She’d seen his face, close enough to reach out and touch the beads of sweat.
Anneliese picked up her gloves. “Let’s go home, shall we?”
SOMETHING WAS TUGGING at Jordan, like a pin stuck into the back of her mind. Something she couldn’t quite get a grip on. Something Kolb said, something her dad had said . . . ? She barely ate any of Anneliese’s excellent meatloaf that night, too perplexed by that niggle of a thought that refused to come out.
“You should go out,” Anneliese told her. “Have your young man take you somewhere!”
The words echoed, all in Anneliese’s voice.
You should go out.
He’ll go when we can afford it.
The date your new life begins . . . go and start leading it!
Go.
But that was ridiculous. Anneliese wasn’t trying to get rid of her, for God’s sake.
Something else still niggled, even as Jordan looked into her stepmother’s candid blue eyes. Making the excuse of film to develop, she took herself down to the darkroom, where she could smell the faint hint of Tony’s aftershave. She wished he were here. He had a way of being able to find the question that somehow hooked the right answer from the mind’s murk.
Slowly, Jordan flipped through her photo-essay. The airfield mechanic, the dancer. What am I looking for? The baker, the pilot. What? All the way back to the first: Dan McBride, his hands framing the card salver. Just the sliver of his eye, wise and amused.
It dropped into her head with a long, protracted click, like a heavy door creaking open ever so slowly, letting in the light a ray at a time.
Anything ever strike you about Kolb, missy?
Like what?
I don’t know. He always looks furtive anytime I come in to check on the restoration work. And with his English so patchy, I can’t ask him anything but the simplest questions. Of course Anna translates anything tricky.
Jordan’s father, the day he’d given her the pearl earrings for her coming wedding. The wedding that never happened.
Does he bring people into the shop? Not customers, I mean bringing people into the back.
Not that I’ve noticed, Jordan remembered answering. Why?
I came up here one day and Kolb had another German fellow in the back room . . . Kolb went off in a babble.
He has experts in sometimes. Jordan remembered saying that too. Anna gave him permission.
That’s what she said.
Jordan stood there, looking at the photograph of her father. She hadn’t given that conversation a second thought, the day they had it. She’d been distracted by her upcoming wedding, rushing at her like a train. Her dad hadn’t sounded worried, no note of alarm in his voice.
But if he was worried, would he have let you know it? The question answered itself, coolly. No, he’d have told himself you shouldn’t worry your head about it.
And was it suspicious, really? Anneliese translating for Kolb, letting him bring in people to help in restoring badly worn books or chipped end tables?
Kolb today, angry. Making you good money, good work. So much money. That bitch—
“He has made money for us,” Jordan said aloud. “Perfectly legally.” Business had blossomed with Kolb to take over restoration work. Anneliese had been the one who suggested sponsoring him, her voice affectionate as she described his old shop in Salzburg, where he’d given her peppermints just as he now gave them to Ruth.
So why did he look so frightened when Anneliese told him to dry out and keep calm?
He had a bad war, Anneliese would say. A bad war could make a man flinching and fearful of anyone. Perfectly plausible.
Except that Jordan didn’t quite believe it.
LOOKING AT THE CHECKBOOK the following day steadied Jordan’s nerves. She’d always kept the family accounts; she knew to the dime what was in the bank. The neatly ruled lines showed no money that shouldn’t have been there. A healthy balance, certainly, showing the kind of steady increase that any prospering business could be proud of. Nothing suspicious. But somehow the spike of relief wore off, and without quite examining her own thoughts, Jordan found herself reaching for her hat and pocketbook, and taking herself to the bank where her father had done business all his life.
“Jordan McBride!” the clerk exclaimed. A grandmotherly sort with ice-cream puffs of hair; Jordan had carefully waited until her line was free. Far better to try this with Miss Fenton, who had watched Jordan come in with her father since she was knee-high, than one of the new clerks who got stuffy about