The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  In a few hours Jordan’s father and Anneliese were back, cheeks red from cold. “I’ve been thoroughly outclassed,” Anneliese said, laughing as Jordan and Ruth came down the dock. “I warned you all I was a terrible shot.” How natural she looked here in the woods, Jordan thought. The dry leaves didn’t even seem to crunch under her feet. “Did you have a nice time, Mäuschen?” Anneliese said to Ruth, stretching out a hand.

  She had duck blood in a smear across her palm, not quite dry. Very clearly, Jordan saw Ruth’s blind recoil.

  “Mama,” she said, but turned away from Anneliese, back toward Jordan.

  “Ruth—” But Ruth was shivering, not listening to her mother. She just clung to Jordan, who stroked the smooth blond hair.

  “The blood must have scared her.” Jordan’s dad swung the game bag over one arm. “I’ll get this stowed away so she doesn’t see any dead ducks, poor little missy.” He went to the car, and Jordan looked up from Ruth’s shaking shoulders to Anneliese. She didn’t have the Leica to record it this time, but she heard the click very clearly in her mind as she snapped an image of her stepmother’s expression. Not a mother’s concern as she looked at her crying child, but eyes full of hard, cool consideration. Like a fisherman deciding whether an inferior catch should just be tossed back in the lake.

  Then her usual warm smile came back, and she bent down to tug Ruth gently but firmly into her arms. “Poor Mäuschen. Mutti ist hier—” She went on murmuring in German, and gradually Ruth calmed, arms stealing about her mother again.

  “What is she remembering?” Jordan asked quietly. “The refugee woman who tried to rob you in Altaussee?”

  It was a shot in the dark, but Anneliese nodded. “Very upsetting,” she said, clearly done with the subject. “Take Ruth to the car? We should be on our way.”

  Jordan acquiesced, settling Ruth in the backseat. “Here’s your book, cricket. We’ll just be a minute.” Jordan’s father was in the cabin stowing the rifles, as Anneliese scraped mud off her boots. Her face was placid, and Jordan saw in her mind’s eye that other expression. Cool, considering, hard.

  She had not imagined it.

  “What happened at Altaussee?” Jordan spoke low and bluntly at her stepmother’s side, persisting when Anneliese made a little retiring gesture. “I’m sorry to ask about something unpleasant, but I don’t ever want to accidentally upset Ruth as happened today.”

  It was the first time she’d pushed so forthrightly, but watching and waiting hadn’t worked. Jordan raised her eyebrows, making it clear she expected an answer.

  “A woman attacked Ruth and me,” Anneliese said at last. “We were sitting by the lake, passing time until our train that afternoon. A refugee woman struck up a conversation, and then she made a grab for our papers and train tickets. Ruth was knocked over, her nose bled everywhere. She hit her head very hard.”

  “Ruth said there was a knife.” Ruth hadn’t said any such thing, but Jordan wanted to know if Anneliese would agree with her. If she does, I’ll know she’s lying.

  But Anneliese just shrugged. “I don’t remember, it all happened so fast. The woman saw the blood from Ruth’s nose and ran away. I suppose she was desperate. So many people were.”

  “You don’t sound very concerned,” Jordan probed.

  “It was quite some time ago. I told Ruth to forget about it. Someday she will. Much better for her.” Anneliese shaded her eyes, looking across the lake. “So beautiful here. Why is it called Selkie Lake?”

  Not your best deflection, Jordan thought. For once I surprised you. Or Ruth did. She filed that away for later. “The name came from Scottish settlers. A selkie is some kind of Scottish water nymph. Like a mermaid, or—”

  “A rusalka?”

  Jordan tilted her head. Her stepmother, she noticed, had almost seemed to flinch. I’ve never seen you flinch before, not once. Of all the things to rattle Anneliese, why this? “What’s a rusalka?”

  “A lake spirit. A night witch that comes out of the water looking for blood.” Anneliese waved a dismissive hand, but the gesture looked jerky. “A horrid old fairy tale, I can’t imagine why I thought of it. Don’t tell Ruth, or she’ll never sleep again.”

  “ . . . I won’t.”

