She hadn’t felt lavished on at the time.
“It would be impossible to forget your dad,” Ember said.
“He doesn’t like for Gram to talk about the past, and right now she wants peace in our family. It’s a bit of a mess.”
“Is your father still on the island?” Ember asked.
He shook his head. “Both my parents moved away after graduation. Dad went west and my mother lives near Boston. My sister has three young kids, and Mom thinks her job is to spoil them properly.”
“A worthy calling.”
“She and Gram are still close. According to Gram, my mom will always be a Kiehl.”
So different from Ember’s family—she didn’t want anyone to know that she’d once been a Heywood.
“How is your brother?” Dakota asked. Everyone in her class knew that she no longer had parents. An accident, she and Alex had told the high school principal when she moved back. No other explanation was needed.
“He’s doing great.” The happiest, in fact, that she’d ever seen him. “He and his wife live in the Poconos with their two kids.”
Maggie and Saul. Twins who were a year younger than Noah.
A crew with yellow vests began circling the Tabernacle, collecting branches from the storm.
“Why the Poconos?”
“He met a lovely woman whose family owns an inn there. Alex helps run it now.”
“I always liked your brother,” Dakota said. “He was nice until—”
“I can’t say he was very fond of you.”
“Understandable.”
Dakota drummed his cell phone against his hand before piloting their conversation back to Germany. “Surely there must have been someone besides Hanna who helped the people in Nuremberg.”
“I haven’t found a record of anyone yet,” she said. “And now the same kind of hatred is brewing again in our country that’s supposed to be welcoming for all.”
He looked back at the stage. “People hurt other people so they can feel better about themselves.”
The way Dakota’s father used to berate him in public. She’d never really thought about it before. Perhaps Dakota decided, at seventeen, to turn that anger on someone else. Hurt her like he’d been hurt.
“Does it work?” she asked, genuinely curious as to what he thought.
“For a while, until they realize the damage they’ve done. If they ever realize it.” He stood up. “And now I have another pressing question.”
“What is it?” she asked. Her official defense wasn’t until September, but she was prepared to defend for her dissertation on the spot if she must.
“Are you hungry?”
She laughed. “Starving.”
He pointed back toward the cottage. “We could attempt to grill pancakes.”
“Barbecued pancakes?”
He shrugged. “Why not.”
“I suppose we can try it on aluminum foil.”
His phone rang, and she trailed behind him back to the house until he finished the call. “Gram’s electricity is back on. She’s wondering if we can come for brunch.”
“And give up our barbecue . . .”
His brown eyes sparked when he smiled. “Perhaps in another storm.”
“Is the road passable?”
He held up his keys. “Only one way to find out.”
“If we can get through, I’d love to visit her this morning.”
When Dakota stepped onto the porch, he picked up several branches and dumped them into a pile beside the cottage.
Second Chance.
That was the name she’d missed in the storm last night, the plaque nailed above Dakota’s front door. And she liked the promise in it.
A Second Chance for all of them.
19
HANNA
Hanna opened the front door, a pail in her hands to harvest the forest’s bounty. The summer morning was warm, sunshine to offset the gloom settling over this mountain.
During their first week as husband and wife, Kolman had awakened early almost every day, leaving the house for a hike while she pretended to sleep. This morning she watched him cross the meadow again, vanish up into the trees.
Was it merely exercise or was this man who’d become her husband searching for something? Everyone seemed to be hiding things these days, and she feared he would find the labyrinth on the hill, the freshly turned soil where she’d buried Paul’s story. But he never told her where he’d been nor had she dared to ask.
Today she was returning to her work at the museum, but before she took her bicycle down to the tram, she decided to follow Kolman into the forest.
With her pail in hand, she stole through the meadow, and as she climbed the rugged hill, she passed the entrance to the old mine that Opa had blocked with an iron grate. A grate that had long since tumbled over.
There were multiple entrances across the hills, most of them sealed up to keep curious parties from injuring themselves. Only a foolish person, Vater once said, would go into an old mine, so he never bothered to restore the gate.
She’d been known to be foolish a time or two.
Her footfalls were as light as leaves dropping onto the padded floor so she wouldn’t startle Kolman if she found him, in case he’d holstered his Luger.
Wild blueberries clustered on the bushes, and she swiped up handfuls of them, fruit pinging against tin as she filled her pail. Then she topped the blue with a fresh cropping of raspberries. Kolman had encouraged her to pursue her housewifery skills, and if he found her in these woods, she’d show off her harvest so he wouldn’t suspect curiosity had forced her out of the house.
They’d had the oddest honeymoon, but one that suited her fine. Kolman had been kind enough in the days after their wedding, leaving only once in a hired car to visit the Gestapo station. They’d visited Old Town together and the newly remodeled zoo.
In the past week, she’d given him a complete tour of the house including the attic, but he wasn’t the least bit interested in dollhouses. They’d draped black fabric over the windows and painted the edges of glass so the house wouldn’t fall victim to a night bombing.
