The Huntress

Ruth’s first clandestine violin lesson goes well, and Ian warns Tony about getting romantically involved with a witness. Meanwhile, Ian and Nina for the names and addresses listed in McBride’s register of antiques dealers. While they find one German couple who were likely involved with the Nazis, they are disappointed when they do not find the Huntress. 

In September 1944 in Western Poland, Nina kills a German with her razor and saves the lives of two British prisoners of war, one of whom is Ian’s brother, Sebastian. Sebastian learned Russian from other prisoners of war, and his innocent, trusting nature enchants and bewilders Nina. 

Nina insists on accompanying Tony to the airfield, where Jordan takes a few photographs. They bump into Jordan’s ex-fiancé, Garrett, who allows Nina to fly one of his planes. Later, Jordan and Tony consummate their relationship in Jordan’s darkroom.

On their way to Pennsylvania to seek out the latest lead in the Huntress search, Nina and Ian stop at a diner. Two men identify Nina’s accent as Russian and accuse her of being a Communist. When they become physically aggressive, Ian fights back. Nina is impressed with Ian’s ability to fight. Ian, who is more in love with her than ever, resolves to find a way to make her stay.

Sebastian tells Nina that he will need her help to survive and that she will need his help in escaping as far West as possible to England. Nina is enthralled by the prospect of going as far from the Soviet Union as possible. They agree that Nina should try to pass herself off as Polish to keep her safe. At a lakeside resort, they meet the Huntress who offers them food. 

Anneliese returns home early, surprising Jordan. Jordan senses that Anneliese is in a hurry for Jordan to begin her new life in New York, almost as though she wants her out of the way. Yet Jordan is reluctant to hasten her journey because she wants to prolong her time with Ruth and Tony. She realizes that she subconsciously keeps things from Anneliese, like Ruth’s violin lessons and the fact that Tony is her lover.

Jordan stumbles on Kolb and Anneliese fighting in German at McBride’s Antiques. Although Kolb calls Anneliese names, Jordan observes that he is terrified of Anneliese. After some detective work, Jordan learns that Anneliese cashed out her bank account. Moreover, she never went to Concord nor attended any antique fairs. Although Jordan loves her stepmother, she has serious doubts about her identity and intentions. 

Ian and Nina go to Florida in September 1950 to chase another futile lead that brings them no closer to the Huntress. On the beach, they camp out and make love. When Ian asks Nina to stay and asks about her previous relationships, he learns that she is bisexual and that she never got over what happened with Yelena. She wrote to her old commander, Bershanskaia, under a false name. and learned that Yelena was made a Hero of the Soviet Union. She shared an apartment with another navigator, Zoya, and her babies. Nina says that she will never love again. Ian is heartbroken over how “there was a dark-eyed Moscow rose in a training cockpit somewhere behind the Iron Curtain, and against her he stood no chance” (448). He agrees to begin divorce proceedings as soon as possible. 

Jordan is made distraught by her suspicions. She seeks to avoid Anneliese as she pretends to prepare to move to New York. Longing to talk to Tony, she walks to his apartment. There, she finds the names and addresses from the antique shop scribbled out in Tony’s handwriting. She also finds a file with the name Lorelei Vogt and a photograph of her stepmother as a teenager inside.

When Ian returns home, he discovers that someone has been in their apartment. The photograph of Lorelei Vogt as a teenager is accompanied by the more recent one that Jordan took when Anneliese first started dating her father. Nina confirms that it is the Huntress’s face. Jordan write on an accompanying sheet of paper, “Lorelei Vogt is Anna McBride” (454)

Jordan rushes home in a cab. Given that she read stories about her stepmother’s predilection for child-killing, Jordan is anxious to remove Ruth from Anneliese’s clutches. She lies to Anneliese, claiming that Tony broke her heart and that she wants to take Ruth out for ice cream. Anneliese is tender with her. Although Jordan feels overwhelming affection for Anneliese, she decides to assist Tony and his team in taking her down.

Ian, Nina, and Tony drive to the McBride residence, cursing the fact that the Huntress was right under their nose. They agree to apprehend her, using any means necessary. However, when they arrive at the house, they find it empty with the door wide open. 

Anneliese interrupts Jordan’s plans to take Ruth out by following her into the darkroom and shutting the door. Anneliese threatens Jordan with a pistol, and the two women sit and talk. Jordan learns that Anneliese murdered Ruth’s Jewish mother for her passport and took Ruth with her because a pretty child would aid her passage to America.

Anneliese also confesses that she felt persecuted ever since the end of the war and that she is tormented by her losses. She claims that her killings of prisoners of war and six Jewish children where acts of “mercy,” because they would have likely met worse deaths in the camps. Anneliese says that she greatly likes and admires Jordan. Moreover, she says she would not have been so eager to get rid of her if she did not have to be on her guard around her. Anneliese explains that she put the wrong ammunition in Daniel’s pistol because he did not trust her in the same way after Jordan’s exposure of her on Thanksgiving. Finally after telling Jordan that she will take Ruth with her, Anneliese urges her not to follow them. She locks Jordan into the darkroom and flees.

