A Novel Idea

by Melissa Bowersock

  Chapter 1

  July, 2003

  THE bucolic German countryside breezed by, wandering sheep and a few lazy cows in direct contrast to the racing bike Julia propelled over the dirt lane. Her blonde hair flying in the late July breeze, she couldn’t get over how clear the air was here, how sharp everything looked. It was as if she’d been living under water all her life and now suddenly she’d been thrust up out of the bleary depths into startling clarity. She couldn’t seem to get enough of it.

  “Jules,” her friend Maggie laughed from her own bike, “you’d better watch the road. This isn’t Venice Beach. If you hit a rock or a pothole while you’re gawking around, you’ll go flying.”

  Chagrinned, Julia dragged her green eyes from the thickly forested hillsides and the rolling pastures. “I can see why you love it here,” she said. “It really is gorgeous. I thought you were nuts when you said you and Denis were moving here.”

  “Well, if you’ll remember, I wasn’t completely crazy about the idea at first, but I have certainly come to love it,” Maggie said. “Like any born and bred Californian, I thought this was the back of beyond, but after a while I realized I enjoyed the peace and quiet, the lack of malls and freeways. It really is almost a fairy-tale existence.”

  “Complete with Prince Charming,” Julia noted. “I think you’d be happy living on a pig farm if you had Denis there with you.”

  “Well,” Maggie allowed cheerfully, “that helps.”

  Julia fell silent, her friend’s quiet happiness in sharp relief against her own new emptiness. It still pained her to remember that gaping hole in her life where her own husband used to be. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the loss of him or the fact that he had wandered so blithely, hardly even considering what his infidelity would do to her. She supposed that lack of consideration had actually underscored their entire married life, but she’d never been forced to arm wrestle with it until he confessed to the affair. Why hadn’t she seen it coming? Try as she might, she could not see the signs, even in the rear-view mirror. Had she been too naïve? Had he been too smooth?

  “I’m so sorry,” Maggie said softly. Julia looked over to see the concern in her friend’s blue eyes and realized she’d sunken into the now familiar silent reverie that seemed to occupy her every day.

  “Shit, Mags, I’m the one who’s sorry,” she said forcefully. “Why my brain insists on climbing back onto that hamster wheel and rehashing the whole thing over and over again, I’ll never know. I go over the same ground every time and it never changes, it never resolves, it never reduces down to an equation I can understand, accept and walk away from. I just keep going through it again and again.”

  “It’s only been a few months,” Maggie reminded her gently. “You don’t undo eight years of life in six months.”

  “I know,” she sighed. “But you know what the worst part is? I feel like I don’t know what’s real anymore, what’s true. Hell, I thought we had a pretty good thing going, better than most. I mean, sure, there were days we weren’t on the same page, things we disagreed on, but all in all I thought we were pretty happy. To find out it wasn’t that way at all … well, it just makes me wonder what else I’m not seeing clearly. I don’t trust my own judgment anymore. I see things one way and then wonder if they’re actually different.” She shook her head. “It really rocked me, a lot more than I would have believed.”

  “I guess,” Maggie said slowly, “when you put it like that, it would be normal to start questioning everything, but I hope you’re not being too hard on yourself. You’re one of the most down-to-earth people I know, Jules. You’ve never been flaky, never been an airhead, so I don’t think it’s fair to start rethinking everything you’ve ever believed. You never expected Jack to stray, so you weren’t looking for it. He did the unexpected. That doesn’t invalidate everything you know.”

  Julia nodded, not completely convinced. “I guess.” She sighed. “But I just hate sliding into that zone, obsessing about it at the drop of a hat. And I don’t want you to feel like your happy marriage makes it worse for me. It doesn’t. I love seeing you and Denis together. You guys are great. You two let me know that honest, respectful relationships really do exist. And the way Denis is with Marita—he’s definitely a keeper.”

  “That he is,” Maggie agreed happily, nodding her dark head. “His offering to keep her today while we go exploring is pretty normal for him. He’s such a good dad, and Marita just adores him. Sometimes I feel a little pang over how close they are, but in a few months I’ll have my hands full with the baby, so I don’t think I’ll have any room to complain.”

  “I don’t think so, either,” Julia said, and her meaning was unmistakable.

