Snowfall at Willow Lake

“Do you have someone to look after you?” Sophie asked.

She nodded. “I am a student intern. I live with a family in Lilles. I suppose, under the circumstances, that is fortunate. But my hosts are not going to be happy about this.”

“They will be. Not right away, but … perhaps eventually.” Sophie spoke from experience. At the same time, she felt a welling of sadness and regret. She hadn’t been there for Daisy, the way her own mother hadn’t been there for her.

Fatou stepped back and straightened her dress, a traditional garment made beautiful by the girl’s youth.

“Better?” Sophie asked.

“For now.”

Sophie placed two euros on the attendant’s tip plate and stepped out into the colonnaded hallway. Through a window in the high-ceilinged corridor, she caught a glimpse of fat white snowflakes coming down fast and thick, illuminated by the floodlights outside. Soon, the courtyard and gardens would be a panorama of winter white.

“What does it feel like?” Fatou asked softly over her shoulder.

“The snow?” Sophie made a snap decision. A very un-Sophie-like decision. She took Fatou by the hand and tugged her toward the exit to the courtyard. “Come. You can find out now.”

Sophie was aware that it was risky to disappear even for a few minutes from a professional event. But she was feeling strange and reckless tonight. The case that had consumed her was officially over. Her children were half a world away in the sunny Caribbean, watching their father remarry. Never had she felt so disconnected yet also aware of how fleeting and tenuous some things were, such as snowfall in coastal Holland. A greeting from a queen. An anthem sung by war orphans. Or the youth of a girl who was pregnant before she was done with childhood herself.

The arched doorway, shadowed by a pair of brooding security cameras, framed a world transformed. Fatou gasped and said something in her native tongue. Then she balked under the dagged canvas awning. Sophie stepped out into the fast-falling snow, turning her face up to feel the soft flakes on her cheeks.

“See, it’s harmless,” she said. “Much more pleasant than rain.”

Fatou joined her in the stone-paved courtyard. Her face lit up with pure wonder, reflecting the glow of the sodium vapor floodlights. She laughed in amazement at the sensation of snow. It now covered everything in a pristine layer of white. “It is, madame,” she said. “It is a wondrous thing.”

Sophie took a mental snapshot of the girl with her face tilted up to the sky, laughing as snowflakes caught in her eyelashes. The moment with Fatou was a reminder that there was beauty and joy in the world, even in the most unlikely of places. She pointed out the individual snowflakes landing on a low garden wall, each one a tiny miracle of perfection.

“They look like the smallest of flowers,” Fatou said.

“Yes.” Sophie took her hand again. Both she and the girl were freezing by now. “We should go back inside.”

She heard something then, a footfall and a breathy voice, and turned to see a hulking shadow coming toward her. “Go inside,” she said more urgently to Fatou. “Quickly. I’ll join you in a moment.”

Sophie recognized the set of his shoulders, silhouetted by the exterior lights. André? She frowned at him. Staggering, he lurched around the side of the building, his dark footprints marking a sinuous path behind him. She wondered what had gotten into him. André was an observant Muslim. He didn’t drink. Sophie hurried forward.

“André,” she said, “qu’est-ce qui ce passe? What happened?”

“Madame,” he mumbled, and sank to his knees, right there in the snow. Then he toppled sideways, resembling a bear felled by a hunter.

At some moment, between the time he spoke and the time his head hit the ground, Sophie’s confusion turned to ice-cold clarity. No, she thought, even though she knew the denial was in vain. Oh, no.

She landed on her knees beside André, scarcely feeling the bite of the cold through her dress and her stockings. “Please, oh, please be all right.”

Yet even as the words left her mouth, Sophie knew it was already too late. She had never seen a person die before, yet when it happened, she recognized the event on some horrible gut level. He emitted an eerie rattle; then there was a shutting down. A slackening. A release. She clung to a moment of disbelief. She had just spoken with her driver, a man who was dedicated to keeping her safe. Now some violence had been done to him.

The hot, meaty odor of blood was so strong she couldn’t believe she hadn’t smelled it earlier.

He was wounded in the chest, the gut. Probably more places than that. She couldn’t tell whether they were stab or gunshot wounds. She had never seen such a thing up close. As she knelt next to him, feeling the amazing speed with which the heat left his body, she felt as though her own blood had stopped circulating and she simply dropped to the ground. He lay so still, his bulky form limned by the yellowish lights.

Sophie looked around the area, finding it eerily deserted. She screamed for help, her voice echoing through the courtyard. She was edging toward panic as she tried to pat his torn and bloody overcoat back into its proper place. “Please,” she said, over and over again, with no idea what she was pleading for. “Please.” She pressed herself down on top of him, pressed her face to his as though she could somehow infuse her own life back into him. This was André, her friend, a gentle giant who had never done anything but good in the world, who was dedicated to Sophie, devoted to keeping her safe, wherever she went.

Keeping her safe.

Her rational mind pushed past the terrible sense of loss. André had come to find her. Not to seek help or to bid her a sentimental farewell. That wouldn’t be like him. No, he had forced himself to survive his wounds long enough to find Sophie for only one reason she could imagine—to warn her.

