The two of us step out onto the narrow balcony that stretches across to my room on the other side, about twenty feet above the lake.
“Are you tired?” he asks.
“More like wired.”
He points toward a small round table in the center of the balcony, the tabletop a colorful mosaic made from pieces of broken tile. “You want to stay up for a bit?” I hear the trepidation in his voice, as if he’s asking me out on a dinner date.
I glance toward the dim lightbulb flickering over my sliding-glass door. Part of me longs to nest inside, but a bigger part of me wants to stay right here with him.
“For a bit,” I say.
“I’ll be right back,” he says before turning toward his room.
I lean against the wrought-iron railing and look down at the lights of town reflecting back as if the lake were a mirror. Across the water is Schloss Schwansee, but I can’t see it anymore. Darkness, it seems, has curtained it for the night.
Four hundred years of stories in that place, many of them lost in the unyielding hourglass of time. But somehow, I think, Josh and I will unearth the story of what happened there during the war.
CHAPTER 27
LAKE HALLSTATT, AUSTRIA
NOVEMBER 1938
A dozen men converged on Schloss Schwansee with blazing torches, like a band of pirates from years past in their boats. Their savage cries ricocheted off the stone crevices in the mountain behind the house and roared across the water.
Annika hid her shovel behind the cottage and raced into the trees, watching the men in the faint starlight from her fortress of pine needles and bark. They looked like a black cloud of bats, wings pulsing madly, red eyes piercing the night.
Had they come for the silver and jewelry and candlesticks buried in the land behind her home?
She shivered in the night air, afraid of what these men woulddo if they discovered what she’d buried. And she prayed that God would be with her in the darkness, not locked away behind chapel walls.
Frederica crawled up beside her, and she lifted the cat, clutching her close.
Were these men drunk or only intoxicated by what they had planned?
She was glad the Dornbach family was safe in Vienna tonight. From her hiding place, she prayed that the things she’d hidden, dozens of items now, would stay safe in the ground.
Glass shattered, a window on the stalwart castle victim to a rock or brick.
Why must they break the glass when they could simply walk through the front door?
For a moment, she thought about running all the way to Obertraun, finding her father, but then she saw Vati in the crowd, carrying a torch like the rest of the men. And she trembled again.
More glass breaking—the castle, the barn, her cottage, the sound rippling through the trees, shattering her heart. Then she smelled kerosene, saw the flames. Their little cottage captured by the fire.
She had to stop these men before the castle was consumed aswell.
Frederica leapt out of her arms when she started to run across the yard.
“Vati,” she hollered, racing up to him.
Her father turned to her, a crazed look in his eyes and then hatred. The same look that he’d given her the night her mother died, bitter and cold, as if Annika had taken her life.
One of the men opened the front door to Schloss Schwansee and rushed inside.
“What are you doing?” she shouted above the roar.
“Serving justice.”
