Grantville, December 1633
"That's probably about the best we can do." Roberta Sutter looked at the stacks of paper on the table in front of her with considerable dissatisfaction.
"We've interviewed everyone in town," Sandra Prickett said. "We've made them look for family Bibles and scrapbooks and newspaper clippings and birth certificates and applications for delayed birth certificates and applications for Social Security cards and . . . Anyway, quite a few people got annoyed and said things, like, 'Don't you realize there's a war on?'"
"We've gotten a lot that we didn't have before," Mary Jo Blackwell added her bit to the Genealogy Club council meeting. Mary Jo was always spoiling someone else's desire to have a good fight. She was a nuisance that way, sometimes.
Marian Butcher nodded. "Some surprises, too, like how Rose Howell's descendants knew that some of Cyrene's great-grandkids lived here in town and that they were related, but Cyrene's had forgotten all about it."
Miriam Miller looked at Jenny Maddox. "I guess the point is—does the Bureau of Vital Statistics want us to stop the blitz? Have we done enough for the records you need?"
"More than enough, probably. We're going to put copies of everything in the public library. Marietta's fine with that. People can come look up their family trees if they're interested. Down-timers as well as up-timers."
Roberta frowned again. "The down-time stuff is still mainly oral history. It's not properly documented. When the wars stop, maybe we can write to the parishes where people told us they were born and married and get copies of their baptisms and weddings for our files."
"With your approach to genealogy, there will never be an end to it."
Roberta looked at Jenny, honestly surprised. "Of course not. Everyone who's ever been born has two parents, and lots of them have aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. And cousins. Even Jesus had cousins. The historian Josephus wrote that Roman officials interviewed them, about thirty years after the crucifixion. Oral history is an important part of the process, even though it isn't sufficient in itself." Her voice was starting to perk up again.
Sandra Prickett sighed.
"I hate to say it, Melvin, but I think they're losing their enthusiasm."
Melvin Sutter chewed his sausage. Personally, he had sort of hoped, after they adopted a couple of
children after the Ring of Fire and Roberta got a full-time job, that she would lose some of hers. Not that he had anything against family trees. But their house didn't have just plain family trees. It even had family trees that Roberta had cross-stitched, framed, and put up on the walls. There was one hanging right over his head, here in the breakfast nook.
"I started to explain how we could supplement the oral history we collected for the new immigrants. I need documentation for our own children. I've already written to Gotha for Albrecht and Margaretha and to Kitzingen for Martin. Now if I could just find someone who remembers exactly where Verena was baptized, since she doesn't seem to be related to any other of the Elsisheimers who have immigrated to Grantville—not that I'm sure they're telling me the truth. They're a bit evasive, especially Magdalena Albert. She's Kunz Polheimer's wife—her first husband was an Elsisheimer, though she didn't have any children by him. If it's because Verena was born out of wedlock and her mother Maria was actually a relative somehow, then . . ."
Melvin, a veteran of such speculations, tuned it all out and continued chewing.
Until he heard the dire words, ". . . and I'm not going to put it off any longer. I'm not going to wait until it's too late."
"Uh. Put what off?"
"Melvin, you haven't been listening."
He didn't even try to defend himself.
"I know we don't have any natural children, but Marilyn has Matt and it's likely he'll marry and have children one of these days. So I really need to finish the Hooper side of the family. Before the Ring of Fire, I took it as far as the church records from Schwarzach that had been microfilmed by the Mormons would let me, but they only started in 1612. If I go to Schwarzach now, before it's too late, I can interview living ancestors. I'm sure with what they remember, I can add a couple more generations to the family tree. Huber, it was, in Germany, before the Germanna immigrants Americanized the spelling. I hope that my ancestor Georg Huber is still the mayor of Schwarzach."
"I hate to say this, but we've got four adopted children, now. Their mother can't just go haring off someplace to do genealogy."
"They're not babies. Albrecht's sixteen; Martin's fifteen. Margaretha's eleven. Even Verena's five, not a baby any more. Marilyn will help you. I'm sure she will, especially now that Matt's off in Magdeburg. It's her family tree too, after all. You can manage on your own this coming summer."
"Marilyn just got married again last fall. Baxter Harris may not want for her to be babysitting a batch of kids all next summer."
