Out of Splinters and Ashes Read online

  Table of Contents

  Excerpt

  Praise for Colleen L. Donnelly

  Out of Splinters and Ashes

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  Chapter 66

  Chapter 67

  Chapter 68

  Chapter 69

  Chapter 70

  Chapter 71

  Chapter 72

  Chapter 73

  Chapter 74

  Chapter 75

  Chapter 76

  A word about the author…

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Also available from The Wild Rose Press, Inc. and other major retailers

  Grandma was impossible to stop. She charged around me, into the room, flipping on a light as she did.

  “You can go now,” she barked at the soldier still holding the door. “This won’t take long.”

  He nodded at Grandpa, then shut us in, us and the mirror.

  I saw Amabile’s story all over again as Grandpa spotted the mirror, the deep-down flicker I’d noticed before, but brighter now. Grandma and I disappeared as time took him backwards, his face transforming from old and haggard to young and alive—then to terrified, and lastly to nothing, except guilt. Grandma didn’t raise the mirror as I expected her to, and shake it in his face. She let it hang in front of her, between them, the charred frame and lone lily all he could see.

  I stared at the trembling finger that stretched and touched the blackened wood, scars this man probably deserved exposed at the cuff of his sleeve.

  “I believe this is yours.” Grandma’s voice was low. I’d never seen them this close together before, never seen them face each other. But I’d seen the mirror between them forever without knowing it was there.

  Praise for Colleen L. Donnelly

  “Colleen has a unique style of writing that pulls you right into the story. Her books are refreshing and intriguing! Once I start to read them I can’t put them down—she is an amazing author!”

  ~Julie Daniels, Pastor’s Wife

  ~*~

  “What do you see as you gaze into the mirror? Generations, mysteries, intrigue, and all those untold stories? That’s what Cate saw as she pursued her family’s path to find the source of her grandparents’ unhappiness. Her desire to perhaps correct a wrong set Cate on an incredible journey to find so much more than she was looking for.”

  ~Kacee Everhart

  ~*~

  Colleen’s awards and accomplishments:

  Amazon #1 Author

  RomCon Reader’s Crown Finalist

  1st Place Jim Richardson Memorial Award

  for short story in 2010

  1st Place Ozarks Writers League Award for short story

  Out of

  Splinters and Ashes

  by

  Colleen L. Donnelly

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Out of Splinters and Ashes

  COPYRIGHT © 2018 by Colleen L. Donnelly

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Diana Carlile

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Vintage Rose Edition, 2018

  Print ISBN 978-1-5092-1778-6

  Digital ISBN 978-1-5092-1779-3

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To my mom,

  my eternal sounding board for story ideas;

  to my readers, who fill me with encouragement

  when I’m lost in the forest and its trees.

  And to my editor, Nan—

  forever patient and wise to a fault.

  Chapter 1

  The book was small with a hard, plain cover, dark and dusty green with an embossed flower barely visible on its front. Dietrich held it on his open palm, stretched his other arm upward, and twisted the ridged plastic casing of the airplane’s reading light. A soft glow lit a circle around the name pressed beneath the flower: Amabile. A name and a book that had meant nothing when Monika, the woman claiming to be Dietrich’s aunt, had handed it to him.

  “The author is the same on both books.” Monika pointed to the paper booklet she’d first given him, explaining her natural mother had wrapped that one in Monika’s blanket with her when Monika was given up for adoption at birth. “They are the same name and the same story. I found the hardcover book after my adoptive mother gave me the first. This story is all I have to find my real mother.”

  “You still haven’t found her. I’m sorry.” Dietrich made no mistake declaring Monika was mistaken. It was what he did; he was a journalist of all that was pure and the truth of and for his country. And now for his family, his Oma, his grandmother who couldn’t be Monika’s mother. Erika Müller, his grandmother’s name at that time, could never have given birth here in Berlin, right before the Second World War, before she’d even met his grandfather.

  “My real father is in there, too, if that’s my mother’s story. He was American. You’re a journalist, one of the top in Germany. You write for the government, so you would want to know the truth about me…about us…wouldn’t you?”

  Dietrich looked at Monika then, tall and slender, light hair, and narrow features. She almost resembled Germany’s old Aryan ideal from that war, just like he did, he being Oma’s true descendant. But Monika wasn’t claiming to be from Dietrich’s Opa, his grandfather. She w
as claiming to be half American, from another man, from before the war. It couldn’t be. Oma would never have loved an enemy or allowed herself to be taken advantage of by one. What this stranger—Monika—was saying would destroy their family, not to mention his integrity and reputation as the author of all that was right for his country.

