The Last Night in London by Karen White (reading list .TXT) 📕

the rest of his glass and set it on the mantel. “Not since university,” he said matter-of-factly, an odd note to his voice. He turned to his father. “Dad? Would you like to join us?”

“Thank you, but I’ve got correspondence I need to see to. You go ahead.” James looked at his watch. “Best hurry—the sun sets in about forty-five minutes. The best place is up on the chalk ridge, which is a decent walk from here. Take torches so you can find your way back. It’s only a crescent moon tonight.”

After running upstairs and quickly changing into jeans and a sweater, I followed Arabella and Colin through the house, grabbing flashlights from the kitchen before heading out through the door to the back garden. The scent of flowers weighted the air with a lightness that almost made me forget the look on Precious’s face when she’d turned away from my scrutiny, the sense I’d had of a pen being held over paper, a story with no ending.

But it did end. It had to. Every story had a final act, a place under which the words “The End” could be written. I’d lived my entire adult life on that premise, on the knowledge that some endings were known before the stories even began.

Tonight, there had been something about the way Precious had said sweet dreams. Something almost challenging, a hook thrown into water to see what might be caught. Not that it was an unusual sentiment. I recalled the same handwritten words on the back of Graham’s RAF photograph. Maybe that was what was niggling at my brain, the sheer coincidence of two things that shouldn’t have been related.

Beside me, Arabella stopped, rubbing her hands up and down her arms. “Brrr. How did it get so cold? I’m afraid I don’t have a jumper.” She looked genuinely disappointed. “And if you wait for me, you’ll miss the sunset.” Flicking her hand at us, she said, “You two go on. Take pictures so you can show me what I missed.”

George and Charlotte, who’d apparently been cooped up during dinner, were eager to escape captivity. “Keep them out of the cowpats,” Arabella warned before swiftly retreating, leaving Colin and me alone.

The dogs leapt and bounded around us like gnats, making me grin despite myself.

“Don’t worry—we haven’t let the cows on this hill for a bit so the grass can grow.” Colin looked down at my Keds. “It’s a gentle hill, but it might be slippery. Are you all right in those?”

“Probably not,” I said, slipping them off, then rolling my socks inside them so that I was barefoot. In response to his blank expression, I explained, “Growing up, I only wore shoes to school, church, and birthday parties. It might be mostly a Southern thing, which means there’s a whole mess of people missing out. There’s just something magical about grass under your bare feet.” I looked pointedly at his loafers. “You should try it.”

He hesitated for only a moment before he took off his shoes and placed them neatly next to mine. “It is nice. A bit cool, though. Won’t my feet get cold?”

“Don’t worry—you’ll get used to it. Your toes will be too happy to complain.”

“Come on, then,” he said, indicating a path leading from the garden to a grass slope interspersed with trees. He whistled to the dogs, who immediately began trotting in our direction.

We walked in silence, the dogs panting as they raced past us and then circled back when they reached the cow gate ahead, prancing impatiently as they waited for Colin to open it. I kept replaying our conversation in the kitchen, hearing Colin’s words about the photo of the boy in the stroller on his desk who wasn’t him. I wanted to ask him who it was but couldn’t find the right words, words that would show an indifference I no longer felt.

“I’ve been making inquiries regarding Eva Harlow,” Colin said, breaking the silence.

“Oh. Great. Have you found out anything?”

He shook his head. “Not a thing. I did find her on the roster of models at House of Lushtak from nineteen thirty-nine through the end of March nineteen forty-one. Then she disappears. Absolutely nothing—from death notices to hospital and marriage records. It’s like she never existed.”

“But we know she lived with Precious—did you check the building’s history?”

“I tried to. There aren’t any tenant records for Precious, because my grandparents owned the flat.”

“And when she returned to London in the seventies, she moved back in. I wonder why she didn’t find a small flat, since it was just her. Maybe it was so Eva could find her after all those years away.”

“Curiouser and curiouser, I’d say,” Colin said, his thoughts matching mine. “I’ll see what I can find in the Devon records—Precious said Eva’s father was a doctor and that both her parents were killed in an automobile accident. Those details should help narrow it down. We have an intern at the office to make phone calls; she can see if there are any newspaper accounts of the accident, that sort of thing. It’s a long shot, but at least it’s a shot.”

The hill had become steeper, and I found myself breathing more heavily. Even the dogs had slowed their pace, although Colin continued with his long strides, slowing down only when he realized he was in front of me.

As we reached the crest of the hill, the light in the sky began to shift, and we stopped with the dogs to admire the view. On the south side of the slope, shadows were beginning to cover the bright green patchwork fields; on the north side, a dense forest claimed the landscape. And in the distance, beyond more rolling hills, the shapes of London’s skyline projected dark shadows into the horizon like greedy fingers claiming the sky.

Colin pointed toward the trees. “Some of the yews in the forest are over five hundred years old. When I was a boy, Nana would take me for walks and