The Good Deed Ferry
The RV is cozy—it’s much smaller than the Wolf’s mobile home but more up to date. A raised bed runs along one side of the interior, and a couch lines the other. A kitchen nook contains a table, microwave, and refrigerator. The windows are draped with pink lace curtains, the couch piled with pink cushions, and the bed covered in an old-fashioned pink stitched quilt. A number of silver crosses decorate the walls, and all are polished to a gleam. This time, there’s a wall between us and our driver.
Annika heads right to the fridge when we get moving. “Chinese food!” she cheers, after looking inside. She opens a few white boxes and sniffs them. “You like chicken fried rice?” she asks.
I shrug. I have no idea. Sounds like a good fit for someone called China, though. Although, if it’s true that I don’t break easily, I never want to hear the word again.
Annika hands me the container along with a fork, and I dig right in.
“This is the best thing I’ve ever eaten in my entire life,” I tell her, mid-chew.
“You saved me from bribes and threats,” Annika says, her mouth full of noodles.
“Wouldn’t have been cool to punch an old lady in the face.”
“I hope you never run out of—”
“Lies,” I say, heading to the fridge. I find cans of apple juice and give one to Annika. We sit and eat and drink until everything is gone.
“We’re driving at, like, thirty miles an hour,” Annika says, glancing out the window.
“I guess beggars can’t be choosers,” I tell her.
“True. Leonora is the lucky break we needed. Even if she’s a bit of a religious nut. Speaking of breaks. What did they tell you at the hospital? No breaks at all? No hairline fractures even?”
“No breaks. No fractures.”
“Talk about lucky!”
“They told me a little more than that.”
“What do you mean?”
I’m having trouble saying the words because they haven’t sunk in yet. And I just can’t believe it. And I can’t face what it means.
“Felix?”
“They told me I don’t have brittle bone disease.”
“What?”
“They did a bone scan and found nothing. The doctor was mad at me for claiming to be the brittle bone kid.”
“You’re serious?”
“That’s what he said.”
“Well that’s…incredible!” Annika’s face lights up. Her eyes sparkle like the blue diamond in her pocket. “Aren’t you ecstatic?” she asks, sitting down next to me on the couch.
“Yes,” I say. “No. Maybe. I just don’t understand. My whole life—”
“Why did they tell you that?” Annika cries, eyes flashing now with indignation. “Why would they steal your entire childhood! They stole it!”
“I’d like to know.”
“You’re going to know,” Annika promises. “You’re going to know soon. And everyone involved is going to pay!”
“I’d also like to know who my parents are. All the Freaks want to know who their parents are.”
“You don’t know anything about them?”
“Not a thing.”
“Faces are going to be punched, Felix. Many, many faces. All the faces!”
I hope so, but I don’t want to talk about this anymore, so I ask, “Did you learn anything in Carson City?”
“Yes!” Annika cries, jumping to her feet. She has to take a few deep breaths to settle down before explaining. “Yes!” she says again. “I found the record on microfiche. I told the lady I was a journalist investigating Willy Adelstein, the owner of Nevada’s most successful pawnshops, because I think it might be a secret criminal enterprise. She got super excited because I was an ‘engaged young woman.’ She said she was sick of mediocre men running the world and was willing to do anything she could to help a strong female find her voice and topple the patriarchy. She was so into it that she stayed late to help.”
“Wow. What’s microfiche?”
“It’s—doesn’t matter.”
“What’s the patriarchy?”
“It doesn’t matter! The point is that the original owner of Battle Born Pawn was, get this…Gerhard Adelsberger.”
“Your grandfather was Gerhard,” I say. “But… Adelsberger?”
“Hold on,” Annika says. “It gets better. There was a transfer of ownership in 1978, when the business was inherited by, get this… Wilhelm Adelsberger.”
“But—?”
“Hold on. There was another transfer of ownership in 1985, when the business was sold to, hold on to your hat—”
“William Adelstein.”
“Bingo.”
“Wilhelm Adelsberger sold it to William Adelstein?” I say. “That’s pretty—”
“His brother changed his name,” Annika says. “Why not him too? But he was too narcissistic to give up his name completely and didn’t think anyone would ever look into his past. William Adelstein—give me a break!”
“But that would mean he sold the business…to himself?” I say. “Why would he do that?”
“Because,” Annika says, “Willy Adelstein wanted to pretend he was Jewish. And that meant not having anything to do with Wilhelm Adelsberger, who was apparently the son of a Nazi. We need to figure out why.”
“Let’s do a search,” I say.
“What do you mean?”
I point toward a shelf above the couch where a pink laptop sits atop a stack of Bibles.
“Genius!” Annika grabs the laptop, powers it up, then starts a search. I go over and watch her fingers fly across the keyboard. “So,” she says, still typing away, “my father pays a company to scrub the web for him, which means they make sure there’s nothing bad about him out there. But the thing about scrubbing the web—is that it really can’t be done, not completely. I learned that from my tech tutor.”
“Tech tutor?”
“I know, I know! Anyway, there are two main things you can do. One is threaten people with lawsuits to take down material you don’t like, a technique my dad is a big fan of. But mostly what these companies do is flood the web with positive stories that will come up when someone searches you, pushing anything negative way, way down the list. Further than any normal person would ever bother looking.”