Once the electricity had been restored, they spent their evenings in the great hall. Kolman read through the collection of books and wrote religiously every night, sitting at her father’s desk. As if he’d already made the lodge his home.
At the top of the hill, the abbey ruins stood empty except for a red fox that watched her closely, ready to steal any berries she dropped from her pail. The moss-covered labyrinth curled beyond the church, and she circled the trail once to pray, stopping by the stone where she’d hidden Paul’s story, praying like her mother had once done. Like the nuns who remembered those who’d died after the plague.
When she returned home, Kolman was already dressed in his uniform. He stopped by the mirror to shine the lightning bolt on his collar with his sleeve. Except for the one time that he’d gone to town alone, he hadn’t donned his uniform for an entire week. And he’d seemed more like the man she’d known from the Ahnenerbe.
He turned slowly toward her. “Where were you?”
“Picking berries.” She held up the pail. “Would you like muesli for breakfast?”
He hesitated as if he wanted to ask something but wasn’t certain of the words. “Muesli would be fine. Will you be ready by eight?”
“I have to leave a bit earlier to catch the tram.”
Kolman shook his head, his blue eyes firing. “It’s silly for you to take the tram when I drive past the museum in a perfectly good automobile.”
She had no argument for that except that she wanted to be alone for the hour. “Are you inviting me to ride with you?”
“A car will be here by eight for both of us.”
Kolman would never understand that she enjoyed the freedom of riding a bicycle down the hill, especially on these summer days. The German people had traded most of their freedom for security, the power of the Reich, but this one small freedom remained for he
r.
She would take her bicycle down to the tram tomorrow.
“Where were you this morning?” she asked, removing a pan of soaked oats from the refrigerator to mix with her freshly picked berries.
“Right here.”
“But you left—”
“I was in the great hall, Hanna. You must have missed me.”
But she’d seen him crossing the meadow. Why was he lying to her?
The driver didn’t speak to either of them beyond his greeting, and Kolman was silent as well on their drive into town. When they stopped along the sidewalk, several meters from the museum entrance, he patted her hand. “I’ll meet you back here at a quarter after five.”
She eyed the driver, but the man’s gaze had settled on two young women across the street, staring at the mannequins in a clothing shop. “I’m taking the tram home.”
“A quarter after—”
She slammed the door. While she might have been strong-armed into marrying Kolman, she did not require an escort, especially since she wanted to visit Frau Weber’s flat after work.
Grete met her at the front door with a cup of black coffee. “Congratulations, Frau Strauss.”
It was the first time anyone had called her by her married name, and it sounded strange. “Please call me Hanna.”
“Dozens of new inventory boxes are waiting for you downstairs.”
She took the cup of coffee. “Where did the boxes come from?”
“I’m not allowed to tell you that.”
Hanna sipped the strong drink, as if it were the French wine that Kolman brought home. “Did someone take the other crates away?”
Grete nodded. “Everything you’ve cataloged has been stored.”
“But you won’t tell me where . . .”
“We’re all just cogs in the wheel, Hanna. Only the director knows how it all works.”
This storage place couldn’t be far from the museum. Somehow they would have to transport the artifacts during the night, to a place that looters wouldn’t suspect. A place strong enough to protect the crates.
Downstairs the clipboard was waiting for her beside a collection of Pelikan fountain pens, the shelves towering with new items. Boxes pooled in her mind. Shifting side to side. Rearranging themselves and replicating like bunnies, hopping up and down.
It would take weeks to catalog all of it for the next transport, but no matter how fast she recorded and wrapped, she suspected the director would keep adding more.
First was a cache of heirloom jewelry; then she began listing vintage clothing and porcelain figurines, packing them for a bombing she hoped would never happen. She pulled out candlesticks from one box and then a block of stone with a lion head centered inside a star, a Hebrew inscription below it. She studied the heavy piece, not knowing what to call it. A plaque. A nameplate. A memorial from a shuttered synagogue. She could read Latin, but she’d never learned Hebrew or Yiddish.
Someone had taped a piece of paper with an address on the back side, and she ripped off the address to tape onto the back of her clipboard. Instead of packing the stone away, she left it on a shelf.
Hours later, Grete brought down a second cup of coffee, this time with a cube of sugar. Hanna reached for the stone.
“Have you ever seen anything like this?”
Grete picked up the piece, examining the back like Hanna had done for markings. “Only once, in a book.”
“What is it?” Hanna asked.
“A wedding stone. They were built into synagogue walls centuries ago. The groom would smash a glass on it during their wedding ceremony to chase away the demons.” Grete pointed at the letters. “‘Mazel tov.’”
“You read Hebrew?”
Grete cringed as if it was an accusation. “Most of these stones say the same thing.”
“I wonder how this one made its way into the museum.”
“I don’t know, but the wedding stones are only found around Nuremberg.”
Hanna took a sip of the coffee and then started wrapping the block of stone. “And the museum wants to store it.”
“It’s an important piece of history.”
A menace—that’s what Hitler had called the Jewish people. A parasite in the body of other nations. How strange that the Germans would be keeping their artifacts even as they warned against the threat of their owners.