  “You’re such a good sister to my Mäuschen, Jordan.” Anneliese touched her cheek, this gesture coming easier. “Let’s go home.”

  She smiled, went past Jordan toward the car. Jordan looked after her, no more uncertainty in her gut. She didn’t know what all this meant—a struggle by an alpine lake, violins and water spirits and Iron Crosses. But Jordan had a sudden urge to shove her father into the car and drive like hell, rather than let Anneliese in with them.

  Who are you? she thought for the thousandth time. In her mind’s eye she saw Ruth recoiling at her mother’s blood-smeared hand, and an answer whispered, full of conviction.

  Someone dangerous.

  GARRETT LOOKED UNEASY. “I don’t know about this . . .”

  “Just keep her distracted.” Jordan glanced past his shoulder toward the kitchen where Anneliese was humming like a tuneful bee. She’d been cooking up a storm in preparation for Thanksgiving in a week’s time—my first Thanksgiving as a proper American! as she said gaily. The house smelled of sage and sugar, and early snow fell past the curtains outside to complete the vision of holiday perfection. Jordan felt no warm holiday spirit; her stomach was churning.

  Garrett raked a hand through his brown hair. “If you really need to ransack your stepmother’s room—”

  “I do.” Because Jordan had spent the last weeks since Selkie Lake going out of her mind with conflicting theories, and enough was enough. She’d looked through Anneliese’s things before, when she was on honeymoon, but had found nothing. This time she was going to find what she needed, no matter what it took. By keeping the Iron Cross, Anneliese had shown she wasn’t above keeping mementos of her past. There had to be something to find.

  Once Jordan would have had no trouble walking into her father’s room and going through it with a dusting rag in hand as excuse, but Anneliese had put a stop to that. Jordan wasn’t exactly forbidden in the room, it was just that Anneliese in her deft way had instituted lines that were not to be crossed. “I’d never dream of going into your room uninvited,” she assured Jordan. “Every woman needs her privacy. Just as new-married couples need theirs!” That little hint of marital intimacy had made Jordan uncomfortable enough to drop the subject. Very convenient.

  Something was in that bedroom. There was certainly nothing in the rest of the house; Jordan had spent the last few weeks covertly combing through all the other rooms under pretext of holiday cleaning: running her hands under mirrors, inside picture frames, behind bureau drawers. Nothing.

  Garrett was still arguing. “At least wait till she’s left the house—”

  “I tried a few days ago, when she went shopping. I had to dive out again when she doubled back to get her gloves.” Also convenient, Jordan thought. Maybe Anneliese was keeping an eye on her, every bit as much as she’d been keeping an eye on Anneliese. “Keep her distracted. I can’t do this if I think she’s going to sneak up behind me on those little cat feet.”

  “You’re actually scared, aren’t you?” Garrett sounded dubious. That stung, seeing he didn’t trust her instinct, but if she was being honest, Jordan couldn’t blame him. When she laid all her suspicions out, they sounded preposterous. Jordan and her wild stories.

  “What if you do find something?” Garrett asked, but Jordan pretended she hadn’t heard, just headed into the bedroom.

  Put it all back exactly as you found it, she warned herself, lifting up the folded nylon slips in the first drawer with fingers like tweezers. Nothing in Anneliese’s drawers, nothing in her lined-up shoes . . . Garrett’s voice floated from the kitchen; he was telling Anneliese something about pilot training, how college classes were boring compared to flying. Anneliese responded, spoon clinking against the side of a mixing bowl, but Jordan’s blood urged her to hurry.


  Anneliese’s dresses, her skirts and blouses on their hangers, her hatboxes. Jordan pinched hems for lumps, lifted each hat and sifted the tissue paper before putting it back at exactly the same angle, felt along the wardrobe’s back. Anneliese’s traveling cases; nothing in any of the pockets. The case knocked against the back of the wardrobe, making a soft thud, and Jordan was out of the bedroom and down the hall in a blink, listening with thudding heart for the sound of her stepmother’s footsteps. You really are scared. She remembered Anneliese by Selkie Lake, face cool and considering.

  Anneliese’s voice down the corridor: “That’s Linzer torte, Garrett. If you like it so much, I’ll teach Jordan to make it. Ruth, cut him a nice big slice.” She sounded so calm and motherly.

