Out of Splinters and Ashes

by Colleen L. Donnelly

  “Excuse me.” Grandma stood, her purse and the wad clutched tighter as she slid past me toward the aisle.

  “Grandma?” I reached at her unsteady step as she nearly stumbled out of the row. “Grandma!” It was a whispered shout as I stood, then turned back to the snake behind us, imagining laying my purse solidly against the side of his head. “Now look what you’ve done.” Grandma was clearing the door as I hit the aisle, leaving Randall’s satisfied expression behind. Tall appeared at my side, beige corduroy, as I stopped. He stopped beside me. And I looked up.

  Chapter 75

  Two men led Grandpa back into the courtroom, one I’d never seen before. His attorney was not with them. I turned to Dietrich, sitting behind me, and stared at a face that knew something but told me nothing, the strength of his hand around my arm having brought me back to my seat. I ignored Randall, the smirk lounging beside Dietrich keeping the air ripe with the stench of old cigarette smoke. Randall’s legs and knees extended into the back of the seat where Grandma should be. I glanced at the courtroom door—still no Grandma.

  I scooted to the edge of my seat and swiveled toward the aisle. Something was wrong, and it was Randall’s fault…probably Dietrich’s too. I rose. A hand grasped my arm. Again.

  I glanced back to where hazel eyes and a corduroy jacket shook his head at me. “Stay here.” He jerked his head toward Randall, a grunt coming from him I took for agreement.

  “But…”

  Dietrich’s hand tightened, and I sat as McCoy was led out with two men, neither his attorney.

  I had no one to ask if this was military procedure, if this was how they presented the verdict, the whole progression of the case having seemed more like a novel than a procedure. Dietrich’s face burned in my mind as I watched, bringing up other questions—Where have you been? What have you been doing? When are you leaving? Even if he’d never really be gone…

  I listened to doors and focused on footsteps, anything that belonged to Grandma instead of the men behind me. The silence teemed with more questions than answers, so I stood. Enough was enough.

  “All rise.” Doors opened at each side of the courtroom, and I stayed where I was, Grandpa’s attorney entering from the left and McCoy’s from the right, Grandma trailing Grandpa’s from behind.

  I gasped. Grandpa surely did also as he turned Grandma’s way. He stared, tightened, then looked down at his hands clasped on the table. His attorney led her past Grandpa to the small swinging gate to where we were seated. He opened it and let her through. She glanced at me, a gaze so brittle I thought she’d crack, then took a seat at the front on the aisle, and set her purse at her feet.

  I sat. We all sat. The white was nearly gone from Grandma’s hands as she crossed them on her lap. I looked from them to the judge as he called the room to order. “New information has come forth,” the judge said. The hammer of his gavel exploded in the room. He laid it aside and reached over the front of his bench to Grandpa’s attorney, who handed him a crumpled wad, white and gray…Grandma. “We have been presented with the missing list.”

  My eyes were too wide as I stared at Grandma’s back and what little I could see of her face as the judge pried it open and flattened it. New information—Grandma’s final revenge. It was the story Randall had wanted and had baited her for. I locked my hands into one solid fist. I’d pummel the slimy smoker—and his companion who’d insisted I sit instead of running out to find her.

  Grandpa was called to the stand, sworn to an oath, his cane taken from him and set in front of where he sat. Pictures I’d never seen before, faces and names that meant nothing to me, smiled from an overhead above. This evidence couldn’t be in Grandpa’s favor with Dietrich, Randall, and Grandma behind it.

  The white from Grandma’s knuckles went to Grandpa’s face. He paled as his attorney asked him to verify himself in the picture at Hitler’s Olympics. I knotted my hands tighter. Grandpa in Berlin, at the Olympics, like Dietrich had said. He and the list, both? Grandpa muttered an answer to his hands beneath McCoy’s attorney’s rise to his feet, his objection the judge dismissed, and the drop back into his seat. Had this line of questioning already been discussed and the process decided? I stared at Grandma’s motionless back and leaned forward, farther away from Dietrich and the snake.

