The House by the Lake (5 page)

The woman turned then, abruptly. “Do you have any idea, Miss Young?”

“Believe me, I do understand. It’s not me I’m doing this for. It’s my grandfather. He is so old, you see, and his memories of this place must be so strong that he . . .” Anna tried a different tack. “Look. All I want to do is help my grandfather. He just wants me to have a look at his old home. That’s all.”

Frau Engel sniffed.

“He practically ordered me to come here. He’s too old to come himself. Please, Frau Engel.”

“You cannot expect a lawyer in Berlin to indulge your grandfather’s wish to take some photographs of his old home. Can’t you see that your plan is ridiculous? Do you want to waste people’s valuable time?”

Anna waited on the doorstep. Once Frau Engel stopped talking, the village square returned to silence.

“I am closing the shop, Miss Young.”

“I came all the way from San Francisco. Please would you reconsider?”

“It was a crazy thing to do.”

“And some of the most important things in life are just that,” Anna said. “Crazy.” Now she was quoting Max! She shook her head at her own words.

“Goodbye.” Frau Engel nodded at Anna and closed her shop door.

Once she was back in her hotel room, Anna knew she had to come up with a plan. The last thing she wanted to do was worry Max, but she had to let him know that she was not going to give up. Siegel had been wasting away for decades. There appeared to be a set amount of information that everyone was willing to share and that was that.

Someone would have to let up.

Only one person appeared to have the key to the old palace, and that was the lawyer in Berlin. Anna would have to contact the lawyer somehow, but she wanted to talk to Max first. If she was going to convince a hard-nosed lawyer that she needed to get into that Schloss, then it would certainly help if she knew what, exactly, she was going to retrieve. She picked up her phone from the bedside table and went out to the checked sofa, settling into a corner with her legs tucked under her.

“Grandfather,” she said.

“Anna!” Max sounded both far away and delighted to hear her voice.

Anna chatted with her grandfather about his health, her flight, and her arrival for a few minutes before she asked the questions that were burning in her mind and shared the information that she had gathered so far.

“Grandfather. Are you aware—did you have any idea about the state of the village?”

There was a silence that could not have been louder had Max played a fanfare down the phone line.

“I haven’t heard anything for nearly twenty years,” he said. “I did have some . . . contact with an old friend, a neighbor back in the 1990s. He warned me that things weren’t good.”

“There hasn’t been any investment in either the estate or the village since then, I’m afraid. The hotel is up and running, and the church appears to have been well kept, but that is all. I didn’t know how to tell you the Schloss is not—”

“I see.” He cut her off.

Anna wished she were with him, able to give him a hug. “The only person who has a key to the Schloss is the Berlin lawyer who represents the current owner. I have no idea who that owner is, but apparently it’s some business or other. This lawyer is going to want a good reason to let me inside the estate, I’m afraid. Can you give me any more compelling reasons why they should allow me to enter?”

She paused for a moment before she went on. “I don’t even know what I’m looking for when I get there.”

“Everything’s harder . . . and easier in equal measures as you get older,” Max sighed. “In fact, you realize how easy things could have been. How simple and straightforward they should have been, had you made the right damned decisions in the first place. It always seems harder at the time than it really is, Anna. I wish I’d known that when I was young.”

Anna leaned against the back of the sofa.

“Still, the past is best left in dreams, Anna. I would like only my little remnant. That is all.”

Anna kept her voice quiet. “Are you able to tell me what it is that you’re looking for?”

“Anna. Please.”

“The problem we have is that your reasons sound sentimental, Grandfather. We are talking about a lawyer here. They don’t tend to deal in sentimentality.”

“Anna.”

This was the closest she had come to having an argument with Max. The feeling was odd and uncomfortable, and yet, something was rising in her chest that was becoming hard to push down.

In a way, Max’s past was her past too. She had a right to know about her ancestors. Who were Max’s sisters and brothers? Surely he was not an only child. What could he possibly not want her to know? The question of trust, of his faith in their relationship, kept bubbling away in her head, but then they were talking about a war. She had to try to put herself in his position, no matter how hard that was at times. He hadn’t lied to her—but he hadn’t told her anything for decades.

“You are thinking too hard,” Max’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I know you too well, my dear.”

“This place is haunting me, even though I haven’t even walked into that Schloss yet. I’m not leaving until I’ve got you what you want. But you have to help me. I have to convince a lawyer, for goodness’ sake, that I have a legitimate reason for wanting to enter that estate. I can’t even convince the owner of the local shop to let me past the barbed wire fence at the moment.”

“Anna,” he said. “Darling. Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yes,” he said. “Okay.”

Anna rested her head against the cushion. She was exhausted from jet lag and fresh air and lack of food. She would have to go down and eat something in the restaurant soon, or she would faint.

There was a long silence down the line. But when Max finally spoke, he sounded as if he were in the next room. “It’s to do with that apartment in Paris,” he said. “I knew the girl who lived there when I was young.”

“Didn’t it belong to a courtesan?”

“Yes, Anna, and I knew her. But it was her granddaughter whom I . . . loved.”

“Ah.”

Max stayed quiet.

“But, hang on, wasn’t the granddaughter the one who locked up the apartment for seventy years and never went back?”

