Past & Present Read online

  There was no adequate response. Louisa picked up on my silence, no flies on this potential client.

  “Arabella seemed to think your team could offer a solution.”

  A solution? With enough money, time, and luck, we could probably offer some answers to the past. Whether it was a past she would welcome remained to be seen. As much as I wanted this first job, Louisa had to know what, and who, she was getting into. Arabella had a motto that authenticity matters. If we were to succeed at Past & Present Investigations, and be proud of what we were doing, transparency was a must.

  “We aren’t private investigators. Each of us brings something different to the table, but if you’re looking for a PI—”

  “I’ve had quite enough experience with private eyes after my serial cheater, thank you very much. Arabella told me about your team. What I know about genealogy would fit in a thimble. I don’t have the time or the interest to dig through old papers. The stuff in this suitcase might tell you a story, so too my mom’s jewelry and whatever’s inside the chocolate box, but I’m not much of a visionary. Most of all, I was swayed by Misty’s tarot message on your website. It was as if she was writing it especially for me.”

  “Hmmm, yes,” I said, as if I had a clue. Had Arabella given Misty a heads up? She must have. I made a mental note to ask. “In that case, I think our team can help you, although it could take some time.”

  “I’m not expecting miracles, and I realize it may take several weeks. As long as I get regular updates, I’ll be satisfied that you’re making progress, or at least trying to.” A savvy business owner might have left it at that, but I felt compelled to caution Louisa. “Sometimes secrets are best left buried in the past. We may find out things you’d rather not know.”

  “I’m aware that there are risks involved. I wish I could explain what force brought me to you. I can’t. Anneliese Prei has a story to tell, and I need to find out what it is.”

  I thought I had been ready, too, when I’d embarked on my quest to find out what happened to my mother. As it turned out, I wasn’t ready at all.

  But this wasn’t about me, or my mother. This was about a woman named Anneliese Prei. A woman who had immigrated to Canada for a better life, only to wind up dead three years after her arrival, cause of death as yet unknown. I looked at the photo. To me, Anneliese had a look of slightly arrogant self-confidence, a sort of feisty inner spirit that life tends to chip away at until it’s all but gone.

  Maybe that’s what had killed her, maybe it was something else. All I knew was, like Louisa, I had to find out.

  6

  Louisa and I settled on an hourly rate, deposit, and a baseline for the overall budget. I drew up the paperwork, including a voucher for the train case and its contents, and felt a tug of excitement when she signed the contract and wrote a check payable to Past & Present Investigations.

  The legalities taken care of, I recorded the few details Louisa could provide. Her mother’s name was Sophie Marta Frankow, born March 23, 1953 in Toronto to Anneliese Prei, father unknown. Was it possible his last name was Frankow?

  “It’s possible,” Louisa said, “but Frankow could have been the last name of one of the foster families. Unfortunately, my mom refused to talk about it.”

  Unfortunate didn’t begin to describe it. The chance of getting past privacy laws to uncover any information were remote. Hopefully Chantelle would have an angle.

  I fired up my computer as soon as Louisa left and went to our website. It was time to read what Misty had written.

  Despite my earlier reservations, I was impressed at the page Misty had created. A carousel of tarot cards rotated beneath the words “Misty’s Messages,” with a small photograph of Misty on the left side of the website banner. Misty was a plump fifty-something woman with fluffy bleached blonde hair and jet-black eyes. The picture had been subtly photoshopped to smooth out the most obvious wrinkles without going overboard, and her into-the-camera gaze made her look approachable.

  The main page for Misty’s Messages had several clickable tabs, which I knew from my website tutorials were called child pages. I clicked the tabs: History of Tarot, Major Arcana, Minor Arcana, and Court Cards. No content yet, but text that said coming soon. I was impressed; Misty had accomplished a lot in a very short time, and it demonstrated her desire to be part of the Past & Present team.

  On her Messages page Misty explained that she used a Rider-Waite deck for her tarot readings.

  Originally published in 1910 by William Rider & Son of London, the illustrations for the Rider-Waite cards were drawn in 1909 by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite. Smith’s richly detailed and symbolic drawings transformed the standard tarot deck. Today, Rider-Waite is one of the most popular tarot decks in the English-speaking world. See History of Tarot for more information.

  The History of Tarot was linked to the “coming soon” child page.

  Today’s Message had captivated Louisa. It featured the Eight of Wands: eight thin logs pointing toward the ground, with leaves falling against a clear blue sky and a rolling, treed landscape.

  The Eight of Wands (Element: Fire)

  This is the only card in the minor arcana that does not include people, animals, or mythological creatures. Notice how the eight wands work in tandem, each pointing in the same downward direction, as if in harmony with each other, the leaves and the earth. The overall impression of the card is one of peacefulness, movement, teamwork, and determination.

  Misty’s Message: This is the perfect time to take action. Working with a team will help you to produce the results you desire.

  I had to grin. I knew from past research that reading of the tarot was at the interpretation of the reader, although there was a general consensus on what each card represented. Misty had taken the Eight of Wands and made it all about purpose and teamwork. Not only was it clever, Misty had earned her first finder’s fee, split fifty-fifty with Arabella. Not a bad start.