"Since she married Baxter, she's Trissie's stepmother, and Trissie's the perfect age to baby-sit Verena and Margaretha, plus she's in the same class at school with Albrecht." Roberta patted Melvin's cheek. "Don't worry. It will all work out fine."
Melvin shook his head. "It won't be that simple. Things never are."
Roberta sat quietly.
Roberta quiet was Roberta dangerous.
"Just where is this Schwarzach place, anyway? Why don't you write them?"
"After the Benedictine imperial abbey there was secularized in 1803, it became part of the Grand Duchy of Baden. That was the German state of Baden-Wuerttemberg in our day. I did write to the mayor, last year. And to the Catholic church, but I haven't gotten an answer. So I need to go."
"By my count, there's close to a hundred seventy-five years of politics between now and 1803. Where is it now?"
"Um. In Swabia."
"Horn has a Swedish army in Swabia."
Roberta tilted her head. "Not in the part of Swabia where Schwarzach is."
"Just what part of Swabia is Schwarzach in?"
"It's on the Rhine. And now I have a contact there, so . . ."
"You have a contact there? I thought you said that they hadn't written back."
"Well, Mayor Huber hasn't written back."
"And . . ."
"Uh, you remember that Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar offered Kamala Horton a job? And she took it and shook the dust of Grantville off her feet, so to speak? She and the kids left right after school was out in May."
"Yeah . . ."
"Well, Duke Bernhard has his military headquarters at Schwarzach. That's where Kamala and her kids are. She's going to Besançon this fall, but there's stuff they want her to do in Schwarzach first. They've been given quarters right in the abbey buildings because she's working on military sanitation first. I can stay with her while I'm doing the research, which will save a lot of money in hotel costs . . ."
"Roberta!" This time Melvin practically shrieked. "You'll be walking right into a war zone."
"But not through a war zone. I can go straight over to Frankfurt and then take a boat down the Main and up the Rhine."
"Roberta! It's fucking dangerous!"
She looked at him, honestly bewildered. "Well, that's sort of the point." She patted his cheek again. "If the war is moving that way, I need to get in and copy the records for our family tree now, before things like tax records get destroyed or someone who remembers important information gets killed or dies. Think how many courthouses got burned during the Civil War up-time. It was horrible—just horrible."
"It's not common to have such a long family tree that's all made up of perfectly ordinary people," Roberta said. "There's not a famous person on it. Just farmers and innkeepers and stonemasons and carpenters. People like that. And their wives. I have all the maiden names back to the Georg Huber who is alive now, in this year 1634. Matt's the thirteenth generation. If I can just talk to this Georg Huber—a lot of the records spell his given name as 'Jerg'—then I'm sure I can add his mother's maiden name and he almost certainly knows the names of his grandparents. All four of them. His father was named 'Jerg' too. I've only been able to determine from the microfilmed church records that the older Jerg died some time between 1629 and 1641. If I'm really lucky and that ancestor is still alive, then he should remember the names of his grandparents, too. That would give us fifteen generations to my nephew Matt. At worst, I'll be able to find out Jerg, Sr.'s date of death and enter it on the charts."
Ed Piazza wished that he dared reach up and massage his temples. Roberta Sutter's family tree—to be more precise, Mrs. Sutter's extended disquisition on the topic of her family tree—was giving him a headache. Not only the abstract "problems for the consular service" headache that would result from her intention to go kiting off into Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's little personal sandbox, but a very real one, here and now, in the front of his brain. This was worse than Count Ludwig Guenther's librarian in full spate on the topic of relationships among the ruling families of the various states and substates of the USE.
"Of course, it's not entirely a male-line pedigree. It was male-line up to my sister Marilyn, but then she married Harry Tisdel, so Matt's a Tisdel. Of course, she'd divorced that bum even before the Ring of Fire and Matt didn't see much of his father. Maybe he'd be willing to change his name to Hooper and carry on the family name." Roberta smiled brightly. "I'll write him in Magdeburg and ask. He's up there training to be a Marine since he graduated from high school this spring. There shouldn't be any legal problems."
Ed pulled his shoulder blades together as inconspicuously as possible, trying to relieve the tension in his neck. Roberta Sutter had been in his office for an hour. Unfortunately, he hadn't primed his secretary to interrupt with an urgent appointment. Maybe the kid liked being a Tisdel. Who knew?
