like congealed ash compressing her throat. Met those blue eyes square and didn’t blink. Anneliese didn’t either, but Jordan thought she saw surprise there—as if her stepmother had expected fluster, not calm.
“If you think this is the time to bring it up,” Jordan said, “then by all means, let’s talk about this.” She laid down the silverware, aware her hands were sweating. “Ruth, will you take the dog into your room and play? Thanks, cricket.” She was not getting into this within Ruth’s earshot. Jordan waited until she heard the click of the bedroom door and then turned back to her stepmother.
“I don’t know if Anneliese Weber is your real name,” Jordan said without preamble. “I don’t know if you were really born in Austria, or if you came to this country legally or were running from something. What I do know is that you’re a liar. You’re a Nazi. And you’re not Ruth’s mother.”
The accusation hung in the suddenly electrified silence, crackling. Jordan felt as though she’d pushed all the air out of her lungs along with the words. She looked at Anneliese, standing there so decorative and pretty. She’d imagined her stepmother flinching or recoiling—maybe bursting into laughter or tears.
But not a muscle moved in Anneliese’s face. Her blue eyes didn’t widen even a fraction of an inch. “Goodness,” she said at last. “Where has all this come from?”
Jordan’s father was looking thunderous. “Jordan—”
“This isn’t a wild story I’ve made up.” She kept her voice calm, reasonable. This was no time to be shrill or defensive. “I have proof, Dad. Just look at it, that’s all I ask.” She’d been keeping the photographs tucked in the lining of her pocketbook, waiting for the right chance to show her father—she got them quickly, laid the first one down on the table before him. The photograph she’d snapped in the powder room after the wedding. “Anneliese’s wedding bouquet. She tied an Iron Cross into it as a wedding charm. An Iron Cross, and it’s not from the fourteen-eighteen war either. That’s a swastika. It’s a Third Reich medal.” Swinging her eyes back to Anneliese. “I didn’t find it in your room when I looked, so what did you do with it?”
Anneliese was silent. Dan McBride’s gaze flicked over the photograph despite himself. Jordan rushed on, the words flowing like a river. Lay it out. Make your case.
“That’s not all. Look at this.” The second photograph, the copy of the vacation picture in Anneliese’s Bible: the couple in bathing suits, standing by the lake waving to someone unseen. “Is that your husband, Anna?”
“Yes,” she answered, still calm.
“Kurt? Or Manfred? Because I’ve heard you use both names. Kurt Weber is listed on Ruth’s birth certificate as her father, so who’s Manfred?”
Blue eyes flickered, then. Triumph stabbed Jordan. She was getting somewhere. Yes.
“The Iron Cross is his, isn’t it?” she pressed. “Because he was a Nazi. And don’t give me that utter horseshit about—”
“Jordan!” Her father barked, an automatic reproof for swearing, but he was still staring at the photograph. She pressed on.
“—about how being a member of the Nazi Party didn’t make you one of the bad ones, Anna, because he wasn’t just a Nazi. He was SS, wasn’t he?” Jordan stabbed a finger down on the man in the photograph, his upraised arm. “He has a tattoo on the underside of his arm. You can just see it, there. Most SS officers had their blood types tattooed under the left arm.” Jordan turned back to her father. “Mr. Sonnenstein told us that, remember? He helped identify the provenance of those paintings that came out of Hamburg right after the war; he told us how the owner selling them had been SS, trying to pass as a French art dealer. How he’d been identified by his tattoo.” Looking back at Anneliese again. “Your husband was a decorated officer in the SS. And neither of you were Ruth’s parents, because the date on that photograph says März, 1942. March. Ruth was born in April ’42 according to her birth certificate, Anna, so why aren’t you eight months pregnant in that photograph?”
This time the silence wasn’t charged through with electricity. It blanketed the room like a weighted sheet. Jordan’s father was standing as if he’d been turned to granite, gaze switching between the photographs on the table. Anneliese stood hands folded, looking at Jordan, and something in that gaze made Jordan’s heart bang off her ribs in a sudden surge of fear. It was