Wildwood Read online

  Praise for Bird’s Eye View

  Toronto Star and Globe and Mail bestseller

  “This debut novel is filled with drama, romance and plenty of colourful Canadian wartime history.”

  — BC Booklook

  “While the story may be one of fiction, Florence hasn’t escaped her reporting past so easily, with large amounts of research and historical facts surrounding her characters.”

  — Penticton Western News

  “Simply put, Bird’s Eye View is the best book I have read in the past year. Not only is the book well-crafted and researched, but so convincing that it is hard to believe it is a novel and not an autobiography.… A fine read for anyone who appreciates good literature.”

  — John Chalmers, Canadian Aviation Hall of Fame

  “Everything Florence writes is vividly alive, but those who remember V-E Day will feel it’s May 1945 on reading this story.”

  — Charlottetown Guardian

  “
  — Cochrane Eagle

  “I learned more about British and Allied wartime intelligence than in any other book I’ve read on the subject.”

  <— Rural Roots

  Wildw00d

  To my three granddaughters,

  Nora June Niddrie, Juliet Vera Niddrie, and Quinn Margaret Plaunt, with love.

  May you show the same courage as your ancestors.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Praise for Bird’s Eye View

  Dedication

  Prologue

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  Epilogue

  Author’s Note

  Book Club Questions

  Copyright

  Cover

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Start of Content

  Author Notes

  Prologue

  September

  I turned my back for a minute, and she was gone.

  Of course, mothers always say that when their children are missing.

  How many times had I seen weeping parents on television, assuring the world that they hadn’t been careless? How many times had I assumed they were lying?

  But not in this case. Bridget had been within my reach — if not a minute ago, then definitely not more than five minutes.

  I saw her through the open door, sitting on the back steps playing with her kitten, Fizzy, just before I opened the oven in the old cook stove, pulled out an unappetizing tuna casserole, and set it on the counter.

  When I turned around, she wasn’t there.

  At the time I wasn’t worried, not in the least. It never crossed my mind that she would leave the sanctity of the steps. I walked to the open doorway. “Bridget, come inside for supper!”

  Although we had been here for a month, I still felt a sense of wonder at seeing the wild, majestic landscape that surrounded us. The sun was high on this northern summer evening, shedding its molten radiance on the overgrown yard, the long grass mingled with brightly coloured weeds and wildflowers, the cool air fresh with the scent of resin.

  Stepping back inside, I pumped two glasses of icy well water using the green hand pump over the enamel sink and set them on the table before calling again. “Bridget!”

  Had she slipped back inside without my noticing? I stopped and listened, but the old house was silent. There was no sound but the call of an unseen songbird from the windbreak at the edge of the yard.

  She must be in the toilet. I went down the path and around the corner of the barn to the biffy, built of small vertical logs, now grey and weathered, flanked by a couple of huge lilacs. The toilet door hung lopsidedly on leather hinges.

  She wasn’t there.

  “Yoo-hoo! Bridget, where are you?” I walked over to the log barn, its double doors fastened shut with a piece of bone like a skeleton’s finger. The catch was too high for a four-year-old to reach, so I didn’t open them.

  Beside the barn was an old log cabin, my great-aunt’s first home. I poked my head inside. The squirrels had been busy in here, and there was a pile of leaves and twigs in one corner, but the cabin was empty.

  “Bridget, come out right now! If you’re joking, it isn’t funny!”

  That’s when I felt the first flicker of fear.

  Surely she wouldn’t have gone down to the creek by herself.

  I dashed across the backyard and through the knee-high grass toward the creek. The poplars, their green leaves already tinged with gold, shook their branches in the breeze as if trying to frighten me away.

  In contrast, the creek moved slowly and dreamily through the fragrant silver willows and bulrushes lining the banks. Along both sides, ferns leaned into the flowing water, their feathery fronds streaming out behind them like human hair.

  “Bridget!” My voice was rising now, matched by the mounting panic in my chest.

  The creek made a lazy curve before it widened into a large pond. At the far end was a beaver dam, a small fortress of branches and mud as high as my head. The pond looked like a dark-blue mirror lying in the green grass, a few fluffy cloud reflections floating on the still surface.

  There was no sign of her.

  Running back to the house, I reassured myself that I would find her waiting inside. I sprang through the back door, but the kitchen was empty. The cooling casserole looked less appealing than ever.

  I flew up the stairs to the second floor. She wasn’t in the front bedroom where we slept, nor was she hiding in any of the unused rooms. I could tell by the layer of dust on the staircase leading to the third floor attic that she hadn’t been there.

  She must be outside, but where? I vaulted down the stairs again, through the kitchen, and out the back door.

  “What’s the matter?” Wynona’s low voice startled me. I whirled to find our new friend from the nearby reserve standing beside the steps.

  “Wynona! Did you see Bridget when you came down the driveway?”

  She shook her head silently.

  I moaned aloud, turning in all directions as I tried to decide where to look next. “I can’t find her! She’s disappeared!”

