missing from Ruth’s room either. Jordan rubbed helpless empty hands up and down her old blue jeans. “She didn’t pack Ruth so much as a spare pair of shoes.”
“Which means she has a bolt-hole somewhere.” Tony was prowling the length of the cozy little bedroom. “She’ll have stashed clothes, money from her closed-out savings account, new identification courtesy of Kolb.”
“Yes.” Jordan scrubbed a hand down the side of her face. “In the darkroom, she said she didn’t dare keep anything in the house after I searched her room years ago.”
“So where would she keep a bolt-hole?” Ian asked.
The four of them looked at one another.
“She went somewhere for a month, when she told me she was in Concord and New York,” Jordan said at last. “She must have been setting something up. Making preparations to run, just in case she needed to.”
“Must be somewhere close,” Nina said. “Somewhere she could go, no one would ask questions. We have to catch her there, or—”
“Or she’s gone,” Jordan finished. “She and Ruth, off who knows where. She might not even stay in this country.” Jordan’s face collapsed. Tony pulled her into his arms. Nina and Ian just looked at each other, helpless and furious. Ruth, Ian kept thinking. Poor little pilgrim stumbling through the alien corn. Lost forever, unless—
“Her bolt-hole would need to be somewhere close, but removed.” Ian drummed his fingers on Ruth’s bedpost. “A place to hide, change her appearance. A place no one could see her coming or going or have any reason to question her being there. Do you know of any—”
“Maybe our hunting cabin on Selkie Lake. It’s more than three hours outside Boston, very remote, no swimming beaches or promenades. Just a big pond in the middle of the woods, really. We stopped going after Dad died, left it locked up. There’s a big stiff old key . . .” Jordan flashed downstairs to her father’s study, the others jostling behind, and began yanking desk drawers open. A cabin on a lake, framed by woods—Ian wondered if it might have reminded Lorelei Vogt of her precious house on Lake Rusalka where Seb had died.
Jordan rummaged every gaping drawer, looking up at last with cheeks blazing scarlet. “The key’s gone. She went to the cabin.” Lips trembling. “But she won’t stay long. She’d know I’d remember it. And she’s at least an hour and a half ahead.”
We will never catch up. Ian heard his whole team think it.
Tony fumbled for the Ford’s keys. “We’ll try.”
“We’ll fail. We need to move faster.” Ian knew how to make that happen, though everything in him turned to ice at the thought. “I’ll tell you on the way, but first, Jordan—tell us about this rusalka dream your stepmother has. Every detail.”
They headed for the door, Jordan recounting a surprisingly specific description of the lake-born nightmare from which die Jägerin apparently suffered. So the huntress doesn’t sleep well, Ian thought in a surge of vicious satisfaction. I’m glad.
As Jordan finished, Ian looked at his wife as they came down the front steps outside. “Lorelei Vogt is afraid of the rusalka.” Quietly. “That’s you, isn’t it?”
A tiny nod as Nina went to the car, head down. Tony and Jordan exchanged glances.
“We can use that,” Ian went on, “if we know exactly what it is she’s afraid of.”
Nina reached for the door handle, her every invisible bristle showing to Ian’s eyes, but he wasn’t backing off this time.
“Spill, Nina.” He dropped a hand over hers on the door handle before she could open it. “I know you don’t want to say what happened on that lake, but we’re out of time. Tell us.”
Chapter 53
Nina
November 1944
Lake Rusalka
The soup was thick with potatoes and cream. The woman in the blue coat had brought two steaming bowls out behind the ocher-walled house, once Nina flatly refused the invitation to come into the kitchen. Sebastian took the bowl with barely contained eagerness, but Nina stood arms folded.
“Don’t be rude,” Seb whispered in Russian, his mouth thick with soup.
Nina’s mouth watered, but she still didn’t reach for the bowl. “She has a pleasure house on the lake and real cream for her stew.” Looking at the slight blue-eyed woman. “That means she’s a friend to the Germans.”
“I told you, she’s a widow. Her husband was German and died before the war began, so the Posen administration leaves her alone.” Seb and the woman had had a lengthy conversation in English, which the woman apparently spoke. “She studied English in