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Twenty

Still in the observation car, Edith Gerhardt stares up at the snow-filled sky through the window in the ceiling and thinks about the past. Looking at the snowfall always had that effect on her, even when she was a little girl on the rooftop of her family’s ramshackle apartment building, her eyes aimed skyward.

Watching the snow now makes her think of her childhood, her parents, her husband, and a hundred other things. Friends and pets she’d completely forgotten about now appear so vivid in her mind it’s as if she’d seen them minutes earlier.

And she thinks about Anna and Tommy, the closest thing she’s ever had to a son and daughter.

They were good children. Well-behaved. So devoted to each other that they couldn’t see how different they were.

Anna took after her father. Smart, astute, prone to bouts of quiet, but always with a dreamy look in her eyes.

Tommy was clearly his mother’s child. How handsome he’d been. How effortlessly charming.

For six years, she cared for them, even though she’d been hired as a housekeeper and not a nanny.

She couldn’t help herself. She’d always wanted to be a mother, but it never worked out while her husband was still alive.

So Edith had transferred all that untapped maternal longing onto the Matheson children.

Making Anna breakfast, sneaking Tommy chocolate, tending to their skinned knees, frostbitten cheeks, foreheads hot with fever.

All of it had been real.

Of that, Edith is certain. Yet it didn’t stop her from choosing Germany over them when the time came to pick a side.

Kenneth Wentworth had a lot do with that.

Edith always referred to him as Der Spinne.

The spider. Always skittering into places he didn’t belong, often at the worst possible time.

And she was just a mere fly who got caught in his web the day he came to the Matheson residence when she was the only one home.

“Mr. and Mrs. Matheson aren’t here,” she said, which didn’t seem to surprise Mr. Wentworth.

“I’m here to see you,” he said. “You might not remember me. We’ve only met once or twice. Kenneth Wentworth.”

Of course Edith remembered him. Mr. Wentworth was hard to forget in many ways.

He was handsome, for one thing. He and his son had also shown up uninvited to the annual Matheson Christmas party, an incident that had upset Mrs. Matheson greatly.

She’d made quite a scene. A reaction that left Edith with a sense that Kenneth Wentworth was not a man to be trusted.

The feeling grew even stronger that afternoon, when he said, “I wanted to talk to you about the war.”

The question made Edith uneasy. From her accent, it was clear where she was from, and as Hitler’s mighty grip spread across Europe, she’d noticed the way reactions to her had changed.

Formerly friendly shopkeepers grew curt.

Housekeepers from neighboring homes stopped waving to her when she passed.

Distrust of Germans, she realized, was everywhere.

“What about it?” she said.

“Surely you have an opinion.”

Edith certainly did, but that was none of Kenneth Wentworth’s business. She started to close the door, mumbling an apologetic “Excuse me, but I must get back to work.”

Before she could completely shut the door, Mr. Wentworth blurted out the question that would change her life—and destroy the lives of her employers.

“Where do your loyalties lie, Miss Gerhardt?”

“Mrs.,” Edith said, quickly correcting him. “And they lie with my adopted country, of course.”

“Then would you care to explain this?”

Kenneth Wentworth removed a photograph from his jacket pocket and showed it to Edith.

She seized up at the sight of her younger self smiling for the camera, so proud of her crisp brown uniform and the swastika armband wrapped around its sleeve.

Her husband stood next to her, dressed the same, giving a stiff-armed salute.

Edith remembered the occasion. It was 1934, and her husband had just been made a ranking member of the Kreisleitung, the district level of the Nazi Party.

How proud she had been then. After years of decline, Hitler and the Third Reich were changing Germany for the better.

And she and her husband were doing their part.

Years later, as Edith looked at the photo, all sense of pride was gone.

She felt then—and still feels now—that Hitler was correct about the German race being superior to all others.

Just look at their accomplishments over the centuries.

All that art and music and technological advancement.

But Edith also knew what it meant if her past was revealed, especially with the war in full swing.

“Where did you get this?” she said.

Kenneth Wentworth flashed a reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Mrs. Gerhardt. I have no intention of causing you any trouble.”

“Then why are you here? Why are you showing me this?”

“Because I have a proposition for you.”

Edith knew even then that it was less of a proposition and more of a demand. He’d give her the photo—plus a heart-stopping amount of money—in exchange for her hiding business files throughout Mr. Matheson’s office.

“What if I refuse?” she asked.

“Then things could get very unpleasant for you, very quickly.”

“These files, what are they? Does it have something to do with the war?”

“Yes,” Kenneth Wentworth said. “Although it’s more personal than political.”

Edith’s knees weakened, for she knew this had something to do with Mr. and Mrs. Matheson. “Which side will benefit?”

“Your side, of course,” Mr. Wentworth said, adding with a wink, “The real one.”

“Isn’t this a disservice to your country?”

Kenneth Wentworth smiled again, this one more sinister than reassuring. “The only allegiance I have is to myself. But you, on the other hand, strike me as a person devoted to her homeland. Think about how this might help them.”

“Then I’ll do it,” Edith told him. “For Germany.”

What she hadn’t known at the time was the personal toll it would take.

She didn’t know that the plan involved a train exploding and Tommy Matheson torn to pieces and Arthur Matheson’s arrest, public shaming, murder.

But there was no backing out. Edith, by that point rich beyond her wildest dreams, had no choice but to keep up the ruse.

Now she stares up at the falling snow, slightly dizzy when she realizes that Anna was right.

Nothing she’d done has helped anyone but her and her co-conspirators.

Soldiers died and lives were destroyed for absolutely no reason.

Germany still lost the war, becoming a shell of its former self.

And Edith has never gone back there, which is more telling than she cares to think about.

If she loves her homeland so much, shouldn’t she be there and not on this train, being inexorably pulled to her ruin?

Yes, she realizes. She should. Yet she never considered going back. And now she understands it’s because, deep down, she knew that returning to Germany and seeing how much it had changed would have made the futility of her actions clear.

The realization hits her like a lightning bolt. A single, sizzling thought exploding in her brain as the rest of her seizes up.

It was a mistake.

All of it.

Betraying her employer, destroying his family, and covering it up had been a complete waste.

And now she regrets everything.

Edith tears her gaze from the observation car roof. As she looks at the snow-swept landscape outside, she becomes aware of someone approaching her from behind.

Slowly.

Silently.

Edith spots them in the observation car’s windows, which distorts the person’s reflection like a fun-house mirror. It takes her a moment to recognize the figure in the glass. When she does, Edith whirls around with a shocked gasp.

“Grauer Geist,” she says.