  Both women had entered USC with no more ulterior motive than to get the education they needed to have the careers they envisioned, Maggie in medicine and Julia in teaching. The fact that each had found and married a compatible partner deterred neither from her course, and for a while it seemed they had it all—satisfying career and nurturing home and family. When Julia’s marriage fell apart, the rock-hard foundations of her life had dissolved suddenly into quicksand.

  “At least,” she said, voicing the thought Maggie had kept silent, “we didn’t have any kids. I can thank God that Jack wanted to wait on that.”

  “Absolutely,” Maggie agreed. “It would be so much harder to start over with small kids, plus you’d be tied to Jack forever through them. This way it’s pretty much a clean break.”

  “I made sure it was,” Julia nodded. “I even traded my stake in his pension for his half of the house. I didn’t want anything tying us together, least of all money. This way we can go our separate ways and not look back.”

  “Well, it’s great that you took the summer off to come over here. I think it’ll be a wonderful interim for you, a time when you can relax and just enjoy yourself and recharge your batteries. At the end of the summer it’ll be time to switch gears again, but by then you’ll probably be frothing at the mouth to get back to work.”

  “I’ve wanted to see your place ever since you moved here, but there just never seemed a convenient time to do it,” Julia said. “Now that I’m here, I wish I had come years ago.”

  “We’ll do our best to make it worth the wait,” Maggie laughed. “When we get to town, I’ll show you our clinic and we’ll eat lunch at a tiny little café and buy fresh-baked bread and do all those European—”

  “What’s that?” Julia interrupted. She pointed to a collection of small white bungalows in a clearing amid the trees. A neat white fence bordered the property, speaking of care. A small parking lot had one car in it. “Couldn’t be a school out here, could it?” Her teacher’s curiosity sparked to attention.

  “No, it’s a museum,” Maggie said. “This was a work camp during World War II. I’ve actually only been there once, and that was years ago.”

  “Work camp?” Julia repeated suspiciously. “Does that mean ...?”

  “Concentration camp?” Maggie finished. “Yes, unfortunately. It wasn’t a big one and didn’t have the ovens or anything like that, but over a thousand Jews died there, as well as others, mostly from starvation and exposure. There’re several mass graves in the back. It’s very tragic, of course, but they do a nice job of honoring the victims. We can stop there sometime, if you want.”

  “Can we stop now?” Julia surprised even herself with the hasty request.

  “Now?” Maggie repeated. “Well, sure, if you want to. We’ve got no schedule today; we can do whatever we want.”

  “Yeah, let’s stop,” Julia said. In her new unattached state, yielding to the sudden pull of the place seemed a small celebration amid the pain. Maybe she really had gotten kind of pedantic without realizing it. How long had it been since she’d done something so impulsive?

  The two women steered their bikes onto the car-wide lane that snaked through the trees. The morning sun slanted intermittently through the trees, its yellow rays alive with dust motes and tiny insects. A
slight breeze barely fluttered the leaves around them. The setting was so peaceful, Julia thought, how could anyone envision a death camp here?

  They parked their bikes in a rack in front of the main building, the small sign reading only Fleischerhaus. Julia had to wonder if it were the kind of thing where everyone knew the story so no explanation was necessary, or if it were a subtle sense of shame that precluded any larger advertising. Any monument to victims that died here had also to be a monument to the native Germans who lived nearby and turned a blind eye to the Nazi atrocities. She couldn’t imagine anyone coming through that war unscathed, no matter how hard they may have tried to go about normal lives. In a conflict like that, there was just no room for neutrality.

  “The fences are all gone, of course, but they’ve set markers in the ground where they used to be,” Maggie explained as they walked past the flowerbeds toward the front door. “All of these bungalows are the originals, just restored.”

  Julia nodded, but thought restored might not be the right word. She doubted that this place ever looked as homey as it did now. Certainly the startling white paint and the multi-colored flowerbeds were never a part of the original experience.

  “What does Fleischerhaus mean?” she asked. “I think haus is house, right?”

  “Yes. Fleischer means butcher.”

  “So, butcher’s house.” Julia shivered. “Ug.”

  They went inside. A docent behind a desk welcomed them and spoke with Maggie. Julia noticed a collection box and slipped a couple Euros into the slot. The walls were covered with black and white photos as well as racks of books about the war.

