The Huntress

by Kate Quinn

  And I’ll be here, Jordan thought, and the thoughts that had been submerged under the struggle of what to do about Anneliese broke free. No New York, no apartment, no interviews to see if she could sell her Boston at Work. At least not yet. Ruth would need her. The scandal was going to break, everyone was going to know what her mother had been. Everything would fall on Jordan now: the neighbors, the bills, the shop, the house, Ruth . . .

  At least when Dad died I had Anneliese, Jordan found herself thinking, and that thought was so macabre, so terrible, so true. How long was it going to be before she stopped instinctively reaching for the quiet bulwark that had been Anneliese, always taking care of her in the background?

  Now it’s just you. Twenty-two years old, with a business and a house and an eight-year-old child. Looking down at the Leica, Jordan wondered how much time she’d have for it in the immediate future.

  “Next question,” Nina said, coming up to the dock, and paused to spit blood into the lake. “Tvoyu mat, one little nick in the cheek, it won’t stop.”

  “Apparently I missed a vampire,” Ian observed, looking at his wife’s scarlet mouth. “What’s your question, comrade?”

  “I fly Olive home. Now we have two more people, so too many.” Nodding at the car. “Who drives, who flies?”

  “Drive,” said Ian and Tony in unison. “With Anneliese,” Tony added. “I’ll take the shotgun and keep it on her the entire way.”

  “Fly,” said Jordan. “Ruth can squeeze in with me.” She’d be afraid, but better that than subject Ruth to ride in the same backseat as Anneliese.

  “Good.” Nina showed her teeth, still faintly red, in a grin. “Is a long time since I fly with a sestra.” For Nina it was simple too, Jordan thought: she’d caught the woman who tried to kill her; now was the time to rejoice.

  “Just don’t . . . turn Olive off midair this time,” Jordan added. “If you don’t mind.”

  “No fun,” Nina grumbled, and Jordan found herself smiling. A weak smile, but a smile.

  She didn’t think the days ahead would bring too many of those.

  BEFORE ANNELIESE DEPARTED the next day for the passenger liner that would take her back to Europe, she spoke only once. She said nothing to Nina, sitting ceaseless and wakeful outside her locked door. She said nothing to Tony when he brought her meals on a tray. She did not even see Ian, who had taken over the typewriter in a fever of inspiration and begun hammering out the first article he’d written in years.

  But when Jordan came into the bedroom with an armload of Anneliese’s clothes for the voyage, watched from the doorway by Nina, Anneliese looked up from where she’d been sitting on the edge of the bed. Jordan stopped, clutching the pile of underclothes and dresses, pulse thumping.

  “May I say good-bye to Ruth?” Anneliese asked.

  “No,” said Jordan.

  Anneliese nodded. She stood, graceful again, hands clasped composedly before her, though she’d never look as composed as she used to—not when the first motion of her eyes was always a quick darting glance to find Nina. She flinched away from the gleam of Nina’s teeth, looked back to Jordan. “When I am put on trial—” She stopped, the cords of her throat showing, and a trace of her old German accent crept back. “When I am put on trial, will you be there?”

  “Yes,” Jordan heard herself say. Why? But—“Yes,” she repeated.

  “Thank you.” Anneliese reached out as if to touch Jordan’s hand. Jordan stepped back. Anneliese gave a small sigh, took the armful of clothes, dressed herself in Jordan’s and Nina’s view to be sure she did not try to hide anything among the layers. Was escorted downstairs and out of the house, unbound yet enclosed by the triple gauntlet of Tony, Ian, and Nina. People were watching, across the street. Whispering. What on earth could be happening at the McBride house? Keep an eye on the front page and wait, Jordan thought, glad she had kept Ruth upstairs.

  The taxi was waiting. Ian opened the door for Anneliese, like a courteous escort. Anneliese straightened her hat with an automatic gesture, looked at Jordan. Her lips parted.

  Say it, Jordan thought. Tell me you’re sorry. Tell me why you did it. Tell me . . . something.

  Anneliese’s soft lips closed. She sank into the cab; her gloved hand pulled the door behind her.

  And they were all gone.

  JORDAN DIDN’T MAKE the mistake her great-aunt did so long ago when her mother lay dying, saying Your mother has gone away in an effort to spare the truth. “Years ago, your mother did some bad things,” Jordan told Ruth simply. “She’s going back to Austria to answer questions about them.”

