“…people said your Peter…” Hilde had begun, and then she stopped, and I could hear her breathing on the telephone as clearly as if she had been sitting in my kitchen. I was standing at the counter in my robe, with sixty four thousand dollars still rolled in rubber bands beside the sugar bowl. I said, “Hilde, finish the sentence.” She said, in a small, old voice, “Ingrid, people said your Peter was the boy who drove the car. The one waiting outside the bank. In 1990. The night the vault was emptied.” I put down the receiver. My knees would not hold me.
I sat on the kitchen step stool for a long time, looking at the clock. It hung on its nail, with its carved pine cones and its tiny painted door, silent as it had been for thirty five years. Klaus had said it was resting. I understood now what he had meant. The clock had stopped on the day our son became a thief. And my husband, a proud, honest man who never took a pfennig that did not belong to him, had refused to let it run again, as though time itself were a witness.
I called Peter that afternoon. He was at his office in Detroit, and he sounded irritated. I said, “Peter, I found the money in your fathers clock. And the list.” There was a click, and then silence. A door closing, I thought, somewhere in a glass tower. When he spoke again, his voice was thin. He said, “Mom, I will drive up tonight. Please do not call anyone. Please do not touch anything else.” I said, “I have already touched everything.” And I put down the telephone, and made a pot of strong coffee, and waited.
A cuckoo clock pulled from a dumpster, rolls of hundred dollar bills behind the bellows, and a list of five names.
He arrived at ten, in a long gray overcoat, with a face I had not seen since he was a boy of ten caught stealing cookies. He sat at the kitchen table across from me, under the yellow lamp, and for a minute neither of us said a word. Then he said that in 1990, when he was twenty, he had fallen in with two older boys from Saginaw. They were planning to rob the Frankenmuth Savings after hours, with the help of an inside friend. Peter drove the car. He did not go in. He said, “I only waited. But I was there, Mom. I was there.”
The robbery had netted thirty one thousand dollars. A night guard was frightened, and a young teller named Doris Kemp had been working late. She saw the men. She saw the car. And she knew Peter, from the church youth group. The next day, she went to the pastor. Reverend Albrecht, in turn, came to Klaus, and Klaus, after a night of walking the streets of Frankenmuth in the rain, made a decision that cost him thirty five years of peace. He paid. To the two boys from Saginaw. To Doris. To the pastor discretion fund. All so that Peter would not go to prison.
I looked at the list again. Five names. The two men from Saginaw, Peter, Doris Kemp, Reverend Albrecht. Each with a date, and an amount, and a check mark. Under the last name, in smaller, shakier writing, Klaus had added a line I had not noticed before. Ingrid, forgive me. I did it for the boy. I could not let a child of mine lose his life for one terrible night. When I read it aloud, Peter put his face in his hands, and his shoulders began to shake.
“Where is Doris Kemp now?” I asked. Peter said he did not know. It took Hilde two days, and a niece at the Saginaw library, to find her. She lived in Bay City, in a small yellow house by the river, a retired bookkeeper of sixty one, living alone with a cat. I drove there on a gray Thursday, with Peter in the passenger seat, saying nothing, and the cuckoo clock wrapped in a quilt on the back seat. I rang her bell. When she opened the door, she looked at Peter, and then at me, and she went very still.
She let us in. We sat in her small kitchen, three people who had carried the same stone for thirty five years, each in a different pocket. Doris said that she had taken the money, and she was ashamed. She said she had been twenty six and afraid, and that she had left town because she could not look at the church. I laid the sixty four thousand dollars in rubber bands on her table. I said, “This was never meant to buy your silence. It was meant to buy a sorry, and no one ever said it. Peter, say it.” He looked up. And he said it.
Doris cried, and so did I, and I think even the cat was moved. She would not keep all of it. She kept twelve thousand dollars, which Klaus had paid her, and she gave the rest to a food pantry in Bay City, in the name of Klaus Weber. Peter confessed to the Frankenmuth chief of police, a gentle man who had long since retired, and who told him, kindly, that the case was thirty five years cold, but that he would accept a letter of apology, and a gift to the bank scholarship fund.
In December, a clockmaker from Bavaria, a friend of Hildes nephew, came to my kitchen with a leather bag of tiny tools. He worked for three hours, without a word, with a magnifying glass and a pair of tweezers. At last he hung the clock on its nail and nudged the pendulum. It swung. Somewhere inside the carved pine cones, a spring unwound, and the little door flew open. A wooden bird shot out, and called, clear and bright, across the old kitchen. Cuckoo. Peter, standing in the doorway, with his hat in his hands, whispered, “Papa.”