, that’s what I always said.”

“There was something else besides this jasper, wasn’t there.”

Pennybacker looked different with his eyes closed, without his bedraggled bow tie. Older, more serious. A man who disguised a hard life by blanketing words upon words on every conversation. He said, “We lost a baby.”

The conductor said, “You never said. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Rudy,” said Pennybacker, voice tremulous, just at the end. The kindness of men! This world forged them with their armor on the inside, and if trauma tugged that skeleton free from their skin, they no longer had the structural integrity to stand. Now war would flay tens of thousands of men at a time, returning them to peace broken. She would not think about her father, Sandy, Sebastian. Not right next to the attentive sweetwater.

“Do you write to your wife?” June asked.

Pennybacker gladly returned to this safer heartbreak. “Every day. I am a typist of the heart. I write, I call, I leave messages with her roommate, who is an actual typist. Every day I send letters from here with all details of the mission redacted, but all the emotion intact. Don’t tell me I’m a cuckold and a fool, I’ve heard it all from my brothers and sister.”

“I was just going to say that silence is a powerful aphrodisiac, Mr. Pennybacker.”

“I’m not gifted in that department.”

“I can arrange to have my staff hold your calls and letters if you cannot hold them yourself. Let her miss you.”

“You haven’t even met her!”

It did not matter. June had seen ever so many husbands and wives and lovers and fiancés and fiancées break up, make up, propose, divorce, marry, schism, remarry, re-divorce, all assuming they were unique, never imagining that the wonder or dysfunction of their intended pairing might have been repeated elsewhere. June listened, watched, learned. No, she had not met Mrs. Pennybacker, but she suspected she knew the shape of her. A missing partner was like an unspoken word; it fit neatly against the spoken one.

“Don’t do that,” the conductor said sharply.

Sudden antagonism crackled between the two Swiss men.

“It is not funny,” the conductor said.

The harpsichordist replied, “I was not being funny.”

June took in the picture: the conductor, drawn back, as if stung. The harpsichordist, eyes alight with an intense, unnamed feeling.

“He splashed me.” The conductor tilted his plate to reveal water droplets glinting in the light. His sleeve was dotted with damp.

“I—I didn’t,” protested the harpsichordist. It was hard to disbelieve him. The conductor wasn’t the sort of man who encouraged foolishness, even if the harpsichordist was a foolish sort of man. “I wouldn’t.”

The conductor’s tone was brittle. “Who did, then?”

The idea that any of them might splash was ludicrous. And to splash and then deny it—childishness beyond imagining. Pennybacker and June watched, bemused, as the harpsichordist scrambled from the pool, not looking at the conductor, lightly touching his face and chest with his fingers, the uncertain gestures of a punished boy.

“I didn’t do it,” he insisted.

The pool rippled between the men. On the walls, bright hard shapes moved restlessly, reflections from the moving surface as the conductor pulled his legs free and went for a towel. After a moment, the harpsichordist followed.

The harpsichordist returned in a few minutes, fully dressed, clutching his bag to his chest. He said, “I am going back to the hotel.”

“Where’s Rudy?” Pennybacker asked. The conductor had already gone, though, somehow slipping away without any of them noticing. Uneasiness hovered somewhere inside June’s chest. She thought of the balcony rung clattering to the balcony floor. The rot at the end of the spindle had been the work of water, slow and inexorable, even if its flight had not. “I don’t know what got into him. This the work of your demon water, Miss Hudson?”

Even though she had just been thinking about it herself, she said, “The water don’t work that way.”

But after they had gone, she lowered her hand into the water once more and listened. Really listened. The water was just a bit warmer than she was. When she rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, it felt like nothing, like she had no skin at all. Her body and the pool and the spring beneath the rock and the stream that simmered under the mountains were the same. Out of nowhere, she was reminded of the first time she had seen Hannelore Wolfe as she pressed her hand onto the moss. June half imagined she could feel the girl’s clever, disordered mind swirling around her fingers—that, and Sabine Wolfe’s chilly unhappiness. June’s sweetwater was, in fact, a little sour.

Standing, she wiped her hand on her slacks.

So the diplomats might be out of here soon? Just as well. The water was starting to listen to them.

Happy birthday.

Part Three

INSIDE

ORDER, ROOM 411, 3/20/1942:

House Beautiful

Landscape Architecture Magazine

2 lemons

2 croissants

Waterman’s 100 Year Pen (do not substitute!)

Along These Streets, Struthers Burt

Wild Is the River, Louis Bromfield

Miss Hudson—

Will be coming back to see Sandy v soon. Beastly business. Nothing else to say that’s fit for the censors (hello, fellas!). Keep the old chin up.

—E. Gilfoyle

Chapter Sixteen

It was a full moon and a mountain town and June was dreaming about the two ways to sabotage a coal mine.

To fire a mine, one lit coal cars filled with oil-soaked timber, then pushed them down the shaft into the belly of the beast. If one was lucky, or calculated, or both, the cars would bite down onto a coal seam. Such a fire wouldn’t cease until it had eaten the whole thing, even if it took years to swallow it.

To flood a mine, one had to shove explosives into a rucksack or strap them to one’s body, and creep down the shaft to the tunnel closest to a lake or pond. Hell, even a stream would do—didn’t have to be a lot of water, just water that wouldn’t quit. It was important to place the explosives so they would blow the rock holding the water at bay. Important, then, to begin to pray. The shorter the fuse, the longer the prayer. If the sudden gust of warm wind from the outside world didn’t blow out your lantern and leave you lost in the darkness, if the falling rock didn’t hit you, if the freed gases didn’t suffocate you, then the water would come for you, filling up every shaft, chasing you to the ladder, to the cage, roaring, rising, the sweetwater stinking like blood already, filling your mouth, blinding you—

June awoke, choking, coughing.

She had scrabbled to sitting before she had even properly realized she had. Her heartbeat was caterwauling in her ears. The room was dark but she saw sparks in the corner of her vision.

Breathe, breathe, breathe.

With effort, she took several long breaths, in and out, for the moment ignoring the dachshunds prodding at her. Slowly the sparkles went out of the darkness, and her eyes adjusted instead. The distant floodlights from the guard towers picked out the furniture in her room. She was awake.

June touched her face. It was soaked. Her cheeks, forehead, throat. Twisting, she touched her pillow, her sheets. Lifting her fingers to her nose, she smelled them. Sweat or sweetwater, she could not tell the difference anymore. She pressed a hand flat against her stomach, ruching her jamarette top, recalling Gilfoyle’s hand doing the same, skimming sweat from her ribs, flank, hip. She closed her eyes again, but she wasn’t tired.

That letter.

Miss Hudson, keep the old chin up, Gilfoyle.

June was a little angry at how confused she felt by—well, by all of it. By the letter from Gilfoyle, Sandy in a wheelchair, Hannelore Wolfe, the diplomats leaving, Agent Minnick’s coal tattoo, what people were saying about Mr. Francis. What were they saying about Mr. Francis? Was this because he knew Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, both of whom had met Hitler personally? Mr. Francis had once said something about President Hindenburg, the man who had appointed Hitler chancellor—she did not remember exactly what, only that she hadn’t liked it at the time. Something about Poland. The Jewish tradition. So on. So forth. She remembered it well enough that when Pearl Harbor happened, a small part of her had been relieved that Mr. Francis had not lived to see it, so that her love of him would not be ruined.

Perhaps she did know what they were saying about Mr. Francis.

She knew, after all, that Sandy had put an ocean of duty between himself and his father’s principles.

With effort, she recalled her Mr. Francis. Sandy hadn’t gotten this version of his father; he’d refused everything to do with it. This Mr. Francis stood with her at the edge of the Magnolia Dining Room, which sparkled with clever ripostes and jingling silverware.

Mr. Francis: It is your job to know these people better than they know themselves.

June: I don’t know the first thing about what these jaspers do outside this hotel.

Him: What they do outside this hotel is only a sheet covering the furniture. Anyone can see the sheet covering the furniture. You need to know what’s underneath, what their life is covering up. Do you know why I’m training you to do this job?

Her: Because I can hear the water.

Him: Because you’ve always cared more about what’s under the sheet. Most people don’t even know themselves why they do what they do.

Gilfoyle was one of these people, she thought. He didn’t know that he always ran away from conflict, like a gentle stream taking the easiest path around rocks. Every time he found himself on the other side of the state from an argument, he seemed surprised. Every failed relationship—all of them his doing—was nonetheless a shock.

Just tell him, she thought.

Just say: I want you.

Just ask: Do you want me?

But she knew she wouldn’t. Because she could not see the furniture beneath the sheet, she could not bring herself to tug the fabric away to find out for sure.

I think the world of you, June.

She let herself understand that she was angry at him. In the dream, the water had burst through the tunnel walls, pushing out every lungful of air, destroying the mine and everyone in it forever. Millions of pounds of crushing force finally set loose.

That was how she felt.

Keep the old chin up! That was something she’d tell Sebastian or Paul if they dropped a tray during service. All day she’d anticipated Gilfoyle’s letter, not knowing that every single gift and word she would receive all day long before opening it would be superior. Her room was full of little flowers and darned socks and cards with humorous or touching memories written in them by people who wrote far more slowly and had much less to their name than Edgar Gilfoyle. It was the overboots; they’d fooled her.

Maybe she was done waiting for him.

She could not lie in this bed any longer. She got up and checked the stairwell to see if her staff had already left the previous day’s updated guest ledgers. They had, so June stood there, halfway in, halfway out of the doorway, paging through them idly, reading about this diplomat’s dining preference and this secretary’s favorite card game, until one entry startled her enough that she dropped the book with a fluttery thud. As she picked it up, laughing a little at her foolishness and at the curious turn of events, a voice sounded from above.

“Oh, Hoss, you are awake.”

“Floréal? That you?”

Floréal, her swing chef (thirties, spry, single, likely to be drafted with the next round), appeared on the top stair. Tactfully averting his eyes from her pajamas, he asked, “Do you have your shoes on?”

• • •

IT WAS THREE O’CLOCK in the morning as Tucker stepped into the Avallon’s valet garage.

“Get the lights off outside the building,” he said. “We don’t need everyone to know our business.”

A handful of Border Patrol agents shared a single cigarette in the doorway, the red glow at the end flaring into being and then disappearing as it moved from person to person. Agent Pennybacker (PennyBAAAAAAACK!) was crouched in the cobblestone aisle, trying unsuccessfully to win the affections of the wiry dachshund. It was a peculiar garage. It had been a stable, and it still had both the stall dividers and the vital atmosphere of one; the horses had simply been swapped for Cadillacs. But it must have seemed slightly strange as a stable, too, because every inch was painted and carved with imagery of mountains, rivers, snails, and a repeating tendril motif that looked sometimes like roots, sometimes like branches, and sometimes like elongated horned figures. It looked like the sweetwater smelled.

In the closest stall, three people in muddy maids’ uniforms sat sullenly against the intricately painted stall divider.

And leaning against a support beam was GM June Hudson, hands in the pockets of a stylish overcoat, dark hair barely slicked back, observing Tucker with that knowing, pleasant smile that seemed her most regular wardrobe item.

“I should have been notified before anyone else,” Tucker told the Border Patrol guards.

“We sent for you and Agent Pennybacker at the same time,” said one of them, a man with upper arms so comically large he seemed burst from the comic strip Thimble Theatre. Tucker could tell he’d been drinking; they’d all been drinking. It was this guard’s turn at the cigarette, and he took a puff, smiling with the twin pleasures of the smoke and the absurdity. He followed Tucker’s gaze to June Hudson. “That’s the GM.”

“I know who Miss Hudson is,” Tucker told him. He was annoyed by them; they had only one job, and carousing wasn’t it. “Why was she notified?”

The guard sucked on the cigarette, passed it to the next. “She wasn’t.”

Tucker took the cigarette, dropped it, stepped on it. “Go tell Agent Calloway to get me the names of every staff member currently on duty. Can you do that? You can all go together, since you’re sharing a brain and a nut amongst you. Then get back to the perimeter. I catch you drinking on the job again, I’ll have you tossed out of this place faster than they can print your draft card. You hear me? Say yessir.”

“Yessir,” said Thimble Theatre.

“Get out of here.”

“Agent Minnick,” said Pennybacker, climbing to his feet. His hair stuck up in all directions, in need of a mother to tamp it down. “You served it cold to those men. They ran right out. Yessir! Off they scuttle to do their jobs. Top shelf.”

Tucker waved this off. “Have you questioned them?”

“I just got here. What do you think of this stable?” Pennybacker was obviously delighted. “Miss Hudson told me there was another quite similar to it on an island in the North Sea; the architect did some of the carvings for this heap over there and had them shipped, if you can believe it! He commissioned these paintings after going on a journey into the mountains here to spark his imagination. Wonderful! She said he also wrote some poetry on the blueprints but, sadly, she said it was no good. There really is nothing more valuable than a great poet and more useless than a bad one.”

“The Bureau has less interest in the stable than the people in it,” Tucker said. “So if you’ll excuse me.”

“Excused!” Pennybacker said merrily. “We like to see a man at work.”

Tucker faced the would-be escapees. Two men, one woman, all three dressed in Avallon maid uniforms. None of them had gone to the trouble of pulling on hose, which was just as well. The men were extremely hairy.

“Names,” he ordered. “If it helps, it’s a rhetorical question; I already know who you are.”

“Archie Boyle.”

“Géza Breznay.”

“Lieselotte Berger.”

Newspaper men (and woman), the three of them, an Irishman, a Hungarian, a German, who’d each earned a spot on the State Department’s detention list by writing propaganda for the German war effort.

Tucker gestured to the bramble-tangled uniforms. “Tell me, in your own words, what I’m looking at.”

“A fire on a distant hill,” said the Irishman. “You smell the smoke, but you can’t know what is burning; you were too far away when it all began and now it all looks the same against the sky.”

Tersely, Tucker said, “I have had three hours of sleep.”

Breznay, the Hungarian, interjected, “What is our crime? Being members of the free press. Our sentence? This prison.”

Tucker said, “It’s my understanding that twenty presidents have stayed here.”

“A prison’s not defined by the beauty of the gates,” the Irishman said.

Tucker waved this away. He turned to Lieselotte Berger. Her wrists weren’t bound, but she turned her hands palm up, heels pressed to each other, in a supplication that nonetheless gave the impression of captivity. Her otherwise unremarkable face was marked by two silver scars, one on either cheek, so identical that they must have been intentional.

He asked, “Who gave you those?”

She said simply, “Please don’t send me back to Germany.”

This set the Irishman off into a diatribe: they would all be killed by the Germans, who had blackmailed them into writing propaganda but knew they were not faithful to the Nazi regime. He started in on the various ways they could be murdered, until eventually Tucker said, “Mr. Boyle, please refrain from hyperbole.”

“I see why they bring in the FBI to do interrogation,” Pennybacker whispered to June Hudson, loud enough that Tucker shot him a look. Pennybacker pressed apologetic fingers to his lips, but spoke through them, “As you were, Agent Minnick.”

Tucker extracted the tale of that evening’s adventure: three journalists, frenzied to action by the looming repatriation, dressed in stolen maids’ uniforms, snuck into the darkness. At the scream of a mountain lion they realized they would not survive the mountains, detoured toward the road, were intercepted by the Border Patrol. A scuffle, a knife, no injuries. The mountain lion was still hungry, presumably.

“Go back to your rooms,” Tucker told the journalists. “You’re paying the Avallon for those uniforms. You now have an eight p.m. curfew. You don’t have to name any staff members who helped you, but if you don’t, I will put a letter in your files that means that, even if you do make your way back to America when this war is over, your life here will be dogged by federal agents. Is that clear? I don’t want any one of you getting me out of bed again. Now get the hell out of here while I have a word with Agent Pennybacker.”

Pennybacker mouthed some astonished word at June—wow or smokes or yowie—and then, after the three journalists had gone out into the cold, Tucker asked, “What’s the status of the negotiations?”

“They’ve been Bickenbached,” Pennybacker said. “Failing. Listless on its cot. Angela Bickenbach continues to be a thorn in my side. Bad numbers, bad faith. It has fallen apart entirely.”

June’s eyes flashed, but Tucker, who’d worked in a government agency for a decade, wasn’t surprised; he had never seen an affair wrapped up faster than it was meant to. These journalists had gotten themselves worked up for nothing; they could’ve taken a few more weeks to perfect their plan.

“And now, these journalists!” Pennybacker exclaimed. “I will either have to find another German to put on that boat in Lieselotte Berger’s place, or argue that she was most of the way through her citizenship process or some such nonsense, while also convincing the State Department they want her here in America, which I highly doubt they will.”

Tucker asked, “And the Irishman and the Hungarian?”

“Oh, we can just dump them over the edge of the boat off the coast of Portugal and they can swim the opposite direction from Germany,” Pennybacker said warmly. “It’s Berger who will be my problem. The Germans are always the problem. The entire thing will drag on; the last communication took nineteen days to get to my German equivalent, Herr Pennybacker, and I assume whatever he replies will take another nineteen. I hope the flowers are nice here in the spring.” There was a sob or a shout from outside and he said, “They’re singing my song. Thanks for the shakedown, Agent. Miss Hudson, don’t forget to ask me about Rudy and Rufey later. I think I have figured it out. Good night, goodbye.”

Tucker and June Hudson and the dachshunds were left in the stable alone.

He asked, “How likely is it that the journalists stole the maids’ uniforms during a dinner service?”

“Unlikely.”

“How likely is it that one of your staff members helped them?”

“Unlikely.”

“Those statements can’t both be true. Is it true 411 is still here?”

“Unless she got away in a maid’s uniform.”

The conversation was complicated by the weight of her attention, by the cleverness of her expression. Her voice was full of mountain twang; he wanted to put her words in his mouth. He was breathless; he stood on a porch and looked into the beautiful sunset of a dangerous landscape. She was toying with him, but she toyed with everyone. But she hadn’t been tucking her hair behind her ear and touching her neck when Pennybacker and the others were here; her cheeks had not been that flushed, had they? Surely he was not mistaken; she was regarding him as Tucker Minnick, man, in addition to Tucker Minnick, agent.

What would he do with this knowledge? Nothing. He was Bureau-minded as they came.

Without saying anything, June headed deeper into the building; he understood, with a pleasant buzz to his gut, that he was to follow. She turned on a light switch; two bulbs revealed a navy-blue Pierce-Arrow limousine. It was a fine-looking vehicle, perhaps ten years old, a little rough around the corners; there were some scratches in the paint and the rear cloth seats showed use. June set to work at once; in just a few minutes, all its doors and hatches and hood were open like a beetle drying in the sun.

She said, “Make yourself useful.”

Tucker did not make himself useful. He stood in the open door on the opposite side of the vehicle and watched her. She knelt to retrieve peppermint-soaked cotton balls from beneath the seats, sniffing them to see if they were still potent. On the back seat was a small wooden case; inside, a small, stained brush and jarred red liquid. Hot pepper sauce. Gingerly, she brushed the deterrent onto various bits and bobs beneath the hood. Her coat had come open, through accident or strategy; she did not hide away her ruched sleeping top.

He remarked, “How lucky the Gilfoyles are to have a general manager driving the mice away for them even at three a.m.”

June moved around the vehicle to paint the brake lines with the spicy fluid. “Oh, this is mine.”

“It’s what?”

“It was one of the house cars ’til five years ago. Once Pierce-Arrow went under, Mr. Francis reckoned it didn’t look good to have them as house cars. The other two were sold down the river; this one I got as a bonus for keeping the hotel afloat during the years all those men were jumping from windows. It’s meant for a chauffeur, of course. You see the front is leather, the back is cloth. The mice prefer the cloth, the little motherless bastards.”

This enormous car—it must have been nearly four thousand dollars new. What an odd and useless bonus for their general manager. A vehicle meant for two, master and servant. He asked, “Do you drive it?”

“I’d go hungry putting gasoline in it, and I could never get new tires for it now with rationing.”

“Sell it for a more practical vehicle?”

Snap went the case as she shut it and returned it to its place in the back seat. “They’d be right offended if I did that, and anyhow, where would I go?”

Tucker had been pressing a finger into the tires, judging their roadworthiness, and realized too late that she’d delivered the last question as a challenge, inviting him to reply with a suggestion. And then the moment had passed. Just as well. What did he think he would do with it? (He already knew what he would do with it—repeatedly reconsider its passing when he couldn’t sleep.) And then she said, “So all that boat business was just a rumor.”

“Seems that way.”

“I don’t want to think about how the diplomats will take the news. That’s a sunshine item, as Toad says; it’ll seem more doable in the sunshine,” June said. “Here’s a moonshine item for you, though: my staff—the ones you’re so quick to suspect of aiding the enemy—turned up an answer for your cloakroom caller. Don’t frown. You know what I mean. The sixth-floor cloakroom, the calls that never happened? It was in yesterday’s ledger notes. Maintenance saw someone go in there; switchboard reported another hang-up. Safe to assume the call was placed by the ghost haunting the room, don’t you think?”

“And the ghost was—?”

“Sabine Wolfe.”

Genteel Sabine, who thus far had only distinguished herself by calming the anxious Hungarians the first day, by having a tantrumming daughter, and by being married to a gregarious cultural attaché with unpleasant friends. But now she had an identity of her own: Sabine Wolfe, the woman who nearly placed calls from the sixth-floor cloakroom. The timing seemed important. When she’d placed the last call, everyone but Pennybacker had assumed departure was imminent. Why might she pick up the phone under those circumstances?

“Miss Hudson,” he said, carefully. “Bureau policy demands we observe subjects in place. Do not approach her.”

“Why would I approach her?”

He said, “You seem like the sort of child who ate bugs.”

“I was actually a very quiet child. More like Hannelore Wolfe.”

“I find that very hard to believe, Miss Hudson.”

“That’s because you’ve never met anyone like me before. And this Miss Hudson business is all over. Now that we’re stuck together for longer, it’s June.”

The thing between them, previously intangible, was acquiring mass. “Do not approach her, June.”

“I do my business, you do your business?”

“That’s right.”

June closed the hood of the car in a definitive sort of way. Then, suddenly, she grinned, and in the brilliance of that grin, Tucker felt every knot tying him to Bureau-minded loosen. She said, “I can’t promise that. Sometimes your business will be my business.”

Tucker quite suddenly had a very clear memory of his boyhood, getting underfoot as his father did the washing up. His father’s shoes, damp from wash water, made boot prints in the coal-dusted floorboards. Tucker did not remember anything important about his mother, but he remembered that during this memory, she was outside smoking a cigar his father had brought her. He still could not smell a cigar without remembering their porch with the six chairs jumbled on it, and someone else’s dog collapsed on the top step, so you had to step over him. Tucker remembered looking at the just-washed pot on the counter and realizing that it needed to be dried, and that, moreover, he could dry it. Such a small revelation, such a meaningless childhood revelation to remember out of an entire life, and yet he remembered pushing the stool close so he could reach. He remembered how his father had looked at him. Was this the first time Tucker had seen something that needed doing and done it, or was it just the first time he noticed what he was doing? Tucker’s father had said, “You’re the marrying kind, Tucker.” Only he hadn’t called him Tucker, because no one would’ve called him Tucker then.

Tucker told June, “Pensacola.”

“What’s that?”

“Pensacola. I know a man who owns holiday cottages there. The beach is white,” Tucker said. “That’s where you could drive an automobile, if you had a reasonable one.”

June pretended to write the word down in the air. Then she closed the two car doors on her side; he closed the two on his. She looked at her little watch (her fine wrist, her long hands) and snapped her fingers at the ever-present dachshunds, who had made a bed of a folded tarp. They sprang to attention.

Outside, in the strange, deceptive light of the Border Patrol’s floodlights, just as they started on their separate ways, he said, “Miss Hudson—June.”

She stopped. She had holes in her earlobes that he hadn’t noticed before; she must have been wearing earrings when they first met. She was looking at his coal tattoo like she wanted to touch it.

He said, “Call me Tucker.”

Chapter Seventeen

This was how June Hudson became Hoss:

It was an excellent spring day in the mountains, redbuds and dogwoods spattering clouds of pink and white through the forests. The lawns were densely green. The birds sang wedding songs. The Avallon grounds were newly alive with work that wasn’t possible as long as there was a danger of snow. Landscaping, exterior paint, roof repair. June, however, was trapped inside, hard at work in her current position in the direct mail department. Her desk was strewn with her gray-covered ledgers and Avallon stationery. She was meant to be simply addressing postcards and stuffing envelopes with brochures, but she couldn’t resist using the opportunity to remind some of the most influential guests what specific pleasures awaited them at the Avallon. Using notes from the ledgers, she composed letter after letter, tucking them in with the advertising materials.

She liked how the letters were written from the hotel’s point of view. We are looking forward to you. We remember what you like. We cannot wait to make your year memorable. June, on her own, was just a teen girl with a barely controlled mountain accent. June, in these letters, was the Avallon, teeming with vivid, lovely power. She commanded them to come; they obeyed.

She was working far above her nominal position; she suspected Mr. Francis meant her to. When he’d moved her from the print shop to direct mail, he’d said, merely, “Learn what you can.” She was unworried about failure; she was secure in her place with the Gilfoyles now. What was the worst that could happen? In the sitting room tartan chair in the family apartment, he’d give her a look over his glasses as she played a board game with Carrie and Edgar with one hand and drew a funny face on Sandy’s palm with the other, and he’d say, June, I heard you were overreaching again. She would say, Yes, and that would be the end of it.

It was not the Gilfoyles’ wealth that intoxicated June. It was their trust in her.

That spring day, the one when she became Hoss, she worked with the window open, not because it was warm enough for that, but because the idea that one day soon, it would be, was sufficient to crack it. That was how she noticed the change at once. One moment, the atmosphere was idyllic.

The next, everything stank of ramps.

Ramps were hard to explain to those from outside West Virginia. They were a wild, onion-like root found on hillsides, and pretty much every poor family in the state had subsisted on them at one time or another. They were not particularly palatable at first, but one got a taste for them, especially when there wasn’t much else. The problem with ramps, however, was that they began to make everything else smell like them, too. Those who ate ramps smelled like ramps. Clothing and bedsheets stored near ramps smelled like ramps. Hair, skin, breath, everything ramps. Garlic thought it was powerful until it had to do battle with ramps. It was a nostalgic odor, though. A proud odor. It was the smell of West Virginia. There was a recent fashion to inject perfume into newsletter inks, and June had heard a story of a printer who had once had the bright idea to invest the newsletter’s words with the smell of ramps for their West Virginia readers. Postal workers collapsed in back rooms and went on strike rather than load the offending documents into their delivery vehicles. Ramps was a smell that always won.

That day at the Avallon, the smell originated from but was not contained to the swimming pools. The drinking water tasted of it; the air smelled of it; every font on every floor burped ramps. June made her way from the direct mail department to the lobby, where she stood, surrounded by the scent of her pre-Avallon childhood, and watched porters flee with handkerchiefs over their noses.

For the guests, the stench was merely horrible. For the staff, it was fearful.

They knew the water was turning.

And where was Francis Gilfoyle? In New York, picking up Edgar from boarding school at the term’s end. Phones did not reach him and, in any case, what would a conversation do? His staff didn’t need to know what to do; they needed Mr. Gilfoyle to do it.

June took control. No one else had.

She called for the portable dance floor to be fetched from storage, for the Grotto to assemble a picnic, for the landscape men to set a bonfire by the Winnet fields to drive away the last of the spring chill. The porters would sing a rousing tune in the hallways to lure guests from their rooms, out the door, to where the orchestra was already serenading the picnic blankets. With the guests taken care of, the pools would be doused with salt and chlorine, the hotel windows thrown open, the fireplace flues set to gaping, the snails collected from the walls of the pool room.

June told Sam Redford, the now long-retired staff captain, that he ought to gather all the staff members who had just gotten engaged.

He didn’t ask why. In a room of uncertainty, confidence wins.

As the guests enjoyed a spontaneous dance festival on the Avallon’s Winnet fields, the newly engaged staff members plucked all the pennies out of the ballroom fountain. For the better part of an hour, the happy young women plunged their arms into the sweetwater, investing it with their joy, giving it what they wanted to get back. Reciprocity.

After that, June told Griff Clemons, then head valet, that she’d be in the Avallon IV, and that she didn’t want anyone to disturb her.

Less than an hour later, the air cleared.

June had emerged from the oldest of the bathhouses, a little wobbly on her feet.

The head of housekeeping had hurried to steady her on one side. The head valet had come for the other.

Griff said, Nicely done, Hoss.

• • •

“WHAT IS THIS game exactly?” Johnny Hosokawa asked.

“Winnet,” June replied. “It’s only played here.”

It was a beautiful day, unseasonably warm, a tantalizing promise of a beautiful spring, right around the corner. Ladybugs had suddenly multiplied in every window, and even outside, the bright, cheerful bugs kept alighting on shoulders and in hair. Erich von Limburg-Stirum and Johnny Hosokawa had the intent bearing of midwives as June threw open the doors of the white-clad, copper-roofed storage building colloquially known as the Winnet Cabinet. She found what she was looking for, a long, stiff cardboard case with reinforced corners. On the side of it was written in stark letters: HUDSON.

“That’s you,” said Erich.

