I shift my legs. “An impossible time.” Each of them—Luzia and Annika, Hermann and Max—they fought evil the best way they could.
The pattern of sky is changing as white layers itself upon the blue, and a breeze stirs up the water in front of us, the lake layered with its own secrets.
“Will you keep diving?” I ask.
“Perhaps.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t find the treasure.”
“We found something more important,” he says. “And, I hope, a second chance.”
“For Luzia and Charlotte?” I ask quietly.
“Yes.” When he turns to me, the fierceness in his eyes matches the storm building overhead. “And perhaps a second chance for both of us, too.”
I like the thought of that—no pressure, just the possibilities.
“What happened to that German wall built firmly around you?” I ask.
“You’re breaking it down, Callie.”
Just like he’s been breaking down the wall I built around my heart. “Sometimes, I suppose, we have to give up that distance to welcome others into our lives.”
He releases my hand and props his arm across the back of the bench. I settle into that space of strength between his arm and chest. A protected place like the depths of this lake before us.
My gaze, in the rest of contentment, falls across this strand of water to the hillside where the grave stands to honor Annika’s life,though the name on it, Luzia, is the one Annika took as hers long ago, Luzi and Annika’s secrets hidden away.
“And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places.”
These words from the bizarre story about a girl named Matilda who loved books, written by Roald Dahl—a man whose imagination seemed unfettered by any chains.
And then I think of another strange story—this one about the salt administrator and his casket that used to travel across these waters every fifty years to visit his home, the last time in 1939 before the war began.
The number does the strangest thing in my mind. It blurs out and then refocuses like the autorefractor at my optometrist’s, crystal clear the second time. According to Luzi, the Gestapo took Annika away in the spring of 1939 as well.
“What if—?” I start, struggling for words so that this man I’ve grown to admire doesn’t think I’m completely crazy. Then again, his willingness to think outside the proverbial box, like Annika once did, has brought us to this place. “What if you can still return the treasure to its owners?”
“I don’t think this lake is ever going to relent.”
I take a deep breath, calming the craziness. “What if the treasure isn’t in the lake?”
He glances behind us at an estate that would have been thoroughly searched by the Gestapo and the teenage boys who resided here under the Nazi regime. “Where else would it be?”
I tell him my idea, and he pulls out his phone to dial a contact in Vienna.
And I realize he doesn’t think I’m crazy at all.
CHAPTER 44
LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA
JUNE 1955
More than a decade after the war, when the Russian soldiers along with the Americans, British, and French finally left Austria, Max returned to Lake Hallstatt.
The newly reunited government of Austria was trying to return property to any Jewish owners left to claim it, but he had no desire to keep the estate that had been used by the Nazis. The place where the Gestapo had stolen Luzi away.
And the treasure that he’d taken such great care to hide with Hermann and Annika—it seemed there was no one left to claim that either.
