A Bridge Across the Ocean

by Susan Meissner

  The Drifter was still with her.

  “I don’t know what you want me to do about this,” she said.

  A breeze that seemed to only exist around her ruffled her hair and the skirt of her dress.

  “I’m really sorry you felt like you had no way out but to jump, Annaliese. I—” But her breath was cut short as a solid weight pressed into her chest. The Drifter was practically shoving Brette’s words back down her throat.

  “Why don’t you just show yourself and tell me what you want!” Brette spun around, searching for a snatch of the Drifter’s spiritual body. “I’m not a mind reader!”

  The book she’d just bought was suddenly out of its bag and on the wooden deck, landing with a thwap. Brette watched in astonishment as the pages flew open and then stopped at the part about Annaliese’s suicide.

  Aunt Ellen had told Brette years before that some souls lingered in the in-between because they were afraid of what awaited them on the other side. But Brette had figured out that others remained because the manner in which their mortal lives ended was undeserved, and they were afraid if they crossed over they would never see justice.

  Those Drifters were waiting for the wrong done to them to be made right.

  Brette bent down to pick up the book. “You didn’t jump, did you?” she said.

  The open pages fluttered slightly in her hands, a gentle nod of paper and ink.

  No, they seemed to say.

  Nineteen

  Brette stayed on the ship for two more hours, using the self-guided audio tour to familiarize herself with the ship’s storied history. The Drifter hovered all around her, shooing away shadows of other Drifters as though to give Brette space and quiet to study the ship. She took the paranormal tour only for the chance to ask the guide if there had ever been a sighting of the ghost of Annaliese Kurtz, the German woman who died in 1946. The guide, a middle-aged man who’d worked on the Queen Mary for a decade, told her that some ghost hunters had supposed that she was one of the dozens of earthbound souls that haunt the ship simply because there are so many reports of paranormal activity and her story is so tragic. But no one had actually “talked” to the ghost of Annaliese Kurtz or captured her shadow or image on film. She’d left no electromagnetic bread crumbs, so to speak. Not like the ghost of the little girl in the second-class swimming pool named Jackie, or the woman in white who appeared from time to time in the Queen’s Salon, or the angry apparition in the only remaining engine room who didn’t like guests poking about his corner of the ship, far belowdecks.

  Another woman taking the tour was listening in on their conversation.

  “So do you really think there are ghosts on this ship?” the woman asked the guide. Her slight grin suggested she believed the ship’s paranormal tour to be more for entertainment value and that the tour guide was paid to behave as if the ghosts were real.

  The guide appeared unfazed by her question; he’d obviously been asked it before. “I can only say there are things that happen on this ship that defy logic. I’ve heard noises and seen things that have no explanation.”

  “Other than your imagination,” the woman quickly countered. “The human mind can conjure up all kinds of things that aren’t real.”

  “But my imagination can’t make you see or hear something. It only works for me,” the guide said. “If my mind conjures a sound for me to hear, you’re not going to hear it, too.”

  “Unless you suggest I hear it,” the woman said.

  “Exactly,” the guide said, smiling as if she’d just proven his point. “Unless I suggest it. Which means if I say nothing and you and I both hear the same sound, I’m not imagining it, and neither are you.”

  Their conversation had attracted a couple more people on the tour.

  “But why would the ghosts come here? It’s not like they all died on the ship. And why so many?” said another woman.

  “It would appear they like the ship,” the guide said. “Maybe they feel safe here.”

  “Safe from what?” said a man wearing a Dodgers T-shirt. “What have they got to be afraid of? They’re ghosts!” He laughed at his little joke.

  The guide smiled and motioned for the rest of the group to follow him. The tour was moving on. “I guess just because you’re a ghost doesn’t mean you don’t have worries.”

  The group continued to ask questions as they walked down the long aisle of staterooms on the A deck. Brette had learned all she could from the tour, so she left it and returned to the stern. She took the steps to the lowest deck, stepped outside, and stood by the railing in the sunshine.

