it open all the way, and every thought of Nina and her Moscow lover and the end of his hopes on a shadowy Florida beach disappeared.
Their worktable lay bare, papers and maps and pencils lying in a jumble across the floor as though someone had swept everything off in one violent heave. A woman’s dusty footprint showed clearly on the back of a map, pointing out the door. On the empty table lay a torn sheet of paper and two photographs.
“Der’mo,” Nina swore, and they were all rushing inside.
The photograph of a young Lorelei Vogt, yanked out of Ian’s file with such force the corner had torn. Another photograph of a woman with a dish towel, standing beside a sink, looking back over one shoulder, eyes strangely alight.
Nina’s breath caught in her throat, Ian heard it. He looked at her, mouth suddenly dry. “Is it—”
His wife stretched a fingertip toward the new photograph, eyes suddenly incandescent. “Is her.” There was no doubt in her voice.
Ian picked up the sheet of paper beside the photographs. Jordan McBride’s handwriting, Ian had seen it on shop paperwork. She had scribbled five words in pencil, nearly engraving the letters through the paper.
Lorelei Vogt is Anna McBride.
Part III
Chapter 49
Jordan
September 1950
Boston
Can you drive faster?”
The cabbie sounded aggrieved. “Slow traffic, miss.”
Jordan’s heart was racing, her feet pressing against the cab’s floor as though she could bodily push the car along. But horror sat cold and heavy in her stomach like a stone ball.
She’d wept in that Scollay Square apartment, choked sobs tearing out of her throat as she sat surrounded by the paper-trail bloodshed and horror of Anneliese’s past. But only for a moment. There was no time to weep, no time to scream, no time to stay here and confront Tony when he returned. No time to fall on him and scream why, why had he been taking her to ballet studios and kissing her in the darkroom when upstairs a soft-spoken murderer sat humming at a sewing machine. Jordan had swallowed her sobs, swept the table clean with one violent motion, slapped down the photograph she hadn’t dared leave in her darkroom anymore, wrote a note, and run for the stairs. The team didn’t know who Anneliese was, that was plain from the file, and Jordan wasn’t going to wait to tell them, as much as she wanted to. She burned to stay and demand answers, and goddammit, she was going to come back here and get them, but she had no idea when Tony and his friends would be back—and Ruth was at home right now with the murderess who had nested in their family like a poisonous spider. It didn’t matter that Ruth had passed years in Anneliese’s company unharmed; Jordan could not delay one minute before getting her sister out of the clutches of a woman who had murdered six children in cold blood.
Her breath left her in a harsh, guttural scrape. The cabbie glanced over his shoulder, but Jordan turned her face to the window. A beautiful summer morning was passing by outside, so many people out for a stroll—couples arm in arm, girls blowing along in giggling groups, men in checked shirts arguing about the Red Sox; none dreaming that there were monsters hiding in this American paradise they were so proud of. Jordan looked at the sunny street but saw instead the exquisite man-made lake in western Poland, conjured up so clearly in Ian Graham’s flat, factual journalist’s notes. Anneliese standing beside it, not much older than Jordan was now. The huddled Jewish children . . .
Jordan had read through the file of her stepmother’s other crimes. Ian’s murdered younger brother, a prisoner of war. The nameless Poles hunted for sport through the trees as a party game. But it was the children Jordan came back to. The children like Ruth.
Why didn’t she kill you? Jordan wondered in numb horror. She killed your mother. Why not you?
The team’s notes on Anneliese/Lorelei’s time in Altaussee had been jotted colloquially in Tony’s hand, as though he were musing aloud. Our girl was living with Frau Eichmann after the war. No money, nowhere to go, lover dead. Frau Eichmann doesn’t like her, tells her to leave autumn ’45. Scared to apply for a visa in case name is flagged, terrified to be found/arrested. How does she get from Altaussee to America???
I think I could tell you how, Jordan thought, remembering Anneliese’s two very different stories about her time in Altaussee. After Thanksgiving,