“Thank you.” Anneliese reached out as if to touch Jordan’s hand. Jordan stepped back. Anneliese gave a small sigh, took the armful of clothes, dressed herself in Jordan’s and Nina’s view to be sure she did not try to hide anything among the layers. Was escorted downstairs and out of the house, unbound yet enclosed by the triple gauntlet of Tony, Ian, and Nina. People were watching, across the street. Whispering. What on earth could be happening at the McBride house? Keep an eye on the front page and wait, Jordan thought, glad she had kept Ruth upstairs.
The taxi was waiting. Ian opened the door for Anneliese, like a courteous escort. Anneliese straightened her hat with an automatic gesture, looked at Jordan. Her lips parted.
Say it, Jordan thought. Tell me you’re sorry. Tell me why you did it. Tell me . . . something.
Anneliese’s soft lips closed. She sank into the cab; her gloved hand pulled the door behind her.
And they were all gone.
JORDAN DIDN’T MAKE the mistake her great-aunt did so long ago when her mother lay dying, saying Your mother has gone away in an effort to spare the truth. “Years ago, your mother did some bad things,” Jordan told Ruth simply. “She’s going back to Austria to answer questions about them.”
“When will she come back?” Ruth whispered.
“She won’t be coming back, Ruth.”
Jordan braced herself, but Ruth didn’t seem to want more information.
“Do we have to go back to the lake?” she wanted to know, fingers twined through Taro’s collar.
“Never,” said Jordan. “We’re going to sell that cabin.” Sell it or burn it like Nina had done with her U-2 in the forest, make a pyre of it for all the terrible things that had happened there.
Ruth said no more, her small face shuttered. Jordan didn’t press her, only sent her to bed with a mug of cocoa and sat stroking the blond hair until Ruth sank into sleep. You’ll sleep, but you’ll also dream, Jordan thought, looking at her sister. Poor Ruth, confused all her life by nightmare fragments of memory. Sometimes pulling away from Anneliese, sometimes toward her. I hope she never remembers what she saw. I very much hope that.
But if she did, Jordan would tell her what happened. She’d tell Ruth everything she needed to know, as kindly and honestly as she could. “Good night, cricket,” Jordan whispered at last, tiptoeing out.
It was the first time she’d been down to the darkroom since Anneliese had locked her in. She stopped at the top of the stairs for a moment, smelling her stepmother’s faint lilac scent, then flicked the light and came down the steps. Only to be seized around the waist by a man’s arms, and to hear a familiar voice in her ear: “Come here, J. Bryde.”
Jordan shrieked, whirled, and smacked him all in the same motion. “Tony Rodomovsky, I’m going to kill you—” Raining more smacks down on him where he stood at the foot of the stairs.
“I apologize.” He offered himself up for the smacks, no resistance. “Es tut mir leid. Je suis désolé. Sajnálom. Imi pare rau. Przepraszam—”
“Shut up.” Another smack. “You couldn’t knock on the front door instead of—”
“I only just got back. Seeing the ship off, then settling things in Scollay Square. And I knew you’d be putting Ruth to bed, so I waited here.”
Jordan stood back, palms stinging. “You’re not on the boat,” she managed to say, rather unsteadily.
“Brilliant deduction, Holmes. Why did you think I’d be on the boat?”
“You didn’t say . . .” Jordan floundered. “It’s done here. You’re done. New chase, new hunt—”
He raised his eyebrows. “New girl?”
She kept her tone matter-of-fact. “We both said it was a summer fling.”
“I thought we discussed modifications to the contract. A potential three-month extension into an autumn fling, as per agreement by both parties—”
“Don’t tease,” Jordan begged. “I watched my stepmother walk away in handcuffs, more or less. Soon it’s going to be all over the front page—”
“Which is one reason I’m staying, at least for a while. Nina and Ian can handle the Austrian authorities without me. But there are going to be questions to answer here, especially when Ian’s done with the story and it breaks.” Tony’s eyes were steady. “I said I’d stay to handle them.”
That made Jordan weak with relief. She tried not to show it, but he reached out to push her hair back, smiling under the harsh light with an extra quirk of tenderness, and tugged her close for a slow, warm kiss, then another. Jordan felt her bones loosen in relief. “Oh, God, Tony. I’m so glad you came back.”
