Heidelberg Effect (13 page)

The days turned into weeks as Ella fell into
a natural rhythm in the convent. Surrounded by female
company—something she had never experienced as an only and
motherless child—she discovered a love for the sound of women’s
voices and laughter. She spoke rudimentary German to the young
novices and even developed a way of communicating with them that
included teasing and personal jokes. When one girl went to bed with
menstrual cramps, Ella brought her tea and massaged her shoulders.
Ella often spoke to the other nuns in English since they had
trouble understanding her German anyway. She found it relaxing to
speak in English and the fact that she was not understood was also,
strangely, comforting to her.

Dinner times were usually silent, but Ella
looked forward to her evenings with the Mother Superior. They would
retire to Greta’s room for a glass of wine and talk about things
from the future.

“I found out some bad news,” Ella told Greta
one night. “Just before I popped over to the 1600’s.”

Greta frowned as they relaxed on her bed and
sipped the sweet wine occasionally delivered from the monastery in
Worms. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

“It’s a long story but
basically, I found out that my mother never wanted me. It’s why I
was out in the storm at night. First, I discovered that
I am related to a Nazi war criminal, which is bad
enough, but because of that, my mother never wanted children. When
she got pregnant, it was my father who insisted she have the baby.
Me.” Ella took a long ragged breath. “She was so sure I’d carry the
bad blood.”

Greta moved a lock of hair from Ella’s eyes
and rested her hand on her friend’s shoulder. “I’m no geneticist,”
she said, “but I don’t think it works like that.”

“It’s not even that so much,” Ella said.
“It’s really the final knowledge of how unwanted I was. Although in
my heart, I knew it.” She touched her necklace. “I always knew
it.”

“You need to forgive her, Ella.”

“She’s beyond that.”

“Yes, but you aren’t.”

Ella looked at her.

“Life is hard enough,” Greta said, “without
carrying the burdens of our parents.”

Ella smiled and took a sip of her wine. “You
are so wise, Mother Superior.”

“You are teasing me.”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make you any less
wise.” Ella stood up and walked to the window, thrusting thoughts
of her mother aside. “How much time do we have left before the moon
wanes?” she asked,

“I thought you might have forgotten about
that.”

“How could I forget?” Ella asked. “I’m
reminded every time you pull up your sleeve to wash the dishes or
dig in the garden. How much time do we have?”

“Not much,” Greta admitted. “Axel is a man
of his word.”

“That’s one way to put it,” Ella said,
frowning. “A week, two?”

“Why? Is there anything we can do to stop
him?”

“Was your plan to just sit tight until he
came?”

Greta looked at her sadly. “My plan is to
have you leave before he comes. You must go back to your own time.
You will be safe there.”

“You could come with me.”

“I cannot leave the nunnery.”

“Then we’ll need a plan,” Ella said. “We
need to meet this bastard head on, which means we do not just wait
for him to show up and herd us all into white slavery or whatever.
Running away is not in my DNA.”

“I will miss the way you speak.”

“We need a plan, Greta.”

Greta sighed heavily. “How can a plan,
however brilliantly it may be conceived, work to topple a power
that rules all of Heidelberg? You saw for yourself that the laws of
the city are powerless against the Krügers. It is hopeless,
Ella.”

“That, Greta, is bullshit,” Ella said. “I
don’t do hopeless and I don’t let my friends do hopeless. I don’t
know how yet or in what way we’re going to tackle this mess but I
do know we’re not going to just sit here and wait for it to
happen.”

Hans Krüger held the object in his hands but
his eyes were not focused on any one thing in the room. He sat at
his massive hand-carved desk and listened again to his first
lieutenant, Mayer, give testimony about the aborted execution.

“So the mob decreed that the boy was not
guilty?” His lips curled in an involuntary sneer when he spoke.
Following the advice from his long dead father, he long ago
promised himself that he would never look his servants full in the
eye unless he was slaying them. While he felt he owed no man
anything, the justness of that pact upon taking a life appealed to
him.

