To Henry’s eye, the barn was more of an oversized garage, housing machinery instead of animals. The floor was a slab of concrete. There was no loft. A mammoth John Deere tractor was parked in the middle, surrounded by all sorts of attachments and equipment. The hideaway, as Anna called it, was in a rear corner with its own door, which Anna opened with the silver key.
It was small, about nine by nine feet, but felt instantly comfy. The walls were painted a soothing green, and there was a custom-made desk along the back with drawers, cabinets, and shelves all built from the same blond wood. A MacBook sat on the desk, folded shut. In the corner was an easy chair with a reading lamp mounted just above it. There was no window, but the lighting was warm and homey. The overall effect was like something you’d see in an IKEA catalog. The only items that seemed out of place were a small space heater and an air-conditioning unit that had been built into the outer wall where a window might have gone.
His eyes were drawn to the highest shelf, where an old bottle half filled with an amber liquid was perched by an empty wineglass.
“Mom’s little tipple?” Anna said.
“I doubt it was a regular habit or she wouldn’t have put it somewhere she’d need a chair to bring it down.”
“The voice of experience?”
He climbed onto the office chair for a closer look. The bottle was dusty, the writing in French.
“Brandy,” he said. “A label I’ve never heard of, probably because it’s well out of my price range. But it’s definitely got some years on it.”
“Only one glass. That’s kind of sad.”
“I can see why she might want a solitary nip now and then.”
“Says the man who drinks alone.”
He was about to climb down when he noticed something else pushed toward the back of the shelf, which made it invisible from below—a big, touristy snow globe with a gilded Eiffel Tower inside, mounted on hulking plaster base with “Paris” painted in blue letters.
“Boy is that ever ugly.”
“What’s ugly?”
“I’ll show you.” Henry raised up on his tiptoes and stretched out his arm. It was covered in dust.
“God, it weighs a ton. Take a gander.”
Anna burst out laughing.
“Wow, that’s hideous.”
“And broken. Looks like somebody knocked a chunk off the bottom.”
“Why would she even keep it?”
“Did your parents go to Paris on their honeymoon?”
Anna snorted. “Are you kidding me? No way. Ocean City, a week at the beach. It was probably all they could afford. Dad’s never even been out of the country. Maybe Mom went while she was in Berlin.”
He set it back on the shelf, climbed down, and wiped the dust on his pants.
“Did your Dad build all this furniture?”
Anna shook her head.
“She wouldn’t let him near the place. She hired some cabinetmaker out of Easton. I always thought it looked like something you’d see in Europe.”
“Definitely. Like Germany.” The word hung in the air for a moment.
“I guess you’d know. Never been there myself. I still can’t imagine Mom being there. In the middle of the Cold War, no less.”
“Well, that’s why we’re here. To find the real Helen Shoat. Should we fire up the Mac, or save the hard stuff for later?”
“Why would the Mac be hard?”
“Password protected, don’t you think?”
Anna smiled.
“Mom told me once that she used the same password on pretty much everything. Her phone, her ATM, her library card. She said she could never keep them all straight otherwise. Osprey. Her favorite bird. She was kind of an idiot about those things.”
Henry was skeptical but typed it in.
“Damn. You’re right. Not exactly a super spy.” He wondered if Anna was as disappointed by that as he was. Mitch probably would be, too. Although, for all Henry knew, Mitch was looking for something completely different.
Icons came up across the bottom of the screen for a web browser, a mail account, search engines, photos, a word processor, and a few other items. He clicked open the browser and got more icons—for Google, Netflix, AccuWeather, and a local bank. He checked her browsing history and it came up blank. The search history on Google gave the same result. The photo archive was empty, and her mail basket only had a half dozen unopened items that had come in since the night she was killed. All of them were junk.
“I’m beginning to see why she didn’t worry about her password. Either she rarely used this, which I’m doubting, or she was good at covering her tracks.” He made a few more clicks. “Look at this. No search histories, no way to follow her footprints. And I’m guessing her emails purged as soon as she read them.”
“What about document files?”
Henry clicked some more.
Nothing.
Anna took a crack at it, and they pecked around a while longer, but it was like scrounging for food in an empty kitchen.
“You said she was an idiot about these things? Looks to me more like she got advice from a professional.” In fact, based on everything Rodney Bales had once taught him, he knew she had. With a sigh of exasperation, he shut it down.
Next to the desk was a two-drawer filing cabinet. Locked.
“Now we’re getting somewhere.”
