“No. I’d say I was disappointed except if we’d had children . . . the outcome would have been devastating for all of us.” Dakota nodded at her phone on the coffee table. “So tell me about your guy.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Why not?”
Because he’d realize that she was just as pathetic as she’d been her senior year.
Because Noah was the only barrier left between them.
“Even if I forgive you, it doesn’t mean that we’re friends,” she said.
Instead of responding to her edict, he slowly sipped the last of his drink. “I have more of these packets stashed in the kitchen.”
The rain pattering against the glass, the yellow candlelight along the wall, the man in the shadows warming more chocolate. Her eyes closed as she rested on the couch, in sweet surrender as the pangs of bitterness began bleeding out.
She was on safe ground, with a man who knew better than her how to fight a storm. Not even the wind bothered her anymore.
At some point during the night, Dakota draped several blankets over her, but she was too tired to thank him. As the rain continued, in the warmth of the blankets, she dreamed of a lake. A light. A net catching her when she fell.
17
HANNA
Kolman didn’t seem to care about hiding his kerosene lantern behind curtains as he explored the Tillich lodge. Hanna followed him into the great hall, none of the windows covered by drapes, and she was stunned by what she saw. Spring flowers spilled over clusters of vases, infusing the room with a candied fragrance. Icing spread across centuries of dust and decor.
Kolman held his lantern over her father’s former desk. The face of Adolf Hitler had replaced Saint Katharine’s portrait. “Looks like we’re not the only one celebrating.”
Hanna didn’t want to think about who had been in her home today, arranging bouquets on the dining table and hanging pictures on her walls while she was at the Wewelsburg Castle. Still the grim face of a certain Gestapo agent reemerged.
Had he returned with the bouquets and a locksmith? If so, he would have found nothing upstairs except the dollhouses.
An exotic honeymoon had been delayed by the war, and that was perfectly fine for Hanna. She’d wanted to delay the inevitable this evening but hadn’t been able to suspend it for any longer than the drive back to Nuremberg with its various checkpoints along the way. When the soldiers saw the silvery skull on Kolman’s cap, the lightning bolt on his collar, they waved him through. A shiny uniform seemed to blind everyone these days.
Kolman straightened the portrait of Hitler before examining a picture of her family, taken more than twenty years ago in a local studio. Her mother was seated, her cheeks sagging as if she’d used every last ounce of her energy to birth the baby girl held in her arms.
“I didn’t realize you had a brother,” he said, picking up the frame, studying the confident young man who’d been fourteen years her senior.
She remembered only glimpses of Jonny. How he’d made her laugh. How she’d cried after he left home.
The military had conscripted him on his seventeenth birthday.
“Jonny died at Amiens.” Three months before the World War ended.
“Your father,” he said, still looking at the picture. “He was in the war as well.”
She nodded slowly. Her father had also fought at Amiens, but he never spoke about his time in the military. Or about the son he’d lost. By not speaking, it was almost as if the loss had never happened. He’d remained quiet while Hanna longed for the stories.
“A colonel,” she said. “He injured his leg in battle.”
“My father died in France.”
She glanced over, surprised. While he’d told her he was from Hanover, he never talked about his family. Did his mother, his siblings, regret not being at their wedding? “When will I meet your family?” she asked.
Instead of answering, he picked up the picture of her and Luisa. “You also had a sister?”
“No.” She took the photograph from him. “My cousin. Luisa.”
“Your tenant?”
“Yes, she moved here when I was a child and then stayed to care for the place in my absence.”
“She was Jewish—”
“She was German.”
Kolman strolled to the desk at the corner of the room, flipped through some of the papers. The list of names, thankfully, was buried in the labyrinth. “Where is Luisa?”
“I don’t know.”
He turned slowly. “She’s gone?”
“Apparently. She and her husband left without even a letter to say goodbye.” If Kolman didn’t already know, she wouldn’t be the one to explain that Paul had been taken because of his Jewish heritage. And Luisa was hiding away from men like him.
“I wonder where they went.”
She shrugged as if she’d never been to Frau Weber’s home. Never read Paul’s story.
But Frau Weber was right. She could never hide Luisa here.
“People are spreading terrible lies about this regime,” he said. “You must not believe them.”
“I’ve heard the Jews are being sent away if they don’t leave on their own.”
“They are going east to find work.”
“In Poland?” she asked. The new living space.
Irritation flashed in his eyes. “A place where they can provide for their families.”
“At least they’re not being forced to marry,” she said.
He stepped back, taking her hand. “I know you’re not thrilled about our arrangement, but we’re going to make it work. For the sake of the—”
“Please don’t say that.” She shook off his hand to rub her temples. While she wished this day would end, she didn’t want to be pressed into another duty for the sake of their Reich.
“You’re tired.”
“Tired and confused,” she said. “I hate the confusion most of all.”
He nodded toward the steps. “Show me the upper floors.”
They climbed the stairs and he turned once to look from the balcony at the raftered ceiling and stone fireplace below. Then they moved into the dark corridor.