  Grandpa was told to answer clearly from now on. He tried. Pieces of his life dislodged as the ugly truth of his betrayals came out. We saw him with his medal, we saw him without. We saw him with the athletic team, and then we saw them without him, a man named Carlson in his place, a sick runner Grandpa had startlingly been allowed to run in place of—because of his Aryan resemblance, McCoy’s attorney stood and suggested. He was dismissed again. Randall made a noise behind me.

  “So you were in Berlin?” Grandpa’s attorney asked.

  “Yes,” Grandpa conceded. Confessed. I looked at Grandma again and thought of the mirror, of Amabile, of all the years her anger had infuriated us.

  “When?”

  “August first to sixteenth.”

  “You weren’t in Poland for that time period?”

  “No, I wasn’t.”

  “Were you ever in Poland?”

  “I was. August first, with the other five that went to Poland, but I was sent straight to Berlin until the sixteenth. Then I returned to Poland August seventeenth to nineteenth.”

  Another picture appeared where we all could see. Another gasp slipped from me, an even larger one from Dietrich behind me. Grandpa stared and Grandma’s shoulders dropped as a woman not dissimilar to me smiled down at us.

  “This is Erika Müller, taken before World War II began,” Grandpa’s attorney said. “You knew her as something else, didn’t you?” He looked at Grandpa.

  McCoy’s attorney was the only one not staring at the lovely face looking down on us. He was frowning at Lieutenant McCoy, who didn’t move beneath the woman’s gaze.

  “Amabile,” my grandfather whispered.

  As Grandpa’s attorney pried, what Grandpa knew and what he didn’t surfaced. He knew McCoy had shipped him to Berlin alone, telling him it was for prewar information gathering, top secret, and Grandpa was to pose as a runner because he was fast. Slipping him into the races became easy when Carlson developed food poisoning. Grandpa took his place, dressing in civilian clothing and doing whatever he was told. Except for falling in love…with Amabile, with the woman McCoy told him to woo while information was being passed through her. She was no one to Grandpa, just a job, until he met her. Then she was someone, and the mirror he’d been told to give her as a gift, carrying the list he wasn’t fully aware of inside, became precious. He added his touches to the mirror, small lilies he’d carved at Hindenburghaus, the housing unit where the Olympic athletes stayed.

  “And you won your race…” Grandpa’s attorney stated in a question. Grandpa nodded, more of a weak shrug. “And you won Erika Müller’s—I mean, Amabile’s—heart.”

  Grandpa drew in a deep breath and turned from Amabile’s face to Grandma’s, the pain on his surely a reflection of what I couldn’t see on hers, and of what I felt in Dietrich’s taut stillness behind me. “I did.”

  “You were supposed to pretend to, according to McCoy. Was she a German spy? A traitor working against her own country under that pseudonym?”

  Grandpa had never moved quickly except in the Olympics. And now. He was on his feet, keeping his balance with his hands on the wood railing around him. “No!” His voice thundered throughout the room. Dietrich fumbled for my shoulder, latched on to it like it was a lifeline, the way Grandpa held on to the railing in front of him.

  But Grandma… I shrugged away from Dietrich as I stared at the lone woman, feeling her disgrace at the rejection being shouted from the witness stand, a testimony of her being unloved. I loved and hated all of them. Especially Dietrich, whose grip, and whose tremor, cheered only for the woman on the screen.

  “You’re sure of that?” Grandpa’s attorney waved him back down to his seat.

  Grandp
a sat. “She had no idea anything was hidden in that mirror. Neither did I understand it, until the day of the blast.”

  The room became liquid, dissolving around me as Amabile’s stories came to life. They could have played the cinematic version on the screen above us, Grandma, Grandpa, Dietrich, and me the only ones knowing what would happen, and only Grandpa knowing why.

  Broken up by thin protests from McCoy’s attorney, the questions and Grandpa’s answers cemented this new guilt and betrayal for all to see. McCoy had been furious when Grandpa admitted to loving Amabile. He had warned Grandpa to sever ties or risk being court martialed for his part in treason. “I never was a real runner,” Grandpa whispered. But Grandpa ran then, ran faster than he had in the races. Ran for Amabile’s, where she waited for him, waited for the last lily he’d carved, the promise he would take her to France, to cement forever what they’d only unofficially performed. She was in danger. He knew that much from McCoy’s threats, but as hard as he ran, he was too late. She and her building exploded in front of him in the attempt to scrap the whole espionage plan, destroy the mirror Amabile had longed to keep, throwing him backwards, disorienting him, but not enough to stop him. He ran into the heat, crawled through the flames, calling for her, searching for her to drag her out.

