She shivered. The photographs, even though they left a void, were her only connection with Max when he wasn’t here. Her father must never find out about those. “They are shoes, Vati, nothing more. Some of the prettiest ones I have ever seen.”
“You are not to touch Frau Dornbach’s things.”
She nodded furiously. “I won’t ever look at them again.”
“You’re supposed to be cleaning the rooms. Like your mother...”
“I know.” Her voice sounded small, like the squeak of a squirrel, and she wished she were stronger like Max or even Sarah. Neither of them were scared of their fathers. “I will clean now.”
“Hermann has arrived. We need your help in the chapel as well.”
She’d known Hermann Stadler since they were children and liked him well enough, but she hated the chapel. The walls felt as if they were smothering her. “I’ll come, after I clean—”
“Now, Annika.”
The Georgette box was sitting on its own, under the canopy of hanging clothes. She lifted another box to return to its original place, hoping to distract her father, but he stepped over her and snatched up the Georgette of Paris box. Then he opened it and dumped the contents onto the carpet.
“What is this?” he whispered, lifting the star pendant.
She shrugged, trying to calm the pounding in her chest. “Just a necklace.”
A dangerous necklace with all its diamonds, the symbol of a people who increasingly needed a shield.
Vati’s eyes changed before her. Angry at first, turning wild and gray like a wolf’s, and then narrowing with greed. As if he’d found a trunk filled with gold. “In Frau Dornbach’s room...”
She scrambled to her feet, following him out of the dressing room. He held the necklace up to the window and the diamonds and gold glistened in the light.
Was her father planning to sell it? Surely not. The Dornbachs would release him from his position for thievery, and he and Annika would lose everything. The cottage and the milk from thegoats. The samlet from the lake. The birds that sang to her in the spring.
Unemployment, she’d read in the papers, was already rampant in Austria. Her father would never be able to get another position.
Annika held out her hand, her voice gaining strength. “Give me the necklace, Vati.”
A strange smile crawled across his lips—the most awful smile she’d ever seen. “I knew it,” he muttered more to himself than to Annika.
Her hand dangled in the air like the hook at the end of a fishing rod. “What did you know?”
Instead of answering her question, he dropped the necklace into his shirt pocket, and she feared this necklace would find trouble in her father’s greedy hands.
“Please, Vati.” She reached out her hand. “Frau Dornbach will find out that we went through her things.”
He glanced out the window again; then he turned back toward her, the eerie smile still pasted on his lips. “She’ll never ask about this piece.”
CHAPTER 6
“Remarkable.” Charlotte traces her neatly trimmed fingernail, polished with a pearly white color, under the script onBambi’s third page. “The print is almost identical to the original text.”
My fingers clench the velvet arms of the chair beside her, my sandals tapping the Oriental rug in time with the classical music playing softly through Charlotte’s speakers. “What does it say?”
She inches her reading glasses closer to her eyes, their rims pressing against her silver-white bangs. Then she checks inside the front cover—a familiar routine for her, this searching for the owner’s name inside a used book.
“A lovely tribute,” Charlotte says quietly after she discovers Annika’s name and the words from her mother.
Even as she says the words, I know she’s thinking about Nadine, her deceased mom. Charlotte’s mother was French, butas a German teacher living on the border between France and Switzerland, Nadine spoke both languages to the daughter she adopted postwar.
There’ll be no magical reconciliation between my biological mother and me, but at least I know my story—our story—as broken as it is. Charlotte doesn’t know where she was born or to whom. Family connections, I’ve discovered, go way beyond blood, but I’ve always wanted to find Charlotte’s biological family for her.
I glance over at the worn blue spine ofHatschi Bratschis Luftballonby Franz Ginzkey on a bookshelf near Charlotte’s piano, the magic balloon book that shaped her childhood and inspired the name of her store. It’s also the one item that Charlotte has left from her early years, the only clue to her past.