The lantern spilled light across the bedroom doors, and he opened the door to Luisa and Paul’s room first, scanning the decor before closing it. Then he opened her bedroom door.
Flowers packed this space as well, the petals sprinkled across the rug and duvet on her narrow bed and a second bed hauled over from Luisa and Paul’s room. As if someone had uprooted a tulip farm and replanted the stems in her private garden.
Kolman eyed the two beds, pressed tightly together, in the kerosene light. They were married now, and he had a right to her body as much as he had a right to this house.
“Your duty is to the Schutzstaffel.”
Himmler’s words rang in her head, but she hadn’t married the SS. She had married one of its officers, and she would make it work. Not because Himmler forced her into this wedding, but because marriage was a sacred union before God.
Kolman turned off the kerosene, the house tour over for tonight. He crossed the room, but he didn’t kiss her, instead brushing away the strands of hair that had fallen from their pins, twirling one of them against her neck.
When she stiffened at his touch, recoiling, he stepped away. “I’ll return when you’re ready.”
She sat on the edge of the bed in her wedding dress, knowing what she must do, wishing there were another way. If she fought him, would he fight back? No one would care about a man who’d hurt the wife who denied him the most base of privileges extended in marriage.
Her virginity, she’d lost to Charlie Ward, and they never recovered their friendship after they crossed that irremeable line. While she’d longed to marry Charlie, he’d taken a ship back to America alone, and she’d poured herself into the work she loved. The hostilities began in Germany soon after—if he had tried to send a letter, she had never received it.
She’d never given herself to another man. It
was a gift, she thought, this giving of one’s self. A gift that was expected with the flowers and ceremony and SS ring.
When he returned, Kolman set one of the bottles of French wine on her nightstand, two goblets beside it. Then he poured them each a glass, and she drank until her mind was fuzzy, her fight gone.
Turning, he sat on the bed behind her, unbuttoning the pearl beads on the back of her dress. Any spark between them had disappeared, his charm gone, but maybe this man beside her would be her husband first. His covenant with the SS a step behind the one he’d made with her.
The monster, she prayed, would remain in her dreams.
18
EMBER
Music pulled Ember from her sleep. Someone was playing the piano, the melody trickling through the glass instead of pounding rain. She bolted up on the couch and glanced around the room. Dakota must have slept upstairs.
A quick test, the flip of a switch, but their electricity hadn’t returned.
She rinsed her face off in the bathroom sink and brushed her teeth before tying her hair back into a messy sort of bun. Then she tucked her cell phone into her back pocket and slipped on wet sandals, stepping out under the blissfully sunny sky.
“Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me” was the song streaming out of the Tabernacle, and she stepped over a graveyard of fallen branches to reach the open-air building in the center of the plaza. Sitting on a bench, she listened to an elderly man play Elton John.
When the piece ended, she clapped, the sole audience member. The pianist waved back before launching into a passionate rendition of “Blessed Assurance,” the notes pouring out from his fingers. In that moment, she could envision Mrs. Kiehl on the front porch of her little cottage, listening to a hymn like this one, foretasting the glory divine. Music could transport them all into the next life, at least for a glimpse of what was to come.
Someone sat down beside her, and she looked over at Dakota, a Red Sox ball cap pulled over his messy hair, the Ember mug in his hand. “You want some coffee?”
“Did the electricity come back?”
He shook his head. “It’s instant and just barely warm, but I added a little milk and sugar to make it tolerable.”
She took a long sip from the heated mug, the caffeine surging through her veins.
Dakota nodded toward the stage. “Mr. Talbot is out here every Thursday, no matter the weather.”
“That song makes me want to run straight through heaven’s gates.”
“I suspect that’s exactly what he was hoping for.” He pointed at the phone in her hands. “Is your cell service working yet?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll need electricity first to revive it.”
The man began playing “How Great Is Our God,” and Dakota leaned back on the bench, stretching his legs out.
She let the music thunder over her, marveling at the power of one man over his ivory keys. Marveling that Dakota was here beside her, that some of the anger in her heart seemed to have washed away in the rain.
What was happening inside her? She’d clung to her anger for so long, her nails digging in as if she could punish Dakota for all that he did, just by remembering. How foolish of her to think that she had the mind power to make him pay. She’d given the teenage ghost of this man control over her.
It sounded like he’d paid plenty already, but not because of her anger. His own struggles, his past, had crash-landed his life, and God, it seemed, had been putting the pieces back together.
Almost two decades ago she’d sworn never to come back on this island. Yet here she was, having coffee with the same man who’d driven her away. Perhaps it truly was a foretaste of heaven, righting what had gone wrong.
“He wraps Himself in light and darkness tries to hide.”
These beautiful lyrics she knew from the church she attended now, one so different from the church where she was raised. Darkness, she’d learned, couldn’t hide in the light of God’s splendor. The lies would be exposed.
She’d been angry at Dakota, but the light slowly turned this morning, shining brightly on her and the anger she’d been clenching inside. For twenty years, she’d been trying to make herself pay. For being stupid enough to stay with the Aryan Council. For losing her child.
