The Missing Read Online Free PDF

a blasted gap in the stone, but the animal stopped dead. Sam kicked away at its flanks, but the big horse took it and stood like a pillar. He looked around, wondering if the animal remembered what had happened here, and dismounting, he looked into the liquid eyes, which seemed deliberately unfocused. He put a hand on its neck and the muscles were taut as fence wire, and he saw that its legs were trembling. He led it back through the wall by its bridle, remounted, and then put the animal forward along the stones, moving away from the place where twenty shattered limbers and many swollen horses lay about as if rained down from a murdering sky.
    He studied the land ahead of him, and within a mile he rode into a squad stacking bags of cordite for demolition and reined up. A lanky private told him that he’d heard a shell rocket overhead. “They ain’t startin’ up again, is they?”
    “No.”
    “I’m glad of it. After I seen all this mess I’m glad I missed the big ruckus. We just turnt over a steam tractor and found two skeletons from Alabama.”
    Sam started the horse through a shell crater the size of a city fountain, rode into a dry canal and out again over a dike. Rising in the distance was a plume of white smoke. He whipped the bay with the reins and got up as much speed as he could, riding through a hedge and out into a mud lane, expecting to be blown up at any second. Suddenly he was in a village, coursing among sheds and small houses of bullet-pocked stucco and a large barn missing half its roof. A quarter-mile on, at the edge of an open field, sat the remnants of a small stone house, its blocks dispersed over an acre, its thatch roof on fire. In the dirt lane out front lay a girl, her long hair splayed on the ground as by an electrical charge. He jumped off the horse and carried her away from the flames, propping her against a low stone wall. No one else was around.
    She appeared to be about eleven, but when she opened her eyes they were watery and old.
    He asked her in French if anyone else had been in the house.
    “Non, monsieur.” She seemed alarmed by his voice and asked where he was from, but he ignored her.
    “Où sont tes parents?”
    “Je ne sais pas.” She raised her right hand and it was streaming blood, the little finger cut off cleanly at the base. Then she told him she thought her parents were in heaven, and that everyone in the village had been killed or driven away. Suddenly she winced, grabbed her arm, and began to sob.
    “Quel est ton nom?” he said, trying to distract her as he sat her up on the stone wall.
    “Amélie,” she cried.
    He pulled out his canteen, washed the wound, poured in disinfectant powder from a kit in his belt pack, and applied a rude bandage meant for gunshot wounds. Leaving her clutching her hand in the folds of her heavy skirt, he walked a circuit through the nearby buildings, all of them empty, though in one house there was a meal on the table, the food dried like scabs on the plates, as though every-one had fled months before and never come back. At the open rear door he looked across a steep field covered with frostbitten weeds, imagining the panicked family running away from an incoming barrage, hoping to reach safety behind the next hill. He knew the girl was alone and would probably starve to death.
    He went back and asked her full name.
    “Amélie Melançon.” She squinted up at him. “Et le vôtre?”
    “Sam Simoneaux.”
    She repeated his name, her eyes growing round. “Il y a des français en Amérique?”
    He explained where he lived and that there were indeed French people in the countryside to the west of there. He described New Orleans and asked if she had heard of it.
    “Mais oui, monsieur.” She bent over as another spasm traveled up her arm.
    He listened to her shuddering intake of breath and stared at the flames until her pain seemed to lessen. Then he told her he would find her a doctor, though he had no idea of where to start looking. He