“Did you get me posing in front of the sideboard yet?” Bernice’s voice. Somewhere behind me. “The light’s pretty good right here.”
“Oui, madame,” droned Madeleine. “I have you in front of the sideboard, the china cabinets, the sofa, the—”
“Well, take another one.” The sandpaper rasp that was her voice morphed into a syrupy lilt. “Have I mentioned that I used to be a magazine model?”
Tilly leaned forward on her walking stick, curiosity oozing from every pore as she zeroed in on Osmond. “So you became entangled in a tree and broke your leg when you fell to the ground. However did you manage the hike to Solange’s barn?”
“I rigged a crutch out of a broken tree limb, and then I headed away from the sound of artillery fire. Don’t even know which direction it was because my compass got smashed in the jump. It’s pretty embarrassin’ for an Iowan to admit, but I was lost about as bad as the Israelites in the wilderness.”
On a brighter note, at least it didn’t take him forty years to find his way back to civilization.
He gave his head a disbelieving shake. “Eighteen thousand Allied troops parachuted into Normandy, but I never ran into another living soul that whole night. No Americans. No Germans. No one. Kinda felt like I’d arrived for the war all by myself.”
“Osmond,” I said gently, “does anyone in the gang have the slightest inkling that you participated in the actual D-Day invasion?”
“Nope. If I’d told ’em I’d been to war, the Dicks would’ve asked, ‘Which one? Revolutionary or Civil?’”
“I’m not sure how you’ve kept it to yourself all these years,” marveled Tilly.
Osmund shrugged. “If you’d seen the things I saw, you’da kept it to yourself, too.”
“But you’re a hero,” I insisted.
He shook his head. “The fellas who jumped out of those planes and never lived to tell about it are the real heroes, Emily. Not me.”
“That’s not true, Ozmund. Have you not told your friends what you did for my family?”
His Adam’s apple bobbed uncomfortably. “No need getting into that now. Far as I’m concerned, it’s all water over the dam.”
“Non! You tell them, Ozmund Chelsvig! If not for you, my mama and papa would have died at zee hands of zee Germans.” Her voice grew sharp. “I would have died!”
“Hey, folks,” Cal called out from the front window, “looks like the bus is here to pick us up.”
“But I still have room on my memory card for five hundred and forty-four more pictures of myself,” whined Bernice.
“If you do not tell them, Ozmund, I will,” threatened Solange. She skewered him with a fierce look. “Well?”
He responded with a stubborn snort. “All right, all right.”
My mom and dad had standoffs like this all the time, but it was usually over an issue that was even more vital to marriages than trust and fidelity: control of the TV remote.
“Solange’s parents hid me in a secret room they’d built under their front staircase, but the day after I showed up, so did the Germans. Three of them came knocking, and it wasn’t a social visit. They knew about the secret room and the family’s involvement in the Underground, so they arrived to voice their objection.” He thrust out his bottom lip and shrugged. “That’s about it.”
I frowned. “That can’t be it. You can’t end a story like that.”