“Give me the shoe.” She held out her hand.
“Why? What if I still need it?” Kate said, gripping it tight.
Malwinka wrenched it from Kate’s hand, leaving behind a burning sensation.
Kate’s palms began to sweat, despite the cold air. It was either Dad on the other side of the door or the Burgosov accomplices. And if it were Dad, what condition would she find him in? Would he still be alive? Her senses were on alert.
Malwinka took out a key, swung the door wide, and invited Kate to look in.
“Dad?” she called out tentatively.
Chapter Thirty-Three
It was him. His hair was a little thinner. His cheeks were hollow. His clothes were not his. But it was him. He was alive.
Kate called again, louder. “Dad?”
Even though finding him was exactly what she’d hoped for, it seemed impossible that she was staring at him now. A lump formed in her throat, and she swallowed.
Sitting at a rough-hewn table, wearing someone else’s too-big khaki pants and shirt, he tilted his head as if trying to make sense of what he was hearing. Of course, seeing Kate in Poland would be one of the last things he would expect.
“Dad!” she called out louder, her voice bouncing off the stones. Forgetting everything else, she ran for him. “It’s me, Kate.”
He was standing before she reached him. “Is it really you?”
She hugged him tight, but when he hugged her back, his arms were loose like a child’s, even though she suspected he was squeezing her as tight as he could.
Then he touched her face as if unbelieving.
“Don’t I still look like me?” she asked, laughing. She’d done it. She’d found her dad. “Are you okay? Let’s get you out of here.” She examined him for signs of illness. He looked like he was well. There were dark circles like bruises under his eyes, and his cheekbones were more defined than she remembered, but he was standing. He could use a shower with a good, strong soap. Maybe the maid had been exaggerating when she said he needed a doctor before it was too late.
“I don’t understand. Why are you here?” His voice was raspy, unused.
“To find you. We thought you were dead, but we didn’t know for sure, and then I had the chance to come to Italy to look for myself.” She raised her hands. “It’s going to take a while to explain, but first, let’s get to a phone so we can call Mom.”
As Kate said this, the door was slammed shut and locked.
She whirled at the sound. “No! No. No. No.” She rushed to the door and turned the handle uselessly. She had been so caught up in seeing her dad she forgot to keep an eye on the others. She pounded. “Lidka! Open up.” There was no answer.
When she turned around, her dad was tracing the edge of the rough-cut table with his fingers and fumbling for the wood stump where he had been sitting. She watched him for a moment, the way his eyes seemed vacant. She waved her hand and he didn’t respond.
“Dad?”
“There is another stump here,” he said. “Sit down and tell me everything. We have lots to talk about.” His vacant eyes looked somewhat in her direction.
Kate remained standing. She needed to stay by the door so she would be ready when it opened. They couldn’t be finished with her yet. She still had something they wanted. “Why did the maid say you needed a doctor?”
“There was an explosion. I was following a tip on a stolen painting, but the building hadn’t been properly swept yet. I think I set off a bomb. The only thing left to heal is my eyesight. There was a doctor. At first. He said it might heal, but I’d need surgery that he couldn’t do, and the sooner I got it, the better my chances.”
“What?” Her knees felt weak. “Are you in any pain?” She searched his face for the truth.
He shifted in his seat. “I’m fine. But please, I want to know how you got here. Is your mom here, too? Floyd?”
“Just me. Mom’s still home and Floyd is in Germany.”
“Germany?”
“He is following in your footsteps, working as one of the Monuments Men. He’s cataloging all the stolen artwork and finding the owners.”
Waves of differing emotions crossed his face, one after the other. “I don’t even know how long I’ve been here. At first, I was unconscious more than I was awake. It’s all so jumbled.” He rubbed his grizzled face like he was trying to wake up.
“You say the Burgosovs found you after the explosion?” She rattled the door handle once more. “They’re keeping you here as a prisoner. Do you know why?” She was getting frightened that they wouldn’t open the door. The conversation she overheard with the maid jutted into her thoughts. Even if she does find him, then what? We let them go?
“No, I haven’t been with these people that long. As I said, I was hurt and unconscious for most of it. I remember waking up in a farmhouse. We had fresh milk. I was in so much pain when I came to, I went under again. Next memory I have is being in the back of a wagon. The jolting woke me up but knocked me out again. Gradually, I came to. Someone was helping me. They said they knew who I was, and they’d try to get me home soon.”
“How could they know who you were when you didn’t have your dog tags? A boy in Italy had them in his treasure box. He said he traded them with a boy who found them in the rubble.”
Dad frowned and shook his head. “I don’t know. It was all hazy. It seems I slept for weeks. And then I had to learn how to walk again. My legs were badly damaged.” He rubbed his right knee. “I lost the lower part of this leg.” He lifted his stained pant leg to reveal a prosthesis.
Kate held back a gasp. “You said someone was helping you. Do you know who?”
“I don’t know. The doctor. I haven’t seen him since I stabilized. I figured he got called away to patients worse off than me. Then one day, a few months ago, maybe, I woke up here.” He cleared his throat. “More about me later. Why are you here?”
“To find you.”
