The mound of namestones turned into a path, several hundred stones circling around the cross. They partnered together for months, nursing the sick, building the path for prayer, until Cristyne caught the pestilence. Emrich never left her side until her life slipped away. Then he continued his work until the plague was defeated, the labyrinth of namestones complete.
The prayers of the nuns, Hanna’s mother once told her, lingered in this space.
Hanna counted the namestones as she walked around the labyrinth—Eins, Zwei, Drei—all the way up to Fünfzehn. Number fifteen was the stone that she pried out of the soil, and hidden underneath, in the sunken crevice caked with mud, was a slender sardine tin. Holding her breath, she opened the tin, and relief flooded out of her lips when she saw the key inside.
She refilled the hole with soil and moved the slippery stone back into place before scraping away the tiniest piece of moss with the trowel of her fingernail, sifting gently until a letter peeked out from its covering. The bottom of an A.
Not even the rain, five centuries’ worth, could wash these letters away. The memories of those lost to the plague withstood even the storms.
Hanna replaced the moss sliver to preserve the carving, and as she stood, her gaze looped around the circumference of stones. Her mother had circled this memorial while Hanna was still in her womb. Praying consistently, Vater once said.
She had been named Hanna in memory of her grandmother, but instead of choosing another ancestor for the middle name, her mother had chosen Cristyne.
Hanna Cristyne Tillich, after the postulant who’d given her life to rescue others.
Long ago, Hanna decided that she also wanted to become a nun.
Before she’d left for the university, Hanna often walked this labyrinth alone, remembering her mother here since her actual memories at home were few. Confusing. In this place, when Hanna was a child, her mother had seemed close, but even those memories were fading.
A bat reeled past her, its wings clipping the breeze.
Darkness was turning this forest into a cavern, and while she could quip about Victor Frankenstein with the cabdriver, locals talked more about mystical creatures like the Wolpertinger haunting these woods, a rabbitlike animal with antlers, wings, and fangs that came out of hiding after dark. A bat, she could handle, but she didn’t want to meet any other creatures of the night.
Another day, early in the morning, she’d walk the entire labyrinth again. And she’d remember her own past as she stepped into her new role as a curator. For one must never forget where one came from. It was the foundation to building a life.
The key in hand, Hanna rushed down the hill through the fading light. Perhaps when she emerged from the trees, she would see Paul or Luisa in the distance. This hike into the forest would be for naught.
The sky cradled a half-moon, splashing light across the cornflowers in her meadow, but the house remained unlit. Neither Luisa nor Paul, it seemed, had returned.
She retrieved her suitcase from the shed and unlocked the front door. The heavy door groaned when she pushed it open, as if she’d awakened it from sleep. She called for Luisa, but no one responded.
Beside the door was an electric switch, but the entry lamp didn’t respond when she flipped it. Had Luisa and Paul neglected to pay the electricity bill?
Luisa knew—she should have known—that Hanna would help her if they were struggling with money. She and Paul could have as much time as necessary before paying their rent. For that matter, they didn’t have to pay at all. Luisa had moved into the lodge more than twenty years ago, before Hanna’s mother died. She belonged in this place.
Hanna swept back drapes that covered the front window, and with the moonlight as her lantern, she slipped through the dining room and into the kitchen. She searched the pantry first, the shelves filled with tins of cookies and crackers, jars of pears, applesauce, and tomatoes, their lids coated with a fine dust. A taper candle, she found on the bottom shelf. Matches were in the alcove beside the pantry with its small desk and one telephone that her father had installed.
She melted the base of the candle, cooling the wax in a silver stand to keep it from teetering. With the flickering light, she moved back through the dining room and a corridor, into the former banquet hall, where the count’s hunting parties were once entertained.
When her grandfather bought the lodge, the walls in this great hall had still displayed the trophy heads of a stag, moose, and wolves, all of them facing a series of arched windows that climbed up both the ground level and first story. Thank goodness, her grandfather had removed the mounts and repapered the walls with a navy-and-gold damask. And these days, one had to travel all the way into Poland to locate a gray wolf.
Her grandfather had left the exposed rafters from the Middle Ages, along with the green ceramic stove and shelves to house the many old books. The banquet table, he’d replaced with clusters of chairs, couches, and small tables on a worn carpet.
A portrait of Saint Katharine was the one original art piece that remained in the great hall, above her father’s corner desk. Hanna could see it in the glow of her candlelight—the young woman dressed in an elegant gown, her hands folded in prayer as the wheel meant for her demise splintered into a thousand pieces behind her. The emperor, his scepter raised like a sword, looked as if he might hit her after she’d refused his proposal of marriage in order to be fully committed to God.
But an angel held the emperor back until the time God had chosen for Katharine to surrender her life for His sake.
Portraits of Hanna’s family had replaced the animal trophies, but they were mounted too high to see now. Once the electricity was restored, an iron chandelier would light this room.
Several frames occupied Vater’s desk. One of him with Hanna, and one of Luisa and Hanna, their legs dangling over one of the docks on Grosser Dutzendteich, laughing together. Luisa with a porcelain brooch pinned on her scarf, pretending to push Hanna over the side. She glanced across the desk’s surface, looking for a letter from Luisa, but all that remained was a ledger resting below the desk lamp and a slab of sandstone her father had used as a paperweight. In perfect Tillich order.