“But we’re not normal people.”
“Exactly. We’re Freaks.” Annika looks at me uncertainly. I can tell she’s hoping she hasn’t overstepped this time.
“And now we know what we’re really looking for,” I tell her, and she looks relieved.
“Right,” Annika confirms, scrolling through entry after entry on the computer screen. Adelsberger appears somewhere in every one moving swiftly by. But neither of us sees a Wilhelm anywhere.
“Stop!” I say on, maybe, the fiftieth screen. I point to a line.
“But that says Gertrude Schmidt Adelsberger,” Annika points out.
“No, look.” I point further along the same line of text, to where it says Nazi Death Ray.
Annika clicks on the link. After looking over what comes up, she says, “It’s an archived Reddit thread from 2010 about university research projects.”
“A Reddit thread?” I ask.
“Just a place online where people have discussions on pretty much any topic you can think of.” Annika clicks again and the page changes. I lean over her shoulder to read the paragraphs that pop up. People were sharing ideas for history research papers. The one we clicked on was written by Hannah Schmidt. She wrote, “I need some advice, everyone. My mother won’t discuss our family tree because I think we might have Nazi roots. I’ve wanted to know the truth, so for years I’ve been reading everything WWII I could get my hands on, searching for the name of my great-grandmother, Angela Schmidt. I found a ring with Angela’s name engraved inside it. It said, in German, ‘To my dear Angela, Love, Gerti.’
“I buy books, read websites, and even go to the library just to check indexes for her name. So, anyway, a few weeks ago I stumbled across a wacky conspiracy theory book about the Nazi Death Ray, with a lot of crazy stuff about Hitler and Tesla and the Kellogg’s cereal guy and alien technologies. But the book also included an alphabetized list of 5,000 workers killed during an RAF strike on the Death Ray facility the Nazis were building in Vatan, France, which really happened, and I spotted the name Gertrude Schmidt Adelsberger. Gerti! So, is it a crazy idea to possibly expose your own family as Nazis? I suppose I could do it just for myself, but I have to pick a thesis topic soon, and they go gaga for anyone who can ‘connect the historical to the personal’ at UNR.”
Below, we read people’s responses—Best to let sleeping dogs lie, and Bury the past or it will bury you. Others encouraged her to find the truth at all cost.
“What’s RAF?” Annika asks.
“Royal Air Force. England,” I tell her. Then I add, “Military history book on the British Empire.”
“I think you had more tutors than I ever did,” Annika says.
“Maybe so,” I say. “What’s UNR?”
“Oh my god!” Annika yelps. “That’s the University of Nevada, Reno! Maybe Hannah Schmidt lives here! But let’s see what this Death Ray nonsense is all about, shall we?” She types in Nazi Death Ray, and we spend the next twenty minutes learning that the Nazis planned to build a “directed energy weapon” capable of destroying entire fleets of airplanes mid-flight and burning cities to the ground. Apparently, Nikola Tesla had perfected the technology for harnessing energy of this kind, and the Nazis wanted to steal it from him. Engineers worked in secret, night and day, to perfect the weapon, but their facilities were repeatedly bombed, so they were unable to complete the project.
“So, did my father manage to perfect this Death Ray weapon?” Annika asks, chewing her lip. “What he did to the Wolf and Headquarters…”
“I don’t think so,” I say. “If he could destroy fleets of planes and burn cities to the ground—”
“He wouldn’t care about two nobodies like you and me.”
“And that video—Gerhart, he seemed to be—”
“Trying to extract energy, not shoot it.”
“But all of this has to be related somehow.”
“Felix,” Annika says, gripping my hand—I instinctively flinch before remembering I don’t have to flinch anymore. “We’re getting close.”
“I think so too.”
We look at each other for a long moment, one that stretches into weirdness. I find myself riveted by her eyes. My hands are instantly damp and my heart races.
But then, all by itself, my head leans toward hers. And we kiss.
Her lips are soft.
We part, then stare at each other, blinking.
“Hmmm,” Annika says. “Was that your first kiss?” I nod, not bothering to lie. “Mine too,” she says. “I think there’s supposed to be more…”
“Electricity?”
Annika smiles awkwardly, and I feel a horrible sinking feeling in my gut. Did I do something wrong?
“Let’s see what else we can find on this Reddit thread,” Annika says, clicking on the history tab at the top of the screen.
“Good idea,” I say.
Annika says, “Oops” when a window pops up with the Reno Gazette Journal banner at the top. The headline screams, in bold capital letters: Five-million-dollar reward offered for Safe Return of Vulnerable Runaways.
“Oh shit,” Annika mutters, clicking on the link to the newspaper article. Below the headline is a security-camera picture of her entering the pawnshop.
“OH SHIT!” she cries, slamming the laptop shut.
“What?” I ask. “We already know they have your—”
“That page from the Reno Gazette was in the browser history!”
“What does that—?”
“It means,” Annika says, “that our Good Deed Fairy visited this page. She knows who we are, Felix! We have to get out of this truck!”