Page 16 of With a Vengeance

“It wasn’t me, Annie. I would never hurt you like this.”

The seized papers and the testimony of others painted Arthur Matheson as a Nazi sympathizer who tried to aid the enemy by hindering the U.S. war effort. Anna’s father was eventually hit with dozens of federal charges, ranging from sabotage to treason to thirty-seven counts of murder, including that of his own son. Denied bail, he was sent to federal prison to await trial.

It never happened.

On his second day there, an inmate stabbed Anna’s father thirty-seven times.

Once for every person killed in the explosion.

Edith and Sal didn’t come to her father’s funeral. No one did. It was just Anna, her mother, and Aunt Retta standing in front of a blessedly closed casket as a pastor-for-hire gave the briefest of prayers. In that moment, Anna consoled herself with the assumption that it would be the lowest point of her life. That things couldn’t possibly get worse.

Until they did.

The absence of a trial didn’t keep her father’s reputation from being posthumously destroyed. A Senate hearing took care of that. During the proceedings, broadcast on every radio station and exhaustively detailed in every newspaper, five star witnesses gave sworn testimony about how and why Arthur Matheson committed sabotage.

Lt. Col. Jack Lapsford said Anna’s father approached him about manufacturing trains expressly for troop transport.

Judd Dodge described several meetings in which he tried to convince Arthur that his locomotive design was doomed to failure.

Herb Pulaski swore that Arthur had ordered him to cut corners as much as possible in the building of that locomotive.

Sally Lawrence provided notes detailing those conversations, along with dozens of memos signed by her father backing them up.

Edith Gerhardt testified about how Arthur seemed highly interested in the Third Reich and even insinuated he’d hired her simply because she was German.

By the time it was all over, not a single person in America besides Anna, her mother, and her aunt believed that Arthur Matheson was innocent. Her father’s company, now worth a fraction of its value, was sold to his chief competitor. And her mother retired to her room, escaping her grief with a steady diet of booze and pills, and leaving Anna utterly, entirely alone.

This lasted a full two months before her mother, bursting out of her bedroom, suggested a picnic. A sudden, surprising treat. They drove outside the city, to a grassy hill that overlooked the Delaware River. There, high above the water, Anna reverted to childhood, doing cartwheels in the grass and making daisy chains for their hair. The one she’d given her mother sat crookedly atop her head as she sat on the hood of the car, smoking one Pall Mall after the other.

“My girl,” her mother said. “My beautiful girl. One day, you’ll forgive me.”

Then she got into the car, started the engine, and drove off the cliff into the river.

Twelve years later, on a train her father used to own, Anna struggles to keep that particular memory at bay. She assumes that if she closes her eyes, the image on the backs of her eyelids will be of her mother sitting calmly behind the wheel as the car sailstoward certain doom. And that if not for the white-noise clatter of the train, she’d hear her mother’s car crashing into the river below. Even so, she catches the faintest hint of it—like the echo of an echo. A horrible crunch-splash that she still sometimes hears in her nightmares.

It makes Anna unexpectedly relieved when someone else in the lounge finally speaks.

“What does any of this have to do with us?”

It’s said by Dante, the only person on the train ignorant enough to get away with such a question. He poses it with enough sincere curiosity to make Anna wonder just how much he knows about what happened back then—and his father’s role in all of it. She herself had known so little.

At the time, Anna never gave much thought to why Edith suddenly quit, why Sal made herself invisible, why her father’s once-devoted employees distanced themselves. She assumed it was because they, like everyone else, thought her father had blood on his hands. People naturally pull away from those who’ve suffered a great loss out of fear that their bad luck is transferable and will soon upend their own placid lives.

It didn’t matter to Anna that these same people had testified against her father. She continued to give them the benefit of the doubt, thinking them mistaken, misguided, or simply confused about what had happened. Never did she consider that all of them were part of a concerted effort to destroy her father, everything he worked for, and everything she loved.

She’d learned that only a year ago, when Aunt Retta was on her deathbed. By then her aunt’s body was riddled with cancer, the disease eating away at her. Anna dutifully sat by her bedside all day and into the night, although her aunt by then was asleep more often than not, thanks to the morphine.

But on that day, she jerked to life, startling Anna from her own fitful sleep in the chair beside the bed.

“Anna.” At first, her aunt’s voice was just a whisper, but it grew more forceful with every word. “Your father didn’t do it.”

She tried to quiet Aunt Retta, who’d said something similar a thousand times in the eleven years they’d lived together. That her father was innocent. That he couldn’t have done all the horrible things he’d been accused of. That he was framed.

Anna, of course, believed her, just as she believed her father when the police carted him away in handcuffs. It didn’t matter that everyone else—the cops, the military, the U.S. government, even his own employees—thought him guilty. Anna knew in her heart that her father was telling the truth when he swore his innocence.

But she also knew it was too late to do anything about it. She didn’t want her aunt to waste her final words speaking about a past that couldn’t be undone. But Aunt Retta insisted on talking. She tried to sit up, the exertion of it making her wince in pain. Anna forced her back against the pillow, where her aunt stared at her with fire in her eyes.

“I have proof,” she said.

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