  Wynona’s face was impassive. “I can help you look.”

  “I don’t know where to start! She never leaves the yard. She hardly lets me out of her sight!”

  “Did you check the other buildings?”

  “Yes. She isn’t even big enough to open the barn doors!”

  “Maybe she fell asleep in the grass.” She pointed to the wild, overgrown garden. “You look over there, and I’ll walk around behind the barn.”

  Although Wynona was only twelve years old, I felt slightly comforted. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Bridget was probably tired from playing outside in the fresh air all day. It wasn’t very long since she had stopped taking her afternoon nap. Surely it was only yesterday that she had been a tiny baby in my arms!

  I waded through the jungly garden area, and looked under the row of poplar and spruce trees that marked the eastern edge of the yard. There were flattened patches of grass below the trees where the deer often slept, but these were empty.

  Running to the opening in the windbreak, I took another look down the long driveway that divided the grain field. The wheat had been cut down on both sides, leaving nothing
behind but ankle-high golden stubble. There was nowhere to hide.

  Now I felt a spurt of anger. If she were playing a trick on me, I swore that I would punish her for the very first time in her short life for giving me such an awful scare.

  As I ran back toward the house, I heard a faint call. “Over here!”

  Wynona had found her! I tore around the side of the barn, my knees weak with relief, but I didn’t see my precious daughter. Wynona was standing at the western edge of the yard beside a row of old wooden granaries, their red paint peeling and faded.

  As I came panting up to her, she pointed at the wall of forest behind them.

  “I think she went into the bush.”

  The only forest I had ever seen — the sparse ponderosa pines of northern Arizona — was quite different from this dense boreal forest. The leafy poplars with their gleaming narrow white trunks grew as straight as power poles while they fought for elbow room with the tall, pointed spruce trees. Woven in and around them was a tangled mass of underbrush, forming a thick stockade.

  I stared at it, shaking my head in denial. There was no way that my timid daughter would venture into such a forbidding place.

  “What makes you think so?”

  Wynona didn’t speak, she simply gestured. There was a slight track through the tall grass leading toward the trees, no more than a disturbance, as if a small animal had moved through it recently.

  Or a small child.

  My anxiety was suddenly transformed into sheer terror. I plunged toward the faint path, screaming her name. “Bridget! Bridget!”

  Wynona caught up with me and grabbed my arm. “Let me go first. I know what to look for.”

  I forced myself to hang back while Wynona waded through the long grass, parted the underbrush with some effort, and wriggled between two spruce trees. I followed her.

  Within a few steps, the forest closed behind us and we were encased in vegetation. I looked up to the sky. The trees weren’t very high, but they would seem monstrously tall to a child. I could see a patch of blue overhead and thanked the gods that the sun would shine for another two hours. Wynona bent down and picked up a sharp rock, scoring the white bark on the trunk of a poplar.

  “What are you doing?”

  “That’s so we can find our way back out.”

  It hadn’t even occurred to me that we might get lost as well. I looked behind me, but I couldn’t tell what direction we had come from. We proceeded at an agonizingly slow pace. Dead trees had fallen sideways, crisscrossing each other. We were forced to crawl under them or, if they were low enough, to climb over them.

  But it was the underbrush that made movement so difficult. The shrubs had branches as hard as iron rods, and twigs like thorny table knives. They were too strong to break, and behind us they snapped back into place. One of them whipped me in the face. My bare arms were soon scratched and bleeding.

  Even worse were the hordes of mosquitoes that swarmed around us, stinging and biting my bare skin mercilessly. Since Wynona had on her usual jeans and long-sleeved hooded sweatshirt, she didn’t seem bothered by them.

  I remembered that Bridget was wearing only shorts and a T-shirt.

  “Bridget!” My throat grew hoarse as I tried with all my strength to project my voice into the forest. The mosquitoes landed on my lips and my eyelids.

  Wynona didn’t speak, but every few minutes she stopped to examine our surroundings. I had no idea what she was looking for.

  “What is it?”

  Silently she pointed to a broken twig. She made a mark on a nearby tree trunk, and we turned to our left.

  I felt sick to my stomach. How had I allowed this to happen? Me, with my overprotective nature! Back in Phoenix I had warned Bridget hundreds of times about stranger danger, about crossing the street without looking, about washing the germs off her hands. But never had I told her not to venture into an impenetrable forest!

  I glanced up through the branches. Was it my imagination, or was the sky turning a darker shade of indigo? I was terrified that we wouldn’t find her before darkness fell. We didn’t even have a flashlight.

  “Wynona, don’t you think we should get help?”

  She didn’t answer.

  Suddenly I realized with stunning clarity that there would be no help.

  There would be no search and rescue personnel, no trained dogs, no helicopter blades beating overhead, no searchlights, no ambulances with sirens wailing.

  We were utterly alone.

  The tears started to run down my cheeks and I sobbed aloud. “Bridget!” I wailed, on the verge of hysteria.

