The pistol rose again. “Sit back down.” Jordan sat. “I’m aware you’re trying to stall me,” Anneliese said. “I confess it’s tempting to sit here and wait until your friends arrive. I really am very tired of running. But that would be giving up, and it was my last promise to Manfred that I not give up. He died in a hail of bullets in Altaussee rather than let himself be taken; the least I can do is run.” She looked at Jordan, very direct. “Don’t look for me. You won’t find me, not this time, and what harm can I do? I don’t want to hurt anyone. I just want to live quietly.”
“You don’t want to hurt anyone, but you will if you think you’re threatened. Dad suspected something at the shop, didn’t he? He saw traces of your little scheme with Kolb. He just thought it was a swindle, not anything to do with war criminals, but he died before he found out more. How did that happen, Anna?” Jordan’s eyes bored into her stepmother. “Did you murder my father?”
That was the other suspicion that had been growing like a monstrous flower in the back of her mind. Even in her frantic drive to get Ruth, some part of Jordan had been reflecting quietly that while Anna McBride knew nothing about firearms, a woman nicknamed the huntress surely would have known what kind of ammunition would make a twelve-gauge shotgun with soft steel Damascus barrels explode. Could have driven out to the lake cabin, slipped a handful of deadly rounds in among the innocent, then taken her stepdaughter shopping for a wedding dress when her husband next went on a turkey hunt . . . “Did you kill him?” Jordan asked, voice breaking. “Did you?”
Anna’s face never moved, not so much as a flicker.
Oh, Dad. Jordan’s mind in its iced-over horror stuttered. Dad—
“I was very fond of him, you know,” Anneliese said at last. “If you hadn’t pushed things—he never really trusted me after that first Thanksgiving. Not deep down. I’d catch him looking at me, in bed when he thought I was asleep . . . I suppose that’s why he found it easy to be suspicious of Kolb, start asking questions.” Anneliese shook her head. “I still wonder how you did it. Putting it all together, just seventeen . . . well, I did say you were clever, didn’t I? I never dared keep anything in the house after that, for fear you’d sniff it out.”
“Don’t you dare tell me Dad’s death was my fault,” Jordan grated.
“I won’t tell you anything. Go live your life, leave me to live mine. I just want to disappear with Ruth.”
Terror swamped Jordan again in a wave. “You are not taking Ruth!”
“Of course I am. She’s my responsibility—also my surety, Jordan. Because if I ever feel I’m being tracked again, I will shoot her and then I will shoot myself.” Anneliese’s gaze was candid, earnest. Jordan sat pinned by it, dry mouthed.
“Please—” she began, but Anneliese overrode her.
“I won’t run a third time. I can’t bear it. I’ll take the easier way, and I’ll take Ruth with me. One doesn’t leave a child alone, that would be a great cruelty. So don’t try to find me again, you and your friends. It will be much better for Ruth if you don’t.” Anneliese mounted the stairs, pistol glinting at her side. At the top of the staircase she looked over her shoulder. “I’ll miss you, you know. Very much. I really wish you had left well enough alone.”
The door clanged shut, the outside bolt screeched as it was turned, and footsteps retreated outside as Jordan flew up the stairs, flung herself against the locked door, and began to scream.
Chapter 52
Ian
September 1950
Boston
She took nothing.” Jordan was pawing through her stepmother’s closet. A floral, feminine bedroom, all Alpine landscapes and arrangements of dried flowers. Too late, Ian kept thinking. We are too late. “The only thing gone is Dad’s car. Her traveling case is still here, her clothes and underthings, even her checkbook and driver’s license—”
Because she’s leaving it all behind, Ian thought. Lorelei Vogt had shed Anna McBride and walked out to some new identity with nothing more than the clothes on her back. Rage swept him in a cold wave. We did not come this far to start all over again at zero.
“She took nothing,” Jordan repeated. She looked white and wrecked, her rosy all-American prettiness drowned by shock. Ian had never been so relieved in his life as when they’d wrenched back the bolt of the darkroom door and she stumbled out—face tearstained above an old red-checked shirt, blond hair wild, hands shaking, but alive. Ian’s relief was nothing to Tony’s, whose olive-skinned face had turned gray as the door came open. Jordan had pushed straight past him, running inside calling her sister’s name, and that was when they realized Lorelei Vogt had taken something, after all.
Ruth.
“Suka,” Nina muttered. She flipped her razor open and closed, yearning visibly for a throat to cut. Taro trailed after her, whining nervously. Ian managed not to pace, but he’d already left white fingernail crescents in his own palms.
“There has to be something to tell us where she’s gone. Something—” Jordan was raking through her stepmother’s handkerchiefs now, eyes flashing up to pin Ian and Tony with a stony gaze. “If you people had just told me—”
“I wanted to.” Tony was searching the drawer beside hers; he reached out and touched her shoulder. “I’ve been wanting to bring you in. But we didn’t know if your father might have been involved, and—”
She jerked away. “Dad would never—” Her voice choked. “Why did Anna even start these under-the-counter deals with Kolb, helping war criminals? If it hadn’t been for that, nothing would have come to light for you to trace all the way to Boston. Why did she risk it?”
“Perhaps they were friends of hers,” Tony suggested. “She wanted to bring her mother over too.”
“She could have brought them legally, sponsored them as refugees. No one would have blinked at that.”
“Money,” Ian said tersely, starting to pace despite himself. “She wanted money of her own in case she ever needed to run again.” And now she has it, he thought in another surge of ice-cold fury. Enough money to run a good long way.
No. You are not escaping us. You are not taking another innocent child. Not this time.
“I don’t want you thinking my father was stupid for falling for her.” The words burst out of Jordan even as she moved to search under her stepmother’s bed. “She was so eager to lose her accent and join his church and be a proper American housewife. So proud to learn Boston slang, change her name from Anneliese to Anna when she got her citizenship. She fooled everyone.”
“Not you.” Tony rummaged among the linens. “Seventeen years old and you sniffed her from day one, which is more than the three of us professionals managed to do. You’re a goddamn genius, J. Bryde.”
“My father still died. I didn’t make him realize—”
“Don’t.” Ian took her by the shoulders as she straightened from looking under the bed, nailing his eyes to hers. “Down that road lies madness, believe me. Put the blame where it belongs—on her.” Where did you go, where . . .