“Do you need this?” I asked. A large S was marked at the top of the page, and beneath it was some kind of schedule—the days listed down the left-hand side, followed by columns of scribbled times. The slip was in my hand for a second—long enough for me to register that Friday morning was underlined—before Henry plucked it from my fingers.

“Phew. Lucky I didn’t lose that,” he said with a strained laugh. “That’s my work hours for the week so I can fill in my time sheet on Friday.”

The explanation made perfect sense and should have been reassuring. But if he were telling the truth, why did Henry snatch the paper back from me?

Overall, my brother seemed settled. There had been no more midnight incidents, no more wild stories about intruders, no more unnecessary calls to the police. He had thrown himself into the job at the lumberyard, just as I’d hoped he would.

If he was a little withdrawn, it was probably because he was bone-tired from trying to make a good impression at work. This was a good thing. For years, I’d hoped and prayed for Henry to find a job that stuck, and despite the rough start, it seemed my prayers had finally been answered.

“Did you ever talk to Jürgen Rhodes about…about that detective? And Henry?” I asked Calvin one morning.

He sipped his coffee thoughtfully, then explained delicately, “You and Sofie Rhodes getting off on such an unfortunate foot makes things with me and Jürgen a little awkward.”

“Oh.”

“He lived and breathed to bring them here, Lizzie. For years. Whenever he speaks of his wife, his adoration of her is evident. I thought about warning him the day Henry called the police, but the opportunity never arose, and then I figured that if there had been any trouble, Jürgen would have mentioned it to me.” Cal set the coffee cup down and seemed to brace himself before he asked gravely, “Has something else happened?”

“No, no,” I hastened to assure him. “It’s been a few weeks and, like I hoped, Henry seems to have settled right down. I was just curious.”

But I kept thinking about that conversation with Cal over his coffee. It took me a few days to figure out why it left me feeling so uncomfortable.

I needed to think of those Germans as monsters—especially Rhodes, given what Calvin suspected about his past. It was unsettling to think of the same man as an ordinary person, with a family he loved and a wife he adored.

When Becca called to invite me to another lunch with the Fort Bliss wives at what she was already calling “our usual restaurant,” an image of that Whites Only sign in the window flashed through my mind, and I shivered.