  “Erika Müller was surely my mother. Erika Schmidt now, I realize, since she married your grandfather. She was an author before she married him. And I understand that the story types between hers and this one are different, but if you…”

  “My Oma is not your mother. Again, I’m sorry, but you couldn’t be more wrong. About everything, including about me if you think with my reputation I would trust fiction as a reliable source.” He asked her to leave and she agreed, but she refused to take the hardcover book with her.

  “Read it. I know it’s a story, but it has to be true. Show it to your Oma and ask her. I’ll come back soon…sometime soon. Maybe then I can meet her.”

  He wouldn’t, and Monika wouldn’t either. He would never read it or show it to Oma, and Monika would never be allowed back. He kept the book so she’d go, intending to mail it to her with a letter warning her to never return. He would have burned the book if it hadn’t been for the determination on Monika’s face, the threat her desperation posed. This book and her silly theory meant too much to her, though it meant nothing to him.

  Until he found another. Also plain, its size and coloring barely noticeable amongst the other books in Oma’s attic. Those books were her romantic tales, their covers exploding with lovers entangled in intimate poses—books she’d written and was well known for, stories that had kept at least Germany’s women warm before and into the Second World War. Erika Müller was slanted across the bottoms of each of those covers in delicate script, appropriately alluring for such stories.

  But the book he’d found near them was like what Monika had left behind. Ordinary, with THE MIRROR embossed in simple block lettering at the top, and Amabile at the bottom, beneath the same sort of flower.

  It couldn’t mean anything. It was surely a coincidence. But he’d done his research then—on Monika, on Amabile, even on Erika Müller. But he’d asked Erika Schmidt in person, not about Monika, or Amabile, or about loving an American enemy, but about being a writer, something the two of them had shared in common even though she hadn’t written since before he was born. He’d also asked again about her injuries, the burns and scars she kept covered by clothing even in the summer. “Furnace explosion.” That was all Oma ever said. But he knew it was a tremendous explosion that had nearly killed her not long before the war. Making it impossible for her to have had an American lover and deliver a child at that time.

  Dietrich set Monika’s book on his lap and opened The Mirror again, ancient and yellowed, but without the noisy protests that come with age and from being hidden in an attic for so long since he had opened it many times recently. The faded print stared up at him. He’d always known. He’d always closed his eyes to what was but wasn’t there with Oma even before these books and Monika had come to his door—his door instead of Oma’s, thankfully. His journalistic instinct, the inner eye that turned impressions into words, had always sensed something. He’d been aware of an occupied vacancy at Oma’s side, an absence so powerful it was palpable. It was in the way she stood, the way she moved, so much a part of her it had become a part of their family, all of them allowing space for a presence that wasn’t there. He’d excused it as sorrow. She’d lost her parents, given up her writing, and then her husband had passed, his Opa. But the manifestation of what was missing had been missing much longer than at least his grandfather.

  That absence, that invisible presence, had a form, according to Monika. The form of a man, and he was American. A runner in Hitler’s Olympics, tall and lanky and blond. And cruel. According to the stories, he’d run fast, run away with Amabile’s heart, and then run away for good.

  Dietrich stared at the sort of book he’d never bothered to read, this one in particular being one he wished he hadn’t. If the journals he wrote for knew—knew that such a relationship might be in his background, knew their top government research journalist was using fiction to find the truth—he’d be fired.

  He leaned back in his seat. Time and secrecy were of the essence. He would read this and the other book one more time each on the flight from Berlin to New York, sifting out every detail about “him” that he could—the American who had stolen Amabile’s heart and left her with nothing but scars…and, God help them all, possibly a baby. Dietrich stared at the black print, so deeply absorbed into the pages it could never be erased. He’d told Monika to stay away, that he’d contact her in two weeks when he returned. Oma had been told he was on assignment for the main journal he wrote for, and they had been told he was doing research on a tip he’d received. None of them would be patient. But by the time this flight landed, he would know, he would have discovered enough about this man to be able to find him if he existed. But of course he didn’t exist, and Dietrich would carry home the truth.

  The Mirror

  To See What Really Is

  The mirror—it was a beautiful gift. From him. One she stared into when she longed to see the two of them again, one she stared at today as she waited for him to come.

