by Simon Wood
I startled awake. The room had cooled though I remained warm beneath the covers. Light leaked through blinds covering the small arched window. Instinctively, I reached for my phone on the bedside table then remembered it wasn’t there. I’d have to go back to where I’d been hit and look for it, or find a store where I could buy another.
I checked a cuckoo clock on the wall and noted that it was after ten in the morning. I’d slept nearly thirteen hours. Five or six was my norm. It could have been the jetlag, I suppose, or maybe I had a concussion. I sat up and felt pangs of hunger, along with a lot of pangs of discomfort. I recalled Emma stating that breakfast was only until 10 a.m. I got out of bed and immediately felt discomfort in my lower back, my right elbow, which I assume struck the ground, and the back of my head, which I knew from the lump had hit the pavement. I took a few deep breaths to get my bearings, grabbed my shaving kit, and walked gingerly to the table with the pitcher of water and glasses. I downed two Aleve and a cup of water and looked out the window. It provided a view into a yard behind the pub and inn that extended to the forest. There was equipment in the yard, a tractor and some other contraption. Both looked rusted and unused. I also noticed a garden with a trellis covered in vines. Just beyond it was a small wooden shed. The door, which looked heavily reinforced, sat at an odd angle, as if it had been blown off its hinges. About to look away, I noticed a woman emerge from the trees, walking through the grass toward the building. She looked to be about my age, mid-to-late twenties with blondish-brown hair. She was limping, favoring her right leg and when she neared I noted rips in her blue-jeans, along the thighs and at the knees. Though Anna had purchased pants brand new with the same look, these appeared to have been torn and muddied, or bloodied.
The woman stopped and looked up at the window with a gaze so intense it was as if she knew I was standing there, watching her. It caused me to step back. After a second or two I looked out again. The woman was gone.
I quickly showered, changed my clothes and made my way downstairs into the pub, expecting it to be largely empty. Instead I found the tables to once again be nearly full. As I entered the room the conversation silenced, glasses stopped in mid-air, and the clatter of utensils eased. Those at the tables eyed me with suspicion, or trepidation. I thought I noticed several of the same people I had seen the night before, but then I had been in no real shape to remember much of anything.
Someone hit the play button and movement and sound resumed. I took a seat at the far end of one of the tables, away from the others. Emma approached carrying a pot of coffee.
“You slept well?” she asked.
“I did,” I said, though my body was stiff and my thoughts still a bit cloudy.
“How do you feel?”
“Like someone ran me over with a truck.” Emma looked alarmed. I smiled and said, “I feel okay, a little sore, but okay.” I flipped over my white porcelain mug. Emma filled it. “Is there a phone I can use to call the rental car company?”
“You can use the phone in the house,” she said. “I’ll bring you eggs and sausage.”
I sipped at my mug, the coffee rich and bursting with flavor. Eyeing the empty seat across the table, I thought again of Anna and wondered if she regretted her decision to leave me at the altar. I sat back when I saw a plate with two soft-boiled eggs, sausage and toast. I looked up, about to say “thank you,” or “danke,” to Emma but the words caught in my throat. The attractive blond woman I’d seen in the field held the plate.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded, providing the hint of a smile and set down my breakfast. I was trying to formulate a question, something to ask her, but when she turned away I noticed what appeared to be fresh scrapes on her elbows, and the distinct limp in her step. I rubbed my elbow, which was sore from having hit the ground.
When I turned my attention back to my plate a man stood on the other side of the table, staring at me. Tall and strapping, with a silver crew cut, and the clearest blue eyes I had ever seen, he wore a long raincoat and carried an umbrella.
“You must be the guest from last evening,” he said.
It was an interesting way to put it. “I guess you could say that.”
He motioned to the bench across from me. “May I?”
I nodded and noticed that the clatter of plates and utensils had once again quieted. It seemed I had again managed to capture the attention of the room.
“I am Klaus Müller,” he said, sitting and putting his cap on the table.
“Richard Quinn,” I said.
“American?”
“Yes.”
“What brings you here?” Müller asked.
“The weather,” I said.
Müller looked uncertain.
“I’m kidding,” I said. He didn’t smile. “And why are you interested in me, Klaus Müller?”
“It seems you are a bit of a celebrity,” he said.
“I highly doubt that. More like a speed bump.” Again, not even the hint of a smile. Germans. “How did you hear that I was here?”
“It’s a small town Mr. Quinn. Word travels fast.”
“I haven’t had much of a chance to look around the town. So tell me, what is being said about me.”
“That you had an accident last evening in your car; that you hit something.”
“An animal, I think. I didn’t see it. It was dark, and raining. But based on the dent it left in my car, it was big.”
“You seem uncertain.”
“Not about the accident,” I said. “I have the dent in my rental car to prove I hit something, and not a cat or a dog. My uncertainty is with respect to what I hit.”
“You don’t know.”
“I don’t. I pulled to the side of the road and went back to try to determine what I’d hit, but I didn’t find anything, at least I didn’t see anything.”
