The Curator's Daughter

by Melanie Dobson

  She’d done the writing, of course. Neither of them had really considered that he might contribute. At the time, it hadn’t even mattered to her that he didn’t offer to help, and that was the problem. She’d elevated—or lowered—Dakota to the level of a god she must serve.

  Whichever, she’d seen Dakota as someone who was better than her. Someone she didn’t deserve. All she had wanted was to be a normal teenager who liked music and movies and boys. A teenager who hadn’t lost her parents or child. But normal had slipped through her grasp long ago. Nothing about her past, it seemed, could be summed up as ordinary.

  “Do you remember when Mrs. Smith selected us to be partners to read The Odyssey?” she asked.

  The blank look on his face proved her point.

  “Of course you don’t remember.” The highlight of her year hadn’t even blipped his Richter scale. “I read the poem and wrote the speech. You only had to read it to the class.”

  “I thought I wrote that speech.”

  She shook her head.

  “I always thought you were talented, Ember. A lousy way to show it, I know. I didn’t deserve an ounce of your admiration.”

  She tried to force a smile onto her lips, embrace the normal. “You really didn’t.”

  “If we could go back, I’d do everything differently.”

  “Starting with . . .”

  “Odyssey, I suppose. That speech would have taken weeks to write because I would have wanted to spend hours upon hours with you.”

  If only they could have a do-over.

  “And I would have gone to your brother,” he continued. “Asked him if I could take you out on a real date to get seafood in Oak Bluffs.”

  She looped a finger around the mug handle. “I would have done just about anything for you back then. It would have been a lousy relationship. No relationship, really.” Just hero worship that he would have tired of quickly.

  “Well, if I had my personal Groundhog Day, I’d do it all again. The right way.”

  He waited for her to speak, as if her words might encourage this endeavor, but he wasn’t the weatherman in some nineties comedy. Nor was she going to spill her heart out on a redo.

  Her phone chimed—it was 9:40 local time.

  She sent her favorite ten-year-old a text, and he replied right back. Noah didn’t understand why she had to be gone so long, but his father had filled their freezer with Phish Food. And he’d been able to rework his schedule so he could meet his son at the bus stop every day.

  “Why is your father angry with your grandmother?” she asked tentatively, a skater testing out the ice.

  Dakota motioned for the server and paid their bill. “You want to walk a bit more?”

  “Sure.”

  Last night’s rainstorm had chased Nurembergers inside, but this evening people huddled around outdoor tables, eating dinner and sipping their wine. Laughter drifted through the buildings, bringing life to the old stones as Dakota and Ember climbed up to the castle. The steep hill flattened into a plateau, an open courtyard beside the locked castle doors.

  “You’re hiding something,” she said softly as she looked out over the city lights, marveling at the restoration after this town had been destroyed by bombs.

  “Something I’m ashamed of . . .”

  “Shame, I think, shuts us off from those who care most.” At least, that’s what her counselor once said.

  He turned to lean back against the wall. “Dad decided to take a DNA test this spring to prove the purity of his genes, but the results were not what he anticipated. He sent in new samples, multiple times, but they all came back the same. He’s half-Jewish, on his maternal side.”

  She blinked. “You’re ashamed of being Jewish?”

  “Of course not.” He looked wounded by her question. “But my dad is furious at Gram for ‘ruining’ his genes. He thinks she lied to him.”

  “Did she know she was partially Jewish?”

  “No. She doesn’t remember much before Charlie brought her to the island, but she’s always been proud of her German heritage.”

  “Perhaps Hanna was able to hide her Jewish background during the war.”

  “It would have been hard to do that in Nuremberg, wouldn’t it?”

  “Extremely,” Ember said. “Does your grandmother want to know the truth?”

  “I think she might be afraid of it.”

  “I understand.” Both their families were messy, it seemed. “People might lie, but genetics never do.”

  “I want to find out what happened to my grandmother, for our family’s sake,” he said. “I want my children one day to know exactly where they came from.”

  “You’ll be a good dad, Dakota.” So different from his father. “Like Charlie.”

  “I pray so.”

  The past might not define her—define either of them—but others created their own definition from the little they knew. Conclusion jumping, like she’d done so often herself.

  If Dakota was going to run, now was the time. Once she told him the truth of her past.

  “Have you heard of the Aryan Council?” she asked.

  “It was in Idaho—”

  She nodded. “After my father left Martha’s Vineyard, he decided it was his mandate to strengthen the white race and destroy anyone he perceived to threaten it. He founded this hostile group in a former Christian camp near Coeur d’Alene and stocked the commune with guns for the millennium. The FBI tore it apart at the end of 1999 before they could attempt their new world order. But it’s how I was raised. Me and my baby.”

  She couldn’t blame Dakota for running now, but he didn’t move.

  “You had a baby?”

  She nodded again, drumming the damp wall. “Her name was Elsie. We think she drowned in the lake, when the FBI raided.”

  “Oh, Ember . . .”

  “In the aftermath I felt like I was drowning as well, but returning to Martha’s Vineyard was a new start. A place for me to learn how to live.”

