Free Tangled Ashes by Michèle Phoenix Page A

to the window for better light, and was finishing the sketch he’d started the day before of the elaborate woodwork of the staircase. He didn’t look up when she asked, “Would you like it on the desk or on the coffee table?”
    “Coffee table’s fine.”
    She deposited the tray on the marble slab that sat on brass legs and turned to Beck, stuffing her hands in the pockets of her wraparound apron. She wore a plaid skirt in browns and beiges and a deep-green cardigan that made her already-dark eyes seem an even deeper shade of walnut brown. Her slender feet were clad in low-heeled pumps. The better to run after the twins, no doubt. “How’s the smell in your apartment?” she asked, not in the least put out by the lack of eye contact and communication coming from the other side of the room.
    “Better,” Beck said, following the flowing curve of the banister with his charcoal pencil. He looked up. “I’ll actually be tearing most of the floorboards out of that corner this afternoon. Get rid of it for good.” It was a decision he’d reached around dawn.
    “Tearing up the floorboards?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Just . . . tearing them out?”
    He looked up. “Is there a problem?”
    “You can’t tear up those floorboards. They’ve been there for centuries!” There was genuine distress in her voice.
    Becker put down his pencil. “It’s going to happen eventually anyway. It’s no use trying to restore boards that are that damaged.”
    She eyed him with suspicion. “I certainly hope you know what you’re doing,” she said. Something sparked in her eyes. “This castle is like a living organism, and I’d hate to see you amputate something that can’t be replaced.”
    Beck smiled a little at the intensity of her expression and tried to mirror it with his own. “I’ll do my very best not to amputate any major organs,” he said with exaggerated seriousness, like a television doctor in a tacky reenactment. “You have my word, ma’am .”
    Jade gave him a sidelong glance and undid the strings of her apron. She pulled it over her head as she moved to the tall door ofthe office. “I’m off to teach the children,” she said, adding “sir” in a pointed way. “The satellite people arrived, by the way. I’m sure Thérèse will be in to inform you of their progress. Just leave the tray by the door when you’re finished, and I’ll take care of it later.”
    As she was pulling the heavy door closed behind her, Becker called her back. “Jade.” He hadn’t said her name before. It sounded foreign and somehow intimate on his lips. He didn’t like the feeling. “It’s a standard renovation process,” he explained as she stood in the doorway with a hand on her hip. “By the time I’m finished with that floor, you won’t be able to tell where the original wood is missing.”
    She wrinkled her nose at him. “We’ll see.”

AUGUST 1943
    I T WAS K ARL who finally shed some light on the goings-on that Kommandant Koch and Nurse Heinz so meticulously oversaw. Elise had run into him during one of her shopping trips to town, and he’d offered to help carry the meager groceries she’d bought to the Horch staff car in which a German driver waited to take her back to the manor.
    As they walked, Elise asked Karl what he knew about what was happening at the manor.
    “They’re SS,” he said, his heavily accented French the product of four years of study in the German school system. “We Wehrmacht don’t know what happens at the manor.”
    “But . . . aren’t you all part of the same army?”
    He smiled tightly. “We fight in the same war, yes, but I don’t think your manor’s Kommandant Koch and our castle’s GeneralmajorMüller want any more contact than that. The SS consider themselves—how do you say it? Superior.” It was a difficult word for the young officer to pronounce, and Elise had him repeat it twice before she was satisfied with his accent.
    “There are new residents at the manor,”