Jim. Tim. Something like that. The son of the store’s owner. And he seemed to be quite enamored with Aimee as well.
It had been Aimee who’d yelled at her that fateful night, Aimee who’d pushed her into the boat. Aimee who’d said they had to go.
But in all of the chaos, where had Aimee gone?
People had crowded onto the pontoon boat that took Ember across Eagle Lake, but she didn’t remember seeing Aimee onboard. Had she ridden over with Lukas?
If so, perhaps she would remember what happened to Elsie.
Few of the Aryan Council members had been identified in the news stories, but Aimee had been quoted once, a year or so after the fire, in an article about Lukas and his conviction.
Ember opened her tablet and began sifting back through the hundreds of files and interviews that she’d stored online, searching until she found the quote.
“God saved my life that night,” Aimee had said. “Rescued me from the fire and set me on higher ground.”
The details were sparse, Aimee’s last name withheld, but the reporter said she had married and wanted nothing else to do with the council.
What if she did remember what happened on the lake? Her memories might be as fragmented as Ember’s, but if she had seen Lukas, Elsie . . .
A miracle, that’s what she had prayed for. And in order for a miracle to happen, she would have to first throw one of her stones.
She found a listing for the grocery in Coeur d’Alene, but it had since been bought out by a conglomerate, so she began searching for the owners of grocery stores across northern Idaho, hoping the son might have pursued his father’s work.
When she didn’t find anything, she expanded her search until she located a Timothy and Aimee Lane, owners of several grocery stores in Montana. And a corporate photograph that matched the face of the woman who’d broken free the same night as Ember.
She called the grocery in Kalispell, asked for Aimee Lane, and the manager said he’d tell her that Sarah called.
Her name had been hidden for so long, but the letter writer knew the truth and probably others like him. It was time to use her old name for good.
45
LILLY
“No!” Lilly pushed the soldier away, but the man wouldn’t leave her alone. She clung to Mami’s arms. Her elbows, wrists, hands. All of them slipped through Lilly’s fingers as Charlie ripped her away.
Why hadn’t her mother clung back? Mami should have told Charlie to leave them alone, fought for her daughter.
Mami’s face blurred, but Lilly could hear her shouting now. The whole village was shouting. She strained her ears for the sound of Mami’s voice as she wrestled against the soldier. Then Charlie’s arm hooked across her chest, lifting her like a sack of potatoes, hauling her away.
“Mami!” she screamed.
Her mother’s arms outstretched, Lilly only wanted to run into them. Hide from the guns and whips and terrible screams.
Her mother said something, but Lilly couldn’t understand the words.
She yelled again as Mami was shoved into a truck, crammed in with the other mothers and some of the children. Why couldn’t she leave with them?
Gunshots rumbled in the distance and the sound silenced her cries, but the women in the trucks only cried louder.
Where were her brothers? They’d promised Mami not to let the soldiers take her away.
An airplane slashed through the sky, raining down fire on their heads. Charlie tossed her into a different truck than Mami, the bed filled with dozens of children. Then he climbed in beside her.
Agony ripped through Lilly when the truck rolled away, leaving her mother behind in the smoke. Digging in the dirt. Burying tins under rocks. Alone.
She flung her arm out again, trying to get away from Charlie and the other soldiers, but they laughed at her pain. Laughed when she wet her pants.
A crash, and Lilly sat up in the darkness, her heart racing as she scanned the bedroom that she’d shared with Albert Kiehl for almost fifty years, before he’d gone out on a wintry night two years back to fill the sheep’s trough.
A patch of ice. A hip injury. And his body failed him.
How she missed that man who used to wake with her in the night, talk her through these nightmares. Remind her that dreams rarely made sense, like the brothers that she dreamed about as often as Charlie Ward taking her away.
Why had Charlie, the man who was supposed to love her, stolen her away from her mother? She wished she could have asked him, but her nightmares had started long after this man she’d called father was gone.
She’d been young, nine years old when she left Germany with him. She couldn’t remember much before this island. Almost as if she had to forget the past in order to embrace her new life here.
Forgetting was what she needed to push forward.
Forgetting, in a sense, kept her alive.
But she had begun to remember more about Hanna. About her mother kneeling in the forest to pray, near the abbey. By the stones.
Her mother had always been digging in those stones.
Her memories were so scattered, shifting with the passing of time. And the memory that she wished to erase, the one of her being taken away, was the one that preyed upon her sleep.
She had no brothers, not even through Charlie and her American mother. But Charlie told her often, when she was younger, that he loved her as his own. Still, what kind of loving person separates a mother and child? Surely Charlie could have found a way to bring both Hanna and Lilly back to the States. Mami could have done her digging on this island.
Lilly leaned back against the pillows, trying to coerce memories out of the caverns in her head. They were important, she thought. Important, even, to what Ember was trying to find now.
What had Hanna buried in the forest?
Frau Weber was the one who’d said Hanna had been a friend to the Jewish people, and she’d clung to those words. Hanna had worked for the Nazis, but she hadn’t been one of the bad ones.
