“Okay,” he said. “Talk.”
The setting sun was behind a cloud, blocking the painful rays. Mama, I hope you’ll forgive me for this.
“If I meet my mother, I’m concerned you’ll follow me and arrest her.”
“You can’t protect her anymore.”
“You said we have the same goal—to get Ethan back safely. I believe my mother may know who has him.”
“Why would she keep that information from us?”
“I’m not sure. She may be protecting someone or something from her past. But if you arrest her, things might go wrong with Ethan.”
“What do you have in mind?”
“My mother trusts me. Let me meet her alone.”
“I’m not letting you out of my sight.”
“I understand, but can you do it surreptitiously? Let me talk to her and try to find out who has Ethan, if she even knows.”
He was quiet for a long time. “You’re putting yourself in danger,” he said.
The cloud in front of the sun had turned a bruised purple pink. “She’s my mother. She would never hurt me.”
“She’s likely killed her fiancé and tried to kill your father.”
“My mother would never hurt me.”
“Let’s hope not,” he said.
CHAPTER 40
Aubrey hadn’t been to the Miami Beach Holocaust Memorial since her grandmother died ten years before. The park and sculpture garden were located on Nineteenth Street and Meridian Avenue. She, Mama, and Kevin used to come here with Nana three or four times a year, for certain Jewish holidays and other occasions that were special to her grandmother.
As she pulled her mother’s BMW into a parking spot just outside the memorial, she had the uncomfortable realization that this was only a few blocks away from the time-share and where her father had been hit by a car. Her mother had been in the vicinity, but Aubrey was relieved not to see Jonathan’s black SUV parked nearby. She wondered where Smolleck’s agents would station themselves.
She hurried toward the entrance, surprised there were no people around, but the memorial closed at sunset, and the sky was already beginning to darken. Her mother wasn’t in the Garden of Meditation. Aubrey gazed at the giant bronze upstretched hand, which rose out of a lily pond toward the sky, and remembered the awe she had felt the first time she’d seen it. The sculpture was beautiful, until you noticed the tormented souls trying to climb up the hand and out of hell.
She continued past a statue of two terrified children clinging to their mother, then through the wooden arbor overhung with white-bougainvillea vines and past the black-granite slabs etched with photos of the Holocaust.
Her mother wasn’t there, either.
As she stepped into the stone tunnel, the piped-in haunting voices of children singing surrounded her. She slowed as she got closer to the statue at the end of the tunnel. A small child reaching for help. Standing beside it was a woman in a white blouse with dark shoulder-length hair.
Her mother turned as Aubrey got nearer. Mama held out her arms toward her. “Sweetheart.”
Aubrey couldn’t hug her, she just couldn’t.
Her mother dropped her arms.
This place was too quiet, too personal. Besides, Smolleck would have a difficult time watching them here.
“I’d rather not stay here,” Aubrey said.
Her mother cocked her head but didn’t question her. “All right.” She followed Aubrey through the rest of the arbor, back to the giant hand sculpture in the lily pond.
Traffic went by in the street beyond the memorial. A couple of men stood on the other side of the pond. Probably Smolleck’s.
Her mother sat on one of the benches near the last statue of the same woman who stood at the entrance of the memorial. Here at the end of her journey, the woman and her two children lay dead, in the shadow of Anne Frank’s words about shattered dreams and ideals.
“Come sit, Aubrey.”
Aubrey stayed where she was.
“You remember coming here?” her mother asked.
“Of course.”
“This place was very special to my mother,” Mama said. “You know she lost her parents and older brothers and many other relatives in the Holocaust.”
“I know.”
“My mother was lucky.” Mama rubbed her hands together as though she were cold. “Her paperwork came through in 1939, so she was able to go to America. She was only sixteen. Then the door slammed shut. Very few Jews got out of Poland after that.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“I want you to understand why I did what I did.”
Aubrey’s legs went weak. She sat down on the bench, avoiding her mother’s eyes, terrified that she was about to hear her mother’s confession of guilt. Several white bougainvillea petals were scattered over the stone tiles with one crushed red petal.
“Your grandmother didn’t talk about the Holocaust when I was growing up, but before I left for college, she told me what had become of everyone in her family. Of her guilt at not being able to save them.” Her mother stared at her hands. “At first it made me sad, especially for my mother to have lost so much. But shortly after I got to college, I started thinking about things differently. I became angry that the people of Germany, as well as the Jews, hadn’t protested more vehemently about what their government was doing. Maybe if they had, they could have stopped the Nazis, stopped the war, prevented the Holocaust.”
Her mother turned to Aubrey. Her eyes were red. “I started college in 1969. The US government had pushed itself into a war with Vietnam. Many of us were angry, but I suppose I saw myself as being on a mission. I believed the aggression in Vietnam was a first step in curtailing the freedoms of Americans, and convinced myself that ordinary citizens had to stand up against the government or we would be opening ourselves up to another Holocaust. I wanted to do what my mother had been unable to. To save her family. To save her country.” Her eyes drifted to the statue of the woman with her dead children. “I failed.”
“You were a member of Stormdrain, weren’t you?”