  “Show me where it happened,” she whispered, knowing the Drifter was still at her side.

  Brette sensed no movement. She asked again.

  Several seconds ticked by before Brette felt a slight tugging. She moved along the railing until she was on the starboard side of the back of the ship. Below her, on the other side of the railing, was the rippling blue ribbon that was the Long Beach harbor.

  Brette put her hands on the rail and pictured herself standing there in 1946 on a chilly night lit by starlight. Below would be the freezing Atlantic. Annaliese Kurtz had stood here after learning she’d been found out. The commodore had been told she was a stowaway pretending to be a Belgian war bride named Katrine Sawyer. He’d been advised that Annaliese Kurtz, who looked like her childhood friend Katrine, had switched passports and identity documents and boarded the ship bound for America. But while the Queen Mary sailed, the identity of the dead woman in the car had been confirmed as that of Sawyer, not Annaliese Kurtz. The ruse was up. She was going to be arrested when they docked in New York and then sent back.

  “You stood here,” Brette said, pondering what would have happened next. “You knew you were going to be sent back in handcuffs. So maybe you climbed the railing and then . . . then you changed your mind. You decided you wanted to live. So you were about to come back over and then . . . you fell. A bit of rough water?”

  The Drifter swirled about her unseen.

  No.

  “Were you pushed, Annaliese? Did someone push you?”

  The movement was more erratic now, pulsing and intense.

  “Can’t you just tell me?”

  The Drifter pulled away in one powerful, swift movement and for the first time since she boarded the ship, Brette felt alone.

  “Annaliese?” She looked about her but there was no indication of any kind that the Drifter was still with her.

  It seemed she had her answer. The Drifter couldn’t tell her what had happened. Maybe Annaliese didn’t know how she ended up in the water. All she knew was that she hadn’t jumped. She had changed her mind and wanted to live.

  But she went overboard anyway and a knife-slice of icy water had welcomed her into the deep. It had greedily pulled her down, filling her lungs with its heaviness.

  Annaliese’s roommates, Phoebe Rogers and Simone Robinson, had told reporters they saw her jump, which meant either they had lied or the nighttime visibility had obscured their vision and they could not see what or who pushed Annaliese over the railing, only that one second she was there and the next she was gone.

  They’d surely run to the spot where she fell, screaming her name. No, perhaps one ran to the spot and the other ran for help. The ship had been traveling at cruising speed to make its New York arrival on time. How long had it taken for the man-overboard siren to clang? How long had it taken for a life preserver to be thrown over, and the ship’s engines to stop, and a lifeboat to be lowered for a search that would prove useless? Too long. The water had been too dark, too cold, and the ship traveling too fast. Annaliese’s body had slipped under the satin blackness, never to be recovered. Eventually the commodore had ordered the engines to be started up again and the ship sailed on to New York. Those waiting to arrest Annaliese Kurtz were told she had taken her life the night before.

  All thes
e years Annaliese must have been biding her time on the Queen Mary waiting for someone like Brette to help her understand what had really happened. Perhaps Annaliese’s ghost had appealed to other people with gifts like Brette’s, but they’d been unable to communicate with her. Or they had missed her altogether. Brette, being a reluctant visitor, had been unlike the many other paranormal enthusiasts and researchers and hunters eagerly boarding the Queen for the chance to encounter a ghost.

  Brette would have seemed very different.

  She knew what she needed to do next if she was going to attempt what she’d always said she would never do: assist a ghost.

  If those two war brides who said they saw Annaliese jump were still alive, they alone knew the truth. Brette would have to locate them and then somehow convince them to tell her what really happened.

  If she did find them and they agreed to talk with her, they were surely going to want to know why Brette believed Annaliese hadn’t jumped.

  “They’ll think I’m crazy,” Brette muttered as she walked away from the railing.