She wished she hadn’t said it—he was supposed to be a friend, a lover, not a rock to cling to. They’d only known each other for a summer. But his arms felt wonderfully rocklike and reassuring, and just for a moment she let herself cling.
“Are you cuddling?” He pulled back, felt her forehead with an anxious hand as if checking for a fever. “You never cuddle. Your idea of afterglow is developing six rolls of film.”
Her laugh was watery, but it was a laugh.
“Now, that really is better.” He pulled back, kissed the tip of her nose, and said with deliberate lightness, “Go swish prints around in trays. I’ll cheer from the sidelines.”
They were both silent in the red light as Jordan processed the most recent roll, comforted slowly by the familiar motions. One by one, she hung the prints, gave them a chance to drip as she cleaned up. She came back to the line, bracing herself, and Tony moved to stand at her elbow. Silently they looked from print to print.
“They’re good,” he said quietly.
Not all of them. Some were blurred, focused on people moving too fast. But that one . . . and that one . . . “Yes,” Jordan said. “They’re the best I’ve ever done.”
She took down a shot of Anneliese leveling the pistol straight at the camera lens. Eyes like lake ice from Nina’s frozen, unknowable home. Jordan knew where it belonged. Going to the folder with her photo-essay prints, she laid them all out in a line, starting with her father, ending with Anneliese and her cornered, merciless gaze. “I couldn’t find the right image to finish it,” Jordan said. “A Killer at Work.”
Tony looked from print to print. “You’ll sell it,” he said. “You do know that?”
“Maybe.” And she could even see this shot as the start of a new essay entirely focused on Anneliese, the progression of a demure bride to an ice-eyed murderess to a prisoner on trial. Shades of a Murderess. Portraits of a Huntress. Something like that might help Ruth understand the many faces of the woman who had stolen her and raised her and cared for her. But Jordan turned away from the worktable, rubbing her temples. “Ruth has to come first, now. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for this. I can’t work the way I was planning to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I’m all Ruth has.” Once again Jordan felt the panic of that, the fear of failing her sister. “I’ll have to do it all, now.”
“As long as I’m in Boston, I’ll help. Not because of you and me, because the team owes you, Jordan. This hunt blew your world to bits.”
“That wasn’t your fault,” Jordan stated. “Dad was already gone before you even came here, and once you began tracking Anna, there were going to be other consequences no matter how she ended up caught. I’ll gladly take them, if it means she’s out of Ruth’s life.”
“That doesn’t mean it sits right with me to swan off and leave you picking up the pieces. It won’t sit right with Ian or Nina either.”
“You’d help us?” The fierce common bond between them all had been Anneliese—what was left when that was gone?
Could it be Ruth?
Tony wrapped his arms around her waist. “Count on it, J. Bryde.”
They stood for a long time, silent under the red light. Jordan’s thoughts were a jumble, exhaustion and relief and cautious hope. The thought of going on entirely alone, carrying Ruth into the coming storm of the breaking scandal, had felt like that hair-raising moment when Nina cut the engine and the plane began to drop. Now it felt like Tony and his partners had reached around, flicked the switch, turned the engine back on. The plane had leveled.
Jordan twisted her head, kissed Tony lightly. “Come upstairs and stay the night.”
“Are you sure? Nosy neighbors take note when gentlemen callers leave in the morning.”
“My family is about to become notorious all through Boston.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over one shoulder and tugged him up the darkroom steps, switching on the overhead light. “I don’t really care if the neighbors think I’m a hussy.”
“Jordan?”
She half turned. Click. Standing two steps below, Tony lowered the little Kodak he’d taken out of his pocket, smiling. “I want a picture of my girl.”
Sometimes you got great pictures with skill, Jordan later thought, and sometimes great pictures just happened. That cheap Kodak snap was the best picture of Jordan McBride ever taken, in its subject’s opinion. Blue jeans and a ponytail, caught in motion halfway up a staircase, slinging the Leica casually over one shoulder as she looked back at the camera. A woman on the move, with a gleam in her eye like a lens.
It was the photo most used by J. Bryde, in her byline.
Chapter 59
Ian
October 1950
Vienna