“Yes, but when you meet the right girl, you know it. Isn’t that right, Gunter?”
Annaliese’s father nodded numbly.
“I don’t have to tell you we live in uncertain times, but I will keep your daughter safe and she will always have a strong roof over her head. You have my word.”
“Well, I . . . Annaliese, what do you say to your proposal of marriage?” Gunter said, turning to his daughter with eyes as wide as hers.
Gratitude filled her soul. She could tell he was as bewildered as she was. She opened her mouth to respond that she was grateful but stunned and not ready to answer. But she waited too long for those words to form on her tongue.
Rolf filled the momentary silence. “She’s my little angel.” He squeezed her hand and then turned to face her. His sapphire eyes glittered with calm resolve. “She came from heaven to be mine. We both know that, don’t we, liebchen?” He turned his head to face her parents again. “It’s important for a ministry official such as myself to have someone like Annaliese at my side. I am a man of influence. As is my father.”
The connotation was lost on no one.
To deny Rolf Kurtz was to tangle with the Nazi Party.
Annaliese and her parents had seen what happened to those the Nazi Party deemed problematic to its intentions. Labor camps all across Germany and Poland were full of prisoners who didn’t line up with the Nazi ideal. There were rumors of mass executions at those camps.
“When are you leaving for Frankfurt?” Louisa said, her voice calm but strained.
“In five days. I would like us to marry on Sunday.”
Annaliese felt as though she were suddenly underwater and unable to breathe. The room began to sway, and she closed her eyes to let the water envelop her so that she could merely float away and never wake up.
She felt Rolf squeeze her hand again. Harder this time. He was trying to keep her from sinking.
“That’s . . . that’s in two days!” Louisa replied, and it was hard to tell if she was appalled at the notion of planning a wedding in forty-eight hours or that Annaliese would be the wife of a Nazi official and on her way to Frankfurt in that amount of time.
Rolf raised Annaliese’s hand to his lips and kissed it. “I’ve arranged for everything, Frau Lange. You have nothing to worry about.”
Annaliese opened her eyes and her gaze met Rolf’s. His stare was controlled, victorious, content.
Rolf knew she didn’t love him.
He didn’t care.
It only mattered to him that she feared and respected him, and surely the return look in her eyes confirmed that she did.
When he left the house, Annaliese at last found her voice. “I don’t love him!” she cried to her parents. “I can’t marry him. Please don’t make me!”
“He’s a man of means, Annaliese,” her father said, looking her in the eye. “You will be well cared for.”
“But I don’t love him.”
“Love is for fairy tales, Annaliese,” her mother snapped, unnerved by the evening’s events. Her voice lacked confidence. She stacked the dinner plates and they clattered against each other.
“I don’t believe that. And you don’t believe that either.”
“But you like him. That is enough. You will learn to love him.” Her mother rose with the dishes in her hands. Her father, who never helped in the kitchen, grabbed the wineglasses to follow her into the kitchen.
“I want the person I marry to be in love with me. Rolf doesn’t love me,” Annaliese said, chasing after them.
“He’s fond of you. He said it himself.” Louisa set the dishes in the sink. Her hands were trembling.
“But why would he want to marry me if he’s only fond of me?” she persisted.
“Annaliese.” Her father said her name with an odd tugging that seemed to come from the back of his throat, as though he could barely push the air past his vocal cords.
“What, Papa?”
Gunter Lange placed the goblets on the kitchen counter. The glass clinked on the tile. “The man is a Nazi official. We are at war. What would you have us do?”
His voice broke on the last sentence. He would not look at her.
“You’ll like Frankfurt,” her mother said as she scraped a dish with unusual vehemence.
Her parents said nothing else. They didn’t look at each other, nor did they look at her. Louisa continued to scrub the dish past its need for it, and Gunter, eyes closed, leaned against the kitchen counter as if to keep it from crumbling into ruin.
• • •
ANNALIESE MARRIED ROLF KURTZ AT A CHAPEL IN BONN AT NOON on Sunday. She wore a pale pink linen suit, pearls, and a tangy-sweet perfume—all items that Rolf had somehow procured. The labels on all three were in French. She had no idea how he had gotten them. His parents in Berlin did not attend. Indeed, only a handful of his friends from the ministry came. Annaliese told a few of her friends in the ballet company that she was marrying the enigmatic young officer she’d been dating, and a couple of them attended, along with her director and a few of her parents’ friends. A dinner reception was held at a restaurant that had been provided with enough sugar and butter to make a stunning cake, although it was so deathly sweet Annaliese could not eat it.
They left Bonn at three in the afternoon and drove to Lahnstein, a quaint town on the Rhine halfway to Frankfurt that the aerial attackers hadn’t troubled.
Her mother had attempted to prepare Annaliese for her wedding night, but her advice was minimal.
“It hurts for the first week or so, and then it doesn’t,” was Louisa’s sage advice to a daughter who knew only the basics of what a husband and wife did in their bedroom.
