Chapter 62
Quill
The Attic
Oldies playing from another
room it’s a quite night
Oldies Playing
“Quill?” Lara said after a while.
“Mm?”
She wiped the tears from her eyes, blinked away the rest, and forced a smile.
“Can we distract ourselves?”
Tears of relief escaped my wet eyes.
“Don't you want to... keep some distance from me?”
Lara shook her head quickly.
“What are you talking about?” She sounded more desperate than before. “It just makes me think about it even more.”
Much too frantically, she raked her fingers through her hair.
“Mom is here, and I was hoping that she and Dad would finally make up, but it ended in disaster. He completely shut her down and she made a scene. In front of everyone.”
I had been wondering what had happened down there. Why Davian had been looking for a distraction.
Was he still up there?
New nervousness sprouted inside me.
“Now I'm finding out all these things from you, including that my dad is so unhappy with his life that he has suicidal thoughts?”
Her voice broke simultaneously with the most cracked part inside my chest.
“I can't do this…” She stepped toward me, took my hands in hers, her eyes cool lakes of tears. “Please. Distract me. Do something Quill-like.” Overwhelmed, I blinked at her, allowing her grip to tighten, wanting to take all her despair upon myself. “Anything... Just let’s not talk about all these things anymore. At least for tonight...”
Suppression might not be right. But when did I ever do the right thing?
It took me a moment to nod.
I forced myself to push away the last thought of Davian, accepting that a part of him would always haunt my mind, all the more relentlessly when he wasn't around, when I didn't know if he was alone. Alone with his thoughts... on a roof...
I tried not to let on that I was on the verge of running back to him, taking him in my arms and holding him close until he promised me he would never even look at a gun again.
I would never be able to bear losing him.
But he had assured me that he would destroy the weapon with me.
Calm down, Quill. Everything will be fine.
A lie made of glass. I could feel its sharp edges against my throat.
Lara's gaze was fixed on me, desperate.
She needed me. A Quill who functioned. Somehow...
But what was Quill-like?
My gaze wandered down the hallway, from one closed door to the next, until I looked back at Lara with a mischievous smile.
“Do you think the Fitzeks have dirty laundry?”
Overwhelm dripped from her expression.
“What?”
I didn't even give her time to make sense of my words, grabbed her by the arm and pulled her behind me, through the hallway around the corner, and my suspicion was confirmed. Another staircase.
Grinning like a gingerbread man suffering from a sugar rush, I turned to my best friend, the shock literally written all over her face.
She had placed an order. I would deliver.
Conspiratorially, I lowered my voice.
“I mean... imagine if we found Troy's secret sex tape collection or Arnold's contraband from Germany.”
Spitting Off the Edge of the World
Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Perfume Genius
Lara's eyes widened, but I was already pulling her along, up the dark staircase, while soft orchestral music crept through the mansion from the ground floor.
“Quill, when I said Quill-like, I didn't mean…”
“Come on.” Euphoric, I pulled her through the empty dark hallway with the single door at the end.
“We'll never get another chance to snoop around the Maplecrest Law director's estate. And where better to do that than...” I paused in front of the door – Lara now breathless behind me – and pressed down on the handle. Bingo. “...in an attic?”
My hunch was confirmed.
The old property had another attic.
I immediately felt along the wall for a light switch, and a few seconds later, pleasant warm light from an old humming lamp flooded the low, albeit far-reaching attic.
Unlike the other room with the roof hatch, this one was completely cluttered with old dusty cardboard boxes that someone had labeled with German words such as Geschirr, Winterklamotten, Kirchengesangsbücher, Postkarten, or Schallplatten.
Most of them I knew, some I could only guess at from their combination of words.
What were Schürzen?
“Shit, Quill. That was really not what I meant.”
“Are you scared?” I teased my visibly petrified friend, who cautiously closed the door and looked around as if Arnold could jump out of one of those boxes at any second.
It smelled like old things. Just like it had always smelled in the old abandoned houses I had liked to break into whenever I hadn't been able to find a better place to sleep.
Sleeping in a child's bed in a house where a family had been massacred ten years ago was probably the creepiest thing I had ever done. But it had been pleasant compared to those nights when I had heard dishes flying through Mama's house.
Lost in thought, I reached for an old book.
Der Suppenkasper.
Mama had forbidden me to read this book. She had owned it too. A last memory of her mother. Now ashes.
“Quill, put that down. If they notice that something isn't where it should be, then...”
“Then what?” I turned back to her. “They'll call the police and find out that Joseph Richter's daughter touched something in the attic of family friends?”