  “She said there’s a self-guided tour,” Maggie said as she joined Julia at the bank of pictures. “I’ve got a guide brochure here. There are four other buildings beside this one.”

  “Look at the children,” Julia noted, pointing to a picture of school-age children working an unpromising plot of ground. Sadly she realized these kids were the same age as her students back home.

  “Yes,” Maggie said, “unfortunately whole families were brought here. I believe the youngest to die here was a child of two.”

  “Were they all Jews?” Julia asked.

  “Primarily. There was a scattering of other ‘undesirables:’ homosexuals, political prisoners, other non-Germans. I suppose the good news is that this area has always been composed of small villages, so there was never a large population of any particular group. I think that alone kept this operation small.”

  Scanning the photos along the wall, Julia was dismayed at the expressions on the faces. She saw the fire of defiance, anger and hatred, the pain of hopelessness and despair, the shuttered look of resignation. Somehow that blank stare was the worst. To her, it looked like those who had abandoned all feeling were dead already. But in what ocean of pain and degradation had they swum before they slipped beneath the surface? How much had they endured before they shut down so completely?

  “Let’s go outside,” she said, wondering now whatever possessed her to want to come in. She hadn’t been prepared to see faces, or for the onslaught of emotions that tore at her.

  Leading the way out the back door, she stepped down the two stairs onto a concrete path. The path led around the perimeter of the grounds and branched to the other buildings as well. Needing the open space and the fresh air, Julia turned right along the perimeter.

  “Boy, it felt so heavy in there,” she told Maggie. “The emotions are just overwhelming.”

  “I know,” Maggie agreed. “It’s such a horrible thing that you don’t even want to be reminded, you don’t want to hear about it or think about it, but it’s exactly because it’s so awful that we have to remind ourselves. We have to keep it fresh so it never happens again.”

  “Amen,” Julia murmured.

  “Here’s that garden area that was in the picture,” Maggie said as they neared a marker. Scanning the brochure, she said, “They mostly raised potatoes, but some other vegetables as well. When the people got so emaciated that they couldn’t work, the gardening stopped.”

  Julia scanned the ordinary plot of dirt, imagining stick-thin people scrounging in the earth for shriveled potatoes. Immense sadness settled around her.

  “How long was this place in operation?” she asked. Standing at the corner of the grounds looking back at the bungalows, she realized the quaint, unremarkable collection of buildings could never align in her head with the atrocities that must have happened here. The peaceful image before her and the sense of the destruction would always be at odds with each other.

  “Four years. Long enough for hundreds to die.”

  Julia nodded. They walked the perimeter to the back of the property where markers denoted mass graves. Physically there was nothing to delineate the graves except the slight rise of the ground. Lush grass covered the area, dotted with small summer flowers that grew wild. This should be a picnic area, she thought when she looked at the cool grass and the tiny flowers nodding in the breeze, but her mind imagined a picnic table set over a pit stuffed with wailing, suffocating people. She shivered and walked on.

  “This next building had been the officers’ quarters,” Maggie read. “The one dormitory that’s been restored is that last building before we turn back to the visitor’s center.”

  The officers’ quarters could have been any military “home.” Austere but comfortable, it had several bedrooms, a large kitchen, a genial front room. The large front windows had heavy, dark drapes that could be drawn against the sight of the emaciated prisoners on the grounds. Was it really that easy to block out? Julia wondered.

  “I guess the ‘lucky’ ones, if you could call them that, were the ones who were recruited to take care of the officers,” Maggie paraphrased from the guidebook.

  Julia shook her head. “The truly lucky ones were the ones who were killed outright,” she said. She could envision a bold young man trying to escape one of the periodic round-ups, imagine him breaking away and running. The cowed others would see him summarily shot and they would go docilely wherever they were herded, thinking they were better off than the man lying dead in the street. Of course they wouldn’t know they were wrong until it was too late.

  Leaving the officers’ quarters, Julia found herself not caring to touch anything, as if the horrific machinery of the past were somehow imbued with an evil that could transfer to her through touch. As before, she felt much better stepping out into the sunlight again.

  A smaller building sat behind the officers’ quarters. There was no sign on it, but Julia felt a morbid curiosity about it. “What’s that?” she asked Maggie.

  Maggie scanned the guidebook. “Storage building,” she said. “The dormitory is over this way.” She indicated the path that would lead them to the last large building and then return them to the front of the property.

