Lillibet blinked and cocked her head. “What?”
“You want to forget you ever saw me,” said Nora. “For your own good.” Nora was thinking about Clint. If Lillibet began telling everyone she’d seen Nora alive and Clint got wind of it, neither she nor Lillibet would be safe. “Do you understand?”
Lillibet stared at her, expressionless, blinking rapidly.
“Lillibet?”
The woman seemed to sway, and Nora reached out to catch her. “I’m so sorry,” said Lillibet. “I seem to be dizzy.” She smiled at Nora, but it was a strange smile, one without past or recognition. “You seem to have rescued me, my dear. Would you be so kind as to find me a chair so that I could sit for a moment? I feel like I’ve had quite a shock.”
“You have,” Nora agreed, guiding the woman to the chair that sat unoccupied in the French drama section.
She looked up at Nora and patted her hand. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “I’ll just sit here a moment. You look like you’re leaving.” The woman pointed to Nora’s coat.
“I was,” said Nora. She backed away from Lillibet. “Are you going to be okay?”
“Oh yes.” The woman smiled. “What was your name again, dear?”
Without hesitation, Nora answered, “Juliet.”
“Such a beautiful name,” said Lillibet. “So Shakespearean.”
“Yes,” said Nora. She turned and looked back. “Goodbye, Lillibet.”
“Goodbye, Juliet.”
Nora left the bookstore and turned the corner quickly, going out of her way two blocks before cutting through another unmarked street that got her back to the safety of the apartment. Lillibet was in her sixties, so Nora doubted that the woman had followed her, but she wasn’t taking any chances. She’d hated deceiving her friend like that, but she couldn’t risk being found. Her hands shaking from adrenaline, she struggled to get her key in the lock. She looked down the street but saw only a paperboy.
She found Luke in the library, evaluating a new painting.
“Someone saw me.” Throwing her raincoat across the sofa, she shook her hair. It was wet from the fine mist outside.
He didn’t look up from an array of books strewn across the mahogany desk. “Many people see you, my love.”
Nora shook her head. “I mean recognized me.”
At this, Luke looked up over his glasses. “Who?”
“Lillibet Denton.”
“That’s not good,” he said. He leaned back in his chair and folded his hands in front of him. “Did you speak to her?”
“It was strange.” Nora came around to the desk and leaned against it. “I was in the bookstore. She saw me and asked me a bunch of questions, mainly about how stupid everyone must have been to believe she’d have a birthday cruise in Long Beach.” Nora shot Luke a look.
“You fell for it,” he said with a shrug. “So?”
“So, she was pressing me about where I’d been and how my French was too proficient.”
“Did you tell her anything?”
“Like that I was born in the 1870s in Challans and jumped off the Pont Neuf to my death?”
“For starters.”
Nora gave him a look. “But that wasn’t the only strange thing.”
Luke pushed the painting aside and stood up. “I’m listening.” He walked around and began packing.
“I don’t think you need to do that.” Nora stopped him from gathering things. “I told her that she needed to forget that she saw me.”
“How’d she respond?”
“She forgot me,” said Nora. “It was as though she’d never met me before.” Nora began to cry. “It was upsetting, actually. Someone knew me. It was nice, and then to just see that blank look of nothing, like I’d removed all memory of me. It was terrible.”
He returned to his desk and glanced down at the papers in a neat pile. “I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something.” He picked up Le Figaro. “I think we might want to leave Paris soon. With Italy joining, we’re surrounded.”
“Where would we go?”
“Back to America. Europe is too unstable right now.”
Nora dreaded the thought of returning to America. She groaned.
“Nora, listen to me.”
“I don’t want to go back to Hollywood.”
“I’m not suggesting that we do.” He sat back down. “It’s a big country.”
“So where were you thinking? New York?”
“No.” He smiled. “Too unwieldy, plus Clint knows New York.”
At the sound of that name, she shuddered. While Paris had been a nice diversion, she had not really escaped her past. She sat on the desk and crossed her legs. “San Francisco?”
“Warmer.”
“Oh God! Not Las Vegas? That place is horrid.”
“No, but you’re getting warmer.”
“This is sounding more dreadful by the minute. What’s left? Oklahoma?”
“Taos.”
“Taos? What is a Taos?”
“It’s a place in New Mexico. There is a fantastic little Spanish house I found. Lots of acres… secluded. You can have horses.”
“Tell me, Luke. Have I ever expressed an interest in having horses?”
“Not exactly.”
“Never exactly.”
“It’s a vibrant community of artists. It might be a great place to hide for a while.”
“You’ve given this a lot of thought, I see.”
“Are you angry?”
“No.” Nora shrugged. “Luke?”
He sat in the chair across from her.
“Luke, why did Lillibet do what I asked her to do? This wasn’t the first time this happened, either. Juliet did this same thing to a man who tried to stop her from jumping off the Pont Neuf.”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t do it?”
“No. Maybe you have some special powers of your own.” He was deep in thought about something.
“What’s wrong? What aren’t you telling me?”
Luke looked uneasy. “It could be.” He got up and busied himself at his bookshelves, but it was all theatrics. He was working something out in his head and didn’t want her to notice.
Nora knew this meant he wouldn’t be giving her a straight answer. Since her terrible nosebleeds when she was having dreams, he’d stopped telling her things. She hated being in the dark. “You’re not going to tell me?”
“Anything that I would say would be purely a guess, and I don’t want to do that until I know more, okay?”
“I thought you knew everything.”
“I know what’s in the contract, Nora. You’ve seen the contract.” He shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. “What you did with Lillibet is definitely not in the contract.”
Nora sighed. That didn’t make her feel any better.
They arrived in New York City in April 1940. Within a month, the Nazis had slipped through the Maginot Line in Belgium and were headed toward Paris. Although they’d locked up the apartment, neither of them knew if they’d ever see it again.