It seemed that Luisa had rebelled against the Nazis in her own way.
Frau Weber reached over and nudged Hanna’s mouth closed. “You didn’t know . . .”
Hanna collapsed on the couch. She’d hoped this visit would bring clarity, but her mind was more muddled than when she arrived. “The Nuremberg laws forbid marriage between an Aryan and Jew.”
“Love doesn’t always fit neatly into our laws.” Frau Weber sat on a chair across the room, her back poised like an arrow intent on a target. “Paul’s family wasn’t observant, but the Gestapo knew about their background.”
“The Gestapo keeps a record of everything.”
“A record of everyone else’s life perhaps. They wouldn’t dare track their own crimes.”
The agent who’d searched Hanna’s home this morning. He wouldn’t have left a trail.
“Why did you come home?” Frau Weber asked.
“Himmler no longer wants women working in the field.”
“Kinder, Küche, und Kirche,” the familiar phrase spilled off Frau Weber’s lips. Children, kitchen, and church—the mission of German woman today.
Hanna forced a smile. “No Kinder for me.”
Frau Weber stood. “I have coffee waiting in the kitchen.”
Kinder, Küche, Kirche. The words jumbled in her mind as Frau Weber slipped through the side door, closing it carefully behind her so she didn’t knock over any of her houseplants.
Hanna had never been much good in the kitchen, and while she’d attended church on most Sundays, she felt God’s presence more in the labyrinth or in those books transcribed by nuns who’d once lived in her home. And children—she had never really considered having them. If one didn’t marry, one didn’t have this hassle even if the Nazis thought rearing them was critical to building their new Reich.
If she’d agreed to marry Kolman, she would have married the entire Nazi organization and their philosophy on women. They probably wouldn’t even let her work at the museum.
Frau Weber returned with two cups of black coffee. After setting them on the table, she stepped back to close the door.
But something shifted on the other side of it. A mouse or—
It was a cat, with bright-golden fur.
Hanna stood. “Schatzi?”
Frau Weber quickly closed the door.
Hanna leaned forward, her voice but a whisper. “Luisa’s here . . .”
Frau Weber’s face blanched. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“She hasn’t left Nuremberg.”
“I couldn’t say.” Frau Weber glanced back at the window. “But it will soon be too dangerous for anyone from a Jewish family to remain in this town.”
“Luisa can come back home with me. I will—”
Frau Weber stopped her. “The Gestapo was searching your house!”
“I’ll find a way to hide her.”
“A way to get us all killed, I’m afraid.”
The woman was right, though Hanna didn’t want to admit it. The Gestapo agent would return, and other than the attic, the only place to hide someone on her property was the abandoned graphite mine on the hillside, between the lodge and abbey. No one could last long in that cold space.
“Tell her that I miss her,” Hanna said. “That she is always welcome to come home.”
Frau Weber checked her watch. “You must have to report to the museum soon.”
“The Gestapo will return.” Hanna wrung her hands together, wanting to open that side door to see if Luisa was hiding. “To search my attic. I want to make sure they don’t find anything up there.”
Frau Weber glanced at her garden of houseplants as if to consult with friends. Then she moved back toward the door. “Wait here.”
When she returned, Frau Weber pressed something cold into Hanna’s hand. “There are some papers in the attic, under the labyrinth. Burn them.”
“But the labyrinth is up on the hill . . .”
“Burn them, Hanna, before the agent finds out what she did.”
“What did Luisa do?”
A door slammed in the corridor outside. “You must leave now. The museum will wonder.”
“Please, Frau Weber. Why is she in trouble?”
“The less you know, the safer you’ll be.”
She knew little now, but she didn’t feel safe at all.
9
EMBER
Tourists crowded the ferry deck in front of Ember, anxious to catch a glimpse of an island where celebrity sightings blossomed, but oddly enough, grapes did not. While legend had it that someone named Martha—or Martin—inspired the island’s name, the only vineyard ever planted here had struggled to survive. But wild vines flourished in this New England climate, the rogue, tangled kind that could weather any storm.
The sole commercial vineyard was long gone and only a backbone of locals weathered the snow, wind, and torrential rain. Unless islanders embraced the tourists or decided to maintain a family farm, work was hard to find. And considering that the value of farm property would buy a home equal in size to those owned by celebrities, it was perfectly understandable why many had decided to leave the island.
Each fall, after the threat of a nor’easter blew the crowds away, islanders tucked themselves away in cabins and cottages that spanned the Vineyard’s hundred square miles. And legends continued to grow like wild vines, the Hollywood stars and their gazers giving locals plenty of fodder.
Stars and tourists and families like hers.
A line of waves headed toward the ferry, the water churning in the wind. Ember was safe behind the glass, but the thought of tumbling up and down, the water their captain, cinched the already tightly woven knot inside her.
She’d been born on this island, on the west side, where her father had pastored a small nondenominational church. She didn’t remember much about those early years, but her brother, Alex, twelve years her senior, had told her that it was as close to normal as it would ever be for their family.