“But you heard something.”
I started at him across the table. His eyes bore into mine. If this had been a staring contest I would have surely lost. “Are you asking or telling me?”
“Asking.”
Bullshit, but I went with it. “Yeah, I heard something.”
“I wonder if you might describe what you heard.”
“What I heard? It sounded like an animal growling and coming toward me.”
“Coming toward you? Are you certain of this?”
“Well…the grass was…” I struggled to describe it. “There was something in the grass…something moving toward me.”
“But you did not see it?”
“No. Like I said, it was in the grass. When I decided it best not to wait around to find out I turned away to run and got hit by a car.”
“You were scared.”
Not that I wanted to admit it but…“Yeah. I was scared. I don’t know these woods. For all I knew it could have been a grizzly bear.”
“There are no grizzly bears in Germany.”
“Where were you last night?” I said.
Müller’s face scrunched in confusion. “Was there anything else you saw or heard?”
I started to shake my head then recalled the hair. “I found a clump of hair in the grill of my car and in the barbed wire.”
“You found hair,” Müller said, his eyes widening. He sat forward, closing the distance between us. “Where is this hair?”
“The one from the grill of my car I gave it to the owner. Heinrich. The other one, I must have dropped when I got hit by the car…along with my phone.”
“I wonder, Mr. Quinn, would you be willing to show me where exactly you hit this…animal?”
I gave this some thought before I answered. Finally, I said, “I guess so,” thinking I could at least look for my phone while I was out there.
Müller drove a four-door BMW. The drive back along the winding road took just a few minutes. I was closer to the small town—stone and stucco buildings with a church at the epicenter—than I thought. The rain continued with
no sign of abating anytime soon. The sky looked like November in Seattle, when the gray cloud layer felt like it was directly on top of you and the rain could persist for weeks.
“Here,” I said, sensing as we came around a bend in the road that we were approaching the place where I had pulled my car over. “It was around here.”
Müller pulled the BMW to the side of the road and handed me one of two umbrellas. We stepped from the car, popped the umbrellas, and I looked about. I walked down the road. “I must have hit it twenty or thirty feet back,” I said, searching the edge of the road for my cellphone. I stopped walking. “I’d say right around here.”
“You’re certain?”
“No, but I pulled over just before the bend after I hit it…so.”
Müller took a moment to search the road, but with the heavy rains it was unlikely any evidence would have remained. After a moment he said, “Where did you hear the animal growling?”
I looked about, saw the tall grass and walked toward it. “It was here,” I said pointing to a still identifiable path in the grass. I stepped over the ditch, the water still running through it and climbed the slope to the barbed-wire fence. “There. You see where the grass has been pressed down but is starting to straighten.” The path was not as pronounced as the night before but I could still see where the animal had traveled. “I saw something in the grass, coming toward me.”
“Coming toward you? Not away?”
“Definitely coming toward me.”
“A wounded deer would not come toward you,” Müller mused.
I looked at him. “No. I don’t imagine it would.”
“Come.” Müller led me back down the slope to the road. As we descended I again looked for my phone but did not see it. We walked back to his car and Müller opened the trunk. He considered my feet and handed me a pair of rubber boots. “Put these on. They may be large, but…”
“Why do I need these?”
“You will ruin your shoes,” Müller said, slipping off his loafers and pulling on the rubber boots. Germans, I thought again. Practical and direct.
I removed my shoes, pulled on my boots, and followed Müller back to the tall grass. He stepped into it and I followed, feeling my shoes sink a few inches in the moist ground. He ducked between the strands of barbed wire, clearly intending to follow the path in the grass. I followed.
“What are we looking for?” I asked, after a hundred yards of walking.
“I’ll know when I find it,” Müller said. He walked for a few more minutes then came to a sudden stop. He pointed, but as I was behind him I could not see what he was drawing my attention to. I stepped to the side and saw an area of flattened grass that looked very much like a place where a deer had bedded down for the night. It would have looked like such a place, except this bed was not empty. A calf lay there, or what had once been a calf. The poor animal looked to have been torn apart, with deep gashes along its body and across its throat. The carcass of the animal looked to have been eaten from the inside out and whatever had done the eating had meant business.
“That,” Müller said.
“What could do such damage?”
“A local farmer, relatively new to the area, only about a year, has reported that something is killing his livestock at night. It is most peculiar.”
“Peculiar how?”
“It happens but once a month.” Müller turned to me. “So you see, I was most interested about your comment as to having hit something the other night.”
“What kind of animal do you believe is responsible for the killings?”
Müller shrugged. “If I had to hazard a guess, I would say wolves.”
“Heinrich said there are no wolves in Germany?”
“Heinrich is mistaken. Wolves are suspected to have migrated here from Poland and have been expanding their range, mostly in the eastern German region, but west and north as well. There have been no sightings of any wolves in this area, but also no shortage of evidence, such as this, indicating their existence.”
