Chapter 16: Said in Another Room

"Where are they?" I asked.

"The office."

I pulled on jeans and a sweater and went down the dark corridor in my socks.

Light showed under Tobias's door.

I did not knock.

Tobias stood behind the desk with a sheet of paper in his hand.

Jonas sat on the corner of the desk, and Stefan leaned against the filing cabinet with his arms crossed.

They looked up together.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

Felix had come in behind me and shut the door.

"Verena," Tobias said. "It's three in the morning."

"I know what time it is."

"We were going to tell you at breakfast."

"After you'd decided," I said.

Stefan winced.

"That's the third rule," I said. "I put it on the kitchen table in front of all of you, and you agreed."

"We didn't want to wake you," Jonas muttered.

"You didn't want me in the room."

He looked at his boots.

"What's the paper?" I asked.

Tobias hesitated, and then he held it out.

It was a bank letter on thick cream stock.

I read it standing up.

The insurer had declined to renew the lodge's cover as of the first of April.

The bank therefore called the loan on the lodge in full, nearly five hundred thousand euro, due that same day.

It was dated yesterday.

"The manager said no notice had gone out," I said.

"It hadn't," Felix said quietly. "Not when Jonas called. Seidl must have rung the regional office after dinner."

"You humiliated him," Stefan said. "So he made it true."

I laid the letter on the blotter.

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