“Maybe not, but I’ll never understand what I do in the air. I just do it.” Nina wriggled her fingers. “Magic.”
Yelena laughed, but it did feel like magic: Nina had no idea why a propeller worked or what the flying wires did, but as soon as the wheels lifted from the ground, her whole body disappeared into the plane. Her arms became wings, her torso filled the cockpit, her feet disappeared into the wheels. The sensation only strengthened in night flying; her eyes disappeared altogether and she could no longer see that she hadn’t become part of the plane. Flying through a midnight sky came as naturally to Nina as a rusalka swimming through her lake. She didn’t have Yelena’s grace or Lilia’s reflexes, but she had no fear of the dark and moved in the air like it was home. It didn’t make her the best, but it made her very good, and for Nina that was enough.
February came to Engels, bearing rumor and heartbreak on an icy wind. One of the navigators learned that her parents had starved to death in Leningrad; a girl in the armorer class had a brother fighting the German advance who swore in his letters that the Fritzes were decorating their tanks with Soviet heads. But even the most ghastly rumor couldn’t dent the ferocious anticipation as the women received their assignments. Nina stood breathless as names were read off.
Aviation Group 122 was no more. There were only the 586th, the 587th, and the 588th. New minted Junior Lieutenant Nina Borisovna Markova would fly out with the 588th.
The night bombers.
Chapter 16
Jordan
Thanksgiving 1946
Boston
Jordan.” Anneliese came into the dining room and dropped the bomb. “Have you been looking through my things?”
Jordan froze, hands full of silverware. She looked across the expanse of dining room table that Anneliese had decorated for Thanksgiving with the gold-rimmed china that only came out of the cupboard a few times a year. Looked at her stepmother, who gazed back at Jordan with quizzical innocence.
“What’s that?” Jordan’s father said, distracted. He was on hands and knees at the sideboard, unearthing the turkey platter.
“I was asking Jordan if she’d been searching my things,” Anneliese said, still with that puzzled air. “Because I think she has been.”
“I was cleaning.” Jordan hitched her voice into use with a jerk she hoped wasn’t too audible. How did you know? “That’s all.”
“Then why were you looking through my Bible?”
The picture, Jordan thought. She’d thought she’d put it back exactly as she found it, but—
Her father rose, puzzled. “What’s this about?”
It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. It was Thanksgiving Day—the house smelled of sage and turkey and fresh-baked rolls, sending Taro into a tail-wagging shiver of canine delight. Ruth was laying out napkin rings, rosy cheeked at the idea of her first Thanksgiving. Within the hour, they should have been sitting down to eat. This was not when Jordan had planned to broach the subject of exactly who and what her stepmother might be. She was going to wait until the holiday was done and both Anneliese and Ruth were out of the house. Then she would lay her case before her dad alone, speaking calmly like an adult, not a child with a wild theory. She would convince him first, and then they could surprise Anneliese together.
But now Anneliese was the one who’d surprised her, and all the cards were up in the air.
“It’s nothing, Dad.” Jordan smiled, trying to slide past the moment. “Let’s check the turkey.”
But Anneliese was holding her ground, looking more and more hurt. “My Bible is private. Why would you—”
Jordan’s father was folding his arms now. “What’s going on, missy?”
He wasn’t going to budge, she could tell.
So, then.
Jordan looked at her stepmother, frail and pretty in her powder-blue dress, pearls like congealed ash compressing her throat. Met those blue eyes square and didn’t blink. Anneliese didn’t either, but Jordan thought she saw surprise there—as if her stepmother had expected fluster, not calm.
“If you think this is the time to bring it up,” Jordan said, “then by all means, let’s talk about this.” She laid down the silverware, aware her hands were sweating. “Ruth, will you take the dog into your room and play? Thanks, cricket.” She was not getting into this within Ruth’s earshot. Jordan waited until she heard the click of the bedroom door and then turned back to her stepmother.