It actually sounded more harmless than it was.
“Arnold definitely wouldn't like it if he knew you were his protégé's daughter.”
With a knowing grin, I spun around and scurried on to a dusty dresser, pulling open the first drawer, which creaked and was slightly stuck.
“Quill!”
Lara stepped next to me, staring down at the old collection of medals, all emblazoned with swastikas.
“This feels illegal.”
Fear resonated in Lara's voice.
“Trust me. The only thing illegal here is that people like Arnold are allowed to walk around freely and become university directors or judges.”
I pushed the drawer shut, walked around three neat stacks of boxes, and continued on to a wardrobe.
“This man scares me. Dad always says he killed a lot of people in the war. My classmates even joke about it, but I know as well as anyone in Maplecrest that every Nazi joke has a dark edge to it.”
Indeed.
At school, people often used to call me a Nazi until they got bored because I didn't react to it.
Mama taught me that people who were unfamiliar with German history would always wrap their xenophobia toward us in comfortable prejudices.
On top of that, I felt hardly any connection to my roots and would probably never travel to Germany. It would only remind me even more of Mama, and I wasn't ready for that.
I turned the small rusty key of the wardrobe twice.
“Don't...”
Too late. The wardrobe was already opening with a creak.
“Ooh” My grin returned and I immediately ran my hands over the fabrics. “Old army clothes.” I randomly grabbed one of the field gray coats, pulled it out, and examined the gold buttons and red stitching. “Look at this.”
This one must have been from World War I.
Lara's face turned pale.
“Hang that back up!”
She looked around frantically, and I took the opportunity to step past her to a piece of furniture covered with a sheet and pull it away. As suspected, a mirror appeared.
“How about a little fashion show?”
“Oh my God, Quill! We shouldn't even be here!” She rushed towards me and snatched the coat from my hands. “Give that to me...”
My grin grew wider and wider and I took another coat out of the closet.
“Let's... Quill?”
I slipped both arms into the coat and turned in front of the mirror.
It was too big, probably belonged to Arnold's father, but I blocked that out, determined not to try on any of the World War II uniforms, because the mere thought of it made me feel sick to my stomach. But this one was a must.
“What are you doing?”
“I just want to know what it must have felt like to wear something like this.”
I fastened the belt and put on the field cap with the red band before turning to her with a dramatic flourish, changing my voice, and saluting with my hand to my head.
“May I introduce, Sergeant Fitzek the First. Brave soldier of the German Army.”
Lara looked as if I had dug up an old photo album of her and was now showing the pictures around during a board game with Anthony and Monica.
“You're not a man.” She wanted to pull at my belt, but I used the moment to grab the other coat. “And besides... Hey! You can't just...” I put it on her and pressed the helmet onto her head.
“Are you sure you don't have any German ancestors?” I laughed and pushed her in front of the mirror. “You look pretty German.”
I turned around, marched through the attic like a soldier, and Lara watched me as if I had truly lost all my marbles, only now she had finally found her grin again.
“You're crazy, Quill!”
We both grinned, and I marched back to the closet to take off the coat.
As interesting as this was, something dark seemed to cling to these clothes. It was as if I could hear the cries of dying soldiers who had perished in the trenches, bleeding to death.
We stowed the coats back in the wardrobe and I lost Lara to an old box of very old cameras, which she marveled at and identified with fascination, as if I knew what all these model names meant.
Slowly combing my way to the back of the attic, I scanned more boxes until I got stuck on a label that made my fingers tingle.
Troy Kinderzimmer
With schadenfreude, I took the other two boxes of dishes off this box and put them down before kneeling curiously in front of the box.
I held my breath as I took off the lid, expecting to find German luxury toys for spoiled little boys, but I froze with the lid in my hand when I saw what was inside.
We Got Your Wife
Carlos Rafael Rivera
There were only three things in the box.
The front part of a miniature steel steam locomotive resting on a black wool scarf, a dark gray leather notebook next to it.
Gripped by curiosity, I reached for the book, opened the first page, and barely noticed Lara appearing beside me.
All I could do was stare at the scrawly black ink writing that partly covered the first page in block letters.
IMPURE BLOOD, T.F.
The mere words made me feel uneasy. An uneasiness that grew as I turned the pages.
“Are these...”
I swallowed, not wanting to say it out loud either, because the fragments of words that flashed before my eyes as I turned the pages, along with the dates, sent a chill down my spine.
“Diary entries,” I whispered, dread in my voice. “By Troy Fitzek.”
Eventually, every facade crumbles.
Eventually, every city collapses into ruin.
– Blue