There was a silence.

“And you had a love affair with her?” Anna stood up and paced around the room.

“It wasn’t just an affair, darling. It was real. You know when it’s real.”

Anna’s insides fluttered. She walked over to the window. It had become dark outside and a couple of streetlights had been switched on in the square.

“A Parisian love affair?”

“It began in Lake Geneva. I knew from the moment I first spoke to her. Her name was Isabelle de Florian.”

“Lake Geneva?”

“We were holidaying there,” he said.

“Oh!”

“Don’t sound so surprised.”

“But what happened? Why did it . . . end?”

Max went quiet again. “Too much happened. Far too much.”

Anna’s head was spinning. Perhaps she could tell the lawyer about the apartment in Paris, the love affair, Max’s need to retrieve something. What if she could get her hands on a copy of the article about the abandoned apartment and show him?

But she had more questions. “What happened, though? What did you do? Why do you have regrets?” Her words came out almost as a squeak.

“It was an engagement ring that I hid under the floorboards of my bedroom.” Max fell silent again. He coughed.

He sounded exhausted now. How valiantly he had tried to push aside thoughts that would take him back to a time that he needed to forget.

But still Anna’s mind filled with questions. What about his relationship with her grandmother, Jean? They had never seemed very happy together. They always seemed to just get by. Max was often withdrawn around his American wife. And Anna’s grandmother had always been so practical. Max had seemed to prefer Anna’s company to that of her grandmother. She had always felt sorry for him, and now he was telling her that he had shared a grand passion with a woman who also seemed to have fled from her past for a reason that no one knew anything about?

Anna couldn’t help but hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. But Max seemed to want to talk again—albeit in riddles.

“All we have left of the past are remnants in our minds, Anna, and all we can do is look at them sometimes, every now and then. Take them out, dust them, turn them over in our hands until we must return, full circle, to the present. And when we are back here, we try to live our lives as best we can—again.”

“What a philosopher you are,” Anna said, but she almost choked on her words.

“One has to be. Goodbye, darling.”

Goodbye? Anna wanted to shout that she had so much more to ask.

But she didn’t want to push him any further. Not now. He was so . . . vulnerable in many ways, even though he seemed formidable in his convictions at the same time.

Anna decided to play things safe. “I’ll find out the name of that lawyer, and, Grandfather, no matter how hard I have to fight for it, I will do my utmost to get you your ring.”

Once she said goodbye and hung up the phone, Anna collapsed on the hotel bed.

Frau Engel was dining in the hotel restaurant when Anna walked downstairs a few minutes later. She was seated with the woman who had been working at the hotel earlier that day, along with a middle-aged man whom Anna had not seen before. He was dressed in a pale pink shirt, cream trousers, and tan leather shoes. Frau Engel had changed into a fitted navy-blue suit. A brooch was pinned to the breast of her jacket. Both women glanced at Anna and then turned away, fast.

Anna felt even more unwelcome than she had in the shop. And yet she would have to approach the group in front of her, and soon. She might as well take advantage of their presence to get some more answers.

A waitress appeared at her side and showed her to a table. The English couple she had met that afternoon were seated in a far corner but didn’t look up when Anna entered. Several of the long tables were occupied, and there was a small group at the bar.

If she could not get the mayor to tell her the name of the lawyer who handled the estate, she would have to talk to the people at the bar and hope they were locals. It wasn’t really Anna’s style to pursue strangers like that, but what did it matter? She was miles away from home and she was going to have to be resourceful. Failing all that, she would have to find the local council offices. The mayor had to have a proper office somewhere. She couldn’t run the district from the shop, could she?

Anna took the menu from the waitress, only half listening while the young girl listed off the specials. Anna ordered
buletten
—specialty meatballs—and a glass of wine for courage.

Once the waitress had left, Anna pushed her chair back and stood up. She would have to act now, while the mayor and her friends were still there.

“
Guten abend
,” Anna said, as she stopped at the mayor’s table.

The two women looked at her as though she had insulted them. The man nodded, but Frau Engel remained stock-still and regarded Anna through narrowed eyes.

“I am sorry to interrupt you,” Anna said. “I won’t take up too much of your time.”

“Please, if you would allow us to enjoy our evening.” Frau Engel sounded cold.

Anna stood her ground. “I didn’t tell you the whole story. You see, my grandfather has great regrets about the past.”

She sensed a shift in the women’s mood. The man in the pink shirt put his beer glass down and studied Anna.

Even so, Anna decided she would not give too much away. An idea had formed in her head. “The Albrechts, my family, were an instrumental part of this village for centuries, I believe. I am just asking for the lawyer’s name. That is all.”

Frau Engel turned back to her food, but the man at the table spoke up. “It is because of your grandfather, Max Albrecht, that the village is in this state. If it wasn’t for me, and for my wife, here—if we had not restored this hotel and rescued it—there would be nothing left of Siegel. It would be a ghost town. So forgive us if we are not so sympathetic to your plight.”

“What are you talking about?” Anna said. “How could you blame the state of an entire village on one person—my grandfather? You don’t even know him!” She felt heat rising in her throat and took a deep breath. She must stay in control of herself.