Anna searched for a key inside the top desk drawer, but found only pencils, pushpins, and paper clips.
“We could force it with a crowbar,” Henry offered.
“We could. But they’re handmade, and I’d hate to damage them. Give me a few minutes in the house. I’ve got a decent idea where she might have kept it.”
Henry waited until he could no longer hear Anna’s departing footsteps. Then he reached into a hip pocket and pulled out a slender black case about double the size of a matchbook. Inside was a set of tiny stainless steel tools, like needles with various shapes at the ends. Rodney Bales had given it to Henry as a “graduation gift” from his School of Night, along with a gag gift of disposable surgical gloves, for rummaging through people’s garbage.
He quickly selected a tool and slipped it into the keyhole. Within seconds he’d maneuvered open the lock, although he also noticed that the mechanism was already loose, and when he looked closer he saw faint scratches around the keyhole. He pocketed his tool case, reached into the desk drawer for a paper clip, and waited in silence for Anna’s return.
“No luck,” she said, coming back through the door. “But I did find this, on the top shelf of her closet.”
It was a hatbox. Inside was a blond wig, in a layered cut that looked fairly retro.
“What do you think? The master of disguise?”
“You never saw her wearing it?”
“God, no! Anyone around here would’ve laughed her out of town, my father included.”
Then she spotted the file drawer, standing ajar.
“You found the key?”
“Picked the lock,” he said, holding aloft the paper clip. No sense letting her know how he’d really done it, or she might start asking some unwelcome questions. “But the lock was already loose. If I had to guess, I’d say it’s fifty-fifty somebody beat us to it.”
“And then relocked it?”
“To cover their tracks. Wouldn’t be that hard for someone who knew what he was doing.”
“Especially if he had the right tools,” she said, eyeing him closely. “You know, like a paper clip.”
Henry shrugged and offered what he hoped was a convincing smile. He then stood aside as she checked inside the drawers. Both were full, front to back, although it quickly became apparent that the contents were mostly routine paperwork—tax returns, car loans, repair invoices, bills for hospital visits (the births of Anna and Willard, Anna’s tonsillectomy). The fattest folder held warranties and user manuals for seemingly every household appliance the family had ever owned. There were insurance policies, banking statements, and reports for a small investment account. Most of the bottom drawer was devoted to records from Washam Poultry, along with invoices from agricultural suppliers, seed companies, and other farm business. There were school report cards, copies of standardized test scores, and catalogs from at least a dozen colleges that Anna must have considered applying to at one time or another.
“I can’t believe she kept all this,” Anna said.
At the back of the top drawer they found a Last Will and Testament for Anna’s parents, which silenced them for a moment. Anna flipped past a few pages of boilerplate until reaching the beneficiaries.
“Looks pretty basic. Says that if they were both to die that everything goes to me, et cetera, et cetera…As does the guardianship of Willard. Then there are a few pages of ‘selected personal effects’ for special distribution.”
“Like what?”
“Well, let’s see.” She flipped another page.
“Wow. I had no idea they were such detail freaks. Listen to this: ‘To the Rev. Martin Wister, if surviving, the small bronze figurine of a feeding heron.’ Probably because he’d complimented the pot roast when they had him over for Sunday dinner, and then maybe said something about liking the heron. Here’s something about a few old books for Willard’s first teacher in kindergarten, who he adored. It goes on for another two pages. Endless junk and glory from stuff around the house. The lawyer who drew it up is also the executor, so I guess I need to make an appointment.”
She closed the folder with a sigh.
“Maybe this is as good as it’s going to get,” Henry said.
“Maybe.” She dug back into the lower drawer. “Ah. Here we go, way in the back. This one’s marked ‘Personal.’ ”
She placed the folder on the desk. Out spilled birth certificates, Social Security cards, vaccination records, and expired driver’s licenses.
“What’s this?” Henry said, picking up a laminated ID. “Your mom got a researcher card at the National Archives.”
“The photo’s pretty recent.”
“These things are good for a year, and this one expires next June, so she must have gotten it a few months ago. What do you think, genealogical research?”
“If it was, it’s nothing she’s ever mentioned. You think maybe she was looking up her own records? CIA stuff?”
“Doubtful. Agency files stay classified at least fifty years, and the stuff they do release is available online.”
“How do you happen to know that?”
“My job on the Hill.” Sir Rodney, yet again. “When you’re paid to dig into other people’s secrets, you end up burrowing into all kinds of archival hidey holes.”
He held aloft the ID card.
