The Curator's Daughter

by Melanie Dobson

  Lukas was supposed to be in prison now, locked away for life.

  How did this woman know him?

  22

  HANNA

  “You never told me the Gestapo searched the house,” Kolman said, slamming the car door.

  She was too exhausted to fight. Another shipment had arrived at the museum last night, and Director Kohlhaussen said she must work faster in order to secure the items immediately, as if Great Britain might be dropping bombs on Nuremberg before the summer’s end.

  She needed to work longer hours, but oddly enough she might lose her job if she worked overtime. If she wasn’t finished by five each day, Kolman, she feared, would pull this position from her, snapping closed the door on her cage. Director Kohlhaussen would have no choice but to bow to the Reich’s oversight, and she’d be reassigned to Kinder and Küche—Kolman would never allow her to attend church.

  Dust billowed in the dry air as the driver backed away.

  “I assumed they told you weeks ago,” she said. “They haven’t returned.”

  Red dirt clouded around Kolman, making it look like he’d just crawled out of a furnace. “The Gestapo is not permitted in our home.”

  “I wasn’t in a position to refuse them.”

  “This is important, Hanna.” His boots clipped as he stepped closer. “You need to tell me what they said.”

  She suspected that Kolman already knew every word of that conversation. He was probably testing her to see if she would be honest with him.

  “They were searching for Paul and Luisa.” She glanced up at the second floor as if she might see their faces in the window.

  “And what did they find?”

  “Nothing. Paul and Luisa were already gone when I returned home.”

  “The agent said you refused to open a door.”

  “I didn’t refuse,” she said. “He wanted to see the attic, and I couldn’t find the key.”

  “But you have a key—”

  “I discovered it later.” She could never tell him or anyone that Luisa had given it to her.

  “Why was the attic locked?”

  “I don’t know, Kolman. Until Himmler ordered me back home, I hadn’t been here in four years.”

  He pointed toward the front door. “I’d like to see the attic again.”

  She retrieved the key from the desk and handed it over to him. When she’d given him the tour before, he had merely glanced at the dollhouses and returned to the lower floors, but this time he scanned the room like he was searching for something.

  “My grandfather made some of the finest dollhouses across Germany,” she said, tracing her hands across the polished roof of one that was almost her height.

  He moved to one of the finer houses and picked up a silver candlestick, rolling it between his fingers. “I almost want the agent to come back with his locksmith. See what he missed.”

  “There’s nothing for him up here.”

  Kolman examined her grandfather’s workbench. Then he knelt on the ground and chimed two pans together in the kitchen of the building that resembled the lodge. Outside the dollhouse window was the stone ribbing of the labyrinth, but he didn’t seem to notice it as he opened and closed the oven.

  He looked back up at her. “This is perfect for a girl.”

  “I suppose,” she concurred, not wanting to talk about children again. It would have certainly been a good place for her to play when she was younger, if her father had given her the choice.

  He stood slowly, then scooted a miniature tricycle across the floor of another dollhouse. “We will have children soon, won’t we?”

  “I don’t know—”

  “At least four of them.”

  “Four?” she gasped.

  “Himmler is requiring all of his men to revitalize the Aryan race in Germany first and then around the world.”

  “It’s not like I can order a child from the store!”

  “I’m quite aware of what it takes to make a baby.” He stood up and reached for a strand of her hair, twirling it slowly, and a torrent of nausea flooded over her at his touch, so different from the sparks she’d felt back in France.

  She was supposed to be researching their heritage, proving the strength of their roots, not contributing to a new generation of Aryans. How could he ask her to birth and then raise four children while he was out working for the Reich? Even one child, she feared, would break her, just like she’d broken her mother.

  Kolman didn’t understand this. Motherhood was supposed to come naturally to women, he thought, even more so than digging in the dirt. But no matter the motto of Deutschland, she’d never make a good one.

  Sleep evaded her most of the night as she tried to devise a plan to convince Kolman that she lacked the necessary skills to mother a nest full of Aryans.

  The next morning, she awoke a few minutes after six and saw her husband already dressed in his uniform. She scooted up quickly in bed, confused. When he began working in Nuremberg, he seemed to have stopped his morning walks into the forest.

  Kolman stuffed a jar of hair cream into his razor bag before glancing out the window. “If the Gestapo agent returns, tell him by the orders of Himmler himself, he must stay away from our house.”

  “You tell him.” She inched up against the headboard, pulling a pillow in front of her. Beside the door was a leather suitcase, and he heaved it onto the bed, clasping the brass buckles to close it.

  She stared at the suitcase. “Where are you going?”

  “Himmler has reassigned me to a location up north.”

  She flung her legs over the side of the bed, blood waking every vein. She could almost feel the trowel in her hands, the packed dirt under her feet. The mystery in the air as their team wondered what was underneath the curtain of soil. All they had to do was draw back history, one layer at a time, to see what nature would reveal. And just maybe find something like the Holy Grail.

  Outside the window, in the first light of day, she could see a Volkswagen waiting for him in their drive. “You’re traveling alone . . .”