Worry roped its tethers around her mind, and she chided herself for it. Fear like this benefited no one. Perhaps Luisa had left a letter in her bedroom upstairs.
On the far side of the hall were wooden steps that Cristyne and her sisters would have solemnly climbed after chasing God in their prayers. Steps that, centuries later, hunters stomped up after a long day chasing prey through the forest. Steps she once raced up as a child, afraid a ghost might be chasing her.
Until now, she’d spent her adult life running toward something instead of away, but it seemed that Himmler had been chasing her as well, all the way back home.
Four bedrooms were located on the next floor, two on each side of the corridor. Luisa and Paul had used the one across from Hanna’s old room.
Clothes were stacked neatly in their dresser, the oak top sprinkled with dust like the jars below, their twin beds equally tidy with matching blue duvets, but she saw no letter.
They’d been gone for longer than the day or even a week, it seemed. Months, perhaps. Had they left to visit relatives now that their country was changing at such a rapid pace? Paul’s family lived in the nearby town of Fürth, just west of Nuremberg.
If they’d gone for an extended visit, why had they left so many of their things behind?
She dropped her suitcase inside her old bedroom and stepped back into the hall with her candle.
If Kolman were here, he’d point to her logic. The Gruenewalds didn’t have to tell her they were leaving. They could have simply moved while Hanna was traveling. Any letter from Luisa might have gotten lost while the Berlin office tried to find her location.
But something was wrong; she could feel it now in the marrow of her bones. Luisa wasn’t only a tenant. She was family. She wouldn’t leave without notice.
Hanna hurried back downstairs to p
lace a call. The upright telephone was ancient compared to the ones in Berlin, but change was slow to arrive in these hills. And this one worked just fine.
Lifting the clunky receiver, she held it up to her ear before asking the operator to connect her with Frau Weber, one of her mother’s closest friends. A woman who’d also befriended Hanna and Luisa.
“I’m sorry,” Frau Weber said when the operator connected their lines. “I didn’t hear your name.”
“It’s Hanna Tillich,” she explained.
“You’ve come home . . .” Perhaps it was a bad connection, but no welcome enveloped these words.
Then a line clicked in the background, the operator listening. Due diligence, she supposed, to report anything suspect to the Gestapo. But Hanna didn’t have anything to hide. She was simply trying to locate her cousin.
“I’m only home for a season,” Hanna said. “I’ll be working at the National Museum.”
“Luisa would have been pleased to know you’ve returned.”
Would have been?
Hanna pressed her palm against the wall. “Where exactly is Luisa?”
A long pause before Frau Weber responded. “Is she missing?”
But her question didn’t ring true. “You must have known she left.”
“Come visit me, dear. When you have time.”
“But—”
“I’ve missed you too.”
An answer, that’s all she wanted. And she didn’t want to wait until morning. Luisa, of all people, wasn’t suspect. “Where is—?”
“Auf Wiedersehen.” Another click and the woman was gone, Hanna’s question dangling with the telephone cord.
A series of possibilities, none of them good, swirled in her mind, but she couldn’t sort through them tonight. Not without answers to her questions. Even if she managed to ride a bicycle into town, she wouldn’t get far. Curfew was one of the immovable columns in their theater of law and order, enforceable with a stint in prison. She had no pass or even a decent excuse to be out after dark.
At first light, she’d search for a bicycle and ride it back down the hill to Frau Weber’s.
She eyed the narrow bed in her former room, the marigold-yellow duvet unchanged. In the past two years, since she’d graduated from the university, she’d spent the night in some perilous places across Europe and Nepal, but always with her team. And usually accompanied by soldiers.
In her travels she rarely felt afraid, but tonight, alone in her own home, Luisa gone, the old childhood fears reared.
But she’d always been stronger than her fears. Had to be.
Vater had taught her how to use both a knife and a hunting rifle, but if he’d kept the gun, she didn’t know where he’d hidden it. A knife would have to do, in case the taxi driver told a friend that he’d dropped off a madwoman near the ruined chapel. She feared men less than she feared the mystical, but Vater would tell her a smart woman was always prepared.
The kitchen knives were dull, so she sharpened one with a stone before wrapping it in an apron to transport upstairs. Her hand cupped behind the flame, Hanna blew out her candle before stepping back into her bedroom. Then she locked the door.
Branches batted the window as she slipped the house key and knife into the top drawer of her nightstand. In the moonlight, she changed into her nightgown and crawled under the familiar flannel duvet.
The last time she’d been home was for Luisa and Paul’s wedding. She and Charlie had come together on their break from the university. Instead of pursuing a monastic life, she’d begun to dream for the first time about her own wedding.
In that week, everything changed for her and Charlie. She’d never planned to sleep with him, not unless they married, but she who once snubbed romance had been swept away by her handsome escort, the easy camaraderie between them. The last night of their trip, when Charlie was supposed to stay in town with a friend, she’d asked him to stay in the empty lodge with her instead. A mistake that cost her dearly.