“That’s me.”

Ordinarily June would not have employed guests to transport Winnet cases, but the Avallon was finding itself even more short-staffed—in a single week, half her porters and most of her landscapers had left for induction—and also, Erich von Limburg-Stirum and Johnny Hosokawa were not exactly like guests. Erich was of course the popular and lovelorn pilot, and Johnny was a bright, hectic young man born in Japan but raised in the United States. Outside of the hotel, he had been a Washington staff correspondent for the Dōmei News Agency, which had recently turned its journalistic priorities toward Japanese nationalistic propaganda.

“I have always wanted to write,” Johnny had told her a few days before, “and I have always been Japanese. I can’t change either. What does a singer do when she is in a convent? She sings about God. I wrote what they wanted me to write about Japan.”

Robert Prager, the lynched German Sandy had been obsessed with, had told his tormentors that he was German only by “an accident” of birth. Johnny was Japanese by accident of birth. June was American by accident of birth. On the right side of the war by accident, the side of—as Sandy had said—using collective power for something good. Sandy had made his accident on purpose by joining the navy. What was June doing with her American accident?

“Are you good at this game?” Erich asked. His tone was competitive.

June grinned at him. “You boys are lucky I ain’t playing.”

She flipped open the case’s lid. Inside were the supplies to play Winnet. The spell resembled a shoehorn, covered tightly with coarse but handsome leather. The billies—of the same family as golf clubs or croquet mallets—had intricately carved handles. One even had a bird head that matched one of the sweetwater fonts in the hotel. And the winnets! They were beautiful, polished wooden eggs of every color. The newest of them were a single, pure color. The oldest of them were patchwork jewels of uneven sizes, their wounds repaired, painted, lacquered anew. Erich and Johnny both wanted to hold these in their hands, so she let them as she retrieved a few more cases from the cabinet.

The two young men had taken to each other at once, forming an unlikely friend group that included June’s waiters Sebastian Hepp and Paul Eidenmüller. June had a sense that such a thing was dangerous—what would happen after the diplomats were gone, when Erich and Johnny had been replaced with the Morgans and the Delafields?—but she didn’t have the heart to break it up. Sebastian had only a few more weeks of his boyhood.

“Bring all of them?” Johnny asked, lifting one of the cardboard cases.

“Bring all of them,” June replied.

Things had been different since the night the journalists attempted escape. The rumor of an early departure had ruined the diplomats. In their minds, they’d already packed their bags, taken the train to New York, boarded a ship, survived the U-boats, landed in Portugal, waited for another train, and then, in their ultimate destinations, prepared to survive the rest of the war. Now the slightest issue at the Avallon vexed them. The beds were uncomfortable, the elevators too slow. The Italians were too loud; the Germans too scathing; the Japanese too contemptuous. At the Greenbrier, the Japanese had thrown such a fit about the Germans that the State Department had to move the Greenbrier’s Japanese legations to an entirely different hotel in the Carolinas. June’s diplomats had not yet reached this level of disorder, but she could taste its sourness in her two glasses of sweetwater in the morning and two glasses at night.

That night had changed her, too. The journalists were desperate. Lieselotte Berger had intentional scars on her face. Sabine Wolfe was picking up a phone and setting it back down without saying a word. Who else in her hotel was afraid?

June either had to balance the souring water, or balance her souring guests, and she didn’t want to go into the Avallon IV.

Chattering all the while, Erich and Johnny joined the other gathered diplomats on the spring-lush Winnet fields, which rolled as far as the eye could see among old-growth trees. Based on an archaic game that had long ago lost to golf in popularity, Winnet existed nowhere else in the world. That the game could not be practiced elsewhere due to the need for such vast courses only added to its appeal; some guests came to the Avallon each summer because they could not otherwise improve their game. How many times had June walked out onto these fields? The Gilfoyles, like everyone else at the Avallon, were Winnet-mad. Endless afternoons, never-ending matches. At night, they all dreamt they were still swinging billies at winnets, still hearing the crack of the winnets against the scoreboards secured high on the trees.

“You playing, Agent Calloway?”

Hugh Calloway had detoured from his walk to investigate the event. He shielded his eyes with his hand. “Just looking, ma’am.”

She once more considered firing Ulcie. But that sour water in the morning, that sour water in the evening . . . She asked, “How is the post office treating you?”

“Just fine.”

June wanted to say, Ulcie’s out the door the moment this is over, but she knew it would be to make her feel better, not him. Instead, she said, “I hear you play a mean hand of poker.”

He gave a braying laugh. “That’s right, Tuck said you had ears all over this place. Speak of the devil—” Hugh lifted his hand to Tucker, who was a small figure in front of the hotel. He did not return the gesture; his eyes drilled into them both. “Cheerful as usual, I see. I got to get running. Enjoy your game, Miss Hudson.”

Since June’s actual Winnet instructor, an ex-cricketer named Thomas Hammerfield, had shipped out two weeks before, the diplomats had to make do with the most patient and presentable of her other staffers. Room service waiters, plumbers, plongeurs, maids, janitors, Luellen her guest history manager, and Zachariah Hatfield her chaplain—they were all out in the sun in their gray-and-gold uniforms gleefully teaching swings, placing spells, tossing winnets back and forth with diplomats from five countries. June felt a bittersweet pang. Front of house, back of house. The very best Winnet players had always been those who had access to the fields year-round. She took great pains to conceal this from the guests, who would not have liked to be bested by the help.

But for now, they just played Winnet.

Just as inside the hotel, the legations remained separated by nationality. The small Italian legation participated enthusiastically. The austere Japanese legation mostly watched from a safe distance, enjoying the sun on blankets and benches. Sebastian Hepp held court over the vast German legation, splitting it up by gender and age, performing his task with Olympic gravity. Sabine Wolfe stood at the edge of this group, watching them play. She wore a dark green hat with a half veil that made her red-gold hair positively luminous, and a silk blouse to match. She held her coat crumpled in her arms like a dead infant.

Do not approach her, Tucker had said, and she had wondered then why he would bother saying such a thing.

And yet here June’s feet went, taking her toward the cultural attaché’s wife. Perhaps it was because of how coldly she had told June that there was nothing she could do to help. Perhaps it was because of how she had not tried to punish Hannelore for her screaming. Perhaps because she had caught June’s notice that first day by being the only woman to have walked up the driveway with the men. Perhaps because of how Sabine had just now lowered herself onto an iron bench among the old-growth trees—as if her knees had given way in defeat. Or perhaps because she wanted to know: What were the words Sabine Wolfe was leaving unspoken?

Whatever it was, June sat down beside her and said, “I hear you are an artist.”

“How would you know that?” Despite being German, she spoke English with a classy Mayfair accent. This was a woman who, until war broke out, belonged securely in the world of the Gilfoyles.

“You mentioned it to one of my staff in the Tapestry Room. The Portrait Gallery has some good works if you haven’t been in to it.”

Sabine smiled small at her. It was gentle, but not genuine; she knew what June was doing. “I used to be very interested in nature figures. When I was younger, I studied birds and painted the different species in diagrams. In watercolor. Their movement and their behavior, what they ate. I created one page for each species, sometimes two, if the male and female were very different. Often two. Often they are very different in the ways they present themselves to the world. I discarded it when I met Friedrich, but I do still sometimes think, in my imagination, about how I would paint a bird. But you . . . you are an artist, too. The Avallon is your canvas.”

Sabine had seemed contemptuous the last time June had seen her, but this seemed genuine. It was possible Sabine, like June, was a piece of furniture covered with a sheet that gave very little away.

“The Avallon is a game that is different each day, that’s for sure,” June said. She hesitated; the crack of winnets and sound of voices filled the gap. “Mrs. Wolfe, the other day, you said there was nothing I could do to help. I’m not used to being told that in my own hotel.”

Sabine’s cheeks immediately colored. “Miss Hudson, I was distressed, I should not have—”

June waved this away. “Mrs. Wolfe, I had fits like Hannelore’s. I was a lot like her.”

Sabine’s brow knit.

It was a difficult journey to picture unless you’d taken it yourself. For many years, June had thought she was the woman she was despite who she’d been as a child. Now she knew she was the woman she was because of who she’d been as a child. Only a person who understood nothing about others had the patience to so thoroughly study them.

Eventually, Sabine said, “Surely your fits were not that severe.”

June only remembered the bystander reactions. Did she judge her mother for wordlessly leaving her in Constancy? It was ’18 or ’19, and in West Virginia, everyone was hungry, unless you were at the Avallon. Her father had retreated into a bullet. Her mother was alone, and June was not an adorable beggar. June would not be the only abandoned child of the time. Her mother would’ve been the same age as June now, wouldn’t she? But it was not fair to compare them. Her mother had had no one, and June had a family of hundreds.

June said, “Don’t you doubt it, my turns were right awful. But Hannelore’s a watcher, just like I was. I saw her that first day. Taking everything in. She just needs time.”

Sabine started to say something, then stopped. This was the thing about Mr. Francis’s gilded royalty and their gorgeous restraint. There were so many things they could never say. Impossible to know what she was really thinking, but for June, one image loomed large: that syringe, Hannelore’s chemical sleep.

June guessed, “You don’t think Hannelore has time.”

Sabine’s eyes gleamed and then cleared just as quickly; as swift as she was to tears, she was swifter to banish them. She tucked a loose thread beneath a button and said in a perfectly neutral tone, “The ambassador’s son, did you hear about him? He was recently given a mental diagnosis. He is sixteen? Seventeen. No, sixteen, certainly. I believe it is schizophrenia. He is in a facility here in America, getting treatment. When the ambassador is repatriated to Germany, his son is supposed to go with him, of course, but . . .” It took a moment for Sabine to develop a strategy for ending this sentence with diplomatic ease. “In Germany, schizophrenics are being euthanized. It is a program for those who are cognitively compromised. Its reach is . . . comprehensive.”

A little shiver danced across June’s skin, quite unbidden. The phrasing, clinical and dispassionate, made the statement more disturbing, not less.

Sabine continued to place her words with intention, careful as someone alphabetizing books. “The rumor is that the ambassador made a deal with the State Department for his son to remain in the United States when they go. I do not think it was easy. But I believe they have agreed to forget about the boy’s file.”

Her eyes flicked up to the rest of the German legation, where Lothar Liebe leaned on a billy, watching the two of them on the bench with his dark, silent-movie-star good looks.

Sabine made a show of smiling as if June had said something wonderful, and then she said, through that ghastly false smile, “The ambassador’s son was terrible just once before they made a diagnosis. A dreadful episode. But aren’t we all terrible just once? He is sixteen years old. When he found out what he had done . . . He is such a sensitive boy. When he was done crying, he agreed to whatever they thought best. He could have been convinced of a lobotomy, electric shock, a merciful death.”

Across the field, Sebastian crouched tenderly beside a frustrated child. For some reason, June’s mind put his face on the ambassador’s son. She did not want him to go to war. She did not want him to be trained to shoot Erich von Limburg-Stirum. She knew he didn’t, either, but he would go anyway, and he would do his best, out of principle. Like Sandy, he believed in the power of the collective. He wouldn’t be at the Avallon if he didn’t.

June asked, “Will they consider Hannelore ‘cognitively compromised’?”

Instead of answering, Sabine said, “Do you have any powder?”

June produced a compact from her pocket. Sabine used this to powder her nose and hide her dabbing a tear away.

June asked, “Does Hannelore know?”

Sabine shook her head a little.

Woman, mother, guest, enemy, superior, prisoner.

Sabine said, “My husband believes he can protect her in Germany. He wishes to believe he can protect her in Germany. She is our only daughter. But I . . .”

June gathered herself. Everything before this was going to feel small in comparison.

Tucker would be mad. Tucker could stuff it.

June said, “Is that what those phone calls were about?”

Sabine whispered, “You know Lothar is Gestapo now, of course.”

“Gestapo,” echoed June. The word sounded cruel, foreign, out of place.

“Secret police. Previously with the SD, our information-gathering agency. He watches everything we do. It is not just him, of course, it is . . . if . . .” Sabine gripped her elbows with her long fingers. “I wanted to call the State Department man to see if she could stay here. I kept losing my nerve. It is not done, to criticize Germany’s choices. Not for us. We represent Germany.”

June pictured her creeping up to the sixth-floor cloakroom, picking up the phone, listening to the hello girl on the other side, putting it down. A few calls right when she had gotten here. And then, once more, when she thought repatriation was near.

“Do you want me to speak to Mr. Pennybacker for you?” June asked.

Sabine nodded, just barely. “Discretion. I cannot emphasize that enough.”

“You can’t run a hotel any other way.”

Across the Winnet field, Lothar Liebe, a neutral smile on his face, gestured for Sabine to join him. The chill that ran up June’s spine was so thorough that she tried to imagine if his gesture itself had been sinister in any way, or if it was only in the context of what she had just heard. No, probably, if this had been an ordinary conversation, she would have thought Lothar Liebe was like Erich, a German citizen tugged into the Avallon by a too-zealous State Department.

Sabine waved lightly. In a tight voice, she asked, “What were we talking about? He will ask.”

“The menu,” June replied immediately. “What can be done about the Germans thinking our chef’s menu is not good enough.”

“Yes. Of course,” Sabine said, relieved.

June watched her stroll to Lothar, who took her arm and spoke into her ear. Both Germans turned in time to see Sebastian Hepp’s winnet carve a beautiful parabola that ended, with an excellent crack, on a scoreboard. Sebastian’s face was flushed with warmth and triumph. Erich von Limburg-Stirum shouted, “Gut gemacht!” Johnny Hosakawa called, “Stellar!” and even Luellen March from guest history shouted, simply, “Mr. Hepp!”

Lifting his billy above his head, Sebastian sang cheerfully:

Leb’ wohl denn, oh Hochland, sey Norden gegrüsst,

Wo Heimath der Ehre und Tapferkeit ist;

Wohin ich auch wandre, wo immer ich bin,

Es zieh zu den Hügeln des Hochlands’s mich hin.

Paul Eidenmüller broke off demonstrating for the Japanese to join him in the song, and so, then, did Erich, all of them amused with themselves, chanting like they were in a pub. After a few lines, June realized they were singing, in German, one of the Robert Burns songs from the ballroom. A moment later, the chamber orchestra recognized the tune and took over, transforming it for everyone else into the very recognizable “My Heart’s in the Highlands.” The sun glittered down on the spontaneous moment, perfect not because it had been elegantly designed but because it had not.

She was reminded of the very first moment she had seen the Avallon at the top of the hill. What a wonderful island, she’d thought, so far from the problems of the weary world. But she could no longer evoke that precise feeling. It was impossible to hear the orchestra crooning over laughter and not think about how, elsewhere in the world, the innocent were being sentenced to death.

She hadn’t moved an inch, and she missed it here already.

“Hoss—hey—”

June heard the unmistakable and mundane sounds of a fistfight. There was simply nothing like it, that combination of knuckles hitting meat and breath huffing between teeth and shoes tearing up ground and watches flinting against eyeglasses. When she saw the source, consternation turned to humiliation. Two of the Japanese diplomats, a Border Patrol agent, and one of her waiters (Chuck Curtis, mild scoliosis, safe from draft) were locked in an ugly, disordered fight.

When she took a step in that direction, she heard—and felt—a crunching sound beneath her feet. A snail. More than one, in fact. The ground was lousy with them, colors bright in the checkered sunlight through the branches. Had she missed them when she sat next to Sabine? She couldn’t have. Two of them, moving slowly with their peculiar horizontal shells, crawled on the armrest of the bench where Sabine had just sat.

The fight continued.

“No,” June called. When it didn’t carry far enough, she cupped her hands around her mouth and repeated, calmly, “No!”

Chuck stopped at once.

This earned him a slap from one of two Japanese men, but when he saw that Chuck wasn’t reacting, he stopped, too. That left the Border Patrol and the other Japanese man, whose fight lost its own spark when they glimpsed the other two men holstering up. All four were motionless by the time June strode into their midst.

“What,” she said, “the devil.”

Chuck’s face was red and he was out of breath. He couldn’t meet her eyes. She’d been the one to convince Mr. Francis that he would make a fine waiter, despite his twisted spine. The tailor had made a custom pad for just the left shoulder of Chuck’s uniform jacket, and he’d never looked back.

June recognized the Border Patrol agent from the garage; she saw him recognize her, too. She asked, “Should I get Agent Minnick?”

She should not.

Bashfully, Chuck described the incident, starting with the opening volley:

Chuck: Can I take your drink?

Japanese clerk: If I can take the Lexington.

This was a reference to the USS Lexington, a carrier the Japanese had recently claimed to have sunk in the Pacific. The rest of the story told itself.

All parties were sorry, Hoss, sorry, ma’am. But June didn’t need them to be sorry. She needed it to have not happened at all. A fistfight, at the Avallon? Unheard of. It did not matter if Chuck had been provoked; they were meant to be unprovokable. Chuck was no neophyte; he was a veteran with many years under his belt.

June felt it all mounting. Mr. Francis’s death, the laugh down in Constancy, the splash in Avallon II, the snails beneath Sabine’s bench. Don’t get cocky, Mayor Foglesong had told her, but she had been a little cocky, hadn’t she? The water don’t work like that, she’d kept saying, but everything was changing these days. Mr. Francis was dead; she’d slept with Gilfoyle; the Gestapo was taking meals in her dining rooms.

“Hoss,” Griff Clemons said. As he joined her, her staff captain held up a muddy snail.

June sighed. “I saw.”

Viva l’Avallon.

Chapter Eighteen

The rest of the day was inevitable, then.

As clouds rolled in over the mountains, erasing the brilliant sun and casting the interior of the hotel in subdued shadow, June tidied up her business as much as she could.

First, she let herself into the Glass Room—where Pennybacker and the Swiss smiled at her while tactfully flipping the documents on the desk onto their faces—and told them about Sabine and Hannelore.

“And you want me to make it right, I suppose. Bickenbached again! This is going to ruin my hostage math.” But Pennybacker used a pen to point at a stack of paper, which the conductor passed to him, and made some notes on it. “I will see what I can do.”

Ordinarily this would have been where the harpsichordist made a sly or foolish comment, but he was uncharacteristically quiet as rain began to hiss against the window. This reminded June that Pennybacker had said he had a thought about the Swiss and the incident in the Avallon II. Later, she’d ask about it, if she remembered, if it still seemed important.

“I got—are you all right, Miss Hudson?” Pennybacker asked.

“I just have a bit of work I’m not looking forward to.” She started to say more, then stopped. They didn’t need to hear any of it. This belonged only to her. “What were you going to say?”

He said, “I got a letter from my wife. All these weeks of me sending letters and hearing nothing, and the moment I stop, she sends one! Just as you said.”

“What’d it say?”

“That I drove her into the arms of another man she felt nothing for.”

June said, “That’s a hell of a drive.”

“She wants me to think about what I’ve done.”

“Shouldn’t we all?” the harpsichordist asked.

“I think I slept late on weekends,” he admitted. “Once, I laughed at one of her jokes, but”—he lowered his voice—“it turned out to not be a joke.”

The conductor asked, “And you want this woman back?”

Pennybacker pressed a hand over his heart. Quite suddenly, June was fond of the three of them. Their casual way with each other, their concerted effort to maintain a friendship across years and countries. The gentle ribbing that never needled over into real meanness. She should remember all this later. This was one of the ways happiness could look, even when discussing unhappy things. Yes, she should remember it well, in the Avallon IV. After the Avallon IV, when it would be hard to.

June said, “You shouldn’t reply to your wife, Agent Pennybacker.”

Pennybacker put his hands on the table with some agitation. “Don’t tell me to give up on her. I’m quite tired of my siblings—and now Rudy and Rufey as well—telling me to give up on her.”

“I’m not. If you want her back, don’t reply to that letter. Trust me, she’ll keep chasing.”

He asked plaintively, “How can you be sure?”

June pushed the door open. “I’m very good at my job.”

• • •

AFTER STOPPING IN the Glass Room, June spent two hours in her office, copying pertinent tasks and information over from her ledgers and to-do lists, making certain it was legible to third parties. She stacked the dishes that she’d accumulated over the course of the day and checked the drawers to make sure she hadn’t stashed any perishables in them. She had; she plucked out a few browning apple slices that she had hidden away to give to the dachshunds and forgotten about. As the rain continued to fall outside, she looked over the outstanding orders for coal, firewood, and ice, making sure nothing would require her attention in the immediate future.

Then, she endured a conversation with Ovid Persinger in the storeroom, making sure the hotel was stocked for the rest of the week’s meals. She paused in the Grotto to tell Fortéscue to call a meeting with all his kitchen and waitstaff to improve morale.

“Are you going down?” he asked her. When she nodded, he disappeared into the back room and returned with a chocolate bonbon, which he placed in the center of her palm. “Bonne chance, Hoss, thank you.”

Finally, she took the dachshunds to Toad’s office. Inside, the head of housekeeping was slamming things about, getting ready for the ritual of cleaning room 411. She whirled to June, ready to blast, but then fell silent as June pointed the dogs to their place under Toad’s desk.

“You’ll mind them, won’t you?” June asked.

Toad used a dry mop to gently but firmly press the wire-haired dachshund fully beneath the desk. “How long will it be?”

June considered how the water had felt and how long she had been putting it off. “Two days. No. You better give me three days.”

“Three days?”

“I put it off too long. There’s snails all over the Winnet fields.”

“Clemons knows?”

“We agreed on it together.”

Toad angrily threw four hand towels onto the housekeeping cart just outside the hall. June wondered if she had been as upset back when it was Mr. Francis’s turn for this. Before June’s time, this happened more often; that was her understanding. The water more mercurial, the hotel more fragile. Everything Mr. Francis and June had done had been to establish a more permanent peace. It had been a long time since the Avallon IV had needed her.

June offered Toad the bonbon Fortéscue had meant for her. Toad took it in her large fingers and studied it as if it were a device she needed to understand and replicate. Then, with a snort, she bit it in half, and gave the other half to June. Together they stood in silence, sucking and savoring and swallowing, and then June neatly stacked four towels on the cart and headed out.

• • •

FINALLY, JUNE WALKED down to the Avallon IV, holding an umbrella and darkening the toes of her Mary Janes in the puddles. The rain began to really come down just as she reached the carved boulder; hurriedly she unlocked the door and stepped inside. She cast one look back up the hill at the Avallon, which looked gloomy and menacing in the downpour, like a giant peering over the edge of the world. An illusion, of course, a trick of the weather; everything ailing the hotel was invisible.

June reminded herself that she loved this place.

Then she closed the door behind herself.

Chapter Nineteen

It was just past a full moon and Tucker was dreaming about the Avallon’s four bathhouses.

He could hear his breath huffing out of him with each step down the hill. Rain drowned him; it was heavy enough that he could not tilt his head back or it would find its shrewd way into his nostrils. His hair was plastered flat to his head. He could feel water trickling down behind his ears and into his collar. Rainwater was nothing like sweetwater, though; it was deaf and innocent.

Avallon I, the closest to the hotel, was unlocked, and when he put his head in the door, the scent of bleach and metal came to him.

Avallon II was warm and scented with dirt, with growing things. The pools were perfectly still.

Avallon III smelled of sex and lilies, rank and strong. The pool leered at him; he left it behind.

Here was the Avallon IV. When he stepped inside the small building, his eyes took a moment to adjust to the lack of light. He saw curious symbols scrawled over the walls, none decipherable. The springhead was accessed via a rough square cut into the floorboards; in that dark hole, he saw a body. Back to him, arms lost to the deep; dead man’s float. Tucker’s feet caught on the floorboards as he hurried to the edge—was he barefoot before?—and heaved out the limp, naked body.

It was June Hudson, her eyes blank and white. “June,” he said, but she was empty of everything but the water.

• • •

TUCKER CAME AWAKE violently. He sat in his bed, hands linked behind his head, taking an accounting of his body’s physical sensations to drag himself from the dream. Sweat humid on his bare breastbone, the air cool against the damp between his shoulder blades. Left shoulder, the one he’d been shot in long ago, tight and uncooperative. Wool blanket scratching his bare feet.

By this point, he had contrived to stay in the cabin June had mentioned, the one with the rainwater cistern. Trillium House (a plaque on the porch railing named it) was not quite a cabin, not quite a cottage. The roof was green, and the exterior, including the porch, had been painted white. Thorned canes wrapped around the porch railings; in the summer, it must have been alive with rose blooms. Rockers slumbered beside the green door. It was pretending at being rustic, but it had little in common with the cabins that spotted these mountains outside the bounds of the Avallon.

Weeks ago, the man who had first opened the door for him was Woody Littlepage, head groundskeeper. Although he couldn’t have known exactly when—or if—Tucker might come down, he nonetheless seemed to be expecting him. Letting him in, he drifted silently after him from room to room, letting him look. Inside, the fixtures were simple: an unfussy table, workmanlike bunks, sturdy quilts, and plainly sewn curtains.

Woody spit onto the floorboard and then smeared the mouthful flat with the toe of his boot. “You prefer this to your room up in the big house?”

“There’s a cistern?” Tucker asked.

Woody gestured for him to step onto the viewing porch. Tucker looked first at the mountains, and then at the network of pipes leading to the concrete pad with its metal door. Tucker had seen setups like this before; this was the story of his childhood. But cisterns and rain barrels were normally for those who didn’t have the means to dig a well, who were scratching out a living on a side of a mountain, who didn’t have enough money to care that the cistern water was complicated with mosquitos and pollen. Running his fingers lightly over the place where the gutters joined, he worked the joint open. Inside was a carbon filter.

“Water keeps some of us up,” Woody said. “Hoss said you’re one of them.”

Tucker found himself grateful for the simple, pragmatic description. Yes. The water kept him up. “Tell me how to make it worth your while.”

“You Feds put me and Don and Marty up in Constancy ’til this has all blown over, you have the whole place to yourself.”

“I will make the call. Which motel?”

“Just give me the cash and I’ll set it up,” Woody replied.

Tucker understood. There would be no rooms in Constancy; the groundsmen would pocket the daily rate and disappear into the holler. The entire process was so seamless that he was certain June had facilitated it. “Acceptable.”

Hugh and Pony hadn’t had any interest in swapping their plush suites for the cabin, only using the kitchen for paperwork during the day, which meant Tucker had the place to himself. He didn’t normally mind the solitude, but tonight, after the disorienting dream of June’s corpse, he found it unpleasant to be alone, listening to the cistern thirstily and metallically drink the rain. He dressed; just slacks, a sweater. Here, he didn’t have to always look the Bureau part. Then he ducked his head against the slow drizzle and made his way out to the Bureau car. He did not start it, just sat in this more familiar dim, listening to the domesticated sounds of his own breathing against the close doors and ceiling. After a minute, his heart settled, and he collected the telegram he’d tucked under the driver’s seat the day before. By the light of the floodlights, he read it again.

SOG was still pleased with him, the telegram said. Could not answer his question about what it would take to guarantee his future employment, the telegram said. But strongly advised him to consider gestures that would look good in newsprint, the telegram said. Remember not to make an international incident, the telegram added.

Find them an incontrovertible but feeble bad guy, that was what it meant. A double-crossing flunky from one of the Axis legations—not a diplomat (Tucker was not allowed to arrest a diplomat), but perhaps a butler or driver or translator. Or a hotel employee with Nazi sympathies, a bedroom hung with secret swastikas. A local, maybe, smuggling letters under the seat of a delivery van. Anything that might provoke a line or two in The New York Times: Federal agents performed an arrest at the Avallon Hotel & Spa . . .

Tucker wasn’t meant to question his SAC’s requests, but he could feel himself doing it now; this was the sweetwater, working inside him. Tucker currently had his hands full chasing down a rumor of coded intel circulating the German legation. Quite certainly anyone involved was too diplomatically protected for him to arrest them. But he hadn’t cared about that; he’d just been thinking that if he could manage to lay his hands on that intel before the diplomats were repatriated, it was information the US would have been unable to get any other way, and Tucker’s presence there would have been worth it. There was little valor in this sort of work, but Tucker had never needed commendations. He just wanted the justice.

But the telegram suggested he would need to change his thinking if he wanted to keep his job.

Through the drizzle, Tucker saw two figures stumble out of the little building they called the Winnet Cabinet. He recognized one of them: Pony Harris. The other was his latest hello girl, hanging on him. The young woman somehow managed to radiate the joyous disrepair of the unclothed while being completely clothed; Pony lightly squeezed her ass. Will it ruin the work? June Hudson asked. Pony, distracted by the switchboard girls, had still caught that sixth-floor cloakroom hang-up and recorded it dutifully in the call logs. The hello girls, distracted by Pony, were still presumably answering the phones. The work went on.

Tucker watched them slobbishly wind their way toward the hotel in the rain, feeling as he did the ancient combination of judgment and envy experienced by the loveless from the beginning of time. Impossible not to think of June Hudson in moments like these; guilty to think of June Hudson in moments like these. It was June who clung, it was Tucker who squeezed, it was them—hotel and Bureau—who stumbled messily up the hill after losing their minds in the Winnet Cabinet. God, her neck, her hands, her throat—

• • •

IN THE MORNING, everything felt washed clean. The sun was out again, illuminating each bright bud on every wick tree branch. Daffodils grinned along either side of the drive. Tucker’s frustration was washed clean as well, and the rest of the hotel seemed to be experiencing a similar, equally surprising renaissance. The Japanese were performing calisthenics on the front lawn. German children were enthusiastically engaged in some educational activity in the Conservatory. One of the Italians was giving piano lessons to a Bulgarian child in the pub. Waiters were sprightly; porters whistled; maids flashed smiles at Tucker in the halls.