  “When will she come back?” Ruth whispered.

  “She won’t be coming back, Ruth.”

  Jordan braced herself, but Ruth didn’t seem to want more information.

  “Do we have to go back to the lake?” she wanted to know, fingers twined through Taro’s collar.

  “Never,” said Jordan. “We’re going to sell that cabin.” Sell it or burn it like Nina had done with her U-2 in the forest, make a pyre of it for all the terrible things that had happened there.

  Ruth said no more, her small face shuttered. Jordan didn’t press her, only sent her to bed with a mug of cocoa and sat stroking the blond hair until Ruth sank into sleep. You’ll sleep, but you’ll also dream, Jordan thought, looking at her sister. Poor Ruth, confused all her life by nightmare fragments of memory. Sometimes pulling away from Anneliese, sometimes toward her. I hope she never remembers what she saw. I very much hope that.

  But if she did, Jordan would tell her what happened. She’d tell Ruth everything she needed to know, as kindly and honestly as she could. “Good night, cricket,” Jordan whispered at last, tiptoeing out.

  It was the first time she’d been down to the darkroom since Anneliese had locked her in. She stopped at the top of the stairs for a moment, smelling her stepmother’s faint lilac scent, then flicked the light and came down the steps. Only to be seized around the waist by a man’s arms, and to hear a familiar voice in her ear: “Come here, J. Bryde.”

  Jordan shrieked, whirled, and smacked him all in the same motion. “Tony Rodomovsky, I’m going to kill you—” Raining more smacks down on him where he stood at the foot of the stairs.

  “I apologize.” He offered himself up for the smacks, no resistance. “Es tut mir leid. Je suis désolé. Sajnálom. Imi pare rau. Przepraszam—”

  “Shut up.” Another smack. “You couldn’t knock on the front door instead of—”

  “I only just got back. Seeing the ship off, then settling things in Scollay Square. And I knew you’d be putting Ruth to bed, so I waited here.”

  Jordan stood back, palms stinging. “You’re not on the boat,” she managed to say, rather unsteadily.

  “Brilliant deduction, Holmes. Why did you think I’d be on the boat?”

  “You didn’t say . . .” Jordan floundered. “It’s done here. You’re done. New chase, new hunt—”

  He raised his eyebrows. “New girl?”

  She kept her tone matter-of-fact. “We both said it was a summer fling.”

  “I thought we discussed modifications to the contract. A potential three-month extension into an autumn fling, as per agreement by both parties—”

  “Don’t tease,” Jordan begged. “I watched my stepmother walk away in handcuffs, more or less. Soon it’s going to be all over the front page—”

  “Which is one reason I’m staying, at least for a while. Nina and Ian can handle the Austrian authorities without me. But there are going to be questions to answer here, especially when Ian’s done with the story and it breaks.” Tony’s eyes were steady. “I said I’d stay to handle them.”

  That made Jordan weak with relief. She tried not to show it, but he reached out to push her hair back, smiling under the harsh light with an extra quirk of tenderness, and tugged her close for a slow, warm kiss, then another. Jordan felt her bones loosen in relief. “Oh, God, Tony. I’m so glad you came back.”

  She wished she hadn’t said i
t—he was supposed to be a friend, a lover, not a rock to cling to. They’d only known each other for a summer. But his arms felt wonderfully rocklike and reassuring, and just for a moment she let herself cling.

  “Are you cuddling?” He pulled back, felt her forehead with an anxious hand as if checking for a fever. “You never cuddle. Your idea of afterglow is developing six rolls of film.”

  Her laugh was watery, but it was a laugh.

  “Now, that really is better.” He pulled back, kissed the tip of her nose, and said with deliberate lightness, “Go swish prints around in trays. I’ll cheer from the sidelines.”

  They were both silent in the red light as Jordan processed the most recent roll, comforted slowly by the familiar motions. One by one, she hung the prints, gave them a chance to drip as she cleaned up. She came back to the line, bracing herself, and Tony moved to stand at her elbow. Silently they looked from print to print.

  “They’re good,” he said quietly.

