There was a letter behind the mirror on the vanity -- cleverly tucked so
you'd have to look for it to find it. She tugged gently at the fragile
envelope, the gum barely holding it shut. The paper was an odd size, and it
was so thin that the writing on the other side shoed through, looking like a
secret code. The front wasn't any clearer to her, though. The scrawl was
full of long words, and the cursive was so far from what she'd learned in
school that she wasn't certain at first that what she'd found wasn't in
English. She stared at the envelope for a while, trying to make out what it
said, until she realized that the scrawl read "M. Herrberger", some numbers,
and she made out the word "Rhine". German, the long words started to make
sense, and she decided that she was sad she'd taken french instead of German
in school. She pressed the pages into her notebook and scrambled out of the
shed to bike to the library. Ms. Jacobs had the desk, she knew, and she
suspected she might be able to read the letter.

She made it to town in record time, and burst into the library in full
excitement, drawing surprised and annoted looks from the couple reading the
news by the front window.

"Sorry!" she exclaimed, trying to whisper. She hurried to the desk and
thrust the letter out at the librarian.

She took it, peering at it for a moment, then got a yellow pad out of the
drawer and a magnifying glass, scanning across the scrawls.

	"Eleanor,
	
	"There's another family coming to you. Things here are getting bad
	A new enemy every day, people cut from job, farm, family, almost
	locked up, and so constrained that just going out is now criminal
	for some.
	
	"They're leaving Amsterdam tonight and the ship should make New York
	about the first of March.
		
	"Marcus. Feb 2, 1942."

The librarian's scrawl was almost as hard to read as the foreign hand, but
she made out every word.

"You've found an interesting thing, dear." Ms Jacobs looked almost as
excited as she did, and she usually kept her voice to a tiny whisper at all
times. "I knew Eleanor Black, then, before she got married. Strong woman --
she ran her whole farm, and managed her father's furnuiture factory for
years after he died. She'd traveled, too -- her brother was a diplomat, and
she went with him often. Africa, I think, or maybe the middle east, mostly,
but she went to Germany twice. She told me about those trips. She visited
the town I grew up in."

"You're from there?"

"Born on the bank of the Rhine. My father came here first as the war broke
out. The Great War."

"World War Two?"

"One, dear. I'm not that young."

"Do you know who this Marcus is?"

"I don't. I never lived there logn, and it's not a little place."

"Oh."

"Sorry about that. not that I'd trade it. Rough times, there. Eleanor and I
weren't really close -- just a small town, you know. She mostly kept to
herself. Maybe this is why."

"Oh?"

"Let me see that list of names you found, again, may I?"