  “I want to see this first,” Julia said, and headed for the storage building.

  She felt a peculiar prickling sensation in her head. A headache? She didn’t think so. The sensation itself was not unpleasant, just ... unusual. She couldn’t remember ever feeling anything quite like it. She walked to the door of the storage building and reached for the doorknob, then found herself immediately, uncontrollably, shrinking back.

  Get a grip, she thought. How much misery can be stamped on a storage building? But she seemed powerless to open the door.

  “Jules?” Maggie queried from behind her.

  Willing herself through the curtain of dread that seemed to keep her stationary, she swallowed and reached for the door. The knob turned easily in her hand—not with difficulty, as with a rusting mechanism as she had expected—and the door swung open. There was no odor, although she expected one: the musty, powdery smell of bulk flour or grain, the earthy smell of raw potatoes. After the brightness of outdoors, the windowless building was dark but she forced herself to step up into the dimness and let her eyes adjust.

  The room was distinctly unremarkable. Blank white walls held a few pictures of p
risoners in a food line, holding dirty, dented metal plates, each being served a single smallish potato in a thin gruel. A small table nearby held one of those plates. A desk in the opposite corner was empty except for a roster of supplies under glass. Rough burlap sacks were stacked against one wall, but when Julia peeked into the loose opening of one, she saw it held only rocks.

  The prickling sensation in Julia’s head intensified. Her vision began to swim slightly, as if her eyes were crossing and she could not get them to line up correctly. Instead of the clean white walls, she saw dingy raw wood and signs tacked up with flat metal thumbtacks. The paper signs seemed to flutter as if a breeze disturbed them, and the blurry picture revolved slowly around and beyond her sight of the actual room before her. She felt her stomach turn over, as if the moving images were making her nauseous. A heavy dread descended on her and she wiped damp palms on her thighs.

  “Nothing much here,” Maggie said behind her.

  But there was, Julia realized. There was a door behind the desk. A door ... to another room. Clamping her jaws tight against the sickness that threatened to well up in her throat, she crossed to the door and put her hand on the knob. Every nerve in her body screamed out against opening it, but she fought through the intense panic and turned the knob. The door swung open to another, smaller room, as she had known it would.

  Her eyes jumped about the room, looking for things that she did not want to see but that should have been there. A ghostly vision of clutter—boxes, wooden boards, stacks of burlap bags and ropes, a crude wooden palette with a thin ticking on top—was superimposed over her view of the room as it currently was. The small windowless room was entirely empty but it felt oppressively crowded to her, as if she couldn’t move, she couldn’t breathe. The air in the room was thick, stifling her lungs. She felt herself struggling for breath. Chest heaving, sweat breaking out on her face, she had to fight to keep her feet as dizziness swamped her. She had the distinct feeling that her throat was closing, her airway shutting down. She heard small, harsh gurgling noises and realized they were coming from her own throat. Putting a hand to her throat, she saw the side door leading to outside and she lunged for it. Yanking the door open, she leaped as if the hounds of hell were after her and fell blindly down the two steps to sprawl on the grass outside.

  “Jules!” Maggie called. She was instantly beside Julia and turning her limp body face up. Julia’s eyes were rolled back in her head and she gagged violently. When Julia fought to turn away from her friend, Maggie let her go and Julia vomited on the grass. Her entire body shuddered with the effort. Maggie sat quietly beside her and rubbed her back until the spasms stopped.

  “Julia?” Maggie said softly. “Are you okay?”

  Julia gulped in air and fought the bile that threatened to rise in her throat again. Slowly her head began to clear and she could open her eyes and see only the grass and trees before her. Raking in huge breaths, she turned back toward Maggie and struggled to sit up next to her friend. Maggie helped her with a supportive arm behind her back.

  “You okay now?” she asked.

  Julia nodded, still not quite trusting her voice. She looked around at the open grounds and was acutely relieved to notice that it all stayed put. She steadied herself with a few more deep breaths and finally faced Maggie.

  “Jesus,” she said wearily.

  Maggie felt her forehead. “You’re warm but you don’t feel like you have a fever,” she said. “I wonder if you’re catching something? Or if something at breakfast didn’t agree with you?”

  Julia shook her head, then regretted it as the dizziness returned. She clamped her jaws tight and waited for it to pass.