A good Nazi.
That wasn’t right. A good German.
There were good and bad members of every people group. Her German father had been one of the bad ones, but not her mother. Mami had been good to Lilly, every year they spent together.
If only Ember could find out the good that her mother had done. Find if she had indeed been the hero that Frau Weber believed her to be.
She needed to call Dakota, tell him everything she knew. Tell him about her crazy dreams. Perhaps it would help them find out where Hanna had gone.
Her clock, she’d knocked to the floor, but it was still night, darkness blinding the view from her window. Sleep never returned after these dreams, so she put on her slippers, padded into the kitchen for tea.
The house had become eerily quiet after Albert’s death. She welcomed Kayla’s company during the day, but her housekeeper had a family of her own to care for at night.
The clock in the kitchen read 2:23. She flipped on the lights and turned on the electric kettle. A cup of black tea always helped chase these nightmares away.
On the dining room wall were pictures of the Ward and Kiehl families. One of Charlie and her when she was about twelve, carrying fishing poles down to the pond. As his only heir, Charlie had taught her everything about the farm and this island.
Albert had no experience in farming, but he’d caught on quickly and Titus had pitched in. Their son didn’t have any long-term interest in the farm, but she’d thought he would stay on the island, for the money if nothing else. Instead he’d moved to Idaho.
Hotheaded, that was the demeanor of their son. Way too proud of being white in this diverse country. And he’d gotten it from her; that’s what she feared. He’d grown up hearing her stories about Germany along with the ones that Albert liked to tell about his family before they’d immigrated to the United States. His parents left in the 1930s when the Nazis began vying for power.
She was proud of her German heritage, and she’d never trie
d to hide that. But she also didn’t want others, her own son especially, to believe that she thought Germans were somehow an elite race.
God help her, she hoped that she’d never given the impression to anyone that she thought she deserved to sit on some sort of throne. What many of the German people had done during the war was horrific. Still, to this day, she couldn’t watch movies, read books about World War II. She had enough of a war in her mind, battling the memories. And on nights like this, it felt like the memories had captured her in their scope.
The telephone rang, and she knew exactly who it was.
“Hello, Kayla.”
“Why is your light on?”
“I used to be able to get up in the middle of the night for a cup of tea, and nobody bothered me.”
The woman ignored her testiness. “Are you okay?”
“I—” A gunshot blasted through her mind. The rattling of plane engines. Crackle of fire. And with the crackle came the heat that flooded up her skin, her lungs heaving from the smoke. She collapsed onto a kitchen chair, the mug shattering on the floor.
She’d forgotten to fill it with water.
“Lilly?”
Her voice shook. “I don’t know what’s wrong.”
“I’ll be right over.”
She was being pulled away to a place she didn’t want to go.
Charlie had tried to be a good father to her, in the decades he had left on the earth, but when she’d asked about Hanna, he would only say she’d been lost like so many in the chaos after the war.
But Hanna hadn’t disappeared. Charlie had taken Lilly away from her, all the way across the Atlantic. And she still wanted to find her mother.
Her legs felt wet, and she remembered sitting in a hard chair, the longing for her family so deep. She’d called out for Mami and someone had whipped her for it.
A wolf.
Her head ached, her hands shook, trying to sort it all out.
It wasn’t a wolf. It was the matron.
But why was a matron chasing her through the forest?
None of it made sense.
She reached out again in the darkness, searching for her mother until she found arms to hold her.
“I’m right here,” Mami said. “The ambulance is on its way.”
But she didn’t need an ambulance. She only needed to go home.
46
EMBER
Cliffs had been carved into the stone walls above the hunting lodge, just like Mrs. Kiehl had described, and at the top of the hill, she and Dakota found a moss-covered wall from the abbey, leaning against the trees.
On the opposite side of the ruins was the labyrinth, barely noticeable with each stone pressed into the ground, the mossy tops circling like an aisle runner to the center. They never would have found this place without Mrs. Kiehl’s direction, but Ember could see it clearly now, hundreds of stones curling around themselves, the never-ending circle of time.
She knelt by one of the stones, brushing her hands over the moss, and saw a letter carved underneath. She clawed at the moss, scraping it away until the letter M appeared. “There are initials on these.”
“Remarkable.” Dakota knelt beside her and scraped off more moss until they saw the letter P. “They’re like the memorial stones in the Bible.”
She looked up. “From where in the Bible?”
“Joshua, I think.” He tapped his phone. “When God told the Israelites to collect twelve stones so they’d never forget what He did.”
He showed her his phone, the passage from Joshua.
“In the future your children will ask you, ‘What do these stones mean?’ Then you can tell them . . .”
That the Jordan River stopped flowing as the Ark of the Lord’s Covenant crossed, drying up like the Red Sea. Memorial stones so the world would forever remember that God’s hand is powerful. Holy. That evil cannot stand in His midst.
Ember studied the swirl of stones. The tangle of memories.
Which of these many stones had Hanna been digging under?
