A Coming Evil by Vivian Vande Velde

there." More softly, he finished, "I am tired and I am cold and I am hungry, and I have heard enough."
    "Wait," she called after him as he started running down the slope. Guiltily she remembered how he'd called after her that day he'd gained his voice, and how she, afraid, had not looked back.
    Gerard didn't look back either. He made it almost to the bottom of the hill before disappearing, which was quite a bit farther than he'd made it the day before.
    Lisette could understand that he was upset. She'd
been saying one thing after another to get him upset ever since they'd first met.
    But how could a ghost possibly be tired or cold or hungry?

15.
Wednesday, September 4, 1940
    As Lisette started down the hill back to the house, she saw that there was a bicycle leaning against the bushes by the front door. It wasn't Aunt Josephine's or Cecile's.
    Oh no,
she thought.
The children. Now what
?
    She wished longingly for the days in Paris when her parents worried about her and she wasn't responsible for anyone. But while she wished, she swung by the chrysanthemum field and grabbed handfuls of blossoms: an excuse, if the visitor, whoever it was, had not already discovered the children and was still open to excuses.
    As she circled round toward the front of the house,
she saw that it was a woman who had come to call. That was better than a German officer, whoever she might be and whatever her reason for being here. The woman was sitting on the front step, though that didn't prove that she hadn't looked in the house before settling there, for the door was not locked. There were five or six cigarette butts crushed out by the woman's feet, an indication that she'd been waiting for a while. Lisette wouldn't have thought she'd been away long enough for someone to smoke five or six cigarettes, but even as she watched, the woman was lighting a new one from the end of the one she was just finishing.
    "Hello,
Madame
," Lisette said, trying to sound neither guilty nor suspicious, but the way any normal thirteen-year-old would who'd just been out collecting fresh flowers and came back to discover a stranger on her aunt's doorstep.
    The woman drew heavily on her new cigarette and the end flared bright red. It smelled more like burning rope than regular tobacco and wasn't rolled tight and smooth, so it must have been homemade. Lisette's father smoked, but he'd already said that once real tobacco wasn't available he'd give it up rather than make do with corn silk. The woman was finally satisfied that her current cigarette wouldn't go out, so she crushed out the old one, all before saying, "Hello, my dear. Is your mother home?"
    "My mother doesn't live here," Lisette said, determined not to volunteer any information about Aunt Josephine, whom, she suspected, this woman did not know, or she wouldn't have mistaken Lisette for her daughter. The woman's movements were so precise, despite the fact that she seemed bristling with nervous energy, that she was making Lisette nervous. That was probably why she was so skinny, Lisette thought: nervous energy. Or maybe she was hungry. Some of the northern provinces had even less food than Paris. Had this woman come south begging? She looked to be closer in age to Lisette's father, who was fifty, than to Aunt Josephine. Her hair, which was cropped short and was all in curls, was almost midway in turning from black to gray. What was Lisette supposed to do about an elderly beggar woman?
    But the woman said, "You aren't Josephine LePage's daughter ... umm, Christine?" which proved that she at least knew Aunt Josephine, even if she wasn't a close friend.
    "I'm her niece."
    The woman sucked deeply on her cigarette. "Well, I'll tell you what, my dear: one of us had better give in or we'll both be sitting out here until the next full moon. And frankly, my behind is getting cold and sore from this step. My name is Eugenie Dumont, and I'm a friend of your aunt's, though she was not expecting me today. Shall I call you