“They took the axman’s fit as evidence that
God wanted the boy to live,” Mayer said.

Krüger glanced down at the barbed dart in
his hand. Neither he nor any of his men had ever seen anything like
it. He touched a calloused finger to one of the sharp points of the
missile that had penetrated the axman’s flesh. The executioner, who
boasted that he had not a scratch on him save the small puncture on
his chest, insisted that the object had attacked his internal
organs with great bolts of lightning. To confirm this, Krüger had
ordered him cut open by the castle surgeons. The results revealed
no signs of scorched or damaged organs. And now Krüger would need
to find a new executioner.

He tossed the missile down on his desk where
it landed with a harmless clank.

“This is not heaven-sent,” he said. “A man
made this. A devilishly devious mind, but a man.”

“Yes, lord. Shall we arrest the boy
again?”

Krüger made a face. He had no wish to
agitate the crowd. Neither did he want them to make a habit of
over-riding his judgments on the guilty.

“We gain little by killing the child. Where
were my officers presiding over the execution?”

“You…you mean, besides the executioner,
himself? I do not know, lord.”

“Find them,” Krüger said. “They are the ones
who must be punished. They are the ones that allowed the mob to
save the child.”

“Yes, lord.”

“And Mayer?”

“Yes, lord?”

“The man who threw this missile into the
chest of the axman was in the crowd that day. It is an unusual
thing, this…projectile. Perhaps even an instrument of the Devil.
Send your spies out to find what other odd things have been heard
or seen in Heidelberg lately. Search everywhere. Find this
man.”

“Yes, lord,” Mayer said meekly. He bowed and
turned to leave. When he opened the door, a handsome young man of
twenty walked through and into the salon. Dressed in velvets and
gilded linens, the man’s face strongly resembled Krüger’s own. Many
had commented on the remarkable likeness.

“Father?” the young man said, entering and
standing in front of Krüger’s desk. “I would have a word.”

Krüger never relaxed the grimace on his face
but he waved away his other counselors, who scurried from the
room.

“I am busy, Christof,” he said, picking up
the barbed slug and rolling it over in his hand.

“I’ve come to ask you
again, Father, to reconsider the toll on the
Brücke Bridge.”

“Not this again,”
Krüger said with disgust.

“Father, the villagers who live across the
Nekker are starving because they cannot bring their wares to the
marketplace to sell.”

“They should pay the toll then.”

“They are poor, Father,”
Christof said, his voice reedy and halting. “
They are starving, separated from a chance to live without
poverty, by an uncrossable bridge—
”

“Enough!” his father roared. “Come to me
once more with this mewling petition of yours and I will throw ten
peasants into the Nekker. Do you hear me?”

His face red, Christof bowed to his
father.

“One hundred peasants! A
village of filthy peasants!
That
will put an end to their poverty!”

As Christof fled from the room, he knocked
into his older brother, Axel, in the doorway.

“Watch where you go, worm!” his brother
snarled at him. “The touch of you sickens me!” He gave Christof a
push that set him stumbling out the door. Christof fell hard on the
stone threshold and caught himself with outstretched arms. As the
heavy door slammed behind him, Christof could hear his brother and
father laughing heartily together.

After a week on the road,
even the dead
rudbeckia
in the front porch planter was a welcome sight.
Rowan tossed his car keys in a dish on the front hall table.
He listened to the silence of his apartment for a
moment. He still couldn’t help monitoring his tactical surrounding
before relaxing. For the last three weeks, he’d done little else,
twenty-four seven. Now he went to the refrigerator and took out a
beer. As important as Rowan firmly believed it to be, there had to
be few things more boring than providing witness security—until the
moment it turned so nonboring that it killed you.