A knock on the door. A wonderful, blessed, knock on the door. It opened. Jamie Lee Swisher's head poked through. "Mr. Piazza, guess what? Mr. Ferrara is here. I just knew that you'd want to see him."
"Yes. Thank you, Jamie. Get him a cup of coffee, will you? I'll finish up here." He prepared for some difficulty in disposing of his current visitor, but Roberta Sutter was already picking up her purse.
Unfortunately, as she went out the door, her parting words were, "I just knew that you would understand how important the project is. I'm meeting Melvin and Henry Dreeson for lunch at Cora's. I'll tell them that you don't have any objections at all."
He did. He could think of a dozen perfectly reasonable objections. He just hadn't been able to get in a word edgewise, which was—unusual for him.
If she had stayed a little longer, he would have told her no. Now, unless he actually chased her down the corridor, she would be out in public announcing that he had given permission to go to Schwarzach before he could do anything about it. That kind of announcement was hard to retract without ending up with egg on your face.
He looked at Mrs. Sutter's departing rear and reminded himself to be careful, because sometimes you get what you wish for. In this case, an interruption. One more premature than timely.
Anyway, why did Mrs. Sutter think that Matt Tisdel needed to carry on the Hooper surname line if the ancestor was alive right now? Presumably carrying the line on himself. Why couldn't anything ever be simple?
At least, Greg was carrying two cups of coffee.
Ed smiled. "Greg," he asked, "do you happen to be interested in genealogy?"
Another hour later, well into the permutations of the Ferrara family tree, which involved the Trapanese family and the second marriage of Greg's mother to one of the Zeppi boys, Ed made a note to himself in regard to an addition to his personal list of "Questions a Sensible Person Never Asks."
Abbot Georgius of the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul at Schwarzach on the Rhine looked at the papers on his pedestal desk. Then he reached out and felt them again. Maybe for the tenth time since the up-time woman arrived. Perhaps for the twentieth time. Possibly for the hundredth time. So slick, so smooth. He had received descriptions of up-time paper from the librarians of the great Stift at Fulda, but this was the first time he had seen it for himself. Much less touched it.
Schwarzach was a Benedictine abbey, an imperial abbey, but not an important one like Fulda. One small town and a few villages, occupying seven square miles. Seven square miles—not seven miles square. Smaller now than it had been in the middle ages—the tribulations of the past couple of centuries had forced the abbey to sell some of its holdings to the margraves of Baden. A few thousand subjects. A ferry across the Rhine at Greffern—the tolls from that, far more than the modest taxes and dues paid in by the village farmers, kept the abbey going in a moderate sort of way. A very moderate sort of way, as evidenced by the fact that there was not a single nobleman among the monks and had not been for generations. Schwarzach did not have sinecures that would support the younger son of an influential family in the style to which he wished to remain accustomed. The monks of Schwarzach did not have to make any significant effort to fulfill their vows of poverty. They doubled as the parish priests for the villages. Sometimes, in difficult circumstances when no fellow villager would serve, they also doubled as godfathers for the children of the abbey's parishioners.
Or for children who did not belong to the abbey. His mind wandered back, briefly, to the annus terribilis of 1622, when the imperial troops had been quartered on the abbey. Sometimes he wondered what had happened to those soldiers and the women to whom the abbey's monks had married them that winter. What was the fate of the children who had been born in a dozen different camps and finally baptized here, on the banks of the Rhine, sometimes three or four years later?
He picked up a piece of the wondrous, slick, smooth, paper.
"Photocopies" the up-time woman called them. "Photocopies" that she had made by a machine from something called "microfilm."
He turned to the other pedestal desk, the one he had borrowed from Father Gallus' cell. On it lay the church registers for Schwarzach and its villages, meticulously maintained—or as meticulously as possible, given the exigencies of the war—in accord with the prescriptions of the Council of Trent. He picked up one of the pieces of paper, turned a few pages of the register, and compared.
It was true. Exactly and precisely true, just as Father Gallus had said. This woman had brought, from the far future, copies of pages from their own church registers. Black, a bright white, and gray, rather than the gentle cream color of the paper in the church books. On the copy from the future, one could see little tears at the edge of some of the pages, broken corners, an occasional stain that didn't yet exist on the originals. But the abbey's own registers, without a doubt.