  The mirror had been hers for several days now, yet she still thrilled at the thoughtfulness that had gone into his choice—the size that nicely framed her shoulders and face…her reflection fitting within its rectangular shape with enough room beneath the slight arch at the top for a hat if she chose to wear one. Enough breadth the two of them could be seen together, pressed close, him so very tall and she with her head hardly reaching his shoulder. But most of all, beyond the mirror’s perfect size and shape, she admired the beauty of its beveled glass encased by the dark wooden frame, and the six handcarved lilies rounding its top, three at each of its curved upper corners.

  He’d brought the mirror the first time he visited her. “When I saw this, I saw us…saw you,” he claimed. He brought the lilies afterward, one at a time, each one uniquely carved by his own hand, symbols of what he’d seen when they’d stood alongside each other and smiled into the mirror. “Each represents a visage of us,” he would explain as he attached each lily, describing how he’d seen her and him. Then he would turn the mirror toward her—toward both of them as he squeezed close—and ask if she didn’t see the same. She stood rapt with each vision he shared, admired each lily as his shoulder pressed against hers. Then whatever she hadn’t understood of his English, or he of her German, they both understood as they gazed at their reflections side by side in the glass.

  Six. Six wooden lilies. Six different thoughts since their first meeting on that rainy evening at the start of Berlin’s Summer Games. Now, near the end of the games, she stared into his mirror as she waited. For on this day he was bringing the seventh. His final reflection, the one he would attach to the peak, the crown of the mirror.

  She turned from the mirror where it hung above her desk and looked to the nearby window, through it and into the street below. Volksoper Street. A mere alleyway recently, instead of the broad thoroughfare it normally was, crowded on both sides with colorful banners hailing the games amidst Germany’s red national flags. She imagined him there on the street, how he would look as he came—tall and lean, blond, a champion bursting between the flags and running her way, the seventh lily like their own Olympic torch in his hand.

  He was right about the mirror. Each of those moments he’d marked by a carved flower was there, each visage of the two of them evident when she looked deep into its glass. Every juncture, every emotion, every experience from the past to the future—all visible to her, and surely leading to one thing. Her hand quivered, the nakedness of her ring finger conspicuous, ready for his seventh lily’s promise. The seal for the vows they’d made privately in the mirror and informally before God.

  Cars, carriages, and even horses’ hooves marked time on the cobbled street outside.
She watched the gaiety, the whole of her neighborhood with its tiny shops and clutter of artisans doing their part to welcome foreigners here for the games. Local artisans like her. Foreigners like him.

  She studied the passersby below, imagined again how he’d look racing along the stones, the grin on his face, his blond hair glistening like the treasure he was to be carrying with that last carving. She pressed her fingertips alongside the sheaves of paper she’d left to dry on the desktop, stretched, and leaned nearer the window as she watched for him. Pages and pages of words rested near her hands, words he liked to hear. Her words. New words. Stories that had changed since meeting him, stories she now wrote as his Amabile…his lily.

  Suddenly he was there, tall and rushing through the crowd, running. Just as she’d hoped, just as his medal—bronze—had proved he could. But faster than she’d thought. And harder. She caught the lift of his chin, the thrust of his chest, the pumping of his fists and elbows that brought his face her way. A face lacking the smile she’d expected to see—fixed, instead, in desperate lines as he raced closer.

  The visage burst into a thousand fragments. She saw and felt the blast before she heard it. The pages of her work launched upward—a spray of leaflets obscuring the window and the anguish that exploded on his face. Stories she’d created for him showered the room. Everything around her collapsed, then blew outward, out of proportion, hurled under a great light and deafening noise. Her heart. His face. Her thoughts. Everything. She grabbed for his mirror and the lilies…she grabbed at the glass, at the wood, at what he was coming to say. At what was supposed to be hers.

  At what she’d hold on to. Until it was.

  ~Amabile

  Dietrich reached upward and twisted the reading light with his fingertips, narrowing its cone of brightness to a pinpoint and then to nothing, Amabile’s book left in shadowy darkness.

  Other passengers, men and women, were leaving their seats, unaware of Amabile’s words. Stewardesses bent around him, retrieving plastic glasses and trays that were disposable, like this woman had been. “Oma, it couldn’t have been you that loved an enemy.” It couldn’t have been her on the pages on his lap. This was fiction. How could any of it be real? At least his grandfather had died before Monika appeared asking about Opa’s wife, Dietrich’s father’s mother, Dietrich’s own grandmother.