It had been the worst possible assignment at
the worst possible time. Witness security was dull but required
vigilance. Rowan figured it was just about the hardest part of his
job: trying to keep his mind from wandering when, on the face of
it, there looked to be nothing going on. Spending seven days
watching and waiting in order to keep his witness secure until the
man could testify gave Rowan’s mind all the time in the world to
wonder what was going on with Ella.

He took a drink of his beer.

Thank God the divided attention hadn’t added
up to a dead witness.

He flipped through the first-class mail but
nothing was interesting enough to require a more in-depth
inspection. He went to the kitchen and pulled out a frozen dinner,
peeled off the cardboard lid and slid it in the microwave. He stood
in front of the oven, drinking his beer and watching the oven
interior rotate. He turned and looked in the direction of the
living room where the television set was on. A wave of depression
washed over him.

The phone call to Ella’s office had revealed
that she had given notice the same day she called him. Something
had happened that made her quit and reach out to him for help.

Not to get all dramatic
here but I need you, Rowan
.

He opened the door off the kitchen that led
to the narrow balcony and took a deep breath. The microwave
finished cooking with a loud bell but he made no move to open
it.

He had talked with the Heidelberg police and
given them Ella’s father’s contact number. He had asked them to
start a missing person’s search and to check out her apartment. He
hated doing all this from this distance—and along with that bat
shit crazy old man of hers—but when the report came back it
confirmed there was no one in the apartment and no sign of foul
play.

That sick feeling in his gut that he’d been
nursing for the last three weeks was getting worse by the minute
and all the beer and mind numbing work or mental calisthenics
wasn’t helping a damn.

Shit, Ella, where are you? And what the hell
am I supposed to do about it?

As Greta lifted the heavy water bucket, she
could hear that men were coming. A ribbon of fear needled into her
heart and she dropped the bucket with a thud, narrowly missing her
foot.

It was too soon!
She turned toward the convent and gauged how long
it would take her to get back and warn the others. She made a fast
calculation. Everyone was in the convent, either working or
praying. Axel would gather them all up in one swoop.

“Oberschwester
!” The voice was high
but definitely male.
Mother
Superior!

Greta’s knees weakened and she let out a
huge breath. She turned to face the nobleman and his two knights as
they entered the small convent courtyard. The nobleman’s boots were
polished leather. His short jacket was a rich forest green of
boiled wool. He smiled when he saw Greta, quickly dismounted and
walked toward her.

“Christof,” she said, holding out her hand
to him.

He grabbed her hand and hesitated, as if
trying to decide whether or not to bring it to his lips. In the
end, he just squeezed it and returned it to her.

“Greta,” he said. “I feared I would not find
you well.”

“Your brother…”

“I know, I know. My shame grows with the
knowledge of his crimes.”

Greta rubbed her hand against her rough
woolen habit. Christof’s face was pale and his hair a very light
blond. He looked nothing like his dark haired brother. Greta always
felt this was an extra point in Christof’s favor.

“The novice he took,” Greta said. “Have you
seen her?”

“I am sorry,
Oberschwester
,” Christof
said, shaking his head. “I have seen nothing.”

And prefer it that
way?
Greta couldn’t help but
think.

“She is just a child, my lord,” she said.
“Not even fifteen.”

She could see she was making him
uncomfortable. She wondered if he knew how uncomfortable the young
girl was being made.

“Greta,” he said, holding a hand up. “I can
do nothing about that. I am here to warn you that Axel talks of
little else but the destruction of your convent.”

Greta forced herself to smile. This was not
news to her. She had this news carved on her arm and in her heart.
Yet, Christof felt he was helping. Clearly, he wanted to be
helping.

He took her hand and held it to his
chest.

“Greta, let me save you,” he said. “I can
take you to my place in the country. You will be safe there.”

It was all she could do not to snatch her
hand from him. She took a long breath and prayed for patience.

“And leave my nuns here to be raped and
killed by your brother?” She eased her hand from his grasp.