  “They told me she was dead.” Grandpa stared at her smiling face above us. “I was dragged out of the building, my arms on fire from pawing through the rubble until I found her limp body. The German police treated me like a foreign thief. I didn’t know their language, only the words I’d learned from her.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “McCoy confirmed she’d been killed. It was my fault. I had not only caused her death, I’d also botched my assignment. I didn’t care when he had my medal stripped away and my name obliterated from the Olympics to cover our tracks. I agreed with his lie that I’d taken money and bribes to run and win. I didn’t care. He had to clean up what he could of the mess I’d made of transferring information. I had to atone for killing Amabile. Erika.” I saw the regret in his eyes as he glanced behind me at Dietrich. I saw it vanish as he looked at her face again, knowing now that she’d lived. I saw something worse than regret as he looked away from Amabile and glanced at his wife. “And I made a bigger mess of things when I came home and hurt more people who didn’t deserve it.”

  His attorney paused, appropriately, allowing Grandpa’s confession to be aired for the wife Grandpa stared at. “And so the list was in the mirror.”

  Grandpa nodded. “I think the plan was that the mirror would be stolen. Erika meant nothing to them. She meant less when they found out I’d become involved with her.”

  “And the mirror was here all this time.”

  Grandpa looked at Grandma. He hadn’t known until today. His attorney prodded him to agree, but Grandpa said nothing.

  “It has been in your wife’s bookstore.”

  Grandpa looked down at his hands. Grandma had placed Grandpa in Berlin, shown he was part of a military crime, yet he said nothing that would incriminate her.

  “Tell us about Poland.” As if enough shame hadn’t been there for Grandpa to face.

  “Orders,” Grandpa whispered, staring at his lap. “I had to do my part to salvage what I’d messed up.”

  The attorney who had been pacing back and forth in front of Grandpa paused. I could feel the quizzical pinch of his brows. “Orders? Your part?”

  Grandpa shook his head. “Erase that I had run. Remove any chance of suspicion.”

  “By going to Poland?”

  Even from where I sat I could see the red ring around Grandpa’s eyes. “McCoy staged a fake fire, showed my face around, and ran me through their hospital for burns I’d received in…” He glanced up at Amabile’s face, then back down again. “That was his part. I was to break my leg.”

  My gut lurched.

  “You what?” Even Grandpa’s attorney couldn’t hide his horror.

  “I broke my own leg. In France.”

  I fell back in my seat.

  “No further questions. I call Lieutenant McCoy to the stand.” Grandpa’s attorney held his cane for him while Grandpa struggled to his feet and stepped down. No further questions were needed. Grandpa’s broken limp to his chair said it all.

  Chapter 76

  Dietrich watched the little runner slump. Wilt was more like it, years and years of pain she didn’t understand, her grandfather’s past, and a self-inflicted broken leg, insufficient atonement for all that had happened to him and all the harm he had caused.

  “Not guilty.” The gavel hit the judge’s bench.

  Crawley’s attorney had summed up by reading the names on the list, one of which was McCoy’s, and promising the mirror would be brought back in. Crawley was being released from the charge of betraying his country because his name wasn’t there, but now the whole world knew about the other betrayal, which his wife had lived for years.

  McCoy was led out of the room to await a hearing of his own. Crawley might be dragged in as an accessory—in fact he likely would—but the final decision would be far less painful than what it would be against McCoy. And far less painful than what Cate’s grandparents were suffering now.

  “I hope they hang him.” Cate’s small shoulders tightened more as the door closed behind McCoy.

  People stood up around them, reporters rushing forward, the crowd filtering out. Dietrich turned to Randall and nodded at him. “You were right. Thank you.”