Tucker asked after June Hudson at the front desk.

“She’s out today,” Basil Pemberton said, “but she left some information for you in the office.”

Out. Out where? He had not thought this hotel could manage without her.

In the office behind the front desk, he discovered the entire blotter was covered with notes in her handwriting, each addressed to a different staff member. The hotel couldn’t manage without her, but she had clearly done her best to stave the bloodshed until she returned. Tucker’s note read: TRM, talked to S, PB has info.

S had to be Sabine Wolfe. He had known June would be unable to resist talking to her—he could tell the moment she told him about the discovery that she had taken ownership of it. Or rather, the hotel had. She was so clearly used to everyone’s happiness falling under the Avallon’s jurisdiction.

He pocketed the note, got ready to go. An idea struck. He picked up the phone.

“Put me through to 411,” he said.

For weeks, he’d rapped on the door to room 411 to little or no answer. She was a staff member; she was supposed to be interviewed. It was the principle of the thing. The only reason he had not forced his way in physically or legally was because he didn’t expect there to be much purpose in a conversation with the long-term guest.

The phone clicked in his ear.

“They printed a photograph of that Goelet woman,” 411 said, not bothering with a hello. “I almost feel sorry for her. The copy says ‘doe-eyed,’ but is ewe-eyed a phrase? Is cow-eyed?”

“Good morning, this is Agent Minnick,” Tucker said. He did his best to keep the satisfaction out of his voice.

“Oh, you fox,” 411 said, with grudging admiration. Her voice was sultry, just as it had been on the other side of the door. She didn’t need to show herself; her voice stood on its own. “Inside a Trojan horse.”

“This interview won’t take long.”

“It has been a very long time since I’ve suffered bureaucracy, Agent Minnick.”

“I need your full legal name and your position.”

She sighed, then told him.

“. . . The designer?” he asked, after a moment’s hesitation. Her disappearance had rocked society many decades before. Briefly, she had been considered a missing person—it was this that must have lodged her name in Tucker’s mind; they must have mentioned the case in the academy. The rest of the details were fuzzy. A great beauty, an almost supernatural muse, a two-time divorcée with a knack for persuading men to give up their wealth.

“Agent Minnick, you flatter me, but I accept it. What’s your next question? My city of birth, my father’s occupation?”

Idly, he pulled open a random drawer on the desk. It was filled to bursting with wedding invitations. A closer examination revealed that they each bore handwritten notes to June Hudson. Most were simple expressions of gratitude, but some were so personal that he closed the drawer, feeling intrusive.

“The only purpose of this interview is to determine if your presence in the hotel represents a security risk.”

“You mean, because Frank was morally flexible? Is that what this is about?”

“In what way was he morally flexible?”

411 laughed. It was an unkind laugh. “Don’t get flustered, Agent Minnick. I am not telling you he was a Nazi. I’m telling you the Avallon is for anyone who can pay for it. You don’t get any more morally bankrupt than unquestioning luxury. It’s the best of the best, for the sake of the best of the best. It’s why it was so exciting designing for him.”

“And your politics?”

“Darling, don’t you think you’d have a more useful time investigating who helped those journalists get the maids’ uniforms?”

He badly wanted to know how she had gotten this information, but he sensed that would only telegraph weakness to her. She’d hang up and it would be over. He needed to press on her own vulnerabilities. Not Francis Gilfoyle, not her career. She’d volunteered those already, so they wouldn’t do. He wanted to extract information about her relationship with June Hudson, but that would have been purely for his own curiosity. Instead, he asked, “Do you know why Sandy Gilfoyle fought with Francis before he died?”

A pause.

Then 411 asked the question he hadn’t: “How do you know that?”

“I’m a fox.”

“They disagreed about the war.”

“I already know that part.”

Another pause, full of reluctance. Finally, she said, “That is a private family matter, not for silly girls hanging on the line listening in. Come see me tonight, Agent Minnick. After you’ve asked the dining room staff about those uniforms.”

• • •

AFTER CURFEW, the hotel felt like it was asleep, the light slumber of a predator. The font by the door trickled audibly. In the lobby, the night clerk looked sharply up as Tucker passed through; wordlessly, Tucker lifted a hand, letting him off the hook. A grateful nod.

With the diplomats all in their rooms, this was the staff’s time. Tucker heard clunking and scraping, uncouth, useful noises that would not be permitted during the hotel’s waking hours. He followed the commotion to the Magnolia Dining Room, where every chandelier was lit to bright-afternoon blaze. An army of whistling, singing, joking staff members carried chairs above their heads and moved tables. Gone were the gray-and-gold uniforms that made them all part of one smooth animal. They were in shirtsleeves and suspenders, ratty sweaters and holey trousers. The clockwork precision of their daylight moves was replaced with chaotic, cheerful disorder.

He let his eyes play over the group, paused when he spotted one of the young men who’d been making paper airplanes on the balcony. It didn’t seem possible that there was someone in this hotel that neither Hugh nor he had interviewed, but try as he might, he couldn’t conjure a name for him. Sensing his interest, the fellow came over, saying, with a slight German accent, “Agent Minnick, room service is supposed to come to you.”

Tucker said, “You never came in for an interview.”

“I’ve been far too busy running this place all by myself.” A winsome smile. The young man lifted one side of a table. “And I am still too busy. If you want to cross-examine me, you will have to wait or give me a hand.”

At the beginning of this, would Tucker have demanded this young man stop for an interview? Would he have demanded the waiters all stop, lined them all up against the wall and asked them one after another to either admit to helping the Axis journalists procure the maids’ uniforms or to nominate someone who had?

Yes, he would have. They had done wrong; he would make it right.

But now—

He was reminded of his post in Florida. Technically, the Bureau provided all the means necessary for agents to transfer, but practically, they offered meager moving expenses and brutal timelines. In Pensacola, navy families swiped all the pleasant low-hanging fruit, leaving Tucker going door-to-door at businesses to ask if he could rent a spare storage closet. At one of these, a dingy seafood restaurant, Tucker walked through the empty dining area, looking for the proprietor, and instead, pushing through a double door, found himself staring at a lot of guns. In the back of the restaurant—which he now knew was a front for some filthy enterprise—there were about eleven guns in various sizes set upon a table next to booze, cards, sandwiches. The owners of the guns were loading boxes into a truck. Standing there, frozen in their gazes, he’d felt his future forking away in several different directions depending upon his very next decision. Tucker had opened his jacket—eleven or so pairs of eyes watched him do it—and took his service Colt from its holster. He’d set it on the edge of the table, then, wordlessly, began to carry boxes into the truck alongside the other men.

That was how he’d gotten a nice room in one of Vince’s other properties, a beach house, all the while not paying too much attention to the merch that passed through the restaurant. While in Pensacola, Tucker put away two killers, a rapist, a car thief, and a dozen writers of bad checks.

He remembered every single compromise he’d ever made, and doubted them every time he did, from the largest to the smallest. Compromises were so much harder to carry than black-and-white justice.

But—

Tucker stripped his sweater, rolled up his sleeves, and lifted the other side of the table.

The waitstaff made noises of surprise and respect, like a sporting event was taking place. And Sebastian Hepp, the Avallon’s head waiter, gave him his interview. The amiable young man’s life story came out as they shifted tables, measured, shifted them again. He did a humorous impression of himself when he first saw the Avallon. Wow! Next room. Wow! Next room. Wow! Every time he said wow he made his eyes and mouth perfectly round, somehow managing to appear once more as the awed kid he was when he arrived. You know how it is.

Tucker didn’t, but he knew what Sebastian Hepp was talking about. He swiped sweat from his forehead. “What are we doing, by the way?”

“You do not see it?” Sebastian said. “It is the Rising Sun. The emperor wants his due. What do you think of that?”

“Democracy got sand under the Japs’ collars,” explained one of the other waitstaff helpfully.

Now that it had been said out loud, Tucker saw it. There was one table in the corner, an array of three tables around it, then five, then seven, then nine. The strict Japanese legation had been growing increasingly uncomfortable with the egalitarian nature of their stay at the Avallon: consul and servant alike enjoyed the same luxurious rooms, the same fine dining, the same entertainment. The Rising Sun was an attempt to restore some kind of national order and dignity, with the senior-most official and his family at the solo table, lesser consuls and support staff placed at increasingly subservient intervals. The other two-thirds of the dining room tables remained democratically scattered.

“I have been asked to do worse,” Sebastian remarked. “At least the Japs clear their plates. And their children are funny little mites.” It was funny to hear him say Japs and mites in his faint German accent; there was no doubt as to where he had been perfecting his English.

“As a German, do you feel sympathetic to the Germans here?” Tucker asked.

Sebastian’s expression was faintly betrayed and slightly complex; he’d forgotten they were performing an interview. He threw a chair onto his shoulder with ease; Tucker took one to match. Sebastian said, voice dry, “Hoss says they’re guests.”

“And what do you say?”

Sebastian looked at Tucker through the rungs of the chair, his expression complicated. “You asking me as you, or you asking me as G-man?”

“Which one do you want?”

The youthful head waiter considered this. Hesitated. Then asked, “What will happen to the journalists who want to stay? To Lieselotte Berger?”

The German journalist with the scars on her face. Please don’t send me back to Germany.

Tucker said, flatly, “You were the one who gave them the maids’ uniforms.”

The dining room had gone dead quiet.

Sebastian drew himself up, eyes worried but his expression proud. “It was the right thing to do.”

Sebastian, cast as hero; Tucker, as villain. But those roles were only true here, in the dining room and Grotto. In a Bureau memo, in crisp, typed, black and white, Sebastian had just admitted to treason.

“Do you know how serious this is?” Tucker asked. “They are considered enemies of the state. Imagine if you’d smuggled out Takeo Nishimura. The manhunt would have been the same for the journalists if they succeeded. People want someone to pay for this war, Mr. Hepp. The president’s signature put the Border Patrol here to keep them in this place. The president’s signature put me in this place. I am a federal agent.”

Sebastian’s eyes were round. Wow.

“Mr. Pennybacker is negotiating for them to be able to stay in this country, and criminal activity only jeopardizes those negotiations,” Tucker said. “We all want the same thing.”

“What do I want?”

“The devils in hell and everyone else living free.”

“And if the government cannot get it done for Lieselotte in time?”

Tucker had no easy answer. The truth was that the journalists were only three people in a war machine that no longer had time or interest in nuance. Three people? Three hundred people. The government had scooped up Lieselotte Berger and Erich von Limburg-Stirum and Lothar Liebe in the exact same swipe, hundreds of lives disrupted and stored in this mountain hotel, whether or not they earned it. Sebastian Hepp would be just another German. Tucker was just another agent. Individuals were being erased every day, in favor of broad, sweeping labels for enormous chunks of the population. But how could Sebastian comprehend such a thing? He’d practically grown up here at the Avallon, and now he was shaped like it. This was why he had confessed so easily; here, both rewards and punishments were child-sized. At the Avallon, it was impossible to imagine someone’s motives being ignored. Impossible to imagine bad faith. Impossible to imagine being made an example. To imagine dying unjustly, far from family, in an electric chair or a concentration camp, one of the irrelevant unnumberable many. The real world had so many ugly consequences.

That leaden weight inside Tucker grew heavier.

He said, “Let’s get these chairs up.”

He helped them place the last of the chairs and sweep up everything that the move had revealed beneath the furniture. He accepted their hands clapping on his back as he left, thinking about how he had entered the dining room as one thing to them and left as another.

Before he went back to Trillium House, he stopped by the fourth floor, although he no longer felt as interested in the answer to his question as he had before. 411’s door cracked open; she had been waiting for him.

He asked the single visible green eye, “How did you know?”

“I get room service.”

Because it hadn’t been a secret, had it? It was just a conversation topic. Something to pass the time, chatting up the long-term guest behind door 411.

“Ask your question, Agent.”

“Tell me what Francis and Sandy argued over.”

“Francis wanted to leave the hotel to Sandy, not Edgar. Sandy said that if he did, he’d close it down.”

“Why?” He was preoccupied, and he knew she could tell; the game had gone from her voice.

“There are better people to be asking that question,” 411 said.

The door closed.

When he got back down to the cabin, he found that someone had turned the porch light on so that he would not trip over a room service tray left on the mat. Funny to imagine someone walking down the drive, holding the tray level, squinting in the dark to find the gravel path to the cabins, climbing the porch stairs, debating leaving it inside on the kitchen table, where it might be missed until morning, or leaving it outside where it might be accidentally kicked by a tired agent’s shoes, deciding to open the door with the service key to turn on the porch light, returning to the hotel empty-handed.

Under the lid, Tucker found a single strawberry dessert, and a note:

The Grotto thanks you for your service, G-man.

Tucker thought about how he could arrest Sebastian Hepp for assisting the writers of Nazi propaganda, and Hoover would have one more public win, and it might be the concrete result that would give Tucker his career back. He thought about how the only cost would be Sebastian Hepp’s future. When he closed his eyes, the smell of sweetwater was overwhelming, even here.

He didn’t need to be liked, he thought.

He needed to get the job done.

Bureau-minded.

Chapter Twenty

Three days passed, and when June stepped out of her basement apartment, blinking, her limousine was waiting.

The navy-blue Pierce-Arrow gleamed; exhaust trailed around its flanks; its engine rumbled productively. Water dripped from the grill; it had gotten a wash after being pulled from the garage. It was not unusual for the staff to do something for her when she finally emerged from her days of convalescence after the Avallon IV, but it wasn’t a staff member who stood against the limo, arms crossed, legs wide, stance typical: it was Tucker Rye Minnick.

She was still too spent from the Avallon IV to find her usual smile, but he didn’t seem to expect one.

Before June had become general manager, Mr. Francis was the one to go down to bathhouses when the water became fractious. When June first found out about them, near the end of her time with direct mail, she thought these visits were a secret, because they were so completely divorced from his family life. He never gave the other Gilfoyles an explanation for missing meals or disappearing for a day or two; instead, he coordinated with Sam his staff captain. Sam met him at the Avallon IV after he was done and helped him up the hill to the hotel, where he was put into an empty guest room to recover. For a long time, June thought Mr. Francis was sparing Madeline from the reality of the Avallon, but by the time she was going to the Avallon IV herself, she had discovered Madeline demanded he not return until he was himself. It was the only time June had felt the position of general manager was a little unfair. One person shouldn’t have to carry all the ugliness, surely.

But who else was both able and willing? Both to go into the Avallon IV and to minimize the magnitude of the task?

Tucker told her, “The Bureau has agenda items that concern you.”

Three days ago, she would have felt something about all of this, but her feelings would take a bit to come back, in pricks and starts, like she’d been sitting on them too long. The Avallon IV hadn’t gotten any easier.

She shielded her eyes from the light. “I’ve got to get some work done.”

Reaching into his jacket, he removed a note, which he showed her.

Hoss,

We can survive another day.

Griff Clemons

The first feeling to return warmed her then, nearly painful in its newness: gratitude.

“Get a coat,” Tucker advised. “It’s cold in the mountains.”

• • •

UP, UP, UP. The limousine roared and whined, shook and rolled. On the rutted mountain road, the tires wailed and bumped. The wooden steering wheel bucked over potholes. The gear shift knocked. The chrome gauges, large and central as an airplane’s, trembled and strained. Everything about it, in fact, put one in mind of a great airplane fuselage, soaring and striving as wind eddied and drafted beneath it. In front of the great dark bonnet of the car, the mountains loomed, great and purple and benevolent. Behind, the highway serpentined down toward Constancy like a dropped spool of thread. Only a few weeks before, the way would have been made impassable by snow and ice, but now, spring was invading, and the heavy rain had turned the growth on the shoulder a saturated green. Redbuds spattered pink here and there.

It had been a while since June had left the Avallon, and still longer since she had been a passenger, and for a space of time, she let herself enjoy it. Out the window, she saw ridges and hollers, churches of every shape and age, some sprouting like mushrooms and others collapsed like a shot man. Every so often, they’d roar round a bend and discover a sudden brave homestead. A shack, a shed, a barn, the clearing temporarily claimed from the mountain forests. Sometimes, just the mouth of a forbidden-looking trail marked by a redundant sign warning away trespassers.

She did not know their destination. She did not care to ask if they had one. She sat on the front bench seat, and every time they went around one of the steep mountain curves, her hip or his hip could not help but slide to touch the other. Her limousine, her foolish limousine. When the Gilfoyles had first given it to her, she’d driven it up and down to Constancy a few times, just for the novelty of it. A limousine with one person in it was such a beautiful, lonely creature. The dachshunds did not count. If you could not see the passenger in the rearview mirror in a limousine, you were still alone.

Currently, the limousine was headed in the direction of June’s birthplace, although it was now a ghost town. Its death had come quite suddenly, a few years after June’s family left. Local legend blamed the sweetwater, but June heard that it had something to do with the abandoned mine. How would it feel to see it again? It felt as if they were driving back in time. June’s childhood had started with dirt floors, bedbugs, no plumbing, no electricity, wagons with wooden wheels, newspapers printed once a week, teachers who died of rabies, doctors who hadn’t finished school, families who never left the county they were born in, and the farther they went into these ancient, greening mountains, the more obvious it was that much of this rural county’s landscape had not progressed far beyond that.

The gas station that came into view after nearly an hour, though, looked like a proper resident of 1942. Previously a speakeasy, it had since embraced an identity as a country store and way station for highway travelers. Tucker got gas there, flipping his ration card and then his badge to the dubious clerk, and June got them two Coca-Colas. The clerk pried the tops off with the counter opener and asked, “Where you two headed?”

Tucker pointed. Up. He offered nothing else.

The clerk glanced at the limousine outside; the hood ornament, a boy shooting an arrow, was right at elbow level. He had a question in his eyes, but Tucker just slid his change off the counter and into his pocket.

Once they were back in the car, Tucker finally spoke. He said, “Pennybacker and I discussed Sabine Wolfe.”

“I ain’t sorry about talking to her,” she said.

“I didn’t expect you to be.” He handed her his open Coke bottle and put the limousine back on the road. “You know if he can manage the numbers, Hannelore will be here alone.”

“Far sight better than dead,” June said. “Worse fates than being an orphan. I was the same age when I came to the hotel.”

“Toad told me.”

“She must’ve taken a shine to you. Were you awful to her? Most people are afraid of her, but if you treated her badly, she’d think you were something special.”

Amusement played around his mouth. She handed him the drink; he took a swig, handed it back. He asked, “Are your parents still alive?”

“My father’s dead,” June replied. “Would you believe I never knew my mother’s real name? My father called her Toots. Took me years to realize it had to be a nickname. Toots Hudson. There was this fellow down by the—”

“I don’t need Hoss,” Tucker interrupted. “Just June.”

She was completely silenced, absorbing his meaning.

That first day, he’d stood in the Smith Library and given her the clean, cool facts of the upcoming detention, somehow correctly guessing she was someone who didn’t need life sugarcoated, even if she was always shaking sugar out for everyone else. And today, he guessed that sugarcoating cost her something, and offered her the ability to talk for free. Every interaction has a social cost, Mr. Francis had said. But what if some didn’t?

Tucker said, “You don’t have to polish the bullets for me. Just fire them.”

So she just said her piece. Hesitantly, with no story to it, in a lumpy, unpolished order. She told Tucker that she, like Hannelore, had been a remote, quiet child, fearful but tearless. She told him she remembered the period of her life after her father’s suicide as if from an owl’s view. The money running out, her mother’s hope running out shortly after, the days of begging in Malden. She told him she did not remember her tantrums, but she remembered the aftermath. Her mother apologizing to passersby. June exiled to sit on a crate behind the post office for entire days while her mother begged, so as to not ruin the gig with a sudden mood shift. Perhaps another child would have been miserable, but June was as far away from her emotions then as she was from anyone else’s. She watched the girl sitting on the crate, and she watched the people going in and out of the back of the post office, and she counted to pass the time. She told Tucker she remembered the sunburn on the top of her legs. She remembered the calico cat. She remembered the sound of the postal wagon’s axles.

He just listened. She didn’t have to tell him that she was only one of many children given up in West Virginia; he knew. She didn’t have to make him feel better about the tragedy of her childhood; he didn’t need her story to be a simple shape, designed to make him feel differently about his own.

She said, “I guess if I regret anything, it’s that no one told her I would grow up eventually; I was just taking a long time to get there. Are your parents—”

“Dead.”

“God rest ’em.” June handed him the Coke bottle. He finished it; she finished hers. Empty glass bottles clicking together in the footwell of a limousine. Somewhere, men were shooting at each other. Somewhere her mink overboots were toppled on their side beside her door. “Land sakes, it feels right indulgent to be putting rubber on this road, Tuck; we’re using up your gas ration.”

She tried it out, Tuck, not Tucker. She called her staff by nicknames all the time, but this was different, and she knew it. This was vocalizing the electricity between them.

He said nothing. He breathed out, real slow, between barely parted lips, which was louder than anything he could have said anyway.

June said, “If you pull up here, you can see the town where I was born.”

On the narrow shoulder, Tucker rolled down the window for them to have a better look. There wasn’t much to see. On this side of the ravine, the trees and brush were badly overgrown. On the other, the town’s remaining buildings, previously painted bright colors, had faded mostly into the same gray-brown-orange of the rest of the landscape.

“There used to be a bridge up there,” June said, “but it washed out sometime after my family moved. Casto Springs. My pop was a doctor. He had all kinds of potions in the trunk of his car and he’d stitch up anyone who asked, whether or not they had a cut. That was a joke. He did like stitching, though.”

Tucker had an elbow up on the edge of the door, and his entire hand pressed over his mouth, as if he were holding in his words. She didn’t mind that he didn’t laugh; she knew he had been listening. He didn’t need to entertain her, either.

Finally, he lowered his hand.

“Poison Point,” he said. “That’s what we used to call it.”

“Yes, I recollect some people called it that. The miners.” He hadn’t gotten that coal tattoo in the Bureau.

“The miners,” he agreed.

They regarded each other. She catalogued his physical features, the ones she liked, the ones she didn’t. The ever-present frown was too severe. The eyes were soft and perceptive, full of soul. The forehead was too wide; he would have to hope he kept his hair as he got old. The nose, fine, the ears acceptable. The mouth was wonderful. Wide, soft lower lip, capable of so many expressions without ever altering the rest of his face. And of course, he was cataloguing her face, too, and obvious attraction can add appeal to an unusual visage, too.

“There’s a higher bridge,” he said. “Above the town. I think it would have been spared in the flood.”

She answered the unspoken question. “Yes.”

So the Pierce-Arrow roared a few more miles. The narrow bridge was still intact, although creeper roamed all over the railings and the road itself was hidden by a layer of rotten leaf muck. Tucker didn’t take his time crossing it. On the other side, the single-track road was nearly invisible. It was only because they both knew it had been there that the gap in the undergrowth seemed inviting.

Tucker let the limo slow. “The raspberries might scratch your paint—?”

June imagined Gilfoyle returning, finding the limousine muddy and etched from a day that didn’t include him. She thought of the letter still resting on her bedstand. Keep the old chin up. She said, “Let them scratch.”

The Pierce-Arrow pressed on.

A mile of trials; that was how long the limousine had to endure brambles scraping down its sides and whipping against its undercarriage. Then, quite suddenly, the trees gave way to a ruined main street where some lucky combination of pavement and environment had kept the central track clear.

June had been so young when they left Casto Springs. But she recognized it.

The town was only about fifteen buildings altogether. What used to be a general store, a feed store, the post office and doctor’s office both—where June’s father had once worked for a time—the mining office, the school she had been too young to attend. A boardinghouse, a mom-and-pop restaurant. All the buildings were clustered on one side of the road; the other side was mountain, rising precipitously to even higher climes. All of it was soft and forgotten now, porches melted into themselves, roofs sloped into the weeds, glass broken out of windows at intervals. The humble church, one of the snake-handling models that wasn’t hard to find in these mountains, was still strangely entire, although its previously pristine white siding was dingy with old pollen and faded coal dust; this was what they had glimpsed from the other side of the ravine.

Without any discussion, they got out. Tucker went a little into the woods to pee on a tree; June had a cigarette while he did so he wouldn’t feel self-conscious about making her wait. Then they walked directly down the middle of the road, looking this way and that. Comfortable memory settled into June. All the years she’d spent here had happened both when she was too young to be wise to other people’s miseries and before her own miseries had begun, so everything, even the ancient destruction of it all, had the fuzzy appeal of nostalgia.

“Were you here long?” Tucker asked, and his voice sounded small, drowned out by the ecstatic birds and the constant roar of unfelt wind caught up in the treetops.

“I was just a mite when we left. Pop got a chance to rent a house with a little field so my mother could have some cows and chickens, and he did house calls from there until the war. The Great War. You? Were you here when I was?”

Even if he had been, they might have never crossed paths; the Hudsons’ Casto Springs home had been far enough outside town that they’d only come to the main street a few times a month for supplies. But she wanted to know if he might’ve been one of the nameless silhouettes of her past.

He considered his answer. “I was here until it flooded.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-five. How old are you?”

“Some women might consider that a rude question.”

His eyes glimmered with humor. “How old are you?”

“I’m thirty-five, too.”

What a marvel that they had both begun in the same place. It was a typical West Virginia story, in its way, that they grew up here and ended up only a few miles away, down the mountain at the Avallon. It was only every single other part of their story that was different.

As they walked, June found she could not remember the last time she had spent this many minutes on so little. A stroll through a place that could serve her no good in the future. Nor could she recall the last time she’d spent so much time with someone who required so little from her. Tucker’s silence didn’t demand her to fill it. His unhappiness, if he had any, was not currently her task to solve. She knew he would have made this walk on his own, just as she would have, but she also knew he preferred it with the wordless company. She was free to simply be herself; he was free to simply be himself, alongside each other. June, not Hoss. Tucker, not Agent Minnick.

What a good feeling this would be to give the water.

Eventually, they came to the miners’ houses crowded close to either side of the road. Here, it seemed like an unlucky wind had put these structures more in the way of the mine’s breath than the rest of the town. Unlike the rest of main street, which was just ravaged by time, these houses had sloughing water damage. What remained of their white-painted exteriors was now dull gray with coal dust and mildew.

The glance Tucker gave these structures was cursory, if anything, and he turned away at once. June took him by his upper arm—electric! What a warm thrum right through her at the excuse to touch him! Every day she laid hands on someone without a passing thought, and yet this utilitarian gesture demanded more—and squared him up to face the houses. She had no memories of them, but she knew that wasn’t true for him. Whatever this town was to her, it was something altogether different for him.

“It was a walk and a half to get here, Agent,” she said. “Don’t look away from what you came to see.”

He crossed his arms, putting his hands in his armpits, a gesture common to him, but today, it was as if this was the first time he had postured in this way, as if he were trialing the man he might become. He was not thirty-five. He was sixteen. He was looking at one of the houses, little more than a rotted porch with half a dozen chairs toppled against each other. His nostrils flared. He was taking quick, small breaths, soaking his lungs with air before the dive.

And then it was over and he turned away lightly. This, she understood, was the story that filled the years between his time here in Casto Springs and the day he had come to the Avallon. The story of learning to breathe again after drowning.

On their way back to the Pierce-Arrow, June sheered off to the charismatic church they’d passed; it felt irresistible now. As she climbed the two rickety stairs to the door, he said, “Watch yourself,” or perhaps just took in his breath sharply enough that she understood that was what he meant. She lifted a hand to show that she’d heard, but pressed through the faded red door anyway.

“Come here and take a gander,” she said.

Inside, the interior was surprisingly intact. The paint had peeled off the walls in big, ragged sections, and the velvet on the pews was moldy and misshapen, but the stained glass windows at the rear of the church that sent candy-colored light over the sturdy pews were unbroken. June searched her mind for any memory, and instead found a composite of childhood memories of churches like this. A preacher saying, Stand, stand, is the spirit upon you? A man or a woman or, sometimes, startlingly, a child, rising from their pew to babble in tongues no one else there could understand. Taken by some amorphous spirit that ruled the heavens or, to June’s mind, more likely, the mountains, the water, the cubits of rocky earth that outnumbered them.

At the altar of the old church, a fallen ceiling beam had pierced the floor. To her amazement, when she eased over to the busted floorboards, she saw movement underneath. Water. When she crouched, she could even hear it, rushing on its way toward the ravine. The sweetwater that had risen up to tear apart this town was still surging beneath it. Poison Point. Years ago—in 1922, to be precise, just as Gary Foglesong, the mayor of Constancy, had noted—this water had turned, but that had been a long time ago, and now she felt no malice or discontent. The irresistible pull she’d felt outside was stronger now.

She spidered her fingers over the gap in the boards.

“June, don’t,” Tucker said, and she heard a thread of anxiety in his voice.

“I ain’t afraid of the water,” she said.

“I am.”

Flatly.

