The accusation hung in the suddenly electrified silence, crackling. Jordan felt as though she’d pushed all the air out of her lungs along with the words. She looked at Anneliese, standing there so decorative and pretty. She’d imagined her stepmother flinching or recoiling—maybe bursting into laughter or tears.
But not a muscle moved in Anneliese’s face. Her blue eyes didn’t widen even a fraction of an inch. “Goodness,” she said at last. “Where has all this come from?”
Jordan’s father was looking thunderous. “Jordan—”
“This isn’t a wild story I’ve made up.” She kept her voice calm, reasonable. This was no time to be shrill or defensive. “I have proof, Dad. Just look at it, that’s all I ask.” She’d been keeping the photographs tucked in the lining of her pocketbook, waiting for the right chance to show her father—she got them quickly, laid the first one down on the table before him. The photograph she’d snapped in the powder room after the wedding. “Anneliese’s wedding bouquet. She tied an Iron Cross into it as a wedding charm. An Iron Cross, and it’s not from the fourteen-eighteen war either. That’s a swastika. It’s a Third Reich medal.” Swinging her eyes back to Anneliese. “I didn’t find it in your room when I looked, so what did you do with it?”
Anneliese was silent. Dan McBride’s gaze flicked over the photograph despite himself. Jordan rushed on, the words flowing like a river. Lay it out. Make your case.
“That’s not all. Look at this.” The second photograph, the copy of the vacation picture in Anneliese’s Bible: the couple in bathing suits, standing by the lake waving to someone unseen. “Is that your husband, Anna?”
“Yes,” she answered, still calm.
“Kurt? Or Manfred? Because I’ve heard you use both names. Kurt Weber is listed on Ruth’s birth certificate as her father, so who’s Manfred?”
Blue eyes flickered, then. Triumph stabbed Jordan. She was getting somewhere. Yes.
“The Iron Cross is his, isn’t it?” she pressed. “Because he was a Nazi. And don’t give me that utter horseshit about—”
“Jordan!” Her father barked, an automatic reproof for swearing, but he was still staring at the photograph. She pressed on.
“—about how being a member of the Nazi Party didn’t make you one of the bad ones, Anna, because he wasn’t just a Nazi. He was SS, wasn’t he?” Jordan stabbed a finger down on the man in the photograph, his upraised arm. “He has a tattoo on the underside of his arm. You can just see it, there. Most SS officers had their blood types tattooed under the left arm.” Jordan turned back to her father. “Mr. Sonnenstein told us that, remember? He helped identify the provenance of those paintings that came out of Hamburg right after the war; he told us how the owner selling them had been SS, trying to pass as a French art dealer. How he’d been identified by his tattoo.” Looking back at Anneliese again. “Your husband was a decorated officer in the SS. And neither of you were Ruth’s parents, because the date on that photograph says März, 1942. March. Ruth was born in April ’42 according to her birth certificate, Anna, so why aren’t you eight months pregnant in that photograph?”
This time the silence wasn’t charged through with electricity. It blanketed the room like a weighted sheet. Jordan’s father was standing as if he’d been turned to granite, gaze switching between the photographs on the table. Anneliese stood hands folded, looking at Jordan, and something in that gaze made Jordan’s heart bang off her ribs in a sudden surge of fear. It was the look she’d captured in the very first picture, the night her father had brought Anneliese to dinner. The woman who looked so fragile and pretty, now somehow dangerous.
“It’s more than just this.” Jordan swept a hand at the pictures. “You spin a story about a refugee attacking Ruth at Altaussee, but it’s you Ruth recoils from. She remembers her mother playing the violin, yet you told me you never played it. Who are you?” From the kitchen came the muffled chime of the timer to check the turkey, but no one moved. “Who are you?” Jordan repeated.
“You haven’t made up your mind about that?” Anneliese said. “You seem very certain about everything else.” Those cold blue eyes swam with tears, and Anneliese was suddenly shaking with sobs.
You are not going to fob this off with crying, Jordan thought, pressing her lips tight. But her dad took a confused, automatic step forward, and Anneliese turned in a helpless movement, turning her wet face against his shirt. “Don’t say anything to Ruth,” she whispered. “It was all to protect her.”
“Stop lying,” Jordan flared, but Anneliese’s tears rolled even faster. Her husband’s arm came around her shoulders, even though his face was still blank with shock.
“There, now,” he muttered. “Let’s all be calm—”
“Be calm?” Jordan cried. “Dad, we let a Nazi into our family. She could be anything, a murderer. Who knows how dangerous she—”
“Stop shouting. I can’t hear myself think—”
“Don’t be angry with Jordan.” Anneliese lifted her face, flushed and dewy with tears. “Please don’t be angry with her.”
“Angry at me?” Jordan’s voice scaled up despite herself. “I’m the one who found you out. You’re the one who lied your way into our—”
“I did,” Anneliese said simply. “I don’t deny any of it.”
Jordan felt as though she’d stepped down a step that wasn’t there, teeth snapping shut on empty air. She’d expected tears, anger, evasions. She hadn’t expected pure, bald-faced acceptance of all charges. “What do you have to say, then?” she rallied, and she cringed to hear how hectoring she sounded.
“Kurt was not my husband’s name,” Anneliese said quietly. “I was never married. The man in the photograph here is my father, and his name was Manfred. He was an officer in the SS, yes. I knew nothing of his work, what any of them did. He never discussed work with me, and it certainly wasn’t my place to ask. I’m not a modern girl like you, Jordan. I went to university and I read English poetry, but my mother died and I came home to keep house for my father, to obey him while I lived under his roof. I wasn’t political; I kept to the kitchen. I didn’t hear the terrible things about the SS until after the war, after my father had already died. Can you imagine my horror? A man who had always been a kind, good father, discovered to be part of . . .”
Her eyes welled up again. She turned her head as if she wanted to bury her face back in her husband’s shirtfront, but with a gigantic effort kept talking, smoothing her cheeks with her hands.
“I wanted no part of Germany or Austria after the war. I wanted a fresh start. Of course I didn’t tell anyone about my family when I applied to come here. Who would? I wouldn’t be accepted if people knew.” Her voice trembled. “My first week in Boston, a boy threw a stone at me because I had a German accent. What would they do if they knew what my father had been?”
“If you’re so innocent, why didn’t you tell us?”
“I wanted to leave it all behind me, all that ugliness. The hatred. People throwing names and stones . . . I wasn’t bringing that into your beautiful house.” She made a little helpless gesture at the four walls, the festive Thanksgiving table. Gently, her hand came to rest atop her husband’s. “I did carry my father’s medal at the wedding. It was the only thing I had of his . . . and I wanted him to walk me down the aisle. Was that wrong?” Her drowned blue eyes turned back to Jordan. “You want to know why you couldn’t find the medal, when you searched my room? I threw it into a pond on our honeymoon. Because that part of my life was finished.”