Lineage(115)

“Heeeee.” Her voice was a breeze blowing through a rusty pipe.

Lance felt himself moving, and then the chair was beneath him again. A hand, skeletal with fingernails as black as sunflower seeds, had crept from beneath the blanket and now rested on the picture. Her eyes had shifted from the wall, and were examining the photo just as intently.

“Heee.” Annette made an attempt to swallow, and a tongue so dry Lance could hear it rasp against her lips came into view.

“He,” Lance said, willing the words forth from the withered form beside him.

“Heee didn’t.” Annette’s brow creased and she swallowed again. “He didn’t kill him.”

Lance blinked at the old woman, whose eyes ran back and forth across the picture like it was about to disappear and she was committing it to memory.

“Erwin didn’t kill him?” Lance asked, bafflement the sort he had never encountered before saturating his thoughts. Annette’s head shook from side to side in slow denial. Her head turned, and for the first time her eyes looked into his.

“I did.”

Lance sat back in the chair as Annette’s attention floated back to the picture.

“You did?” he asked, the disbelief so acute within his voice that he felt sure she would deny the statement. Instead, he watched her eyes begin to glaze over, and within seconds, the wall had become her focal point once again. Lance realized what was happening and sat forward.

“Why? Why did you kill Gerald? Did he do something to you? Were you seeing each other? What? What happened?” Lance’s eyes roamed over the old woman’s face, watching for a sign that she was formulating an answer. When her stare deepened, he began to panic. He reached out and snapped his fingers before her face, over and over.

“Stay with me, Annette. I need you to stay with me.” Frantically, Lance looked around for something that would help him keep her from falling back into the abyss from which she had emerged. The crossword was the only thing that stood out to him. He held it up in front of her face, along with the picture of Gerald.

“Do you remember him? Gerald Rhinelander?” Nothing. Lance looked at the crossword and an idea struck him. “Who is Wulf?” he asked, holding the black-and-white checkering within a few inches of her nose.

Several seconds crept by and then the wrinkled eyelids blinked in their sunken sockets. Her tongue scratched across her lips again.

“Wulf is Metzger. Heinrich is Erwin.” Her voice had cleared some, like an unused engine finally firing on all cylinders. “He told me that over and over before we crossed the ocean.”

“Who told you that?” Lance asked, his voice low and, he hoped, soothing. Annette seemed to slip away and then return, her eyes blinking.

“Erwin, Heinrich. Both the same. We came on the ship with the others. Heinrich’s face was still bleeding. I remember the bandages he would change, sopping with blood.”

Lance nodded. “Where the SS cut him?” Annette turned a surprised gaze in his direction, actually seeing him for the first time.

“He did it himself,” she said.

“What?” It was the only word that could articulate the confusion ravaging his mind. “John said that you’d owned land during the war. You employed Jews to keep them safe. He said the Nazis made an example of Erwin.”

Annette closed her eyes and shook her head in a quick movement. “Lies. His lies to keep us safe. To keep him safe.”

“What do you mean?”

Annette sighed, and it sounded like ancient tissue paper being crumpled. Her head tilted forward and Lance feared that she would succumb once again to the silence, but soon words began to float out from beneath the veil of translucent hair enclosing her face.

“There was something wrong inside him. I knew it from the beginning. Maybe it was what drew me to him. I thought I could change it. But it was too deep, like a splinter that only slips farther in when you dig at it. I didn’t know. I didn’t know what he was.”

She paused, and Lance noticed that she had begun to rock in the chair. She reminded him of a child relating a particularly bad dream to a parent.

“He joined the army young. He told his family and friends that it was idealism. That he wanted to serve the Führer.” Annette raised her head so Lance could see her eyes through the curtain of hair. “He wanted to kill.”

Lance shifted in his chair. The pressure in the room felt nearly unbearable. He opened his jaw and tried to alleviate the discomfort in his ears, but to no avail. He was about to ask Annette if she felt it too when she continued.