Page 90 of Winter's End
Breathing hard, Evi said nothing, just stared into his amber eyes. He was close enough that she could feel his breath, and she all but swayed at the memory of the single kiss they had shared that night under the oak tree.
She willed him, yearned for him to kiss her again. But he blinked after a moment and pulled away.
“Good job, Itty-Bitty,” he said.
Embarrassed now, she backed away and reached for the Colt. “I’ll bet I can out-shoot you, too.”
“Hah!” he retorted, bringing out his pistol. “That will be the day You’re on!”
...
After an hour, it was quite clear Jacob could absolutely out-shoot her, hitting the collection of makeshift targets very time. But Evi hit them often enough to take pride in her own skill.
He looked at his watch. “Time to round up the Beekhof men for your birthday lunch,” he said. “Wait here. I’ll go down and get them.”
Evi cocked her head. It was not the first time she had observed Jacob and the Beekhof men going off to work in the lower field.
“It is too early to be planting,” she said, “What are the three of you doing in the lower field?”
“Clearing,” Jacob told her. “Just clearing the field. It’s a long, tiring job.”
She shaded her eyes, watched his broad back recede, shifted her weight from one foot to the other. After a moment, the earlier playfulness returned.
“Wait,” she called. “I will race you!”
She could not be sure whether his silence was assent, or whether he simply had not heard her, but she began to lope after him, through tallgrasses that seemed to go on forever. She thought she heard voices, stopped to listen, but saw no one.
“Jacob? Willem! Where are you?”
She moved closer to the source of the sound, made a full circle, bewildered – and to her surprise, as she shaded her eyes and surveyed the land, she caught the glint of sunlight on water.
She squinted. She had had no idea that the Beekhof farm was bound on one side by water…quite likely, she realized, now that she considered the arc of land, an inland arm of the Spaarne – the same river that had been her home for more than four long years.
She contemplated the course of the terrain, certain she heard voices.
“Jacob?” She called, more assertively. “I can hear you, but I cannot see you.”
Then another curious thing happened. To her right, what appeared for all the world to be a grassy berm began to fall away before her eyes, and Willem’s rangy form emerged as if from nowhere. Behind him came Jacob, and finally Papa Beekhof.
She looked from one to the other, but the silence was long and deep.
“There’s a tunnel, Evi.” Jacob said finally, looking over at the older Beekhof. “We’ve been clearing out the tunnel Papa Beekhof dug years ago as an escape route for Jewish refugees.”
Evi’s mouth dropped open.
“Klara and I were horrified when the Germans began rounding up the Jews,” Papa Beekhof leaned on a hoe. “I think, in the first months of 1941, perhaps a hundred or more escapees made their way through this tunnel – down through the Spaarne, in small boats, to the North Sea and beyond.”
They were more words than Evi had ever heard from the reticent, bearded farmer. She nodded, though she was truly dumbstruck.
“Hard to know how many actually made it to safety,” Jacob shrugged. “The North Sea can be rough. But one thing for sure; the escape route is damned hard to detect.”
Evi marveled, looking from one to other.How fortunate was Jacob when he dropped from the sky to come to rest on Beekhof land…
She nudged Willem. “Lunch is ready. I will race you back to the house.”
ZOE
The elderly physician hopped onto the gurney with more agility than she expected. “God bless,” he said.
