Something else still niggled, even as Jordan looked into her stepmother’s candid blue eyes. Making the excuse of film to develop, she took herself down to the darkroom, where she could smell the faint hint of Tony’s aftershave. She wished he were here. He had a way of being able to find the question that somehow hooked the right answer from the mind’s murk.

Slowly, Jordan flipped through her photo-essay. The airfield mechanic, the dancer. What am I looking for? The baker, the pilot. What? All the way back to the first: Dan McBride, his hands framing the card salver. Just the sliver of his eye, wise and amused.

It dropped into her head with a long, protracted click, like a heavy door creaking open ever so slowly, letting in the light a ray at a time.

Anything ever strike you about Kolb, missy?

Like what?

I don’t know. He always looks furtive anytime I come in to check on the restoration work. And with his English so patchy, I can’t ask him anything but the simplest questions. Of course Anna translates anything tricky.

Jordan’s father, the day he’d given her the pearl earrings for her coming wedding. The wedding that never happened.

Does he bring people into the shop? Not customers, I mean bringing people into the back.

Not that I’ve noticed, Jordan remembered answering. Why?

I came up here one day and Kolb had another German fellow in the back room . . . Kolb went off in a babble.

He has experts in sometimes. Jordan remembered saying that too. Anna gave him permission.

That’s what she said.

Jordan stood there, looking at the photograph of her father. She hadn’t given that conversation a second thought, the day they had it. She’d been distracted by her upcoming wedding, rushing at her like a train. Her dad hadn’t sounded worried, no note of alarm in his voice.

But if he was worried, would he have let you know it? The question answered itself, coolly. No, he’d have told himself you shouldn’t worry your head about it.

And was it suspicious, really? Anneliese translating for Kolb, letting him bring in people to help in restoring badly worn books or chipped end tables?

Kolb today, angry. Making you good money, good work. So much money. That bitch—

“He has made money for us,” Jordan said aloud. “Perfectly legally.” Business had blossomed with Kolb to take over restoration work. Anneliese had been the one who suggested sponsoring him, her voice affectionate as she described his old shop in Salzburg, where he’d given her peppermints just as he now gave them to Ruth.

So why did he look so frightened when Anneliese told him to dry out and keep calm?

He had a bad war, Anneliese would say. A bad war could make a man flinching and fearful of anyone. Perfectly plausible.

Except that Jordan didn’t quite believe it.

LOOKING AT THE CHECKBOOK the following day steadied Jordan’s nerves. She’d always kept the family accounts; she knew to the dime what was in the bank. The neatly ruled lines showed no money that shouldn’t have been there. A healthy balance, certainly, showing the kind of steady increase that any prospering business could be proud of. Nothing suspicious. But somehow the spike of relief wore off, and without quite examining her own thoughts, Jordan found herself reaching for her hat and pocketbook, and taking herself to the bank where her father had done business all his life.

“Jordan McBride!” the clerk exclaimed. A grandmotherly sort with ice-cream puffs of hair; Jordan had carefully waited until her line was free. Far better to try this with Miss Fenton, who had watched Jordan come in with her father since she was knee-high, than one of the new clerks who got stuffy about answering a girl’s questions if she didn’t have her father along. Jordan spent some minutes chatting across the desk—Is your niece really six already, Miss Fenton? Isn’t she precious!—then trotted out a careful story about forgetting to note a deposit in the checkbook at home; had there been any large deposits made lately . . . Not in checking or savings accounts? What a relief. “I know Dad’s gone, but I just wince thinking of him looking down at me and thinking I’ve been careless,” Jordan said ruefully.

“God rest his soul, they broke the mold when they made Dan McBride.”

“They certainly did . . . My stepmother’s account, does that show any new deposits? Maybe that’s the one I was thinking of.” Jordan held her breath. Because Anneliese didn’t have an account of her own. Jordan’s father had given her housekeeping money whenever she liked, but the accounts had always been his alone.

“That account has been cashed out, dear.”

“Oh,” Jordan managed to say. “When?”

Miss Fenton squinted. “About a month ago.”

Right before Anneliese had left for New York and Concord. “How much?” Jordan asked, holding her casual tone. It wasn’t the kind of question a clerk should answer, not when her name wasn’t on the account, but Miss Fenton never hesitated. She gave the number right away, and it was a number that made Jordan swallow. No fortune, perhaps, but a nest egg indeed.

“Mrs. McBride said it was an extra insurance policy of your father’s,” Miss Fenton twittered, oblivious. “Such a lovely woman, your stepmother! I’ve always wished I knew her better.”

Mrs. Dunne had said the same thing once, when Jordan was dropping off Ruth to play. I’m happy to help your stepmother! She should come to my sewing circle, all my friends would love to know her better . . . Anneliese had been part of this neighborhood for years, yet how many people knew her well?

I do, Jordan couldn’t help thinking. The woman who had kept agonized vigil at Dan McBride’s hospital bed and had confessed her rusalka nightmare over nighttime cocoa. The woman who had put untold hours into sewing Jordan new skirts and sundresses and could laugh herself sick watching Taro run after a ball. The woman who had offered Jordan a cigarette and independence, affection and freedom. I know her, Jordan thought helplessly. I know her and I love her.

And yet. The fear on Kolb’s face. This money, which perfectly well could be an additional insurance policy—except that Jordan didn’t believe it.

And she wasn’t really surprised later, after she said her good-byes to Miss Fenton and went home, checked the house to be sure Anneliese really was out doing the shopping, and put a call through to the country inn in Concord where her father had taken Anneliese for their honeymoon. The inn where Anneliese had stayed, in conjunction with her New York buying trip. “No Mrs. McBride has stayed here this past month, miss.” Jordan described her carefully—dark hair, blue eyes, in her early thirties, very chic and pretty. “No one like that, miss.”

It took longer, digging into her father’s tooled-leather address book, to find telephone numbers for his colleagues in New York. Other shop owners, antiques dealers, bookbinders; men who had come to Dan McBride’s funeral, with whom he dickered and talked shop at auctions like the ones Anneliese had just attended. Except that none of his colleagues, at least the ones Jordan could get on the telephone, remembered seeing her there. “I’d have noticed her,” the co-owner of Chadwick & Black said, sounding mellow from what Jordan suspected was a two-martini lunch. “Your stepmother’s quite a looker. Your father was a lucky man, God rest his soul.”

“God rest his soul,” Jordan echoed, replacing the receiver. So, Anneliese had not been in Concord or New York.

What did you do, Anneliese? Where did you go? What are you planning? Jordan shook her head in reflexive refusal, but she couldn’t help it: the resurrection of every suspicion she’d ever harbored about Anneliese from the day she’d turned around from the kitchen sink with a soapy plate in her hand, asking Jordan’s father You hunt? as the Leica’s shutter snapped. Mysteries about names, dates, swastikas among roses.

Now, now, Jordan could almost hear her dad chiding. No more of your wild stories, missy! But he was dead, and there was nothing wild or imaginary about the fact that Anneliese had been lying about her recent travels, that there was something fishy between her and Kolb, and that she had a great deal of unexplained cash.

Swastikas. Jordan forced herself to think about them again. And all the rest.

What did you do, Anneliese?

Who are you, Anneliese?

Who?

Chapter 46

Ian

September 1950

Florida coast

Kolb was sent home from work drunk yesterday, according to Jordan,” Tony said over a crackling line. “I think he might be about to crack.”