“Tell me about this garden project Father spoke of at Christmas.”
“It’s not a garden project. It’s a mining reclamation project.”
“Tell me more.”
“Essentially, it’s an answer to the question of what happens to mines when they’re not useful anymore, when they’re depleted or are no longer cost-effective to keep operating. And I hasten to add that it’s not as if this is an outrageous topic. It’s a standard part of the planning process for mines these days. I started thinking about the Lubin mine. It probably only has five profitable years left. We don’t need another call center. What are we going to do then? Abandon it?”
“Yes?”
“But what if we didn’t? What if we made it into something else? Something that kept people employed and ideally also did some good environmentally?”
“Like a charity? You could do that with an old mine?”
“Not like a charity. That’s what I can’t seem to make anyone see. It can be a legitimate business venture. It can make money. Not right away, but as with any new business, you invest at the beginning so it can be profitable later. And yes, you can do that with an old mine. You can do lots of things with old mines if you think creatively.” Seb proceeded to spin a tale of on old clay mine in Cornwall that had been transformed into an enormous domed botanical garden. “Just because this one use—mining—has run its course doesn’t mean we need to walk away.”
“That’s astounding.” Max had underestimated his brother. Probably for years. “Could we do something with a historical angle?”
“You mean a museum? Mining history? There’s no reason we couldn’t do that at one of our properties.”
“Not mining history per se. I’ve been thinking about our mines in Innsbruck, actually. What do we mine there?” He should know, but he didn’t.
“Quartz.”
“Ah, then never mind.” It had been a wild idea anyway, to think there might be a connection.
“Never mind what?”
“Well, you know Karina Klein?”
“Of course.”
“I’ve been doing some research on her.”
“You have?”
Perhaps Max wasn’t the only one who had been underestimating his brother. “Yes. I wanted to revisit some letters of hers I knew were at Oxford. An archivist there has been digitizing them for me.” He’d started looking into it after The Nutcracker, when the fictional tale he’d spun of Karina’s New York adventure had so delighted Dani. He’d hoped to find something about a real New York trip, to what end he wasn’t sure—perhaps merely to entertain Dani. But as was so often the way with historical research, looking for one thing led to another. “I ended up reading about a mine near Innsbruck that was used by the Austrian resistance toward the end of the war. I found some letters between Karina and some of its leaders.”
Seb raised his eyebrows. “Look at you, turning up new information on a national hero.” The praise warmed Max. “I didn’t realize there was an organized Austrian resistance.”
“It was small and sometimes internally at odds, but they were arming local insurgencies in the spring of 1945, and it sounds from these letters as though they were hiding supplies and arms in an abandoned mine. I idly wondered if it had been one of ours, but clearly not if they’re quartz mines. You can’t hide things in open-pit mines.”
“We used to have tungsten mines there!” Sebastien said excitedly, and for a moment his face looked exactly like six-year-old Seb when Max agreed to take a role in a play Seb wanted to stage. “They’ve long since closed, but tungsten was mined underground.”
“Well, then, perhaps it’s worth looking into,” Max said with a casualness he did not feel. He was getting excited, both about the mystery of the historical question and about the niggling feeling that perhaps this could be his calling. “Would those old mines still be there? Could we find them?”
“They should be. We still own the land. Actually, Oma owned the land, so it’s part of the holdings of her trust.”
Their father’s mother had been Austrian and had come to her marriage with their grandfather with a trove of exploitable lands. This was exactly what Max had meant when he’d told Dani that marriages in their family were often made for strategic reasons.
“Finding the mines should be straightforward,” Seb said, “but how would we ever discover if one of them was used by the resistance?”
“We’d look for diaries and letters. Perhaps eventually ancestors of the people involved.”
“I can put you on the payroll as a historian. Or a cultural officer or something,” Seb said.
“Oh that’s—”
“Father will never notice.”
Was it Max’s imagination, or had there been a hint of a sneer on Seb’s face for a second? How extraordinary. “It may end up going nowhere, so it seems ill-advised to put me on the payroll. I don’t need a salary, anyway. I just . . .”
“You want to feel useful,” Seb suggested, with a sudden world-weariness in his tone that made something catch in Max’s chest. Max’s whole mission for the first thirteen years of Seb’s life had been to arrange things so Seb never had to sound like that. Perhaps Max’s mistake had been to assume that once Seb was safely away at school, the work was done.
“Yes. That’s exactly it. Why don’t we work on this project together and see how it turns out? You find the mines, and I’ll do some historical sleuthing. If it turns out we do own a mine with some historical significance, we can discuss further.”
“All right, then.” Seb smiled at him and took a big bite of his galette. “This is nice,” he said through a mouthful.
Max didn’t know if he was talking about the food or simply the fact that they were together. Or the understanding they seemed to have arrived at, so suddenly and so easily. Perhaps all they’d needed was an afternoon alone, away from the external forces that were constantly pressing in on them. Whatever Seb meant, Max agreed, so he smiled and said, “It is nice.”
He felt as if he had his brother back. Or, more accurately, his brother had him back. And he wasn’t letting him go again.
Chapter Eight
Dani’s first Tinder date was a bust.
On paper, it should have worked. Her pact with Max had forced her out of her paralysis, and after a lot of swiping and messaging that went nowhere, she’d finally found one Mr. Logan Bram. Logan Bram owned an apartment, loved his two-year-old nephew, and worked as a “fitness tech engineer,” which Dani hadn’t realized was a job, but then again, she hadn’t realized “duke” was a job, either.
Also, Logan Bram was hot, in a tanned, muscly, conventional sort of way. That was the relevant point. She just needed someone who was moderately attractive and not a serial killer. The job and the apartment and the nephew didn’t matter inherently; they were merely evidence that he was not a serial killer—though she supposed serial killers could have jobs and apartments and nephews.
She had done everything she was supposed to do, was the point. She’d done the swiping and the vetting and the DM-ing and the “Is he or is he not likely to be a serial killer?” risk analysis.