Simple Faith by Anna Schmidt Read Free Book Online Page B

with little else to occupy him, he spent hours exercising it to rebuild strength.
    From outside the thin walls of the cottage, he heard the low murmur of a car’s engine. No one on the farm owned a car. Even Josef Buchermann did not travel by car when he came to visit. And given the quiet purr of the motor, Peter would wager that this was an expensive car—a car driven by someone of importance or at least someone with power. He concentrated on each sound.
    The slam of a car door. A beat. A second car door closing, followed by footsteps mounting the steps to the front door of the cottage. From below him he heard the murmur of conversation—Anja’s grandparents, their muffled voices filled with anxiety. Daniel was at the orphanage. Anja was still at work in Brussels.
    Three sharp knocks at the front door.
    Peter leaned close to the floor, straining to hear.
    Olaf Jensen moved slowly through the house, in broken German calling out to the visitor that he was coming. Peter could imagine Ailsa standing in the doorway to the kitchen, her forearms wrapped in the skirt of her ever-present apron.
    Outside the December wind howled, and tree branches scratched at the cottage windows.
    Peter caught only a few words. Not that he could understand any of it. Olaf spoke only a little German—the result of having the island that he’d lived on most of his life occupied by the Germans before he and Ailsa had come to Belgium with Anja. Like Anja he was Danish by birth. Unlike Anja he was unschooled, and while she was fluent in at least three other languages that Peter knew of, her grandfather’s command of languages other than his own was not good.
    Peter heard Olaf open the front door, heard the squeak that always accompanied that gesture, then heard a man speaking German in a quiet but authoritative voice as he entered the house. The door closed. Next he heard Ailsa’s quavering greeting as she welcomed this unexpected—and Peter had to assume, unwanted—guest. That was followed by the scrape of a chair on the wooden floor and the clink of glass on glass. Olaf and Ailsa were buying time—offering the man a drink from the bottle of schnapps Anja had told Peter they kept for just such visits. It was no doubt the same bottle that Josef had insisted Peter drink from the night he’d come to remove the bullet.
    More sounds—these from outside.
    Someone was sliding open the door to the shed where he had stayed that first night after his rescue. Next he heard chickens squawking as someone evidently searched the henhouse. And then the crunch of bicycle tires on the gravel lane and Anja’s voice demanding to be told what was going on.
    He had been looking forward to her arrival. It always lifted his spirits to know that she—not her grandmother—would be caring for his needs for the next two days. But now he wished she had not come. If they found him …
    At least Daniel was out of immediate harm’s way. Peter was very glad that Anja had decided that it would be best for her son to stay permanently at the orphanage while Peter was with them. For until Peter could be moved away from the farm, his presence put them all in grave danger as it did now. He was well aware that the man downstairs had not simply stopped by for a routine visit. He would not waste his time. He suspected something or, worse, had received some information that had brought him to the farm after all these weeks.
    Peter searched the tiny space, looking for options in case the search should lead these men up the stairway to Ailsa and Olaf’s bedroom. He focused on the small doorway that was the only way in—or out.

    Anja supposed she should be frightened at the sight of the sleek black car parked outside her grandparents’ cottage, but she was so very tired of this war—of these men strutting about as if they and they alone could decide the fate of anyone they chose. Of course they could, but that didn’t keep Anja from being infuriated by their arrogance.
    She had