“What do you think I do at the Avallon?” June asked him.

He closed his eyes and turned his face away; too proud to leave, not proud enough to watch.

Some people saw fear and mirrored it without question, but June wasn’t put off by Tucker’s. Whatever he was afraid of belonged only to him.

She lowered her fingers into the water in the way she always did. Pinky, ring, middle, pointer, thumb, palm. A gesture repeated so often the staff used it as an offhand shorthand to refer to her. Where is [hand gesture]? Don’t let [hand gesture] catch you at that! Hoss. The hand gesture meant Hoss, the person who held the Avallon steady, unchanging, the same as it had been for decades.

The water beneath the church was quite cold. Not as cold as one would expect—it should have been just short of freezing—but not as warm as the waters around the Avallon.

Oh, hello, June thought. Hello, hello.

This water was different from her water. How sweet and wild and innocent it was. It rampaged around her fingers, not out of unkindness, because it did not know how breakable she was, and it was in a hurry. It curiously splashed up her wrist right up to her elbow, right onto her face, hungry, disbelieving. It must have been a very long time since any human had set foot in it. It must have been a very long time, June thought, since this sweetwater was asked to do anything but be sweetwater. She let it play around her skin, listening to how she felt, to that wholeness she’d just felt on the walk here. In return, she listened to it—it was so eager to be heard. She let it fill her with its youthful mayhem, its sweet healing, its fretful certainty it had somewhere else to be. She wondered if there was a time when the water beneath the Avallon had ever felt like this, if they had taken something away from it by making it useful.

June, not Hoss.

I’d like to put you into the purchasing department, June, Mr. Francis had said. You and I both know you’re headed for staff captain, but I can’t transfer you right from direct mail. In purchasing, you’ll see how everything moves in this place from top to bottom. You’ll meet everyone. You’ll touch everything. I’m putting a lot of responsibility on you, though. It’d be hard to replace you. Do you intend to stay—

I’ll be at the Avallon forever, Mr. Francis.

“You should come over here,” she told Tucker. “I’m learning about last year’s snow.”

He did not come over there.

She said, “Look, I’m fine, more than fine. You don’t trust me?”

“You’re different.”

“What do you think will happen?”

Tucker said, “I think it’ll remember me.”

She weighed this sentence, decided it was not worth pressing him, and stood up, shaking her nearly numb hand out. By the time she was wiping it on her slacks, she saw that his fear had given over to something else: rueful admiration.

“So that’s why they’ll walk through fire for you,” he said.

“Through water, but point taken. Reckon so.”

It didn’t seem wise to navigate the overgrown road and bridge past dusk, so they returned to the limousine. Without a word, Tucker pulled open the passenger-side door and sat; June drove them back down the mountain. They went the same way they had started, in silence. A full, growing silence, one that filled every inch of the car.

By the time they arrived back in Constancy, the day had already given up and it was pitch-black, except, of course, for the Avallon, whose floodlights blazed through the trees at the top of the hill. June drove past the hotel to the dark train station a mile down the road. She pulled the Pierce-Arrow up to the benches and turned it off. She still felt like she was moving. It had gotten cold.

In the dark of the car, she heard a rustle. She knew what he was up to before he finished it, and she finished it for him, closing the distance between them. There was his mouth, wonderful as she’d expected, gentle and accommodating against hers. They had both done this before, with other people, so the only awkwardness was that they had never done it with each other. But that dissipated quickly; a good kiss erases doubt. He had a lovely, mannish smell to him this close, the sort of earthy-coffee-metal working man scent that colognes were always trying to capture and amplify, and she liked tasting him as much as looking at him. She touched his hair, his neck. His hands were awed on her neck, her breastbone, curious beneath the edge of her bra. They were as close as the front seat would allow; anything further would require more planning, more logical thought, more commitment. June considered it as he put her earlobe in his mouth. The youthful water was still running through her from earlier today, urging speed, exploration, wonder. She slid her hand in his jacket, testing herself for desire, finding it in spades. It felt so long since she had wanted something in such a delicious, thorough, uncomplicated way.

Tucker said, “Wait.”

He did not mean wait. He meant stop.

They stopped. They sat back in their seats. June put her hand on her throat and felt her heart racing beneath her palm. Her eyes had adjusted to the dim light, and she saw Tucker’s chest rising and falling. Wild to think she had ever thought it had gotten cold. Heat suffused every part of her.

After a space, he said, “My SAC handed me a resignation letter right before I came to the hotel. My name at the bottom. I didn’t write it.”

June rummaged in her mind for a response and found she didn’t have one at the ready. His confession described a world she had heard and read about but never experienced. A masculine circumstance. A military circumstance. Are you listening to me, soldier? circumstance. Head games and handshakes, obedience and obsequence. It was as far away from the Avallon as she could imagine, the opposite of luxury.

“Why?” she asked.

A faint, repetitive noise. He was running his middle finger across the dash over and over, left to right, left to right, left to right, left to right, trying to dispel the energy that they’d generated between them. He said, “We had new background checks after Pearl Harbor and they didn’t like what they found. If I prove myself invaluable here, they look the other way, because I’ve been there ten years. Longer than most. This is a way to make it right. What I did.”

June wasn’t sure if that was how right and wrong worked—it felt more like how blackmail worked—but she understood what he was really saying. He was telling her why this assignment was important to him. He was telling her that he used to be someone else. He was telling her that he would do anything to remain in the Bureau. He was telling her this was why he would not take her in the back seat and do something they might both regret later.

He was giving her a way to wait. To stop. And he was right. Of course he was right. The Avallon was just up the hill. What did she think they were going to do? At the top of that hill, she would turn back into the general manager of the Avallon and he would turn back into Special Agent Tucker Rye Minnick. She wasn’t going to go. He wasn’t going to stay. What had they even been doing?

“Ten years is a long time,” June said, cautiously, evenly, because she felt sweetwater rushing beneath her heart, and after this, she had to go back to the Avallon, which was always listening carefully to her. “Your whole life.”

He was absurdly grateful. “Yes. Exactly.”

“Can’t feel good to be accused of wrongdoing,” she said. “Not when you’ve been trying to do it for the right reasons all this time.”

“Exactly.”

“And you’ve invested so many years in this, it’s who you are.”

“Exactly.”

What she would do, she thought, was get the Lily House in order. She would finally move her belongings in there. She would stop waiting to be asked into the Gilfoyle family apartment instead. She’d set up new rules for the hotel now that Mr. Francis was gone, rules she could live with. It was time to stop fooling around and be grateful for what she had. She’d told Mr. Francis he should think about what the hotel needed, not what he wanted. She needed to think about where she’d invested ten years of her life.

“Is this the Bureau business you wanted to discuss?” she asked.

Tucker hesitated, mouth working.

“Sebastian Hepp was the one who gave the journalists the maids’ uniforms,” he said. Before she could consider how she felt about this information or why he might be telling her, he added, “I could arrest him. For assisting Nazis.”

Warmth became fiery heat. “What the devil!”

“I haven’t yet.”

“Yet! Sebastian? Do you know what that would do to the Grotto? Do you know what that would do to him? For the crime of what? For the crime of kindness. For the crime of gentleness in this world, when he could’ve been any kind of man and he chose to be one with pity. For the—”

“June,” he interrupted, and despite everything he had just said, she felt her own name in his voice send voltage through her. June, not Hoss, but it didn’t matter, because he belonged to the Bureau and she belonged to the Avallon. “June, stop. That’s what this is about. That’s why I asked to meet with you. I wanted to hear what you had to say.”

Now she was cold. Thoroughly cold, right to her spine, her fingers squeezed into her lap to warm them. Tucker opened his door. The smell of woodsmoke and wet earth came in.

“What are you doing?”

“I heard what you had to say,” he said. “Now I’m walking back. Good night, Miss Hudson.”

• • •

THAT NIGHT, quite late, when she got ready for bed, she got ready to draw a glass of sweetwater from her kitchen sink as the dachshunds watched her anxiously. Then, for the first time, she backed away from the tap without touching it.

She didn’t want this feeling anywhere near the Avallon.

Chapter Twenty-One

Hannelore was quite afraid of Sandy, which meant, of course, that she could not stay away from him. It was not unlike the mountain lion font on her balcony. She did not want to be near it, in case it moved. She did not want to turn her back on it, in case it moved. And deep inside, she could not tell if she was terribly afraid, or terribly intrigued.

Citizen kept trying to get Sandy to pet him. Surely a dog would know if Sandy Gilfoyle was something fearful?

When Hannelore was not in the school held in the third-floor mezzanine (14,400 seconds) or taking piano lessons from Frau Hof (3,600 seconds) or eating meals in the Magnolia Room (2,750 seconds) or searching for snails, she hunted through the hotel until she discovered where he was in that moment. He did not move on his own, of course. He only got from one place to another when his caretaker, Stella, pushed him in his wooden wheelchair, which he never left. Sometimes Stella took him on walks, talking to him sweetly and foolishly the entire time, as if he were a little dog. Sometimes, on nice days (there were more and more of these), Stella read to him on one of the verandas or balconies. Stella read slowly, and the books she chose were very babyish, in Hannelore’s opinion. She read him Mr. Popper’s Penguins more than once.

Most people did not seem interested in him. The staff glanced at him when he entered a room, but unlike Hannelore, who only found him more fascinating the longer he was here, they found him less notable as time went on. The diplomats spared him slightly more attention, but mostly in their exaggerated attempts to appear that they were not giving him attention. They politely averted their eyes from him when Stella navigated him through crowded places. Apart from Stella, the only person who gave him consideration with any regularity was June Hudson, the woman who Hannelore now knew managed the entire hotel.

June Hudson always gave Sandy a full nod when she passed him and Stella in the halls, despite the fact he never returned it, and at least once a day, she talked to him. Sometimes for twenty minutes, sometimes for just a minute.

But other than that, he was mostly left alone. Stella would often push the wheelchair next to a window, pat his shoulder, tell him to have a good day, and wander off.

These were the best times.

Because then Hannelore could creep around Sandy, studying him. At first, she didn’t get close. She hid behind chairs or pressed against the molding or crouched in the mouth of a fireplace to peer at the back of his tousled hair. But as the days went by, she grew bold enough to face him. Eye to eye. His face was frozen in vague distress. When he blinked, slowly and not often, she spooked before returning.

He was so terribly wrong. What had made him this way? Had he been frozen by some horrible witch? Had he gotten ill? Could this happen to anyone? Was this what happened to the mountain lion? Could Hannelore wake up one day to find herself trapped in a chair, too?

It was awful; she could not stay away.

Today, Hannelore had Sandy Gilfoyle to herself in the Portrait Gallery.

The gallery was a very dull room for children, as it only contained four things: sofas, potted plants, mirrors, and dozens of portraits hung on the deep-blue walls. But it had a good view, or so Stella cooed at Sandy Gilfoyle as she parked him by the window, patted his shoulder, and left him there. It was another relentlessly gray day, springlike but not proper spring, with rain pouring endlessly outside, turning the soaked landscape deep green, purple, black.

Hannelore crouched behind one of the sofas to stare at him. She could see his face in full in one of the mirrors hanging on the other side of him.

Her heart was already racing a little.

Footsteps entering the Portrait Gallery made her startle. But the fear soon resolved when she heard voices, speaking in German. “—not as simple as that. Oh—there’s someone here already.”

“It’s only the son,” said the other, and she realized it was her father’s voice. They moved further into view in the mirror; Hannelore shrank back so that she would be hidden from them. It was Lothar Liebe, Dr. Otto, and her father. They all had drinks in hand, except for slender, dark Lothar Liebe, who had a cigarette.

“Should we find another room?”

Dr. Otto pointed at Citizen putting his paws on Sandy’s knees; the young man didn’t move, and eventually the terrier gave up. “The other day, in the arcade, I saw that colored agent spill coffee on him. He didn’t even bat an eyelid! He’s a cabbage. Let him have his view.”

They all sat, the sofas creaking and sighing, and continued the conversation they’d been having, which was intensely dull. After a few moments, staff came to deliver drinks and light refreshments. When the plates clinked against the tables, Hannelore’s stomach growled, much to her horror. To her relief, the waitstaff’s footsteps covered the sound.

Once the staff had gone, Dr. Otto said, “I did not think I could be so bored as I have been here. We have been here long enough for me to become a drunk and then grow bored of drinking and sober up. I feel like that man right there.” He must have been indicating one of the portraits Hannelore could not see from her position. “I have slept with a different woman every night. And I think I’ve come to the end of my choices; I will have to circle back around to start at the beginning again.”

“Begin on the men,” suggested Friedrich.

They all laughed; Hannelore’s cheeks burned ferociously. Sandy stared out the window. For the first time, she noticed three live snails beneath the sofa, moving slowly, one after another, antennae waving.

Lothar Liebe smoked energetically and replied, “Negotiations are nearly done. Lieselotte Berger is coming with us, so there is nothing else to talk about.”

“How do you know?” Dr. Otto asked.

“How does Lothar know anything?” her father replied. “Better not to ask. Lothar, how dangerous will the journey to Portugal be, do we think?”

“It should be marked as a neutral diplomatic craft, so we’ll be as safe as one can be right now,” Lothar said. “How well can you swim?”

This reminded the men of some previous posting, and they fell into reminiscing, as Hannelore’s legs cramped from crouching. She glanced in the mirror. Sandy Gilfoyle still gazed vaguely toward the rain. Citizen wasn’t afraid of him, she thought. She wanted to believe the terrier had secret knowledge about good and evil, but she also knew that he’d vomited the day before after eating trash from the suite’s wastebasket.

“How is Sabine doing?” Lothar asked Friedrich. “Has she stopped fretting about Hannelore?”

Hannelore froze as still as Sandy. No one answered. Had she imagined the question? Or had she missed the answer? The silence felt heavy as custard.

“I think that was a misunderstanding of the situation,” Friedrich said, his voice strange. Squished. “Hannelore just doesn’t do well with change, as you have seen, and she’s hoping to spare her if she can.”

“Surely being separated from her parents would be the biggest change Hannelore could be asked to endure,” Lothar said. “Come now, Wolfman, do not let your wife work you over. I made inquiries. They feel she’s a good candidate for sterilization and, possibly, some mild conditioning. You don’t have to worry.”

Hannelore squeezed tightly against the floor. The conversation made her feel the same way she did when the children from her hate list surrounded her with their impenetrable chatter.

“Friedrich,” Lothar said, when her father had not answered.

Dr. Otto spoke up. “Friedrich, that is a part of her life she is unlikely to even notice missing.”

“Precisely,” Lothar said. “Please don’t ask me to divide my loyalties further.”

“I wouldn’t want to make life difficult for you, a childless, single cad with an ermine’s heart,” snapped her father, sounding so unlike himself that Hannelore would not have thought it him speaking.

“Come here, Friedrich. Look at my face, toast my glass. Do not let this war come between us.”

Glasses chimed against each other. “I’m sorry.”

“I know you are. Now tell me what the meaning of her song is.”

“Scheibenkleister, Lothar! That’s for Germany.”

Humor had entered Lothar’s voice. “So she is going back to Germany, then.”

It had not entered her father’s. “Lothar, I will strike you.”

“Something I have dreamed about for years,” observed Dr. Otto, lightening the mood.

They fell back into political conversation, but she was not focused on their words. She was thinking about returning to Germany. She was thinking about her mother’s hand on her wrist. She was thinking about sterilization.

The men were leaving. Shuffling and chuckling, clanking tumblers against one another on tables, leaving their cigarettes pushed into the trays. She hadn’t realized how noisy they’d been, but the Portrait Gallery seemed very quiet after they had gone. She could hear the rain pouring outside again.

It was just her and Sandy Gilfoyle.

She waited another short stretch of time (65 seconds) to be safe, and then she stood. She watched the back of Sandy’s head in real life and the front of his head in the mirror as she backed out of the room, feeling her way around the sofa. She made it to the door, which the men had shut behind them. Without taking her eyes off Sandy, she felt for the knob. On the other side of the doorway was the hall and safety.

Instead of finding the knob, however, what she felt was wet.

She had put her hands into the animal-headed font beside the door. The shock of the sensation made her ears hiss. It was inside her, everything being said in the hotel, all at once; she could feel the location of every snail all over the building and grounds and even in a place she could clearly see in her mind: a hot spring and a cold spring emerging an arm’s width apart, the space between covered with green, green, green moss and crawling with beautiful, multicolored snails.

Sterilization, she thought again.

The water filled her with a sensation. But this time, it was not joy or calm.

It was run.

Hannelore staggered. As she did, her attention was snagged by movement. She saw it as if in slow motion: outside the window, a dark shape plummeted from somewhere above to somewhere below. It was large. At first, she thought it was a part of the roof. Then she thought it was a piece of clothing. Then, no, she realized that it was flesh and bones, it was moving. An animal.

Then she realized it was a woman.

A woman was falling past the window.

Hannelore saw her face for one clear moment. Her eyes were blue.

And then Hannelore began to scream, because Sandy Gilfoyle turned his head.

Chapter Twenty-Two

Is she dead?”

“Heavens,” Pennybacker said. He crumpled his face in his hands. “Heavens. How has it come to this?”

“Mr. Pennybacker,” said June. “Is she dead?”

The State Department man was folded in one of the deeply padded leather armchairs in the Isley Library, the smallest and most personal of the libraries. Behind his rumpled form was a backdrop of Sandy’s language titles, his endless dictionaries, primers, texts in the original, texts with annotated notes, books, bücher, könyveket, hon, knigi, libri. The arm of the chair he sat in still had an ugly dark stain where Sandy had accidentally notated right off the edge of a page onto the leather, and then made it worse by rubbing at it.

“I had no idea this was possible, or I would have . . . I don’t know what I would have done,” Pennybacker said. “No, she’s not dead. Not yet, anyway. She has broken a leg and a collarbone and something else that I cannot remember right now, but she was conscious, last I heard. The doctors could not believe she had fallen so far and survived. Are you certain which floor she jumped from?”

June said, “The fourth.”

From the balcony her room had shared with the Wolfes’ suite to the bushes in front of the tearoom. The same distance that the rotten balcony rung had fallen. That was how far Lieselotte Berger, twenty-eight-year-old German journalist with scars on her face, had plunged that day.

“She had just learned she had to return to Germany after all,” Pennybacker said. “No, that is the coward’s way of putting it. I had just told her she had to return. That the State Department could not accommodate her request to stay. And then she went up there and . . .”

It was too raw to even look at full-on, but June could not prevent herself from glimpsing the edges. Lieselotte Berger sitting on the floor of the garage in a grubby maid’s uniform, her hair mussed, three buffoons in stolen dresses. The Irishman listing all the ways they could die in Germany.

“Is this because of Hannelore?” June asked.

“No, no, Miss Hudson. Hannelore is another problem for my devil’s math, yes, but it is nothing to do with her. I was already failing to persuade the Americans to keep Miss Berger. This is how they see it: she spent a year publishing demoralizing little pieces with massaged facts. She claims she was blackmailed; there is no proof. Without it, she is just a young woman willing to send facts about America’s war machine back to press folks in Germany whose nasty motives are not at all in doubt.”

He paused as the door opened. Through it came Sandy Gilfoyle in his wheelchair, pushed by Tucker, accompanied by Hugh Calloway. For a moment, a trick of the bright spring sunlight seemed to reveal Sandy finally meeting her gaze, but even as her heart surged, she realized it had only been a wishful illusion. The scars on his cheeks looked a little better than before, though, reminding her of Lieselotte Berger’s symmetrically marred face.

The look June and Tucker exchanged was carefully professional, unfreighted. How miserable to see him in the unsparing light of the day after and realize she didn’t regret their intimacy, but rather, the opposite. Spending the day with him had erased everything she hadn’t liked about his features. She did not want just him; she wanted the person she was with him. All previous desires seemed naïve. Abbreviated. Reactive.

Wait, he said. Stop.

Pennybacker waited until Hugh closed the door and then finished telling June, “To me, it seemed less likely she was a sophisticated agent of Nazi Germany and more likely a young woman who made several bad decisions at a very bad time to make bad decisions. But unfortunately for her, she is more useful to the United States as a bargaining chip. One particular American civilian detained with our diplomats would have to stay in Germany if she stays here, and the State Department is far more worried about his safety than Miss Berger’s.”

This devilish math. Lieselotte for this other American citizen. Sebastian for Tucker’s career. All the times June had sat in this library, listening to Sandy try out pronunciation on her, not knowing that she was headed toward a future with him wheelchair-bound and silent before all his words, while she received this report on the misery bubbling inside her hotel.

“Agent Minnick, do you have news of her condition?” Pennybacker asked.

“She has a contingent of Border Patrol agents with her at the hospital in Malden,” Tucker replied. “They decided not to move her to Charleston. For our part, we have finished our search of the suite and although we do not suspect any foul play, I think it would be better if the Wolfes, who share the balcony, could be moved to another room.”

“We can find room on a different floor,” June said. She was going to have to go back to the Avallon IV again, wasn’t she? She had not tested the waters for their reaction to Lieselotte’s misery, but it wasn’t difficult to anticipate. What happiness could she offer? She supposed she could show it that walk down Casto Springs’ main street. She didn’t want to give the feeling away, but a woman had just tried to kill herself.

Most people can’t tell the water’s about to turn, Mr. Francis said. That’s what makes us different. We can. That means we can stop it. We can keep it pleasant forever. You know, June, before you, it was a little lonely, being the only one.

“Please let us know where you move them so we can document everything,” Tucker said. It was too formal; too correct. This time, when he glanced at June, she saw Hugh intercept the moment with interest.

“The Bureau and its memos!” Pennybacker said. “Agent Minnick, why don’t you put Mr. Gilfoyle at the window? You have him facing this shelf, which I’m sure is boring him to tears.”

He was trying to be kind, but June heard herself say, “They are his books.”

“Are they really!” Pennybacker rose to stand next to Sandy, politely tilting his head to scan the spines. Always sensitive, he could tell he’d blundered. “Did he read all these languages?”

“Does he,” June corrected. For some reason, her cheeks went warm. There was no reason to be freshly upset about Sandy, and yet. As one of the dachshunds nudged her hand, words continued to pour from her unbidden. “He speaks them, too. He always wanted to understand everything. Everyone. He wanted the real meaning, the intended one. We have so many people from all over the world here. He thought it right silly that we made them translate their thoughts into English for us. He told me he wanted people to just be themselves with him, let him do the translating.”

Saying it out loud made her realize that it was just another form of luxury. For all that Sandy had butted heads with Mr. Francis, they did have that core in common. They hadn’t talked about his father at all, the last time she saw Sandy in person, nearly a year before. He’d shown up alone, not to see the Avallon, but her. They’d chattered nonstop in the kitchen of her basement apartment, the staff canteen, her office, the prep rooms outside the Grotto. Sandy knew what the job entailed; he fit himself into the shape of her spare moments. They had talked about Robert Prager, the war, why sacrifice for the sake of sacrifice wasn’t noble at all. But they’d also talked about silly things, relating hilarious tales from her life as a general manager and his life translating and training in the navy. Mr. Francis’s death had still been in the future—plenty of time for them to reconcile—so there was no need to rehash old arguments about whether his version of hospitality was an outdated one. The rekindling of her affair with Gilfoyle was in the future, too, so no need for Sandy to say, Goon, you know how he is, why are you doing this to yourself? They’d just prattled on about everything and nothing long into the night, and then he’d kissed her cheek and set off to do good in the world. She loved all the Gilfoyles very much, but she liked Sandy the best. What a funny thought to have.

How frustrated Mr. Francis had been with him, at the end.

Sandy hears the water, Mr. Francis.

I know. He hears, but he refuses to listen.

The sweetwater was the only language Sandy never tried to learn.

“Very impressive,” Pennybacker said, and sounded like he meant it. “Did he plan to use it here in the hotel?”

“No,” June said. There was so much more that she could say—that she wanted to say—but she was in control of her words again now. She could feel Tucker looking at her. She would not look back. She was only barely maintaining her veneer as it was; if she looked right at him now, she would be June, not Hoss. “He wanted to do more in the world.”

What do you do here, June? Sandy had asked her. What do all these people do here?

We make a few folks very, very happy, she replied.

Is that enough these days?

It had been.

Hugh broke in, kindly. “He did.”

Incredible, June thought, that Toad spent every day with this feeling inside herself, that she came to work each day and cleaned rooms after Pearl Harbor, with her son dead and her husband gone. Incredible that the war had not taken her body and soul in a world where a German U-boat had just drowned two dozen men within sight of the Massachusetts shore. Where Pennybacker was negotiating to save Hannelore Wolfe from possible euthanasia, where Sandy just stared at all the books he used to read aloud, where journalists murmured that everyone knew what they were saying about Francis Gilfoyle. Where Tucker Rye Minnick did his business, she did her business. Keep the old chin up. Keep the old chin up. Keep the old chin up.

For a moment, June thought she hated it. Everything about this job, this hotel. She remembered that sweet, free water beneath the church at Casto Springs, and for a moment, she felt a howling miserable envy, so violently strong that she wondered at how long it must have been inside her, unspoken, unacknowledged.

“Hertha,” June said. “I want to find Hertha.”

Pennybacker asked, “What is Hertha? Why do I know this word?”

“Erich von Limburg-Stirum’s fiancée. The pilot.”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes, I’m sorry. My mind is not in the right place. I had already brought his situation to the State Department’s attention before. They haven’t found her; she is one woman in a land of women.”

“I don’t believe that,” June said. “Not when I’ve got the Bureau in my walls. You jaspers have files on everyone. If it was a priority, you’d have Hertha here, between the State Department, the FBI, whatever other men in suits you have at your disposal to swarm—”

Pennybacker interrupted, “Hold up, hold up. Miss Hudson, why the urgency? Does this have something to do with Miss Berger? Has something happened to Mr. von Limburg-Stirum?”

Something had happened to June Hudson. Something had happened and it was time for these diplomats to be out of her hotel; it was time for them all to get as far away from the sweetwater as quickly as possible. Diplomats, Border Patrol agents, and Tucker Rye Minnick. She could feel the Avallon slipping away.

“Hertha’s German,” June said. “That’s what Erich tells me. German citizen. Erich says she was in New York. I have hotel contacts up there, too. We can find her. If she agrees to go back with him, then your wretched math is satisfied, isn’t it? And Hannelore is taken care of? Hertha is one more German going, so one more German can stay: Hannelore. Then we’re all done here, yes?”

Pennybacker peered at her for a long moment, as if she had spoken in a language he had only a fleeting knowledge of, and then he said, “It would be a very neat solution, if she can be found. Yes, I think things could happen very quickly if that was the case. It would be nice to give someone some satisfaction.”

There had been a time when every guest at the Avallon got satisfaction.

June turned to go, then stopped herself. “Wait . . . what were you going to say about the Swiss? Forever ago, you told me you had something to say about them.”

“Oh. That,” Pennybacker said. “I decided it was not mine to give away.”

There was a time when she would’ve pressed on this; the granular details of his uncertainty would have felt enormously important. She would have devoted an entire day’s work, an entire department’s staff, to discovering the small unhappiness and then solving it. But today she felt as wrung out as if she’d only just crawled out of Avallon IV.

She did not want to go back into the Avallon IV. She would not go back into the Avallon IV.

“Let’s get to work,” Pennybacker said. “I think we’ve more than overstayed our welcome.”

Part Four

OUT

ORDER, ROOM 411, 4/01/1942:

New York Times

Vogue

Britannia and Eve

Modes & Travaux

2 lemons

2 croissants

Pied Piper, Nevil Shute

The Japanese Enemy, Hugh Byas

The Moon Is Down, John Steinbeck

Chapter Twenty-Three

As June had expected, it took only a few days to track Hertha using the combined efforts of the State Department, the FBI, and June’s hotel contacts. She was working as a secretary, living in a nest of other secretaries in Glendale in Queens. A very small part of June was worried that Hertha would see reason and decline to join her fiancé in wartime Germany, but she needn’t have worried. Just as Erich had been pining in the hotel, she had been pining in New York, twisting in agony that she had been abandoned.

“The State Department is very happy,” Pennybacker told June. “Especially since they want to get married posthaste. It’s very tidy.”

“Wonderful,” June said. Pennybacker had forgotten to turn over a memo when she entered the Glass Room; she could see a report that Lieselotte Berger was alive, expected to survive, still unwelcome in America. “A wife. How’s your wife, by the way?”

“Funny you should ask,” Pennybacker said. He tried to pet one of the dachshunds; it evaded him. “I didn’t reply to the first letter, but she sent me another anyway.”

“I just can’t fathom that.”

“I found it less satisfactory than the last one. The contents were mainly a compilation of specific instances I fell short of her expectations. Highly detailed. She has always had a very sharp memory. If I were to describe the letter, I think I would call it an uncomfortable portrait of an unathletic career man.”

“Don’t you answer. Wait for the third letter,” June said. “That’ll be the one you frame.”

Hertha arrived at the hotel flanked by enough Border Patrol agents to carry her; she had dropped everything as soon as she got news of her pilot. Young Erich dressed in his finest to meet her in the lobby, and a not-insignificant number of legation and staff members (including Fortéscue) hung over the balcony to watch their reunion, in addition to Tucker, Hugh, and Pony, there to search her bags for listening devices, bombs, and any other wartime wedding gifts.

