Chapter 11

Chapter Eleven

Three months ago

Virginia

T he day after her father's sudden death—after he'd shown all signs of being on the mend—Kira finally stopped crying long enough to face the legal tasks that were bound to get worse the longer she put them off. She entered his study, carefully avoiding looking at the recliner that faced the hearth where she'd found him the day before. Instead, she grabbed the key to the fire safe from her dad's desk drawer.

She knelt in front of the credenza and opened the cabinet, then pulled out the sturdy rolling tray that held the small fireproof box. A twist of the key and lift of the lid, and there were the files containing the house title, last will and testament, and other documents that made up his legal existence.

The folder marked "passports" brought envy, and a hint of anger. He'd lived his life freely, while Kira had been restrained even after her mother's death. She remembered the argument two years before, when she demanded he help her get a copy of her birth certificate. Her mother was dead. Who would be hurt now?

But he'd denied her. Said it was impossible. She suspected he was protecting himself—as if somehow, her traveling would harm him. But he traveled freely, so how could that be the case?

Now she reached into the file and found four well-used passports covering the last four decades of his life. She flipped through the most recent one. Stamps for foreign countries were few—she suspected many countries just scanned the documents these days and didn't bother with a stamp—but there were stamps for Malta. Several of them.

She knew he'd been to Malta, but had no idea he'd gone there that often. He'd always said Germany was his destination.

She pulled out the other passports and found the same thing, but the older books also had stamps for other European countries. The UK, Germany, Spain, France, Italy. Older still, she found West German stamps. The former Yugoslavia. Poland. And Malta. Nine times over ten years. Seven more trips in the oldest book.

She counted twenty-three trips in thirty-eight years. Kira would turn forty in August.

Why had he rarely spoken of Malta, the country he'd visited most in her lifetime?

Loose in the safe was a stack of envelopes with Maltese postmarks, letters sent to her father at an address in Malta. It wasn't a hotel; it was a residence in Birgu.

She was back to wondering if he had another family. A wife. Children. Did Kira have half siblings? But how was that possible when he spent most of his time in the US?

Around her tenth birthday, they'd moved to the town where she would eventually graduate high school. Her father had taken a job at a small liberal arts college in Pennsylvania. The job forced him to limit his travels to the summertime, when he wasn't teaching. He mostly taught art history, but his expertise was also in the Cold War politics of a divided Germany. Kira had sat in on some of those lectures when she was an undergrad at the same school, and he gave a fascinating and very personal account of what it was like to be a German-American living in the brD—Bundesrepublik Deutschland, better known as West Germany to Americans—in the final decade of the Cold War.

Of course, even the use of brD as the abbreviated name was controversial, because nothing at that time was without strife or political implications in a divided Germany, but that was why her father used the abbreviation in his teaching. He'd been living there, doing historic research, in what would become an historic time.

It was where he'd met her mother, according to them both, but they'd never described their courtship, and later, she realized that, given her mother's Russian background, there was a reasonable chance her father had access to East Germany—aka Deutsche Demokratische Republik, abbreviated DDR.

With his death, how Conrad Hanson had managed to enter DDR—what must have been several times—and help her mother escape was destined to remain a mystery.

She stared down at the letters. Eighteen of them. The first was dated around the time of unification, the last was postmarked mid-January. It had been sent ten days before her father's stroke.

He must've hidden these somewhere in the house, because when he first went to the hospital, she'd gone through the fireproof safe, looking for medical power of attorney, and these letters hadn't been here then.

He'd returned home from the hospital at the end of February. His mobility had been limited, the stroke having severely damaged control of the right side of his body. Still, at some point, he must've retrieved the letters from a hiding place and put them in the safe.

Did he want her to find them, or had he planned to destroy them? There were only a few times Kira had left him alone during the three weeks he was home from the hospital. None of those times had she been gone long.

Last week, she'd returned home early from Morgan's baby shower and found her father on the floor in this room. He'd fallen from his wheelchair and gotten stuck.

She'd berated herself for leaving him alone so she could enjoy a night with friends—only to suffer a flash of unexpected heartbreak—and then discovered he'd needed her.

He'd shushed her and said he was testing his mobility when she wasn't there to coddle him.

She took a deep breath, thinking of that moment. At the time, unlike now, the room had the smoky scent of a fire in the hearth, and she'd startled at seeing the small blaze when she returned from Morgan's.

No way had there been a fire when she left—she'd never leave him alone with an unattended fire in his condition—and he admitted he'd built it as soon as she was gone. It hadn't been a large one, just a few sticks slightly larger than kindling engulfed in orange flame. He expressed pride that he'd been able to build a fire by himself on a chilly evening.

Now she realized he'd been near the credenza that held the fireproof document safe when she found him on the floor. Had he been burning papers, but then deposited these letters in the safe when she'd returned sooner than expected? Had he planned to burn them?

And what had he burned before she got there?

Her birth certificate?

She hadn't left him alone in the house in the week following that incident. There had been more fires in the hearth in the study—it was his favorite room, and he'd enjoyed watching TV in the new, accessible recliner she'd purchased for his return home. But he couldn't transfer from wheelchair to recliner without help, so she was certain he'd never had a chance to venture to the fire safe again.

Now he was gone, the recliner he'd died in destined for donation to someone who needed it.

She opened the most recent letter. Her father's correspondent wrote in German, but she didn't think it was the writer's original language. There were phrases that didn't seem quite right, but the person was clearly fluent—likely more fluent than she was—so she could be wrong. She wasn't sure what their primary language would be, but assumed it was one she wasn't fluent in or she might recognize why the word usage and order felt off.

Her first guess was Russian. Her father had always relied on her mother for Russian translation. But these letters were for him and him alone.

She read it quickly, translating what she could in her head. Later, she'd go back and do a careful translation to look at nuance.

My dear friend,

Our decades-long shared project at last comes to conclusion. My influence wanes, as does yours. But it doesn't end with failure. That which you have sought from the beginning is within reach. Other works too. Yours and other families will see the return of their legacies and this sad chapter shall finally close for the Stoltz family, at least.

Kira paused on the name. Her father had told her his stepfather, who died when Kira was five, was a West German man with the last name Stoltz.

One last visit. We will drink a toast to success and grieve for those who are not present to celebrate with us. Your parents. My wife and daughter. And the countless people we tried to help but were unable.

It is within our grasp, Conrad. See you on 3 July.

The letter wasn't signed.

Her father hadn't been to Malta to receive this letter, so it must've been forwarded to him by someone at the Birgu address. Had the same person or family lived there for the last thirty-five years?

Over the next weeks, Kira tried to find the resident of the address, but had no luck identifying them and her registered mail letter went unclaimed.

Her search for the Stoltz family hadn't gone much better. In need of a starting point, she'd combed through her father's call history for German or Maltese phone numbers and come up empty.

Her luck changed when a letter arrived from her step-cousin, Andre Stoltz, who'd been unable to find a phone number for Kira, so he'd resorted to snail mail to send his condolences on her father's passing.

Kira immediately called the number provided in the letter and connected with the last living member of the Stoltz family. It was a wonder to speak with a family member. It didn't matter that they weren't blood relatives; she felt kinship. This man knew her father. He knew about the parts of his life that had been hidden from her, all those visits to Europe. But most important, Andre knew what her father's mysterious letters might be about.

According to her step-cousin, her father had spent the last four decades on a quest for Andre's grandfather—Conrad's stepfather—to find the Stoltz family's stolen art.

It was in her conversations with Andre that the idea of visiting Malta—if she could get a passport—took root.