The scars on his left arm were revealed now, and again Elisabeth had trouble taking her eyes away from them. It seemed that there were even more of them now, and they looked thicker and darker, like veins turned inside out.
“When I’m flying is the only time I ever feel truly at ease,” Alfred said, rolling up the right sleeve. “The sky is freedom. It’s possibilities, not peril. That’s why they keep me in my windowless cell. That’s why they keep me from seeing the sky. They’re trying to break me down. To rob me even of hope. It’s one of only two cells,” he said, “just two cells in the entire prison without a window. The other houses a mute idiot who tears his own clothes off. That’s how highly my captors think of me here.”
He was pacing around the table now, hooking toward Elisabeth. Instinctively, she pushed her chair away from him as he approached, and then she stood, bracing herself for whatever was coming next. Alfred held his arms straight up, which were bare now to the elbows.
“You asked me about my service,” he said, still walking toward her. “I was talented at surviving, but it wasn’t always easy.” She moved back, step after step, but Alfred kept coming, and in a second more their bodies were only inches apart. “These,” he said, still holding up his arms, “were the primary decorations I received from the war. My plane went down, and I woke up in a pool of glass and splinters and blood. You can’t tell with my clothes on, but my whole body is covered in scars. I was cut to pieces. I would have rather died. The ground,” he said, “the ground is the most dangerous part of flying, Elisabeth, and the most punishing.”
He lowered his arms now and looked down at her body, his gaze as thick on her as smoke. Then he raised his eyes.
“Get on your knees,” he said.
She stepped back.
“You’re mistaken about something,” he said, matching her every movement. “You think you have the upper hand, but you do not. You have no leverage over me. You have no control. It’s me, Elisabeth,” and with that he came so close that they finally touched, her breasts flattening against him. “It’s me who controls this relationship.”
Silence, and now she wasn’t retreating. She stood squarely against him.
“Your knees,” he said. “Get down on your knees.”
Her heart was beating. Her blood was flowing. She had thawed. She was moving. And then she was easing down to the floor, despite every rational thought in her mind. She stared at Alfred’s arms, which hung loosely beside him. His scars reached out for her.
“Sometimes,” he said, “they bleed.” He stared down at her. “After they pulled me from the glass, they took me to a camp in Frith Hill. They didn’t treat my wounds as they should have. We did terrible things to the English, Elisabeth, and a few of them paid us back in kind.” He rotated his arms, palms facing out. “Like your sister,” he said, “I do not take well to captivity, and I do not take well to any man who holds me captive, English or Alaskan.” He closed his fists and scowled at her, fury teeming in his eyes. Elisabeth couldn’t move. She was frozen. Captured. “I know you spoke to the police,” Alfred said. “I told you not to, but you spoke to them anyway.”
She was back on her feet in an instant, but then Alfred had her by the neck, his right hand clamping around her like the jaws of a striking snake.
“What did I tell you?” he said, pushing her back. “What did I say?”
She slammed against a wall, and then he was squeezing her neck even harder, the arch of his hand pressing up toward the base of her skull. She thrashed against him, but already she was weak, and she could feel for the first time how powerful he was. She beat her hands against his arm, but his tensing flesh felt as stiff and strong as stone.
“I told you,” he said. “I told you not to speak to them. I told you to keep this between us. Between countrymen.”
His breath was hot on her face. He was leaning so close to her. Elisabeth flailed against the wall, but she couldn’t break away from him, and she couldn’t breathe. She couldn’t muster the lightest gasp. He was crushing her.
“Tell me you spoke to them,” Alfred said. “Admit you disobeyed me. Say ‘Yes.’ Say ‘Yes.’”
And she wanted so desperately to say that word. She would admit fault—she’d admit anything—if that was what it took for him to loosen his grip around her neck. But she couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t speak. There was sound escaping from her throat, but this was only the rasping of life leaving her body. She felt her heels rise off the ground. Perhaps he was lifting her, or perhaps she was losing consciousness. But his grip never loosened.