  It was time to tackle the train case and sort the contents. I felt the muscles in my neck relax. I could do this. We could do this. I called Chantelle, provided a brief update, and paced the room until she arrived.

  After jumping up and down, hugging each other, and making a large pot of Earl Grey tea, Chantelle and I were ready to start.

  The first plastic pouch I removed contained a green cardboard passport. It was stamped Bundesrepublik Deutschland and Reisepass.

  “A passport for the Federal Republic of Germany,” Chantelle said, stating the obvious.

  I opened up the passport. The black-and-white photo inside showed a serious Anneliese Ruth Prei. It was issued in London, England, on February 12, 1952, with an expiry date of February 12, 1954. Anneliese was described as having an oval face, brown eyes, no identifying marks, height one hundred and sixty-five centimeters.

  Canada may have gone metric in the 1970s, but everyone I knew still weighed themselves in pounds and measured themselves in feet and inches, including me. “How tall is one hundred and sixty-five centimeters?”

  Chantelle tapped on her keyboard. “About five foot four,” she said. “What else does it say?”

  “It lists her current location as Nottingham, and her birthplace as Stettin, Pommern.”

  “Stettin, Pommern.” Chantelle tapped away at her keyboard. “Got it. Pommern was a province in Prussia. Stettin is now Szczecin, not sure if I pronounced that right. It’s spelled s-z-c-z-e-c-i-n. It’s a port city, on the Oder River, which flows from the Baltic Sea. It says that Stettin became part of Poland after World War II. Here’s a Wikipedia entry. ‘In April 1945, Nazi authorities of the city issued an evacuation order, and most of the city’s German population fled.’ My guess is that Anneliese fled to another part of Germany, and at some point, made the necessary arrangements to immigrate to England. Something or someone made her want to leave England and come to Canada.”

  “It’s someone,” I said, pointing to a handwritten entry in the passport. “This is her Canadian visa
application, approved on June 12, 1952, in Liverpool. The word fiancee is written in block letters and underlined.”

  “So there was a man waiting for her in Canada. What else does the passport tell us?”

  “She was immunized on June 17 and arrived in Quebec City, Quebec, on July 7.” I flipped through the pages. There were no more entries until the back page, where a paper record had been pasted in. “Look at this. Foreign exchange for traveling expenses, a special allotment for emigration. Looks like Anneliese received fifteen pounds.”

  Chantelle started typing. “About forty Canadian dollars, according to my historical currency converter. It would be worth about three hundred and fifty dollars in today’s money. Which is interesting, but not something that warrants more than a footnote in our investigation. What can the immigration identification card tell us?”

  “Anneliese R. Prei became a landed immigrant in Quebec City on July 7, 1952. That ties with the passport, which is no surprise. The ship was the T.S.S. Canberra, Greek Line. It departed from Southampton, England.”

  “According to Wikipedia, the Canberra sailed for the Greek Line from 1949 to 1954,” Chantelle said. “Unfortunately, the Greek Line stopped operating in 1975.”

  “So it’s a dead end.”

  “Not necessarily. Hang on while I go to the Canadian Museum of Immigration.” Chantelle’s fingers flew across the keyboard. “Here it is. The T.S.S. Canberra had seven hundred and thirty-three passengers on that journey. It would be nice to get a copy of the passenger list, although I’m not optimistic. A lot of those records were destroyed, and there are privacy laws, which can be quite restrictive. However, I do have a contact at the Museum. I’ll send her an email. Ancestry.ca might also have a record.” She pulled a pen and a spiral-bound notebook from her purse and made a note.

  The cover of the notebook had an autumn scene of a rocky-edged lake, a red canoe docked at shore. It was the sort of picture you’d expect from Tom Thomson or the Group of Seven. “Pen and a notebook. I thought I was the last of a dying breed.”

  “There have to be more of us out there,” Chantelle said, grinning. “Maybe we can start a notebook club. Of course, only pretty notebooks will be allowed, none of those five-subject kind you used in school.”

  “That goes without saying.”

  “What else do we have? In case I want to write more notes.”

  “The only other thing in here is an envelope with three postcards from the ship.” I took the postcards out and laid them one by one on the desk. The pictures on the postcards were black and white, the paper yellowed with age. All three had captions in German. “There must have been a lot of Germans on that ship, even though it left from England.”

  Chantelle nodded. “That makes sense. Many of the immigrants from England at that time were originally from Germany.”

  I picked up the first card. It depicted a wood-paneled room with a beamed ceiling and patterned carpet. A large piano was clearly the main attraction, with end tables and frilly, floral upholstered chairs and love seats positioned throughout the room. The caption read T.D. Canberra - Erste Klasse Musik Salon.

  “I wonder why it’s the T.D. Canberra instead of the T.S.S. Canberra?”

  “I’ve come across that before with my genealogy research,” Chantelle said. “T.S.S. stands for twin-screw steamer or steamship. T.D. stands for Turbine Dampfschiff, which translates to turbine steamboat.”

  “You are a veritable wealth of information. Can I assume that Erste Klasse Musik Salon translates to First Class Music Salon?”

