Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum Read Free Book Online Page B

the Christmas closet, since her mother used to store gifts for the holiday in this crawlspace. As a child, Anna was often unable to resist stealing the key from her mother’s sewing kit and taking it to this door, which she would eye with a curiosity matched only by fear of the consequences should she be caught opening it. She waits in front of it now gripped by much the same emotions, the key clutched in her slippery hand.
    She is counting slowly to five hundred, Gerhard’s car having left the drive a few minutes earlier. Anna cannot be too cautious, although there is little chance that he will return and even less that he would find her if he does, once she has entered the closet. Anna is fairly certain that Gerhard doesn’t even know of its existence. The Elternhaus is full of architectural oddities that its current owner has forgotten. Initially conceived of as a hunting lodge, it was never intended to be more than a seasonal outpost from which its builder, Gerhard’s great-grandfather, could ride to hounds. But with each successive male Brandt the wheel of the family’s fortune has spun further downward, and subsequent generations, camped full-time in the Elternhaus, have added their personal touches to its original sprawling floorplan.
    And Anna, during her tenure as housekeeper, has cleaned every inch of it, often on stepladders or on her hands and knees. In the days following her mother’s death, she sometimes had help in doing so: a series of maids hired by Gerhard—all named, oddly, either Grete or Hilde. But every Grete-Hilde departed within a month of arrival, perhaps owing as much to Gerhard’s fickle attitude toward payment as to his tempers: when he was in pocket, he would dole out wages with the air of conferring a great favor; when not, promises. And by the time his financial situation became more stable—his legal practice bolstered by new friends he had made among the ranks of the Reich—Anna had fulfilled the positions of maid, cook, and laundress so nicely that Gerhard apparently never considered it necessary to seek more staff.
    Therefore the unexpected breezes in the Elternhaus corridors, the ominous gurgles of its plumbing, are as familiar to Anna as the workings of her own body. She would be able to describe each idiosyncrasy of the house if marched through it blindfolded: the windowseats where there are no windows, the halls that lead nowhere, the hearts carved in the banisters by a fey great-uncle. And Anna knows about something else that she believes Gerhard, given his general neglect of his property, does not. She shifts from foot to foot; she has reached four hundred now, and she bounces the key in her palm. It is true that once Gerhard has left for his office in the city, he usually does not return until evening—and then accompanied by supposed clients, drunken fellows wearing the Nazi armband who shout and sing until all hours of the night. But better to be safe than sorry.
    Finally, when two more minutes have passed and the only sound is that of water pattering from the eaves, Anna unlocks the door to the Christmas closet and steps inside. To her left is a wall with a high window that allows a dusty shaft of light to fall on another little door to her right. This conceals a maids’ staircase connecting the upper stories of the Elternhaus to the kitchen, once enabling servants to scurry behind the wall to answer their masters’ demands while remaining out of sight. Now, of course, Anna is using it for a different purpose. She knocks on the interior door, three soft raps, and pushes it open.
    A few meters down, on the landing, Max shields his eyes with a hand. Even such indirect light is painful to him after hours in the dark. His upturned face is a pallid circle, and Anna pityingly thinks, as she gropes her way along the steps, of creatures living in caves so deep beneath the sea that they have never seen the sun and are white and blind in consequence.
    Max rearranges his nest of