  He lifted his suitcase off the bed. “I spoke with Director Kohlhaussen, and he said that he can’t spare you right now.”

  She pulled her feet back off the floor, curling them under her legs. How long had Kolman been planning to leave? As much as she wanted to be back in the field, she didn’t want to be there as his wife, waiting at the hotel or inn while the team excavated. The men would never respect her again for her expertise.

  Still Kolman should have told her that he was going away.

  “There is much to be done at the museum,” she said.

  He kissed her cheek. “And you will do it better than anyone.”

  For the first time in weeks, she felt a ray of hope. As if this new life of hers could finally begin. As if she might be able to flutter free from this cage after all.

  “Hanna?”

  Her mind was racing so fast with possibilities that she thought Kolman had already left. Instead he was still standing beside the door. “What is it?”

  “The driver will take you to work at eight every morning and pick you up at five.”

  “I don’t need a driver.”

  “He will keep you safe.” His eyebrows narrowed with the clap of his heels. “And help you stay away from Kaiserstrasse.”

  Then he was gone.

  She shivered against the pillows. How did Kolman know she’d tried to find the Dreydel family in Old Town?

  She watched him climb into the Volkswagen and speed away.

  His driver might keep watch over her outside, but he couldn’t control what she did inside this house.

  23

  EMBER

  “We weren’t really married.” Ember sank onto the damp bale of hay, as if the storm had opened up a hole, sending her tumbling into the sea. The light, she needed it to catch her before she drowned.

  “It doesn’t matter—”

  “No one told me until much later that Lukas and I were supposed to h
ave a license. I was so young—in order to marry, I needed the approval of a court.”

  “I’m sorry, Em.”

  She shook her head. “Please stop calling me Em.”

  “Gram wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

  “I know.” She looked through the barn door, at the sheep salting the hill outside, the thread of blue sky and sea beyond. The clouds had reached a truce, but a new storm was raging in her heart. “I was only fourteen when we had the ceremony. Lukas was supposed to be the next—”

  But how could she explain to him, explain to anyone, about the Aryan Council? How their fierce religion wasn’t to be questioned. How she’d been trapped in the web until the FBI broke her free. She’d gained her freedom then, but her sweet daughter . . .

  She tapped her hands against her legs again, reminding herself that she was strong. That God had replaced her weakness, her loss, with an outpouring of love.

  “Did you know what happened to my family in Idaho?”

  He sat down on the bale beside her. “Only a little. Dad had attended your father’s church a few times on the island, and I heard him talking to Gram about the compound in Idaho when you moved back. Arguing, really, about Lukas and something that happened when he lived near here.”

  Ember flinched. “Lukas never lived on Martha’s Vineyard.” Her first memories of him were on Eagle Lake, working with her dad to repair the cabins at the former church camp.

  Dakota leaned back, chewing on a piece of straw. “He had moved here from Germany; I remember Gram saying that. She and Dad fought about Lukas before my dad moved off the island. I thought it was odd since your father’s church had been disbanded for at least ten years.”

  The tapping on her legs slowed. “What did Lukas do to your grandmother?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Truly. But I do know that Gram cares about you, Ember. She would never want to hurt you, not like I did . . .”

  “You hurt me, Dakota, but the humiliation started long before you. For most of my childhood, I was made to feel . . .” She took a deep breath. “Worthless.”

  Her only redeeming value, she’d been told, was her Aryan blood, to create a new generation, but she couldn’t tell Dakota that. He’d think she was crazy.

  “No one should have made you feel like that, especially not me. If I hadn’t been so stupid, I would have told you that you were a treasure, Ember. Worth more than gold.”

  She dug her phone out of her pocket. “I need to call my brother.”

  “Of course.” He stood. “You want me to take you back to the cottage?”

  “No,” she said. “I’ll call him from here.”

  Dakota wandered off, giving her space.

  Mrs. Kiehl was right. Nothing she wrote in her dissertation would stop the ballooning hatred in their country, but she could remind those willing to listen that the pride of any race, pitted against another, led only to another kind of fire, burning people up from the inside.

  She couldn’t bury this desire that God had given her, this passion to share the truth. Her readers, her students, didn’t have to respond, but they would be given the opportunity to make a change. Ember and others were responsible, before God, to share what they had been given, and she desperately wanted others to know the history of how persecution began and what they could do to stop it.

  Her words, sprinkled on the raging fire, might not help, but if others joined her in looking solidly into the past and its reflection on their future, perhaps they could extinguish this persecution together.

  Alex’s familiar voicemail greeting was short, the same one he’d recorded years ago when he bought his phone. Her brother was a fixer, and a cell phone interrupted his work of resurrecting broken things for the guests at his inn. He celebrated every revived motor, each plumbing feat, the wires that sparked at his touch. Material things. He’d always been good to her, but relationships he struggled to mend.

  After the entire student body had laughed at her ridiculous walk onto the homecoming field, Alex made a strawberry milkshake for the two of them to share, as if that was all it took to wash away her tears.