“Say it,” he repeated. “Say, ‘Yes, I betrayed you.’”
Even tighter now. His fingers were digging deep into her neck. She closed her eyes, and darkness enveloped her. She heard nothing. Felt nothing. Then she was braced on her hands and knees, her forehead touching the cold concrete floor. She was racked with shaking, fighting for air through a fit of coughing. Alfred still stood over her.
“And what else did I tell you?” he said. “I told you that if you went to the police, our exchange would be over. And it is.” He knelt down next to her, though Elisabeth could see his form only vaguely. The world was still coming back to her, and her eyes were clouded with mucus and tears. Alfred loomed beside her like a shadow. “Are you listening to me?” he said, his voice as tender as a parent’s. “Elisabeth, darling, do you hear me?”
And then she was running toward the door, pounding on it with both fists. The door was open a moment later, and Elisabeth fled so urgently down the hallway that she didn’t see the guards gaping at her or hear their puzzled questions. A moment later she was outside, and the sun was on her face, and the Fairbanks air had never tasted so bitter. It burned in her throat like acid.
CHAPTER 27
A clerical error—that was what York called it. For a second time, he had contacted the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and thanks to Elisabeth’s own persistence in contacting them about Alfred, they had already looked further into their records, discovered a discrepancy, and corrected it accordingly. Alfred had been telling the truth about the year of his immigration. He had come to the United States in 1919, not 1929, and he had moved straight from New York to Lancaster County. He had been living in Lititz at the time of Jacqueline’s disappearance.
Not only that: He had kidnapped her, and he had murdered her. The signed confession sat on York’s desk.
Elisabeth’s first reaction wasn’t fury. She didn’t rage at York, not when he detailed his meeting with Alfred and his revelation of the compass and the picture and the dress, not even when he announced—triumphantly—the confession.
No, at first Elisabeth broke down, and she cried. She felt as weak as a baby, though not because of the bruises already spreading across her neck, hidden for the time with a layer of hastily applied concealer. She was weak with despair and frustration, but even more she was weak with the possibility of Alfred never speaking to her again. She sat across from York and listened to his deadpan summary of it all, and she cried. She sobbed into both hands.
“This is difficult, I know,” York said, totally oblivious. “And I realize it wasn’t exactly what you wanted, but isn’t it something?”
She didn’t answer him.
“Mrs. Pfautz—”
Across the desk, he offered her a tissue.
“Mrs. Pfautz, your sister—”
“My sister,” she shouted. “My sister—” but she couldn’t go on. She was getting carried away with herself, and she just couldn’t help it. A noodle of mucus hung from her face, but what did appearances matter now? Let him see what he had done to her. Let him see how he had broken her down.
“This is a lot to process, I know,” York said. “But you have to understand—”
“What happened to the grifter?” Elisabeth said. “What happened to him toying with me? Now you believe anything he says?”
“The facts have changed. The evidence has changed.”
“He’s lying,” she said. “He’s doing this to spite you. Are you really this stupid?”
Nothing.
“I told you,” Elisabeth said, and she pounded her fists against her head like a madwoman. “I told you not to talk to him. My sister isn’t dead, and Alfred didn’t kill her. But he knows what happened to her, and he was going to tell me everything, but now it’s all ruined.”
“You have to calm down, Mrs. Pfautz.”
But she was sobbing and couldn’t stop it, and she had never felt so close to the brink of losing her mind. She cried, and Sam York stared at her in silent terror as she pounded her fists against her head. And again and again, rising through the hurried horror of her thoughts, she saw Alfred’s scars. She saw them bleeding, and she understood why they would, for some things are irrevocable and cannot ever heal, no matter the effort or bandage or balm.