  “You can.”

  I turned the card over. “There’s nothing written on the back. I wonder if Anneliese ever saw the inside of that salon. It looks very stiff and formal, doesn’t it? Not the sort of place where you’d be doing a singalong with the pianist.”

  I studied the next postcard. This room had wood plank floors, a small piano, ceiling fans, and a few upholstered chairs. It was still nice, but it didn’t have the opulence of the music room. “T.D. Canberra - Touristenklasse Aufenthaltsraum,” I said, stumbling over the pronunciation. “The first word means tourist class, but the other is beyond my cyphering abilities.”

  Chantelle was already on it. “It means lounge. This must be where the tourist class hung out.”

  I turned the card over. Blank again. The final postcard, captioned T.D. Canberra – Touristenklasse Speisesalon, was clearly a dining room, showing three long tables, seven chairs to a side, although the impression was of a much larger room with several more tables. A white tablecloth and napkins were in stark contrast to the dark furniture and bare wooden floors.

  “Okay, we have blank postcards from the ship Anneliese came to Canada on,” Chantelle said. “Obviously she kept them as mementoes of her journey, but they don’t really tell us much.”

  “Except this one of the dining room does have this on the back.” I pointed to a hand drawn heart with the number seven written inside it. “What do you think it means?”

  “The tables and chairs on the ship would have been numbered, and the passengers would have sat at the same table, with the same people, every night. My guess is that Anneliese fancied someone at the table.”

  “That’s my thinking, as well. But how do we find out which passenger?”

  “We’re just getting started. Maybe one of the three other storage bags in this suitcase will help us connect the dots. Or at least get us to the map that has the dots on it.”

  Connecting the dots. I remembered Louisa’s words, how she felt when she saw Anneliese’s photograph for the first time, as if her grandmother was reaching out to her from beyond the grave. I hoped Anneliese would trust us and keep on reaching.

  7

  I unzipped the first plastic pouch and carefully removed five black-and-white photographs of Anneliese. Once again I was struck by Louisa’s uncanny resemblance to her grandmother.

  I recognized the Canberra’s tourist class lounge in two of the photos. Unlike the postcards, which featured empty rooms, these pictures included people sitting, chatting, and milling about. I turned them over to find a penciled alphanumeric notation of 406-C and 412-C, almost certainly jotted by the ship’s photographer. Unfortunately, the demise of the Greek Line and the absence of a photographer’s name made further identification impossible.

  There was, however, a date of June 30, 1952 written in blue fountain pen ink on the back of both. Anneliese? A quick comparison of the spiky, Germanic handwriting against the signature on her passport confirmed it.

  I studied the first shipboard photo. Anneliese stood next to the small piano, a half smile playing on her full lips. The other shot showed Anneliese laughing, surrounded by a group of people.

  She wore a barber pole striped shirt with a large winged collar and softly puffed three-quarter length sleeves, paired with a slim-fitted A-line skirt, a row of decorative buttons down the right side. Sling-back, peep-toed pumps completed the look. It was obvious that Anneliese liked fashion, and with her tiny waist and slender ankles, she wore it well, but it was more than that. Everything about Anneliese Prei exuded quiet confidence.

  The third picture had been snapped in front of the chateau-styled Royal York Hotel in Toronto. Now dwarfed by mega-high-rise office towers and condominiums, in 1952 the twenty-eight story Royal York was the most prestigious address in town. Anneliese wore low-heeled pumps and a wide-strap sundress with a square neckline and white scalloped trim. It was difficult to determine the color, but I imagined it to be a deep shade of lavender. The dress was fitted at the waist and flared out to just below her knees, accentuating her trim figure. I flipped it over and noted the same handwriting, “July 9, 1952.”

  “There’s something different about her in this photo, but I can’t put my finger on it.”

  Chantelle glanced at the photograph. “Her hair has lost a bit of its bounce, but otherwise, she’s as crisp as a newly minted bill, not so much as a crease in that cotton dress of hers. Maybe coming from the temperate climate of England to t
he heat and humidity of Toronto in July sapped her energy. She landed in Quebec City, there would have been a train trip to Toronto, a lengthy journey back then.”

  The long journey was a plausible explanation. But my gut told me there was more to Anneliese’s lack of bounce than hot weather and the trials and tribulations of travel. I placed the pictures side by side, studying Anneliese’s expression. There was something about her smile, her eyes…

  “That’s it.” I pointed to the pictures taken on the ship. “In these two, Anneliese has a mysterious half smile, as if she’s hiding a secret, but she also looks positively radiant. In the one taken in front of the Royal York, there’s tension there. She’s smiling, but the smile doesn’t quite reach her eyes. It’s the kind of expression you see on people’s faces when they’re forced to pose for a picture.”

  Chantelle nodded. “You’re right. Damn, you’re good at this reading between the lines stuff.”

  “I’m going to have to be if we want to succeed.” I slid the next photo out of its plastic storage bag and felt a stir of excitement. “This one might actually provide our first solid clue.”

  Anneliese was wearing the same dress as in the previous photo. She looked more relaxed, the smile more genuine. She was standing on the front porch of a narrow, nondescript two-story duplex.