“Erich,” Hertha said, taking off her hat. “Do you recognize me?”

Erich von Limburg-Stirum was bright as the sun; his cheeks glowed.

He said, “Of course I remember what heaven looks like.”

“Gentlemen,” said Basil Pemberton, behind the counter, in his plummy voice, “that’s simply how it’s done.”

Wedding discussions were already underway; now that Pennybacker’s hostage math was better satisfied, repatriation was surely just around the corner. Who knew what fate would befall an excellent pilot once his boots were on German ground? Fiancées had no rights; wives did. June learned that Erich and Hertha’s ceremony was to be a short, brutish affair: guards would escort the anticipatory couple down the drive to the Constancy town hall to be joined in civic matrimony, then return them to the hotel after a cursory search to make certain they had not received any illegal communications during the process of becoming husband and wife.

June went to 411 to ask her for magic.

“I would like to plan your wedding,” 411 told June. “It would be daffodils, of course, and lily of the valley. A two-story trellis behind you, covered with blossoms and ivy. Nothing but harps and flutes; you’d be a mountain princess; men would weep that they hadn’t thought to ask you first.”

June sat against the doorjamb as she had so often, listening to the trickle of sweetwater in the fonts, thinking about how Lieselotte Berger had jumped from the window just a few rooms down. She was thinking about how, that morning, she had seen the harpsichordist sit at the piano in the lobby to play an effortless, merry tune, and had realized that he, at least, had become happy, which meant that he had not been when he arrived. His face had been incandescent. “I’m never getting married.”

“You’re very dull when you’re like this,” 411 said.

“You’re very dull when you’re like this.”

“I’m always like this. When will these diplomats leave so that I can have something real to do again?”

June was about to tell her there’s a war on, what sort of events do you think we’ll be throwing? But she realized even as she did that 411 wouldn’t believe her. People had been dying in the streets during the Depression while June spent the Gilfoyles’ money on new bedside lamps for the suites. It had seemed so important to be a beacon of happiness, to prove joy could still exist in that joyless time. Truth be told, June still thought it had been important back then. She just couldn’t find it in her to think it was important now.

“Did you ever wonder what the hotel would have been like if Sandy had taken it?” June asked.

“Sandy is the dullest of the family,” 411 replied. “It would probably be an airstrip or a dairy farm.”

“That’s not what he’s like.”

“He once knocked on my door, did you know? He said, ‘I just want to see what kind of a woman you are.’”

“What kind of woman are you?”

“The kind who did not open the door. Now, look, how long are you going to be like this?”

Earlier that day, June had seen Sabine speaking softly to Hannelore in the shopping arcade as the girl peered blankly at other shoppers in her owlish way, and she had thought about how terrible it was that the happiest ending the Avallon could arrange for them was to be separated. June always spoke about her own abandonment in cavalier terms, but deep down, she knew that overcoming adversity successfully wasn’t the same as being unaffected by it. It had made her unnimble, hadn’t it? All these years, she had thought she was content, but now she realized she had been complacent, which was not the same at all. And now that she had felt the difference, she could not remember how long it had been since she had been happy. Incandescent.

“Good heavens,” 411 said, after June didn’t reply. “Go away and don’t come back until you can better please me.”

• • •

THE DAY OF ERICH and Hertha’s wedding was a very pretty one, with the daffodils 411 had longed for emerging all along the drive and right into the still leafless forest. The caravan headed down to Constancy as planned: two house Cadillacs, one carrying Erich and half of the string quartet, the other carrying Hertha and the other half of the string quartet, two black federal cars escorting. The third house Cadillac, dressed in flowers, hung back in order to be a heartening reveal after the civil service.

It all went off as planned, and June thought the couple looked happy and durable by the time they sprang from the decorated house Cadillac. Violins shrilled Handel beautifully as the two strode down a path lined with dozens of multicolored strips of silk and dozens of neatly uniformed staff members. Staff snatched each silk strand out of the way just before the couple’s feet touched it, letting fabric flutter down behind them. The effect was as if the couple pushed through an undulating, waterlike tunnel to the hotel—411 had promised it would be magical. It was, of course.

Inside, Erich, comely in the suit altered by the hotel’s tailor, told June, “I am very grateful.”

“Thank you for everything, Miss Hudson,” Hertha said. “I made you a little card.”

June opened it, read: The Avallon is proof the world is still worth fighting for. Xoxo Mr. and Mrs. von Limburg-Stirum. A boyish hand had drawn a wobbly paper airplane.

It would go in the drawer with the others.

Erich counted off on his fingers, three nice things to say to his host. “The ride down was very smooth; everyone was on time; the paperwork was straightforward.”

Pony and Hugh stepped in behind them. Both the agents looked a bit worn-through, but Hugh put some real warmth in his voice as he told Hertha, “You’ve got a good, loyal man, Mrs. von Limburg-Stirum.”

“We should know,” added Pony. “He’s been under surveillance for weeks.”

This was what passed for romance at the Avallon now, June supposed.

Now that the couple was back on the Avallon’s turf, the reception expanded to include the rest of the diplomats. 411 had insisted the event take place on the lawn beside the children’s playhouse. The playhouse was a fanciful centerpiece, a folly the size of most houses in Constancy, designed with the silly, cartoonish properties of a dollhouse. The walls were butter yellow, the ceilings in periwinkle blue, the floors laid in Alice-in-Wonderland mismatched tile. Levers, wheels, and buttons jutted in each room; when operated, each would flip open secret panels, reveal walls of toy cubbies, or unfold a slide from the second-floor loft to the exterior. Even the landscaping was a childish wonder. Bushes trimmed into animals and pom-poms, flowers tipping from planters held by carved fauns, a sweetwater fountain spilling on brilliantly colored tile for warm-weather splashing.

The playhouse’s entire north wall opened up like the cover of a book, revealing a stage, and it was there that the Avallon’s chamber orchestra played now. It was there, too, that guests could participate in the complicated games 411 had devised for the partygoers, including a scavenger hunt that required one to get the middle names from as many people as possible; she had always been good at invisible party tricks designed to generate real conversation.

Everyone was masked.

This element in particular revealed 411’s touch. The youngest of the children were set at a mask-making station, crafting funny, horrifying, charming, innocent paper creations that staff members helped tie onto each arrival. The masks did not completely erase their wearers’ identities, of course, but the feeling of being masked was unmistakable. Everyone’s expression was hidden so they could dance while Lieselotte Berger convalesced and war raged.

The children gave June a mask with a childish yelling face drawn upon it. Yes, she thought. This was right. Ordinarily, the staff would have immediately sensed her in their peripheral vision. She would have heard Hoss more than once, and she would have felt someone reaching out to tap their fingers against hers. But instead she and the dachshunds made it all the way to the playhouse without so much as a whisper. In the main room of the playhouse, where the legation children giggled and played with the house’s delights, a man wearing a multicolored mask approached her. The mask’s grin was enormous, lopsided, and drawn in green, blue, and purple. The voice behind it said, “General Manager?”

June’s breath was hot against her face behind her own mask. “Agent.”

Without another word, she turned; Tucker followed. She led him to an unoccupied warm yellow hallway, where she knelt to press on a slightly raised carved snail on the baseboard. A door barely wide enough to admit her popped open in the wallpaper. Behind it were narrow, tall stairs, barely better than a ladder, each riser painted with a stars, flowers, vines, suns.

“Stay here,” she told the dachshunds. “There ain’t room for you.”

Turning sideways, June and Tucker climbed, resting palms on the stairs above to balance themselves, eventually reaching a very small room with a window on each side and walls entirely covered with colorfully painted little drawers. At one time, the floor had been painted, too, but it was now mostly scuffed to bare wood.

“Do you know where we are?” June asked.

“The cupola?” Tucker guessed. “Beneath the weathervane. What’s in these drawers?”

She tugged one open to show him the contents: a small carved bear wearing galoshes. She opened another: a witch holding a broom. Another: a frog with a crown. Toys. Totems. Pocket-sized whimsies.

Tucker pulled open a drawer: a dachshund wearing a plaid jacket.

June pulled another: a knight with a frowning face.

For several minutes, there was silence except for the small scraping of drawers opening and closing.

Then Tucker said, “I flooded the mine. That was what the background check turned up.”

June took off her mask. He didn’t. She felt him studying her face behind the safety of his cartoonish grin, his expression hidden. Nothing in her Avallon experience had trained her for what to do in this moment, so she just did what she would have done before the hotel: listened.

Voice flat, Tucker told the story:

Tucker is sixteen.

His father works in the mines. It’s a typical tale. They begin in a cabin in the holler but migrate to the company town as the mines require their workers to live where they can keep tabs on them—and most important, where they can’t keep a garden, because workers who have easy years in the holler don’t come back to the mines. His father’s skin is always dark with coal, no matter how hard he scrubs. So are the floors and windowsills of their company house. From his father’s friends and his sisters’ husbands, Tucker learns all the ways people can die: explosions, gas leaks, water leaks, tunnel collapses, lungs giving way after years of dust. The miners have names for the different kinds of noxious gases that can kill miners. Stinkdamp. Firedamp. Whitedamp. Blackdamp. Accidents take out one, two, forty, sixty miners at a time, sometimes immediately, sometimes after being trapped for days.

There are little insults, too. Crushed hands, crushed feet. Mine bosses shorting the weight of coal carts to pay less. Immediate evictions of widows after accidents, of miners suspected of union activity. Corruption, intimidation, casual brutality. A sense of expendability, inevitability. There are always more men willing to go into the ground.

Where was I? In the playhouse, in the now, Tucker had gotten lost in his own past.

You were sixteen. June prompted gently.

I was sixteen.

As the roaring twenties get underway, the mine wars begin. Thousands of men, Tucker’s father among them, rise against the corrupt Baldwin-Felts detectives and local law enforcement, so many that the government sends in the military, with air support.

But this is not where Tucker’s story ends. Perhaps it would have been cleaner if Tucker’s father had been killed at the Battle of Matewan or the Battle of Blair Mountain. But what happens is that one million rounds of ammunition are exchanged, the full might of the US government presses ten thousand miners back to work, and the unions dissipate. Tucker’s father goes back to work like the rest. A month later, a tunnel collapses and he’s killed in a place glory can’t see. Tucker chokes on the injustice. Blair Mountain was supposed to have changed something. When people saw what was wrong and right, they were supposed to choose right.

Where was I?

You were sixteen.

I was sixteen.

All week after his father’s death, Tucker doesn’t sleep. The mine collapse has started to turn the sweetwater, and now it whispers an idea to him, one he can’t seem to put down. The idea is this: Tucker can flood the mine. He knows it is probably death. But he can’t put it down—heartbroken, flogged to madness by the unfairness, the injustice, can’t stop thinking about it. He does not want to die, but what if he did? Hundreds died at Blair Mountain. For his father to come back and go to work just as he had before, and for it to kill him, as he knew it would. If Tucker floods the mine, he takes something that mattered from the coal companies. He would be a symbol, like Sid Hatfield. It is a dreadful idea, it is an immortal idea. It feels wrong, but everything already feels wrong.

The night he gets up to do it is a full moon. He wants the company to pay. He wants people to do the right thing. He wants someone else to do this for him. There is no one else. At the mine, he scratches himself several times to work himself up, to get himself into a stage of feral power. He feels coal dust settling into the lines of the wounds, but he doesn’t expect it much matters. He has left a note for his mother on the kitchen table: Do not cry for me, Mother, I do this for them, I lived a good life.

Tucker wears his father’s equipment as he descends into the mine. He has been to the mines before; he was taking a look at his own future. His father’s equipment is a familiar armor against the dark. For a time, as he navigates to where he knows he will need to blast, he feels quite powerful. He is a lone hero, he will be regaled in the town below, he is doing what other people were afraid to do. But by the time he gets to the tunnel’s end, tears run silently down his face. They do not stop as he tests the wall to be certain it is the one that lies the closest to the river. Nor as he sets the explosives. Nor as he runs, suddenly understanding, hideously, that first of all, he will not survive, and secondly, that this is a mistake, a terrible mistake, what he wanted was not to die but to have his father—

Tucker remembers the rocks falling, the blast of wind knocking him from his feet, the lantern going black. He remembers making it to the ladder, then the flood reaching him before he got far. He remembers when the air started being water.

The following morning, before dawn, Tucker is found far, far downstream, among the rocks and the snails and the wreckage of Casto Springs. The mine is done for. The sweetwater has turned, so Casto Springs is done for, too, the buildings soaked through with Tucker’s ugly feelings, snails thick on the ground. Everyone who can leave has gone already, and the rest will follow soon. But the mine company hasn’t yet found out they’ve lost it all. Tucker has not yet been arrested, tried, found guilty, has not yet spent the rest of his life paying for this night, but it is coming. He is not good at lying; he’s only ever managed the one, really.

What was the one lie?

I’m getting there. Where was I?

They had just found you. You were sixteen.

I was sixteen.

The thing was, Tucker had always been an easy boy for adults to like. A boy made to break the hearts of those who could not be as idealistic. And how he breaks them that morning, when the older men realize who he is and what he did. And then the wives and the sisters and the mothers find out—it does not take any time at all for them to fashion a scheme. He has a cousin, see, Tucker Rye Minnick, who died several years earlier in the holler. Who knew he died? No one. The holler keeps its business to itself. And he is close enough in age to pass. No reason for the brave, stupid boy to lose his father and his future at once, not when he was just trying to do the right thing. A handful of dollars from the sale of the property closest to the famous Golden Delicious apple tree funds his flight from the state, and the transformation is complete.

He entered the mines as Richard Monrow Minnick. He left them as Tucker Rye Minnick. Richard Monrow Minnick died to fight injustice. Tucker Rye Minnick lived to fight it.

“Where was I?” Tucker asked, dazed.

Outside, the chamber orchestra sprang into a piece by Saint-Saëns. From here, June could see the grizzled Swiss conductor standing by the orchestra, his expression hidden behind a weeping red face, his knuckles pressed to his paper lips. The harpsichordist was beside him in a nervous green mask with a sketched bushy beard. His fingers brushed the conductor’s other hand.

June took off Tucker’s mask. “Here.”

At once they came together again. It did not matter that he had said he was trying hard to stay in the Bureau; it did not matter that she thought she had chosen the hotel. The kiss in the car—it was as if there had been no break at all between now and then; it had merely been preamble for this moment, instead. They could skip over all of that and go straight to her blouse on the floor, his tie hung on a drawer knob, his service weapon set on the floor beside the stairs. She freed him from his suspenders, tugged his shirt free of his waistband, and let her hands linger on his spine, his shoulder blades, not comparing him to Gilfoyle, but nonetheless considering all the ways he was not like him. Gilfoyle, soft and practiced, tricksy, like a wizard. Tucker, muscled and straightforward, precise, like an engineer. She pressed her cheek against his neck, next to his coal tattoo, and he pressed his cheek into her hair; such closeness, such indulgence. Tucker had run his hand down her belly and between her legs and now he let her hang upon him, gasping. Time was elongated and compressed, she both lingered in each warm second, color exploding in her vision, and urgently longed to surge forward. She pressed a hand on the front of his trousers and he said, very simply, “Ah—”

They froze.

There was something—

He blinked at her; she blinked at him, but neither of them were really looking at each other.

Both were tense with focus, listening.

The timbre of the party outside had changed. Out the window, June and Tucker both watched a vehicle wind past the festivities. Recognizable, even at this distance, in this state: endless yards of cream and chrome, an elegant and delectable Auburn sports car.

Edgar Gilfoyle had returned.

Chapter Twenty-Four

The first time Edgar Gilfoyle told June he loved her was in the Lily House.

Edgar Gilfoyle: playfellow, playboy. After pulling Sandy from the well, June had first been invited to dinner with the Gilfoyle family, then to play board games in the apartment, to take lessons with the other siblings, to accompany them to plays, to films, to other hotels on holiday, to be one of them. How she loved them all. The rest of them as family; Edgar as something else, always something else, even back then. It was in the Avallon III that Edgar first kissed her, after months of going mad with accidental and then purposeful touches in halls, under tables, in the pool. Then she kissed him again in the Conservatory, and he kissed her again in the service elevator down to the Grotto. They played cards with the rest of the family at the coffee table, their knees pressed together beneath it, waiting for night to fall and for everyone to go to bed so that they could meet in the Tower, a solitary one-room folly that rose an additional story from the apartment. They spent every moment together, him reading or knocking a croquet ball or winnet around, her studying her notes or beating him at croquet or Winnet. I think about you all the time. Then he went away to boarding school and June became enmeshed in her apprenticeship with Mr. Francis, but when Edgar came back on break, it was as if no time at all had passed. The only difference was that his mouth and his hands grew craftier, more practiced. Where did you learn this? June whispered to him, and he whispered back, What do you think they teach us boys at school?

Edgar Gilfoyle: playfellow, playboy. June had seen exactly what he became as he grew older: handsome, confident, passionate, desired. Unlike what the papers said, though, it was not that he moved callously through relationships. He felt each deeply; by senior year, June was hearing all about it in chummish weekly correspondence and calls. He courted, caught, loved, lost quicker than anyone else June knew. He suffered weekly heartbreaks and titillation and agonies and enthrallment, the Diana Goelets, the Mary Rockefellers, the Irma Goldbergs, the Eugenie Vanderbilts, all of them emergencies.

The problem was that, when she was younger, June had assumed that when Edgar grew exhausted with his Dianas, Marys, Irmas, Eugenies—and he would, because they did not know him, and she did—he would return to the Avallon and realize, with a sigh of relief, that June was still there.

Second floor of the Lily House, home on break. A summer thunderstorm growling on the other side of the mountains, not yet arrived. The water had been newly balanced and everything felt like the first day of life. By then, June was staff captain, newly installed in her basement apartment. Mr. Francis was lying somewhere in the dark, recovering from the burden of absorbing the troubles of an entire hotel, and Madeline sent June and Gilfoyle to the Lily House to hang new curtains before an aunt’s visit. June could have easily redirected maids in order to enjoy her day off, but she accepted the task to give Madeline her space.

Gilfoyle put on a record while she dragged a chair to the windows to reach the curtain rods. June, arms stretched above her, felt Gilfoyle’s hands on her newly exposed back. She let him lower her to the floor. Kate Smith sang sweetly in the background (“I’ve waited long in vain for you, dear”) as they danced in slow circles over the forgotten new curtains strewn across the floor. In her ear, cautiously, he tried it out: “I love you, June.”

She remembered that she just grinned at him. She didn’t doubt it.

Ah, the bittersweet gift of the Lily House! She was only one person. It was ever so much larger than a limousine.

• • •

“I DIDN’T KNOW you were coming,” June said. “Nothing’s ready for you.”

Ordinarily, when any of the Gilfoyle family was at the Avallon, they required a full contingent of staff assigned just to them. A battered ledger in the office listed the full protocol for meals, cleaning, laundry, leisure, as well as each family member’s personal requests (June was ashamed to admit she had once written a pretend version of what her requests would look like if added to the ledger, but she had long since crumpled it up and thrown it away).

(Bed warmers prepared

Honeysuckle powder in the bathroom

Yellow roses on the table

Fresh stationery in the sitting room)

“Oh, that doesn’t matter,” Gilfoyle said. “We need to talk, June, later, we need to talk.”

June not Miss Hudson, and with everyone in the lobby staring at them, some still hidden behind masks. Her name nailed her feet to the floor.

“When?”

Gilfoyle looked at his watch—it would not be right, his watches were never right—and then at the clock behind the front desk. He seemed to realize the staff were watching, because he frowned. “Tonight, Miss Hudson.”

Between now and tonight was Pennybacker, who summoned her to his suites, an airy, teal-blue set of rooms that looked out at the mountains to the west. A single winding horse trail led across the fields and into the woods on this side of the property; if one followed it long enough, they’d end up in Casto Springs. The suites themselves had fallen into the sort of personal chaos only possible in a long-stay hotel room; folding socks was the least of Pennybacker’s problems. Pennybacker was sat at the desk, a pen in his balled fist, his shirt wrinkled many times over and his hair unkempt.

June stepped in, eyeing a breakfast tray at the end of his bed; a crumpled piece of paper was half dipped in dried egg. “Mr. Pennybacker, I’m sure the Grotto would be happy to run you down a meal.”

He just flapped his hand for her to shut the door and said, “You were right about the third letter. She woos me. My wife. Mrs. Pennybacker.”

“Congratulations.”

“To you, as well,” he said. When her face showed confusion, he added, embarrassed, “I assumed Mr. Gilfoyle had raced here to tell you the news. We have a train scheduled. Tomorrow, at midnight. It’s done.”

June found she needed to take his statement apart into individual words, as she had when she was still riding the elevators. Train. Tomorrow. Midnight. Done.

Train.

Tomorrow.

Midnight.

Done.

“I know,” he said. “After all this time. I can barely believe it myself. But everything is finally in order, much thanks to you. Without Hertha, who knows how long this would have gone on.”

June wondered how Sabine would take the news. Or perhaps Pennybacker had already told her. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen Sabine Wolfe at the wedding reception, although the ubiquitous trio of Friedrich, Dr. Kirsch, and Lothar Liebe had been in attendance, of course, scrutinizing the German legation. “How did Sabine Wolfe take the news?”

Pennybacker carefully put his pen down.

He did not have to say anything. The unspoken words bellowed at her.

“No!” June said, “No, I don’t accept it. Why not?”

He did not meet her gaze.

“You jaspers came in here and just about ruined my hotel. My summer season is in shambles. The draft’s gutted my staff and I haven’t had a week of certainty to know when I should be rehiring or if I should at all, all while on a discount rate, which means we’re paying you lot for the privilege of housing people who mock my staff while they bring them coffee. All I’m asking from you is to make this happen, to make one girl stay here. I gave you Hertha. You can give me that.”

He was abashed. “The State Department just won’t have her.”

“No,” she said again. “I know you have bureaucratic power. I know power. I can smell it on you.”

“Miss Hudson, she has no guardians here,” Pennybacker said. “The Wolfes are not wealthy enough to leave a fund for her care. And there is the matter of her parents—do you want to see her file? This is what I have to contend with.”

Rising from his desk, he shuffled through a stack of papers that turned out to be entirely covering his open luggage cases, then tossed some onto her lap. One, a newspaper clipping, was an op-ed Friedrich Wolfe had written in defense of the Nazi Party. Another was an invitation to a party Sabine Wolfe arranged in honor of Hitler’s birthday the previous April. Here was a statement from a senator’s wife, saying Friedrich Wolfe had discussed Hitler’s opinion that German businessmen who felt sympathy for Jews were devoid of conscience. Here was a photo of Sabine Wolfe during a state visit to Germany, attending a party rally. Here was a list of their bosom family and friends back in Germany, with their various positions within the Nazi Party to the right of their name. A vibrant and hectic social calendar; June had seen lives like this before. There was one crucial difference. The Gilfoyles’ web was full of people with old money and influence.

The Wolfes’ web was full of Nazis.

Hannelore’s unusual personality hadn’t changed the Wolfes’ lives; it had simply complicated them.

June thought about how Sabine had never asked to stay behind with her daughter.

Her ears hissed, water rushing through caverns. She had comforted Sabine on the bench by the Winnet field. Delivered promises, the same as she would to any other guest, not questioning if Sabine deserved it. Who were the Morgans outside the hotel? Who was Sabine Wolfe? It wasn’t supposed to matter.

But it mattered. She didn’t know how it could never not matter ever again.

Pennybacker sounded tired. “So you see that the State Department has little sympathy for Hannelore Wolfe.”

No, June saw nothing. What was June at that age? A silent half-orphaned maid in the back of a hotel, no longer a mountaineer but not yet an honorary Gilfoyle. Hannelore had her entire life in front of her, no matter her pedigree.

“But Hannelore is a child,” June said.

“Which is why I tried my very best.”

“And you sleep at night?”

“Sleep! I work against that murderous mistress, time.” Pennybacker threw a letter at her; as it sailed to the carpet beside her feet, she was reminded of that long-ago day in the ballroom, when Erich, Paul, and Sebastian were flying paper airplanes into her fountain. Erich, whose brother was an SS-Gruppenführer back in Germany; Sebastian, who had just been folded into the American military; Erich, who, in very short order, would be shooting Americans out of the sky; Sebastian, who, in very short order, would be shooting back. Pennybacker went on, “I can tell you, in extreme confidentiality, that there are American spies in that German hotel, and if they are found out, they will be killed for it. Time is not a kindness. Miss Hudson, what does that letter say?”

With a sick, dull feeling in her stomach, June returned the letter to its place on his desk. “That the Americans are starving.”

“Diplomatic reciprocity is a sham, whether through a lack of principle or a lack of supply. The Americans at Bad Nauheim have been losing weight since December. The Americans in Japan are—it doesn’t bear thinking about. You understand. They must come back. I care deeply about the fate of that peculiar girl and I would go so far as to put her under my own roof if the issue of her housing was the only one, but the diplomats in this hotel are only one of innumerable moving parts. A train comes for them; a hotel in Jersey City waits for them; a boat survived wolf packs of U-boats to meet them there; a documented and timed route for their safe passage back to Europe has been communicated to an ocean full of nasties who agree to pause their nastiness; hotels full of Americans in danger wait on the other side of the ocean in a mirrored staging process. If any of it falls apart now, who is to say how long it will take for this confluence of events to happen once more? I am, and have been, trying to save as many lives as possible.”

June was aware that this room would forever contain this conversation. Never again, for as long as she was at the Avallon, would she be able to walk into this suite without remembering the letter describing how much weight the American diplomats and their families had lost while waiting for the negotiations to be completed. There were innumerable rooms in this hotel that were now permanently encoded with war. And the playhouse with Tucker—whatever was she going to do about Tucker? One day. One day left for all of this.

“Miss Hudson,” Pennybacker said, sympathetically. “It is not all bad. I persuaded the State Department that Lieselotte Berger’s suicide attempt was the gesture of an innocent woman, and Hertha made the numbers work. You gave her a life in America. You’ve done a magnificent job. It is not your fault that war is hell, and in hell, they compromise.”

Train.

Tomorrow.

Midnight.

Done.

“You have made two of my closest friends the happiest they have ever been,” Pennybacker said. “We can only keep doing our best.”

What had Sabine Wolfe said so many days ago? There is absolutely nothing you can do, Miss Hudson.

She realized that Pennybacker was saying the words for himself, too.

June took up the breakfast tray, just as she would have back when she was a maid, and said, “I’m having the Grotto send you up a proper dinner.”

• • •

NEWS OF THE APPROACHING train broke across the hotel in the way barely secret news always did. Back of house carried it to front of house who eventually seeded it among the guests, where it blossomed into lurid, ripe gossip.

She needed to talk to Tucker.

But first, she had to hold a meeting with her shopkeepers, who wanted to know if they had to continue to enforce the strict limits on some goods now that there was only one more shopping day left. Then she had to convene with Griff to coordinate a staff plan for the actual departure; the train, scheduled at midnight to avoid journalists and crowds, was also scheduled to avoid the day staff. The State Department budget didn’t allow for extra pay; they’d give the porters an extra day off instead. After that it was a meeting with Friedrich Wolfe and Takeo Nishimura; the diplomats wanted drinks to flow freely in the hours leading up to their departure and were willing to spend the cash to make it happen. Keeping her bearing as professional as possible, she reassured them that she would coordinate with the Grotto and beverages manager. Then it was the meeting with Fortéscue, to coordinate the final meals and food orders, then the Swiss, who wanted to make sure several important pieces of mail regarding the sale of embassy assets got out before the diplomats had left.

The evening was getting away from her, but she caught a glimpse of Tucker’s silhouette outside by one of the guard towers and thought that if she used the staff elevator Mr. Francis had cursed, she could probably get to him without being snagged by staff once more.

She only made it two floors. The doors opened prematurely on the third floor; commotion flowed in. A knot of maids filled the hall, their voices at fever pitch.

Mattie Howard was the one who had called the elevator; her finger still hovered over the button. When she saw June, relief filled her expression. She asked, “Are you going up or down, Hoss?”

Clearly, the only right answer was out. June stepped into the hallway.

The center of attention was a maid known as Carol Carol Carol, so named as she was the third Carol June had assigned to housekeeping since she was manager. Carol was currently on her knees, her forehead pressed to the carpet. It was a huge and honest gesture, performed for no one but its owner. The other maids pressed hands to mouths, wrapped their arms around themselves, clung to each other—more mundane and acceptable forms of shock and grief.

Silently, they passed a parcel to June for inspection.

The offending package was a bundle of about forty beat-up envelopes, all tied together with twine. June could see the topmost letter had Carol’s real name girlishly written in the upper left corner and was addressed to Carol’s husband, whom she’d married the year before, in a quiet service June attended. It had been very nice. Carol and her husband already had a child together, and the toddler, just this side of walking, had been persuaded to bring the ring to them, even though he stumbled multiple times. June had the rustic invitation in a drawer somewhere.

Stamped over all the handwritten words, in block print, was:

RETURN TO SENDER

DECEASED

The next envelope looked the same. And the next. The next. Slowly, June realized what she was looking at and why Carol was lost to silent supplication. For how many months had she been writing to a corpse? How had this parcel beaten the official telegram?

