All around her, volunteers were arranging the dead in rows. Nurses followed behind, draping sheets over their faces. How would Cora find either of them? And what if she did, beneath two of those shrouds? She would have to try yet hope for failure. If they weren’t here, they might have jumped overboard before the Slocum reached North Brother and hopefully had been rescued. “What do they look like?”
“Find my Rolene,” he mumbled as he rummaged through his bag, “and Ulrich.”
“I’ll do my best, sir.” She dug the tip of her boot into the sand. “What do they look like?”
He scrunched his face. “Blond, blue eyes, slim.”
That description had to match many of the Germans who’d been attending the Lutheran church outing. At least the boy might bear a resemblance to the doctor, and the memory of Ingrid’s features would give her a sense of the mother’s.
Sweltering beneath the layer of wool, she walked toward the end of the row of corpses on the beach, closest to the water, and pulled back her hood. These poor souls are beyond the reach of my pests, she thought as she tugged down her face covering.
As she moved along the beach, waves tugging at her ankles, she thought of the bodies settling into the muck. Rolene and Ulrich might be among them. What if she’d grabbed a different hand, saving Ulrich instead of a stranger’s child? Was his life more valuable simply because his father was her doctor? If she’d swum faster, enabling her to rescue a twelfth, it might have been him.
Nearby, a badly burned elderly woman collapsed in the shallows, and nurse Nellie O’Donnell rushed to her. Cora sidestepped them to keep her distance.
“Du stolsst mein Baby!” shrieked a hoarse voice.
Cora turned toward the noise and stiffened. A tall, soot-stained woman in a sodden dress was charging at her, narrowly dodging the bodies in her way.
She thinks I stole her baby, Cora realized.
“Gib ihm zu mir.” Give him to me.
Cora winced at the woman’s misplaced hope.
The distraught mother tripped over a leather dress shoe, attached to a corpse, and regained her momentum.
“Ich habe ihn nicht,” Cora said, using the German she’d learned from Dr. Gettler, and raised her empty hands to show she didn’t have him.
“Meine kleiner Friedrich, wo ist er?” (Where is he?) the woman asked from within spitting distance. The strands of wet hair wrapped around her neck and intense, beady brown eyes gave her the look of a crazed animal, but Cora knew it was instead herself who should be feared.
Donning her hood, she backed away from the woman. “Ich weiß nicht.”
How could she know where little Friedrich was? Most likely, she thought as a sob snagged in her throat, the babe was somewhere within the burned wreckage or the river depths.
The woman howled and reeled toward another female of childbearing age.
Cora longed to run to her room and hide beneath the bedcovers. Instead, she lifted the sheet from the face of the first body and bit her knuckle. The teenage boy’s mouth was contorted in agony, his fingers curled as if he were still clawing for the water’s surface. She dropped the cloth and moved on to three children and a woman, all with auburn hair and freckles. Surely the father had heard the news by now and was frantically searching for them.
Stop, she warned herself, or she would fall apart and fail at her task. Clenching her teeth, she peeked under the next sheet and backed into the surf, away from a mother, her baby still clutched to her breast.
Unnaturally warm water, thick with debris, sloshed against Cora’s calves. She shoved aside a charred plank and turned away from the pair. The heat rolling off the Slocum stung her cheeks and dried her tears. Beyond the shallows, men aboard a hodgepodge armada were collecting the floating bodies, adding to the number of faces she’d have to scrutinize.
No, she couldn’t complete this assignment. The sorrow would drown her.
But if she quit, Dr. Gettler might abandon the wounded to search for his family. And then others might die because of her. Inhaling deeply, she once again faced the rows of dead.
Under Kate’s direction, volunteers had begun moving the bodies to the lawn in front of the main hospital. To avoid seeing any face twice, she decided to restart her search with the farthest row on the higher ground. Climbing over the seawall, she reeled at the lines of tiny corpses.
“You sh-sh-shouldn’t be out here,” nurse Puetz called to Cora as she trudged past with a tower of blankets that dwarfed her petite frame.
“Dr. Gettler wants me to find his family.”
“Oh, dear God.” The nurse handed the topmost to a shirtless, portly man, who was staring into the sun and singing a German hymn in a deep baritone. “I’ll keep an eye out.”
Cora nodded and skirted the dead to reach her starting point. She passed a mother, hugging her howling baby girl to the side of her body that wasn’t burned. “Mein Adella.” she said with a sob, “Mein süße Adella.”
A bedraggled man, wearing the white collar of the church, reached the mother and patted her head. “Your husband, he’s alive. Stay here. I’ll tell him where you are.”
The woman cried harder. “Vielen Danken, Reverend Haas.”
“God is with us, even now.” His hand slipped from her brow, and he wandered away.
Maybe she would happen upon Rolene and Ulrich in the same condition, Cora told herself and inspected the first prostrate figure on the grass—a girl close to her own age. Quickly, she moved on, passing two full-size bodies in britches and a plump, shrouded woman, without lifting their coverings. Three fewer faces to haunt her dreams. She moved on to an outline that looked about three years old.
Saying a quick prayer, she flipped back the sheet. With blondish hair and chubby cheeks,