Father Gallus' own handwriting, plain and straightforward, just like Father Gallus himself. Gallus was a solid man. Plain spoken. Abbot Georgius' right hand in these difficult times.
Here was a page with Father Bonifacius' delicate script. It always surprised correspondents when they first met Bonifacius in person. He was a big man—bigger even than Gallus—who looked like he would destroy anything in his path, but somehow he walked without making a sound. Of all the monks, he was most successful at keeping the Great Silence. Abbot Georgius always chose him if there was detail work to be done.
The woman, Mrs. Sutter, had expected Father Christophorus to be much older. The style of his handwriting, she said, belonged to the middle of the previous century. But Christophorus, barely thirty, was the youngest of them all. Excited by new things, his writing was where he stepped back, at least in form. Not to mention, of course, that his village schoolmaster had been nearly eighty years old. Perhaps Christophorus simply shaped his letters the way he had learned them as a child.
Father Paulus wrote this page. His script, as usual, was clear, but a little cramped. Paulus was a fussy little man, insistent on getting the details right, sometimes at the expense of the big picture. But he was also the man who, wondering about the Latin baptismal record that listed a child's mother as "Regina" when no one in the village called her that, had gone back, year by year, realized that the priest from Lorraine who thought that he was hearing "Königin" and translated it into the Latin "Regina" was misunderstanding "Kunigunde," and had given the young mother her proper name back in the registers. Abbot Georgius smiled briefly at the thought of a village woman named "Queenie."
Father Augustinus, large and florid, but without flourishes. An excitable fellow. Sometimes loud and with just the touch of a fanatic about him. Very sure of his beliefs, but kind for all of that. He had spearheaded that 1622 campaign to regularize the military marriages and legitimate the children, completely ignoring demands that he first seek permission from the regimental commanders.
Father Anselmus. His handwriting was difficult, but consistent. The up-time woman had remarked that she had found it hard to decipher originally, but once she had become used to it, had no further problems. Anselmus was also difficult, in a way. He struggles with his faith, the abbot thought. Anselmus wants to believe as a little child, but he can't help questioning.
Father Beda's small, angular, uncomplicated script—as close to a printed page as handwriting would ever come. A cold man, Abbot Georgius thought, though he tries to be a good one.
Father Geroldus. He always had Father Beda enter clean copies of his scribbled notes, kept on random scraps as he went from village to village, into the permanent register. Geroldus was a natural persuader and organizer. The scrawl of his signature indicated that everyone else should be grateful that he had persuaded Father Beda to write out his documents.
Father Gabriel. Abbot George smiled again at the up-time woman's description. What had she said? "Presuming that he believes in purgatory, I hope he spends a couple of centuries there, writing on the blackboard, getting his cursive improved under a stern taskmaster who will also break him of that obnoxious habit of throwing in non-standard abbreviations at random." It was true. Father Gabriel was creative and sometimes half out of control. His thoughts came too fast for him to keep track of. The other up-time woman, Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's "nurse," called Gabriel, "an absent minded professor type."
Father Antonius, whose writing was even worse than Gabriel's. The up-time woman had said, "I couldn't even decipher his surname. If anyone ever wants to keep a secret, just have this guy write it down; flocks of cryptographers will perish in despair." Georgius had thought briefly that he might be able to get some money from Duke Bernhard by loaning him a short little red-headed monk with a pot belly and a goatee." Then Frau Sutter had destroyed this hope by adding, "Of course, the recipient won't be able to make heads nor tails of it, either. If possible, I would like to be permitted to work with him, and have him read his entries to me out loud."
And Father Gregorius, the paper consumer. One would think his entries had been written by a lady-in-waiting at the court of Ferdinand II, with the wide margins, the wide spacing between the lines, and all the flourishes on the capital letters. Still, the page was legible, and that was what mattered. Gregorius willingly assumed the tedious responsibilities associated with vestment repair, the mending of liturgical books, the cleaning of stained glass, the thousand minute and unending tasks associated with keeping a centuries-old church building intended for a far larger congregation usable and in a condition that honored God. In return, Abbot Georgius did not begrudge him twice as much paper as anyone else used.
And that was the venerable Benedictine abbey of Schwarzach anno domini 1634. An abbot and eleven monks.
Until Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar's Kloster arrived and took up quarters in their cloister.
