by Alex Grecian
“Who are you?” She was in her late forties, dressed casually in a dark red drop-neck sweater and a khaki skirt. She wasn’t wearing shoes. Her long hair was pulled up on her head, and the skin around her eyes was puffy, as if she hadn’t slept well or had been recently crying. She was holding a cut-crystal bowl in her hand, and diffuse sunlight through the screen door was projected upon her through a thousand prisms, making her look blotchy or blurred, only partially there.
“My name is Dr. Travis Roan, of the Noah Roan Foundation in San Diego. I have my credentials with me if you would like to review them. And of course you may wish to call the Foundation to verify that they did indeed send me. Ruth Elder requested my presence.”
The woman shook her head, but reached out and unlocked the screen door. She swung it open toward Travis, and when he reached for the handle she took a step back, allowing them to walk past her into a tiny vestibule that contained a bench and a row of hooks. A staircase along the left wall led to a second floor.
Travis remained quiet while the woman wandered away into the living room, holding the bowl out in front of her. At last she set it down on an end table and turned around.
She attempted a smile. “I’m sorry. What did you say your name was?”
“Roan.”
“Rhone, like the river?”
“More like a horse, I suppose.”
“Oh, of course. I wasn’t thinking. I forgot. I saw your name on the website, didn’t I?”
“Yes, I am sure you did. Please call me Travis. And this is Bear.” Bear ducked his head at her and raised one paw.
“He’s beautiful. Is he dangerous?”
“You have nothing to fear from Bear. He is exceedingly well-mannered.”
“We expected you a long time ago. That man . . . I can’t say whether he’s still there anymore.”
“Yes,” Travis said. “I apologize for my tardiness. Was it your mother who called the Foundation?”
“No. It was me. She asked me to call. She was afraid she would lose her nerve.”
“Yes, that sometimes happens.”
“I’m sorry. My name is Rachel Bloom. Bloom’s my married name. I’m her daughter.” She laughed, a short, soft sound that failed to convey amusement. “I suppose you already know that.”
“A lucky guess.”
She smiled. “Can I offer you something? I have a half pot of coffee left. I can heat it up. Or I think there’s tea, if you prefer.”
“What sort of tea?”
“Let me look.” Having a task to perform seemed to energize her. She hurried out of the room, her bare feet making no sound on the heavy carpeting. Travis looked around at the wallpaper and furnishings. They were as outdated as the carpet, left over from the late seventies. He followed Rachel to the kitchen and watched as she opened the cabinets above the counter, searching for the promised tea.
“May I ask you, Mrs. Bloom . . . has anyone else from the Foundation paid you a visit recently? An older man by the name of Ransom?”
“Ransom? That’s a strange name.”
“I take it you—”
“No offense, but you people were supposed to come back ages ago. You really left my mother hanging, and I know she was anxious.”
“Then you—”
“Here it is!” She turned and held out a box of Bedtime Story tea. It was caffeine-free, and on the front of the box was a printed claim that it was “made with real chamomile flowers.”
Travis smiled politely and nodded. “Yes, splendid.”
Rachel turned and busied herself with making tea, filling a mug with water and putting it in the microwave to warm. “I’m sorry. I interrupted you.”
“No, it is quite all right.”
“Would, um . . . I’m sorry, what’s your dog’s name again?”
“Bear.”
“Right. Would Bear like something? Water?”
“Thank you very much. I am sure he would appreciate that.”
She looked through the cupboards again until she found a bowl, which she took to the sink and filled. She set it down in front of Bear and he snorted, then lowered his head and lapped, sloshing water up over the rim and onto the floor. Rachel didn’t seem to mind.
“I used to have a dog,” she said.
“Oh? What breed?”
“She died.”
“I am so sorry.”
“It was a long time ago. Her name was Niki, like Nikita. It’s Russian, you know, after the Elton John song.”
Travis nodded as if he understood the reference.
The microwave dinged and Rachel took out the mug, unwrapped a tea bag and dropped it in the hot water, then handed it to Travis.
“You said we were supposed to come back here,” he said. “Does that mean you did receive a visit from the Foundation?”
“My mother did. I wasn’t here anymore. I used all my leave on that last visit. It’s why it’s taken me so long to get back out here.” Tears had begun to puddle on her lower lashes. “The man from the Foundation told her to write down everything she could remember and he would come back in a day or two, but he never did. If she told me his name, I don’t remember. I just know she waited and waited and she was getting so worried.”
He took a sip of tea. It tasted like swamp water. “You were with your mother when she saw the fugitive?”
“Yes, it was right here in town. What are the odds? I mean, really? He was as close as you are now. Mother went white as a sheet and grabbed my arm. I thought she was having a heart attack, but that man never even looked at us. Even when she reacted like that. Like, an ordinary person would have been concerned, but he didn’t seem to notice. Maybe he’s blind, I don’t know.”
“Will she be home soon? Your mother?”
“No. I’m sorry, Travis. I thought you knew. My mother died last week.”
