Under the Same Stars by Libba Bray(10)
“Not sure yet.”
“Chloeeeee!”
“FML,” Chloe says under her breath.
“You better go. Spit won’t wait.”
“All right. Well…” She trails off.
Chloe flips back to the newspaper clipping. “Hey, I know this is weird, but I know Mormor—she wouldn’t send this to me if it wasn’t important.” She wrinkles her nose again, hunches her shoulders. “Would you be up for helping me try to figure out this missing persons mystery? It could be something to do besides Netflix—our own Mystery Mavens.”
The hurt part of Miles wants to say something cutting. Oh, sure. After five months of complete radio silence from you, there’s nothing I’d like more. But he’s missed her. And Covid has put certain things into perspective. “I think I can fit it into my busy pandemic schedule, yeah.”
“Thanks, Miles-y.” Her grin warms him.
“Okay. Send me a copy of everything. I’ll see what I can find while you expectorate.”
Fifteen minutes later, Chloe forwards him screenshots of the scrapbook’s contents along with a note: I hope it turns out we’re related to Ted Bundy just to piss Joyce off.
* * *
Over a bowl of contraband Frosted Flakes, Miles watches the evening news with the sound down. Refrigerated morgue trucks are parked outside a hospital in Queens. It’s like a disaster movie but for real. New York City, the City That Never Sleeps, has been pinched into an eerie stillness. Everyone officially ordered to shelter in place to flatten the curve.
In the kitchen, he splashes water from the tap into a semi-clean coffee mug—some horrible ceramic cat thing he made in fourth grade that the Moms Squared will never throw out. He checks the date against his phone, then pops open the little blue compartment of his pill minder and swallows down his daily meds in two gulps. He drops the mug into the sink. “Suck it, Anxiety.”
He pours out the last of the Frosted Flakes and shovels them into his mouth before they get can get milk-sad. The Moms Squared don’t have to know about the sugar cereal. Or the Doritos and the bowls of powdery Kraft Mac and Cheese he’s been downing three nights a week since he did a bulk grocery order last month. A siren breaks the stillness, followed by another, and another. Miles pictures an exhausted Mom Lisa running a gurney down a bright hallway, racing against time and limited knowledge about a new killer, trying desperately to save the people in those ambulances even as she worries that this might be the day the virus comes for her. He pictures his other mother, Mama D, stuck in Europe with no way home, worried sick about Miles and Lisa.
He turns off the TV.
Upstairs in his room again, Miles examines Chloe’s screenshot of the old German newspaper article, grateful for the distraction. He enjoys researching odd topics that have nothing to do with school and likes connecting the dots between seemingly unrelated pieces. It was part of what got him hooked on Mystery Mavens, the way they’d follow some crazy thread down various random rabbit holes until it yielded an answer that, once you stood back and looked at it from a certain distance, made sense.
A cursory search for anything new on the missing teens gets him nothing. He opens another tab and types in “Kleinwald, Germany. 1941.” Ads pop up for luxury condos overlooking a peaceful lake: “… all-new in bucolic Kleinwald … home of Kleinwald University … near the Dodauer Forest…”
Big yay for capitalism. He types in “Dodauer Forest” since it’s where the teens disappeared. The forest, which looks like any other to Miles, has one big claim to fame—a matchmaking tree called the Bridegroom’s Oak that even has its own postal code.
“Nineteenth-century Tinder. All right.”
Miles goes back to his Kleinwald tab. He clicks images and scrolls to a black-and-white photo of a quaint village that looks like it came out of a Brothers Grimm tale. The same red tile roofs and half-timbered houses, the stone castle, and a gaslit bridge across the placid lake. It looks like the drawing in Mormor’s scrapbook with one exception: a flag emblazoned with a swastika flies from the top of the castle’s ivy-draped tower. The caption reads: “Wilhelm Schloss.” Castle Wilhelm. Miles adds “WWII” to his search words. A new photograph pops up from 1944. The same quaint village is now a pulverized ruin of smoke and rubble. The bridge has a hole in the middle. There’s little left of the town. A poke into an archival site for rare newspapers reveals that Die Kleinwald Zeitung stopped printing in 1944. Miles’s heart sinks a bit. He wonders if any of the town’s records survived the bombing. If anybody would have records, it’s probably the university’s library. Miles fires off an email in his best German, hoping both that he hasn’t accidentally said something offensive and that the librarian will be able to help him out.
Miles jots a bullet-pointed list on a fresh page in his notebook.
Kleinwald bombed 1944
Nazi flag + bombing site = Military outpost? Munitions factory?
Who were Oskar, Sophie, and Hanna?
He taps his pen against the page and stares at Mormor’s feathery handwriting: Die Eichel. Why would Chloe’s grandmother write that down? And what does it have to do with the disappearance of three missing teens? To the list, he adds one last question:
WTF is Die Eichel?
His eyelids are heavy. Somehow, it’s gotten to be midnight. Miles takes one last look at Oskar’s, Sophie’s, and Hanna’s faces peering out at him from the past. They seem hopeful, as if the future is waiting for them to grab it. They had no idea what was coming.