flying. Anneliese responded, spoon clinking against the side of a mixing bowl, but Jordan’s blood urged her to hurry.
Anneliese’s dresses, her skirts and blouses on their hangers, her hatboxes. Jordan pinched hems for lumps, lifted each hat and sifted the tissue paper before putting it back at exactly the same angle, felt along the wardrobe’s back. Anneliese’s traveling cases; nothing in any of the pockets. The case knocked against the back of the wardrobe, making a soft thud, and Jordan was out of the bedroom and down the hall in a blink, listening with thudding heart for the sound of her stepmother’s footsteps. You really are scared. She remembered Anneliese by Selkie Lake, face cool and considering.
Anneliese’s voice down the corridor: “That’s Linzer torte, Garrett. If you like it so much, I’ll teach Jordan to make it. Ruth, cut him a nice big slice.” She sounded so calm and motherly.
Yes, Jordan thought, I’m scared.
The wardrobe yielded nothing. She felt her way around the bedside tables, the bases of the lamps, aware that time was ticking. There was only so long Garrett could eat cake and make small talk. Nothing in the lamps, the drawers of the bedside tables, between the pages of Anneliese’s Bible.
The cover of the Bible, though . . .
Jordan nearly dropped it, fingers suddenly shaky. A quick crane of her neck toward the door; still the hum of voices from the kitchen. As delicately as she could, she peeled up the soft leather of the cover, where her fingers felt a straight edge of something slipped between decorative leather and the stiffer stock beneath. The leather peeled easily; it was used to being lifted.
A photograph, small and worn. Jordan brought it nearly to her nose. Definitely Anneliese, some years younger and considerably more carefree, trim figured and tousle haired in a bathing suit. Ankle deep in lapping water, the ripples of a pond or a lake stretching behind her, a man at her side. Considerably older than she, broad shouldered and smiling, also in a bathing suit, one arm raised as if to wave to someone in the distance. Anneliese’s handwriting on the back, but all she had written was März, 1942.
A vacation picture, Jordan thought flatly. All this trouble and suspicion to find a picture of Anneliese and what was probably her first husband, on a lakeside vacation. Well done, J. Bryde. You’ll be getting a Pulitzer for this for sure.
She began to slide the photograph back into its hiding place, disappointment bitter on her tongue, and paused. Took another good hard stare. The date. März, 1942.
März. March.
And something else, besides the date. Some sort of mark under the man’s upraised arm . . . A memory scratched at the edge of Jordan’s mind, and she peered closer. Definitely a mark. A tattoo? Hard to be certain.
Jordan laid the photograph on the bed where the light was strongest and took several careful shots with the Leica. A photograph of a photograph; the detail wouldn’t be as good as she wanted, but she couldn’t take the original. If Anneliese had hidden it in her bedside Bible, then she reached for it often, even if only to feel the picture’s edge through the leather. So Jordan slid the photo back into place, pressed the leather back down, replaced the Bible, and ran a hasty search over the rest of the room. No sign of the Iron Cross; either it was gone or hidden elsewhere, but Jordan didn’t dare stay longer. She slipped out of the bedroom, easing the door shut, and dashed into the bathroom, turning the lock and sinking back against the bathtub.
“Jordan?” Anneliese’s voice down the hall.
“Just a moment!” Hastily she turned the taps on, dashing cold water on her cheeks, which she could see in the mirror were flaming. Not with shame, with triumph.
The voice came nearer. “I was going to ask Garrett to stay for supper.”
“Of course,” Jordan called back, patting the water off her face. In the mirror she let herself have one smile, hearing her stepmother’s heels click away. A date, a mark on a man’s arm, and a medal. Three things, but all caught on camera—and cameras didn’t lie.
Chapter 14
Ian
April 1950
Salzburg
Gretchen Vogt. Respectable, widowed, lived all her life in Salzburg.” Tony summed up his discreet survey of the mail, the city records, and the neighbors at the Lindenplatz. “One daughter recorded, Lorelei Vogt, of the right age to be our girl.”
“Any photographs?” Ian asked as the three of them cut through