June stood for several long seconds, just looking at the letters, the bold words, the weeping maids, holding Mattie’s knowing and somber gaze. There was nothing to be done, but that wasn’t good enough.

So she made a plan, as she always did, although it would change very little.

June said, “Mattie, go find Toad and get her leave taken care of. Wilma, Joan, make sure she gets home. Girls, clean your faces, get back to work, we’ll talk about this later.”

Sinking beside Carol, June gently turned her face from the ground. Carol’s eyes were dry and dead and blank; she looked like she had just pulled herself from Avallon IV. Brushing the young woman’s hair away from her forehead, like Carol was a small girl, June said, “It’s not all right. It’s not going to be all right for a long time. But you need to go home and be brave for your little boy.”

All around them were the sounds of the hotel doing its ordinary work. Distant vacuuming. Room service trays tinkling. Voices murmuring in bright conversation on floors not yet touched by death. Carol climbed to her feet and stared at the hall as if she didn’t recognize it. June knew how she felt.

The elevator doors opened. June and the remaining maids looked at the place where Mr. Francis had died.

Mattie whispered, “Hoss, the water . . .”

June replied, “Leave the water to me.”

• • •

EDGAR GILFOYLE: playfellow, playboy. So now it was night, finally, and June found herself with Gilfoyle again, this time in the large hotel bar. They had it to themselves except for Tucker, who, despite Gilfoyle clearing his throat territorially when they entered, did not take the hint. He was at the end of the bar poring over documents, drinking a club soda with a lime gripping the edge. She had expected that he’d be at the Trillium House, but perhaps he, too, had been trying to find a moment to talk to her. Now he was so engrossed that he seemed to be in a room of his own.

Gilfoyle claimed a far-off corner booth for himself and June. He was a handsome cliché here in the bar that he owned, lanky arm draped over the back of the leather booth, hair tossed, profile finely etched as if by sculptors. The darling of the society pages, Edgar Gilfoyle, fast car, fast life, fast man. Purchaser of mink overboots.

An impeccably dressed waiter was already at their table, setting drinks in front of them, a Peter Dawson for June, a plantation sidecar in front of Gilfoyle.

Gilfoyle marveled, “How do they remember after all this time?”

They remembered because there was a piece of paper stuck behind the bar that said Gilfoyle Family and listed their favorites, just as there was in nearly every department, but June said, “Magic.”

“Tell me something only you can tell me. Tell me a financial bedtime story. A story of rationing, of the summer season. How are we doing?”

“Do you really want to hear it?”

She suspected he just wanted to give the appearance of utility, but she gave him the same briefing her managers had heard at the end of the quarter, the same one that she went over with the accountants and the event coordinators and everyone who was ordinarily involved in pitching the circus tent that was the Avallon’s financial landscape. He listened, swirled his drink, lit a cigarette.

Finally, he said, “Do you know a woman spit on me the other day?”

So he had not really wanted to know. She said, “That can’t be as shocking an occurrence as you’re making it out to be.”

“I was just walking down the street out of the New York office and she walked right up and spit on me. No, stop, don’t make a joke; she said, ‘Don’t you feel ashamed?’ She meant because I wasn’t in uniform. Everyone outside of the Avallon is in a uniform, every man who can walk in a straight line. ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’ she asked, and she meant that they were fighting and I was not.”

“And you were.”

“I was.”

She imagined it. The woman lifting her voice to address him from a safe distance across the street. Gilfoyle’s chin jerking, old habits never dying, only sleeping, as humiliation jerked his ligaments. It was a bad image on top of many bad images that day, but she kept her voice light. He wanted to be soothed; this was how she soothed him. “This your first brush with shame?”

“You’re not funny.” Beneath the table, his leg touched hers. Memories burned through her. He’d called her June in front of the staff, not Miss Hudson. They sat together at the hotel bar, where anyone could see them. She was not imagining that things had changed.

“Says you. They tell me you broke it off with the Goelet woman.”

“God. Yes. Diana. What a shame. But it’s all for the best, because you . . .” He broke off. He tipped his cigarette at the waiter, who brought him another drink. Gilfoyle said, “This tastes like nostalgia. Do you remember that hideous Fourth of July do at the Palmers?”

“I remember you vomiting.”

“Sorry about that, I know you liked those shoes.”

This back-and-forth patter was familiar, easy. But it left too much room for her mind to wander. To Hannelore, to Carol, to Tucker behind his mask. She asked, “What were you going to say, earlier? After Diana. ‘Because you,’ that’s what you said. Don’t tell me if it’s boring or disgusting.”

He laughed. “You’re such a June Hudson. I always forget how June Hudsonny you are.”

“I never do. That’s my secret.”

“I’ll try to be more June Hudsonny, then,” he said. “I was just thinking about what happens after all this. Father told me about the Lily House, you know, and I just thought, maybe this whole affair is . . . maybe it’s simpler if we just . . . it’s all on account of Sandy, you know. He’s made me rethink how I do things. That’s what I was going to say before. It’s so rotten, how he is. What happened.”

Movement caught the corner of June’s eye; at the bar, Tucker turned his head. He was still looking down, his chin pressed against his shoulder, but she knew the look; he was listening.

“When that woman spit on me, I was thinking about Sandy,” Gilfoyle said. “He joined up. He might have been drafted by now anyway, but that doesn’t matter, what matters is he joined up. He was always so good. Why couldn’t he have been a little rat? Then we could all be saying ‘It’ll do him some good being stuck like that’ and other uncharitable sentiments.”

“Instead, we’re the little rats,” June said.

“Not you. Me, though,” Gilfoyle said. “Does it bother you to talk about him?”

June blinked. She did not think she was crying, but blinking still felt a little perilous. It bothered her. Dutiful Sandy, saying that he would stay if she asked him to. This entire thing, coming to an end. The regulars, back again. The limousine, the Lily House. Sabine being right that Hannelore didn’t have time to become better at navigating the world. Lieselotte Berger wanting to die rather than return to whatever awaited her in Germany. Carol’s and Erich von Limburg-Stirum’s futile weddings. The harpsichordist touching the conductor’s hand with one day left. Gilfoyle saying, I was just thinking about what happens after all this. She knew what he was saying. After all this time. And yet—she blinked again. Damn this whiskey!

“Ah, Junebug,” Gilfoyle said. He took her hand and pressed it in both of his. Palm to palm, enclosed by him. She could smell the citrus of his plantation sidecar and the spice of his Dunhill cologne. This close, the physical magnetism of him was silkily immediate; he had always been very good with his hands. He murmured, “I miss him, too. I keep asking myself what I can do to help him. How did he get like this? How does he feel now? Is he suffering? If only I—”

A loud scraping sound drowned out whatever he said next; both looked up to discover Tucker had shoved his stool aggressively back as he stood. He braced his palm against the bar, the way a drunk might steady himself for launch, but he had had nothing but that club soda.

Approaching their table, Tucker looked somewhat unfamiliar with the dramatic, dim lighting of the bar casting half of him in shadow and half in infernal neon red. He looked sharper, younger, more unsafe. His body was remembering it had been born here; the sweetwater was remembering him.

Tucker said tersely, “Mr. Gilfoyle, I need to speak to you.”

“It’s coming on three a.m., Agent,” Gilfoyle said. “I’ll find you tomorrow.”

Anyone else in this hotel would have deferred to Edgar Gilfoyle, but Tucker simply stood, legs wide, arms crossed, like a boxer. June could have identified that silhouette in any light. His gaze was on Gilfoyle’s hands enclosing June’s.

“Read the room,” said Gilfoyle.

There was hot coal dust ground into Tucker’s tone. “You should be glad it took me this long to.”

Gilfoyle released June’s hand. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Do not try me at this hour, Mr. Gilfoyle, it’s been a very long day,” Tucker snapped. He shifted his attention to her. “Miss Hudson—”

June, aching, battered, peered up at him. She felt the size of the umbrella in a mixed drink. Gilfoyle, playfellow, playboy, had knocked back the rest of his sidecar and risen to stand beside Tucker, to go. Gilfoyle had said he needed to talk to June, but had he said what he was going to say? She knew he hadn’t. She could feel the shape of the unspoken right alongside the spoken. His hand around her hand, her face pressed against Tucker’s coal tattoo, the days until the train arrived counting down to zero. She wanted, she wanted, she wanted, would it ever stop, this wanting, this never getting, this never-shrinking chasm between need and reality. Damn this whiskey; she could feel her eyes burning once more.

“Miss Hudson,” Tucker said again, “you’ll have him back shortly.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tucker tried to shake his fury off as he left the meeting with Gilfoyle; failed. He tried to walk it off; failed. He felt it seething through him like the water flowed under and through the hotel, and every time it began to cool, a recalled phrase from the overheard conversation simmered up in him. How dare he invoke Sandy Gilfoyle.

In the basement, on the way to the Grotto, Tucker discovered Pony and a hello girl engaged in some busywork. He had not thought about Pony’s frisky hands since he had seen him and a girl emerge from the Winnet Cabinet and he’d recalled June saying, Will it ruin the work? But now Tucker strode down the hall, past the various kitchen workers playing cards and prepping the next day’s service. Wordlessly, Tucker took Pony by the collar, leveraged him from behind the hello girl—who turned out to be Ulcie Crites—Ulcie Crites!—and used Pony’s shirt to pull him back down the hall, heads turning to watch through every door.

Pony showed him his rows of teeth. “Howdy, Minnick.”

“This is a conversation about conduct befitting a Bureau agent,” Tucker told him.

Pony said, “The Bureau was consoling Ms. Crites on her last day of work.”

June had fired Ulcie after all?

Tucker released his grip on Pony’s collar with enough verve to knock the other agent’s blond head briskly against the wallpaper. “Strap it in, Harris, or I’ll send a write-up so blazing Hoover will reread it to his mistresses on cold nights.”

Pony waited until Tucker was a safe distance down the hall to say, “Okey dokey, gramps.”

Tucker turned.

His fist.

Pony’s chin.

The speed of it surprised both of them. But Pony was game; he shot one back easily, lazily. He’d made it through the academy, same as Tucker. And now it was fair, they’d both set the scene. For a few minutes, they shoved and punched and pulped each other a bit in the hallway, breaths coming in machine-gun bursts, shoes scraping on carpet and wood, fingernails and skulls making contact with walls and doorjambs, until Pony cut open Tucker’s cheek with his class ring and Tucker landed a memorable one on Pony’s ear and kicked him for good measure. Pony stayed down, moaning resentfully and holding his thigh like the Dying Gaul.

The incident hadn’t cooled Tucker a bit. He left Pony there and paced back down the hallway, not even sure where his feet were taking him, until he heard Hugh’s voice say, “Tuck, whoa, Tuck. Walk in here a second.”

Tucker stepped into the workroom adjacent the Grotto. The doleful sound of Virginia Bruce singing Cole Porter’s “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” came from somewhere within. Don’t you know, little fool, she sang, you never can win?

“Sleepwalking, Agent Minnick?”

A half dozen kitchen staff of every age, color, and gender were rehydrating dried apple slices and preparing pies; Hugh sat at a small table playing solitaire and smoking a cigarette. Before Tucker even knew he was staying, a stool was pulled out and a cup of coffee and a few apple slices put beside it. A moment later, a chunk of ice inside a washcloth was added. He held this to his busted cheek.

“Watercolor artist.”

“Shepherd.”

“Xylophone maker.”

It took Tucker a few minutes to realize they were talking about him; they were guessing what he’d done before he joined the Bureau.

“Rodeo cowboy.”

“Tuna fisherman.”

“Thanks for the coffee,” Tucker said. “What am I looking at?”

Golden Delicious apples, that was what he was looking at. Last year’s crop, which had been immediately sliced and dried on window screens, in truck beds, and on top of chicken coops, with sheets on top to keep the bugs out. Now they were being simmered, soaked, lightly sugared, converted from dry good to indulgence.

“You know the Golden Delicious is a West Virginian apple,” said one of the men, a wiry man with healed burns on the back of his hands.

“You know the acre the original tree grows on is the most expensive acre in the state,” Tucker countered.

Grins. They were pleased. He was one of them, but not one of them. It made the game of him far better. Two of them broke off the line to dance, one of the women still holding a strainer behind her partner’s back as they did the rumba. Hugh and Tucker were left in peace; the Grotto was a place that didn’t ask questions.

“You look like someone nicked your ration card,” Hugh told him. “Was that the sound of Agent Harris’s head hitting the floor I heard out there?”

Tucker already regretted it. Ulcie Crites! Punishment enough, surely.

Hugh asked, “What’s this really about? The woman?”

Tucker just put his head in his hands and stared at the dim shapes of the apple slices between his elbows. He thought, but could not say, She’s with him.

“If she’s worth you hurting over her, that won’t matter. She’ll come to you,” Hugh said. “And if she doesn’t, you don’t want her anyway. That reminds me. You should take a look at a letter that was in the mail today. Go on, get it out of my jacket over there. Yeah, I like the taste of bossing you around; I think I should be SAC next time.”

Tucker fetched out the envelope Hugh had tucked into his jacket. “This is from PennyBAAAAAACK.”

Hugh raised his eyebrows. “He knows we’re reading everything. He didn’t have to send it regular mail. He must’ve wanted us to see it.”

The letter was typed neat as any State Department communication.

Salutations Linda,

After some thought, I realized what you said when you left was right after all. We are no good for each other anymore. Richie will do the paperwork for us.

Best, Benny

Tucker felt in himself a grudging admiration for the floppy agent. Pennybacker had kept up his annoyingly unflappable mood and successfully navigated a complex negotiation spanning two oceans, while in the background, a negotiation that mattered to only him slowly fell apart. Hugh was right, Tucker thought. It felt like this letter had been sent through the Bureau’s post office gauntlet just for them to see. The G-men had not asked and so Pennybacker had not answered, but here was a truth about him, a truth he endured as they were clannishly forcing him to brunch with the Swiss.

“I’m not working for you, though, Calloway,” Tucker said as he folded the letter away. “I’m never working for anyone else ever again.”

The moment he said it, he could feel how miserably and wonderfully true it was. He knew he was a hair away from winning his way back into the Bureau, but it didn’t matter. No matter what he accomplished between now and when the train arrived for the diplomats, he was quitting.

“Agent Minnick, Hoover’s most loyal soldier?” said Hugh. “I can’t be hearing right.”

“I’m ruined for the work. This place—” Tucker started the sentence, but didn’t know how to finish it. “I’m sending that resignation letter back with Pony.”

Ten years. Ten years of his life. More, really, because hadn’t he been headed toward the Bureau all through school, too? Since the moment his feet took him out of West Virginia and he thought, I’m going to make this right, where this was everything. Hundreds of nights of bad sleep in bad places, of lousy food at lousy times, of weighing right in one palm and wrong in the other until it became impossible to look at a situation without feeling that judgment inside himself. A lifetime of being shaped by this job, and him with only a loose idea of what he would do on the other side of it.

But he knew the decision was made.

Hugh asked, “You gonna tuck it in your bra so he notices it?”

As Tucker laughed, helplessly, a staff member slid one of the fresh apple tarts they’d been making in front of him. Four birthday candles glowed in it. When Tucker looked up, he saw that his confession had an appreciative, feral audience in the Grotto staff. Faces he recognized, from interviewing them, from carrying tables with them. The closest of them was René Durand, who had shut a door in his face on the very first week there.

“Congratulations, G-man,” Durand said. “Welcome to the real world.”

It had taken several months, but the Avallon had finally found a way to give him luxury.

Chapter Twenty-Six

After Gilfoyle left with Tucker, June went to the fourth floor.

Although every door was closed, there was nonetheless the sensation of vital activity; everyone was awake, talking about the approaching departure. Even if she could not hear their conversations, she could feel them. Everyone can tell the difference between a sleeping hotel and a waking one.

She was headed to 411.

For the longest time, the Gilfoyles had lived on the fourth floor. This was before her time, when Mr. Francis was a much younger man, and the current family apartment was still being used as a presidential suite, those rooms brought up to a standard of luxury the rest of the hotel had yet to achieve. In a fourth-floor suite, he’d raised his young family, buried his first wife, married his second. He did not talk much about his past, but he had once said, I didn’t mean to stay so long, and June had been unable to tell if he meant it fondly or wistfully. She hadn’t asked for more.

Now, she stopped outside his old door. A dark stain appeared to creep from beneath it; hard to tell if it was a trick of the light. She pressed a toe into the carpet. Damp squeezed from the carpet; no, it was real. She lifted her eyes to the number plate.

The Wolfes’ old suite.

Mr. Francis’s old suite.

Leave the water to me.

Fetching out her master key ring, June let herself in. With a soft intake of breath, she closed the door behind herself.

The suite stank of sulfur and blood. A sluggish, shallow stream glistened from the sitting room to one of the closed bedroom doors. Damp streaked the wallpaper, bled from beneath the mirror, trickled from an outlet. The lights struggled to pierce the thick air. A whispering, chuckling sound came from nowhere and everywhere, the sound of an unseen stream over rocks.

The water was turning.

For so many years, she’d kept this at bay. She’d spent endless hours hanging in the narrow shaft of the Avallon IV, the water the same temperature as her listless body, soaking in every terrible impulse a guest had ever had, letting it leech every positive feeling from her. It had been worth it to see that joy amplified later. On the Winnet field, in the dining room, as poetry twirled over the ballroom. She had seen her efforts written up in magazines, talked about in conferences, reflected in the powerful guests who came to revel in her mind for a little while, not realizing just how thoroughly they were praising June when they said, This place, this place!

June pressed open the bathroom door. Stench roiled out; humidity coated her skin. The bathtub was not on, but it was full. Cloudy water had come up the drain and filled it to the edge, and then some. A rank puddle reached nearly to her feet.

She wondered how Mr. Francis had first stumbled across the ruined hotel. Where had he been going that he found himself here, in the middle of the mountains, his hand hovered over the top of a pool of bright water? Why had it stopped him in his tracks?

But she remembered how it felt to put her hand in the water at Casto Springs. She would have been caught, too.

Abandoning the bathroom, she followed the seeping water to the closed bedroom door. Inside, heat roiled. The water here was steaming. She smelled hot earth, damp stone, green things, growing things, the smell of the water as it completed its journey to the surface, just after being superheated by a hidden, undulating core. June’s feet splashed through the puddle as she pushed open the balcony door. Here, steam rose even more densely. The floodlights down below shot the cloud through with crazed glowing shafts. A carved mountain lion screamed sweetwater into the font.

She knew she had to go to the Avallon IV again. If not tonight, then tomorrow night, as soon as the diplomats were gone. Or else there would be no summer season, no fall season. The Avallon would cease to be an unchanging island, where all that mattered was a glorious present, every day. She would be general manager of nothing.

Upstairs, downstairs, inside, out. How wonderful it had been to realize that, with the water at her back, she could be understood. Not just understood, but beloved. She hadn’t begrudged the Avallon IV taking its due; the cost made it rare. But now it was hard not to think of the scale of it all. The joy, the luxury, the expense. June was the Avallon’s mind, the sweetwater its magnificent beating heart. But if she was wrong—then the Avallon was instead a huge, ugly animal, the sweetwater making the ideas more powerful than June herself ever could on her own.

Sandy had refused it.

Mr. Francis had safeguarded it until he found someone else.

And now June had no one but herself left.

She spread her hand over the top of the font’s churning water, but didn’t touch the surface. Had the water heard Lieselotte Berger as she jumped from this balcony? Or had she heard the water? It was hard to tell here at the Avallon. The guests made it what it was; it made the guests what they were; back and forth, mirrors facing each other.

The water strained toward her.

Run.

• • •

“LET ME IN,” June said.

The door was barely cracked. 411’s brilliant green eye appeared in it. “GM, are you drunk?”

“411, let me in.” 411 had never opened the door all the way, not even on that dreadful night ten years ago, and June had never really asked her to. But tonight, June put her palm on the cracked door and pressed.

“Darling, you’re disgusting,” 411 said. “Do not ever do that in public where a man could see you.”

June hadn’t even realized she was crying. She said, “I need to talk to you. Actually talk to you.”

411 opened the door.

June fell through it.

For ten, fifteen, twenty years, no one had entered room 411, apart from Toad. Room service left food at her door. Housekeeping took the trash she left outside her door. Runner boys left her varied orders; every so often, boxes of discarded items took their place outside her door. If she ever got bored, lonely, or sick, there was no sign of it from the hallway. Everything was paid for by Mr. Francis, silently, automatically, and even after his death, a trust fund enabled her permanent existence here. If Madeline knew about it, she never said. Carrie sometimes threw rocks at 411’s window, but that was the closest anyone had come to articulating the shape of her story.

Now June was inside her room, gazing around with dumb surprise. She was not sure what her expectations of the room were, only that it defied them. She’d imagined the walls to be sloping with unsorted materials, evidence of a shrunken life, halted midstride by an affair that altered the course of it forever.

But it was not like that at all.

It was beautiful.

Every inch of every surface was designed. Art and unusual objects decorated the sitting room wall at precise, museum-like intervals. Books were neatly stacked this way and that to form a perfect rectangle of words beneath a desk that held three dress forms, each wearing a marvelously wild blouse, two still in safety pins. Another mannequin in the corner wore a jaunty top hat, a beautiful dress, and a man’s vest, the arms positioned to hold a book open. Here was a lamp with hand-pieced shade, here a half-completed drawing of Winnet players. Here a gramophone, here a magazine propped beside an assortment of scented creams and masks. A trellis twined with scraps of leftover chiffons framed the door to the balcony.

There was no sense that 411’s life should have been anything but this.

411 herself was no abandoned garden, either. She was a handsome mature woman of indeterminate age. Her dark, shoulder-length hair, shot through with gray, was curled timelessly, with heavy bangs disguising any wrinkles on her forehead. She could not have been expecting anyone, but she was made up as if going out.

She was smoking a cigarette and she used this to indicate the chair by the desk. “Sit down and clean yourself up. You smell like purgatory and look like hell. I suppose it’s the same as it was last time, isn’t it?” She said last time as if none of their conversations between the first and this one had happened.

There was a tissue box on an end table; June used one to wipe her tears. “This isn’t about Gilfoyle.”

To her astonishment, she knew it was true the moment she said it.

Stubbing her cigarette, 411 poured two drinks. She drank both of them and then, after some thought, refilled one and handed it to June. It was strange to properly see her, because it was as if June had been seeing her all along. There was no surprise to her full appearance, standing there with a hand on one hip, giving June that glittering look; it somehow carried exactly the same effect as her eye glimpsed through the crack in the door.

“So what is this about?” 411 asked.

What was it about?

June said, “It’s about the Avallon and I.”

“The Avallon and me.” 411 went to stand on her balcony. How many times had June seen her from the other side, silhouetted just like that? “It is strange that you never left, isn’t it?”

The way she said it was meant to sting, and it did. June accused, “You never left. You spent your whole life waiting for Mr. Francis!”

411 whirled around at once. “Is that what you think?”

“It’s what I know! You as much as told me! Spent your life waiting for him to leave Madeline for you!”

The laugh. The laugh was definitely different on this side of the door. From the hall, it was buttercream. In person, it was arsenic and vinegar and vodka, all applied in the fondest way possible. 411 said, “It would have been a dark day if that man ever reappeared in these rooms, GM. Do you know why I stay? Look around you. I have been living in the finest hotel in America for half my life, on someone else’s nickel, letting me use all the means I have acquired and inherited to delight myself. What a wonderful life. I love the Avallon.”

The inflection was clear. “And me?”

“You’re just afraid to see what you are without it.”

June still had not touched the drink 411 had put in her hand, so 411 took it back. She downed it with a balletic air of practice.

“‘Possum farmer,’” June shot back.

411 laughed wildly. She amused herself enormously.

“What if my decision is wrong? No one manages me but me.”

“Are we still talking about the hotel and you?”

No. She was talking about Hannelore now, although she didn’t want to say that to 411. June was considering interfering in the rarefied air of high international law, and she didn’t want anyone else involved unless they had to be. June had made many plans in her day, and now she mulled over a new one: taking the matter of Hannelore into her own hands. And, more important, she considered what it would look like if she didn’t take the matter of Hannelore into her own hands. If she just kept the old chin up and got the hotel running as usual while the girl sailed silently back to Germany. June would have to live the rest of her life knowing that, for a few months, she had Hannelore under her roof, in her hotel, with all the power of the sweetwater behind her, and yet had done nothing. Was she really considering sacrificing it all for a single person?

Wasn’t that luxury?

“Come to think of it, I should do whatever I want and just frame you, you sow,” June said, and 411 snorted, breaking her second smoke ring in half. “This is right serious. I’m talking about maybe losing this place, maybe losing who I am here. You’d have to find a new social partner to talk to through the door. Toad, maybe.”

This line of conversation didn’t interest 411 at all. Bored, she said, “Who you are? Right now, you are just performing a wonderful script for society, pretending they’ll have you one day. How long would you like to pretend for? Another decade? Two?”

“Says the woman laden with diamonds.”

“Darling, don’t you understand? I’m not society, either, I’m just rich. What is it you love to say?”

Wealth isn’t luxury.

411 waved her off, reminding her, quite suddenly, of Tucker. “You just want me to cosign whatever you’ve already decided. Frank loved himself a bit of theater, too. Do you know what I think my best idea was, here at the Avallon? The glass snails. They were all over the carpets when he first bought this place, you know—live ones. You’d have to scoop them out of the fonts every day. Everyone thought they were hideous. Grotesque. Even after the place was cleaned up, you’d still find them inside. I told Frank to churn out beautiful glass snails for the guests and tell them they were special to this place, and suddenly it was an event whenever a live snail was found. It was the promise of the hotel fulfilled. So wonderful! The snails hadn’t changed. I just tricked everyone into loving them for a little bit. Here is my opinion: get out of my chair and go do what you’re going to do, GM. And tell your boys to hurry up with my books; I’ve run out.”

Just like that, June found herself back in the hall. The door was closed as if it had never been opened, and only the faint scent of brandy on her fingertips convinced her the entire episode had happened at all.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The day the hotel changed forever began as any other. Elsewhere, Americans were being asked to turn in their old tin toothpaste tubes if they wanted to buy new ones, the Philippines had fallen to Japan, and Toad’s husband had just sent a letter home saying he was still alive; but here, the orchestra was tuned, the Grotto was in fine form, and the guests were emptying their drawers.

June woke before dawn in her basement apartment in the staff cottage closest to the springs. She climbed out of bed, displacing three dachshunds (two smooth, one wiry), who poured from the bed to follow her at a polite distance. She ducked beneath the clothesline hung the short way across the room and unclipped her shirt and underwear before hanging her quilt in their place to air all day.

By the light of a single bedside lamp, she dressed in her usual attire: waist-high wide-legged slacks, a button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up neatly, a delicate wristwatch, a swipe of lipstick. Her dark hair was bobbed just below her ears, and when she was working, she slicked it back elegantly with some grooming cream. After she stepped into her low-heeled Mary Janes, June went to the basement kitchenette and drew a glass of sweetwater. She set it on the counter and regarded it. The water looked no different than it had before.

June poured the undrunk water into the dachshunds’ bowl, fed them some meat scraps from the icebox, and then got to work.

Work, work. In eighteen hours, the train was due to arrive to take the diplomats away. Up, up, up, to Jersey City, where they would hurry up and wait once more, spending just a few nights in (far less glamourous) hotels before boarding a one-thousand-passenger ship bound for Portugal. June’s gray-jacketed ledgers contained lists of the tasks that were to be done, all the frantic final work of departure. Every legation would want their last-minute shopping packaged for travel; they would want haircuts; they would want their confiscated luggage. The front desk was already unofficially checking out guests who didn’t intend to add any more shopping, drinking, or room service to their tabs. The kitchen was organizing the final meals to hopefully use up all the perishable goods, since they could not book any guests until they were quite certain the train was not delayed. Waste not, want not; boil the jam jars for their sugar. The driveway hummed with activity as trucks traveled up and down the road, taking luggage and supplies down to the guarded train station.

Spring shrilled all over the hotel grounds. There was nothing like the sight of the stone-clad building bursting from the deep green lawns as blossoms exploded in yellow and white up and down the drive. The Avallon, the Avallon.

She had loved it so much.

The work felt irrelevant. Maybe it was. On the way to the office, she found Sabine Wolfe standing at the edge of the breakfast room, watching the other diners murmur excitedly about repatriation. She looked brittle enough to break.

Guest.

Nazi.

Woman.

Mother.

June touched her elbow lightly; she started. “Mrs. Wolfe, about our earlier talk—”

Sabine’s eyes darted to the diners; undoubtedly, Lothar Liebe was somewhere among them.

“—I know it’s the last day, but I’m still considering the menu,” June said. “I’m guessing you still find it unsatisfactory.”

Sabine nodded tightly. June nodded back, once, and the women parted.

Now June really did have to decide if she was going to do something about Hannelore.

She was running out of time to decide.

• • •

“THEY SAID YOU were in here,” Gilfoyle said.