At some point before her sixth birthday, their father stopped praying to God . . . because he thought he was God. And it became his calling to purify their nation.
When he began protesting against the island’s Hebrew Center—their Jewish neighbors—people started to leave the church. Her mother had cried at the departure of her closest friend. Ember remembered crying too, but her father only wanted those he considered “faithful” to remain in his flock. Those he considered to be true soldiers of Christ.
According to Alex, the whole island had begun to talk about the strange church that displayed a swastika behind the lectern. By the time their family and half the church membership left this island in search of a more accommodating community, her father and his twisted rhetoric were legend.
The Heywood family, along with her father’s ardent followers, had relocated to Idaho, but Alex, eighteen at the time, chose to stay on Martha’s Vineyard. Titus Kiehl—Dakota’s dad—offered Alex a job and a cabin at the family’s farm.
Her brother decided to change his last name to Ellis. Start a new life. No one except the Kiehl family, he’d said, remembered his past.
A decade later Ember returned to the island, her heart shattered like broken shells along the shore. Her brother was the only relative she had left in the world.
She and Alex had brought in the new millennium in his cabin, but neither of them celebrated. On that icy lakeshore in Idaho, everything had changed for both of them.
Ember took a long sip of the Sprite she’d bought back by the ferry dock in Woods Hole, hoping it would settle the rocking, but her anxiety stemmed from a place much deeper than the ocean. A seagull circled the ferry before cresting up with the breeze, and she tried to focus on the bird rather than the rise and fall of the waves.
In lieu of arranging a phone call, Kayla Mann had invited her to visit Mrs. Kiehl this evening. They’d talk over dinner, and then Ember would stay in the Kiehls’ gingerbread cottage in the town of Oak Bluffs, one of those built for the Methodist camp m
eeting more than a century ago. It was a second homecoming of sorts after being away for so long.
Now she needed to embrace this coming home.
The boat rocked again, and she tucked her suitcase under a bench before slipping out of her seat. The stuffy air wasn’t helping her stomach or clearing her mind.
Wind blew through the door as she moved out to the bow, ruffling the skirt of her white sundress. The island’s bluffs were in view now, large homes perched on the edge. Even though she’d been born on this island, attended school here for several years, she was more stranger than local. She and Alex had moved to Pennsylvania during her senior year of high school. Then Brooke attended college in Minnesota and opted to stay. There’d been no reason for her to return until now.
Happier memories spilled over in her mind with the choppy waves, of riding the carousel with Brooke when they were in high school, hooking the brass rings. Camping out along the cliffs at Aquinnah, a million stars melded into the sky.
The ridicule on homecoming night ended those few years that she’d tried to embrace being a teenager. Laughter had echoed behind her as she escaped down to the shore that evening, wading through the foamy water in her gown while her classmates danced among construction-papered coral in the gym.
Dark-blonde hair tangled around her face as the ferry neared the port, and she tried to hold it back in the wind. She’d left DC before daybreak, taking the train to Boston and then a bus down to the ferry terminal. Dakota never texted again, and she was relieved. Back when she was an awkward teen trying to find herself in a strange new world, she’d practically declared her love for him, days before he humiliated her in front of the school.
She’d since learned to keep her feelings close to her heart.
In the distance, a line of clouds was ballooning into gray, rustling up the waves as they prepped for a grand production on this theater of sea. The clouds could blow over the island with just a sprinkle of rain or they might dump buckets across the crowded towns and quiet farms.
When the ferry docked, Ember tied her hair back in a ponytail and pulled out her phone to check the time. In a half hour, Noah would return home, but she’d told both him and his VIP dad that she would be traveling today and tomorrow. No matter how many times Noah texted, she couldn’t return home any faster, but she had given Jack a tub of Phish Food and homework instructions. Hopefully, the man would put both to good use.
Her phone chimed as she descended the narrow staircase with the crowd. A Denver number appeared on the screen before she reached the platform, the one she hadn’t assigned a name.
A missed call and then a message.
I’ll meet you by the ticket office.
A man ran smack into Ember, sending her down two steps into a blessedly large woman who stopped her fall.
“I’m sorry,” Ember blurted, shaken more from the text than the near miss of landing on the vehicle deck below.
At the bottom of the stairs, she turned left to the pedestrian walk and waited while the remaining cars rattled off the boat. She didn’t want to see Dakota. Couldn’t see him.
He was supposed to be in Denver, not on this island.
What was she going to do now? She wasn’t stepping off this ferry, not until her racing heart began to calm. It was one thing to remember the humiliation from high school. It was quite another to be confronted with it.
The last car rolled onto the island, and an attendant looked over at her. The gangway was clear now, all the passengers gone. And a lineup of new vehicles were waiting to cross the waters into Woods Hole. Back and forth, rain or shine, a steady rhythm of delivering people as if they were packages.
Right now, she wanted to take the train back to her condo in Georgetown, dig her golden spoon into a bowl of ice cream with Noah. If she refused to disembark, they’d have to take her back to the mainland.
The attendant stepped up beside her. “Are you afraid of the gangway?”
