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Low-slung pumps were not made for digging through sand. Neither was the stiff skirt of Avis’s Victory suit appropriate for the job at hand.
For the tenth time this morning, she wished the Office of Civilian Defense would mind its own business. Or at least that Miss Cavendish would get someone else—Freddy, perhaps, or her handyman, Hamish—to do the grunt work. But no, as soon as the office determined homes and businesses should keep buckets of sand in case of bomb-related fires, Louise had added it to Avis’s already-long task list.
Even with the breeze off the ocean, sweat trickled down the small of her back, sticking her blouse to her skin. The first of the summer people had started to rent out cottages near the shoreline, but they weren’t yet crowding the slope of sand, glinting wet in the sun overhead. The beach was nearly deserted, with the only color and sound coming from fishermen visible down by the piers, and the bold pops of blue of the lupines growing in the tangled greenery among the rocks.
Beside her, Rosa Bianchini tossed pebbles at seagulls that bobbed too close, scattering them in a noisy retreat. Gio, the more likely of her two assistants to provide actual help, carrieda shovel slung like a rifle over his shoulder, a serious expression on his face.
Avis had a brief flashback to the only time her stern father talked about the Great War, on Armistice Day.“Digging,”he’d said, scoffing at the speaker on the platform speaking of heroic acts and patriotism.“Digging and dying and mud. That’s what the ‘noble conflict’ was all about.”
Avis shuddered, brushing the memory away.We’re not digging a trench. We’re just taking safety precautions we’ll likely never need.
“All right,” she said, stopping where the pebbles turned to sand and trying to sound cheerful—children liked cheerful people, didn’t they? For all she wanted to be a mother, she knew very little about actual children. “We can stop here. All four of these buckets need to be filled to the brim.”
Gio unloaded the milk pails, pressing them into the sand, and began digging without question, good soldier that he was.
“Won’t that make the wagon very heavy?” Rosa asked, regarding her with dark, serious eyes.
“Yes, it will. But we’re tough,” Avis said, making a pose like a circus strongman and getting a giggle out of the girl. “We can do it.”
Now that school was out for the summer, Martina’s two children hung about the library most afternoons while their mother was at work, so Avis didn’t feel guilty enlisting their help.
Gio insisted on using the shovel, so Avis settled for her garden trowel, while Rosa scooped the occasional handful of sand and got distracted by any pretty rocks or shells that shifted loose.
“What’s this for, anyway?” Gio asked when they’d filled two of the milk pails.
Avis frowned, weighing how much information to share. “The government requested every home and business keep several pounds of sand on hand. That way, if there’s a—” She glanced at Rosa, not wanting to use the wordsincendiary bomb.Goodness, the child’s father was in the navy. She probably heard enough grim talk. “If something starts a fire, the sand can be tossed on it to put it out.”
“Because you wouldn’t want to spray water on the books,” Rosa said, nodding, as if it suddenly made all the sense in the world.
More accurately, because the authorities worried that the water mains might be destroyed in a mass bombing, as had the utilities in Coventry, England, two years before.
Avis patted the girl’s shoulder. “That’s right, dear. We must keep our friends the books safe.”
From the glance Gio sent her, maybe that was a bit too singsong, but he leveled off the last milk pail with his shovel, clean and flat.
Instead of taking up the handle of the wagon, Rosa dropped to her knees, dirtying the hem of her hand-sewn dress dotted with flowers. “Can we make a castle now?”
Avis paused with a no on her lips, picturing her typewriter and stack of cards, ready to induct new volumes into the Dewey decimal system, sitting on her desk past a locked entrance with a patently falseOut for Lunchsign. There was so much work to be done.
Then again, the task had gone twice as fast with the children’s help as it would have on her own.
“Why not?” she said, and the smile that blossomed on Rosa’s face made her sure she’d chosen correctly. She knelt to tug off her pumps. If Miss Cavendish forced her to close the library early and haul sand like a common laborer, she might as well have a little fun.
Pleading the fact that he was “too old for stuff like that,” Gio perched on a nearby boulder and reached into his bag for ... was that a book? She must have been staring because Gio said, “Mr. Freddy said it was his favorite.”
The glaring sun made it difficult to read most of the title,save for one unusual name:Doctor Dolittle. It seemed he’d lost interest in gardening books already, which wasn’t surprising. While practical, they’d all seemed about as exciting as a plate of unsalted turnip mash.
After getting instructions from Rosa about the proper way to build a castle—a mix of wet and dry sand, careful not to make the tower too high, poke the windows in last—Avis was sent on a quest to secure shells to decorate the exterior.
She turned toward the sea, letting the breeze blow her hair back, and breathed deeply. When was the last time she’d felt sand between her toes? Maybe that night on Old Orchard Beach when she and Russell had run out of money for the fancy ballrooms and restaurants and had watched the sunset together, eating hot dogs and drinking a Dr Pepper rammed with two straws. There was something freeing about the feeling, even in the jolt of cold that ran up her spine when the sea spray broke against her ankles.
Avis reached for a discarded mussel shell, then frowned. Something bobbed on the surface of the water, just out of reach. She fished out the burnt-orange rag with a piece of driftwood and examined it more closely. The material felt stiff, like canvas, with a hole in the middle and a thick strap around the back.
This was no discarded tarp. This was a life jacket. Studded with a strange metal insert and rubber tube, but easily recognizable, all the same.
What Avis didn’t recognize was the word written in white letters on the device’s front:Tauchretter.
But she knew it was in German.
