by Ilsa J. Bick
“So it’s possible that Catherine Bleverton rented the house, right?” I’d only picked at my sandwich, and now I pushed the plate away. I couldn’t really tell everybody why I’d reacted the way I had; not even Dr. Rainier knew about the time trip to the garden room. Thank God there’d been the painting in Mr. Witek’s room. That, along with Katarina at Sunset (which Sarah knew about so I didn’t look completely nutzoid), was enough to explain my reaction.
I said, “I mean, she lived in Milwaukee before. Eisenmann lived here, and he wouldn’t move to Milwaukee if his foundry was in town. So they’d probably want to build a house or something, but she couldn’t live with him. They didn’t, you know, do things like that back then.” Actually, I didn’t know what people did in 1945, but I seemed to be in good company because everyone sort of looked at one another and nodded like they thought it was a good-enough explanation.
Then Dr. Rainier said what we all thought: “Makes you wonder if she was living here when that baby was walled up.”
Sarah said, “Or if Catherine Bleverton was the mother. If she was, then the father . . . could it be Mr. Eisenmann’s kid?”
Uncle Hank screwed up his face. “I don’t see it. They were gonna get married. They could’ve gotten married earlier, if it came down to it, then go away somewhere, come back when the baby’s been born, and people might talk, but so what?”
“Unless Eisenmann couldn’t leave,” I said. “He had a business to run. The war was just over, and there’d be a lot of rebuilding to do, tons of opportunities. I don’t see how he could run his business by remote control. It’s not like they had computers.”
“Well, we’re not talking the Dark Ages here. They did have telephones and telegrams, and people would direct their affairs from overseas all the time,” Dr. Rainier said, with a smile. “But here’s the other problem. We know that Catherine Bleverton died in 1946, and we know that they weren’t married yet, and Mr. Eisenmann was on the boat with her. Maybe it’s a question of digging deeper into the newspapers of the time, but I would think that a pregnancy would’ve been hard to hide. The illegitimate baby of an heiress would’ve made all the headlines.”
“You said the engagement was announced in the spring of 1945. Given that the child’s only a month old, Miss Bleverton would’ve been pregnant throughout the latter part of ’45, early 1946. You could check the social columns, see if she dropped out of sight, but that’s not the sense I get.” Dr. Nichols took a big bite of her second sandwich, chewed, swallowed, and said: “I think this baby belonged to somebody else.”
I could feel my theories doing a real flameout. “You’ll do DNA on it, won’t you?”
She nodded, chewed some more, followed that with a swig of water, and said, “We’ll see what we can extract. The body appears to be in good condition, however, so that shouldn’t be much of a problem. Our difficulty comes in knowing where to go next. If there are relatives of Miss Bleverton’s still living— and assuming we can locate them—we will ask for samples. That’s no guarantee we’ll get them, however. There’s been a crime committed here, certainly, but there’s no hard evidence linking Miss Bleverton to this house. I know . . .” She held up a hand when I opened my mouth in protest. “I know. You say there’s this painting of Miss Bleverton with this room as a backdrop. But consider this: This house is beautiful. I’m sure this room was known, and painters, as well as their subjects, look for exotic locations all the time. She might have suggested this as a backdrop for her portrait. That’s very different from actually living in the house. In addition, we have no idea if Mordecai Witek didn’t just paint this from memory. He might have seen the room, sketched it, and then filled it in when doing the portrait in a studio.”
I knew this wasn’t right, but I couldn’t contradict her either. “So you can’t force them.”
Dr. Nichols shook her head. “Nor am I about to suggest to Mr. Eisenmann that he give us a swab either. There is, in fact, more to implicate the Zieglers, the original owners, and then renters than either Eisenmann or Bleverton. I’m sorry. I wish it were easier than it is, but . . .” She shrugged.
“She’s right. I can’t see how Eisenmann can be forced to provide DNA, with no evidence,” said Uncle Hank. “Unless there’s something else to date that baby, all we know is it was put there sometime after 1941. Coulda been anyone.”
