“But what...” she started. “What did the Dornbachs do?”
“Klara Dornbach is a Jew.”
He said the word as if she were a criminal. As if Frau Dornbach had committed a terrible crime.
And then Annika understood. The necklace wasn’t a gift for Frau Dornbach or something she’d purchased, like her shoes from Paris. Like Sarah’s, this necklace was a symbol of her heritage. Vati had been forced to work for someone he thought less than him. Someone he believed should be serving him instead.
Her heart wrenched, the pain of it threading down her limbs. She, in her nosiness, had convicted the entire Dornbach family.
Through the castle window she saw the flash of flames in the salon, smoke pouring through the portal of broken glass, extinguishing the starlight. If they didn’t douse this now, the fire would devour the castle. Perhaps every building on the estate.
She yanked on her father’s coat. “We have to stop this!”
They had a lake full of water behind them and a fire hose. They could pump out every drop of the lake if they must to stop these flames.
But instead of racing for the hose, her father ran toward the front door.
An upstairs window shattered, raining down glass from the castle, and the mob of men poured back into the courtyard. One, two, three—she counted only eleven now. Her father wasn’t among them.
The men rushed back to their boats and disappeared into the darkness, leaving the fire to spread behind them.
“Vati!” Annika yelled, running toward the castle. She had to get him out before the flaming walls, the roof collapsed on him.
But the heat—it lashed at her skin when she stepped through the front door. And she couldn’t see through the smoke.
Surely her father would retreat out one of the back doors. Or she could enter through the chapel.
Across the courtyard, her cottage buckled under the weight of flames, shuddered to the ground, but the storage shed near it remained intact. The doors behind the castle were locked, so she retrieved the hose in the storage shed and began dragging it toward the main house.
Through the smoke, she saw someone else rushing up the bank.
Had more men arrived to finish the destruction?
But then she heard the man call her name.
“Hook it up,” Hermann commanded, pointing toward a tap.
Her hands trembling, Annika screwed in the brass connector, and cold water poured out of the nozzle as they dragged the hose to the front of the house.
“Vati!” she screamed again as the flames blazed inside the window.
But he never answered her cries.
CHAPTER 28
“I thought it might help you sleep,” Josh says, lifting a bottle of Riesling.
I step back from the railing and sit on one of the two wrought-iron chairs. “I’d love a glass.”
He sets a paper bag on the small table between us and fills the two wineglasses that he brought out of his room. “Apparently they grow these grapes at a vineyard nearby.”
I sip the sweet drink. “Is Ella asleep?”
“Like someone conked her over the head.”
“I swear I didn’t do it.”
He laughs. “I know. She said that you read to her until she fell asleep on the plane.”
