“I can’t imagine they will keep it,” June said. “They’ll probably be advised by their grandparents to sell it and split the profit so that they can each buy their own place someday. Two teenage boys have no use for a house in Malibu. I need to be the one to buy it from them.”
“So when will you do that? I mean, how long will it take for…” Eva’s voice trailed off.
“I have no idea how long before Elwood will be declared dead. And I can’t ask anyone.”
“But if those boys don’t want to sell it, where will you go?” Eva asked, knowing intimately what it is like to have a home one day and be without one the next.
“I can’t even begin to think about that. I guess I’ll have to go back to the city and get what I can afford.”
“And you’d just leave Elwood…here?” Melanie asked.
Eva saw June shudder. “What choice would I have?” she said.
“But…,” Eva began as a new thought sprang to mind, and then she closed her mouth. She was about to say: What if the boys keep the house and decide someday to take out the rose garden?
What if they should decide to dig?
The quiet resting place of a good but troubled man would become a crime scene. The police would come looking for June. She would likely be charged with murder despite her claim Elwood had overdosed on sleeping pills. June would spend the rest of her days in prison as a murderer who had killed no one.
Eva suddenly knew what would need to be done if June lost the house. Perhaps regardless of whether or not she got it.
It was the only thing that could be done, really, though it seemed impossible to carry out.
It would require a great deal of planning.
Still, she was the one who could do it if therewasa way to make Elwood’s last resting place forever secure.
If there was a way, she could do it for June. For all of them, really.
After all. She had done it before.
21
Eva had somehow known from the first day of working for Louise Geller that this woman would change her life.
She wasn’t normally given to prescient thoughts but there was no mistaking the sensation when she met her that Louise was going to be the person to set her on a new course. Sascha’s mother had done that, too, by fleeing with Eva and Sascha’s sister Tanja to Berlin when the Red Army began its march to reclaim occupied Kyiv. But this relationship with Louise was going to be different. With Irina, Eva had been bound by a promise she’d made to her father to do whatever Sascha’s mother asked of her. She’d been just shy of her sixteenth birthday when she’d made that pledge, and still seen as a dependent child in the eyes of the world.
By the time she met Louise, however, she was twenty-two.
The war had been over for five years and she was alone in yet another Displaced Persons camp, this time in southern Germany. Irina had long since remarried a Hungarian man she’d met in their second DP camp and moved with him and Tanja to Budapest. Though Irina had been her last link to Sascha, they’d lost toucheven before the war ended, when Irina and Tanja relocated to a different DP camp so that she could be with the man she was going to marry.
It was after Irina left that Eva learned southern Germany’s new occupiers, the Americans, had been told by Moscow that the Soviet Union wanted its citizens in DP camps repatriated, whether they had a home and family to go back to or not. American camp officials were expected to make that happen.
It had given Eva nightmares thinking what her return to Russia would be like. She’d surely be seen as a conspirator who’d sided with the Reich as its soldiers marched into Kyiv, and a traitor who then worked for the Nazis for nearly two years. Eva knew what the Red Army did to traitors…
When a dorm mate Eva had befriended told her she was going to tell the American forces overseeing the camp that she was Polish and that all of her documentation had been stolen from her during the war, she invited Eva to do the same. They agreed to pretend they were cousins who could corroborate each other’s claims. Living in the camps alongside Polish women for several years had allowed them to pick up just enough of the language to fake it.
“What if the Americans check the camp records?” Eva had asked her as they formulated their plan.
Her friend had replied, “What if they don’t?”
In the end, there had been no camp records to check. At this new monastery turned refugee camp, it was not unheard of for someone to claim his or her few belongings had been stolen from them, been destroyed by warfare, or been lost.
The Americans in charge believed that Eva and her friend were Polish cousins brought by force to Germany to labor for the Reich. They believed it simply because the same was true for hundreds of thousands of other non-Germans who were in Germany at war’send. The Americans believed Eva’s suitcase had been ransacked and that she’d been robbed of her identification papers. She was given new ones.
Eva had felt a tremendous sense of control that she’d not only managed that deception but that it had held. She had in an instant become someone else.
And now she felt the same was going to happen with Louise; she was embarking on a new life without camp officials and foreign occupiers forcing her hand or erecting limitations. Her new employer was going to be instrumental in helping her forge a new future. She couldn’t explain it, but she could feel it. And she wanted it. She needed it.