PART
3
CHAPTER 28
January 1942
The official story: Alfred H. K. Seidel had kidnapped Jacqueline with the intent of holding her for ransom. As the search for the young girl escalated, however, Seidel grew increasingly nervous, and he abandoned his plan altogether and murdered her in cold blood. He strangled her with a belt, tied rocks to her arms and legs, and then dumped her body in the Susquehanna River some fifty miles south of town. All these years later, a bald sense of guilt had driven him to confession. His trial for the unrelated murder of Mack Sanford was postponed until June, and his arraignment for the murder of Jacqueline Gabriela Metzger would be scheduled shortly thereafter.
Alfred was a ruthless killer. Sam York was a hero. The family of the girl wept in relief and bittersweet catharsis. Elisabeth read a dozen newspaper articles about the crime and the confession, and each one took the same angle and lingered on the same details. The rocks. The belt. A decades-long mystery solved. Each newspaper, too, reached out to Elisabeth for comment, and she told them all the same thing.
“I have no statement on Alfred Seidel or my sister’s disappearance.”
Why bother? If she stirred the pot, what difference would it make? She would be ignored, or she would be treated as if she was deranged. She and Jacqueline and their entire family would draw even more attention to themselves, and it was outsider attention that had gotten her into this fix in the first place. So she deferred. She curtly declined. Besides, her uncle and aunt gave the papers all they wanted.
“He’s a beast,” her aunt Ethel was quoted as saying in the Lancaster Herald. “He’s a vile degenerate, and may God alone have mercy on him.”
Even with all its drama and hyperbole, Elisabeth didn’t doubt that Ethel really said that. The two of them spoke just days after Alfred’s confession, her aunt in fits of tears.
“It’s over,” she wept into the telephone. “It’s really over.”
“Yes,” Elisabeth told her, “it is.”
Though she didn’t want it to be, despite what had happened. Alfred had nearly killed her, yes. He had proven himself to be exactly what Elisabeth had always feared: a true psychotic, a man who wasn’t safe to be around for a single second.
But she had come too far. She couldn’t give up now. If Alfred was a wild animal, then she was his handler, and no handler would be deterred by a brush with the animal’s teeth. There was still so much she didn’t know, so much she felt unsure about. Her sister was alive—she trusted that—but had Alfred been telling her the truth apart from this? A fellow German, he had told her. My age. Kept to himself, and that seemed like a real possibility, one that meshed with the mysteries of that summer twenty years past.
But did she believe him absolutely? No, not yet, not by a long shot. Perhaps he was mingling facts with fiction. Perhaps Alfred and the little bird were one and the same. The evidence was there—his service in the war, his handwriting, the dress, the photograph—but Elisabeth knew that she needed more: more information, more time, more of everything. And she wanted to press on, however cautiously, but Alfred wasn’t returning her letters. She wrote him a dozen times. She telephoned. She visited the penitentiary in person. Yet always she heard nothing, or was turned away.
“He’s not seeing visitors,” the Walrus told her.
But she kept on trying, and the months flitted by. October, November, December. First the quick autumn, then the long winter. It came on as it always did—so fast and intense that it seemed almost unnatural. Had it really been this cold last year? That didn’t seem possible. But it had been, and it was, though their new home made the weather more manageable.
The house in Fairbanks was nice. Four bedrooms, one and a half bathrooms, big kitchen, fully furnished. The living room came with a Zenith console radio, and the emerald Formica kitchen countertops were seas of gleaming perfection. The couch was wrapped in a gorgeous Dorothy Draper slipcover, and the bathtub had a white swan painted onto its pink linoleum tiles. Their neighborhood was just outside of Ladd, and their home was a perfect copy of the houses on either side of it. Each had its own fenced-in yard, but theirs had something extra, too: a plywood work shed, the handiwork of the man who had lived there before them, an army colonel who practiced woodworking.
