In the years that follow, Elfriede will recall, most of all, the emptiness of the house during that terrible day. The absence of things, the dusty absence of life, which she remembers as an absence of light itself, even though the official weather records indicate that the sun shone as brightly as ever, from dawn until dusk.

Helga’s happy to explain the whole affair. The previous evening, while Elfriede bathed the children, she offered Charlotte ten thousand marks to depart the next morning with her daughters, never to return to Germany, never to make any further claim on the family, never to attempt to contact the family again. After a short period of consideration, Charlotte counteroffered at twenty thousand marks, and Helga accepted. She wrote out the cheque right there in the parlor, and Charlotte had just tucked this valuable scrap of paper into her pocket when Elfriede arrived downstairs with Gertrud. Helga relates all this while sipping her coffee, nibbling her toast. Elfriede’s too stunned and enraged to speak, let alone eat. She leaves without a word, walks three miles to the train station with a bewildered Johann in tow, but the ticket master came on duty at ten o’clock, he doesn’t know anything about a party of four, a woman and three small girls, who might have departed on some train at dawn or thereabouts. Elfriede, not to be denied, insists he check the receipts, the ticket log left behind by his predecessor. He tells her he’s awfully sorry, but he can’t do that, confidentiality or something.

But not for nothing is Elfriede so beautiful as she is. She fixes her large, angelic eyes upon this ticket master, forty-five years of age or thereabouts, thinning hair and paunchy stomach, creased uniform of navy blue, who’s already stammering, poor fellow, in the presence of such a heavenly creature as Elfriede. She explains in her halting English how she’s raised these girls as her own daughters, how the nurse has absconded with them, how frantic she is to find them again. Possibly a tear or two wets her long eyelashes, and who’s to say they aren’t real, unfeigned tears? Elfriede’s desperate, after all, she’s heartbroken. She’s standing at the ticket office of this hot, cramped, dirty train station in the middle of Florida, atmosphere heavy with heat and the reek of coal smoke, and all she wants is her girls back, her beloved and irreplaceable girls, in the same way she wants air to breathe. And what do you expect? Within the space of a minute or two, Elfriede learns that one Charlotte Kassmeyer and her three minor children were aboard the six fifty-three to Savannah, Georgia, with tickets through to New York City.