Skeletons at the Feast by Chris Bohjalian

intelligence chaps from Wales. They told us about another camp. One further east in Poland. They had heard rumors--"
    "I've heard rumors. We've all heard rumors. I've listened to your propaganda on the radio."
    "You listen to the BBC? That's illegal, Anna, you know that," he told her, his voice mocking her good-naturedly.
    "Everyone listens. And you know that."
    Wally dumped his apples in one of the shipping crates in the back of a wagon and started to say something, his mouth opening into an anxiety-ridden O, but then stopped himself and returned to the trees where he was working, shaking his head in bewilderment.
    "Besides," she said, angry now, "what am I supposed to do? Am I supposed to go have tea with the fuhrer and advise him on policy?" He paused, seeming to think about this, unsure what to say. She decided to press her advantage. "You would be in serious trouble, you know, if I told anyone what you were saying."
    "Indeed I would. I am putting my trust completely at your discretion."
    "Why?"
    "Because you are very pretty and very smart, and until I was sent here I hadn't spoken to a girl who was either in a very, very long time."
    "Spare me," she said, but she couldn't help being flattered. "I've gone just as long without the company of boys. They're all off fighting somewhere."
    "Ah, but then your navy men arrived," he said, and she realized he was actually a little jealous of them. He seemed about to say more when Wally returned, this time accompanied by the Yorkshire schoolteacher named Arthur Frost. "Come along, Callum," Arthur said firmly, "those apples won't pick themselves. No more dillydallying."
    Callum nodded agreeably and left, turning back to Anna once to bring his index and middle finger to the tip of his lips. At the time, she thought he was shushing her; later, she would conclude he had in fact blown her a kiss.
    theo moved two of his toy cavalrymen to the front of his column, and then had them ride to the river that Anna had helped him paint a year ago now on a piece of barn board. The board was at least a meter and a half square and he could carry it by himself--but just barely. Helmut had found it and his father had sanded it flat. In addition to the river, he and Anna had also painted trees and wooden fences on it, and a long trench winding its way down one of the sides, all as if seen from a low-flying airplane. He had wanted to add barbed wire near the trench, but Anna had convinced him that it would reduce the number of conflicts he could reenact by limiting his scenarios to the Great War. The trench, she had suggested, could be a streambed that had dried up in the summer if he wanted to stage a battle from the nineteenth century.
    "Or," he had suggested helpfully at the time, "one of the fire-fights Werner has been in."
    "That's right," she had said, but he had been able to tell by the pause and the way her voice had quivered just the tiniest bit that for some reason she was troubled by the idea of him using his lead soldiers to reenact battles along the eastern front. He hadn't really expected at the time that he would, because he had only a pair of toy tanks, and battles these days demanded lots and lots of armor. Moreover, his two tanks were of a different scale than his lead soldiers. They were from another collection and they were barely the height of his fighting men, which meant that he rarely used them.
    He did know boys who owned model tanks that would have worked quite well with his men. But they wouldn't have shared their tanks with him and he never played with them. He wanted to, and he would have been happy to join them if they had ever asked-- he would have been happy and flattered and more than a little grateful--but they never did. Moreover, he knew they never would. Once he made the mistake of telling some of the boys in school about the scene he and Anna had painted for his soldiers, hinting that they should come to Kaminheim and bring their own model cannons and tanks, but they