The stew tasted like the beef soup his mother used to make, full of carrots and potatoes and chopped leeks. It warmed his belly. Reminded him of home.
After supper, the farmer showed them a bathing hut outside. He filled the zinc tub with water, and while Brigitte bathed, Dietmar dragged two straw pallets from the barn and positioned them on the wooden floor in the attic, above the kitchen. Then he took a short bath, not wanting to leave Brigitte alone for long.
Brigitte was already asleep by the time he lay on his pallet. It felt good to have clean skin, to rest his head on a mattress even if it was made of straw. He hadn’t slept well in the forest, keen to the noises and shadows around them, but as his eyes closed, he hoped he could rest tonight.
When he woke again, Brigitte breathed peacefully on the pallet beside him. Moonlight slipped through the dormer window, its fingers reaching back into the dusty corners filled with crates and broken furniture. The attic was silent, but someone spoke below them, the voice muted by the floor. He crawled across the rickety floor and quietly opened the door before descending the steps. Near the bottom, he could hear the whispered urgency of a woman’s voice even if he couldn’t understand her words.
Who was she talking to?
As he peeked around the corner, Dietmar saw the fat hips of the farmer’s wife, draped in a green robe that looked ghoulish in the kerosene light. She was alone in the kitchen, the telephone cradled against her ear as she spoke to someone in Dutch.
Then she switched to broken German. “There is a boy here,” she explained. “And a girl.”
His heart seemed to stop at her words. Last night, he’d thought the woman frightened or vexed at having to share her food. He’d never guessed her to be malicious.
Did the farmer know?
Probably not—judging by her whispers. Either she didn’t want her husband to find out or she didn’t want to wake their guests. Then again, if the police offered a reward for runaways, perhaps the farmer knew exactly what was happening. Instead of being concerned, he might have used the bait of stew to lure Dietmar and Brigitte into the house.
Dietmar never should have allowed his stomach pains to dull his good sense.
The woman slammed the phone onto the receiver, mumbling something to herself in Dutch. Dietmar turned swiftly and tiptoed back upstairs. Then he shook Brigitte’s arm. After the farmer’s wife left the kitchen, they snuck down the steps, clinging to each other in the darkness until he unlocked the front door.
Hours later, as he was shoveling leaves and moss into a mound for their bed, Brigitte stared up at the moon above the forest, the bright orb webbed by tree limbs.
“Dietmar?” she whispered.
“Yes.”
“Why must we keep running?”
He stopped and looked at the moon with her, hoping their parents could see the light wherever they were.
She tugged on his arm, repeating her question. “Why do we have to run, Dietmar?”
He put his arm around her to keep her warm. “Because my mother told us to.”
CHAPTER 5
_____
A pearl-gray castle was pleated into the island’s jagged cliffs, the same color as the oyster shells swept along the shoreline below it. From the air, Quenby couldn’t tell where the seams of the castle were stitched into the fortress of rock—it all appeared to be one grand monument built by a collaboration of God and man.
The private jet circled above a copse of stone spires on the castle and cast shadows over the white-capped bay and a roof of solar panels implanted on a greenhouse. Beyond the castle, the island was thick with forest, like a layer of moss clinging to stone.
Samantha, the flight attendant, slipped a china cup off the table in front of Quenby. “We’re about to land,” she said, raising the soft leather seat Mr. Hough had occupied during takeoff. “You’ll want to buckle up.”
Quenby scanned the hill behind the castle for some sort of landing strip but didn’t see a break in the trees. “Where exactly are we landing?”
Samantha zipped her thumb and finger across her lips. “Sworn to secrecy.”
Quenby rolled her eyes. “Mr. Hough won’t hear you.”
“Don’t bet on it,” he mumbled from behind them.
Glancing back between the seats, she saw Lucas Hough stretched out on the couch, exactly where he’d been for most of their flight across the Atlantic and then the expanse of Canada. His eyes were closed, his tweed blazer hanging neatly in a closet near the galley. Dark stubble peppered his chin.
According to the profile she’d found online, he was thirty-one years old, only three years her senior. He might call her Miss Vaughn, but she was an American by birth and no one in the States called their peers mister or miss. From now on, she was calling him Lucas.
The plane jolted in their descent, and she turned toward the front again.
Samantha winked as she passed by one last time. “It’s more fun than a roller coaster.”