I gave this some thought. “So this farmer hired you to do what, exactly?”
“Find evidence of what is killing his cattle. The wolf population is larger than the government will admit, and without some proof, some evidence, the government will continue with, as they say in your country, their heads in the sand. If I can prove this man’s livestock are being killed by wolves, he can recover compensation from the state. At present they refuse to accept wolves as the basis for his loss.”
“What else could it be?”
Müller shrugged and slowly shook his head. “I am at a loss to explain further,” he said.
“What will you do if you can prove it? In the United States wolves are protected.”
“Here as well under Germany’s tightly controlled forestry laws, but if I can catch one feeding on a farmer’s livestock, I can kill it. Then I will have solid proof of their existence and my client will have grounds to recover compensation. I wonder if I might have a look at that tuft of hair you pulled from the grill or your car?”
I shook my head. “I told you, I gave it to the bar owner, Heinrich.”
“Then I shall retrieve it when we return.”
That, however, proved easier said than done.
“I don’t have it,” Heinrich said when we returned to the pub. “It was in the front pocket of my apron and, I am afraid, Emma washed it, as she does on Sundays.”
Müller and I retreated to one of the long tables, nursing beers in two large steins.
“What will you do now?” I asked.
“I’m thinking, perhaps, to take the slaughter to the game.”
“I don’t follow. Do you mean bait the wolves? With what?”
“The carcass of that calf we located.”
“Isn’t that dangerous?”
“Wolves are, by their nature shy animals. They seek to avoid humans.”
“Not the one I encountered.”
“I wonder if perhaps that is because the animal was injured after you struck it. If so, such an animal would be far more dangerous to more than just livestock.”
“When will you do this?”
“Tonight. While the kill remains fresh. Do you wish to participate?”
I gave this some thought. I didn’t have a phone, or a car for that matter, at least not until the morning. I had another night to kill before the towing company opened Monday morning. Then again, I thought of the night before, of the growling as the blades of grass bent toward me. That wasn’t exactly enticing. But, what the hell. I’d been left at the altar. Nothing could be worse than that. What really did I have to lose?
The rain stopped, but it looked to be just a momentary reprieve. I took the opportunity to wander outside in the garden behind the house where, I assumed, Heinrich and Emma obtained much of the herbs and spices and other ingredients in the food they served.
As I wandered I noted movement in a row of tomato plants and saw a head pop up above the vines—the blond woman I had seen that morning out my window and at breakfast. She was stunningly attractive, with strong German features and a lithe, muscular figure. Figuring it best to get back in the saddle sooner than later, I approached, determined to speak to her. Easier said than done. I came up behind the woman and scared her so badly she dropped the tomatoes and assortment of other vegetables she had collected.
“I’m sorry,” I said, bending to help her retrieve the items. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
She smiled wanly and said nothing.
“Do you speak English,” I asked.
She nodded. “A little,” she said and it sounded like LEE-TLE.
Up close she had Emma’s sharp features—pronounced cheekbones, a thin nose and Heinrich’s sharp clear blue eyes that, when she wasn’t turning away from my gaze, were as clear as glaciers.
“You’re Heinrich and Emma’s daughter,” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
The picture
was becoming clearer. “So you work here?”
“Yes.”
“I saw you this morning, coming through the field. Do you live out that way?”
“No.” She offered nothing else.
“You were limping and have scrapes on your arms. Are you all right?”
She looked away, picked up the basket and stood. “I must go,” she said.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to—” I reached for the basket of vegetables. “Let me carry it for you,” I said.
She relented, thought reluctantly, and we started toward the back door to the kitchen. She kept her head down, her gaze on the dirt.
“I don’t know your name,” I said.
“I am Mila,” she said.
“Mila. That’s a beautiful name,” I said. “I am Richard Quinn.”
“I know,” she said.
I hoped she had asked Emma or Heinrich about the stranger, which caused me to wonder if Mila had asked Emma if she could serve me breakfast.
“You were hit with car,” she said.
“Just a flesh wound,” I said, trying out my best Monty Python.
It didn’t garner a reaction. We reached the back door.
“Would you like to have dinner tonight?” I asked, throwing caution to the wind. When you’ve been left at the altar, a rejection to a dinner date was nothing.
“Tonight? No. Is not possible.”
“Okay,” I said, knowing I’d be leaving in the morning. “Well, it was nice to have met you Mila.”
She stepped to the door and opened it. I stepped away but I did not hear the door shut. “You will stay here tonight?” she asked.
I turned, thinking perhaps her question would be an invite to, perhaps, a date some other night. Under the circumstances, I was game. “I don’t have much choice. I’m waiting for my car.”
“You will stay here,” she said looking at me with sad, almost pleading eyes. The invitation to another date never came. She shut the door.
Müller arrived just before dark, picking me up outside the back of the pub, and explaining to me that wolves generally commenced hunting at dusk and were primarily nocturnal animals. “Like any hunter, they will return to a kill and feast on it until it is gone, rather than work to kill again.”
