“You can’t trump a Russian when it comes to suffering,” Tony grumbled, peeling into the Boston traffic. “They have always suffered more, and in minus-twenty-degree weather, and in a gulag to boot. You just can’t win.” He looked at both his passengers, Ian staring out one window, Nina the other. “Anything happen that I should—”
“No,” Ian said around the stone in his throat, and the silence held as they trudged upstairs to the apartment. Normally Nina skipped backward up the steps just ahead of him until he told her to get out of his bloody way. Now she took the steps two at a time without looking back, uncharacteristically silent. Better this way, Ian thought, already eager to sink back into the grind of cross-checking and telephoning and diner stakeouts. Better the drudgery of a stalled chase than this tangle of pain and anger with which he had no time to deal.
At the top landing, Ian saw their door ajar. He reached out, twitched it open all the way, and every thought of Nina and her Moscow lover and the end of his hopes on a shadowy Florida beach disappeared.
Their worktable lay bare, papers and maps and pencils lying in a jumble across the floor as though someone had swept everything off in one violent heave. A woman’s dusty footprint showed clearly on the back of a map, pointing out the door. On the empty table lay a torn sheet of paper and two photographs.
“Der’mo,” Nina swore, and they were all rushing inside.
The photograph of a young Lorelei Vogt, yanked out of Ian’s file with such force the corner had torn. Another photograph of a woman with a dish towel, standing beside a sink, looking back over one shoulder, eyes strangely alight.
Nina’s breath caught in her throat, Ian heard it. He looked at her, mouth suddenly dry. “Is it—”
His wife stretched a fingertip toward the new photograph, eyes suddenly incandescent. “Is her.” There was no doubt in her voice.
Ian picked up the sheet of paper beside the photographs. Jordan McBride’s handwriting, Ian had seen it on shop paperwork. She had scribbled five words in pencil, nearly engraving the letters through the paper.
Lorelei Vogt is Anna McBride.
Part III
Chapter 49
Jordan
September 1950
Boston
Can you drive faster?”
The cabbie sounded aggrieved. “Slow traffic, miss.”
Jordan’s heart was racing, her feet pressing against the cab’s floor as though she could bodily push the car along. But horror sat cold and heavy in her stomach like a stone ball.
She’d wept in that Scollay Square apartment, choked sobs tearing out of her throat as she sat surrounded by the paper-trail bloodshed and horror of Anneliese’s past. But only for a moment. There was no time to weep, no time to scream, no time to stay here and confront Tony when he returned. No time to fall on him and scream why, why had he been taking her to ballet studios and kissing her in the darkroom when upstairs a soft-spoken murderer sat humming at a sewing machine. Jordan had swallowed her sobs, swept the table clean with one violent motion, slapped down the photograph she hadn’t dared leave in her darkroom anymore, wrote a note, and run for the stairs. The team didn’t know who Anneliese was, that was plain from the file, and Jordan wasn’t going to wait to tell them, as much as she wanted to. She burned to stay and demand answers, and goddammit, she was going to come back here and get them, but she had no idea when Tony and his friends would be back—and Ruth was at home right now with the murderess who had nested in their family like a poisonous spider. It didn’t matter that Ruth had passed years in Anneliese’s company unharmed; Jordan could not delay one minute before getting her sister out of the clutches of a woman who had murdered six children in cold blood.
Her breath left her in a harsh, guttural scrape. The cabbie glanced over his shoulder, but Jordan turned her face to the window. A beautiful summer morning was passing by outside, so many people out for a stroll—couples arm in arm, girls blowing along in giggling groups, men in checked shirts arguing about the Red Sox; none dreaming that there were monsters hiding in this American paradise they were so proud of. Jordan looked at the sunny street but saw instead the exquisite man-made lake in western Poland, conjured up so clearly in Ian Graham’s flat, factual journalist’s notes. Anneliese standing beside it, not much older than Jordan was now. The huddled Jewish children . . .
Jordan had read through the file of her stepmother’s other crimes. Ian’s murdered younger brother, a prisoner of war. The nameless Poles hunted for sport through the trees as a party game. But it was the children Jordan came back to. The children like Ruth.
Why didn’t she kill you? Jordan wondered in numb horror. She killed your mother. Why not you?
The team’s notes on Anneliese/Lorelei’s time in Altaussee had been jotted colloquially in Tony’s hand, as though he were musing aloud. Our girl was living with Frau Eichmann after the war. No money, nowhere to go, lover dead. Frau Eichmann doesn’t like her, tells her to leave autumn ’45. Scared to apply for a visa in case name is flagged, terrified to be found/arrested. How does she get from Altaussee to America???
I think I could tell you how, Jordan thought, remembering Anneliese’s two very different stories about her time in Altaussee. After Thanksgiving, when she couldn’t deny she hadn’t given birth to Ruth, she came up with the story about finding her as an orphan abandoned beside the lake . . . but at first, when she was explaining Ruth’s nightmares, hadn’t there been a story about how a refugee woman had attacked them on the lakeshore and frightened Ruth? Had Anneliese been telling the truth, as much of it as she could? It was the cleverest way to lie, after all.
She wasn’t the one being attacked, Jordan thought. She was the one who did the attacking. Desperate to leave, desperate not to be caught, desperate to get away, she had met a woman by the lake—a Jewish woman named Anneliese Weber who had papers, boat tickets, refugee status, and a little girl. The answer to every prayer. Just murder her and take it all. Ruth—with her strained seeking eyes, her musicality, her sudden vacillation between laughter and fear, pulling toward Anneliese and then pulling away—had watched her mother murdered by the woman who then became her mother.
“Why did she take you?” Jordan whispered aloud. It would have been easier to travel unencumbered, surely. And she had no qualms killing children before.
Numbly, Jordan shook her head. The old admonishment rang in her brain of Jordan and her wild imagination! In the space of a single morning the world had turned into a wilder and more horrible place than her imagination could ever have conjured up.
“Here we are, miss.”
Jordan shoved a handful of change at the driver and tumbled out of the cab. The car was here; Anneliese was home. Of course she was. Jordan drew in a shaky breath. Pretend nothing has happened, she thought. Make up a story, get Ruth out of the house. Just do it.
She squared her shoulders and went to face the huntress.
“DON’T CRY, JORDAN.” Anneliese opened her arms, brows creasing. “He’s not worth it.”
No way to hide her reddened eyes, not from Anneliese’s penetrating gaze, so Jordan hadn’t even tried. The moment Anneliese came out of her sewing room with Taro wagging at her heels, Jordan released the sob hovering in her throat and exploded into tears, choking out as incoherently as possible that he’s broken my heart.