  Not all of them. Some were blurred, focused on people moving too fast. But that one . . . and that one . . . “Yes,” Jordan said. “They’re the best I’ve ever done.”

  She took down a shot of Anneliese leveling the pistol straight at the camera lens. Eyes like lake ice from Nina’s frozen, unknowable home. Jordan knew where it belonged. Going to the folder with her photo-essay prints, she laid them all out in a line, starting with her father, ending with Anneliese and her cornered, merciless gaze. “I couldn’t find the right image to finish it,” Jordan said. “A Killer at Work.”

  Tony looked from print to print. “You’ll sell it,” he said. “You do know that?”

  “Maybe.” And she could even see this shot as the start of a new essay entirely focused on Anneliese, the progression of a demure bride to an ice-eyed murderess to a prisoner on trial. Shades of a Murderess. Portraits of a Huntress. Something like that might help Ruth understand the many faces of the woman who had stolen her and raised her and cared for her. But Jordan turned away from the worktable, rubbing her temples. “Ruth has to come first, now. I don’t know how much time I’ll have for this. I can’t work the way I was planning to.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’m all Ruth has.” Once again Jordan felt the panic of that, the fear of failing her sister. “I’ll have to do it all, now.”

  “As long as I’m in Boston, I’ll help. Not because of you and me, because the team owes you, Jordan. This hunt blew your world to bits.”

  “That wasn’t your fault,” Jordan stated. “Dad was already gone before you even came here, and once you began tracking Anna, there were going to be other consequences no matter how she ended up caught. I’ll gladly take them, if it means she’s out of Ruth’s life.”

  “That doesn’t mean it sits right with me to swan off and leave you picking up the pieces. It won’t sit right with Ian or Nina either.”

  “You’d help us?” The fierce common bond between them all had been Anneliese—what was left when that was gone?

  Could it be Ruth?

  Tony wrapped his arms around her waist. “Count on it, J. Bryde.”

  They stood for a long time, silent under the red light. Jordan’s thoughts were a jumble, exhaustion and relief and cautious hope. The thought of going on entirely alone, carrying Ruth into the coming storm of the breaking scandal, had felt like that hair-raising moment when Nina cut the engine and the plane began to drop. Now it felt like Tony and his partners had reached around, flicked the switch, turned the engine back on. The plane had leveled.

  Jordan twisted her head, kissed Tony lightly. “Come upstairs and stay the night.”

  “Are you sure? Nosy neighbors take note when gentlemen callers leave in the morning.”

  “My family is about to become notorious all through Boston.” Jordan slung the Leica’s strap over one shoulder and tugged him up the darkroom steps, switching on the overhead light. “I don’t really care if the neighbors think I’m a hussy.”

  “Jordan?”

  She half turned. Click. Standing two steps below, Tony lowered the little Kodak he’d taken out of his pocket, smiling. “I want a picture of my girl.”

  Sometimes you got great pictures with skill, Jordan later thought, and sometimes great pictures just happened. That cheap Kodak snap was the best picture of Jordan McBride ever taken, in its subject’s opinion. Blue jeans and a ponytail, caught in motion halfway up a staircase, slinging the Leica casually over one shoulder as she looked back at the camera. A woman on the move, with a gleam in her eye like a lens.

  It was the photo most used by J. Bryde, in her byline.

  Chapter 59

  Ian

  October 1950

  Vienna

  The story was a razor in print form.

  Ian had thought he’d never write again, that war had used up all his words. Now, sitting in a deck chair outside the locked third-class cabin where Lorelei Vogt would wait out the Atlantic crossing, he wrote the story of the capture, the story begun in Boston on Jordan’s typewriter. Finishing it longhand on a notepad, he hammered it into shape: the article he was determined would make die Jägerin famous.

  Lake Rusalka: a lake in Poland named for a creature of the night, and during the darkest years of the war, a woman lived on her shores far more fearful than any witch who crawled from a lake’s depths.

  That was his lede, and in the paragraphs that followed Ian vivisected the woman born as Lorelei Vogt, reborn in murder as Anneliese Weber, rechristened in deception as Anna McBride, and identified by nature—primitive, primal nature red in tooth and claw—as a huntress. He knew every pulse point to push in those paragraphs, every emotional trigger to pull. Women would cry at this article; men would shake their heads; newspaper editors would see banknotes. Ian looked down at his final copy and thought, Dynamite in ink.