He stepped into the cluttered office, looking worlds away from her staff members in his light double-breasted jacket, his tailored slacks, his carefully expressed hair. As he pressed his long fingers against the edge of her desk, scanning her papers—as if he had any idea of what he was looking at—she felt a lurch of uncertainty. Her heart had begun beating double speed as soon as she’d stepped into the hotel, and it showed no signs of slowing. “I need to talk to you,” he said.

“It’s gonna have to wait, Ed.”

So many times Mr. Francis had said the same thing to one of them, or all of them. He would be late for dinner, he would not be able to join them at the Avallon II, he could not answer their question: Go ask Madeline, sorry, child, I have been up since four. The Avallon owned him. The Avallon owned her.

“It can’t wait.”

She looked up at him. He tapped his fingers lightly at the edge of the desk, as if playing a piano, as he glanced all around her office, eyes flitting over the tools of her trade as if he was seeing them for the first time. He was nervous, she realized.

Suddenly, she was nervous, too. Words spilled from her. “Take a look at this desk. You want me to put this down? You want me to put off my meeting with accounting? You want me to wait on my Grotto rounds? There’s a party out there that needs my eyes on it. You want—”

With great agitation, he said, “June, I want you to marry me.”

On her desk were twelve preliminary invoices. One glass of sweetwater, one-third full. A glass snail, antennae pointed curiously toward the wall of key fobs. Two pens. No, three. An incorrectly filed guest folio waiting for rehoming. A stale cracker broken into three pieces, waiting for the dachshunds to earn it. A quarter sandwich taken from a tea tray.

“Did you hear what I said?”

She moved one of the invoices over the top of the other, and then back again, then peered up at him. He was holding a fist of his right hand in his left and twisting them against each other, as boyishly uncertain as he ever was.

June was watching herself from above, just as she’d watched herself when she was a girl. Safely removed, puzzled by the feelings she saw outside herself. The woman at the desk sat proper and upright at the desk chair. The heel of her hand was smeared with ink from her writing and there was a dent in the skin at her wrist where it had been resting on the edge of the blotter for too long. Her hair was freshly washed and tucked behind her ear; she’d had to scrub the smell of the fourth-floor sweetwater out of it. That room was still tearing itself apart behind a closed door. So was she.

Gilfoyle said, “I tried to do it before, at a better time. Then the moment wasn’t right.”

The hotel bar. He had been getting around to it. Yes. She knew that. Maybe not exactly what he was going to say, maybe not exactly this, but she’d known the shape of the unspoken. This was why she had sat in the booth for a long time, even after Gilfoyle didn’t return, trying to decide if she would go to the Gilfoyle apartment, knock, say, Finish your sentence.

She had gone to the fourth floor instead. She hadn’t been ready to hear the rest of it then, and it turned out she wasn’t ready to hear it now, either. “I can’t do this now. Tell me later, when they’re gone, when I can listen to what you’re trying to say.”

“I’m trying to say be my wife!” Gilfoyle said. His voice was loud enough that she was sure they’d heard him at the front desk. In the lobby. In the ballroom. On the lawn. In the town. In the capital, across the ocean, on the battlefields, in Bad Nauheim where the Americans waited their turn to come home. “June, you’re always doing this. Stop fussing over those papers, stop fussing over that work. You did hear me, you do know what I’m trying to say. You always did this, when you were a kid, too. Be right here. Forget about the old dower house, forget about your old apartment, come to the North Wing, let’s just have it done with. Wasn’t it always going to be this way?”

June’s ears hissed again, that sweetwater running through her mind. She was thinking about the New York trip. The New York trip, the only New York trip that had mattered and would ever matter.

Here was the story:

Three weeks of visiting, sightseeing, dancing, meeting with other denizens in the Gilfoyles’ world, all while staying in the Soria, a hotel owned by one of Mr. Francis’s friends. The Avallon, placed on indulgent hiatus, was executing all the noisy repairs incompatible with guests. The girls had their pearls, their dresses. June had been fitted for several new ones, including a slinky, low-backed number that shocked and delighted her. Where was she supposed to wear this? Everywhere. To drinks. To cocktail parties. To dancing, oh the dancing. While Carrie and Madeline attended teas and other social events during the day, Mr. Francis took June to hotel after hotel, introducing her to this manager and that, leaving her to shadow them back of house, explore their kitchens, interview their head of housekeeping, read their shipping manifests, listen to amiable lectures by senior accountants. By night, June went to parties. A string of young men far above her station was somehow always at her table to dance with her, but her eyes were always on Gilfoyle.

One night, two weeks in, watching Gilfoyle dance with yet another debutante made June excuse herself and leave the ballroom. She wandered the halls before talking her way to back of house and finally down to the big kitchen in the bowels of the beast. In that slinky dress, she sat out of the way and watched the commercial kitchen seethe, learning the rhythm of it, listening to the chef rage at his underlings, watching what worked and what didn’t. Eventually the kitchen wound down, the chef kissed her cheek and called her their angel, and June remained in the dim kitchen alone. It was there Gilfoyle found her.

He tugged her gently from her perch on the counter. Wordlessly, they began to dance, bodies fitting together with the perfection of two halves long stored beside one another. In that moment, June had never loved anyone as much as Edgar Gilfoyle, swaying back and forth next to the empty soup pots and the piled onions waiting for tomorrow’s service. She thought she might die of it.

Mr. Francis was waiting for them back at the suites. He was furious—June had never seen him angry. He dragged Gilfoyle into their room and, although the door was closed, she could hear the conversation clearly.

June is not to be played with, he snarled at Gilfoyle. She is not the help. She is not some scullery maid to throw away.

I’m not playing, Gilfoyle said.

When we get back, June is taking over as general manager, do you understand? She will be a part of the hotel forever. She is the only other person I trust with it. Do not toy with her!

I just said I’m not!

I thought I raised you to be honest. I’m embarrassed by you, Mr. Francis said. From now on, you treat her with the respect her position demands and paw an elevator girl if you can’t help yourself.

Understanding had crystallized in June’s mind: she was not the help, but she also wasn’t a Gilfoyle. She was too good to throw away, but not good enough for Mr. Francis to consider the relationship with the family heir anything other than a dalliance. She was not like Carrie; New York was never about her entering society. June was to become general manager so the Gilfoyles could finally be free; this was her last meal before execution.

June didn’t remember how she had gotten out of the hotel at all, or how she had gotten on the bus—although now, as a general manager of a very good hotel herself, she could guess at it. When she stumbled into the lobby, the concierge or a porter or a desk clerk would have intercepted her and listened to her story and—being concierges or porters or desk clerks and not Gilfoyles themselves—would have sympathized deeply. A bus would have been found. Money, if she did not have it on her in that slinky black dress, would have been found. A coat found, if she did not have one, and she knew she did not, because she still had the moth-eaten sailor’s coat someone had put her into.

She went home. The only home she knew—the Avallon. It took her three buses and nearly a full day to get there, stumbling with exhaustion and heartbreak, in only a very low-backed dress and sailor’s coat. God protects the foolish, she supposed. When she arrived in the middle of the night, the hotel was quiet, running on a skeleton crew, everyone getting a full night’s sleep because there were no guests to tend.

Well, no guests but one.

June haunted the halls of the hotel she was meant to manage, sobbing as she had never sobbed. It was this June who had encountered a cracked door on the fourth floor. It was this guest who had pressed her green eye to the crack as June slid down the doorjamb to cry on the floor beside her room. It was this guest, in room 411, who had stayed up with June all night, talking to her through a cracked-open door.

“‘June is not to be played with,’” June said. “New York. Do you remember?”

Gilfoyle frowned at her. “Oh. What a terrible night that was.”

Not terrible enough for him to defend their relationship. Not terrible enough for her to have spent the last ten years as June Gilfoyle, his wife. Only terrible enough to push him to Mary, to Irma, to Eugenie, to Diana, to endless public relationships that had scarred her heart until she did not feel things until it was nearly too late.

Behind Gilfoyle, Griff Clemons’s face appeared momentarily in the door, eyebrows raised, assessing the situation with a glance. She gazed at him, dazed, long enough that Gilfoyle turned his head to find Griff there.

“What do you need?” Gilfoyle asked.

Griff Clemons lied smoothly. “We need Hoss.”

The burst of affection June felt for Griff Clemons, sweetly giving her the opportunity to escape and regroup, was immediately trampled by irritation when Gilfoyle said, “Handle it. Get out and close the door behind you. Now.”

The door had barely closed when June said, “I don’t speak to my staff that way.”

“June, you’re driving me crazy,” Gilfoyle said. “Yes or no. Just say yes.”

June remembered putting her hand in the bright, wild water beneath the church. She remembered her handprint on the Lily House’s door. She remembered Gilfoyle’s thumb pressed into her palm. She had loved him so much.

She said, “No.”

A thorough no. A no you could roll onto paperwork in a heavy wind to crush it to the ground. Gilfoyle’s chin jerked, as if no time had passed since they were younger, and then he slumped back against the door as if she’d shot him. “You must.”

She felt quite shot through the heart herself. Her voice was faint as she said, “I don’t have to do anything, Ed.”

“You don’t understand; you’re not a man,” he said. “You don’t know how they look at me. Every single man is in uniform. Everywhere I go. Everyone I stay with. Everywhere is the rumor that I’ve bought my way out of the draft. It’s—I can’t bear it.”

June’s heart broke. Not for herself. But for every single June she had been in the last twenty years, all those younger Junes who had sat up a little straighter when someone said Mr. Gilfoyle is on the phone. Poor thing. Poor, stupid thing.

She said, “You want to marry me to spare you the shame?”

“Yes—no. If I’m married, the rumors end, yes; if I was already married, I couldn’t have been drafted. But I don’t want to marry just anyone. I want to marry you. Aren’t we excellent together? Haven’t we always been good together? Don’t you want this hotel? Not just the Lily House. Marry me, you marry the hotel. It’ll be just the same, almost. I won’t interfere with your work.” He didn’t say the rest, but she understood it: and you won’t interfere with my life outside the hotel. “We would tell people we didn’t want to upset my father, but we’ve been married for ages. We’re madly in love. It solves everything.”

He was so earnest. She could tell that the last few months had been hell for him. The Avallon had taught him that all problems could be made to go away with enough money and manpower, but the Avallon had been wrong. Poor, insubstantial Edgar Gilfoyle, ever flinching away from a world shaped by conflict.

In a tired voice, she said, “I see what you’re saying. The rumor of you buying out of the draft goes away.”

“And the rumors that you’re a gold digger vanish, too,” Gilfoyle agreed.

June had to take a moment. She picked up one of the pens and drew a hard, dark square on the blotter, then put the pen down again. When she spoke, her voice was calm. “Only, I’m not marrying you.”

“June.”

“For starters, I don’t love you—”

“—sure you do—”

“—and there’s someone else.”

Now it was Gilfoyle who had to take a moment. He crossed his arms. Uncrossed them. Mussed his hair. Unmussed it. Then he said, “I don’t believe it.”

June considered her tryst with Tucker in the playhouse, the walk down Casto Springs’ main street. He saw the difference between Hoss and June. Unlike everyone else, he preferred June. Now that she knew that was possible, it was never going to be Gilfoyle.

“I loved you so much, Ed,” she said. “I was wild about you. If you’d asked me in New York all those years ago . . .”

He lowered his eyelids. She saw him snagging his line again and again on the memories of wrong choices lurking in the deep. Mr. Francis had once told June: They say youth is wasted on the young. Why do we hate the foolishness that made us unfoolish? She tested her own line for regrets, but she came up empty-handed. Every decision, heartbreak, and victory had brought her to this moment, after all, hadn’t it? The moment June realized she’d made her decision.

She saw Gilfoyle swallow.

He said, “There’s still time.”

With gentle pity, June said, “Shut the door behind you.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Hannelore had never seen so many swastikas in her life. They were stitched into curtains. Painted on tablecloths. Arranged into the fruit platters. The tables in the dining room were shoved into a swastika shape. The silverware, wrapped in napkins, was laid out in swastikas. The most shocking, though, was a freshly painted symbol, still wet, in the middle of the ballroom floor. It had the look of haste and secrecy; the legs were different lengths and one of them was quite feathery, as if the painter had taken flight before doing a second coat.

Everyone was talking about the last one as the music played and the wine flowed. It was mentioned in the same breath as a décor item that the staff had placed on each table that morning: candle centerpieces fashioned of rustic wood and metal. They were quite odd-looking, featuring special matchsticks with red, white, and blue heads that were displayed in purpose-made holes on top of the base. Each bore a printed inscription that read:

ONLY FOR BLACKOUT!

Made especially for John Willy, Hotel Monthly, Chicago, Ill

Remember Pearl Harbor, Sun. Dec. 7, 1941

Buy Defense Stamps

The painted swastika, Hannelore understood, was somehow a punishment for these candles being placed on the tables. Both were acts of war in a battle that, until today, the last day, had been unspoken. Now, it was not quite spoken, but it could not be denied, either.

It seemed to Hannelore like someone should be punished for something—either the staff for the somehow shocking candles, or the Germans for the definitely shocking swastika—but the hotel whirred in an odd in-between. The diplomats were there, but they were also almost not-there. A train was on its way to them right at that moment, and although they had not yet removed everything from their rooms, they had put their heads on those pillows for the last time. There were no classes for the children, no more meetings with the Swiss. No more conversations with the waiters over tomorrow’s breakfast, no more asking the shopkeepers what might come in at the end of the week. The board that had previously advertised which movies would be played in the theater room was empty.

So the staff saw the swastika on the floor, whispered hastily among themselves, and did not raise a fuss. They simply vanished quietly. Yes, scurry scurry, said one of the consuls. They can do nothing to us now. But later, Hannelore saw one of the porters urinating into one of the German suitcases in the hall. He saw her catch him, cock in his hand, but he didn’t flinch. He just shifted slightly to hide his member and finished what he was doing. He buttoned his fly, flipped the case closed, then turned to give Hannelore a look of pure acid. She just stared.

He left without a word.

The hotel was different. Every font she passed vibrated with sullen, crackling energy. Every diplomat hummed to match. The air shimmered. She could smell the sweetwater with every breath. Run. She could not run. Where would she run to? She was going to Germany.

Sterilization.

In the hallway, Hannelore saw Erich von Limburg-Stirum and the friendly waiter, Sebastian Hepp, talking together in German. Ordinarily Sebastian would have had a kind word for her, but today, he didn’t seem to see her when she passed; he was looking into nothing, listening hard to Erich saying, We should make a promise—

Uneasy, she scurried until she found her father and Lothar in the bar, talking in low voices. The lights of the space were turned low and everything was painted green-blue, like they were underwater. Difficult to tell if it had simply not yet opened for the night or was not going to open at all for the rest of the detainment. They were alone apart from Citizen sitting at their feet; there was neither bartender nor customers in the booths. No, not entirely alone. As she stepped in, she saw that Sandy Gilfoyle sat in his wheelchair, facing a blank wood-paneled wall—a boring place to leave him, but Stella, too, had seemed out of sorts. Earlier that day, a staff member had put a book in her hand and pushed her into one of the quiet sitting rooms.

Hannelore’s father reached a hand to her and said, “Sing the song for us, Liebchen, before your mother gets here. Show me how well you know it.”

Casting a suspicious look at Sandy, she sang, “H 1 6 89 L / R Y W 1 2 / Q U 49—”

As she sang, she heard her father talking to Lothar. “. . . is that sufficient for you? I am the only one who knows how to decode it, and she is the only one who has the entire list now that the embassy paperwork is gone.”

“Why are you telling me now?” Lothar said.

“In case I am made to vanish once we arrive,” her father said.

They would ordinarily never have spoken like this in front of her, but it was as if they thought she could not hear them because she was singing. Couldn’t she count thousands of numbers while also listening to a conversation, though? Of course she could easily recall these stanzas while listening.

“Why would you be made to vanish?”

“Why would anyone, Lothar?”

Lothar laughed, but it was an unfunny laugh. Hannelore knew the difference.

Run.

“Is this the time or place for that?” Sabine’s voice cut through the smoky air of the pub. She snapped, “Hannelore, stop singing.”

Her mother was dressed for the journey, in her favorite traveling suit coat and skirt; she once told Hannelore that, on a long journey, it was important to be both comfortable and dressed appropriately for a social gathering. People treated you as you asked them to, she had said, and clothing was the first demand you made of them.

Sabine’s hands, however, were not dressed for the journey. Hannelore watched them tremor by her sides.

“They are getting your gun out of the basement. Go make sure everything is in order with our luggage,” Sabine told Friedrich.

This was the sort of order Lothar would have teased Friedrich over, but today, the men meekly took their leave. Sabine crouched before Hannelore and put her hands on either side of her face. Hannelore was aware this was a gesture of closeness, so she held quite still, even though she did not like it. The silence in the pub only accentuated the loudness of the whispering water; the brightness of her mother’s red-gold hair only accentuated the darkness of the close wood paneling around them. Hannelore looked into her mother’s eyes and counted seconds until Sabine finally sighed and released her.

“Mrs. Wolfe, can I have a word with you?”

It was the State Department man, Benjamin Pennybacker. Citizen ran up to him, and, unthinkingly, he bent to rumple the dog’s ears.

“If this is about the graffiti, I have no idea—”

“No,” Pennybacker said. “It is about . . .”

A complex silence stretched, the sort Hannelore was not yet good at interpreting. The two adults’ expressions gave nothing away, no matter how hard she looked.

“Sit at that table, Hannelore,” Sabine said. She unrolled a napkin and put it in front of Hannelore on the table so that she could pretend to draw on it. “Don’t get up until I tell you to.”

Then she retreated farther into the pub with Pennybacker. There they whispered, but Hannelore could still hear them quite clearly.

“Now is the time, Mrs. Wolfe, to tell me if there is anything, absolutely anything, that might help me to help you,” he said. “If there is anything you might be willing to share with the US government about your husband’s work, it is possible they might be willing to keep you both.”

Sabine’s voice was chilly. “I think you have completely misunderstood my intentions. I am not seeking amnesty. I am trying to protect my child. Not to betray my husband. Is this conversation even appropriate for the State Department to have with a member of a diplomatic legation?”

This was the version of her mother who had stepped forward to calm the fractious Hungarians on the very first day. Sabine Wolfe, the diplomat’s wife, representing German ideals. That seemed like a very long time ago. Back then, Hannelore had not always known how long they would go between moves, but she understood that they would move, from post to post, country to country, being German for the rest of the world to see. Now she wasn’t sure what the future held.

“Of course, of course, I did not mean to imply your husband was doing anything, uh, untoward. I was merely seeking creative solutions. You understand my hands are quite tied. But I just . . . I didn’t sleep last night, Mrs. Wolfe. I didn’t sleep. I was thinking about Hannelore. I look at her and I see . . .”

“Hannelore is a very special child,” Sabine interrupted.

“I know,” he said hurriedly. “That is what I was going to say. When she watches a room, it is really something to see. I can tell she is taking in everything, cataloguing it. I have seen her working away at her lists. She is quite a marvelous child. I am sure she will be an interesting woman.”

Her mother fell silent for a moment and then said, in a different voice, “Can she not just stay with you, just for a few months?”

Her mother offered it so casually, as if Hannelore was a piece of luggage. Could you keep this behind the front desk until we return? Hannelore had watched Benjamin Pennybacker, as she had watched everyone in the hotel. Now she recalled his breakfast-taking, his fingers sticky with jelly or syrup as he used a pen to carefully turn the page of whatever file or book he was looking at. She recalled his clumsiness in the hall, the other federal agents talking easily to each other as he shoved words into all the wrong places. She saw his hand rested gently, instinctually, on Citizen’s head as he spoke to her mother.

Hannelore traced the shape of his crumpled mouth on her napkin.

“I have agonized over this very question,” he said. “I cannot keep her off that train when I have been expressly told to put her on it. It would be an act of war. I can continue to work after you have gone, hoping that I might get satisfaction before you leave New Jersey, but I . . . I would not have asked you about your husband if I had any choice.”

From deeper in the hotel, voices rose in momentary hostility before ebbing away. The sounds of discord. Hannelore hadn’t realized how unusual such sounds had become to her; the Avallon had repelled them for a very long time. She understood now that it was coming to an end. Hannelore drew an invisible drawing of herself standing in one of the hotel windows. Water poured over the sill. Her hand, like her mother’s, was trembling.

Sabine said, “You ask me to give up one or the other.”

“No,” Pennybacker replied, gravely. “I’m afraid your country is doing that.”

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Tucker’s footfalls were heavier than usual as he made the walk from the hotel proper down to the cabins at the woods’ edge, not from a heaviness of heart—although there was weight there, he couldn’t lie—but rather from the burden on his shoulders. On one shoulder, Tucker carried his typewriter and paper in its case, and over the other a bag full of recordings and Pony’s call logs. Overhead, the sky was towering and blue all the way up to God’s grin. Birds sang breathlessly. It was spring; all around him were the signs of bright industry. Staff mowed the Winnet fields, dug weeds from the beds, planted new annuals from the greenhouse, and painted pollen-grimed windowsills. The diplomats were not gone yet, but they would be soon, and the Avallon needed to be ready for whoever came next. Some of these staff members waved when they saw Tucker on his walk down. A few even addressed him with that odd, flying hand gesture that they used both to greet and to reference June, a conflation of their identities that he wished was true.

He was tired, awake, anticipatory, unsure; he hadn’t felt this tangled since his first post after the academy. A long time ago. Iowa. Their SAC had Tucker pulling sixty, seventy, eighty hours a week trying to track down a hog thief. A quaint-sounding gig, but in practice, a blood-stained, high-dollar rustling affair that involved hundreds of heads of hog traveling across state lines in the dead of night. There wasn’t much glory work to be had, but what there was, SAC Des Moines performed, while Tucker resolutely took statements from neighbors, staked out in ditches while tornadoes roared a few counties away, and scraped blood-soaked floorboards into purpose-built crates destined for the lab. His SAC grunted orders: Minnick, get up. Minnick, now. Minnick, get their statements. Minnick, sit down. Don’t leave this place ’til they come back. Minnick, I have ass hairs longer than that memo, do better.

Such a long time ago.

“Hugh, you here?” Tucker called as he entered the Trillium House, letting his bag slump on the bunk snugged along the hall wall. One of his surveillance recordings was already playing from deeper in the cabin; a scratchy German conversation muttered back and forth. Stepping into the dim sitting room, he found Sandy Gilfoyle parked in a chair before the unset fire as the murmured German filled the room around him.

Behind him, he heard the door open and then, belatedly, a knock on it.

“You have a minute?” June Hudson asked.

She was in the doorway like the mountains were on the horizon; once he’d seen her, there was no point looking anywhere else. There was only one question Tucker wanted the answer to, but in the way of men and women since time immemorial, he could ask anything but it. “How are the diplomats doing?”

He knew what Edgar Gilfoyle had asked her. Even though he’d dismantled his surveillance equipment, the walls of the hotel had their own ears and eyes. Everyone in the hotel knew. Knowing that the Grotto and the landscapers and the porters and Toad’s girls in housekeeping were all backing him instead of Gilfoyle brought him not a lick of comfort. In the end, it was June’s heart, and whatever this family was to her. Tucker was just a man. Gilfoyle was an entire way of life.

“They painted a swastika on my ballroom. One of the Italians spit on one of the Japanese consuls. Breznay left the maids a hateful letter. Did you get done what you needed to get done?” she asked. “For your position.”

It was unbearably polite. Tucker stacked a sheaf of paperwork, squaring the edges. The real work of packing would take far more than that, but it felt important to look industrious, unbothered. He said, “I know they already told you.”

She admitted, “Durand did just now. Is that all right? Do you feel all right?”

An easy question, finally. He smiled at her.

She peered at him as if looking for the complication in this confession, but in this broad daylight, there wasn’t any. She was the only complication.

“I need to talk to you,” June said. She glanced at Sandy. “I think we better talk alone.”

They stepped out back as the German recording continued to mutter in the background. The porch was a rudimentary slab with no railings, just an excuse to drink and look at the mountains. The groundskeepers hadn’t dragged chairs out, so Tucker and June sat on the edge of the concrete, legs dangling into the weeds. Mockingbirds called to each other; in the woods, a deer woofed in distant alarm. She stared up at the mountains; he stared at her.

“I don’t know what he can hear,” June said, “but I don’t want him to be implicated in this in case he can. I want to keep Hannelore off that train.”

Disappointment stabbed, sharp and short, followed by shock. “June.”

“I know, and don’t lecture me on things I already know. I know what I can live with and what I can’t, and I can’t live with this. Seems to me if I can get the train out of the station without her on it and her parents not crying the alarm until New Jersey, the wheels’ll already be in motion. They’ll look for her, but they’ll think she went missing, and they won’t stop the machine for one little girl. So we just keep her off that train and they’ll get on that boat.”

“And then?”

“And then even if she shows back up, it’s months before Pennybacker’s stooges can get paperwork through to do anything about it.”

It was a glorious idea. It was a terrible idea. The sort of potent, impossible idea the sweetwater would whisper on a clear day. “How will you get her away today?”

“The water.”

A prickle of nerves, both memory and anticipation, just below his belly button.

June spidered her fingers, as if the air was sweetwater and she could read it. “You still afraid of it, after all this?”

Casto Springs. Poison Point. He could remember lying in the dark, knowing the sweetwater was moving in its secret way beneath the rock, so very interested in how he was feeling. He knew now the poison had been inside him, not the water. The sweetwater should have been afraid of him, not the other way around. What was it doing before people arrived? Remembering last year’s snow. “Afraid’s not the right word.”

“What is the right word?”

He looked at the side of her face, at her pensive mouth, her clever eyes. He couldn’t bear it anymore. “June, what am I to you?”

The breeze made her flutter her eyelashes low. “What do you want to be to me?”

The first night Tucker lived as Tucker Rye Minnick instead of Richard Monrow Minnick had lasted forever. He’d traded lodging in a room in exchange for chasing down a homesteader’s bull, and he’d curled on a quilt on the pantry floor listening to the man berate his wife in a hard, low tone, and thought of how he was still within walking distance of his mother and sisters and he could still go back to face justice instead of leaving everything behind. He thought of prison and he thought of hanging. He thought of his father. He had the cold, miserable realization that he would never be happy again.

But in the morning, the sun was clear, and the road ahead of him was downhill and the road behind uphill, and he felt like he had started a completely new life. Tucker Rye Minnick. Whatever happened would be something that he would have never even imagined.

That was how he felt now.

“Everything,” he replied. “I want to be what makes you smile when we come home to each other and I want to be what makes you settle under a full moon and I want to be what makes you wild when I’m gone and I want to be what makes you laugh when I’m inside you and I want to be what makes you weep when I die and I want to be everything else in between and I want to take you out into the world and see it with you, but if it has to be here, then here is where I land.”

Words rarely came easily to Tucker, but they didn’t stop coming to him then, breaking through to the surface until there were no more left. He wanted her to know. He wanted every part of her to know, in a thorough way, in a way that left no room for doubt.

June whispered, “Then that’s what you should be to me.”

Much is made of first kisses, and not enough of third or fourth kisses. Not enough is made of the third or fourth time a man takes a woman’s hand. Not enough of the third or fourth time a woman smiles at a man with all her teeth, like a girl. June and Tucker kissed, Bureau and hotel, although that was only true for another few hours, and it was better for not being the first time. Then he tugged her back inside. She let herself be tugged, and he knew she expected and wanted him to take her to one of the rooms. He wanted that, too. But that was for later.

Instead, he led her into the sitting room. The recorded German conversation had gotten a little heated. Sandy was still in front of the fireplace, notes piled beside him. If June had looked closely, she would probably have recognized the handwriting. Tucker pulled the curtains to cover the windows between the lawn and the cabin. One did not have a curtain, so he pushed a hutch to block the view. He returned to Sandy’s side. The youngest Gilfoyle sat motionless, gazing at nothing, handsome and scarred.

When he’d first encountered Sandy, Tucker had thought he was just another Gilfoyle, but he realized now that Sandy was very little like the rest of his family. He was much more like June. Made sense, really, once you knew.

Tucker said to him, “Twenty horsemen.”

The silence stretched out in the dim.

Then Sandy turned on one elbow and said, “April Fools’, June.”

Chapter Thirty

Sandy Gilfoyle was standing. He was speaking. June watched him rise; as if from the outside, she watched him fold his arms around her. He was the young man she had raised from a small boy and she was the woman she had raised from an odd little orphan. His dusty tousled hair pressed to her sleek dark bob. He looked like a son back from war. She looked as if she had been assigned a puzzling task she did not yet know how to solve.

Sandy was laughing at her, hugging her tightly, as she said, “I talked to you and you didn’t blink an eye. Stella told the joke about the Pharisee and you didn’t move! You never ate! You looked out the window for hours!” June couldn’t seem to stop finding evidence against what was directly before her. “Agent Calloway spilt hot coffee on you, that’s what I heard, and you didn’t move!”

“That was necessary,” Tucker said. “Had to be done in front of the Germans so they believed in him.”

“Wasn’t easy,” Sandy admitted. “Especially because I knew it was coming. Itches were tough, too. And when that woman fell from the balcony . . .”