Whatever else might be said about Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar and his advisors, they were scarcely monks. Georgius was grateful that they spent much of their time out campaigning or at the duke's new capital in the Franche Comté. Although, to give them credit, they appeared to be reasonably chaste. They had not defiled the abbey's walls with loose women.
The duke also insisted that his soldiers attend church services, albeit heretical Lutheran ones. His Protestant chaplains made an effort to keep a rein on the blasphemies falling from the soldiers' mouths, although they did little about other obscenities and profanities. Still, Bernhard's men refrained from taking the name of the Lord in vain. At least when the officers and chaplains were present.
Abbot Georgius picked up the sheet of paper again, sliding his thumb over its slick surface.
He was an old man. He had been in office since 1597. Every year became a little more difficult. He, too, like Father Anselmus, longed for the simple faith of a child. But it seemed as if nothing was ever simple. Duke Bernhard had recently gone south to join the troops he had called into the Breisgau. He would have to notify the duke of the woman's arrival. The duke would undoubtedly want to know that the up-time "nurse" had another up-time woman staying with her. One of Jerg Huber's sons-in-law could take a message down to Lörrach. They were reliable men, and close-mouthed. Simon Jerger, Sibilla Huberin's husband—he would do. Simon could take Susanna Huberin's son, young Regenold with him. The boy was fourteen, and didn't get along very well with his stepfather. He was restless. Eva Reinlin had been complaining about his behavior, just the other day. The errand would do him good.
Lawrence Crawford hated this job. He was twenty-three years old and had been a soldier since he was fifteen. From the age of fifteen, he had fought in the armies of Christian IV of Denmark and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. He had fought in the name of young Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine, after the death of the Winter King, who was at least properly Calvinist. He had joined Duke Bernhard to fight, even though he, like the Dane and the Swede, was only a Lutheran, which was a poor substitute for the truth of God, if you asked him. Charles I and Laud were very close to being papists, and the Lutherans weren't much better.
Was he fighting? No. Instead, he had been assigned to a monastery to act as translator for the up-time "nurse." The woman's German was very poor. She said in excuse that she had spent the four years since the Ring of Fire mainly either at work in a nursing home, which seemed to be some kind of Spital, or attending her children's school events. In any case, it was still very poor and almost entirely limited to phrases such as, "When did her symptoms start getting worse? And "Is his temperature coming down?"
The woman's English wasn't much better. At least not from the perspective of a man who had been born in Jordanhill in Glasgow. In Scotland. He and Mistress Horton were divided by a common tongue. Not to mention by the fact that she belonged to some kind of sectarian church. Crawford did not hold with toleration of Independents and other religious radicals. Disciples of Christ—that was what she called her body of dissenters.
And now she had brought another up-time woman to Schwarzach. Whom he was to escort to meet the mayor.
Mistress Sutter's German was better, at least.
Jerg Huber was nearly sixty-five years old. An old man. Almost as old as Abbot Georgius. He had been mayor of Schwarzach since 1615, and on the town council long before that. The two of them had worked together for half their lives.
It was one thing for a man to have children. He had seven children who had survived. Five had already married and established families of their own. He had nearly two dozen grandchildren already—a blessing from God in these days of war and disease, these latter times of tribulation.
Though he could wish that Hans and young Jerg would get married. Except for Michael's two, all of his grandchildren came through the girls. He had only one grandson named Huber, so far-Michael's four-year-old Jerg.
They were good, steady, sons, though: hard-working and civic-minded, all a reasonable man could ask for. Barring famine and plague, one of them would probably, some day, become mayor of Schwarzach in his stead. Presuming Hans and Jerg got married, that is.
But.
He could not see that it was a divine blessing to have someone suddenly appear in the world who claimed to be his descendant thirteen times removed.
Not all miracles were necessarily blessings. Undoubtedly the fig tree cursed by Our Lord Jesus Christ had come to that conclusion somewhere in the process of being the object of a miraculous action. So he had ignored the letter from this woman, Frau Sutter, when it arrived the previous winter.
Now she was in Schwarzach.
It was hard to avoid a miracle when God wanted you to undergo it. Consider the fate of Jonah. Jerg Huber paused during his morning's work and considered the efforts of Jonah to avoid destiny. The maneuvers of Joseph. The evasions of Elijah.