  “No,” she said finally, “it’s nothing like that.” She glanced over her shoulder at the small white building behind them. “It’s that,” she said, hooking a thumb in that direction.

  Maggie looked back over her shoulder, clearly confused. “It’s what?” she asked. There was nothing there, at least nothing that would make anyone sick.

  “Can you ... help me up?” Julia asked. She rolled to her knees and let Maggie pull her to her feet. “I’d like a drink of water.”

  “Sure,” Maggie said. “Come on, let’s go back to the visitor’s center.”

  “No,” Julia said firmly. “I want to stay outside. Over there.” She pointed to a bench set beneath a large tree just off the parking lot.

  “Okay,” Maggie said. “Can you walk okay? I’ll go get you some water.”

  Julia nodded and started across the grounds toward the bench. Maggie angled back toward the visitor’s center and found Julia beneath the tree a few minutes later.

  “Thanks, Mags,” Julia said gratefully. She opened the small bottle of water and sipped it. The cool liquid felt heavenly on her rough throat. She sloshed some water around in her mouth and spit it out on the ground, then drank deeply. She held the cool bottle to her forehead.

  “So, now,” Maggie said, watching her friend closely, “what did you mean back there? What do you think made you sick?”

  Julia rolled the bottle across her forehead, stalling a bit. “This is going to sound nuts,” she started slowly, “but the truth is that I feel like I died in that room.”

  Maggie sat silently, a blank look on her face. “What do you mean?” she asked finally, her brow knitted in confusion. “You only blacked out for just a few—”

  “Not just now,” Julia said quickly. “Before. I think I died there, suffocated there ... like in another life.”

  Maggie laughed, a short, humorless sound. “Very funny, Jules. Look, you really had me—”

  The look on Julia’s face stopped Maggie in mid-sentence. There was no trace of a smile on Julia’s face, not even the faintest shadow of any humor at all. Instead there was only a hard, unyielding resolve. “You’re serious,” Maggie said.

  Julia nodded. “Very.” She took another sip of water. “I know it sounds crazy, but the feelings I got in that room were just overpowering. I think someone murdered me there. I think I was strangled.”

  Maggie’s jaw worked briefly but no sound came out. Finally she shook herself. “But how could that be?” she asked. “How could you know—?”

  “I don’t know,” Julia said quickly. “I don’t know any of the whys or hows, I just know what I felt in there, and it felt like memories.”

  She turned earnestly to Maggie. “You’ve had incidents of déjà vu, haven’t you? Times when things felt familiar, as if you’d experienced them before?”

  “Yes,” Maggie said, nodding. “Is that what this felt like?”

  “No. That’s what I’m saying. This was completely different, much stronger and more focused. This felt like memories. I think I was murdered in there.”

  “Ug,” Maggie said. “Like by a Nazi?”

  “I think it was during that time,” Julia said, “when this was a working camp. So it had to be a Nazi. I must have been Jewish.” She drank deeply and capped the water bottle. “Man, how’s that for a two-by-four upside the head?”

  Maggie didn’t answer. Julia could tell by her stunned silence that her friend was having as much trouble with the concept as she was.

  “This is nuts,” Julia said, certain Maggie would agree. “I would never believe this if I didn’t feel it myself, but I actually physically felt like my airway was being pressed closed. It wasn’t like it was all in my head, in my mind. It was physical.” She turned to Maggie. “I actually felt like if I didn’t get out of that room, I would die―again.” She shrugged and took another sip. “Sounds like a horror movie.” A chill patterned up her spine.

  “Possession?” Maggie offered softly.

  Julia laughed grimly, a short contemptible bark. “That’s even crazier than a past life.”

  She glanced around her at the pastoral setting, the sloughing trees and the nodding flowers. The contrast between the peaceful countryside and her dramatic feelings made the incident seem that much more far-fetched. And doubtful. She was alive now, in the 21st
century, not the 1940s. She was young, healthy, free. This … thing … had nothing to do with her, Julia Martin. There was no way she could reconcile it with her life.

  “Enough,” she said out loud. She glanced at her watch. “Let’s get going. Lunch is starting to sound real good.”

  “Why don’t we head back home?” Maggie suggested.

  Julia shook her head. “I’m okay, Mags. Let’s go on to town. I want to see your clinic.”