  It felt good, not to be done with words, after all.

  The ship stopped in New York before starting across the Atlantic. Ian took the chance to wire the story to Tony, told him to pitch it to every major newspaper in Boston, and promptly wrote a follow-up memorializing his brother and the Jewish children and poor Daniel McBride. Ian barely slept and neither did Nina, one or the other of them on continuous watch outside Lorelei Vogt’s door.

  Not until the very end, after they’d left the ship behind in Cannes and boarded a series of trains that would take them to Vienna, did the huntress speak to him. Ian had been too tense for conversation or scribbling once they left the security of the ship, far too aware Lorelei Vogt could make a panicked run the moment his attention lapsed—but she passed through the train travel passive and silent as a wax doll. On the final train to Vienna, hearing the wheels slow beneath them, she looked at Ian suddenly as if realizing this limbo time of traveling was coming to an end. “I still don’t know who you are, Mr. Graham.”

  Ian raised an eyebrow.

  “I don’t know you, so why did you come looking for me?” She sounded so puzzled. “You crossed half a world to catch me. What did I do to you?”

  How many times had he envisioned sitting down with this woman and telling her in biting words what she’d taken from him? Telling her about a little brother who dreamed of flight and did not know what distrust was. How he’d yearned to do that. Yearned for something else too—for any memories she might have of Seb, the way he looked bolting his stew when she took him inside her ocher-walled house, the things they had talked about in her warm kitchen. The last look on his face before she shot him . . .

  But Nina had recounted with quiet poignancy what the last look on Seb’s face had been, had sketched him in the end as he stood in the moonlight warm and well fed, looking at the sky and never dreaming he was about to die. I won’t replace that memory with whatever poisoned image you might have, Ian thought, looking at die Jägerin’s puzzled blue eyes. I want to remember my brother through Nina’s eyes, not yours. The eyes of a woman who saw a friend, not a murderer who saw prey.

  So Ian just gave a smile like his wife’s razor. “Y
ou’ll find out at the trial,” he said. “If I am called to testify.”

  “You should have let me die,” the huntress answered, low voiced. “You should have let me shoot myself.”

  “You don’t get to die,” Ian said. “I am not that merciful.”

  Lorelei Vogt bowed her head. It stayed bowed through the commotion and paperwork that greeted their arrival in Austria. Fritz Bauer came from Braunschweig in a whirl of suits and uniforms to witness the arrest. Bauer’s greeting had been a fierce smile around his ever-present cigarette, but Ian hadn’t been surprised to see the blend of curiosity and resentment their colleagues aimed at them.

  “Sour faces,” Nina commented, puzzled.

  “No one wants to arrest Nazis anymore,” Bauer said, not caring a jot for the glares. “Sweep it all under the rug, live and let live. Your girl may not get more than a few years in prison,” he warned Ian. “Maybe even the case thrown out. Judges don’t like locking up pretty young widows.”

  “I’ll make her so famous they won’t have a choice.” Tony had said on Ian’s last telephone call that the first story had exploded in Boston like a V-2 rocket. Ian already had the stories to follow it up, paced to land like a sequence of punches in a boxing ring. Once the nationals picked up the story, even the hidebound Austrians with their distaste for scandal wouldn’t be able to slide away from their duty.

  Ian watched die Jägerin walk away, disappearing into a cloud of homburgs and Polizei caps as she was finally taken off his hands. He supposed the next time he saw her it would be her trial. Jordan McBride, he guessed, would be at his side, the lens of her eye poised behind the lens of her camera. She needs answers more than I. Or if she didn’t, Ruth would someday, when she was old enough to ask the difficult questions about the woman who had raised her.

  “I have a question for you, comrade.” Ian looked down at Nina, strolling along at his side. They were staying at a hotel on the Graben, but he wasn’t eager to return yet. They hadn’t really talked, he and his wife, since the night on the beach in Florida. After that the chase had swamped them, and the tense need to watch their prey. “You could have killed Lorelei Vogt, out there on Selkie Lake. She had a pistol, she was moving to use it. You disarmed her rather than cutting her down. Why?” Nina’s restraint had surprised him. Since when had she ever been restrained, in the matter of capture over vengeance?