  Even though the Drifter wasn’t at her side anymore, Brette still felt its presence, like a cloud above her, watching over her almost protectively. For the first time in her life she knew she wanted to help a Drifter. She wanted to help this one.

  This one was different somehow.

  “I’ll be back,” Brette whispered as a moment later she stepped off the ship and the wide embrace of the Drifter lifted.

  As she walked back to her car, deep in thought about how to proceed and how to explain to Keith everything that had happened, her phone vibrated in her pocket.

  Trevor.

  “I can’t wait any longer,” he said when she answered. “Are you still on the ship? Have you been there all this time? Did you see Laura?”

  “I’m just now leaving. And no. I was all over the ship and I didn’t see her.”

  “But you saw other . . . ghosts.”

  “Yes.”

  He paused for a moment. “How many others?”

  Brette had reached her car and clicked the remote to unlock it. Trevor sounded doubtful. “Do you really want to know how many ghosts I saw?” she replied.

  “I just want Emily to know you saw some but you didn’t see her mother.”

  She slid into her car. The interior was hot and oppressive. “I saw a sufficient number of others.”

  “And did you talk to them? I remember you saying you could talk to them.”

  “I did.”

  “You asked them about Laura, right? And they said she wasn’t there.”

  His tone and questions were tight and deliberate, like he wasn’t interested in anything but lining up answers for his little girl.

  “She’s not there.”

  He hesitated again. “And why would she think she did feel her mother there on that ship? Was a ghost maybe trying to trick her? Play games with her?”

  “Drifters aren’t like that.”

  Another second passed as he thought on this. “It doesn’t matter to me what they might be like, Brette. I just need to know why Emily thinks she felt her mother there.”

  “So you can explain it all away.”

  “God, yes! I want her to forget all about this!”

  She heard the desperation in his voice and the cry of father-love in his words. “All right. Maybe Emily ran into a ghost who had been a mother when alive and that ghost reached out to your daughter because it sensed Emily’s sorrow and wanted to comfort her.”

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  It was remotely possible and as good an explanation as any. “Sure.”

  Trevor exhaled heavily. “I told her what you were doing this morning. She knows you are at the ship right now. She’s mad I didn’t bring her over there.”

  Thank God you didn’t, Brette wanted to say. “If you and she had tagged along, it would have changed nothing. Laura’s not here.”

  “I’m going to tell her you didn’t see Laura. But if she doesn’t believe me, will you talk to her?

  “I will if you think it will help. But it might not, Trevor. I’m no one to her.”

  “You’re my friend who talks to ghosts. That’s who you are.”

  Brette smiled. “That’s what you told her?”

  “It’s true, isn’t it?”

  “So now you think I can talk to ghosts?”

  “If there are ghosts, you’d be a great person for them to talk to.”

  “Okay. Very funny. I’m going to hang up now and head back to San Diego.”

  “I owe you one.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “But you drove up all this way to find nothing.”

  She could have said he was way off the truth, but she merely told him she’d been glad to help and hoped he could soon get back to the life he and Emily had waiting for them in Texas.

  • • •

  THE DRIVE HOME FROM LOS ANGELES SEEMED LONGER THAN usual as Brette itched to get on the Internet and follow up with what she had learned on the ship.

  She made it home by five, changed into yoga pants and one of Keith’s old T-shirts, and got comfortable with her laptop.

  Annaliese Kurtz’s roommates, Phoebe Rogers and Simone Robinson, were both listed on websites dedicated to archiving information about GI war brides from World War II. Both had been interviewed over the years for newspaper articles. Phoebe and her husband, Hal, had retired in Missouri, and he’d passed away in 2005. A St. Louis newspaper had done a story on her in 2016 for the seventieth anniversary of the war brides’ arrival in the United States. The story mentioned the suicide of Annaliese Kurtz, but the main thrust of the article was how Phoebe and her American husband met, how difficult the war years were, how exciting it had been to travel to the States on the RMS Queen Mary, and what it had been like to live as an American for the last seventy years. Brette skipped to the paragraph about Phoebe’s roommate, Annaliese.

