It had rained for three long, dreary days. Tommy had been clearing the entrance to the bunker for a week. It was providential that I was with him that morning as he usually shunned my company in favor of solitude or the two hulking Scibetta boys—my friend Susan’s brothers and our far neighbors on the outskirts of Ars. Tommy, impatient to resume excavation, allowed me to accompany him to help haul and carry rocks away from the entrance to the bunker. I’m not sure what kind of child I must have been to have considered this something I wanted to do, but there I was, slipping and picking my way on the muddy, steep ground, to where the mysterious bunker lay hidden. Tommy discovered the bunker two weeks earlier but he’d only recently had the time to turn his attention to exploring it. Six months into our stay in France, he had already found two caves totally hidden from the population, one lengthy part of a badly damaged tunnel he was sure was part of the tunnel system used by the Nazis in the Allied invasion sixteen years earlier.
