“What are we to do?” she asked.
“Fight, in our own way.”
But there was nothing she could do to fight the mighty Hitler. She was only a young woman. A kitten, in Max’s eyes.
Hours later, after she’d prepared the meal, she delivered the Tafelspitz to the castle. The front door was unlocked, and she found Max in the library, a book and what looked like a letter in his lap.
She set the tray on the circular table. “What are you reading?”
“Bambi.”
She sat on the chair opposite him. “My mother gave me that book before she died.”
He slipped the paper into the book and closed the cover, his eyes turning toward the dark window as if he could see the cottage behind the trees. “These days it feels as if we are all being hunted.”
Perhaps he saw his own dreams of escaping in those pages about the deer.
“If you could run, Max, where would you go?”
“To my aunt’s home in Paris,” he said. “Or someplace else where the Nazis aren’t allowed to hunt people like they are prey.”
“It makes me sad to think of people hurting someone who’s weaker instead of protecting those who have already been wounded.”
Max placed one hand on the book. “People hurt others because they are afraid.”
Fear, Annika thought, was a curious thing. Motivating some to hurt and others to heal.
She almost told him about the necklace, but it seemed that Vati had forgotten about it now. Max had enough to worry about without her adding to his heavy load.
When he reopened his book, the words that had once slipped easily between them turned into an awkward silence, bricking up a wall that separated them instead. They could talk here for hours tonight without his parents or her father to disturb them, and yet it seemed as if he were more interested in the silence found inside these walls than conversation.
As Annika returned to the cottage, loneliness engulfed her once again. A bird sang out in the darkness, and she wished she could fly away with the songbirds until Hitler was gone. And Max had returned to her.
CHAPTER 13
The front yard of my sister’s home smells like charcoal and grilled meat. Charlotte and I step out of the Prius, onto the sidewalk, and I brace myself for the front door to spring open, my nephews attempting to tackle me with their hugs.
On the way home from Columbus, Brie texted and asked us to join her family for dinner. Charlotte seemed to forget her own plans for the night, readily agreeing to a meal of barbecued chicken, fried potatoes, and fruit salad.
I scan the narrow driveway that leads to an attached garage before glancing up toward two stories and attic dormers of the Victorian house. Typically my nephews are either playing in the drive or watching for me from the windows, but I don’t see them peeking down at me this evening.
Did Brie forget to tell the twins I was coming? Or maybe she wanted to surprise them.
Charlotte glances at her watch. “Perhaps we should wait a few minutes.”
“Brie won’t care if we’re early.” After our excursion today, I was glad to be ten minutes ahead of schedule. “And Ethan already has meat on the grill.”
After flipping the latch on their picket fence, I open it wide for Charlotte and we stroll up the pebbly path that divides the lawn in two, giving my nephews extra time to tumble out. But when we step up onto the porch, the front door is still closed and, oddly enough, locked. I ring the doorbell and wait.
Charlotte checks her cell phone. “Perhaps Brie is still at the store.”
“I know where the key is.” Tucked away on the corner of their porch in a tiny pop-up box that Ethan rigged up after Brie locked herself out one afternoon, their boys napping upstairs. Before the locksmith arrived, she’d busted the window on the back door and let herself in.
“I’ll text her,” Charlotte says as I retrieve the key. “We won’t want to scare her if she’s inside.”
Seconds later, my sister’s face appears in the narrow window that lines the evergreen door. She waves at us, but it takes her way too long to open the door. An image flashes in my mind of Miss Clavel in Madeline’s Parisian boardinghouse.
“In the middle of one night Miss Clavel turned on her light and said, ‘Something is not right!’”
