Max walked toward the front door to lock it. “Father will find out.”
“Not if you don’t tell him.”
He’d never betray either of them.
CHAPTER 21
LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA
OCTOBER 1938
The rumble of a car engine drowned the chorus of birds who’d nestled themselves between green conifer boughs and crisp leaves turned auburn and orange by the autumn winds. Annika hopped off her bicycle and hid behind one of the giant pines, watching between branches as a black sedan moved slowly toward her, bumping over the rocks and tree limbs that littered the dirt.
A long lane, the width more accommodating to an oxcart than an automobile, stretched from Schloss Schwansee east, to an unlocked gate about half a kilometer away and on into the town of Obertraun. Every few months, lost or curious drivers would venture through the gate and find themselves on the estate with no place to turn around until they reached the courtyard by the castle.
The estate had been built to be accessed by water, but this path, hidden under the trees, gave the Dornbachs and the occasional visitor opportunity to drive. These days she wished they could lock the gate and block anyone from coming onto the property. Except Max, of course, and Sarah and Hermann. How she missed all of them. Sarah had left for Bolivia months ago, and Annika’s father no longer needed Hermann’s help with the platform. It still needed to be painted, but Vati didn’t seem to care.
The men in uniforms came to visit her father several evenings a week now and sometimes during the day, often taking him away with them. At first she thought they were friends of his, going to the pub, but he no longer stumbled home in a stupor, smelling like sour beer. In fact, he seemed much more focused, like the sharp prick of a pin, though she didn’t know exactly what held his attention.
She was furious at him for telling Max that she’d found his mother’s necklace, as if she had been trying to steal from the Dornbach family. It was almost as if he were intent on ruining the Dornbachs out of pure jealousy for their wealth and prestige. And ruining her as well.
Where would she and her father go when Herr and Frau Dornbach decided they had enough of Vati’s rage?
The black sedan crawled past her, and she saw two men in the front seat wearing the stormy gray tunics of the SS men she’d seen in the village of Obertraun.
What did these men want with her father?
The Dornbachs, she suspected, wouldn’t want Hitler’s men on their estate, but Vati didn’t care what they thought anymore. He’d stopped their work in the chapel, and he didn’t even bother to lock the front door to the castle, coming and going as if he owned the place.
As if he didn’t expect the Dornbachs to return.
Max and his mother had left hours after Vati showed him the necklace. The next day Annika had cleaned the castle, but she didn’t linger, afraid of what she might find. Max hadn’t contacted her even though she’d written a letter of apology, saying that she’d never intended to harm him or his family. It had been stupid of her to go through Frau Dornbach’s things.
When the forest sounds returned, she pushed her bike back on the lane and began pedaling again, careful to maneuver around the rocks. She’d told Vati that she needed to go to the grocer’s, and if these men returned before she was in the village, she didn’t want them to offer her a ride.
She’d waited weeks for Hermann to bring her valuables to hide, but he hadn’t returned to the estate after Vati stopped building the platform. Hermann needed to know that she wanted to help. That she would do whatever she could to protect what her father and these men were trying to steal.
She unlatched the iron gate that stretched like a spiderweb between the stone walls and pedaled to the road that followed the train tracks into town. The chalets and barns ahead of her rambled through the threads of valley, hemmed in between the Alps. In addition to its five hundred residents, Obertraun had been filled in summers past with tourists from across Austria and Germany who boated and swam on the lake or hiked through the mountains. Other visitors arrived in the winter for skiing.
In autumn and spring, this town consisted mainly of residents like her who’d been living here their entire lives. Most people knew one another, Hermann once told her, but since Vati had forbidden her to attend school or church, her world rarely expanded past the iron gates. Now that Max and Sarah were gone, her onlyconnection to life outside was Hermann, along with the grocer and the butcher and the regular visits from Pastor Dietz, asking Vati if she could return to the evangelical church.
She’d waited long enough to help Max and the others hide their valuables from the Nazis. The papers no longer reported anything negative about Hitler or his party, but she’d heard something on the BBC last night that terrified her. The Jewish people in Germany were disappearing, it seemed. Taken away to work camps. Their things confiscated.
What would happen if people in Austria started disappearing as well?
The air on the other side of the village smelled like fallen leaves and the newly chopped wood that had been stacked in bins near the country homes and lined up neatly against barn walls. Cows wandered toward a fence along the bike path to watch her, their bells clanging like chimes in the breeze.
The Stadler family farmed in a valley east of Obertraun, at the foot of the Dachstein Mountains, and Annika found Hermann in his overalls and work gloves, loading shovelfuls of manure into a cart inside their barn.
He leaned his shovel against the door. “You’re a long way from home.”
She felt awkward for a moment, interrupting his work instead of answering his knock at her cottage. “I’ve come for a reason.”
“Of course. Would you like some coffee?” He nodded toward his family’s house on the other side of the barn door, a chalet backed against the hillside. Autumn leaves dangled low on heavy branches, framing the sloped roof and heavy shutters and empty window boxes.
“Perhaps in a bit,” she said. The house would be quiet withHermann’s siblings gone, off starting families of their own, but she still wanted to speak with him outside so his mother wouldn’t hear. “Did you see Max when he visited in August?”
Hermann shook his head slowly. “I didn’t know he was here.”