  Sort of like the Phish Food she kept for Noah.

  “I’m coming through Philadelphia tomorrow and wondered if you’d have time for a late lunch. I wanted to talk to you about . . .” She couldn’t very well explain over voicemail why she wanted to speak with him. “I had a couple of questions that I wanted to ask.”

  Then she called another number in her list of contacts, one that she’d called often over the years. She gave the penitentiary officer at Atwater the familiar ID number, and in return, he gave her the same information that he’d given her the last four times she’d called.

  Lukas Tillich was the prisoner’s name, convicted of second-degree murder, age forty-eight, six feet and one inch, 210 pounds. His next parole hearing—what she wanted to know most of all—was September 13.

  The charges were second-degree only because the prosecutor hadn’t been able to prove that Lukas intended to kill her parents and five other members of the Aryan Council who’d died when he started the fire. According to the news articles that she read, he’d planned to confuse the federal agents so council members could flee.

  To Eagle’s Nest. The reporters didn’t write this, but she knew, like the others, where they were supposed to run.

  The FBI agent had whisked her away from the scene, but they never found Elsie. When they arrested Lukas, he was empty-handed. Her baby, Alex told her later, had drowned in the lake and Lukas had been locked away for thirty years.

  She and Alex had mourned this loss together when she arrived on the island. They’d given their family—her mother, father, and Elsie—a private memorial service, then they pressed on into the new millennium. She’d immersed herself in high school, trying to find value in fitting in, while Alex worked to support both of them. When she turned sixteen, she began serving buttered lobster rolls at a tourist stand to help pay bills and rent for their new house in town. Between school and work and the books she loved, she tried to fight off the ghosts from Idaho on her own. Another five years passed before she found a therapist able to help her face them.

  It was a delicate balance now, trying to forget the past even as the past kept haunting her.

  Dakota was beside the stone wall, stacking a mound of branches. Quietly she joined him, sweeping up the branches and trees that dangled from the limestone, tossing them in with the others.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah.” Her cell phone chimed, and she looked down to see a text from Alex. Where are you?

  Dakota nodded at her phone. “Is it Noah?”

  “It’s my brother.” On Martha’s Vineyard, she typed.

  She loaded up another armful of branches before he texted back.

  You swore you’d never go back there.

  I needed to meet with Mrs. Kiehl.

  His next note came back in rapid fire. I can be in Philadelphia by noon.

  She looked at Dakota. “The ferry will be running tomorrow, won’t it?”

  “I’m afraid not. They’ve postponed the next departure until Saturday afternoon.”

  She groaned, but the news wasn’t nearly as bad as it would have been last night. “I’ll have to reschedule with my brother.”

  “If you want, I can take you to Woods Hole in the morning so you can catch a bus to the Boston train station.”

  “You have a plane on this island?”

  “No, but I have a boat stored near the marina.”

  “If I get seasick on the ferry, I’ll never survive your boat.”

  Several sheep ambled up beside him, and he petted the fur of one as if it were a pet. “As long as another storm doesn’t come through, it should be a calm trip, but if you want to wait, you’re welcome to stay at the cottage. Either way, I have to take the boat over tomorrow morning. I’m scheduled to fly out of Logan in the afternoon.”

  She began to scroll through the Amtrak schedules to Philadelphia. “I�
�ll need to be at South Station by nine.”

  “If you’re ready to leave the cottage by six, we should get there in plenty of time.”

  She closed the app. “I’ll be ready.”

  “Tell you what.” He eyed the house. “Why don’t we say goodbye to Gram, and then I’ll take you out to eat?”

  She studied his face. “Where did you want to go?”

  “I know a decent place in Aquinnah.”

  She took a step back, cringing at the memory. “That pizza place?”

  “Please,” he said. “Give me one more chance at being your friend.”

  She thought for a moment. She wouldn’t mind a redo of that terrible night, when she wasn’t fawning over the man in front of her, but he’d only taken her to Aquinnah because he didn’t want anyone seeing them together.

  “I’m not hiding out on the other side of the island.”

  He patted the head of the sheep again. “Then how about lobster in Oak Bluffs?”

  “Locals will talk, Dakota.”

  He smiled. “I hope they do.”

  It was a risk, having another meal alone with this man, but he was only trying to be kind. Make up for what he’d done in the past. She was a strong believer in repentance and restitution. “Lobster sounds good.”

  He picked up another branch and threw it onto the pile. “Thank you, Em—Ember.”

  As if she was doing him a favor.

  “Do you think your grandmother would let me borrow some hot water for a shower before we leave?”

  “I suspect she’s going to want to apologize again.”

  “She only asked a question,” Ember said. “No need to apologize.”

  “Gram always apologizes, even when she hasn’t done anything wrong.”

  24

  LILLY

  SONNENWIESE CHILDREN’S HOME

  The adoption lady was dressed in red this time, the silver brooch pinned to her collar like a thorn from one of Mama’s roses. A man sat beside her in the forest room, his hair crisp like buttered toast, his gray shirt and trousers like fur.