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 would do 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 as well.

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.”

“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.