She finished the coffee, thanking Grete as she handed back her cup.
After wrapping the wedding stone, Hanna memorized the address taped to her clipboard. It was only a ten-minute detour between Kaiserstrasse and Frau Weber’s house. Perhaps she could find out what happened to the people who’d owned this artifact.
Right at five, the director shook her hand, thanked her for her work even as he scanned her frame, like she might have stuffed the wedding stone under her blouse. Instead of walking through the center of Old Town, she turned left to follow the perimeter of the city wall. Then she turned onto another passage between buildings, losing herself in the pedestrians and bicyclists before she crossed a bridge over the Pegnitz River, out to a cobblestoned plaza.
The Hauptmarkt was framed by the gothic Church of Our Lady with its medieval Männleinlaufen clock, Town Hall, and a gilded fountain called Schöner Brunnen. Before the war, this plaza had hosted an annual Christmas market with its lights and concerts and cinnamon-spiced wine. Along with the zoo, it had been one of her favorite places as a child.
Kaiserstrasse was stitched like a hemline along the tranquil river, the hill beyond it skirting straight up to Kaiserburg Castle. An archway off the street led into a courtyard of bicycles and garden of herbs. The medieval houses were boxed together around the yard, each one sharing the warmth of walls, many of their windows overlooking the water. The owners of the wedding stone must have been quite wealthy to live here.
The door of Number 18 was locked, so Hanna rang the bell. A uniformed man in his early twenties answered. His widowed mother had just signed a lease for the upper floors, he explained, the opportunity of a lifetime for her and his siblings since he was preparing to leave for the eastern front. No, he didn’t know the name of the previous occupants. They’d left nothing behind in the rooms.
Hanna waited on the front steps until another tenant returned home, a lady with impossibly high heels and a shopping bag.
Hanna stood. “I’m searching for the family who used to live here.”
The woman glanced over Hanna’s shoulder, scanning the empty courtyard. “I didn’t know them well.”
“Do you know what happened to them?”
“I heard they received an invitation to relocate. To a better place for work.” The woman slipped a cigarette into her mouth and lit a match, her hands trembling as she took a long draw. “What do you want with them?”
“I found something of theirs.”
“They owned a bakery, over on Adlerstrasse, but they were Itzige.”
Hanna cringed at the slur. The government must have shut their store down.
“They had two children who used to play hopscotch right here.” She pointed at the paved walk. “Back when children played.”
Back before they had to march across Nuremberg like troops with their bandannas and flags. Before they had to memorize large portions of Mein Kampf and diagram the treachery of their Jewish enemies.
“The Dreydel family, that was their surname,” the woman said quietly. “Richard and Josefine.”
Hanna caught her breath. Josefine Dreydel was a name she knew. It was on Luisa’s list.
Did Luisa know what happened to the Dreydel family? And why the museum was now the keeper of their things?
She had to find—keep—their story.
No one answered her knock on Frau Weber’s door, so she wandered down to Lorenzkirche, settling onto a bench to hear the organ play. She no longer felt welcome in her own home, and these summer nights were long, the sun staying up until ten. Kolman could eat the leftover muesli for dinner if he was hungry.
“I was supposed to r
etrieve you after work,” Kolman said when she finally returned home by tram and the long walk up past the zoo, a loaf of fresh bread and bottle of milk in her hands. “We were meeting by the curb.”
“I told you that I was taking the tram.”
“It’s not necessary—”
She placed the bottle of milk into the refrigerator. “Himmler secured this position for me, Kolman. If I can’t be in the field, I intend to do this job to the best of my ability, even if it means working late.”
“What exactly are you doing at the museum?” He reached for a kitchen knife and began to cut the rye bread. It would be a simple meal tonight. Sausages with bread and the tomatoes she’d found growing in Luisa’s garden.
“Cataloging the new items they are bringing in.”
“Perhaps it’s not good for you to work,” he said. It was a threat, hardly veiled. He knew that she needed this job, much more than she needed a marriage. If she was required to spend her whole day in this lodge alone, she’d waste away.
“Himmler said . . .” But she didn’t know exactly what Himmler had said about this position. Kolman had received the telegram.
“The car will pick us up at eight in the morning.”
She’d done everything the Reich had asked of her and yet they continued to siphon off more, as if they owned her. As if she were one of the caged animals at the zoo, a lioness in all of her glory, unable to fight because she was trapped behind steel bars. The zookeeper would shoot this creature in a heartbeat if she became a threat.
Hanna couldn’t threaten, not now. She had to embrace the walls of her cage and wait until someone opened the door to an animal they thought tamed. A lioness who purred in public, swallowing her roar until the time was right. Until the women of Germany could speak out again.
The Nazi Party might suppress her voice for now, but she wouldn’t let them take her paper and pen. If Frau Weber would help her, she’d find out what was happening to people like the Dreydel family. She would write inside this cage, bury the Dreydels’ story with Paul’s biography in the labyrinth, when Kolman wasn’t home.
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