JULY 1956
She arrived on the hottest day of the year, and on the same train that had brought Rudy. Her name was Magdalene, although she preferred to be called Magda. It was the first thing she said to him. She was of good stock, with sturdy legs and light brown hair that glowed gold in the afternoon sun. She was not pretty in any conventional way, but her posture was good and Rudy thought he detected something regal in the line of her jaw. She carried one small bag, and it apparently held all that she owned in the world because she did not ask him to wait for any luggage.
She was a cousin to Jacob, and although Jacob had never met her, he had assured Rudy that she carried no mixed blood and would be a good wife for him.
Rudy drove her home in his Volkswagen, which was only two years old, almost new, and chatted with her in German along the way. He told her about production at the ranch, how he and Jacob now had one hundred head of cattle—Rinder—and two hundred head of goats—Ziegen—and that they planned to expand when the purchase of some nearby farmland had been finalized.
“I talk English,” she said to him. “Not good now, but one little bit.”
Rudy smiled and switched to English, thinking that it might be good for her to listen to the way it should be spoken. It would help her adjust to her new home.
He was no longer living in Don Veitch’s old house. He had built a new home for Magda and had finished it only the week before her arrival, so it felt nearly as alien to him as he thought it must to her. He had provided the house with a large kitchen, including appliances that he did not know how to use. He doubted Magda knew, either, but he anticipated that they would have many good years together and she would have time to learn. There was a den for him on the first floor at the back of the house, big enough that he planned to hold meetings there in the future, and three bedrooms upstairs for when they had children. There was a small fireplace, and Rudy had framed the picture Magda had sent him of herself and placed it on the mantel, where she would see it when she entered the front room.
/> She did not smile when she saw the house. He opened the car door for her, and she stepped out and looked all around her at the wide brown space full of neatly combed furrows and squat silos full of grain and herd animals on the distant horizon.
Nearly hidden in the shadows of a line of sycamores to the east of the house was an outbuilding, a tin shed that he had filled with gardening equipment. In the floor of the shed was a trapdoor that led to a small room with a steel table and a drain in the floor. Manacles were bolted to the table, and a rolling cart held the various instruments that Rudy used in his work. There was electricity and water in the room, and its thick concrete walls were soundproof. Rudy hoped Magda would never be curious enough to lift the trapdoor. That room was not meant for her.
She turned and looked again at the house and spoke without looking at her new husband.
“I wish that I . . . I am not old for you,” she said.
“Too old, you mean,” Rudy said. He wanted to teach her the proper way.
“Yes. Am I?”
“How old are you?”
“Zweiunddreißig. I am . . . I mean, I am thirty-two years of age.”
“That is older than I thought you would be,” he said. “But it is not too old.”
She looked at him then, her eyes narrow, as if trying to ascertain his truthfulness. He stared back at her without smiling, his hands held straight down at his sides, not influencing her in any way. At last, she seemed satisfied that he was not lying, and she picked up her bag. He thought about lifting her and carrying her over the threshold, but was not sure he could manage it. Instead, he took her by the hand and led her into their new home.
CHAPTER THREE
1
It was almost ten o’clock by the time Skottie pulled up behind Travis Roan’s vehicle. She got out and walked around the Jeep, peered in through the tinted windows. There was no sign of the dog. The path to the front door was neatly edged, and there was evidence that the two trees in the yard had been trimmed back and cared for, but there was something about the house that felt abandoned. It sat quiet, watching the street like a pet waiting for its owner to return.
Skottie knocked on the screen door, and a moment later a woman opened the inner door and offered her a tentative smile.
“Yes?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m looking for someone. He’s—”
“Oh, you must be with Travis?”
“Um, yes.”
“Please come in.” The woman stepped aside, and Skottie pulled the screen door open and walked in.
Travis Roan was standing in front of a plush sofa, holding a steaming mug and groomed like a mannequin, neatly pressed, gelled, and poised. He seemed to favor the color gray, and Skottie wondered whether it was an eccentricity or a practicality. Dog hair would be nearly invisible on a gray suit. Travis nodded at her in greeting and held the mug out. “There is a fresh pot of tea in the kitchen,” he said. “I found some Earl Grey back behind the coffee.”
“Thanks,” Skottie said. “So there’s coffee?”
“Yes,” the woman said. “My name’s Rachel, by the way. Rachel Bloom.”
“Oh, sorry, I’m Officer Foster.” She fished out her badge and showed it to Rachel, who barely gave it a look. “But it’s my day off. Please call me Skottie.”
“Okay. Coffee then? Or we have some decaf tea. It’s got chamomile.”
Rachel had her back to Travis and didn’t see him shake his head, warning Skottie off the chamomile tea.
“Coffee would be great, thank you. Can I help?”
“Not at all.” Rachel disappeared into the kitchen. “I think it’s probably cold, but I’ll heat it up.” Her voice faded and was replaced with the sounds of cabinets opening and closing, microwave buttons beeping.
