Page 78 of Strangers She Knows

Kellen turned the page. It was empty. So was the next. And the next. She rifled through the rest of the diary.

Empty.

“What’s next?” Rae asked belligerently.

Kellen cleared her throat. “Ruby stopped there.”

“Stopped? There?” Rae stood up on the window seat, her stocking-clad feet curled around the edge of the cushion. She lifted her arms straight over her head. She shook her fists in rage. “No. No! After all this, Ruby can’t have a baby who dies, and Patrick who goes away and doesn’t come back. Ruby has to havesomething. Some crumb of happiness. She has to. Please, Mommy. This can’t be all there is.”

Luna was on her feet, watching Rae in alarm, whining softly.

Kellen wanted to say stuff about,Life’s not fair, which was true, but right now, after Olympia, and Dylan and Jamie, and being alone on the island—that wasn’t what wasneeded. “Rae, you’re right. Um…” Kellen looked at the diary, then shut it with a finger in the last page. “There are pages that are torn out at the end. It’s the stuff Ruby didn’t dare to leave on paper.” A lie, but a lie told for good reason.

“What?” Rae demanded.

“Well… Well…” Kellen thought hard and fast, making up stories. “She had lost her baby. So terrible. Such a heartache. She thinks Patrick left her. Her mother is a broken woman. Her father is a bully. She doesn’t have anywhere to turn. She talks to her friend, to Hermione, and asks if she’ll take a message to General Tempe, begging an interview.”

“Ruby is begging General Tempe for an interview? Why?”

Luna stared at Kellen as if she, too, wanted to know.

“Well. Well.” Kellen was doing better, coming up with story ideas. “Remember when the general asked if she spoke Japanese?”

“Yes. So what?”

“The Japanese were the enemies. They had bombed Pearl Harbor without provocation. And…and the American Army needed spies.”

“Ruby became a spy?” Rae sounded suspicious.

“Yes. Yes!”Sure. Why not?“Her father still didn’t know about the secret passages, so with Hermione and her mother covering for her, he never knew Ruby had disappeared from the house.”

“That’s prodigious!”

Prodigious. The word stopped Kellen for a moment. But Rae had always had an impressive vocabulary, the result of having a teacher for a grandmother. Kellen plunged on with Ruby’s story. “The Navy took her across the sea to their prisoner-of-war camps, and asked her to listen in on the important prisoners and report what they said. The information she gave them was so good and so valuable, they made her a real spy.”

Rae collapsed back onto the cushions on the window seat and hugged Luna around the neck. “What kind of spy stuff did she do?”

“The World War II US secret spy organization—” so secret Kellen didn’t have a clue what to call it “—managed to smuggle her into Japan, where she penetrated the depths of their war planning operation!” Her brain was flinging up nonsense so fast Kellen wanted to pat the poor probed and picked-on organ.Kellen’s Brain, indeed! “When one of her contacts betrayed her, she barely escaped with her life!”

“Whoa.” Rae scooted closer. “Is that what really happened?”

“As far as we’re concerned, it is.”

Rae was good with that. “What about Patrick?”

“The reason why she didn’t hear from him was because he had become a spy, too. He was one of the men in charge, and he knew all about her mission. When her transmissions ceased and she vanished, he dressed up like a Japanese fisherman and took a boat to the meeting place. They almost missed each other. At first, she didn’t recognize him in his disguise.” Kellen was impressed with her own imagination. “Then she ran to his arms. They embraced. They kissed!”

“That is so perfect.” Rae leaned forward eagerly. “Then what?”

Then what? Wasn’t that enough?“They were caught by a Japanese soldier.”Good one, Kellen!

“No!” Rae covered her mouth in horror.

“Only Ruby’s quick thinking and her mastery of the Japanese language saved them. She told the soldier they were newlyweds—and he let them go.”

Rae put her hand over her heart as if it was racing. “Then what?”

“They got back to his ship and returned the United States.”

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