Clash by Night by Doreen Owens Malek Page B

front of her and she looked up at him.
    “How did you meet your husband?” he asked quietly.
    “He was the son of the man who sent me to school.”
    “Ah. So you grew up with him.”  
    “In a way. I met him when I was twelve.”
    “Childhood sweethearts, then.”
    Lysette said nothing, watching him warily. She didn’t resent the personal turn of the conversation; she was too surprised by his curiosity to be offended. But the impression he was getting was so far from the truth that she didn’t know how to respond.
    He misinterpreted her silence and changed the subject. “Did you organize this system?” he asked, gesturing to the banks of drawers, the rows of bookshelves.
    “Yes. I put it all together when I came here.”  
    “Explain it to me,” he said, in that voice of command which demanded instant obedience. Lysette couldn’t believe he was actually interested but he listened attentively while she described the numerical coding of the books and their placement on the shelves, as well as the card catalogs, which were indexed by title, author, and subject matter. He stopped her a few times to ask pertinent questions, and when she paused for a moment to collect her thoughts, he said, “You love books, don’t you?”
    She nodded. “They’re great friends, I think.”  
    “I think so too.”
    “They’re not fickle like people, they’re always there when you want them and they never change,” Lysette added softly.
    Brown eyes met blue, and for a moment she could sense the loneliness in him, which echoed hers.
    He looked away from her abruptly, breaking the connection. “Very true.” His gaze returned to her face. “Please go on.”
    Lysette hesitated. This man was the top ranking officer in the whole German garrison, and he wanted to spend his morning talking to her about a library, and not a very good one at that? But he was waiting patiently, his arms folded, his dark head tilted to one side, and she saw no alternative but to comply with his request.
    Anyway, she didn’t want him to leave. So she went on talking, hoping she had enough gold in her mine of information to hold his attention for a while longer.
    And she did.
    * * *
    Laura walked her bicycle down the main street of Bar-le-Duc, steadying the packages in the basket on the back. The general store in Fains, which also served as the post office and the repository of the village’s single telephone, had a limited supply of fresh produce so she bought food in Bar-le-Duc as often as she could. Today she had gotten some special items to prepare a dinner for Harris, including the fruit preserves for which the town was famous; the least she could do was feed the man. She could see after only one meeting that he would rather smoke than eat, and while he was with them she felt it her duty to make sure he had regular meals.
    She had managed to put the marine out of her mind until now, concentrating on the morning’s tasks. But as she crossed the road and slid her bike into the rack in front of the hospital, she allowed him to fill her thoughts, remembering the previous night.
    She’d decided within an hour or so that his superiors had picked the right man for the job. And that she had to be very careful around him.
    Her reaction was purely emotional and the reason for it was clear. Even in his ridiculous borrowed clothes Harris had been so American that it hurt. She could easily picture him at a baseball game, sunstruck in a tennis shirt with a hot dog in his hand, yelling at the umpire. Or playing touch football in the chill October dusk, calling for a pass on a leaf strewn field redolent of wood smoke and fallen apples. He reminded her of every boy she had ever known in school, in her early life; Bobby Hicks who’d taught her to shoot marbles in the fourth grade, Scott Marston who’d sat behind her in junior high and whispered jokes in her ear during social studies, Dave Wincote who’d taken her to the prom. Harris was the great Midwest, the