Free The Secrets We Kept by Lara Prescott Page B

salt water. Despite the camp-like conditions and the seasickness, we all got along famously. We were in our early twenties and ready to take on the world. We were the kind of girls who’d grown up reading Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, then graduated to H. Rider Haggard’s She in high school. We bonded over the belief that a life of adventure wasn’t reserved for men, and we set out to claim our piece of it.
    Most important, we shared a similar sense of humor, which went a long way when sharing one toilet with questionable flushing abilities—especially when the ship hit rougher seas. Julia loved to play pranks and once started a rumor that we were a group of Catholic nuns headed to Calcutta. The men, who’d been catcalling us any chance they could get, became reverent when passing us in the corridors. One soldier had even asked if we’d pray for his sick dog. I made the sign of the cross and Bev burst out laughing.
    By the time the Mariposa made landfall in Ceylon, we were inseparable, and held tight to each other in the back of a thick-wheeled truck that jettisoned us through the jungle to the port at Kandy. Surrounded by tea plantations and electric-green terraced rice paddies that spilled down from the hills, Kandy, though just across the bay from the terror unfolding in Burma, felt as far away from the war as one could get.
    Many of us would remember our time in Kandy fondly. And when we’d write each other—or, if we were lucky, catch up in person—we’d reminisce about the many nights spent under a sky so large and so dark the stars would reveal themselves in layers. We’d recount slicing papayas off the trees surrounding the thatch-roofed OSS offices with a rusty machete, or the time an elephant got into our compound and had to be enticed out with a jar of peanut butter. We’d recall the all-night parties at the Officers’ Club, dangling our legs in blue-green Kandy Lake and yanking them back out when we disturbed some bubbling creature lurking beneath. There were the throngs of monks making their way to and from the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic, the sweaty weekends in Colombo, the leaf monkey we’d named Matilda who’d given birth in our food hut.
    I’d started out as MO support staff—filing papers, typing, that sort of thing. But my career trajectory changed when I received an invitation to attend a dinner at Earl Louis Mountbatten’s lavish residence up on the hill, overlooking the OSS compound. It was the first of many parties I’d attend and the first time I’d discover that powerful men would willingly give information to me, whether I asked for it or not.
    That’s how it started. That first party, I’d squeezed myself into a low-cut black evening gown Bev had packed “just in case,” and by the end of the night, a Brazilian arms dealer who’d been chatting me up let slip that he believed there was a mole within Mountbatten’s staff. I reported the tip to Anderson the next day. What the OSS did with that information, I have no idea. But I was soon inundated with more dinner invitations, set up with visiting people of import, and given questions to ask loose-lipped men.
    I got good at my new job—so good I was given a stipend to purchase gowns we’d have shipped in with our toilet paper, Spam, and mosquito repellent. The funny thing was, I never thought of myself as a spy. Surely the craft took more than smiling and laughing at stupid jokes and pretending to be interested in everything these men said. There wasn’t a name for it back then, but it was at that first party that I became a Swallow: a woman who uses her God-given talents to gain information—talents I’d been accumulating since puberty, had refined in my twenties, and then perfected in my thirties. These men thought they were using me, but it was always the reverse; my power was making them think it wasn’t.
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    “Wanna dance?” Bev asked.
    I wrinkled my nose as Bev shimmied her hips. “To this?” I