answering a girl’s questions if she didn’t have her father along. Jordan spent some minutes chatting across the desk—Is your niece really six already, Miss Fenton? Isn’t she precious!—then trotted out a careful story about forgetting to note a deposit in the checkbook at home; had there been any large deposits made lately . . . Not in checking or savings accounts? What a relief. “I know Dad’s gone, but I just wince thinking of him looking down at me and thinking I’ve been careless,” Jordan said ruefully.
“God rest his soul, they broke the mold when they made Dan McBride.”
“They certainly did . . . My stepmother’s account, does that show any new deposits? Maybe that’s the one I was thinking of.” Jordan held her breath. Because Anneliese didn’t have an account of her own. Jordan’s father had given her housekeeping money whenever she liked, but the accounts had always been his alone.
“That account has been cashed out, dear.”
“Oh,” Jordan managed to say. “When?”
Miss Fenton squinted. “About a month ago.”
Right before Anneliese had left for New York and Concord. “How much?” Jordan asked, holding her casual tone. It wasn’t the kind of question a clerk should answer, not when her name wasn’t on the account, but Miss Fenton never hesitated. She gave the number right away, and it was a number that made Jordan swallow. No fortune, perhaps, but a nest egg indeed.
“Mrs. McBride said it was an extra insurance policy of your father’s,” Miss Fenton twittered, oblivious. “Such a lovely woman, your stepmother! I’ve always wished I knew her better.”
Mrs. Dunne had said the same thing once, when Jordan was dropping off Ruth to play. I’m happy to help your stepmother! She should come to my sewing circle, all my friends would love to know her better . . . Anneliese had been part of this neighborhood for years, yet how many people knew her well?
I do, Jordan couldn’t help thinking. The woman who had kept agonized vigil at Dan McBride’s hospital bed and had confessed her rusalka nightmare over nighttime cocoa. The woman who had put untold hours into sewing Jordan new skirts and sundresses and could laugh herself sick watching Taro run after a ball. The woman who had offered Jordan a cigarette and independence, affection and freedom. I know her, Jordan thought helplessly. I know her and I love her.
And yet. The fear on Kolb’s face. This money, which perfectly well could be an additional insurance policy—except that Jordan didn’t believe it.
And she wasn’t really surprised later, after she said her good-byes to Miss Fenton and went home, checked the house to be sure Anneliese really was out doing the shopping, and put a call through to the country inn in Concord where her father had taken Anneliese for their honeymoon. The inn where Anneliese had stayed, in conjunction with her New York buying trip. “No Mrs. McBride has stayed here this past month, miss.” Jordan described her carefully—dark hair, blue eyes, in her early thirties, very chic and pretty. “No one like that, miss.”
It took longer, digging into her father’s tooled-leather address book, to find telephone numbers for his colleagues in New York. Other shop owners, antiques dealers, bookbinders; men who had come to Dan McBride’s funeral, with whom he dickered and talked shop at auctions like the ones Anneliese had just attended. Except that none of his colleagues, at least the ones Jordan could get on the telephone, remembered seeing her there. “I’d have noticed her,” the co-owner of Chadwick & Black said, sounding mellow from what Jordan suspected was a two-martini lunch. “Your stepmother’s quite a looker. Your father was a lucky man, God rest his soul.”
“God rest his soul,” Jordan echoed, replacing the receiver. So, Anneliese had not been in Concord or New York.
What did you do, Anneliese? Where did you go? What are you planning? Jordan shook her head in reflexive refusal, but she couldn’t help it: the resurrection of every suspicion she’d ever harbored about Anneliese from the day she’d turned around from the kitchen sink with a soapy plate in her hand, asking Jordan’s father You hunt? as the Leica’s shutter snapped. Mysteries about names, dates, swastikas among roses.
Now, now, Jordan could almost hear her dad chiding. No more of your wild stories, missy! But he was dead, and there was nothing wild or imaginary about the fact that Anneliese had been lying about her recent travels, that there was something fishy between her and Kolb, and that she