Transgression: A Novel of Love and War - By James W. Nichol Page 0,2

out?” René persisted.

“Nothing.” Adele tried to sound as casual as possible. “This Wehrmacht officer looked up Father’s name. But their lists aren’t complete either. It’s very slow, getting information out of Germany, even for them. He said I should come back in two weeks’ time.”

René held his cigarette between his teeth and clapped his hands together in a slow show of appreciation. Adele knew her brother very well. The sound hurt her ears. She braced herself.

“Well done. Well done! And the SS officer, what did he say?”

“What SS officer?”

“You stupid little shit!” René yelled at her.

“Why did you follow me?” Adele yelled back.

René raised one of his greasy hands and rubbed it against his face as if he were trying to rub off her indirect admission of guilt. Adele could see a purple vein on his forehead pumping blood. He got up slowly and moved around the table. “I didn’t follow you. One of my men did.”

“Ha!” Adele retorted, her voice, she hoped, ringing with sharp scorn and ridicule. One of his men, what a dreamer.

“What did you tell the SS officer and what did he say to you?”

“He doesn’t suspect anything. They always ask questions, that’s all they do. They don’t follow everything up.”

René clasped the edge of the sink and closed his eyes. When he opened them again and turned her way, his eyes looked bloodshot. “Did you give him our father’s name?”

“What other name would I give him? What good would it do to give him a fictitious name, so we could find a fictitious father?”

René’s hand shot out, grabbed Adele’s thin arm and in one swift motion slammed her up against the cupboard. “I told you not to go there, I forbade it, and now you’ve given him away!”

“That’s all in your head! He’s waiting for us to find him. He needs us to help him. He needs to come home!”

“He’ll never come home now!”

“He will, he will, he will!”

“Murderer!” René’s mouth opened in a scream.

He let Adele’s arm go and leaned against the wall. He turned his face away and started to cry.

Adele couldn’t have been more surprised if he’d pulled out a gun and shot her. Great wrenching sobs shook his body.

Adele reached up to him, held his head. “René,” she whispered, “dear René.”

René pulled away from her and rushed out the door.

CANADA, 1946

CHAPTER TWO

There were dead children hanging in the woods.

At first Madeleine hadn’t noticed them because it was wet over there and full of mosquitoes and she was concentrating on finding the cows, and then she’d seen them. Three of them. They had looked like dried bunches of grapes.

“You remember how Father and Andrew and Uncle Matt strung up the pig last fall?”

Jenny had nodded.

“And you remember how Uncle Matt hangs up ducks in the garage to ripen them?”

Jenny had nodded again.

“That’s what she was doing. She was ripening them.”

“W-w-why?” Jenny had been afflicted with a terrible stutter since she’d learned to talk.

“You know why. She eats them.”

Jenny’s breath had caught in her throat.

“She looks for ones she can catch. Lame ones and half-blind ones and ones who can’t hear so good. Ones who are defective.”

“D-d-defective?” Jenny had said.

Two months had passed and Jenny had almost forgotten her big sister’s story when Madeleine came into the bedroom they shared and caught her. “What are you doing looking at my things?” Madeleine screamed.

“I’m not hurting anyth-th-th-th…”

Thing, Jenny raged in her head, thing. But the word wouldn’t come out of her mouth.

“Stay out!” Madeleine snatched back her small cedar chest full of dirty jokes and notes from boys and other private treasures.

“I was just looking for the c-c-c…” Coins, Jenny wanted to say, the coins from Great Britain Grandma Jenkins gave you, but she found it particularly difficult to speak when she was caught red-handed.

Her sister gave her a violent push. “Why don’t you just g-g-g-go outside and g-g-g-get lost?”

Jenny ran through the back kitchen, past the lilacs and the privy and headed out into the buzzing sun-scorched world.

She made up an escape plan as she ran. She knew what she’d do–she’d cut through the woods to the other side and wade through Mr. Timmon’s oat field to the road. It was just a short walk from there to the trestle bridge. The railway under the bridge was on an up-hill grade that slowed the trains down to a walk. This was where the farm boys gathered in the warm summer evenings to ride the freights all the way to the Township Line. This