I nodded like I understood and agreed, but I was already thinking about what I’d experienced and thought: Yeah, but what if it wasn’t just anyone?
And what if Charles Eisenmann’s not the father?
We stayed until Dr. Nichols and her team had extracted the chunk of hearth with the mummified baby. That ended up being nearly half the hearth, something Dr. Nichols wanted to do for both comparison purposes—looking at the composition of the types of mortar and brick—and safety’s sake: “And you never know if maybe we won’t find something else embedded in the cement.”
When they were done, Dr. Rainier looked at the ruined masonry and said wryly, “Well, I never much cared for brick anyway.”
The message light was blinking when Uncle Hank and I got home. Uncle Hank punched up the recording:
Hello, I’m calling in reference to an e-mail sent by Mr. Christian Cage to the Wisconsin Jewish Museum in Milwaukee. Mr. Cage, my name is David Saltzman, and your message was forwarded to me by the archivist at the museum. I thought to call you because I wasn’t sure when you’d look at your e-mail next. I am Albert Saltzman’s grandson, and I would be very happy to speak with you about what I know about Beth Tikva and the events surrounding the murder of Mr. Brotz and Mr. Witek’s subsequent disappearance. It’s about noon here; if you can call back before four thirty, we can talk. Otherwise, this will have to wait until Saturday night around eight or Sunday morning.
He rattled off his number, which I jotted down on a slip of paper. When I hung up, Uncle Hank said, “It’s four fifteen now. You can just catch him, I’ll bet.”
I dialed, heard the phone ring at the other end, and then a woman picked up: “Hello?”
I identified myself and then asked, “May I speak to Mr. Saltzman?”
“Of course. One moment.” She must have covered the phone because all I heard then were muffled voices and then the sound of someone putting down the phone, approaching footsteps, and then the man’s voice that had been on our answering machine: “This is Rabbi Saltzman.”
Rabbi? I hadn’t been expecting this. “Uh . . . Rabbi, this is . . . ah . . . Christian Cage? From Winter?” I heard my voice rising in a question at the end of each sentence—our English teacher hates that—and muscled back my nerves. “You called me back about Mr. Witek.”
“Ah, Christian, yes, thank you. I’m sorry that there won’t be much time for us to talk today. It will be Shabbos soon—our sabbath—and I can’t speak on the phone until Saturday night.”
“Okay.”
“Anyway, I want to caution you that I know some of what happened from back then but not a lot. There are many things people want to forget, and I believe Winter is one of them. In fact, the community dispersed after Beth Tikva burned and the congregation decided to relocate. Then, too, there’s been a lot of attrition over the years. More and more young people are choosing to settle somewhere other than Wisconsin, and most of the people from that time are dead.”
“Except David—Mr. Witek.”
“Yes, I was astonished to hear that. He’s one person the community had lost all contact with. You said he has Alzheimer’s? Where is he living?”
I told him and then added, “He’s not doing very well.”
There was a pause. “By not very well, you mean . . . what, exactly?”
I pulled in a breath. “He’s dying. The doctor here said he probably has only a week or two at this point.”
Rabbi Saltzman was quiet a few moments. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry to hear that.” Another pause. “Look, I have to go. May I call you on Sunday?”
After we hung up, Uncle Hank said, “This keeps getting mo
re and more interesting. You know, I finally located the old files on the murder, and there’s barely anything there. Interviews with Witek’s family, of course....”
My ears pricked. “Interviews? What did the son say?”
“Nothing.”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “You mean, he said he didn’t see anything?” That would be a lie, only I couldn’t very well explain how I knew that. Not yet, anyway. I didn’t have a clue why David would lie.
“No,” Uncle Hank said. “He said nothing. Literally. My grandfather—your great-grandfather Jasper—saw the child, and that boy was totally mute. They sent him down to Madison finally, and the psychiatrist who saw him had spent time in England with the orphans there from the war. His report’s in the record. He said the boy was suffering from some kind of extreme mental trauma, like you saw in kids who’d lived through the Blitz or having their towns bombed.”
