door, that side of things was clearly going very well too. Last week Jordan had knocked on their bedroom door in the afternoon and come in to see Anneliese straightening the bedclothes as her husband fastened his cuffs—Jordan had seen the private smile that passed between them. Maybe she was just an eighteen-year-old high school graduate who had never gone further than taking off her blouse in her boyfriend’s car, but it was perfectly clear that elegant Anneliese with her impeccable housekeeping and starched handkerchiefs had a less impeccable, less starched side, one that Jordan’s father was very happy with after so many years of sleeping alone. And everyone had multiple sides, really, so should she really worry like this about the various sides of Anneliese?
Jordan frowned, fighting the dread that she really was just making up wild stories again—that same part of her that had to fantasize about war-zone men and whistling bullets rather than honeymoon suites and bias-cut ivory satin.
“There you are.” Anneliese looked up from her sewing machine as Jordan came into the upstairs sunroom, now a sewing room. “What do you think?” Shaking out a half-stitched lilac cotton dress for Ruth.
“More ruffles. Ruth always wants more ruffles.” Anneliese had made Jordan’s graduation dress in this room: green silk molded tight to the waist, a wide neckline, elbow sleeves; the most stunning dress in the graduating class. Jordan’s father had mopped his eyes, and Anneliese had given her an armload of cream roses to carry. Jordan felt that squirm of guilt again and flopped down at the sewing table with a sigh.
“Restless?” Anneliese smiled. “It’s a hard time in a girl’s life, out of school but not moved to the next stage yet.”
“Are you going to tell me to stop moping around and get engaged?” Because Jordan’s father was thinking it, she could tell.
“No, because the last thing a girl your age needs is to be—what’s the word? Bossed.” Anneliese pronounced it with precision; her quest to conquer American slang was unceasing. “My mother lectured me day and night when I was your age, and it just made me stubborn and resentful.”
“You’re so nice to me,” Jordan couldn’t help saying. Strategy, or because you really are as good as you seem?
Anneliese bit off a thread, eyes sparkling. “I have no wish to be a wicked stepmother.”
I keep watching you, Jordan thought desperately, and you don’t give me anything to see. Nothing but reasons to like you.
Until the afternoon months later, on Selkie Lake.
Chapter 11
Ian
April 1950
Vienna
That bitch,” Tony fumed, kicking the legs of their bench on the railway station. “That goddamn Nazi bitch. I know she knew something.”
“Agreed,” Ian said, scanning his newspaper. “I’d be willing to wager she knew quite a lot.”
The morning expedition to 8 Fischerndorf had not gone well. No combination of plausible half-lies, Tony’s charm, or money had pried anything useful from Vera Eichmann née Liebl. She didn’t know any woman with dark hair and a scar on the neck. No such woman had stayed with her after the war. If the neighbors said so, she couldn’t be responsible for what they thought. They were only too eager to make up evil things about a widow struggling to make ends meet. Yes, she considered herself a widow. She had not laid eyes on her husband in five years. She wished to be left alone. The door had then banged in their faces.
Ian hadn’t expected it to go much better, so he remained sanguine, reading while his partner raged. At last Tony stopped pacing and dropped onto the bench. “What I’d have given to drag that woman into her own cellar and beat the truth out of her.”
“You wouldn’t do that, and you know it.”
“Wouldn’t I?” Tony raised an eyebrow. “I don’t have a lot of chivalric feeling for a woman like that. It’s not like trying to understand the compromises little people like the Ziegler sisters might have made to get through the war—Adolf Eichmann’s wife was at the top level. She had to know something about how her husband was shipping Jews east by the million. Believe me, I could bounce her off a wall or two and still sleep well at night if it got us the information we needed.”
“What if it didn’t? Would you start to break bones? Threaten her children? Where does it stop?” Ian folded his newspaper, feeling the spring breeze ruffle his hair. “That’s why we don’t operate that way.”
They’d had this same conversation the first week they