  Wynona stopped dead and raised her hand for silence. “Did you hear something?”

  “No.” I gulped back my tears and held my breath, straining my ears above the sough of the wind in the treetops.

  Then I heard it, too, the faintest of far-off cries. “Mama!”

  “Oh, thank God! Bridget, I’m coming!”

  I plunged toward the sound, but Wynona struck off in a different direction and I knew better than to disagree. We crashed through the undergrowth. A jagged branch tore open my jeans and gashed the skin underneath.

  Then we saw her.

  She was sitting in a small clearing, her back against a tree, clutching Fizzy to her chest. Her arms and legs were scratched and bitten, her little face tearstained. I threw myself on her and her arms came around my neck, squeezing me for dear life as she burst into sobs almost as loud as my own. Fizzy yowled in protest.

  “Bridget, my darling! You scared the wits out of me! How did you end up way out here in the bush?” Even now, she wouldn’t speak in front of Wynona.

  I turned to the older girl as she stood watching without expression. “Please, let’s get out of here!”

  It was doubly difficult to clamber through the brush with both Bridget and the cat clinging to me, climbing over and under fallen trees while trying to keep the clouds of mosquitoes away from her face, but she didn’t loosen her grip for an instant.

  Mingled with my immense relief was a crushing sense of dread.

  Until now my greatest fears had been presented by civilization — in other words, people. People with semi-automatic weapons. People with incurable contagious illnesses. People who drove drunk.

  Never before had I considered that nature herself would threaten our very existence.

  As we emerged from the trees, sweating and exhausted, Wynona spoke again. “Good thing there were no bears around.”

  1

  July, Two Months Earlier

  It was the hottest day of the year in America’s hottest city. A dust devil spun off the desert and across the burnished pavement of the parking lot. The leaves of the surrounding palms flipped over in the scorching breeze and showed their yellow underbellies.

  “Ready, Bridge?” I stood at the shopping mall exit, clutching her hot little hand. When the automatic doors slid open, the scorching heat struck us like a soundless blast. We ran to the car as fast as Bridget’s four-year-old legs would carry her, counting in unison. It took seventy-three of her short steps to reach the car.

  I thrust her into the passenger seat and turned on the ignition, then pulled a bottle of cold water from my purse. We counted our sips while the air conditioner battled with the heat. Sweat poured off our bodies and dried instantly, leaving a salty residue.

  I gazed down at Bridget with my usual anguished adoration. Tendrils of dark curly hair, so much like mine, stuck to her forehead, and her round cheeks looked like small ripe tomatoes. Her eyes were swollen with weeping, and she still gave the odd hiccupping sob.

  Our trip to the supermarket had ended, as usual, with a tantrum. Bridget was placing each item from the cart onto the counter with mathematical precision when the cashier smiled at her. “How are you today, honey?”

  Bridget hid behind me, grinding her face into the backs of my knees.

  “Oh, she’s fine, just shy.” I spoke quickly, giving the cashier a significant look. But she hadn’t taken the hint.
>
  “Don’t worry, sweetie. I won’t bite.” She reached down and patted Bridget on the head.

  Bridget let out a primal scream. All around us, heads swivelled. I thrust a $20 bill at the cashier and grabbed my bag of groceries with one hand while Bridget howled like a banshee. We fled to the public washroom and hid there until she was calm enough to leave the mall.

  The fan had now reduced the interior temperature to eighty-six degrees, and the searing metal seat belt buckles were cool enough to touch. I didn’t want to waste any more gas, so I backed the car out of the parking spot and we headed toward home.

  It wouldn’t be home for very long, though.

  Between the heat outside and the waves of burning anxiety that washed over my body, I felt dizzy. Each hour seemed to speed past more quickly, as if time were accelerating. We had to leave our rented condominium before midnight on the last day of July. I glanced at the dashboard clock. We had twenty-eight days, eight hours, and thirty-seven minutes left.

  Back at the condo, we performed our usual ritual of going straight into the bathroom and scrubbing our hands. Bridget ran off to the sanctuary of her bedroom while I put away the tortillas, canned beans, lettuce, and cheese, then I walked into the living room and sank into the cream leather couch.

  I looked around at the stylish furniture. This was a former show home, and five years ago I had been happy to rent the place fully furnished. As a result, we inhabited a space-age interior filled with glass tables and snowy tiles. Even Bridget’s bedroom was starkly modern.

  I wondered occasionally if she yearned for pink drapes and fluorescent stars on the ceiling, but she hadn’t complained. Like me, she preferred an orderly life. Just yesterday I had come into her room to find her sixteen Barbie dolls laid on the bed in a neat row.

  “Are you playing with your dolls?” I asked indulgently.

  “Mama, I’m not playing with them, I’m organizing them!”

  As they say, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

  I dragged myself to my feet and went over to my immaculate desk. This was the second worst year of my life. Second worst, because nothing compared with the catastrophe I had experienced twenty years ago, when I was only twelve.