The corners of his mouth curled slightly. “I wish you hadn’t. It appears now that we are both prisoners.”
The word “prisoner” made Kate pound on the door again. “Lidka. Let us out!”
“You know these people?”
After pounding at the door a few more times, Kate sank back onto the seat opposite her dad. “It’s a long story. It all started when Aunt Elsie and Uncle Adalbert showed up on our doorstep with an old steamer trunk.” Kate searched the room for another exit. There was only the one door and one barred window up high on the wall. She stood on the stump to see if she could reach it. What she saw made her skin prickle. The matching shoe was hidden on the high windowsill. This must have been where the maid had put it. Malwinka had forgotten to ask for this shoe.
“Go on,” Dad said. “Help me fill in the blanks.”
How much of the story will he believe? She stretched for the shoe, her fingers barely able to grasp it and pull it down. She’d hide it so the Burgosovs wouldn’t have a complete set. After what they’d done, she had no concerns about upsetting the peace Princess Kolodenko thought the families had formed.
She searched for a place to hide the glass slipper. “Aunt Elsie and Babcia grew up with a famous family—royalty from another time. During the recent war, they were separated, but Elsie had something of theirs, and they came to New York to get it back. They have a daughter close to my age, who invited me to come to Italy with them for the summer.”
“Are we still in Italy?” Dad asked. “Based on the language I figured they’d moved me to Poland. Communication hasn’t been easy. I can pick up a few words here and there that Babcia used to say.”
“You guessed right. We’re in Poland.”
He pressed his hands on the table as if holding himself back.
“On our way to Italy, I met another girl, Lidka. She helped me follow the clues to a woman named Malwinka. And here you are.”
He shook his head. “Those are some big dots to follow. I still don’t know how you found me.”
She stashed the
shoe in a dark corner and covered it with a blanket. Not a great hiding place, but there was nowhere else, except her bag, and that seemed obvious. She grasped his hand. “It’s complicated, but those are the highlights. The good news is it wasn’t only me.” She cleared her throat. “My, uh, boyfriend is also here somewhere. We were separated at the border, but he planned to come through Germany.”
“A boyfriend, huh?” He smiled a little, the first evidence of the teasing man she remembered. “I see we do have a lot to catch up on.”
“Oh, you’ll like him. He’s . . . he’s . . .” How to describe Johnny? “Reliable. And artistic, so you’ll like that about him.”
“Does he have a job?”
“Dad!”
“Well?”
“Yes, and he’s going to art school in the fall.”
Dad got up and walked to the wall. His gait had a decided limp. He stood under the window with the light warming his uplifted face. “I’ve missed so much. I pretend this window looks out over our street in New York. I think of you all, picture you sitting down for breakfast. Arguing over whose turn it is to do dishes. I’d love to be back in my classroom this fall.” He made a noise like a laugh, but sad. “But now that I can’t see, I won’t be much use to my students.”
A lump formed in Kate’s throat. He sounded so unlike her dad. He sounded like he’d given up. “You won’t know until we get you home and you see your doctor. Who knows what’s causing the blindness. It could be fixed with a simple procedure.”
Dad didn’t say anything for the longest time. They had run out of words, even though they hadn’t seen each other in so long. This wasn’t how she expected the reunion to go.
“Does your mother know I’m alive?”
“The army sent us a letter saying you were missing, and then they told us you were presumed dead. They also sent your personal effects.”
He turned slightly away from the window. “What was returned?”
“Not much. Your sketchbook with a surprise inside.”
Now he turned around fully. “You found it?”
“Mom refused to open the box. So when Floyd sent me a telegram telling me to look for a diamond, I opened it. You had a good hiding spot. I almost missed it. What was the diamond for?”
“I was going to give it to Elsie when I got home. She could have sold it to pay for passage back to Poland.”
So Floyd had the correct story after all. But what was it with all the blue diamonds? Elsie had acted like she knew exactly what the diamond was. And Princess Kolodenko had acted funny about it, too. There was still a mystery to uncover; Kate had to look harder. “You can give it to her yourself. I brought it with me.” She opened her bag to take out her mini sewing kit.
“Shhh. They may be listening outside the door. We might need it as a bribe later.“
Kate proceeded to pull the stitching out of her waistband near the hidden diamond. No sense in her keeping two. She reached for his hand and put the diamond in it. “There you go. I can sew it into your shirt collar if you’d like. That way you’ll have it to give to Elsie when you meet her.”
“Going home is one hope I haven’t given up on,” he said.
“My hope now is that we don’t give Mom a heart attack. Can you imagine her surprise?” Kate pushed back the thought that Dad might be the surprised one if Mom had started dating again.
Dad chuckled. “She’d faint if I just showed up and knocked on the door. ‘Hi, Deb, what’s for dinner?’ We’d better call her first and ease her into the idea.”
She laughed with him. It was good to see Dad’s humor returning. “I also got the watercolor you sent me for my birthday. The one of the fairy-tale cottage.”
“Did you like it? Such an interesting little place I stumbled across. The architecture made it so different from the other villas. How did Floyd know about the diamond?”
“He met one of your buddies, who told him about you getting the diamond from an old lady.”