  His gaze dropped to the cobblestones. “My dad began to embrace the religion of white supremacy when I was a child.”

  “Did my father convert him?” she asked, alarmed.

  “He was already well on the way, I’m told, before your dad arrived. Mom wouldn’t let him go to your father’s church, but they met secretly. Hiring Alex was a way for him to stay connected, I think.”

  Guilt—Vergangenheitsbewältigung—rushed over her. As if this were somehow her fault.

  “Now I’m the one sorry.”

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, his voice strong. “At some point, Dad decided that the trouble with the world, all of his problems, boiled down to the race issue. He moved west to where, I’m told, he found others equally devoted to the Aryan cause.”

  She leaned forward. “Is your dad still in Idaho?”

  “That’s what Gram says. I haven’t talked to him in years.”

  She looked back out at the lights. Titus Kiehl had known for many years where she and Alex lived. He’d never made any attempt to harass either of them, but perhaps Ember became a threat when she started her fellowship at the Holocaust museum.

  “Dakota—” She took a deep breath. “The letters I’ve been getting are from Idaho. I wonder if members of the Aryan Council are still working there.”

  He reached for her hand, squeezing it gently. “You have to tell someone about my dad.”

  “I’ll call the head of security at the museum. She’s working with the Boise police.”

  It was a few minutes before five in Washington, so she placed the call, giving Rebekah the information.

  She and Dakota walked quietly back down the hill, hand in hand, as if nothing else mattered in that moment except being together. They were much different from the two teenagers who’d failed as friends in their high school years. Both of them knew who they were now, beyond their DNA.

  “Good night, Em,” he said, looking like how she’d felt in all her awkwardness at seventeen. As if h
e wasn’t sure if he should give her a hug or even kiss her on the cheek.

  This time, she didn’t correct him for the nickname. Instead she patted his shoulder, like he’d done to her at the Jetway. “Good night.”

  And she slipped quickly up to her room.

  43

  HANNA

  SUMMER 1945

  Hanna spent her summer with a team of women carting mounds of rubble from Old Town to a towering debris hill called Silberbuck on the Nazi Party Rally Grounds. Lilly returned to school during the morning hours, in a building outside the wall where the teacher didn’t require her to measure fellow students. Afternoons Lilly often spent with Grete Cohn.

  How ironic, she thought, to be digging haphazardly through piles of destruction when she used to dig with great care in her profession. Now she was shoveling up pieces of broken buildings and artifacts alike in order to survive, throwing it all into wheelbarrows, the income providing for their most basic needs.

  The summer garden and forest at home had given her and Lilly a full bounty, but autumn was coming and food was strictly rationed. She didn’t want to rely on the Americans to feed them.

  Daily she went to the Red Cross, checking for information about Luisa Gruenewald and Marianne Weber. She’d pinned their names to the bulletin boards, along with a picture of Luisa, but neither woman had been found.

  Her work at the museum seemed like a lifetime ago. She didn’t know what happened to all the crates she’d packed and neither did Grete, but no amount of wrappings, no cellar, could have withstood this bombing in Old Town. The director had used the mine, she hoped, to store it all away.

  The zoo reopened in May and new animals arrived almost daily from zoos across Europe that had suffered irreparable damage. American troops continued to oversee the Tiergarten, so the soldiers remained in her home. And Charlie. She made certain she was never alone with him, and he didn’t push the issue. He was rarely at the lodge anyway.

  This afternoon, though, she was shocked to see him walking through the market square with Director Kohlhaussen and several American officers. The director didn’t see her, didn’t even seem to look at any of the workers he passed. His mind, she guessed, was focused on trying to recover any remaining artifacts.

  But what was Charlie doing with him?

  An orphan, one of hundreds who lived among the wreckage on these streets, stopped Charlie. Guttersnipes, the soldiers called them. Some of them had lived at the zoo. Others built their own little rooms out of the rubble. They all stole coal from the trains to exchange for food.

  Charlie took out a silver case from his pocket, gave him a Chesterfield. Americans weren’t supposed to give gifts to any German, young or old, but this one cigarette would buy the boy food for a week.

  If something happened to her, God forbid, Lilly would be on the streets with these orphans. They’d survived the war, but Lilly, she feared, would never make it trying to live among the brokenness of their city.

  “No time to linger,” the supervisor said, and Hanna scooped another pile of rubble in her shovel, one of thousands necessary to relocate the remains of Lorenzkirche.

  When she turned back, Charlie and the other men were gone.

  That night, she slipped out of her room after Lilly slept. Charlie was downstairs at the desk, eight other soldiers smoking their cigarettes in the great hall, playing cards in the glow of electric light, drinking their schnapps.

  She sat down beside him. “You’re not really here for the zoo, are you?”

  His eyes flashed in response; then he motioned to the other men. They crushed their cigarettes in an ashtray and stomped up to beds scattered in the three remaining bedrooms and between dollhouses they’d helped restore.

  “The soldiers are working at the zoo,” he said.

  “But not you,” she persisted. “What exactly are you doing here?”

  “I have another assignment in Nuremberg.”