She stuffed her phone into purse. “I’m afraid of what’s on the other side.”
“Martha’s Vineyard is one of the safest places on earth.”
But it wasn’t safe for her heart.
When she still didn’t move, the man pointed at a yellow building at the end of the dock. “If you’re going back with us, you’ll need a return ticket. And with this storm coming, we might be leaving early.”
She tilted her head. “Can I just buy a ticket from you?”
“Sorry.” He smiled. “The ticket office will get you set up though, and you can walk right back on the ferry.”
She wanted to study the past, the centuries before, but the realities of her own story were overwhelming. Then again, she was no longer that teenager thrown into a strange new world, struggling to stand on legs so shaky that she once clung to whoever supplied what she’d deemed worthy. No man had control over her anymore—except this attendant, she supposed. He wasn’t going to let her stay on the boat without a ticket. “I’ll be returning first thing in the morning,” she said as if he cared about her plans.
He tipped his hat, and she stepped onto the gangway, her suitcase rolling behind her to the ticket office. Then she walked right past it.
Hopefully Dakota was so madly in love with his wife and a houseful of children that he barely remembered anything from their high school years. Hopefully he would respect her decision to leave their past in the past.
A sidewalk on her left pointed toward the rumble of ocean waves. Dark clouds bruised the afternoon sky, a bully threatening to unleash its power.
Ahead was a parking lot where taxis usually waited for the island guests and a grassy plaza with a gazebo for events. To her right was the village of Oak Bluffs, where she and Alex had moved after a few months in Titus’s cabin.
Perhaps Dakota had returned home to work at the farm like his father and then Alex had done for a season. He’d probably exchanged his football uniform for overalls and a straw hat, a dirty handkerchief around his neck.
If she hurried, she could stick to her original plan of taking a taxi to Mrs. Kiehl’s house. The thirty-minute ride would give her time to process seeing Dakota, perhaps meeting his wife.
“Ember?”
Her stomach rolled again, but it wasn’t the waves that plagued her. She pretended that she didn’t hear, that the buzz of tourists, the engines from waiting cars, blocked his voice.
She waved her hand at a Prius with Martha’s Vineyard Taxi displayed on its side. The cab moved toward her.
Dakota called her name again, louder, and this fear—she had to stop being afraid. She dug her heels into the cement, then turned slowly.
In front of her was one of the men that she’d never wanted to see again. The man who was supposed to be living in Denver.
The hem of his beach shorts fell almost to his knees, and he wore flip-flops and a sweatshirt as if he’d spent the day surfing at Squibnocket before picking her up. She’d been so hoping for the denim overalls. Or the sprouting of horns. Anything to detract from the curly brown hair that splayed to one side, a smile that had once made her heart cartwheel.
But Dakota Kiehl was just as attractive as she remembered, perhaps even more so with his shadow of a beard.
He was the primary reason why she’d received a C in Algebra II, something that would haunt her months later when she applied for an honors scholarship at Georgetown. She never did explain to the college administrator that the captain of her high school’s football team had ruined her ability to ace the class, just that she was in the process of overcoming her aversion to numbers.
Her lack of attentiveness almost cost her the scholarship, and she’d determined that this man would never cause her to lose anything important again.
Dakota smiled at her. “Hello, Ember.”
She forced her lips into what she hoped was a smile. “Hello.”
The salty tang of sea rolled over the bluff, threatening to take her back again to those high school years.
“Gram said you took the train.”
/>
“A train and bus.” She nodded toward the water. “And the ferry, of course. A taxi ride is what I need to complete my journey.”
He reached for the handle of her suitcase, but she waved him away, picking it up instead.
“You still get seasick?” he asked, studying her face.
If he remembered that, he’d never forget how she’d groveled in her admiration for him. “Nothing wrong with your memory.”
“Or my vehicle.” He pointed at a muddy black 4Runner with roll bars parked above the beach, a later model of the one he’d driven their senior year. “No reason for you to ride in a taxi.”
But she could think of a hundred good reasons. A thousand even.
“I’m still taking one,” she said, scanning the parking lot again, but the Prius was gone.
“I’ll just be following you home.”
When she looked back, she saw the questioning in his gaze. Was he taunting her like he’d done long ago? While she could remember facts well, she’d always struggled to read people. A memory of steel, that’s what she had, but her discernment . . . it was more like Jell-O.
But he must understand why she couldn’t get in his car.
“You do what you want, Dakota. I’m here to see your grandmother.” She didn’t want to be mean, not like how he’d treated her, but she wasn’t going to spend a half hour with him. Alone.
“What if you can’t catch another taxi?” he asked.
The island shuttle pulled up by the plaza to distribute tourists to the towns and remote beaches across the island.
Without another word, she rushed across the street and hopped on it, locking her heart tight again. And she didn’t look back, not until the shuttle pulled into the parking lot of West Tisbury’s town hall.
But she hadn’t locked her heart tight enough. At the sight of the black 4Runner, of the man who stepped out into the rain, her heart felt exposed. Raw and tender.
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