She hadn’t allowed herself to be angry at those who’d led her down that path, for the abuse of her parents and then Lukas. She’d pushed those memories into the darkness.
The pianist covered the keyboard and tipped his classic brown fedora toward them and their applause. Then he retrieved the cane that he’d stretched over the lid and shuffled down the steps, exiting the stage on the opposite side.
Dakota turned toward her. “What’s your name?”
She looked at him, slightly alarmed.
He held out the peace offering of his hand. “I’d like to start over, if we could.”
“I’m Ember Ellis,” she finally said, shaking it. “Used to live on this island.”
“My name is Dakota.” He let go of her hand. “I’ve made a winding journey across our country, but the Vineyard is home for me now.”
“It’s nice to meet you, Captain Kiehl.”
“Very funny.”
“I don’t know you well enough to call you by your first name.”
He grinned at her, and she saw a flash of the man that she’d hoped he would grow up to be. The sculpture under plaster casting. “Just Captain works.”
And she laughed, genuinely laughed, with Dakota at her side.
He folded his arms over his chest. “Why did you decide to spend this season of your life researching the Holocaust?”
“I have a deep affinity for people who’ve faced persecution.”
His face fell. “Because of high school?”
“No,” she started. “Well, maybe that was part of it. A nudge toward finding out why people hurt others. But my search began years before that homecoming game.”
He knew a glimpse of her story perhaps, about the church her father led and the demise of the Aryan Council in Idaho, but he didn’t know about Elsie. No one on this island knew.
She took another sip of the coffee. “Do you remember the stories your grandmother used to tell us in school?”
“I remember more of her stories from home.”
“I wrote one of my high school papers based on those stories,” she said. “Nuremberg was a Nazi stronghold, but the persecution started there long before the war. In the fifteenth century, residents thought the Jewish people had poisoned their wells, so they massacred hundreds of them during the Black Plague and expelled the rest to places like Poland. Then, during the Holocaust, the Nazis expanded their territory right into Poland, exterminating the descendants of those Jewish people who had fled.”
“Gram said she doesn’t remember much about living in Nuremberg,” he said. “Good or bad.”
Ember swirled the last of the coffee in the mug. “The article said her mother helped the Jewish people during the war.”
“Gram rarely mentions Hanna, but my great-grandfather attended college for a year in Germany before the war and then he was an inspector during the military tribunals. The Great Atlantic Hurricane hit our farm, and he had to leave Germany before the trials were finished so he could help restore it.”
She sorted through the little she knew of his family’s history. If Charlie and Hanna had moved to the island after the war, they would have brought Lilly with them as a baby.
But the Americans didn’t even enter Nuremberg until April 1945. Plenty of soldiers fathered children in Germany, but the math still didn’t work for Charlie to have a child before he returned to Martha’s Vineyard.
“When did Hanna bring your grandmother to the States?”
“Actually, my great-grandfather brought her here by himself when he returned home.” Someone rumbled down the path nearby with a wheelbarrow. “Charlie was already married to my great-grandmother by then. A woman named Arlene.”
Ember tucked a loose piece of hair back
into her bun. That must have been an emotional scenario for Charlie to return home with a child from another woman. A girl who’d been scarred from the war.
“Did your grandmother keep in contact with her biological mother?”
“I don’t know,” Dakota said. “She doesn’t talk about Hanna out of respect for the woman who raised her, I think, and because she doesn’t remember much. I’m told Arlene loved my grandmother very much. She just refused to let Gram speak German in their home.”
“She was probably afraid that someone might hurt her because of her German heritage.”
“A valid fear, I would think, right after the war.”
Ember nodded. A lot of American Germans tried to hide their heritage. “Mrs. Kiehl used to speak German in class.”
“She said that she never stopped speaking it in her head or with the German boyfriend who became her husband. My grandparents used to speak German at home when Dad was a kid.” Dakota glanced over at her. “Do you remember my father?”
Titus Kiehl had knocked on their cabin door often for Alex in the late hours with something he deemed to be an emergency, long after her brother’s shift on the farm had ended. Alex had put up with the man’s anger for years, but after Ember arrived back on the island, her brother found a new job so they could move into Oak Bluffs.
She remembered Titus from those late-night outbursts and from sidelines of their high school football games. He was the parent who stood right behind the coaches, an equal opportunist when it came to yelling at the refs, the coaches, the opposing team. Most of all, at his son. Sometimes he even turned around and yelled at the home crowd, as if they were the enemy.
Dakota’s mother was quite different. Instead of yelling at the students, she was volunteering on the PTA. At least, until Dakota’s senior year. Those autumn weeks before Ember left school, when she’d thought that Dakota and she were a thing, he’d told her that his parents were getting a divorce.
After the disastrous homecoming game, Dakota’s mom left flowers on the patio when Ember refused to answer the door. There’d been a Bible verse on the card from the book of 1 John, about how God had lavished His love on her.
The Curator's Daughter Page 13