“Post-traumatic stress?”
“We’d call it that, yeah. They say shell-shocked in the record. Anyway, they never did figure out why. The boy stayed in the hospital for months, and when he finally quit being mute, the doctors said he had no memory for the night of the murder. The last thing the boy remembered was going to school two days before. Traumatic amnesia is what they said. Only here’s the thing that stuck in my grandfather’s mind.” Uncle Hank gave me a significant look. “Trauma over what?”
Well, I knew the answer to that one.
Now if I could just figure out how to make sense of what David had seen before it was too late.
XXVI
That night I had no dreams. Saturday morning, I jerked awake early: no headache, no mutterings in my head, nothing from out of this world trying to send weird Christian Cage any kind of messages. The door, minus a knob, remained on my wall, but for once I had no creepy-crawly feelings or the sense that anything waited behind other than primer and drywall.
Why? That was the question. Was it because I was giving up on finding my mother? Searching my feelings, I decided this wasn’t quite true. I loved my mother . . . no, that’s not quite accurate. I mean, how can you love a three-year-old’s memory of a mother?
As I lay there trying to imagine what Dr. Rainier might say, I realized one change in me. For once, I was interested in the world. There were things happening out here that were fascinating and new and very, very different.
I mean, well, for one thing, I kind of had a friend. Maybe Sarah had always been there—looking back on it now, I think that’s probably true—but I either had never allowed myself to think of her that way or been so caught up in seeing through my mom’s eyes that I was blind to what was right in front of me.
For another thing, Winter’s forgotten past had a hold on me. I wanted to find out more. I mean, if you discovered that German PWs and maybe some Nazis had lived in your town and might be mixed up in a murder, wouldn’t you be a little, well, obsessed too?
Most of all, I allowed myself to think that maybe all of this was happening along the lines of some hidden design. You want to say higher power, go ahead; I don’t mind. I’m not sure where I come down on the subject of God and all that, but we were all connected in some way: me, Sarah, Uncle Hank and Dr. Rainier, and David Witek. I had always been different and had abilities I shied away from to protect the few people who cared about me—just Uncle Hank now. The guilt I lived with about Aunt Jean . . . I didn’t know how it would help Uncle Hank to know what had really happened.
Perhaps David was the catalyst. Or maybe my life had been a journey to this point in time, a road I’d been traveling without understanding the destination.
Or it could just be a bunch of crap.
As freaked out as I was about what was happening, I wanted more. I wanted to find out what had happened in that barn. David was either trying to tell me or his brain had gotten just messed up enough that he’d somehow glommed on to me or our brains had meshed their wavelengths . . . something.
But here was the undeniable fact: David Witek was going to die. His brain was crapping out.... So I should be surprised that I’m not getting as many messages in the night? What if his brain had up and quit? So what I had could be all I was going to get from David?
That completely sucked.
For once, I won when it came to Uncle Hank. He wanted to drive me out to Dekker’s or have Justin do it, but I flat-out told him that wasn’t going to happen. I wouldn’t bike out; the chop shop was way out of town, and the roads weren’t that great, and yeah, yeah, I didn’t want to get into any “accidents.”
“I’m seventeen.” We were at the table, and I splashed more coffee into my mug. “You can’t protect me forever. I appreciate it, but I should drive myself out. You know where I’m going to be. Nothing’s going to happen to me while I’m there.”
Uncle Hank’s face darkened. “Accidents happen in shops all the time. Pneumatic lifts fail, cars take a tumble....”
“I won’t be in the shop. They’re not gonna want me painting the motorcycle in there.” I didn’t strictly know that, never having painted a motorcycle in my life. “It’s important I do this on my own. Soon I’ll be gone, either at college or . . . well, you know, at college. I’ll have to manage on my own, and that means fighting my own fights, and there isn’t going to be a fight anyway. Did your dad take you everywhere just because he was worried you’d be a target?”
“I was different.”