  Yes, Jordan thought, I’m scared.

  The wardrobe yielded nothing. She felt her way around the bedside tables, the bases of the lamps, aware that time was ticking. There was only so long Garrett could eat cake and make small talk. Nothing in the lamps, the drawers of the bedside tables, between the pages of Anneliese’s Bible.

  The cover of the Bible, though . . .

  Jordan nearly dropped it, fingers suddenly shaky. A quick crane of her neck toward the door; still the hum of voices from the kitchen. As delicately as she could, she peeled up the soft leather of the cover, where her fingers felt a straight edge of something slipped between decorative leather and the stiffer stock beneath. The leather peeled easily; it was used to being lifted.

  A photograph, small and worn. Jordan brought it nearly to her nose. Definitely Anneliese, some years younger and considerably more carefree, trim figured and tousle haired in a bathing suit. Ankle deep in lapping water, the ripples of a pond or a lake stretching behind her, a man at her side. Considerably older than she, broad shouldered and smiling, also in a bathing suit, one arm raised as if to wave to someone in the distance. Anneliese’s handwriting on the back, but all she had written was März, 1942.

  A vacation picture, Jordan thought flatly. All this trouble and suspicion to find a picture of Anneliese and what was probably her first husband, on a lakeside vacation. Well done, J. Bryde. You’ll be getting a Pulitzer for this for sure.

  She began to slide the photograph back into its hiding place, disappointment bitter on her tongue, and paused. Took another good hard stare. The date. März, 1942.

  März. March.

  And something else, besides the date. Some sort of mark under the man’s upraised arm . . . A memory scratched at the edge of Jordan’s mind, and she peered closer. Definitely a mark. A tattoo? Hard to be certain.

  Jordan laid the photograph on the bed where the light was strongest and took several careful shots with the Leica. A photograph of a photograph; the detail wouldn’t be as good as she wanted, but she couldn’t take the original. If Anneliese had hidden it in her bedside Bible, then she reached for it often, even if only to feel the picture’s edge through the leather. So Jordan slid the photo back into place, pressed the leather back down, replaced the Bible, and ran a hasty search over the rest of the room. No sign of the Iron Cross; either it was gone or hidden elsewhere, but Jordan didn’t dare stay longer. She slipped out of the bedroom, easing the door shut, and dashed into the bathroom, turning the lock and sinking back against the bathtub.

  “Jordan?” Anneliese’s voice down the hall.

  “Just a moment!” Hastily she turned the taps on, dashing cold water on her cheeks, which she could see in the mirror were flaming. Not with shame, with triumph.

  The voice came nearer. “I was going to ask Garrett to stay for supper.”

  “Of course,” Jordan called back, patting the water off her face. In the mirror she let herself have one smile, hearing her stepmother’s heels click away. A date, a mark on a man’s arm, and a medal. Three things, but all caught on camera—and cameras didn’t lie.

  Chapter 14

  Ian

  April 1950

  Salzburg

  Gretchen Vogt. Respectable, widowed, lived all her life in Salzburg.” Tony summed up his discreet survey of the mail, the city records, and the neighbors at the Lindenplatz. “One daughter recorded, Lorelei Vogt, of the right age to be our girl.”

  “Any photographs?” Ian asked as the three of them cut through the formal gardens at Schloss Mirabell, a pretty little palace like a marble wedding cake surrounded by fountains.

  “None I could find on public record.”

  “Lorelei Vogt.” Ian tasted the name, wondering if it really was the woman they sought. Die Jägerin. She might have lied to the Ziegler girl who carried her letter here; there was no guarantee Gretchen Vogt really was her mother, but . . . “Even if it does turn out to be her birth name, it won’t be much use—she’ll have changed it to flee. Still, I’d like to have a name for her other than the huntress.” Take her down from a mythic villain to just another common sieg-heiling Fräulein.

  “Names, they’re powerful,” Nina agreed. “Is why Comrade Stalin doesn’t like being called the Red Tsar.” She stopped to pluck a red begonia from the nearest flower bed, sticking it through her lapel. My wife, the Red Menace, Ian thought with a grin.