There was a glass-topped table in front of the sofa, piled with boxes and papers. Skottie guessed she had interrupted a historical search. Travis’s dog sat on the floor beside the sofa. He looked up at Skottie as she entered, then laid his head back down on his paws. Skottie stepped over to the table and looked at the open boxes. In addition to the papers spilling out of them, the boxes held a jumble of photographs and costume jewelry.
“This isn’t the woman you came here to see? The one who saw your Nazi?”
“No, this is her daughter,” Travis said. “The mother is dead. I will not be able to talk to her.”
“What happened to you this morning?”
“I promise to tell you later. But you really did not need to come. I feel I am monopolizing all your free time since I arrived.”
“It’s my time,” Skottie said. “And I think I ought to keep an eye on things here. Unofficially, of course.”
“We can talk later,” Travis said as Rachel entered the room carrying a white mug with a Mutts cartoon printed on one side.
Skottie thanked her and took the mug, walked around the end of the table, and sat on the sofa near the dog. She looked down at him and he opened one eye, thumped his tail, and went back to sleep.
“I’m surprised you didn’t leave your dog in the car,” Skottie said. “Or at the hotel.”
“I rarely leave Bear anywhere, if I can help it.”
“But doesn’t he intimidate people?” She smiled at Rachel.
“I think he’s adorable,” Rachel said. She sat on a straight-backed wooden chair across from them.
“He does intimidate some,” Travis said. “But in other cases, people seem to like him better than they like me.”
Skottie believed him. She took a sip of the coffee and swallowed. It was stale but hot, and it warmed her all the way down. She waved her hand at the table. “What’s all this?”
“Travis caught me in the middle of going through my mother’s things.”
“I’m sorry to hear about your loss.”
“It was kind of sudden, but she was over ninety years old.” Rachel shook her head. “I guess that’s not very sudden after all, is it? It’s sort of expected.”
“What was her name?”
“Ruth. Ruth Madeline Elder.”
“My daughter’s name is Madeline,” Skottie said.
Rachel’s eyes lit up. “It’s a pretty name. I’ve been boxing all this up, getting ready to put most of it in storage until I can go through it. We’ll probably have to auction it, but I need to put this house on the market as soon as I can. There’s just no time. I have to get back to . . . back to everything, I guess. They need me at work and . . .” Rachel broke off and looked around the room helplessly.
“I’m sorry,” Skottie said again. She was afraid Rachel Bloom might cry, so she changed the subject. “What are you looking for exactly?”
“We didn’t think anyone was coming back,” Rachel said. She looked at Travis and then quickly away. “After the first man came from the Foundation, nothing else happened, so we thought they’d forgotten about us. Mother wouldn’t let me call again, no matter what I said. She wouldn’t make the call herself. And I couldn’t really call on my own. I didn’t know what to say if someone asked me questions, you know? She told me about her past, I mean after we saw him. I never knew she was at a camp. She never told me before, never mentioned it at all.”
“She was a prisoner there?”
Rachel looked down at her empty hands. When she spoke, it was in a whisper and Skottie had to lean forward to hear her. “She was a guard. But she wasn’t a Nazi. She told me she was never a Nazi.” Rachel looked up and raised her voice. “She was a good woman, all her life, a good mother. She cared for my father through the cancer and never once complained. Everyone loved her. Everyone. She couldn’t have been a Nazi. Not in a million years.”
“It is all right,” Travis said. “I believe you. We both do.” He looked at Skottie, including her in the statement, then back at Rachel. “Not everyone in Germany was a Nazi.”
“No,” Rachel s
aid. She looked gratefully at Travis. “But you know, I never knew she lived in Germany. She didn’t have an accent or anything. Not like you.”
“My accent is not German,” Travis said.
“No, but I mean she sounded American.”
“She lived here a long time.”
“Yes.”
“So . . . this?” Skottie pointed at the table, trying to get the conversation back on track.
“After that first man came, before she died, Mother said that she wrote everything down. Or maybe not everything, but the important details. In case anyone ever did come back. She didn’t want to tell me if there wasn’t any use in it, but she didn’t want him to get away with it, either. She wanted there to be something, some record of what he did.” Rachel’s fingers twined together and writhed in her lap. “I don’t know. She can’t have thought there would be any justice. Not after so long.”
“There will be,” Travis said. “At least, I will try. Justice is still possible, no matter how long it has been.”
“How could she have been a guard at a camp, Travis, if she wasn’t a Nazi?”
“It is possible. Hopefully she has left her story behind for us to discover. Somewhere in this.” He glanced at Skottie and indicated the papers. “Will you help look?”
Skottie hesitated before setting her mug down and pulling one of the boxes toward her. It had been taped shut, and the words papers and bedroom were written in thick black marker on one of the flaps. She looked up again at Rachel. “Are there more boxes?”
“Some still in the bedroom,” Rachel said. “That’s where I was working this morning when Travis came to the door. She kept her old things in a closet. And there are other boxes around the house.”
“I have checked the kitchen,” Travis said. “When I was looking for tea.”
“So no more boxes in the kitchen, then,” Skottie said.