Annaliese had imagined that she would don the peignoir set that frothed with lace and satin ribbons—which her mother had given her out of her own closet—and then she and Rolf would slip under the covers with the lights off and somehow he would find his way past all that material. She was surprised, when they arrived at a hotel with a peaceful view of the river, that her body was yearning for Rolf in an almost visceral way. Perhaps if they made love, they’d find love, she thought. She for him, and vice versa. She knew she would not be Rolf’s first lover—he had hinted as much—but he’d told her plenty of times that she would be his first “angel,” and for some reason, he was thrilled about Annaliese being a virgin.
When they got to their room, however, her yearning quickly morphed into apprehension.
Rolf had no sooner closed the door and set the latch when he took her into his arms and began to kiss her, plunging his tongue into her mouth. He used one hand to hold her trembling body steady and the other to explore her through her clothes. She couldn’t breathe, and she felt like she might vomit into his mouth. She broke away, gasping for breath.
Annaliese wanted to tell him to go slow, give her time, allow her to put on the negligee. Couldn’t they just sit for a moment and let the sun set first? But the words would not come. Instead she could only say his name in desperation. He seemed to greatly enjoy the tenor of her shaking voice.
“My little liebchen is nervous,” he said coyly, his hand inside her shirt.
“Yes,” she admitted.
He laughed and stepped away. Relief flooded her and she opened her mouth to say thank you. But before she could, he told her to take off her clothes while he watched.
“What?” she whispered.
He took another step back so he could see her fully. “You heard me.” He laughed.
Annaliese swallowed hard as she fought back tears. “Rolf. If I could just . . . In my suitcase I have—”
“Take off your clothes.”
“I want to put on the peignoir my mother gave me. It’s very pretty, and—”
“But that’s not what I want.” The smile on his face disappeared.
“Please, Rolf.” Two tears slid down he
r cheeks.
“Do it.” The playful tone was gone. “You will obey, Annaliese. You are my wife now. This is how it works. Take off your clothes. And stop crying.”
She closed her eyes so that she could pretend she was merely getting ready to go on stage and dance, and that instead of taking her clothes off, she was putting on a tutu of softest tulle.
When her clothes lay in a heap at her feet, Rolf commanded her to open her eyes. She would realize later that he wanted her to know that he was in control. He had always been in control. He then inspected her naked body as though she were a new car he had just bought and was immensely proud of, turning her this way and that, and touching places on her body that had never been touched by anyone.
Something was being awakened in her even as something was dying.
Then he pushed her onto the bed.
What had been awakened was snuffed out in seconds, never to return.
And what was dying continued to swirl down into the darkest depths of human misery as Rolf did whatever he wanted.
Eighteen
RMS QUEEN MARY
PRESENT DAY
The air around Brette felt stiff and cool, even though the day’s heat had those milling about in the ship’s former sick bay fanning themselves with deck maps. The unseen force that bid her look at the placard listing those who’d died aboard the Queen Mary had loosened its hold on her, but she could sense that the ghost still hovered just at her shoulder, making sure that she took careful note of the name.
Annaliese Kurtz.
“I can’t help you. Honestly. I can’t.” Brette spoke the words just above a whisper, and still a couple of tourists just a few yards away stared at her before moving off.
She pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and put it up to her ear, feigning a conversation with a person on the other end.
“Did you hear what I said, Annaliese? I’m not the person who can change anything for you, okay? So I’d like to go now.”
She started to move away, but the ghost blocked her, like a mighty wind, from taking another step forward.
Brette whirled around and whispered harshly into her phone. “Look. You’re not playing fair. I told you I can’t help you. I can’t. I am really sorry if something terrible happened to you. Life is hard sometimes. We don’t always get treated fairly. If I were you, I’d just head on out of here. Nobody can change the past. Not even you.”
The air around her stilled.
“Did you hear what I said?”
Nothing. Not a sound. Not a breath of movement.
“I’m leaving now.”
Brette took a cautionary step forward and encountered no resistance. But the tingling of the hairs on the back of her neck told her the Drifter was still with her. She walked out of the sick bay and up the stairs to the deck outside, the presence of the ghost all around her. Whoever it was wasn’t finished with her, and yet remained invisible.
“Great,” she mumbled as she shoved her phone back in her pocket. Brette climbed another set of stairs back up to the promenade deck and began to walk the length of the port side, hoping the Drifter would tire of her and leave. She closed the distance to the ship’s bridge, all the while sensing that other opalescent Drifters spirited themselves away at her approach, almost as if they’d been told to leave her alone; she’d already been claimed by the Drifter that had found her when she first stepped aboard.
Brette returned the phone to her ear. “I just want to know if there’s someone here who is new. That’s all. Her name is Laura.”
The Drifter that followed made no sound.
“Fine,” Brette mumbled, and climbed the steps that led to the bridge, the place where Trevor’s daughter had said she’d felt her mother’s arms around her. The ship’s instruments, little towers of shining brass and gleaming wood, stood on the other side of a thick rope held aloft by stanchions. Tourists were taking photos with the instruments behind them as a backdrop. A shimmer of gauzy light lingered at the starboard-side door. It was another Drifter, a young woman in a flowing gown, with long hair that looked amber in the late-morning light. Definitely not Laura. Annaliese perhaps? It started to move away and Brette closed the distance between them.