“She was a strange one. Didn’t look like she had much, and I tried to refuse her, but she insisted I take it. We were in one of the piazzas and she was sitting all alone at a little table, mumbling things. Everyone avoided her. But she caught my eye and waved me over to her. I thought she might have some information for me. You never know who has a masterpiece hidden in their barn.”
Kate’s mouth went dry. Of course. Threads are linked.
“I met her, too,” Kate said. “They call her the babuszka. It was her cottage that you painted, and it’s on my friends’ property, the Kolodenkos.”
“Is it now? Huh. I can’t remember which happened first—the watercolor or the diamond. If she saw me painting her place, that could be why she singled me out. We didn’t spend much time in that town.”
“Did she know you were asking about the amber necklace?”
“Oh, uh. Maybe. Why would that matter to the old woman? Wait. That was the same day I picked up the necklace. She might have seen me.” He rubbed his temples. “My memories are all jumbled. It’s hard to keep things straight.”
“That’s okay, Dad. What matters now is that we get out of here.”
Chapter Thirty-Four
In the morning, Gustaw brought their breakfast, a selection of smoked cheese and crackers. He escorted Kate to the primitive bathroom up a level before locking her in while he led her dad to do the same. Before leaving them alone, he did a quick search of the room and quickly retrieved the shoe from her not-so-swell hiding place in the corner. He appeared unfazed at the dark look Kate gave him. She should have thought to smuggle it out to the privy.
“We need to leave today,” Kate said after the man had left. She put the plate on the table. “If I lead the way, can you walk okay?”
Her dad rubbed his knee. “I can manage. What I was missing was a good pair of eyes. I’m glad you came. I know I didn’t sound like it last night, but I was worried for you.” He sat down. “I still can’t figure out why they want me. If the war is over, what’s the point? There had been talk of me looking at some paintings for them, but when my eyes never healed, they still kept me.”
“Sometimes people get so deep into trouble, they don’t know how to get themselves out of it again. Instead of owning up to their mistakes, they keep on going.” She was thinking about Lidka. “Maybe they didn’t know what to do with you.”
“I’m blind. It’s not like I can identify them.”
“Let’s work on getting out of here,” Kate said, changing the subject. “We can figure out the Burgosovs later.”
While they ate, they talked over several plans. The hardest part was how to break out of the room without arousing suspicion. Once they escaped the castle, Kate may not be able to find the exact trail they took, but as long as they started down the right side of the mountain, they should reach a town eventually. They’d need to leave at night to have the longest lead time.
Midafternoon, Lidka came for her.
“Are you fine?” she asked as they walked up the dim passage.
Maybe Lidka hadn’t betrayed her, but had been as shocked as Kate was. Lidka was new to this crazy family secret. She didn’t know all the history, or could have been told one very skewed version.
“Yes,” she answered, hiking her bag up on her shoulder. She was going to try to steal the key and needed a place to quickly hide it. “I am happy to be with my dad again. When can we leave?”
Lidka shook her head. “I not know what Malwinka’s plans are.” She shone the light back the way they had come. “But the shoes worked. I am a person who needs to see something to believe. Since I had never seen the dresses or the shoes, I thought maybe they were merely expensive items and that was their worth. I have seen people fight over less.”
The light from Lidka’s flashlight skittered on the stone walls as they walked through the winding passageways. Kate counted turns and made note of doors. If she were to escape with Dad, she could afford no mistakes, no hesitations.
“I played along with everyone about
Kopciuszek being real, but I did not think it was true,” Lidka continued. “I knew that Malwinka wanted to meet you and offered to help. And you wanted to meet her. She knew about you even before you left New York. It was nice of you to ask Kamil on the ship about a Malwinka—an American girl asking questions—since until then we were not sure exactly when you would come. And look, everyone got what they wanted.”
Kate stopped, her anger flaring. “Meeting us at the train wasn’t a coincidence. You knew we were on our way to Italy, so you made it seem like you stumbled across us. I remember thinking it was odd you had a bag with you, but justified it because I never considered something so devious. What is wrong with this family?”
“Is not like that,” Lidka said. “We do what is needed. Sometimes we have to play game to get there. You are not playing game? Pretending you do not know Polish when I know you do?” She switched from English to Polish to make her point.
Kate looked away. “Does Malwinka know?”
“I not tell her everything. She is smart and will learn on her own.”
Lidka pulled her along, maintaining a tight grip on her arm.
Kate stopped again, straining against Lidka’s grasp as she made another realization. “Holy Toledo. The cheese we had for breakfast. It was the same kind you gave to Mr. De Luca; you’d just come from here. I was hoping you didn’t know about my dad, but you did. The whole time. Back in Italy you could have told me.”
“Keep moving. The stepsisters not like waiting.”
“They’re not stepsisters like the original ones were,” Kate corrected her in irritation.
Lidka laughed. “You can call them the stepsisters—they all do. It helps fuel the fire.” Lidka brought her into a large room with a black-and-white-checked marble floor. Great arches spanned the roof and frescoes of cherubs and angels filled the ceiling. The room must have been the great hall back in the days of Kopciuszek. Kate’s attention went from the paintings to the group waiting for them.
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