  “Are you sure?” Maggie was obviously not sure. She eyed her friend warily.

  “I’m sure. Come on. I’m feeling much better.”

  The bike ride on to town was considerably quieter. Maggie rode close beside and just slightly behind her friend as if watching for any aberrant behavior. Julia relaxed into the silence and turned her attention again to the peaceful countryside. Neither pursuing the strange experience at Fleischerhaus nor banning it from her mind, she allowed it to percolate quietly on the edges of her consciousness. She could neither corroborate the feelings that had enveloped her nor could she dismiss them, as startling as they had been, so her only option was simply to allow them.

  More cottages dotted the woodlands as they neared the village. Maggie pointed out the homes of friends and colleagues, some of whom Julia would meet during her time in Germany. She tried to keep track of all the polysyllabic names, but finally decided she’d just have to wait until she had some sort of reference before she could really file the information away in long-term memory.

  The town of Waldenreuth was a quaint, slow-paced little village nestled comfortably in a clearing amid the forest. Maggie and Denis had driven Julia through it on the way to their house from the airport, but she’d only seen it from the main road through town then, several days ago. Now she would have the chance to really become acquainted with it and find her bearings.

  Like so many villages in Bavaria, its clustered whitewashed buildings and predominantly red roofs created a pleasing contrast to the forest greenery around it. The spire of the aged Catholic church, thrusting up from the center of the village square, provided reference from anywhere in town like an unlit beacon. The square was cobbled with stones worn smooth by hundreds of years of use, and the narrow streets starred out in all directions around it.

  The feel of Waldenreuth reminded Julia of what a small American town might have been in the 1930s or 40s, where everyone knew everyone else and no one was a stranger. The closeness of the community was at once comforting—any friend of Maggie’s and Denis’ was a friend of all—and somewhat oppressive, compared to the crowded yet anonymous lifestyle of Southern California.

  Everyone waved to them and several people wanted to stop and chat. Maggie introduced Julia to a few of her friends, including a woman who owned a bed and breakfast with her husband, the local grocer and the wife of the newspaper editor. Primarily in German but also in varying degrees of English, Maggie explained that they were headed to the clinic and would stop longer at another time.

  “Is it always this tough to get through town?” Julia asked as they cycled the last block to the clinic.

  “Sometimes,” Maggie laughed. “One thing about a town this size: it can be tough to keep a strict schedule. Everyone expects that you can take a few minutes to socialize. You get used to it.”

  The clinic was a “newer” building (as in built in the last forty years, Maggie explained) and devoid of any charm whatsoever. It was square, a uniform tan color and squatted in the center of its surrounding parking lot.

  “It’s ugly, I know,” Maggie apologized. “At the time when it was built, it was supposed to look ‘modern.’ Now it’s just plain ugly. We’d like to build a new one, but that will have to wait.”

  “How many doctors do you have here?” Julia asked as they parked their bikes in the bike rack at the side of the building.

  “Four: me and Denis, a GP named Theo Seiler and an OB/GYN named Katja Bressler. With me in pediatrics and Denis in internal medicine, we just about have everything covered. It makes a nice balanced arrangement. Come on; we’ll go in the back, otherwise we’ll get stuck socializing in the waiting room.”

  Maggie led the way to an unmarked door on the back side of the building. Opening the door with her key, she led Julia into a brightly lit hallway and steered her toward a central administrative area bordered by desks and office machines. Maggie introduced her to the two nurses, Ursula and Pia, and the two administrative assistants, Trina and Sylvie. Pia, the younger of the two nurses, was the only one who spoke fluent English.

  “Pia went to school in London,” Maggie told Julia. To Pia, she said, “I need an examining room for a few minutes; what’s open?”

  “Number four,” Pia said. “Do you need help with anything?”

  Maggie shook her head. “No, but I’d like Theo to take a look at Julia. Does he have a few minutes?”

  “We can make time,” Pia said grinning. “I’ll let him know.”

  “Great,” Maggie said. “Come on, Jules.”

  “What are you doing?” Julia asked, even though it wasn’t hard to guess. Maggie led her back into the hallway and steered her into an examining room.

  “Have a seat,” Maggie said, motioning toward the elevated couch. She proceeded to the sink to wash her hands. “I just want Theo to take a quick look at you,” Maggie said. She eyed her friend as she dried her hands. “I just want to make sure everything’s okay.”