“Don’t go,” Brette whispered.
The vaporous spirit hung back and Brette waited until the tourists had left by the portside door.
“Please,” Brette said. “Are you Annaliese?”
The Drifter shook her head slowly.
“Is there . . . one like you here named Laura? She misses her daughter. Do you know her?”
Again the Drifter shook its head. Its face was expressionless.
Brette didn’t even know if the ghost understood what she was asking.
“What is your name? Can you tell me?” Brette hoped to make some kind of personal connection that would coax the Drifter into trusting her.
The ghost cocked its head to one side, almost as if it were considering the benefit of answering.
“I’m not here to cause trouble for you. I just want to know if there’s someone like you named Laura. Someone who misses her daughter, Emily.”
The ghost began to drift upward, clearly indifferent to Brette’s questions.
“Wait!”
The apparition looked down on her, its appearance languid. Brette could feel the first Drifter pressing in all around her, wanting to reclaim her attention.
“What is it you all want here? What does Annaliese want?” Brette asked.
The Drifter in front of her blinked dreamily.
“Why are you all here? Please tell me.”
In a split second the Drifter was at eye level, its face inches from her own. The ghost had had blue eyes when she was alive. She lets us come.
The whispered words floated across the air between them, and then the apparition was gone, like a snuffed candle flame.
But Brette wasn’t alone on the bridge. The Drifter she surmised to be Annaliese enveloped her, desperate for her attention.
“I said I was never going to do this,” Brette muttered, more to herself than to the ghost. The Drifter seemed to caress her then, as if it could sense Brette’s unease. The touch felt like a gentle half embrace, meant to soothe and reassure.
“I’m not the one you want,” Brette said to the invisible presence.
You are, it seemed to say in response.
A gentle tugging pulled her down a flight of stairs and out onto the sun deck. She could feel the Drifter pressing from behind, directing her back to the promenade deck, back toward the rear of the ship and the sick ward where the placard hung with the names of the dead.
“Okay! I’ll do it!” Brette said sharply. A ship’s employee walking past eyed her curiously.
“Everything all right, miss?” he said. He looked to be in his late twenties, with close-cropped hair and wearing ear gauges the size of dimes. The name tag on his uniform read Shane.
“Yes. No!” Brette exclaimed. “I mean, yes, I’m all right. But I have a question.”
“Sure. How can I help you?”
“I . . . uh. So how could I find out more about one of the names listed on the tally of people who died aboard this ship?”
“More about what?”
“You know. That placard in the old isolation ward that lists all the names and dates of the people who died while aboard this ship.”
“Oh. That list.” The young man pointed back toward the middle of the promenade. “I’d start in the gift shop, I guess. There are several books in there about the ship’s history.”
Brette thanked him and then turned to walk back the way she’d come, thankful the Drifter seemed to approve. She headed down the deck and into the ship’s gift shop, making a beeline for the bookshelves. She thumbed through several books before finding the name “Annaliese Kurtz” in the index of a book detailing the history o
f the Queen Mary’s three lives: first as ocean liner, then as troop carrier, and finally as floating hotel. She flipped to the page the index referenced and found the chapter on the many voyages the Queen undertook to bring twenty thousand war brides and their children to their new homes in America.
The crossings were made beginning in February 1946 and ended in September, and each voyage lasted approximately five to six days. A complement of army nurses and Red Cross workers accompanied the brides, along with a full crew, and while the weather wasn’t always amenable, every voyage was made without major incident save for one.
Brette continued to read:
Annaliese Kurtz, a German citizen pretending to be an American war bride, committed suicide by jumping overboard the night before the ship was to dock in New York. Mrs. Kurtz had stolen a passport and travel documents belonging to Belgian war bride Katrine Sawyer, a friend of Mrs. Kurtz’s who had died in a tragic accident a few days prior to the sailing. Kurtz, who was the wife of a German Nazi official and who favored Mrs. Sawyer in appearance, had boarded the ship claiming to be Katrine Sawyer and was planning to disappear once the ship docked in America, according to her roommates, Phoebe Rogers and Simone Robinson. It is believed Mrs. Kurtz heard that the ship’s commodore had received a telegraph message alerting him to the presence of the German woman posing as an American war bride, and that law enforcement would board the Queen when it docked to take Mrs. Kurtz into custody. Mrs. Rogers said she and Mrs. Robinson had learned of Mrs. Kurtz’s true identity only minutes prior to Mrs. Kurtz’s suicide. “She’d been forced to marry a Nazi who beat her,” Mrs. Rogers told reporters clamoring for news of the stowaway’s death. “She told us she’d rather die than go back to him.” Her roommates, who saw her jump, were unable to reach her in time to pull her back over the railing.
There was nothing else in any of the books in the gift shop about Annaliese Kurtz.
Brette bought the book with its minimal information and returned to the promenade deck, wondering what the Drifter wanted her to do.
She strolled away from other people, exiting the promenade deck and stepping out on the sun-drenched stern.
A Bridge Across the Ocean Page 13