Free When We Meet Again by Kristin Harmel

beautifully, as perfectly, as that. But before he could say another word, she was already walking away. He stared after her until he could no longer hear her footfalls in the muck, and then slowly, he sank to his knees, the wind knocked out of him.
    “Peter?” Maus was saying his name with concern somewhere in the distance, but Peter couldn’t move. Something had just changed within him, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on, but he had the strange feeling it had altered the course of everything.
    “Peter!” Maus said again, this time much closer to Peter’s ear. Peter turned around and was surprised to see Maus right behind him, his face tense with concern. “Come on! I can hear the guards coming back. What is wrong with you? You’ve never seen a pretty girl before?”
    Peter didn’t reply, but he let Maus drag him back to the field, where once again, he began to slice through the stalks of sugarcane. And even though he was surrounded by dozens of his countrymen, even though someone had begun singing the familiar “ Memelwacht ” in the next row of stalks, Peter suddenly felt more alone than ever, lost in a forest of cloying sweetness, a million miles from home.

CHAPTER SEVEN
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    B ack at home that evening, I heated up yet another Lean Cuisine, sat down with my laptop on the back porch, and googled Peter A. Dahler . Pages of search results appeared instantly, but they all seemed connected to a Danish professor who was obviously too young to be the Peter Dahler I was looking for. There were a few stray results for other Peter Dahlers, but they all led to unused Twitter accounts or family tree projects in which the Peter in question was the wrong age.
    I checked the envelope Jeremiah had given me and entered in the barely legible Holzkirchen return address, but that didn’t bring up anything other than a Google map indicating that it was located on a side street near the town center. I tried searching for the address with the last name Dahler, but that didn’t bring up anything meaningful either.
    Other than discovering that Holzkirchen was just thirty minutes from Munich, where the painting had been shipped from, I came up empty. Tomorrow morning, I would call my ex-boyfriend Scott at the Orlando Sentinel to ask if he could run a search for Peter A. Dahler using the newspaper’s research system; their software would scroll through driver’s license databases across the country and a few registries in Europe too. In the meantime, though, I had hit a wall.
    I gave up on looking for Peter for the time being and instead entered German POWs in U.S. during WWII . I still couldn’t quite believe what Jeremiah had told me—that during the Second World War, German soldiers had been employed in civilian jobs all over our country. But as soon as I began scanning search results, I realized that the prison camp system across the United States was even more extensive than he had described. For the next hour, I read quickly, my surprise growing as I scanned page after page of information.
    I was floored to learn that nearly four hundred thousand Germans had been imprisoned in the United States during the 1940s, but that newspaper coverage of the POW camps was limited, so many Americans didn’t even know about them. Most of the prisoners had been captured in battle or on German U-boats and had been brought to the States to work. According to the Geneva Conventions, enlisted prisoners could be used for labor, but only if they were paid and worked reasonable hours, so most were on a roughly nine-to-five schedule and received eighty cents a day, equivalent to an American private’s pay in the army at the time.
    Apparently some seven hundred prison camps were dotted all across the country—in almost every state, although the majority of the prisoners were housed in the South. Many of the larger camps provided university-level courses, English instruction, libraries, church services, soccer fields, and great medical