  “She must have had it terrible back home in Germany to have done what she did,” Phoebe was quoted as saying. “I could tell something was bothering her before we even got on the ship. She was in the queue behind me when we registered at the camp at Tidworth. Everyone who heard her speak thought she was German, and you can imagine the looks she got after everything Hitler and the Nazis had done. They’d killed the boy I loved before I met my Hal, and bombed my house, and you know what they did to all those Jews. Everybody in that queue had suffered in some way, so to hear Annaliese’s voice was to be reminded of all that. She said her name was Katrine and that she was Belgian and grew up close to the border where lots of people spoke German. And I felt sorry for her because everyone seemed to mistrust her. I tried to be nice to her. But in the end she got found out. And I guess she just decided she’d rather be dead than go back to Germany. I try not to think about it much.”

  The article included a photo of Phoebe and her husband as newlyweds in England, a family photo of her with her three children, eleven grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren, as well as a single shot of her sitting on the balcony of her assisted-living condo in St. Louis.

  Brette found less information on Simone Robinson, who seemed to have lived a quieter life as an American. She was listed in 2010 as living in New Mexico. Simone had been part of a larger story on her husband, Everett, who’d been interviewed in 1995 for the fiftieth anniversary of V-E Day. A reconnaissance pilot, he had been shot down over southeastern France during scouting missions for Operation Dragoon, an offensive that would later be known as the Other D-Day, when Allied troops landed on the Mediterranean coast of France and marched upward into Germany. Everett, who had been rescued by local villagers after he’d bailed out of his plane, had been hidden in a wine cellar where Simone, a Parisian wanted by the Germans for her work with the Résistance, was also in hiding. Simone had nursed his wounds while Everett waited for the
opportunity to rejoin his battalion. They had fallen in love while he taught her English and she taught him French, as there was nothing else to do in the concealed wine cellar while they waited. After the Allies landed on the beaches in Provence, Everett had gone on to fight in the Ardennes and advanced into Germany. They’d married in Paris right after the war.

  The interviewer had apparently asked about Simone’s eventful voyage on the Queen Mary and the death of her German cabinmate, but Simone had declined to comment on that.

  “She doesn’t like to talk about what happened on the ship,” Everett was quoted as saying.

  No other news article was found about Simone. The only other Google hits were related to stories about Everett. The couple apparently still lived in the Albuquerque area. A white pages link offered an address that appeared to be current.

  Brette looked down at her notes. She had a phone number for the administrator’s office for Phoebe Rogers’s assisted-living complex in St. Louis and an address for Simone Robinson’s New Mexico home. The easiest next step would be to try calling Phoebe. It was just a few minutes before six, nearly eight o’clock in St. Louis. The office would be closed. She’d have to wait and call the following day at work, perhaps on her lunch break. She didn’t have a number for Simone, and a Google search didn’t immediately locate one.

  There was just one more thing to check before going for an evening jog before dark.

  She Googled Annaliese Kurtz.

  She paged through the results, looking for any new information. It seemed the woman was a mere footnote in the annals of history. Every news account or historical archive confirmed what Brette already knew about her, with only a couple of exceptions. The body in the car, originally thought to have been Annaliese Kurtz, had been identified as Katrine Sawyer by Katrine’s maternal grandfather, a British exports trader who had been in India at the time of the accident. A second news account mentioned that Annaliese’s German husband, a former Nazi Party member named Rolf Kurtz, remarried two years after Annaliese’s death. He had never commented to reporters about why his first wife had left him. His second wife died young, at thirty-seven, the result of a fall down a flight of stairs. Investigators had said the details of the fall were suspicious, but no charges were ever filed against anyone.