“You’re coming with me.” Eva had no sooner wrapped her arms around Louise to help her up when her friend screamed Ernst’s name and Eva felt herself being lifted away from the floor as if on puppet strings. Then she was flying. She slammed into the wall andthen fell to the floor. Stars burst in her head much like they had when the Red Army soldier smacked her with the butt of his rifle on that long-ago, terrible day.
For several seconds a buzzing blackness filled her mind.
When her vision cleared, she saw Ernst kicking Louise as she lay on the floor at his feet after he’d flung her there, hurling insults at her.
Louise was curled into herself, crying out, begging him to stop, but he did not. Eva knew she had to make him stop. He had to stop. She stood on shaking feet, grabbed the largest piece of the broken vase, the heavy bottom, and swung it hard, cracking the back of Ernst’s head.
He went down next to Louise with a groan, but the next second he grabbed his wife’s wrist as she lay just feet from him. He dug his nails into the soft flesh of Louise’s underarm as he tried to yank her toward him. She cried out in pain.
In that moment, every terrible thing Eva had witnessed since the moment her father and brother and Sascha were taken from her, every cruelty she’d seen in Kyiv, every act of anger and aggression at the camps, every moment she wished she could unsee, smashed into her. She had not been able to save her family or Sascha. She’d not been able to save any of the people the Nazis had executed in Kyiv. She’d not been able to save anyone.
Until now.
She would stop Ernst.
Eva raised her arm and brought the base of the vase down on the back of Ernst’s head.
She did it again and again and again until he was still and the vase bottom was red in her hand.
There.
He had stopped.
In the years that followed, Eva would understand completely why June buried Elwood in the backyard. She would understand why a person might decide the best thing to do with a body that needs to disappear is to bury it in a rose garden in the backyard. When one is traumatized and frightened and tired but required nonetheless to address a gigantic problem at that very same moment, one might do an impulsive thing.
No one would believe Ernst might have killed them both, Louise said in those endless minutes after they both realized he was dead. No one was going to believe that Ernst had been violent with Louise since the earliest days of their marriage. No one would believe it because Ernst was an upstanding citizen of fine pedigree and held an important position with the biggest bank in the country. Louise was a nobody American who’d never complained in the past about anything Ernst had done. Ernst’s family had wealth, privilege, and influence. She had nothing. If she called for an ambulance, it was likely Eva would be arrested for murder. Louise probably would be, too, as an accessory.
As they dug his grave in the backyard, Louise decided on the story she would tell Ernst’s family and the authorities. Ernst had already been planning to go the following morning to Starnberger See, a beautiful lake outside Munich where he liked to row his canoe for recreation and exercise. It was how he maintained his strong physique. Louise would report him missing that evening when he failed to come home. After they were done burying the body and while it was still the wee hours, Louise would drive Ernst’s car to the lake’s shore, and Eva would follow behind in Louise’s car. They would push Ernst’s canoe out into the water and let it float away. Then they would return to the house in Louise’s car, leaving Ernst’s at the lake. Louise would bring Eva back to the DP camp in the morning and Eva would tell her roommates sheslept over at her employer’s house after working at a dinner party that lasted past camp curfew when the gates were locked.
Eva, numb and in shock, at first said nothing as they dug and Louise spoke their plan into being.
All she could think about was that she had killed a man. A monster of a man but still a man. She’d killed him.
Ernst was dead. Dead. He was dead.
And Louise kept laying out what they would do about it, with tears of fear and perhaps relief slipping down her face as she plunged her shovel into the ground.
When the plan was implemented, Louise was saying, she would play the grieving wife concerned for her missing husband. In a few days’ time it would be determined that Ernst Geller had drowned, for there was no other conceivable explanation. “And this nightmare will be over,” Louise said. Eva would immigrate to the States just like they’d talked about.
At this point in their digging, Eva found her voice. “I only meant to stop him, Louise. I just wanted him to stop. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Louise dropped her shovel and gathered Eva into her arms. “I’ve imagined him dead a hundred different ways, Eva. I’m the sorry one. I should never have asked you to stay late. I’m the one who needs your forgiveness.”
They clung to each other for several long minutes before Louise whispered they had to finish what they’d begun. They needed to finish digging the grave. They needed to drop Ernst into it. They needed to drive to the lake. They needed to get back to the house so that what happened next would be according to her plan.
All might have transpired just as Louise had intended if not for the neighbor’s beagles.
The dogs would not leave the burial site alone. Over the nextfew days Louise and Eva chased the two dogs away several times. They’d even been digging at it four days after Ernst had disappeared when Louise was sitting in the living room with a police detective, following up on Ernst’s parents’ claim that foul play had to have been involved. She saw through the window the dogs pawing at the ground as she answered the detective’s questions with her heart pounding madly in her chest.
Eva and Louise knew they needed to move the body, and it had to be done quickly and soon. But how and when and where to take it? More people were coming to the house all the time. Family, friends, police.
The evening Louise was asked to meet with the Geller family in the city to discuss who might have had reason to harm Ernst, Eva decided she would do what needed to be done while Louise was gone.
The blanket-wrapped body they had buried on a Friday was not the foul-smelling thing Eva dragged to Ernst’s car as soon as night fell on a Wednesday. But she did not think about this.
She did not think about anything as she drove two hours out of the city to a deserted forest road that led to deep woods where there was no trail, and to a ravine where—she hoped—woodland animals and insects would find and devour what was left of Ernst Geller.
When she returned to the Geller home, Louise was waiting for her, near frantic with worry. The police were still of a mind Ernst hadn’t just fallen out of his canoe and drowned as there was no body. Divers and dredgers had searched the lake twice.