  “Oh, Maggie,” Julia protested. “I’m fine. Really.”

  “I know,” Maggie agreed, but she’d already reached for her stethoscope and the blood pressure cuff. “Just humor me, okay? I’ll feel better.”

  Sighing, Julia hopped up on the couch and let Maggie apply the cuff and pump up the air bag. She sat quietly as Maggie took her blood pressure and found her pulse. Just then there was a quiet knock on the door.

  “Come,” Maggie said. The door opened and the other doctor slid into the room. Mid-thirties with close-cropped, curly hair, he nodded to both women.

  “You called?” he asked Maggie with a questioning smile in his blue eyes.

  “Theo, this is my friend from America, Julia Martin. Julia, Theo Seiler.”

  “Hello,” Julia said, extending her hand.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” Theo said. His English held hardly any accent at all. He took her hand in a warm grip. To Maggie, he dropped his voice to a stage whisper and said, “But examining someone before I meet them is really not necessary. I’m sure she’s had all her shots.”

  Maggie poked him with an elbow. “I just want you to look at her. She fainted on our way into town.”

  “Oh?” Theo’s manner turned immediately professional.

  “It’s no big deal,” Julia sighed. “What was I out—thirty seconds?”

  “She also threw up,” Maggie supplied.

  “Hmm,” Theo said. Edging Maggie out of the way, he stood before Julia and looked in each green eye closely, then reached beneath her blonde hair to feel below and behind her ears. “Did you take her temperature?” he asked Maggie.

  “Not yet.” Maggie immediately reached in a cupboard for an ear thermometer and slipped the protective cover on it, then held it in Julia’s ear.

  “What were you doing at the time?” Theo asked Julia. “Were you bicycling?”

  “No,” Julia said. “We’d stopped at—” She glanced at Maggie for the name.

  “Fleischerhaus,” Maggie supplied. The thermometer beeped and she withdrew it. “Thirty-six point five,” she told Theo. For Julia’s benefit, she added, “That’s Celsius. Perfectly normal.”

  “Okay, tell me what you were doing,” Theo insisted. “When did you first notice that you weren’t feeling okay?”

  Slightly alarmed at the prospect of telling this good-looking stranger about her unusual “experience,” Julia hesitated and glanced at Maggie. Maggie lifted her eyebrows as if to say, “It’s your story.” Julia sighed.

  “We were touring the camp,” she told Theo, “and I noticed I was
getting a weird prickly sensation inside my head. I don’t remember ever feeling that before.” She waited, but Theo had no comment. “I was okay until we went back to that storage building in the back.”

  “You know that little one behind the officers’ quarters?” Maggie asked Theo.

  “Yes, I’ve seen it,” he said. “I can’t say that I’ve ever been inside.” He arched an eyebrow at Julia, prompting her to continue.

  “I started feeling bad then,” she told him. “I felt very anxious and had this horrible sensation of dread.” She glanced again at Maggie, but her friend was not going to help her. “I felt ... I had this feeling that I could see it as it was ... years ago. I could see it with dingy wood, with signs tacked up over bags and boxes of supplies piled against the walls. It was like seeing two different versions of it, one on top of the other.”

  “Is that when you fainted?” Theo asked.

  Julia shook her head. “No. I looked around the room and noticed a door, and I knew—I knew—there was another room beyond it, a smaller room with a door leading outside. I went in there and that’s when the feelings really hit me. The room was empty but I could see it just crowded with stuff, bags and boxes and piles of papers, a bed ...” Julia had to stop and swallow to allay the sudden rise of bile in her throat. Unwittingly she put her hand to her throat. It was a struggle to swallow.

  “Okay,” Theo said soothingly. “You’re okay. Maggie, get her a sip of water, would you?”

  Maggie got a paper cup and half-filled it with water for her friend. Julia sipped it sparingly. Gradually the tight feeling in her throat began to diminish.

  “You okay now?” Theo asked.

  Julia nodded. “This is exactly what happened then,” she said. “I felt like I couldn’t breathe. I felt like there was something around my neck and ...” she glanced at Maggie, then back to Theo, “... that I was being strangled.”