“I don’t know if Anneliese Weber is your real name,” Jordan said without preamble. “I don’t know if you were really born in Austria, or if you came to this country legally or were running from something. What I do know is that you’re a liar. You’re a Nazi. And you’re not Ruth’s mother.”
The accusation hung in the suddenly electrified silence, crackling. Jordan felt as though she’d pushed all the air out of her lungs along with the words. She looked at Anneliese, standing there so decorative and pretty. She’d imagined her stepmother flinching or recoiling—maybe bursting into laughter or tears.
But not a muscle moved in Anneliese’s face. Her blue eyes didn’t widen even a fraction of an inch. “Goodness,” she said at last. “Where has all this come from?”
Jordan’s father was looking thunderous. “Jordan—”
“This isn’t a wild story I’ve made up.” She kept her voice calm, reasonable. This was no time to be shrill or defensive. “I have proof, Dad. Just look at it, that’s all I ask.” She’d been keeping the photographs tucked in the lining of her pocketbook, waiting for the right chance to show her father—she got them quickly, laid the first one down on the table before him. The photograph she’d snapped in the powder room after the wedding. “Anneliese’s wedding bouquet. She tied an Iron Cross into it as a wedding charm. An Iron Cross, and it’s not from the fourteen-eighteen war either. That’s a swastika. It’s a Third Reich medal.” Swinging her eyes back to Anneliese. “I didn’t find it in your room when I looked, so what did you do with it?”
Anneliese was silent. Dan McBride’s gaze flicked over the photograph despite himself. Jordan rushed on, the words flowing like a river. Lay it out. Make your case.
“That’s not all. Look at this.” The second photograph, the copy of the vacation picture in Anneliese’s Bible: the couple in bathing suits, standing by the lake waving to someone unseen. “Is that your husband, Anna?”
“Yes,” she answered, still calm.
“Kurt? Or Manfred? Because I’ve heard you use both names. Kurt Weber is listed on Ruth’s birth certificate as her father, so who’s Manfred?”
Blue eyes flickered, then. Triumph stabbed Jordan. She was getting somewhere. Yes.
“The Iron Cross is his, isn’t it?” she pressed. “Because he was a Nazi. And don’t give me that utter horseshit about—”
“Jordan!” Her father barked, an automatic reproof for swearing, but he was still staring at the photograph. She pressed on.
“—about how being a member of the Nazi Party didn’t make you one of the bad ones, Anna, because he wasn’t just a Nazi. He was SS, wasn’t he?” Jordan stabbed a finger down on the man in the photograph, his upraised arm. “He has a tattoo on the underside of his arm. You can just see it, there. Most SS officers had their blood types tattooed under the left arm.” Jordan turned back to her father. “Mr. Sonnenstein told us that, remember? He helped identify the provenance of those paintings that came out of Hamburg right after the war; he told us how the owner selling them had been SS, trying to pass as a French art dealer. How he’d been identified by his tattoo.” Looking back at Anneliese again. “Your husband was a decorated officer in the SS. And neither of you were Ruth’s parents, because the date on that photograph says M?rz, 1942. March. Ruth was born in April ’42 according to her birth certificate, Anna, so why aren’t you eight months pregnant in that photograph?”
This time the silence wasn’t charged through with electricity. It blanketed the room like a weighted sheet. Jordan’s father was standing as if he’d been turned to granite, gaze switching between the photographs on the table. Anneliese stood hands folded, looking at Jordan, and something in that gaze made Jordan’s heart bang off her ribs in a sudden surge of fear. It was the look she’d captured in the very first picture, the night her father had brought Anneliese to dinner. The woman who looked so fragile and pretty, now somehow dangerous.
“It’s more than just this.” Jordan swept a hand at the pictures. “You spin a story about a refugee attacking Ruth at Altaussee, but it’s you Ruth recoils from. She remembers her mother playing the violin, yet you told me you never played it. Who are you?” From the kitchen came the muffled chime of the timer to check the turkey, but no one moved. “Who are you?” Jordan repeated.