  “Let me tackle Gretchen Vogt alone,” Tony proposed as they passed out of the gardens. The Vogt house lay across the toffee-colored Salzach River, near the Mozartplatz. “If you and I go in together against die Jägerin’s mother and get the stone wall, that’s it. Let me try the carrot first—if I fail, you come in heavy with the stick.”

  “Agreed. You take first crack. The old inheritance trick?”

  “How much money can we spare?”

  Ian pulled a packet from inside his coat. Tony counted notes, eyebrows rising. It was the whole of Ian’s monthly annuity, including the center’s rent. Ian nodded. “Use it.” He got the racing chill across his nerves he remembered from poker games with fellow war correspondents during Blitz attacks, throwing every shilling on the next hand because the bombs were getting closer and the odds were good the roof was coming down. Throw it all on the line, because this was it.

  Don’t be reckless, he warned himself. “If we both fail, and neither carrot nor stick works on Frau Vogt?”

  “I cut her thumbs off,” Nina said cheerfully, flicking her straight razor. “Then she talks. Carrot, then stick, then razor. Is simple.”

  “You had better be joking, because that is not how this works,” Ian said. “That is not how any of this works.” But Tony was tossing some gibe at Nina in Russian, and she answered with a rude gesture, so Ian lengthened his stride toward their quarry, amused and irritated at the same time. “Let’s go.”

  The Lindenplatz was a small square around a statue of some obscure Austrian saint with a sour face, the expected line of lime trees green veiled with new leaves. An old, gracious neighborhood made for the prosperous and the well educated. Families here would attend church in immaculate Sunday hats, summer on the Salzkammergut, and have nothing to do with jazz music. Number twelve was a graceful white house: spacious walled garden, well-tended window boxes spilling pink geraniums. Tony stood on that scrubbed front step, hat in hand as he awaited an answer to his knock. Nina and Ian watched discreetly from the square’s center, blocked from number twelve’s view by the stone-carved saint. “Don’t stare, Nina,” Ian murmured. “Put your arm through mine, and look like a tourist.” He had an old Baedeker guidebook in hand, saved for occasions when he had to loiter without looking suspicious. Austria, Together with Budapest, Prague, Karlsbad, and Marienbad.

  “Saint . . .” Nina squinted at the statue’s plaque.

  “Liutberga.” From the corner of his eye, Ian saw the door at number twelve opening.

  “Tvoyu mat, what kind of name is that?”

  “A very holy anchoress, circa 870. What does that mean, ‘tvoyu mat’?”

  “‘Fuck your mother.’”

  “Bloody hell, the mouth on you—”

  “I can’t see, what’s Antochka doing?”

  “Someone’s answered the door. Housewife, white apron. He’s going
into his speech now . . . What does that mean, ‘Antochka’?”

  “From Anton. In Russian, Anton would be nicknamed Antochka, not Tony. I don’t see how you get Tony from Anton.”

  “I don’t see how you get Antochka from Anton either,” Ian couldn’t help saying, eyes locked on his partner. “He’s been invited in . . .”

  “What now?” Nina whispered.

  Ian looked at number twelve’s innocuous door. “We wait.”

  “How long?”

  “However long it takes.”

  “We stand here for hours? You, me, and Liutberga?”

  “Chasing war criminals is a great deal of waiting and paperwork. No one will ever make a thrilling film out of it.” Ian turned her away from the statue. “We’ll meander awhile, admire the trees . . .”

  “What is meander? I don’t know this meander.”

  “Wander, dawdle. Play tourist. If he’s very long inside, we’ll—”

  Nina tugged her hand from Ian’s arm and strolled across the square, around the side of number twelve. The stone wall enclosing the back garden came up to the side of the house; the ground-floor window was shut, and Nina stood studying it as though she had a perfect right to be there. Ian reached her in a few long strides, taking her arm and pointing at the window box as though they’d come to admire the geraniums. “Get away from here before someone sees you,” he muttered through gritted teeth.

  “No windows this side”—jerking her chin at the next house—“and no one in square to see but Liutberga. She won’t tattle on us, dismal stone bitch.”