Where the Bones are Buried by Jeanne Matthews Read Free Book Online Page A

gusted through the tunnels beneath the city, Dinah worried the little piece of spray-painted concrete in her pocket, allegedly a chip off the Berlin Wall. Every souvenir shop in the city sold them by the gross. She knew it was fake, but it had a nice indentation for her thumb and she had rubbed it smooth. She rubbed it now and tried to assay how much of what Swan and Margaret had told her was true, and how much delusional nonsense. She thought about her mother striking out on her own in a huge foreign city where she didn’t speak the language, to meet a man she’d only met on Facebook—a German who styled himself as Thunder Moon. Was this Thunder Moon a separate manifestation of Swan’s insanity, or was he the go-between to Reiner Hess?
    The train ground to a halt and the doors slid open. The couple with the beer got off and a platoon of Chinese tourists crammed inside. Margaret sneezed explosively and they covered their mouths and shrank away toward the rear of the car. The doors slid shut; the train gusted on and gathered speed.
    Margaret said, “I’ve been watching how you are with Swan. You’re tense as a wire, like you’re afraid she’ll blurt out something terrible. Maybe something you can’t forgive.”
    â€œSuch as?”
    Margaret declined to go out on that particular limb, but ventured onto another. “Do you love her?”
    It was a snide question. Backhanded and presumptuous, but painfully on target. Dinah wished she could come back with a resounding yes. The fact that she couldn’t, made her feel like a traitor. How could she not love the woman who brought her into this world, who taught her to read and ride a bike, who played piano duets with her and filled her head with songs and Mother Goose rhymes and fairy tales? But there was a wall in her heart, love on one side, doubt and dread on the other. The doubts began with Cleon’s admission that he had killed her father. Did Swan know and, if she did, when did she know? Dinah couldn’t delete the question from her internal hard drive. She was afraid to hear the answer, yet she couldn’t come to terms with the past until and unless she did. But however conflicted she might be, her feelings about Swan were none of Margaret’s beeswax.
    The train slowed as it approached the next station and she stood up. “She’s my mother, Margaret. With all the Sturm und Drang that implies. And this is our stop.”
    The knot of Chinese passengers shoved their way out the door ahead of them. Dinah weaved her way through the mob onto the platform and followed the arrows to Kurfürstenstrasse. She heard Margaret huffing behind her, but she didn’t look back. She jogged up the stairs to street level and headed toward the central shopping district.
    There are almost no old buildings in Berlin. The Allies bombed the city to rubble during World War II and the new Berlin is a mosaic of uber-modern architecture and rampant development. Boom cranes sprout across the skyline like dandelions and the noise of construction is so constant that you cease to notice. One of the more curious sights is the jungle of gigantic pink, yellow, and blue pipes that parallel the streets, snake around corners, climb and loop overhead. At first, Dinah had thought it was some kind of art installation. In fact, it is plumbing. Berlin sits smack in the middle of a swamp and before a new building can be erected, water must be pumped from the foundation pit into the River Spree or one of the canals. Emerging onto Kurfürstenstrasse, they passed under and through a labyrinth of blue pipes.
    Rows of shops selling everything from vinyl records and funky hats to designer fashions and elegant jewelry lined both sides of the street. The face of Chancellor Angela Merkel smiled serenely from a large political billboard. The country had trusted her to steer the ship of state for the last eight years and just this past weekend, voters