“What do you think? Something worth following up?”
“Maybe.” She rummaged some more. “Look, pictures!”
Anna pulled out a small pile of photos.
“Didn’t she keep a family album?”
“Tons. There’s a whole shelf of them in the house. Maybe these are special.”
A few were mug shots of Anna’s mom, like the ones you’d use for passports and visas. There were different sets that appeared to have been taken at different times in her life. Others seemed to have sentimental value—family shots at Christmas, one of both kids with their Easter baskets. There was a shot of Willard and Anna from when Anna must have been about ten. They were barefoot, standing by a picnic table on a summer lawn. She stood behind her brother in a protective pose, hands on his shoulders and her face a bit fierce. Willard grinned goofily. A pink wisp of cotton candy was stuck to the left side of his mouth.
Anna grew quiet and picked up the next one, a shot from a few years later of her family out on the Bay, seated on the windward side of a sailboat. She was eyeing Willard as if he might be about to fall overboard. Seated just behind her was a handsome middle-aged man with sinewy muscles and a farmer’s tan.
“Your dad?”
“Yes.”
Anna had her mother’s eyes, but her father’s cheekbones and oval face. His hair color, too. In the photos that had run on TV he’d looked a little haggard, and most of his hair was gone. In this one, with a full head of reddish brown locks tossed by the breeze, he looked downright dashing.
“What was he like?”
“Strong and silent type. Self-made man.”
“This wasn’t his family’s farm?”
“Oh, no. He saved his money, bought small, and kept adding. He even made the chicken houses work. So many people get into that and get in over their heads, because Washam pays you depending on how your birds stack up against everybody else’s. But his flocks always rated near the top. He started with almost nothing. His dad was an electrician who kind of bounced from one job to the next. I think his wiring burned down somebody’s house.”
“Ouch.”
“Dad used to tell a pretty funny story about it. He didn’t say much, but whenever he told a story he hit all the right notes.”
“Brevity is the soul of wit.”
“He never wasted a word. He was sneaky smart, and solid. I think that’s what must’ve caught Mom’s eye when they met. He was older, by four years. Maybe it’s what she needed at the time.”
“A CIA gal who ended up in the middle of nowhere, clerking for a real estate lawyer. What was her family like?”
“Holy rollers, from rural North Carolina. Her father was a preacher, Assembly of God. Supposedly he wanted to baptize me, but Mom refused. Dad said that later she changed her mind, but by then he was in the hospital after a massive coronary and he never recovered. I think Dad told me that so I wouldn’t make the same mistake, waiting too late to tell them something important.”
She looked away. Henry waited for a moment before speaking again.
“Do you remember your mom’s parents?”
“Not the preacher. I vaguely remember my maw-maw, but she was kind of a nervous wreck. Not at all the doting type. She kept her distance, especially from Willard. She died a few years after my grandfather, and by then I think she was drinking pretty heavily.”
There were a few more photos of Anna and her brother, and she sorted through them quietly. Toward the bottom of the pile was a fading color shot from an old Instamatic, curling at the edges, of a man in his fifties, handsome in a way not unlike Anna’s father. He was seated in a café, smiling rakishly but with a hand thrust forward, as if he didn’t want his picture taken.
“Who’s he?” Henry asked.
“No idea.”
Henry looked closer. On the rear wall of the café you could just make out the word HERREN on a sign with an arrow.
“From Germany, I’m guessing. That sign is pointing to the men’s room. Interesting.”
“A lot of character in that face.”
He flipped it over, but there was no writing.
“Look at this one,” she said, pulling out the last photo in the pile.
“Is that you on the left?”
“When I was a little girl.”
The young Anna stood on the Mall in Washington next to her mom and another woman maybe twenty years older, in a business suit, with the dome of the U.S. Capitol in the background.
“Is that one of your grandmothers?”
“No. No idea who it is. I vaguely remember that trip, mostly as a lot of standing in long lines and too much walking. Although now I’m thinking that maybe this woman took us to lunch.”
“So they were friends?”
“Maybe. Those smiles don’t exactly give you the warm and fuzzies, though, do they?”
“Anything on the back?”
She flipped it. Blank.
The final item in the file was a six-by-nine cream-colored envelope, closed with a metal clasp. Inside were three passports, two blue and one black.
“Whose are these?” Henry said.
“I didn’t know Mom and Dad had one, much less Willard, although I guess Mom would have had to have had one, if, well…”
“For working in Berlin. Right.”