  Randall leaned close. “They were married…or thought they were. Pretended, more like it. I spoke with your grandmother.”

  Dietrich felt the gape. He never gaped, and he did his best to keep from it now even though it had been there in Amabile’s stories, the insinuation that a tie had been formed.

  “Your grandmother’s cousin did a little private ceremony. They intended to make it official in France. So you’ve got an aunt somewhere.” Randall knew who and where, but from his cesspool of journalistic tricks, he chose an honorable tact instead.

  “So you’re why Oma started writing again…”

  Randall grinned.

  “And them?” Dietrich nodded toward the Crawleys. “Do they know about the daughter Oma had?”

  “They should. I gave Crawley’s attorney what I had. He just needed the list to end it, break everything loose for the army and in Crawley’s life.”

  Dietrich appreciated the distinction Randall made between himself and the lowly hacks, who wouldn’t have been so kind or so thorough. Randall had his story, though, so he was content. He’d told Dietrich the rest of it late last night, Randall’s last paragraph finished once he’d baited an embittered Mrs. Crawley enough to cough up the list he was sure she must have. A list he’d concluded could save her husband. All that remained now, on top of criminal procedures, was watching McCoy be exposed for contriving to poison an Olympian’s food, destroying a private Polish gas tanker—along with Amabile’s apartment—to cover up his own military crimes, falsifying dates and records in Poland, and endangering soldiers as well as civilians. Randall ferreted out dirt for the sheer pleasure of being able to, making a show of being smirkingly disappointed when something wholesome came with it.

  Cate remained in her seat, alert, intent on the cluster of newsmen around her grandfather while still watching the back of her grandmother. Dietrich heard Cate sniffle, fished a handkerchief from inside his jacket, and extended it toward her.

  “He really did love an enemy,” she whispered. She turned to Dietrich, stared at him.

  “He loved two, actually, but in very different ways.” Dietrich moved the handkerchief closer, a white flag. “Enemies surrender sometimes,” he said. She stared at the white, then at him as she took it.

  “Grandma?” Cate rose to her feet, Mavis Crawley on hers, maneuvering down the aisle. She stopped at their row, stared at her granddaughter, then nodded at Dietrich. He rose with them, saying what he could in a look before she continued down the aisle and out the door. She’d just given her
husband over to Dietrich’s family while giving the man freedom from all charges at the same time.

  “She’s the real story,” Randall said. He stood, bringing his aroma of reporter’s smoke with him.

  “Don’t you dare,” Dietrich warned.

  Randall smirked. “Journalist’s honor. But her story tells it all. It’s what novels are made of—heroines that save the hero, even when he’s barely been heroic for them.” He smirked again and walked out the back.

  “I don’t know what he means by that, but he’s wrong to speak of my grandparents that way—or in any way.” Cate glared where Randall had gone.

  “He’s right, actually, but he won’t talk ill of them in whatever he publishes.”

  Cate whirled.

  Dietrich raised a hand. “Listen to me. Your grandmother has finally written herself into her own story, and she’s a real heroine…an enemy surrendered.” Like Oma, who surrendered her heart to write a final chapter to show Dietrich the truth that she cherished and set her lover—all of them, actually—free.

  “Surrendered?” Cate shook her head. “And heroine? The only thing she got out of today was shame. Public shame.”

  “And she wore it well.” Dietrich stared down at Cate. “She gave up revenge and took the shame. A last heroic effort after years of wrong. Even more wrong than she’d thought.”

  Cate dropped back in her seat. Her grandfather was being taken out of the courtroom. He would be a free man before long. “I don’t understand,” she whispered as Crawley disappeared behind the door.

  Dietrich walked to the aisle and stepped into Cate’s row. He sidled between the seats until he stood above her. “The one thing my grandmother held onto in the explosion was the mirror, even though it was little more than charred ash. It was part of him. By the time they moved her, no one was around who would know what it was, and they felt sorry for her and brought it to the hospital along with her, probably figuring she would die anyway. Your grandfather meant to take her to France, where he would marry her, even though in his and my Oma’s eyes they already were married. But he intended to confess to your grandmother first that he’d fallen in love with another, and break off that engagement to free her.”