The War that Saved My Life by Kimberly Brubaker Bradley

the shoreline. Right in the center of the sand, the man stepped from his
rowboat. He carried a suitcase and had a rucksack on his back. As I watched,
he shoved the rowboat back into the water. The sea was quiet. The boat
floated high above the gentle waves, and began to drift sideways, following
the shore.
I swallowed hard.
The man—an ordinary-looking man, at least from the distance—took
something from his rucksack. He unfolded it and used whatever it was to dig
a hole in the beach. He put the suitcase into the hole. Covered the hole with
sand. Walked cautiously up the sand dunes toward the barbed wire. I couldn’t
see what happened next, but suddenly the man was on the other side of the
fence, walking down the road toward me.
I turned Butter and galloped away.
I could have gone to the airfield, but the police station was closer and I knew
where it was: near the school, near the shop where I’d had tea. I kept Butter to
a canter even over the cobblestoned main street. I pulled him to a halt at the
station, wrapped his reins around the handrail, and hurried up the steps as best
as I could. I didn’t have my crutches. “I think I found a spy!” I said to the first
person I saw, a portly man seated behind a large wooden desk. “A spy on the
beach!”
The portly man turned toward me. “Get ahold of yourself, miss!” he said.
“I can’t understand you the way you’re gabbling.”
I grabbed the edge of his desk for balance. I repeated my words.
The man looked me up and down. Particularly down, at my bad foot in its
odd homemade shoe. I fought the urge to hide it.
“How was it you saw this spy?” he asked. He had a little smile on his face.
I realized he did not believe me.
“I was out on my pony—” I began. I told the whole story, the hill where I
always kept a lookout, the little boat, the suitcase buried in the sand.
“On your pony,” the man said, nodding, his smile widening into a smirk.
“Watch a lot of newsreels, do you? Listen to the scary stories on the radio?”
He thought I was lying, or, at best, exaggerating. And now he was staring
at my bad foot again. I felt a wave of heat climb up my neck.
I thought of what Susan would do. I drew myself up, taller, and glared at
the man, and I said, “My bad foot’s a long way from my brain.”