  She studied the empty space behind the desk where Hitler’s portrait had hung. Kindling, she’d used it for over the winter. One day she would put Saint Katharine back on the wall.

  “I saw you today,” she said, “walking through the Hauptmarkt.”

  He nodded but didn’t say anything.

  “I helped Director Kohlhaussen pack crates to store the museum’s artwork and other artifacts during the war, but no one has told me if these crates have been found.”

  “They’ve been located,” he said. “We are working with the director to safely retrieve it all.”

  “The crates survived the bombing?”

  He nodded again, but he didn’t tell her where they were. The information, she thought, must be kept secret to stop looters, but if they’d found the museum’s cache on her property, wouldn’t she have seen their trucks?

  Then again, she never saw German soldiers bringing crates up to the mine.

  Was this the reason that Charlie decided to billet at her home? To find all the artifacts? But if the crates were on her property, why was he with the director in Old Town?

  Charlie, like her husband, was keeping secrets. She wouldn’t ask again, nor would she tell him about the locked grate until he was honest with her. Or she found out what was inside.

  A picture reappeared in her mind of Kolman on those early mornings before she rose, walking through the meadow.

  “Have your men located Kolman?” she asked.

  He watched her carefully before responding. “We have not.”

  “But you are continuing to look for him.”

  “Intently,” he said. “We are searching for everyone who persecuted the Jewish people.”

  Kolman had tormented her in his own way, but persecuting others? What had her husband done?

  “Kolman is an archaeologist . . .”

  “Was an archaeologist,” he said. “We’ve found camps of people in the east, and terrible things happened there . . . Kolman, we believe, was an integral part of it.”

  Nausea rippled up from her stomach, and she took several deep breaths to calm it. As much as she wanted to contradict this possibility, as most wives would do, she wondered if Kolman had murdered some of the Jewish people.

  “We have to find the truth, Hanna.”

  She straightened the ashtray on the coffee table, wanting to right in some way what Kolman—who Kolman—had wronged.

  “During the war,” she said slowly, “I kept the stories of what happened to some of the Jews in Nuremberg. Of what the Nazis did—”

  He inched forward. “Do you still have them?”

  “Yes.” She turned toward the window. “They are hidden away.”

  “We have to convict these beasts,” he said, his eyes flashing. “I need the stories, and I need evidence to prove what they did.”

  She turned the ashtray one more time before speaking again. “Are you here to convict me as well?”

  “Have you done something wrong?” he asked quietly as if he was afraid of her answer.

  She glanced up at the ceiling, to the space below where Lilly slept. “I cared for things taken from fellow Germans and other countries. I protected them so they wouldn’t be harmed. At first I didn’t know they were stolen, but eventually I found out.”

  He sighed. “It was an impossible situation.”

  “What have you heard from Poland?” she asked. “Some of those artifacts . . .”

  “Poland is in a terrible state. The Russians have taken over.”

  “So nothing will be returned?”

  “Eventually, I hope, but not now.”

  “What about the people?” she asked.

  “We are working to bring everyone home.”

  Bringing the Germans home from Poland, but what about returning the Polish children? She didn’t dare ask. Didn’t even want to know, really. Lilly would be sent into a broken state, she had no doubt. Her beautiful daughter would be a target for those who preyed on children.

  She had to protect Lilly, at least until the world began to make sense again.
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br />   At first light she walked out to the mine, but the grate was still locked and didn’t appear to be disturbed. She continued her walk to the labyrinth and dug up the stories, dozens of them, she’d buried under the rocks. But she left Lilly’s paperwork under the soil. Charlie was here to return things, to right what had gone wrong. To bring justice back to Germany.

  It wouldn’t be justice to send Lilly back to Poland. Not yet.

  One day she would go with her daughter and see if the Nowak family survived the war.

  44

  EMBER

  “You can’t go back.”

  Ember woke in the middle of the night, the fog clearing as those words rattled in her head. The night of the fire, in those moments when Ember was fighting to save Elsie’s life, Aimee had told her that she couldn’t go back to the cabin.

  A latch flipped inside her. A quaking that shifted the fragments of memories even as she hammered the mattress with her fists. She couldn’t go back, didn’t want to go . . . unless she could recall the missing pieces in the fog. That was the only reason she’d return.

  Her hands began to slow, her mind drifting.

  For years, the tapping had calmed the memories, but she decided to stop for just this moment, allow herself to step back into that dark place one more time.

  So she could remember.

  She had kissed Elsie’s head before walking down to the lake that night, like she always did. And she’d tiptoed out of their room so Lukas wouldn’t hear.

  Her heart had been wrecked, the turmoil overwhelming. The lake had called to her, but God’s call was stronger. A call to live.

  Aimee was about five years older than she was, the daughter of another elder. While Ember hadn’t really called her a friend—they’d all been raised to be suspicious of one another—she knew her well enough to know her greatest secret.

  Joseph didn’t allow anyone to deliver things to the compound, so Aimee was one of the few who drove into Coeur d’Alene for supplies. And Aimee had fallen head over heels for the young man who’d bagged their groceries.