June’s heart just kept exploding; she could feel it trickling through her, tingling through every vein, down her arms, down her legs. This was what they meant when they said dance for joy, she thought. Sandy was well, Sandy was fine, Sandy was bright and dutiful and everything else she already knew about him. Sandy was fine. War had not ruined his wonderful mind. He was here and happy and gallant and oh she could leap from sofa to table to mantel in this cabin! He had stepped back but she had to hug him again, hard around his rib cage, good old wiry Sandy, no longer the small boy she had rescued, but still familiar and wonderful to embrace just the same.

“The training accident was real, of course,” Tucker said. “When I heard he was meant to come home to convalesce, I saw my opportunity.”

The shaved patch over Sandy’s ear had long since grown back, but one side of his face was still pocked with scars; he touched one of these lightly now. He said, “I’d already volunteered for special assignments, something to use my languages with, and I’d already heard Ed was working on getting the diplomats into the hotel and had mentioned me, so as soon as Agent Minnick asked me if I was up for something crazy, boy, June, I was on it.”

Oh. June put it together, what this must mean. The night at the bar. Gilfoyle’s hands on hers. No wonder Tucker had been out of his mind. “So Ed knows.”

“Of course. He was the one who told Minnick about my accident. He was in on it from the beginning.”

She held Tucker’s gaze. He shrugged a single shoulder. Nothing to be said.

“—no one looks at someone in a wheelchair, and he was right,” Sandy was saying. “You wouldn’t believe what people say in front of me.”

As Tucker picked up the phone and spoke a few low words into it, June collapsed back onto the ratty cabin sofa. No matter that Gilfoyle was a rat. The sun was out, and Sandy was fine, and Tucker wanted to be everything to her. The water needed to wash Hannelore away from Germany, and she knew she could do it, if she put her mind to it. Happiness and terror mingled inside her, closer to one another than she had previously suspected. If she had been a harpsichordist, she would have plunked herself down at the lobby piano to shout this feeling out, too.

“Minnick, Minnick,” Sandy said. There was familiarity in the way he said it; more than anything, it convinced June how closely the two men had been working together. “Listen. Before June showed up, I had come down here to say—can I say it in front of her? Good—I know what the code is.”

Tucker was immediately alert. With effort, he paused long enough to explain to June that Friedrich Wolfe had taught Hannelore Wolfe a sung code, thinking it might keep her alive in Germany. He and Sandy had been trying to figure out what the code might be for weeks. He asked Sandy, “How did you find out?”

“He told Liebe in the bar this morning. He’s getting nervous about what will happen to them now that it’s real. It’s a list of anti-Nazi individuals in German diplomatic circles.”

“Two birds, one stone,” Tucker said. “Makes Hannelore seem valuable and proves Friedrich’s loyalty. Did Liebe seem impressed?”

“Do you know what, I think he seemed a little disappointed. I think he thought Wolfe was the kind one. This is pretty ruthless.” Sandy scratched his head. “I am not sure their friendship will survive Nazi Germany. How luxurious, to scratch my head! What will I do with myself when I am allowed to move during the day? Wolfe’s plan seems dead in the water to me. Encoding his daughter only proves her strangeness. She throws a fit while they are getting it out of her, and it’s worse than if he’d done nothing. Or, maybe worse, they find some use for her, and she spends the next few years singing code in war rooms. Why does he think it will work?”

“Desperation,” Tucker said. “But hard to feel sorry for him when he’s willing to get other people killed over it.”

It was an even more devilish arithmetic than ever before. June had read about the Wolfes’ Nazi politics in their file, but this—the willingness to give up unwitting associates in exchange for Hannelore—was an intimate violence. Yes, Hannelore was their daughter, but whoever they were giving up was someone’s son, someone’s daughter. Friedrich Wolfe was willing to use other people as bargaining chips, just as Lieselotte Berger and Hertha were bargaining chips. How dehumanizing this war was.

“Ah, Mr. Clemons,” said Sandy. “Take a chair; it’s revelation day.”

Griff Clemons, June’s trustworthy staff captain, stepped into the cabin. When he saw June’s shocked expression, he rubbed his bum eye apologetically. He did not look at all surprised to see Sandy alert and cheerful. Tersely, Tucker explained to June that Sandy, thinking he was alone, had scratched his ear the day after he arrived; the watchful and suspicious staff captain had to be folded into the plan at once.

“Sure was hard to keep you in the dark, Hoss,” Griff said.

The revelation seemed to deserve a handshake. She and her staff captain shook hands, as if they’d been separated for a long time, and then they went to business.

“June intends to keep Hannelore off that train,” Tucker said.

Sandy regarded her with frank admiration. Griff said, Whssssssst, a noise that usually indicated June had asked for something far outside of budget. She knew they were thinking the same things she had been thinking since last night. Every room full of people. The Border Patrol agents waiting to escort the diplomats to the train. State Department passenger lists demanding accuracy. June would need to get Hannelore away, making sure that no one saw her, or, if they did, making sure it had happened in a manner easily explained away, nothing that would be an international incident, nothing that would result in June spending a long time accounting for sins in a courtroom. Hannelore would have to be hidden away for as many days as it took for the boat to plunge out to sea with the diplomats. And then . . . and then . . .

“The water will be a distraction,” she said. She realized that Tucker had been absolutely right to summon Griff; he needed to know that June was the one causing the commotion. Otherwise he would have done his best to put a stop to it. “No one will be watching us. I’ll slip her out. And after . . .”

“I’ll take her,” Sandy interrupted. “You get her out of the hotel, and then I’ll take her. No one has been looking at me. They all expect me to convalesce forever. No one will suspect I was the one to whisk her away in broad daylight. I’ll keep her hidden until the boat’s gone, and then I’ll take her to Pennybacker. In the pub today, he said he would take her. On one condition.”

June raised an eyebrow.

“You leave this place,” Sandy said. “Get your affairs in order over the next few days, so no one thinks you had a whit to do with it, then get as far away from the Avallon IV as you can.”

How bitter it had been at the end. Mr. Francis had finally given up trying to explain luxury and intention to a young man who had no need of it, and Sandy had long since stopped trying to describe how that world was already dead to an older man who was still living in it. In the middle was Edgar, of course, who had never shown the slightest interest in running the hotel. Carrie was already married and had no interest in signing herself into a second prison. And Madeline—well, she couldn’t even talk about the water. Who was left?

“June,” Sandy said, voice earnest, “I died every time you went in there.”

He meant the Avallon IV.

He had dangled in there for hours. He knew what it could be like.

He said, “I never forgave him for convincing you to be GM.”

Ten years of her life, intentionally curating joy for anyone who came. Leaving her thumbprints on every person who came. Learning society so thoroughly that Sachiko Nishimura, who couldn’t hear her accent, had mistaken her for a Gilfoyle. Changing the lives of the hundreds of staff who worked here, some of them who couldn’t have survived anywhere else—including June herself. She’d given away so much to the Avallon IV, and she was ready to stop, but it didn’t change all the good that had come before this moment.

She did not regret it. But she was ready to go.

She held Griff’s gaze. His life was all bound up in the Avallon, too, after all, and who knew what was to come after this. Who knew what the Avallon was without her. They’d both gotten as high up as they could get here on this mountain, neither able to do it without the other.

Her staff captain said, “Everything’s got to change eventually, Hoss.”

The cabin was silent. It had its rainwater cistern, so there was no sweetwater to hear the feeling inside her. It would soon enough.

Outside, they heard the sounds of staff calling to one another; the porters were starting the herculean task of putting the luggage into delivery trucks. It was almost over.

Chapter Thirty-One

The train arrived at midnight, and the Japanese were singing.

They sang a bright, martial tune in time with their footsteps as they marched down the grand lobby staircases for the last time. It was the most merriment anyone had seen from the legation; the staff and other legations paused to watch even the sleepy-eyed children join. What was the song about? No one knew, at least not until Sachiko Nishimura broke off from the group long enough to whisper in June’s ear: “‘Beyond the clouds of dawn, / Fuji’s peak rises / eternal and beautiful / what pride has Japan!’”

The translation was a parting gift: the gift of understanding, just for June.

June bowed to Sachiko as she had seen the other Japanese do.

Sachiko, surprised, bowed back.

The train had actually arrived nearly an hour before, and the Border Patrol and a handful of state troopers had already started on the dozens of escorted trips required to ferry the luggage to the station. Once they were done, the women and children would ride down the same way. And then, finally, the men would walk to the station. It was the process of arrival, neatly reversed.

The Border Patrol would demolish their guard towers the following morning and throw the lumber onto the back of work trucks. Tucker, Hugh, and Pony would put the last of the recording equipment into the Bureau car and seal any sensitive evidence in locked bags for SOG. Housekeeping would begin to turn over the rooms. The Grotto would do inventory in the pantries and put purchase orders on June’s desk. The phones would ring, the calls going straight through the switchboard with no agent listening in, and the registrars would begin to book the summer season.

That was the government’s plan.

That was not June’s plan.

She watched the Italian legation descend the grand staircase, some pausing to tip the staff. Many of them nodded or lifted a hand to June as they passed, including the fellow who had set his room on fire.

Here came the journalists, except for Lieselotte Berger, who had been transferred to a hospital in Charleston that morning. When she finally healed, she would be allowed to walk right out into America and to wherever her future took her. The two other journalists passed June without saying a word. The hotel had never stopped being a prison to them, and she was just one of their jailers.

Tucker had appeared in one of the doorways; June joined him. Was Sandy in place? He nodded.

Wordlessly, they watched the German legation emerge on the second-floor balcony. Friedrich Wolfe, with Lothar close beside him, stopped them on the stairs and addressed his legation in German. Impossible for June to know what the contents of the speech were; all she knew was that partway through, Erich von Limburg-Stirum, holding his wife’s hand, averted his eyes, and at the end, Friedrich Wolfe and Lothar Liebe both gave a one-armed salute that made every staff member in the lobby hold their breath.

A heavy silence followed.

The Avallon was used to maintaining the illusion of luxury through all sorts of circumstances, but this single gestured punctured right through the veil for all time.

Tucker’s attention focused; June followed his gaze. Sabine and Hannelore Wolfe had joined the legation late. Sabine had clearly been crying; no amount of diplomatic poise could hide it. Hannelore, on the other hand, was clear-eyed, her expression flat, no more expressive than June had been when her own mother left her in Constancy.

“Everyone, can I have your attention?” Basil Pemberton raised his plummy voice from the front door. “There are quite a lot of you and only a few cars, so I appreciate your patience as we get you all down to the train, thank you! Please let us know if we can make your wait any more comfortable.”

June let the gathered people slowly push her to Sabine, inevitable as a tide reaching shore. “Mrs. Wolfe, I promised to help you before. Do you still want it?”

Sabine gazed at her. Shocked. Stricken. Where was the gilded queen who had arrived at the Avallon? Nowhere in evidence. This also reminded June of her abandonment in Constancy. Her mother’s face had looked like this, too. That glazed expression that meant she wouldn’t be able to withstand any additional tribulation; she was at the end of her ability to survive. Likewise, Sabine didn’t seem to have even been able to hear June, although the two women were close as they could be.

“Quickly,” June said. “I need to know now.”

Yes or no? Gilfoyle said.

“Yes,” said Sabine.

The smell of spring sucked into the lobby as people flowed through the flung-open front doors. The trees must already be beautiful along the ruined street of Casto Springs. Was it this warm in Germany, too? Did the smell of flowers and fresh-cut grass pour into the hotel at Bad Nauheim as the Americans hurried toward their own train? Or was it the churning, vile smell of machinery and rot, an unchanging season of war?

Sabine took Hannelore’s hand. Her daughter stared at this union of their fingers. June knew that she would be analyzing the gesture, taking apart all its possible meanings, trying to decide what was expected of her, trying to perform that for her mother.

“Once there was a girl named Hannelore,” Sabine whispered, “who traveled on a train to a magical land. Long ago, her mother and her father had made a bargain to a wicked king, and so they had to go back to their old home for a year and a day so that the curse could be lifted. It was a bargain they made long before Hannelore was born. It was not her fault. The queen loved Hannelore very—”

Sabine broke off. She transferred Hannelore’s hand to June’s grip instead.

“Be gentle,” she told her daughter.

Hannelore didn’t pull away. Her hand was dead weight in June’s. Her owlish frown seemed to indicate she understood this gesture far better than the other. By the time she looked up, Sabine was backing away toward the rest of the German legation, her eyes getting brighter and brighter. Hannelore’s body was beginning to quiver, but she remained, obedient, until Sabine, finally unable to watch her daughter’s slow understanding, turned away.

Hannelore let out a wordless noise, soft as a kitten.

June’s mother hadn’t said goodbye. She had simply told June to wait while she went begging, and then she’d never returned. It had taken a full day for June to understand.

“I am sorry,” June told Hannelore. Making eye contact with Tucker across the room, she nodded at him. He knew his part in what was coming. “Later, this will make more sense.”

Robotically, the German girl let June lead her through the gathered diplomats to the lobby’s beautiful sweetwater font, carved for the hotel by Cyrus Edwin Dallin, who was known for his vibrant equestrian statues. Three horses, their manes sculpted into oceanic waves, poured sweetwater into the basin below. Snails crawled beneath their throats and into their nostrils.

This close, the smell of spring was overpowered by the stench of the water. It was the stench of that one-handed salute. It was the stench of that swastika. It was the stench of a list of betrayed colleagues. The stench of war.

Hannelore whimpered.

Across the lobby, Griff put his hand on a door, ready to push it open.

June said, “It’s all right to scream.”

She plunged their held hands into the water.

• • •

JUNE REMEMBERED HER final tantrum. It was embarrassingly late, long after her mother had left her in Constancy, long after she’d come to the Avallon to work as a maid. She was upset. Not over anything important: she’d been blamed for the housekeeping department’s latest linen shortage. She had known she hadn’t misplaced any towels. She was always very conscientious—she could not be otherwise, no matter how hard she tried. As the other maids tried to get her to admit her failing, shame and fury kept rolling over her in increasing waves, each one eroding her calm further. Even though the others were still talking to her and over her, she walked away. Down the hall, into the supply closet. She closed the door to shut out their distant voices and, in the dark, furious heat hazed her cheeks. She could feel her trembling body prepping the screams.

Curling herself into a ball on the floor, she fisted her hands. The floorboard pressed into her cheek. Everything smelled of the Avallon. Floor polish. Floral sachets. Woodsmoke. Fresh bread. Sweetwater. It whispered to her through the pipes, soothing her. Be calm.

And she was calm.

In that little quiet, she found she was able to be practical. She considered who else might have lost the linens. Burned kitchen linens got thrown away instead of tossed in the hamper. Plongeurs accidentally stuffed linens into their lockers along with their coats. Lazy maids rolled them behind pillows in unused sitting areas for later retrieval. Plumbers balled them into sponges beneath persistent leaks. Waiters collected dropped napkins during meal service and forgot to extricate them from their pockets at end of shift.

She would just explain this to the rest of housekeeping, she thought. She’d find the linens; no need to defend herself. It wouldn’t happen again.

The tantrum was gone as if it had never been a possibility.

It was not that everything began to make sense in that moment, but it was that it could. The world had a system, and she just needed to listen. Watch. Then put it into action.

It was the first time in her life she hadn’t felt powerless.

The sweetwater’s first gift to her.

• • •

THE WATER IN the lobby’s font was hot and unpleasant. Misery clawed at her skin. Hannelore began to wail. Something gurgled in the walls.

Across the room, Griff Clemons made eye contact with her. The staff at the front desk made eye contact. The staff on the stairs, in the halls. Holding the doors open for the diplomats. The staff that put their head out of the dining room, that crowded from the kitchen. That leaned over the balcony from higher floors. So much of what went on in a hotel had to be unspoken. A gaze exchanged across a hallway, a subtle hand gesture from a balcony, a quiet anticipation of what the other needed, keeping the work of luxury silent.

Now everyone was looking at Hoss. Trusting her, as they had always trusted her. She didn’t know what Griff had told them—she was certain he had told them something—but she knew what she had told them.

Leave the water to me.

They had made something wonderful together, but the cost of luxury had become too steep. Everything comes to an end. She didn’t know what the Avallon would be after this, but she knew it would never be this again.

With her expression, June told her beloved staff: Thank you.

With her heart, June told the water: Be free.

The font beneath her hand spilled water onto the tile beneath it.

Water formed glistening beads on the plaster ceiling far overhead. Water trickled from behind the paintings on the walls. Water seeped from the fonts on either side of the front door, as diplomats backed away. In the halls, in the Grotto, in the rooms. Pipes burst. Tubs coughed and spit water from their drains. The walls wept water. Where was it all coming from? There was so much. They were on a mountain, but the unwelcome guests were all suddenly up to their ankles in water.

A mighty crash sounded from overhead. Not 411 throwing furniture. Something violent was occurring in the Wolfes’ old suite—Francis Gilfoyle’s old suite.

Oh, the smell!

For so long, the metallic, sulfuric odor of the sweetwater had been synonymous with the Avallon. But now, every other scent of the hotel was flowing from the fonts. Shoe polish and new leather. Freshly cleaned sheets and just-soaped carpets. Coffee in the morning and bourbon at night. Decades of human activity that had seeped into the water, teaching it everything it knew.

Confusion murmured and then shouted through the lobby. It was imperative to get the people out of the building as quickly as possible. Federal agents and Avallon porters and Border Patrol agents and state troopers mingled with the crowd, everything in chaos, as people flooded out the front doors. It was all going according to plan. How June loved a plan.

“Do you hear what the water is saying?” June whispered to Hannelore.

Run.

Hannelore looked over the lobby. She was standing straight, but somehow, she looked uncivilized. Wild. She looked, June thought, like the water running beneath the church in Casto Springs. Water wasn’t just one thing; it could be rain, snow, ice, and rivers. Hannelore had her entire life ahead of her. June had her entire life ahead of her.

Then, as sweetwater cascaded down the stairs, smelling of flowers, of fruit, of delicately spiced vanilla, of a hotel slowly weeping from every seam, June led Hannelore away.

Epilogue

It was the week of April 30. Henri Giraud, the French general, had just escaped from Königstein Fortress; the Hollywood Victory Caravan, including Bing Crosby, Spencer Tracy, and Groucho Marx, had just visited the White House; all the Jews in the Netherlands had been ordered to wear yellow badges. And Benjamin Pennybacker of the United States State Department was standing at the window of his Virginia rambler, watching Sandy Gilfoyle pull his car onto the bright curb.

By the time Pennybacker got his slippers on and met him outside, Hannelore Wolfe was taking a suitcase out of the trunk. He watched the girl carefully set it on the curb, then return to the car to collect a stack of lists from the passenger seat. Sandy gestured at her, and she returned once more to fetch the keys from the ignition, clearly busywork to send her away from the adult conversation. She wasted time in the driver’s seat while Sandy handed Pennybacker a second suitcase. The youngest Gilfoyle and the girl had clearly reached an accord.

“They’ve been looking everywhere for that child,” Pennybacker said, weakly.

“Not everywhere,” Sandy remarked.

Suburban birds shrieked with delight. The sun moved slowly overhead. Pennybacker had thought—hoped—that the case of the disappearing Wolfe girl had involved Allied subterfuge of some sort, but the surprise he felt at actually seeing her told him that he had not really believed it. He’d thought her fate was just one more tragedy in a situation full of them. But it made sense, in retrospect. During the disaster at the hotel, June had disappeared; her staff told everyone she was working behind the scenes to mitigate the damage. The timing of Sandy’s absence had been more difficult to pinpoint—no one paid attention to a man in a wheelchair. Had he disappeared after the flood? Or had he already been gone? He was not one of the internees, so Pennybacker hadn’t been watching him closely. Hannelore’s absence had become painfully obvious in Jersey City, although where she’d gone absent was less clear. Her name was on the list of train passengers; her mother insisted she had boarded with them. No one had disembarked at any point during the journey.

It had been a tense day. Despite appearances, Pennybacker was very good at his job. He had never lost an entire human before.

They searched the hotel in Jersey City. They searched the train, even though it had already departed. They searched the Avallon, with its blocked-off halls and wilting damp wallpaper. Finally, as international tensions mounted, they sent the rest of the diplomats on their way across the ocean.

Case closed. For now.

“Now, listen. Hannelore has a head full of code,” Sandy told him. “A list of American sympathizers in the German diplomatic corps. Useful? I have no idea. But she will sing it for you if you make her a tuna fish sandwich. She’s awfully fond of them. Make them pretty dry, though. Not too much mayo, or you’ll get an earful.”

Pennybacker wanted to say something like What makes you think I will take her, but he already knew; Sandy had been in the bar when he told Sabine Wolfe. What a week he suddenly had ahead of himself. It was too late to put her on the boat, of course—Sandy had made sure of that—but she was still in danger. He would need to continue to wrap her in bureaucracy until she, like the ambassador’s son, was forgotten by anyone who had power.

“June says this’ll be good for you,” Sandy said. He grinned.

Pennybacker hadn’t thought to suspect June, even though his calls to the Avallon now always led him to either Griff Clemons or Basil Pemberton: We’re so sorry, but Miss Hudson isn’t available right now. He’d just thought that, like her dachshunds, she was now rejecting him. And why not? He’d headed the mission that knocked her lovely hotel to its knees.

He had not even thought to suspect Tucker Minnick, his resignation written even before he got to the Avallon.

Pennybacker was still in his bedroom slippers. There was not much food in the house. He was not gifted at living alone. He would need to shop. He would need to make up the guest bed. He would need to reopen files. He would stop sleeping in. He would make breakfasts in the morning and tuna fish sandwiches at lunch, without too much mayo.

Pennybacker could feel the light touch of June Hudson all the way in this Washington, DC, suburb.

“The State Department wants to buy the Avallon, did you hear?” Pennybacker asked. The hotel was badly water damaged after the flood, but the government didn’t care about some mildewing walls or rotten stairs; they’d just snag it at a nicer price. “I saw the preliminary proposal the other day.”

Sandy asked casually, “How would I know anything about that?”

Pennybacker gave him a look. He had been in government for a long time; the youngest Gilfoyle had clearly made either friends or a nest in the intelligence community. “What do you think?”

“War hospital,” mused Sandy, giving up the pretense. “It’s a good way for the old ship to go out, I think. I hope Ed agrees. He never wanted to run that hotel. End of an era.”

Hannelore climbed out of the car, waited for her mother’s terrier to jump out, and closed the door. Letting the leash drop to the ground, she shielded her eyes to take in the neat, square neighborhood. It was quintessentially American, this neighborhood, selected by the Pennybackers years before for its mundane charms, and surely had to be different from anyplace she’d ever stayed before.

“Where are they?” Pennybacker asked. “The hotel says she’s gone. And I know he is. I got his file.”

Sandy smiled sunnily. He was still winsomely handsome, even with his shrapnel scars. He looked, Pennybacker thought, quite a bit like June Hudson, although they were not related by blood. “Do you think they told me?”

“Yes.”

Sandy said, “Here is what I imagine. I think the Grotto probably packed them a picnic, because she loves a picnic. They probably tried to leave the dachshunds behind, but they couldn’t be persuaded to leave her, so into the back seat they went. I bet Toad cried over that. I bet they took that limo of hers as far as Charlotte, then got as much cash for it as they could. I think they bought a car off someone who didn’t have a gas ration for it anyway. I think they drove awhile. Probably held hands a lot. Florida would be nice right now. Pensacola, Miami, white beaches.”

“You think he’ll get drafted?”

“Maybe,” Sandy said. “He’s already had one bullet pulled out of him. He’s tough.”

“What do you think she’ll do?”

“Something big,” he said. “That’s how she is.”

The Wolfes’ terrier gamboled over to Pennybacker, leash dragging. It asked to be pet; Pennybacker did so. “What’ll you do?”

Sandy just wagged a finger at him. “You take care, Mr. Pennybacker.”

Benjamin Pennybacker stood in his bright driveway as Sandy Gilfoyle pulled away, not moving until the sound of the engine had completely faded away. Then he turned to Hannelore Wolfe, who stood beside him, her arms by her sides. She looked up at him. She was not crying, even though she was sad, but that made sense to him; he hadn’t cried when he was sad, earlier, either. He was not the sort of person who required faces to tell the entire story.

At that moment, he was just thinking of how he would manage the next few weeks with her. Later, he’d laugh at the person he’d been. A few weeks! They’d all been quite naïve, he thought, at the beginning of the war. It was a different time.

“Well, kid,” he said. “Looks like it’s you and me.”

ORDER, ROOM 411, 5/13/1942:

New York Times

2 lemons

2 croissants

1 ticket, Constancy-Charlottesville-Washington-New York, no return

Bride of Glory, Bradda Field

Evil Under the Sun, Agatha Christie

January 31, 1962

Eric Parnell

U.S. State Department

Washington, D.C.

Dear Mr. Parnell,

Thank you for the story. I know you said it was to help me understand my father, but it also helped me understand Hannelore. My father never spoke of how he came to adopt her and she is, as you might have discovered yourself, more interested in other people’s secrets than her own. Now I know why she calls him each January to recite a Burns song at him.

I pray you are right about the miracles. Dad has always been an optimist.

Gratefully, Jillian Pennybacker

Acknowledgments

Many people helped me with this five-year process, but I’d particularly like to thank:

• My agent, Richard Pine, and my editor, Andrea Schulz, the most devoted and supportive minds I could have hoped for on this project. They shepherded this idea from a whisper into a shout, and I could not have done it without their patience and wisdom.

• The many folks who helped me with the research: Rick Armstrong of the Bath County Historical Society; Kenna Jenkins of the Greenbrier Hotel Archives; Kayla Gross, who assisted with the interlibrary loans; Harvey Solomon, author of one of the defining works on the hotel detentions; Bill Quain (a magician and a hotelier); Niklaus Leuenberger (a hotelier and a storyteller); and Bruce O’Brien, who invested me with a passion for critical historical research.

• The Trobaughs, who walked me through the Hershey Hotel way back in 2019.

• BeePee, who must have been fairly certain, at one point, that she would also be detained at the Avallon forever.

• Brenna, Vanitha, Coleman, Dad: early eyeballs on ugly drafts; a thankless role.

• Victoria and William and Emy, for enduring my increasingly intangible form, cooking surprise meals, and forcing me to precipitate into a real version of myself every so often.

• Edward, well. You know how it is.

Author’s Note

What to do with the diplomats? This was a very real question in the days following Pearl Harbor. Over the course of the war, several hotels found themselves hosting Axis diplomatic legations: West Virginia’s Greenbrier Hotel, North Carolina’s Grove Park Inn, Pennsylvania’s Hershey Hotel, Arizona’s TriangleT Ranch, and Virginia’s Homestead Hotel and Ingleside Hotel.

Although June and the Avallon are fictional, much of what June encountered is real. A German ambassador really did cut a deal with the State Department to save his son’s life—his son went on to live a long, productive life in America, his mental diagnosis turning out to be a misdiagnosis after all. A journalist really did leap out a window in an attempt to keep from returning to Germany—one of many foreign nationals captured in the State Department’s broad net. The FBI really did facilitate hasty weddings in between their grueling, endless hours of surveillance. The Japanese really did request the dining room be arranged like the Rising Sun—and they really did despise the German legation so much that they had to be separated. As a novelist, I usually have to dramatize reality. In The Listeners, I found myself having to do the opposite. There were so many heightened and bizarre instances that I could not possibly use them all. To think an Italian diplomat setting fire to secret documents in his shoe only managed to earn a sentence in the final manuscript!

I also tried to be faithful to the joys and challenges of running a luxury hotel in the 1940s. The Avallon’s menus, staff numbers, and services are an artful combination of many of the hotels of the time, all of which felt the pinch of rationing and the slap of the draft. June, a woman, would have been unusual as the general manager of a hotel of the Avallon’s status, but issues of Hotel Monthly from the time period reveal a small handful of women managing smaller hotels across America. She stood unknowingly on the edge of a quiet revolution as the draft urged women into the workforce in record numbers.

In real life, some of the hotels survived the war; some didn’t. The Greenbrier became a war hospital. The Ingleside Hotel fell into ruin. None of them were ever quite the same; even if war hadn’t completely changed them, it had completely changed Americans.

Recommended Reading

In order to make The Listeners as lifelike as possible, I spent four years wallowing in primary and secondary documents—visiting the Greenbrier’s archives, reading memoirs, digging up industry magazines from the time period, interviewing hoteliers, poring over newspaper articles, and enduring FBI files—and I must confess: this history major enjoyed herself hugely.

I will spare you the dry stuff and instead say that if you’re interested in finding out more about the story beneath The Listener’s waters, these are accessible starting points:

For the diplomats:

Axis Diplomats in American Custody: The Housing of Enemy Representatives and Their Exchange for American Counterparts, 1941–1945, by Landon Alfriend Dunn and Timothy J. Ryan

And more accessibly:

Such Splendid Prisons: Diplomatic Detainment in America during World War II, by Harvey Solomon

A fun hotel memoir:

Do Not Disturb, by Frank Case

On the FBI:

FBI Man: A Personal History, by Louis Cochran

The internees’ perspective:

Bridge to the Sun: A Memoir of Love and War, by Gwen Terasaki

And, finally, oral histories of the home front:

Americans Remember the Home Front: An Oral Narrative of the World War II Years in America, by Roy Hoopes

100-year Viking page [TK]