He opened the first blue one, which looked brand-new. It belonged to Anna’s mother, and was still valid. She had obtained it only three years earlier.
“Did they take trips overseas?”
“Never, as far as I know. Dad had no desire whatsoever. And Willard would have been such a handful.”
They flipped through the back section for visas and entry stamps, but the pages were blank.
“Looks like it’s never been used.”
“How sad. I wonder why she even got it.”
Anna picked up the next one, which was black and said “Diplomatic Passport” on the cover. There was a hole punched in it, meaning it was expired. Helen Marie Abell had obtained it in 1977, the year she joined the CIA. The photo was a revelation, a young woman full of energy and life, a hint of mischief. Henry was thinking how much she looked like Anna, especially in the eyes, when Anna said, “Look at her. She was beautiful.”
“She’s got your eyes for sure.”
“You think?”
“Don’t you?”
Anna shrugged. “I never used to like it when people said I took after Mom. Too afraid I’d end up like her, I guess, giving up on herself the way she did.”
“You think she gave up?”
“Well, look at the life she’d made. Farm wife with soybeans and chicken houses. Three meals a day to cook, a grown son to take care of. She’d kind of painted herself into a corner.”
“And this little room out here was her corner.”
The passport’s back pages had entry stamps for Germany, plus a few more indicating she had passed through East Germany, probably on her way to and from Berlin. The only other entry stamps were for the United Kingdom.
“Guess she didn’t go to Paris, then,” Anna said. “Not exactly the globe-trotting mystery woman if she spent the whole two years in Germany.”
“Don’t sell it short. Plenty of intrigue to go around in Berlin in those days.”
“Secretarial job, that’s my guess.”
“I doubt they give severance packages to secretaries.”
“Unless some boss tried to knock her up.”
“In those days that’s probably how the boss got promoted.”
Anna smiled.
“Hand me the last one.”
It, too, was dark blue, but the writing on the cover was a shock.
“Canadian?” Anna said. “What the hell?”
They opened it. The younger version of Anna’s mom again stared back at them—the same photo as the one from her diplomatic passport, but with one important difference.
“She’s blond! Do you think it’s the wig?”
Henry took the wig back out of the box.
“Can’t be. This one’s almost new. But look at the name in the passport.”
The Canadian passport had been issued in the name of Elizabeth Waring Hart.
“Holy shit. An alias?”
“I think they’re also called cryptonyms.”
“So she was undercover?”
“Let’s see if she used it.”
He flipped through the pages and found entry stamps for France and Germany.
“So here’s the Paris connection,” she said. “Look at the dates. October of seventy-nine.”
“Wasn’t that about the time of her severance?”
Anna checked the materials the government had sent her.
“This doesn’t add up. The date of her severance is before all of those entry stamps.”
“Maybe they kept her on unofficially a while longer. For a last hurrah.”
“For something sneaky, you mean?”
“Isn’t everything they do sneaky?”
He flipped through the passport again. A scrap of yellowed newsprint fluttered out like a moth. Anna caught it in midair. It was a news story, only four paragraphs. Handwritten across the top was Tagesspiegel, with a date from October 1979.
“This is also dated before her severance,” Anna said. “Can you translate it?”
She handed it to Henry, who read it quickly but carefully.
“It’s about a murder. A young woman, beaten and strangled. A suspected lovers’ quarrel in an apartment in Kreuzberg, meaning it was probably a dump. She was only nineteen.”
“American?”
“German. Anneliese Kurz.”
Anna gasped, a sudden intake of breath that caused Henry to look up.
“You’ve heard of her?”
“No. But her name, it’s…”
“It’s what?”
“The same as mine. Anneliese. Look, it’s even spelled the same, with an ‘e’ in the middle. It’s my first name. I’ve always hated it.”
“Did you ever ask where it came from?”
“She just said it was a name she’d always liked. I hated all my names, but that one especially.”
“All your names?”
“Anneliese Audra Claire Shoat. Two middle names, for God’s sake. Try fitting that on your driver’s license. I wanted to go by Claire, but she wouldn’t let me. She said Anneliese was noble and honorable.”
“Noble and honorable enough for your mom to quit her job?”
“And then go traveling around Europe under a false identity, doing God knows what?”
Anna was quiet, thinking it over. Then her eyes widened.
“What? What is it?”
“I just remembered something. A moment with Mom, from the summer before I went off to college. August, it would’ve been. In 2002.”
She stared into space, eyes blazing.