She’d traded their friendship for a bumbling romance that ended when Charlie returned to America. Traded the truest of love for a broken heart.
And she decided again that while marriage was a fine proposition for Luisa and other women, it wasn’t for her.
The warmth of the flannel began luring her to sleep, the memories of Charlie fading.
In the morning, she would find out what happened to Luisa. And in the morning she would write to Kolman again. While the Berlin office might have misplaced a letter from Luisa, she wanted to make sure that Kolman was clear about her rescinding any promise of marriage.
But Kolman wouldn’t wait until morning. He smashed right into her dreams.
With his gray eyes, pressed lips, he hovered near her bed, his forehead broken with sweat, and his voice—he growled like a wolf.
There were no wolves left in Germany. Only in Poland. She tried to tell herself this, in the fog of her nightmare. As if it mattered.
This ghost of a man tugged open the nightstand drawer and found her knife. Then he turned toward her, and she could see the fangs of folklore. Another monster created in a German lab.
When he lifted the knife, she screamed, the word no ripping from her lips as she awoke in the stillness.
No Kolman. No wolf. No fangs.
No creature wanting to hurt those who could help him.
Her no had meant something.
She elbowed herself up on the pillows and relit the candle. Her body was covered in sweat as she stepped toward the window, the flicker of light chasing the shadows of this monster outside, to the meadow beyond.
The candlestick trembling in her hand, she knew for certain that she couldn’t marry Kolman. Not now or next month or next year. Not even when the war was over.
Kolman was attractive, strong, but marriage to him wouldn’t console her loss. Nor did she need a man to take care of her. She could change the world on her own.
Germany had needed her to excavate its past so the German people knew exactly where they’d come from. Now she would do her best to curate this past as her country forged into the future.
She returned to bed, and the next time she woke, someone was ringing the doorbell.
Luisa and Paul, she prayed, had come home.
7
EMBER
Ember chewed on the end of a pencil, staring at her forlorn Facebook profile instead of the river below her loft. She rarely posted on social media, and the only reason she kept her accounts was to connect with friends who liked to unfold the pages of their lives online.
She wasn’t opposed to sharing one’s life, but the digital world seemed to favor those who didn’t want to talk to each other. Only at each other. Talk or shout, like those men on the streets who were spewing their anger, refusing to consider the opinions of others. The constant talking, never listening, did no one any good.
The screen blinked back as if it sensed her dilemma.
Years ago she’d promised herself that she would never, ever look up Dakota Kiehl, a promise soldered by the memories of him discarding her like a rotten apple their senior year.
But she’d also promised herself that she’d never again hide from him or any man.
She switched on the lamp beside her desk. The sun wouldn’t set for another three hours or so, but the evening light cast shadows through her condo and she couldn’t stand the dark.
Instead of obsessing over the past, she had to keep her gaze focused on the future. If not, she would paralyze herself.
Today she’d tried to track down a phone number to interview Mrs. Kiehl, but no one at the high school or any of the businesses that she’d called on Martha’s Vineyard or even the postmaster could help her. The only number she found online was outdated, belonging to a man in Cape Cod who’d never heard of the Vineyard teacher.
Typing quickly, she searched for Dakota’s name before she changed her mind. It wasn’t like she was planning to stalk the man. This was a professional search to inquire about his grandmother. To a
sk Mrs. Kiehl to share her mother’s story.
A brief search brought up an article about Dakota’s marriage to a former Miss Massachusetts. She hoped for his wife’s sake, for the sake of their children, that he had changed, but there wasn’t much else to see online. Most of his social media settings were private, so no family pictures or selfies of the man who’d busted open her heart long ago. He might have posted his photos privately, but she’d have to send a request to see them and she’d never extend an invitation to restore even an online friendship with this man.
She typed out a message, edited it twice. Then she deleted it. With their lack of Facebook friendship, he’d probably never get it anyway.
While she shouldn’t spend another moment this evening on Dakota’s profile, she continued to scroll. The few pictures he’d posted publicly were mostly of mountains. Grand, snow-covered peaks, one with purple wildflowers bursting through the fresh powder.
Other photos on Dakota’s profile were from Martha’s Vineyard, taken years ago. The rolling waves at sunset. A boiled lobster, probably caught right offshore. A picture of Captain Kiehl with his high school varsity football team.
That’s the Dakota she remembered. The teenager she would have done anything to please.
She shivered. How pathetic she’d been back then, thinking that caring for a man meant you did whatever he wanted. That worship somehow equaled affection.
A printed copy of the Vineyard Gazette article lay beside her keyboard, and she studied the photograph again of the woman on the front porch. The Kiehl family had owned the same farm on Martha’s Vineyard for more than a century, a picturesque place tucked back in hills that insulated them from the tourist crowds.
She could find their address and overnight a letter, asking if she could visit, but this was ridiculous, stalling her research because Dakota hurt her twenty years ago. What mattered now was asking Mrs. Kiehl about her mother before Ember boarded the plane to Nuremberg. Perhaps she could still find one hero whose story survived.
The Curator's Daughter Page 6