Ian and his team find Jordan and let her out of the dark room. They search the house, but all the Huntress’s possessions are abandoned as she prepares to leave behind Anna McBride and take on a new identity. Given that the keys to the cabin at Selkie Lake are missing, they decide to track her down there. After Ian makes Jordan tell him about Anneliese’s rusalka nightmares, he infers that the rusalka Anneliese fears is Nina. Ian demands that Nina tell him the truth about what happened at the lake. 

Nina recounts the story of how she and Sebastian entered the Huntress’s house, where she fed them a delicious warm soup. Sebastian wanted to stay the night in the warmth, but Nina was suspicious of the woman’s motives. The fact that the woman had real cream, Nina believes, meant that she was almost certainly allied with the Nazis.

On the way back to the campsite alone, Nina senses that something is wrong. She returns to find the Huntress killing Sebastian. She fights the Huntress, leaving a scar down her back. She flings herself into the lake to miss the shots the Huntress fires at her. Nina decides that she and not the Huntress will be the predatory rusalka. The Huntress expresses real fear at Nina’s presence and prays aloud that she will be gone. Nina hurries to Sebastian’s body and, taking his prisoner’s tags and rings, resolves to find his older brother Ian and tell him that Sebastian “died a hero” (488). Nina runs for her life and spends a winter in Polish hospitals, nearly dead of pneumonia and haunted by the Huntress, before she finds Ian. 

Ian sees the desperate vulnerability in Nina’s eyes after she makes her confession regarding Sebastian. He now knows that what she truly fears is failing another team of people. Nina decides that the only way that they will catch Anneliese at Selkie Lake is by flying there. They persuade Garrett to lend them a plane and take to the skies. Nina terrifies her passengers as she makes an engineless drop to Selkie Lake. 

When the group arrives at the cabin, they spot Ruth. Ian lures her over to them by whistling the Siberian lullaby that he played for her on the violin. Tony takes Ruth into his arms and gets her into the car. The Huntress, who has taken on a blonder, more casual appearance, comes out with a pistol. Jordan takes her camera with her, knowing that it is her “best weapon” (499) and that Anneliese is afraid of it (499). She addresses her stepmother by her original name and tells her to smile for the camera.

Overwhelmed by her desire to kill the Huntress, Nina is surprised by the “protective rage” she feels when a shot echoes and she worries that the Huntress might have killed Nina’s “husband” (502). She cuts the insides of her cheeks so that blood will pour out and throws herself into the lake.

Ian gets his long-awaited confrontation with the Huntress. He tells her that he knows her crimes and will write an exposé in the Boston Globe about her. She pleads with them that they have everything, including Ruth, and that her sole request is that they let her go. When the Huntress sees Nina as the rusalka from her nightmares, she tries to take the pistol to her mouth and kill herself, but Nina intercepts the weapon. Ian says that the Huntress must decide between being tried for war crimes in Austria or being charged for the murder of Daniel McBride in Massachusetts. 

The Huntress chooses to be tried for war crimes in Austria because Nina said that she never wanted to come back to Europe. They plan to take her to Austria by boat. Jordan confesses to Tony that she finds it difficult to “turn off” (511) her affection for the Huntress, despite knowing that she is a murderer. She reasons that looking after Ruth will be her priority, and that she will have to put her photography on hold until things are more stable at the antiques store.

Jordan determines that she will tell Ruth a soft version of the truth: that her mother “did some bad things” (515) and will never return.

Tony surprises Jordan in the darkroom. where she develops her final shots of the Huntress. Tony says he will not accompany Nina and Ian to Austria. Instead, he will stay to help Jordan so she can continue her career in photography. He then takes a picture of her that becomes the one that will accompany her byline as a photojournalist.

On the Atlantic crossing, the Huntress asks Ian who he is and why he wanted to find her. He will not satisfy her with an answer unless he is called to testify. While Ian thinks he will write a story so famous that the Huntress’s reputation will never die, Fritz Bauer warns him that judges do not favor “locking up pretty young widows” (522).

Ian would like to move back to Boston to hunt down other Nazi war criminals with Nina on his team, even if she pushes ahead with the divorce proceedings. Nina confesses that she did not let the Huntress kill herself because justice is a far greater punishment than vengeance. She agrees to go back to Boston with Ian.

In April 1951, Nina is at a baseball game with Ian, Jordan, Tony, and Ruth. She thinks the game is too tame to be entertaining. Nevertheless, she feels bonded to this team of people and tells Ian that she would like to delay their divorce for at least a year. She still misses Yelena and her life with the regiment but decides that she can love Ian too.

On October 9, 1959, in an article titled “A Nazi Murderess Sentenced,” Ian describes how the Huntress’s trial failed to start until 1953 and dragged out for six more years. Jordan’s photographic essay, “Portrait of Evil” for Life magazine, makes her famous. The Huntress’s victims are memorialized at Tony’s Documentation Center in Boston. Ian concludes the narrative by saying that generations who choose to forget history are destined to repeat it.