Five

Sophie had occasionally wondered how she would react in a crisis. Would she be helpless? She didn’t know. She did not disappoint herself by flying into hysterics or folding herself into a whimpering fetal position. Instead, she froze inside, her emotions barricaded behind a stone-cold facade. She felt as if a thick layer of ice insulated her from all feeling. It had to be that way. If she allowed herself to feel one single thing, she would fall apart. She would be lost.

She heard a sound behind her and jumped up, terror surging through her. “Fatou. You startled me. I told you to go inside.” In spite of herself, she was glad for the girl’s presence.

Fatou wore an expression of quiet resignation. Apparently none of this was new to her, or even shocking.

“I am very sorry, madame,” the girl said. “Did you know him?”

“He was my driver.” He was more than that, a man whose loyalty and dedication she possessed but was never quite sure she deserved. She knew he had emigrated to Holland with nothing and now lived alone in a flat on the outskirts of the Statenkwartier district, though she had never visited him there. Now she wished she had. These were matters she would grieve in private, when she allowed herself to thaw out and feel something.

She grabbed Fatou by the hand and drew her to the shadows of the palace. It was still snowing, the thick wet flakes already settling on André’s unmoving form. “We’ll find a security agent,” she said, leading the way back into the building. They hesitated in the hallway and stood for a moment, listening. The light trill of singing drifted from the grand hall. Her first impulse was to burst in and sound an alarm, to babble that someone had murdered her driver. Then a feeling, like a breath of cold air on the back of her neck, made her hesitate.

She felt certain the murder of André was not an isolated incident. She looked around, saw no one. “We mustn’t go back in there,” she whispered. “We’ll go to the security office.” There were cameras everywhere, though they’d done André no good at all. She knocked at the door. Getting no response, she pushed at it, expecting to find it locked. But the door opened.

Sophie hesitated. There was this thing that happened to her sometimes, a cold clutch of awareness in the center of her stomach. It told her when someone was lying, when something didn’t add up—like now. The lights were off, the room illuminated by the bluish haze of monitors and electronic equipment. There were three men inside; at first she thought they might be passed out, drunk. Then she noticed a faint odor of bitter almond.

“Gas,” she hissed at Fatou. “Stay outside.”

Sophie held her breath. She could probably hold it longer than anyone she knew, thanks to her years of swim training. The men wore the uniforms of the Diplomatic Protection Group. She went to the nearest victim, who lay on the floor, and touched his shoulder, finding his body disconcertingly stiff and resistant. She tried not to look at his face—still-wet blood streaming from his nose—as she found the tiny alert device on his lapel and depressed the button, praying it worked as it was supposed to, instantly alerting the team in the ballroom downstairs, as well as deploying an antiterrorist squad from their remote headquarters in Rotterdam. She had no idea how long it would take for help to arrive, though.

The array of monitors, still glowing dully, showed nothing amiss anywhere in the building. The reception was still going on. She caught sight of a security agent in his dark suit in the ballroom. He showed no outward sign of having received the alert, yet to Sophie he seemed to move with a briskness of purpose that was reassuring. His hand rested on the front button of his suit coat, and he was murmuring into his mouthpiece.

She ducked out of the room, nearly bursting from holding her breath. Shutting the door behind her, she told Fatou, “I think it worked. They’ll evacuate everyone and—” Fatou was looking not at her, but at a point somewhere past her shoulder.

“Ne bougez pas,” said a low voice in a thick accent, “ou je tire.”

The words made no sense to Sophie for approximately two beats of her heart. Then something was shoved against the underside of her jaw. Don’t move, or I’ll shoot.

A second man appeared behind Fatou, and Sophie realized he’d been there, in the shadows, all along. Dressed as a security agent, he had a big, bony Dutchman’s face and a pistol of some sort with its barrel pressed up under the girl’s jaw.

“Oh, please, no, she’s only a child. Don’t harm her,” Sophie said.

A third man, an African also disguised as an agent, stepped forward, kicking open the door to the security office, crossing the room to crank open the windows. So she’d been right about the gas.

It was too soon to feel afraid. Too surreal to grasp the idea that with one squeeze of a stranger’s finger, she would be gone. She said nothing, though her heart pounded so loudly she was certain it could be heard. Two thoughts filled her mind—Max and Daisy. Her children. She might never see them again. In her mind, she reviewed the last time she had seen them, talked to them. Her phone conversation yesterday with Max. Had she spoken with kindness, respect, love? Or had she been in a rush? Had she been demanding? Daisy always accused her of being demanding. Maybe exacting was the word. She was too exacting.

“Merde,” said one of the men—the French African—leaning on the counter to study an image of the main hall. The security agents at the ceremony were taking action, their weapons drawn as they gave orders to evacuate. “The alert went through.” As he spoke, he straightened up and turned and, with a curious grace, smacked Sophie across the face with the back of his hand.

She had never been touched with violence before, and the shock of the attack preceded the pain. Then it felt like the time she’d been hit in the face with a field hockey ball. She saw a flash of white followed by multiple images, the monitor screens floating in front of her. The blow jostled her against the man with the gun. She shut her eyes, terrified he’d panic and pull the trigger.

“Stop,” ordered one of the other men. “An alert’s been sounded. We may need her.”