He had to answer the message from Herr Crawford. He sent his granddaughter up to the abbey to say that he agreed to meet with the up-time woman.
If a miracle wanted you, it would get you.
Although why God thought she really needed to learn his grandfather's name was well beyond his comprehension.
Anyway, it had been Huber. Of course. What had she expected?
Father Anselmus came with Frau Sutter, most times. Abbot Georgius thought that his faith could benefit from close contact with a modern miracle.
Officially, Abbot Georgius had assigned him to make copies of all the information that Jerg was remembering about earlier times in Schwarzach and the people who had lived there. He said that he would place it in the monastery's archives, next to the church registers. Perhaps, some day, if he had time, he could turn it into a chronicle.
Jerg Huber took exception to Frau Sutter's assertion that his family tree consisted of "perfectly ordinary people." He was, after all, a citizen of Schwarzach. The mayor of Schwarzach. Not some insignificant day laborer or vagrant.
"Well, I meant . . ." She sputtered a little. "Not nobles or anything."
Their conversations continued. One day, the topic was Jerg's maternal great-grandfather's sister's stepdaughter. Whom he had never met. That was the day that Father Anselmus mentioned that the abbey had tax and lease records much older than the church books. Mrs. Sutter gave him a blinding smile.
Jerg Huber gave him a blinding smile, too. Even if Father Anselmus didn't, quite, believe in miracles, he had performed one, at least in Jerg's opinion. Since then, the up-timer hadn't pestered him any more, but rather had buried herself in the muniment room at the monastery, assisted by Father Paulus. From first daylight to the last dim remnants of dusk, according to Herr Crawford, the day he left Schwarzach to escort Mistress Horton to Besançon, she made copies of financial documents and put them in her files.
As Jerg Huber lighted a votive candle in the great church at the Abbey of Saints Peter and Paul, he gave thanks that the world still contained small miracles as well as large ones. Miracles such as the diversion of Frau Sutter to the abbey's archives.
Moreover, he had received, through this woman, the knowledge that his fatherly patience would be rewarded. Eventually, Hans and Jerg would marry—marry well, both of them—and father families. There would be only daughters for Hans, but four sons for Jerg.
If things remained the same in this world as they had unfolded in the one from which Grantville came, of course. A man could only hope.
"Send her home," Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar said. Firmly. "By the time we wind things up here and das Kloster returns to Schwarzach to start planning next spring's actions, let her be gone. Absent. Removed. No longer present. While I admit that the likelihood that she is an intelligence agent seems to be . . ." His voice trailed off.
"Diminishingly small, on the basis of everything Crawford told us," Friedrich von Kanoffski contributed.
"Minute," Duke Bernhard admitted. "Minuscule. Nevertheless, we have Mistress Horton on her way to our civil headquarters, where she can do the most good now that she has provided directions for our new medical corps and well away from the location where we will be considering our . . . upcoming enterprises. Let the other one depart as well."
"You are assigning Colonel Raudegen to guard Frau Dreeson and Signorina Allegretti," Kanoffski suggested. "I will have the boat stop at Schwarzach. He is surely capable of removing Frau Sutter from the abbey and ensuring that she returns to Grantville."
"If anyone is. He can certainly try," Duke Bernhard rubbed his stomach. "But I remember all too well what it was like when I was a boy and my tutors started talking about the genealogy of the Wettins."
"Do you realize, Melvin?" Roberta asked. "The colonel would not even tell me his actual name. The one with which he was born. He claimed that he had used his military alias since he was old enough to run away from home and it was good enough for him."
"Ummnn," Melvin said.
"But I kept talking to him, and I got a lot of clues. I'm pretty sure I know what village he was born in, now, but I need a good map of Lower Austria. And his mother was called Barbel. I'm pretty sure that with those clues to go on, I could work out his family tree, with enough time and effort."
"Sounds like more trouble than it's worth, to me. Especially since Raudegen doesn't want you to research his family tree. Why don't you just keep working on our kids, now? There's a whole batch of stuff that came in while you were gone, from Kitzingen and places like that. I piled it all in your inbox. It doesn't sound to me that doing research on Raudegen's family would be easy."
"But it would be a challenge, Melvin. A challenge." Roberta waved both her hands. "Nothing worthwhile is ever simple. Nothing."