  “That’s when she fainted,” Maggie said. “She bolted outside so fast, she fell on the grass and just passed out. She came around quick enough, but then threw up.”

  Theo frowned. “There’s no doubt there’s a lot of emotional energy in a place like that,” he admitted. “It’s nothing you’ll ever find in medical books, but that doesn’t make it any less real to the people who are sensitive enough to pick up on it. I’ll bet if you asked everyone who visited Dachau or Auschwitz, more than half of them would admit to a little bit of what you felt.”

  “I understand what you’re saying,” Julia told Theo, “but I didn’t feel like that anywhere except in that storage building. I didn’t feel it when we first went in the visitor’s center, nor on the grounds.”

  “Hm. Any history of allergies?” Theo asked, steering the conversation back to the medical arena. “Asthma? There’s a lot of dust out there.”

  “No,” Julia said.

  “It’s not unusual to panic when you feel like your throat is closing. Personally, I can’t think of a worse feeling than that of not being able to breathe.”

  “But I was afraid before my throat started to close,” she insisted. “And no one in my family has ever had asthma.”

  Theo looked thoughtful. His blue eyes scanned her face intently. “Could you be pregnant?”

  Julia shook her head. “Not a chance,” she said firmly.

  “All right.” Theo hesitated. He stepped back. “Interesting,” he murmured.

  “Is that all you have to say?” Maggie asked in exasperation.

  Theo snorted. “You asked me to look at her; I did. She’s fine. I don’t see any evidence of illness or injury.” He looked back at Julia. “If you want to talk philosophy, we could talk about overactive imaginations, the absorption of an emotional residue of a place, or we could talk about past-life memories. What do you think it was, Julia?”

  Asked point blank like that, Julia hesitated. Somehow feeling the experience in her body was less frightening than putting forth a bonafide theory about it, and she realized how crazy it all sounded.

  “I’m not sure,” she started slowly. “I don’t think it was just my imagination. And I don’t think I was soaking up someone else’s experience.” She swallowed and faced Theo and Maggie directly. “I think it happened to me.”

  “A past life,” Theo said.

  Julia nodded. “I guess that’s what fits. I’ve never thought about past lives before. Do people do that? Have past life memories that just attack them?”

  “It’s not unheard of,” Theo mused. “There are plenty of anecdotal reports of people having memories triggered by being in a place or a situation that matches the past life. Proof is something else entirely.”

  “Yeah, how do you prove something like that?” Julia agreed. “But I know what I felt, and right now I’ll take my gut feelings over a textbook any day.”

  Theo tapped his chin with a blunt finger, thinking. “I have a friend who’s a psychologist who has done some work with past-life memories. He’s mentioned it to me, although we’ve never talked about it in—”

  Just then there was a tapping at the door. Pia opened the door slightly. “Dr. Seiler? You’ve got two waiting.”

  “Sorry, ladies,” he told Maggie and Julia. “Duty calls.”

  “Thanks, Theo,” Maggie said. “Sorry to drag you out of your busy schedule.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Julia said. She put her hand out again. “I appreciate your taking the time with us.”

  Theo pressed her hand, smiling warmly. Dimples appeared briefly in his closely-shaven cheeks. “My pleasure. Sorry I couldn’t help more. You’re spending some time here?” he asked. “I’ll see you again?”

  “She’ll be here for at least a month,” Maggie said. “I’m making sure of that.”

  “Good,” Theo said brightly. “I hope the rest of your time here is a little less ... disturbing.”

  Maggie and Julia left by the same back door and retrieved their bicycles, continuing their tour of the town. “There’s a nice little restaurant where we can have lunch,” Maggie said. “It’s just a couple blocks down.”

  “You could have warned me,” Julia groused.

  “Warned you?” Maggie grinned. “Of what? That I was going to sic Theo on you?”

  “And that he was so good-looking.”

  Maggie looked sideways at her friend. “Oh, do you think so?”

  Julia snorted. “As if you don’t? And you know I’m a sucker for dimples.”

  Maggie laughed. “He’s not married, either.”

  “Girlfriend?” Julia queried.

  “Not at present. Sometimes small towns can have pretty slim pickings.”

  “Hmm,” Julia murmured. “I need to think about a new relationship like a hole in the head,” she allowed.

  “You’ve got time,” Maggie grinned. “Here’s that restaurant I was talking about.”