“You mean, not everyone thought you were weird.”
Uncle Hank held my gaze a long moment. “Damn it, you know what I’m saying. Don’t twist this around to be my fault.”
I was sorry, but I held my ground. “I’m not blaming you. I am who I am. I’ve got to live in my own skin. You can’t live my life for me. When Aunt Jean was alive, you always said that the most important thing in life was growing into being the best man I could be.” It was a cheap shot, and I knew it as soon as I saw the pain cross his face, but I pressed on: “Well, I’m trying and this is one step, and you got to let me take it, no one looking over my shoulder to make sure I don’t scrape my knees if I fall.”
The muscles in Uncle Hank’s jaw jumped, and I thought he’d say no, but then something seemed to bleed out of him like the air whooshing out of a balloon. His shoulders sagged, and he sighed. “Oh Christian, believe me, when you fall, it’s going to hurt a lot more than that.”
But he let me go to Dekker’s alone.
The morning was crisp and cold, with a glaze of frost icing the stubble in the fields and stretches of fog hanging in clouds over dips in the road. Dekker’s dad’s place was west of town about fifteen miles out on a county road with no name and dominated by fields and farms. On the way out, I spied wild turkey. A lone Cooper’s hawk lifted from a speed limit sign as I shot past. No crows.
The shop was at the end of an old strip mall of about four stores, all of them out of business. Across the road was a combination gas station-country store that sold bait and fishing licenses. Next to that was a crummy little bar that did a pretty good business during the fishing and hunting seasons and served only the locals who live out this way the rest of the year. Actually, I heard that the bar did really well because it was one of those places you could do things you might not want other people to see. Fifteen miles is a long way from Winter.
There was a rusting pickup perched on blocks in the front of the shop and about ten other junkers scattered on dead weeds off to one side. A pile of tires was humped alongside, and I saw similar piles of just about any kind of car junk you could think of: rearviews, hubcaps. There was even a pile of door handles.
Dekker’s father wandered out of the shop as I crunched in and parked the truck. He wore a grimy long-sleeved shirt and stained coveralls that had probably been blue but were now a splotchy steel gray. A soiled red kerchief was loosely knotted around his neck, and as I pushed out of the truck, he jerked off the kerchief and began wiping engine grease from his fingers.
“What, no escort?” He smiled through a wild growth of red beard going sm
udgy gray at the corners of his lips and revealed a mouthful of stained teeth going black at the gum line. “Sheriff let his little neffyou outta his sight?”
“Hello, Mr. Dekker.” I didn’t know what to do with my hands, and he didn’t seem to be in the mood to shake, so I stuffed them into the front pockets of my jeans. My breath fogged in the cold morning air, but that wasn’t why I shivered. Behind Mr. Dekker, I could see two other men in coveralls talking across the engine block of an old Chevrolet wagon, its hood yawning open. Then one said something to the other, and they turned to stare out at us too. I said to Mr. Dekker, “Uh, I’m here to take care of Karl’s motorcycle. Is he, uh, is he here?”
“Nope. Still waiting on him to get done with his shift at the foundry. He’ll be along soon.”
“Okay. Well, I can get started.”
“Yeah.” Mr. Dekker didn’t move, though. Just wiped his fingers and then threaded the kerchief back around his neck and knotted it in place. His hands were large as shovels. Then he jerked his head toward the shop. “Around back.”
I followed him down a gravel path overgrown with weeds. At the back of the shop was a kind of shed that reminded me of a hiker’s shelter: enclosed on three sides, open on one, with a slanting roof. Dekker’s bike was there, and I was startled to see that the body had already been painted a bright glossy black. To the right of the bike, three boards had been set up between two sawhorses. On top of the boards was an array of small cans of acrylic paint, a set of aluminum four-ounce cups, and a spray gun that looked a little like the kind you used on a hose to water your garden. A face mask, like the kind you use for spraying pesticides, sat alongside a carton of latex gloves. On the ground was a boxy black metal air compressor and a hose snaking to the spray gun.