“We were shopping, buying a bunch of clothes for me at Hecht’s. We’d driven all the way across the Bay Bridge so I could go to a mall. I’d just come out of the dressing room in some god-awful thing she made me try on, and she must have seen something over my shoulder that made her stop, because she dropped her shopping bag and just stared. So I turned to look, too, and there was some man in a suit on the other side of the store, standing there with his arms crossed and staring at us. Then he nodded, like he was about to come over to say hello.
“I asked her who it was, but I don’t think she even heard me, ’cause then she said, real quiet, ‘You see that man over there, honey?’
“I said, ‘Yes,’ also real quiet, because by then I could tell it was something serious. And when I turned back around to look again he was smirking, and she said, ‘I want you to remember his face. If you ever see him again—at school, at home, or anywhere—then I want you to let me know right away. Do you understand?’ ”
“Did you ask who he was?”
Anna nodded.
“Her answer was really vague. ‘Somebody Mommy used to know.’ That’s all she’d say. I remember the words exactly because for a second or two she sounded like she was talking to a ten-year-old. Then she said, ‘He’s the reason you have your name.’ ”
“Meaning ‘Anneliese’?”
“That’s what I assumed, because it was the name I’d always bugged her about the most. I was in second grade before she let me shorten it to Anna.”
“And this guy, what did he do next?”
“Nothing. Next time I turned around he was gone. I never saw him again, and Mom never mentioned it again.”
“That’s quite a story. Would you remember him if you saw him again?”
“I don’t know. It’s been, what, twelve years? He was older than Mom, so he might even be dead by now.”
“It wasn’t this guy, was it?” Henry slid out the photo of the man in the German café.
“No. Or I don’t think so. Although maybe I’m saying that ’cause the guy in the picture looks friendly. This other guy had a pretty nasty smile.”
“Let’s hang on to this,” he said, setting aside the clipping with the passports and a few of the photos. They poked around for another half hour, but found nothing of interest. Anna was more subdued, and they said little as she collected the items she needed for the severance check.
“You said the lock was already loose?” she asked, just before closing the file drawer.
“Yeah.”
“Makes me wonder what might be missing.”
“Maybe nothing.”
“We can hope.”
As she prepared to lock up, Henry gave the room a final once-over. Then he looked up at the ceiling, and his gaze stayed there.
“What is it?” Anna asked.
“That.”
He pointed to an air duct, one foot square, with a louvered metal vent. “If you’ve got a space heater, and an air-conditioning unit in the wall, what’s that for?”
“Fresh air from outside?”
“Maybe. But wouldn’t that be mounted on an outer wall?”
Henry pulled over the office chair.
“Hold this steady for me,” he said, stepping onto it. He reached into his pocket for his tool kit, thought better of it, and instead retrieved a dime, which he used to unscrew the bolts on the vent cover. He dropped the screws into his shirt pocket and handed the cover to Anna.
“What’s up there?”
“Nothing I can see.”
He reached inside and felt around. The recess in the ceiling was of the same dimensions as the opening except on one side, where it extended at least a foot farther onto a small shelf above the ceiling. He groped back, reaching as far as he could until he felt the edge of a small envelope.
“Got something.”
He grabbed it and slid it free. Then he stepped down from the chair. The envelope was tiny, only two by three and a half inches, with a clasp closure. On the outside, in cursive lettering in black ink, was the word Sisterhood.
“A hideaway within a hideaway,” Anna said.
“What do you think?” He handed it to Anna.
“Definitely Mom’s handwriting. But ‘Sisterhood’? Not her style.”
Anna undid the clasp and turned the envelope endwise. Out dropped a small key. There was nothing else. Anna tried it on the file drawers, but it didn’t fit.
“It’s numbered,” she said, taking a closer look. “Like for a post office box.”
“Or a safe deposit box.”
“Also not her style. And wouldn’t there be some kind of bill for it?”
They rechecked the banking records, just in case, but it was all pretty standard, and there were no mysterious service charges.
“It could be for some other bank, so she could hide it from your dad.”
“Or in Switzerland,” Anna said, which made her giggle. “I’m thinking the post office is more likely.”
“What’s the Sisterhood, then?”
“Nothing from around here, as far as I know.”
“But you’ve been gone awhile. This could’ve been something recent. Whatever it is, she went to a lot of trouble to hide it.”
Anna turned the key over in her hand.
“We might as well try the post office first. See if the slipper fits.”
“After you, Cinderella.”
They locked the office and set out for the middle of town.