this was Anneliese, who had encouraged her to dream beyond Garrett Byrne and his pear-shaped diamond; who had admitted her own fears and listened to Jordan’s; who adored the family dog and made the best cocoa in Boston.
So much for dogs knowing good people from bad, Jordan thought. Or stepdaughters knowing a wicked stepmother in the flesh.
Except some part of her had suspected, right from the first. If only I’d convinced Dad—
But she shoved that thought away hard too.
“Oh, Anna.” Jordan squeezed that soft hand. “I don’t know what I’d do without you. I’ll miss you when I leave for New York.”
“We’ll always be here, Ruth and Taro and me. New York isn’t so far away.”
A prison cell is a lot farther, Jordan thought. Whoever Ian and Tony and Nina really were, they were clearly looking to build some kind of case against Anneliese. And with a sudden surge of implacability, Jordan brushed aside the fact that Tony had lied to her. If he’d done it to put Anneliese in a cell, she was going to help.
“Ruth,” Anneliese was calling up the stairs, “hurry out of the bathtub, your sister is taking you for ice cream.”
I love you, Anneliese, Jordan thought, looking at that serene profile. But I’m still taking you down.
Chapter 50
Ian
September 1950
Boston
Let’s admit we’re idiots.” Tony broke the silence. “She was under our noses the entire time. I saw her with my own eyes, I talked with her—”
“She looks almost nothing like that picture we have,” Ian said tersely. “It was too old to be useful. Only someone who knew that face very well would—goddammit, can’t you make this car go faster?”
Tony had the Ford’s gas pedal mashed to the floor, but the lunchtime traffic poured like slow honey. “I looked at her neck the day we met. There was no scar!” His hands were clenched around the wheel.
“She covers it,” Nina guessed from the backseat. “Is makeup, maybe. Blyadt, how far is McBride house—”
Not far, but who knew how long ago Jordan had left Scollay Square? She went for her sister, Ian thought. That’s what I would do, if I learned my stepmother was a murderess.
“I should have known when we spoke,” Tony muttered. “That she wasn’t a native speaker, the rhythms—”
“You said she had no accent, even dropped her R’s like a Bostonian.”
“Still should have brought me in to check,” Nina snapped. “I would have known her, more than you only seeing the old picture—”
Ian cut them both off. “We all could have done better, yes. But we had no reason to think Lorelei Vogt had stopped in Boston rather than passing through as all the others did; we had no reason to think Jordan’s stepmother had connections to Europe—not with a name like Anna McBride, listed as born in Boston, no accent to give her away. There seemed nothing suspicious about her to investigate, and we had Kolb in front of us, looking suspicious as a rotting fish.”
“And she kept her distance from the shop,” Tony said. “Jordan said her father took pride that his wife didn’t have to work, and I didn’t think anything of it. But she kept her distance so if anyone took a second look for shady business, what they’d see was Kolb. And we did, damn us all—”
“Stop this. Stop it now.” Ian pushed steel through his voice, slicing through the discussion. “We finally know who she is and where she is. Let’s focus on that and assign blame later.”
“Holy hell, I hope Jordan grabbed Ruthie and got out of that house,” Tony muttered. “If she’d just waited—”
“Why should she?” Nina said. “Has no reason to trust us, or know what we do.”
“We should have brought her in. Told her.”
“We saw no reason to. We’ve never brought in outsiders before. Once and for all, stop the what ifs and should haves.” The last thing this team needed was to careen into recrimination. But Ian’s hands were clenched so tight around his panama that the brim had crumpled like paper, and the same tense fear was vibrating through the car between all of them, unspoken.
If Jordan or her sister came to harm because of this, the team was finished.
In a squeal of tires, Tony brought the car around the corner onto the street with the McBride house. “If Lorelei Vogt is there,” Ian said, “we confront and apprehend on the spot.”
“On whose authority? We have no warrant!”
Ian thought he could bluff around that. He was damned well going to try. This