“I’m late, I’m lost! I’m late, I’m lost! I’m going to miss my own wedding.”
Well, not my wedding, but the panicked words from Robert Munsch’s Ribbon Rescue loop through my head as I attempt—quite poorly—to traverse the metropolis known as Ohio State University, searching for a parking space to house Charlotte’s Prius.
“What time is Dr. Nemeth’s class?” Charlotte asks from the seat beside me, her eyes hidden behind Jackie O sunglasses, her silver-white hair curled with soft waves.
“Four.”
She checks her cell phone. “It’s three fifteen now.”
“We’re close,” I say, trying to reassure both of us that this road trip wasn’t in vain.
In hindsight, perhaps I should have accepted Dr. Nemeth’s offer to drive to Mount Vernon, but Charlotte has been asking to shop in Easton, and at the time, it seemed like a good idea to visit those stores and Dr. Nemeth on the same day. I hadn’t wanted a man who’d found me via the Internet to come to the bookshop either, but it wasn’t like Dr. Nemeth couldn’t visit on his own—the address to Magic Balloon is right on the website.
Charlotte’s phone rings, Bach’s Minuet in G major interrupting my thoughts. She quickly mutes the ringer.
“Who’s that?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Probably a telemarketer.”
I nod toward the phone. “You can answer it.”
She tucks it into her navy-blue handbag instead.
We pass century-old brick buildings, one with a clock tower, and then modern ones enclosed in glass. A reflecting pool. Shady buckeye trees. The gray perimeter of the football stadium and Grecian columns on the library. No time for it now, but I wish we could escape into the library for an hour and peruse the books.
I groan as we drive past the clock tower a second time. “I should have met him someplace else.”
“We’ll get there,” Charlotte says, gently resting one of her hands over my fingers, which have begun drumming a beat on the steering wheel. We stop and wait for a horde of students to ramble across the street.
It’s three forty by the time we find a visitor’s space, at least two blocks from Dr. Nemeth’s office. Charlotte holds on to my arm as we rush toward the sprawling brick edifice that houses the history department. The admin at the front desk directs us to Dr. Nemeth’s office, but even though the light is on, his door is closed. And locked.
No surprise, I guess. It’s now two minutes after four.
Through the window, I see Dr. Nemeth’s desk cluttered with papers and notebooks and an assortment of scattered pens. Hanging above his desk, perfectly centered, is an eight-by-ten photograph of him with a stunning woman at his side and a toddler in his arms. The woman has straight blonde hair, and she’s wearing a floral sundress that matches her daughter’s attire. Picture perfect in the frame.
I lean against the doorpost in defeat. “I don’t know if he’ll come back to his office after class.”
Charlotte glances down the hallway. “We’ll have to find out where he’s teaching.”
“I’m not storming into his class!”
Charlotte puts one hand on her hip. “We came all this way, and now you’re going to quit?”
“It’s not quitting. I’ll just connect with him later.”
But Charlotte’s not waiting until later to find out about Annika and her list. “I’m going to speak with that young lady at the front desk.”
She turns away, but she doesn’t walk far. An older man, a fellow professor I assume, wheels his chair to the edge of his office door. “Are you the woman with the German book?”
I step toward him. “My name’s Callie.”
He doesn’t seem to care about my name. “Josh said to find him upstairs in room 240.”
Charlotte flashes a triumphant smile, and I thank the professor before following her back down the hall and then up a narrow flight of steps. Charlotte props open the door to the lecture hall as I eye the stacked rows of students. Several hundred of them.
At the bottom of the hall stands Dr. Nemeth, his brown hair swept to the side. His jeans, oxfords, and tan T-shirt make him look more like a student than a professor. He doesn’t seem to notice as Charlotte and I slip into the back row and fold down plastic chairs.
“Austria’s Salzkammergut was a mountain retreat for Nazi officers during World War II,” he tells his class, one hand on the side of a wooden podium. “The Nazi elite built villas on the shores of the seventy-six lakes in that district to entertain their mistresses. They also tested submarines and underwater rockets in the deepest lakes, three hundred or more feet below the surface.”
Charlotte seems to be as immersed in his lecture as the rest of the class, her chin propped up by her fist, the sleeve of her pale-pink blouse on the armrest. And I wonder—were Annika’s parents members of the Nazi Party? Her mother might have been the mistress of an officer, gifting Annika with the Bambi book before it was banned.
“The Nazis stole and then hid countless pieces of art from the Jewish people, along with gold bullion and other relics, in their quest for wealth and, more important to many of them, power. The salt mines and tunnels in these mountains served as a sort of depository for such treasures during the war, but what happened after the war is just as shocking.”
No one moves in the room, and I wonder at the magic of this professor. He’s waved a wand of sorts, hypnotizing with his words. A map of Austria appears on the screen behind Dr. Nemeth, and he sweeps a circle around Hallstatt and several surrounding lakes with his hand.
“The Nazis planned to build a Fourth Reich here in what they dubbed the Alpine Fortress, but when the Allies infiltrated their fortress, they began throwing stuff in these lakes. Crates and crates of gold, weapons, thousands of counterfeit British banknotes that Hitler planned to use to destroy the British economy during the war.”
What if the Nazis used Annika’s book to record what they hid?
But then again, what Nazi, rushing from the Allied troops, would take the time to write out a detailed list in a children’s book?
