Page 4 of 13 Nights

I still don’t mention the folder, the German documents, or Johann Brandt. First, I want to give him one fact and watch what it does to him.

“I never told you where I’m staying.”

Tom glances up from the shelf. “I figured with the last name of Caldwell it was out at the cottage.”

“Yes, out on Crane Lane. My mother left it to me.”

His expression tightens for half a second, jaw and eyes catching before the rest of his face smooths back into polite interest. I know what a flinch looks like, even when someone dresses it up as a blink.

I hold his gaze. “Did you know my mother?”

“Not well. She was here years ago, before I took over the shop.”

Not no. Not quite yes, either.

“But you remember her.”

“I know the cottage.” His tone stays easy, but the distinction is too careful to be accidental. “How long are you staying?”

“At least until I finish my novel.”

Something flickers across his face again.

“Well, let me know if you need anything. Local history, research access, restaurant recommendations.” His smile returns, warm enough to be convincing. “We take care of our transplants around here.”

It’s a perfectly friendly offer that lands like a door being held shut while someone smiles through the gap.

I buy a volume on Hessian regimental records and walk back to the cottage in the dark. Beyond the commercial blocks, the streetlights thin out and the trees close over Crane Lane. My phone illuminates only the next few feet of gravel. Woodsmoke hangs in the cold air, and the silence between my footsteps lasts a little too long.

The place is exactly as I left it. I go inside, pour a glass of wine, grab a sandwich and sit at the desk with the folder spread open beside the sketch.

The regimental records from Tom's shop cross-reference with several of my mother's photocopied documents. Most of those reference the same anomaly she flagged in her margin notes: Johann Brandt's debtor substitution paperwork, inconsistent with the standard pattern.

My mother found the loose thread. She pulled it far enough to write to archivists in two countries and sketch a man's face before she locked everything in a drawer and walked away.

I flip through the German correspondence, marking pages I'll need to translate. The sandwich is mostly eaten but the wine goes warm. The house settles around me with the small sounds old buildings make at night, the ticking of pipes and the creak of wood adjusting to the cold.

When I look up from the documents, someone is standing at the edge of the yard.

He's visible through the front window, near the tree line, positioned where the light barely reaches the grass. He wears a dark coat cut long over tall boots, period clothing that in any other town would mean a reenactor who wandered off-route.

But the reenactors are downtown, performing for tourists. This figure is outside my cottage close to midnight, watching me through the glass with the stillness of someone who has been waiting.

I open the camera and start recording before I leave the desk. If he runs, I want his face. If he doesn't, I want proof he was here.

I walk to the front door.

Every rational impulse I have says stay inside, call the police, let the lock do its job. But I've built a career walking toward the thing that tells me to turn around. I've spent hours with a dead woman's research, wondering what she found here that scared her badly enough to leave. The answer to what drove her out of this cottage may be standing three steps below me.

I open the door. I keep the phone recording and my free hand on the frame. He is below me in the full wash of the lamp, and I remain behind the threshold with the lock inches from my hand. It isn’t safe. But I’m not surrendering every advantage to get my answers.

The cold hits first, October air sharp enough to sting. He's closer than he appeared from inside, at the bottom of the steps with his chin angled up toward the light. The lamp catches his features fully.

I know that face. I stared at those pencil lines for half the afternoon, traced the cheekbones and the jaw and the layered, corrected eyes. The sketch on my desk matches the man in front of me line for line.

He speaks first. Low, rough, the consonants shaped by a German accent I can't place more precisely. Nothing theatrical about it.

"You shouldn't be here."