All they’d brought were two trowels, purchased from a merchant near the zoo. But even with these tools, it would take days to mine this dirt.
She sighed. “Where should we begin?”
It was early in Martha’s Vineyard, a little after five, but Dakota said Kayla might already be at the house, helping Gram prepare for the day. He’d ask her.
But his face flushed after Kayla answered the phone. Whatever she said seemed to frighten him.
“Where is she?” Dakota demanded, his cell phone fixed against his shoulder.
Fear captured his gaze, and she marveled at how this man had changed. She didn’t doubt it now. He cared more about Mrs. Kiehl at least than she’d ever imagined him being able to care about anyone.
“Is she okay?” Ember whispered.
He nodded, but the worry lingered in his eyes as he stepped away.
She began to pray for Mrs. Kiehl as she stepped between the stones, circling slowly like nuns would have done centuries ago. And she prayed for Elsie, if she was still alive, that she would know the true love of a father and it would wash away any hatred from her heart, capturing her soul.
Then Ember prayed for whoever was stalking her, that the authorities would find him or her before they hurt anyone. And that God would heal the animosity in the Kiehl family.
Her burden grew heavier as if she carried the weight of it all. Like each rock, about two hundred of them, had latched themselves to her ankles, the wide path narrowing as she drew closer to the middle.
She couldn’t carry it any longer.
As she neared the center of the labyrinth, her steps slowed. The path stopped at a stump, at this place of surrender, and she must stop as well.
Collapsing on her denimed knees, crushing the leaves, she laid it all right there at the foot of a cross she couldn’t see. A cross that could bear every pound of her burden. Shoulders that could balance the weight of her past, every ounce of her pain.
Love, overwhelming, swallowed her as she sank back into the leaves, the center stump steady beneath her hands.
Beloved.
Her soul stirred at the word. She was loved, deeply loved, not because of what she did or said or pretended to be. She was loved because God had chosen to love her when she was still in her mother’s womb. Not because of her blood. Because she was His daughter.
She couldn’t force people to stop hating. They had to choose it for themselves. God hadn’t sent His Son as a narrow-minded dictator who demanded they follow Him. He’d sent His Son as a gift. Because there was no other way. Out of His deep love, this outpouring free to everyone He’d created, God paved a pathway on the back of His Son.
No matter what she’d done, what anyone had done, it wasn’t beyond the width across Christ’s arms. The two nails that staked boundaries from the east to west, a giant crevice between them that dropped into the endless depth of His love.
He’d loved her in the darkness of that chasm. Even when she’d turned her back, run away, He was waiting there all along.
The hatred slipped off her own shoulders, falling into that chasm, lost forever. And she never wanted to see it again.
She dug her trowel into the soil, inches from where a cross might have stood, wondering if Hanna might have done her digging here too. A chain appeared in the dirt, and she reached for it carefully.
Had Hanna buried this?
It was a cylinder piece made of copper and iron, Roman numerals displayed on its face. A watch from an era long past, like the one invented by Peter Henlein in Nuremberg. Centuries before Hanna would have visited this place.
Ember stared at it for a moment, thinking about the abbey bells that were stored away in a museum cellar, preserving them for the next generation. But they were far from where they were meant to be. The earth had done a good job preserving this watch, she thought. She might never know its story, but the labyrinth, she decided, was its home.
She took a picture of the watch to show D
akota, then scooped dirt back over it before retracing her steps. With each stone she passed, she thanked God for one of His many gifts. For the brother who’d cared for her. For the niece and nephew she loved. For the man who waited for her in the trees. And for the woman on Martha’s Vineyard who’d reopened her heart to the truth.
How she wanted to give this gift of truth to Mrs. Kiehl.
The worries on this mountain must have been staggering at one time, but also the gratefulness. A grateful heart, she’d read, was better than medicine for healing one on the inside.
The path grew wider, the center far behind, and she felt lighter as she stepped out of the stone circle, breathing in the forest air, wiping her face dry from the tears. It was perhaps the greatest blessing of all, being able to lay down that hatred she’d carried for so long. Lay it down and leave it here.
Her soul sang in response, like a meadowlark in the trees.
Dakota hiked back toward the labyrinth, pocketing his phone.
“What happened to your grandmother?” Ember asked.
“She collapsed on the kitchen floor during the night.”
Her heart sank.
“She’s awake now, and my mom is with her at the hospital. The doctor believes it’s a form of PTSD. Delayed onset. Apparently a memory is trying to elbow its way out, and her body isn’t able to take the load of it. She keeps calling out for her mother, as if Hanna might still be alive.”
Ember shook her head. “I’ve triggered something terrible, haven’t I?”
“She’s been having nightmares for several years,” Dakota said.
“If only we could find out what happened to Hanna . . .”
“Kayla said Gram’s been talking about the stones again. About her mother digging here. Mom is worried, and she said that my dad is angry again.”
“Because your grandmother is in the hospital?”
“No, because he doesn’t want us to find anything that might validate the results of his genetic test. My mom, on the other hand, doesn’t want me to stop searching.”
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