Dr. Nemeth glances up at our row, and I lift my hand in an awkward wave. He nods and then returns to the matter at hand. “Some people call this region the Devil’s Dustbin, for it seems as if the devil himself swept across Austria and dumped whatever remained right here.”
I’ve done some research about the Nazis in both Germany and Austria over the years, in particular how they treated Felix Salten and other Jewish authors among them. My favorite monkey wouldn’t have existed if the Nazis had their way. His German authors, Margret and Hans Rey, were also Jewish. They fled by bicycle when the Nazis invaded their refuge in Paris, taking their treasured drafts of the Curious George manuscript with them.
But I’ve never read anything about the Nazis hiding treasure in Austria’s lakes.
Dr. Nemeth gestures toward the region one more time, and I run my hands over the stone-colored tote in my lap, a cocoon of sorts for Bambi.
Is it possible that Annika found treasure in one of these lakes or in a mine near Hallstatt? And if so, what happened to it?
“Let’s take a five-minute break,” Dr. Nemeth announces to the class. Chatter ripples across the room as he turns off the projector and hikes up the stairs, his hand stretching toward me as I stand. “You must be Callie.”
“That’s me,” I say, shaking his hand. “I’m sorry I’m so late. I—”
“No need or, frankly, time for apologies.” He’s looking at me, but he doesn’t see me, not really. His gaze is focused on the tote strung over my arm.
“This is my friend Charlotte Trent,” I say, redirecting him for the moment. “She helped me translate part of the list.”
Charlotte smiles at him. “My eyes aren’t as cooperative as they used to be.”
He shakes her hand. “A pleasure to meet you, Mrs. Trent.”
Reaching inside the bag, I pull out the book for him. He finds Annika’s name inscribed in the front, tracing the word with his finger. Then he turns to the second page, and his eyes widen when they land on the handwritten listing of the gold necklace and ruby brooch.
“You know German?” I ask.
“A little.”
He flips through the pages quickly as if he has to catch the writing before it flies away. Then he starts to translate more of Annika’s words. “‘Diamond earrings. Pearl strand. Brass candlesticks.’”
Five minutes have passed now, but Dr. Nemeth seems to have forgotten about both the time and the crowd of students waiting behind him. Finally he closes the book, but instead of handing it to me, he pulls it closer to his chest. “I’m leaving Sunday for the Salzkammergut,” he says. “I have a grant to take six students with me, and we’ll spend almost a month searching for items like these that the Nazis dumped or hid.”
Charlotte inches toward him. “It’s been eighty years . . .”
“It seems impossible, but divers continue to find things under the rock ledges and submerged forests in these lakes.” Dr. Nemeth slowly lowers the book. “And the water is cold enough to preserve what’s been left behind.”
What would it be like to dive into the depths of one of those lakes and search for hidden candlesticks and jewelry among the ledges and forests? Of course I’d never go, but it must be magical to explore where few people have ever been. A treasure hunt on an entirely new scale.
He glances back down at the podium before looking at me again. “Can I borrow this book?”
I shake my head. “I want to return it to Annika’s family.”
“I’ll get it back to you by the end of the week,” he assures me, but it feels as if someone is taking something valuable—priceless, even—from me, like one of the items listed inside the book.
“I don’t know—”
“We’re a lot alike, Callie,” he says, but I can’t imagine that I have much in common with this professor of history. “You want to return books to their original owners, and I want to return stolen heirlooms to the descendants of those who lost their things during the war.”
The pieces seem to fall into place, this mutual quest of ours to reconcile the past.
“You’ll tell me what you find about Annika?”
He glances down at the forlorn deer on the cover, standing in the forest alone. “I’ll pass along everything I can.”
His best offer—a book loan for the week to help us both reunite things with their owners.
Dr. Nemeth turns, the Bambi book in hand, and pierces the chatter in the rows below us with a low-pitched whistle. And I want to stay here, learning more about the history of these lakes.
I lean toward Charlotte, whispering, “Should we listen to the rest of the lecture?”
She checks her phone. “We don’t have time.”
“The mall is open until ten.”
Charlotte shakes her head. “I need to be home for dinner.”
“You have a date?” I ask, eyebrows cresting.
“I can’t tell you.”
Dr. Nemeth has started talking about where various Nazi members hid near the end of the war, including the Austrian Alps. I wish we could stay a bit longer to hear his stories, but Charlotte is determined, and now I’m intrigued by her urgency to return home.
Outside we both slip on our sunglasses, and as we walk to the car, my phone buzzes.
“Who is it?” Charlotte asks.
“The researcher in Vienna.” I scan the email. “She’s going to look for the newspaper photograph from 1938. When she finds it, she’ll email it along with the caption so we know whose picture Annika taped in her book.”
“You think there’s a love story there, don’t you?”
I shrug. “Perhaps.”
Charlotte knows I’m a romantic. An undercover romantic, but a hopeless one nonetheless.
“When did you start keeping secrets from me?” I ask as Charlotte checks her phone again.
“It’s not actually a secret. . . .”
“Then tell me.”
She smiles over at me as one who knows me well, better even than I know myself. “Sometimes surprises can be good, Calisandra.”
“Not in my experience.”
“Then perhaps we’ll have to change your experience.”
But I don’t want to change. The steadiness of my life, the nest I’ve built around myself, keeps me safe. Other people, like Dr. Nemeth and my sister and Charlotte, could step outside their walls and experience life on the outside, but me, I’m quite secure inside the twigs and leaves I’ve plucked for myself. No surprises necessary.