In the weeks just after the move, Elisabeth spent entire hours at a time in that work shed. It had a small fireplace, but she never kept it lit. Dressed in her boots and parka, she liked to sit in the winter darkness and feel the icy cold enveloping her. The ceaseless light of the summertime had given way to a night that was never far away. The sun rose at ten o’clock in the morning, and it set shortly after four. In years past, the Alaskan winter had always been a challenge for her. If the summer was a season for rattled nerves and fits of brittle sleeplessness, the winter was just the opposite. January and February weren’t so much months as bouts of soporific depression. In the summer, Elisabeth would go to sleep with the expectation of waking too soon. In the winter, she would sleep with the expectation of never waking at all.
But this winter was different. The darkness still sapped her energy, but there was also some comfort in that—some semblance of tranquility that she had never before found in the winter’s frigid darkness. Sitting in the work shed out back, she liked to feel the cold creeping through her clothes and spreading across her skin. She liked to watch the dissipating clouds of her breath, plumes of air that seemed to sparkle as they floated above her head.
But more than anything else, she liked to watch the work shed itself. Apart from a single stool and a scarred pine table, the work shed was empty—or almost empty. Through some trick of condensation or smoke from the fireplace, the walls of the work shed were lined with the shadows of the tools that had once hung on them. Chisels, dowels, jigs, clamps, marking knives, countersinks, burnishers, and saws, dozens of saws. She would sit and study their ghosts, ticking off their names one by one, over and over again.
She had the time for this in Fairbanks. A week before their move, the school at Ladd had offered to take in Margaret when the January term began, and John and Elisabeth had eagerly accepted. Between the arrangement’s convenience and John’s own insistence that declining the offer would be rude, it seemed as though they had no choice in the matter. So, just like that, Elisabeth’s teaching days came to a close.
As for John’s own teaching, his first few weeks were unhurried and nearly carefree. Then the Japanese attacked Hawaii, and everything changed. Listening to the president’s address, the three of them sat around the radio in the living room, huddling together as if for warmth, as if some creeping coldness would soon freeze them all to the core.
“The people of the United States have already formed their opinions and well understand the implications to the very life and safety of our nation,” Roosevelt told them. “Hostilities exist. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory, and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces,
with the unbounding determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph—so help us God.”
John stood and switched it off.
“I hope we burn them all alive,” he said, “women and children and all.”
In a seeming instant, Fairbanks changed. Transport planes and heavy bombers rumbled overhead. Jeeps and half-track carriers clamored down the roads. Soldiers were everywhere, young and old alike, men who rushed around with worry in their eyes but joy in their smiles, frightened of the war but happy for its purpose. By the looks of the commotion that now defined Fairbanks, you might have thought that the Japanese were only miles away and closing quickly, and indeed Elisabeth heard almost constant chatter about the possibility of an invasion.
“Let ’em come,” she overheard a man saying one night at the grocery store. “We’ll string ’em up by their rotten buckteeth.”
Fairbanks’s population swelled, and Ladd was at the center of its growth. By Christmas, the school was bustling with students; by New Year’s, it was teeming.
“That’s the thing about military men,” John told her. “Most of them have enough kids to raise their own standing armies.”
For the January term, John was assigned three periods of eleventh-grade biology, three periods of tenth-grade mathematics, and two periods of ninth-grade English. He was inundated with work. Some days, he stayed so late at the school that Elisabeth thought he might be sleeping there. When he did come home, he poured himself a drink, ate a cold dinner, and went silently to bed. In Tanacross, Margaret and John were never far away. In Fairbanks, Elisabeth hardly ever saw them.
And although she would never admit as much out loud, she found that she didn’t really miss them. Part of her did; most of her didn’t. It wasn’t that she reveled in her newfound independence. It was just that she didn’t think of John and Margaret, not when they were away. Planes and trucks thundered all around her, but she barely even heard them. The radio droned with endless updates about the war, but more often than not, the places and names and battles and numbers rolled right off her. She thought of Alfred. She thought of her sister. She thought of Pennsylvania. And sometimes, when she was lucky, she didn’t think of anything at all. She sat in the work shed. She watched her breath. She studied the shadows on the wall.
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