by Helen Grant
“Are you sure, Papa?”
“Pia, I am trying to read the newspaper. What’s so important about Caroline… what did you say her name was?”
“Caroline Hack. Papa, Frau Kessel says she-”
“Frau Kessel?” My father sighed. He was about to say something along the lines of what my mother had said about not listening to Frau Kessel’s stories. Then light dawned. “She was the girl who ran away.”
“She ran away? Frau Kessel said she disappeared.”
“Well, she did, I suppose. She just took herself off without a warning. But how did you come to be discussing it with Frau Kessel?”
“She asked me to carry her shopping for her,” I said truthfully.
“She did? Unverschämt,” grunted my father.
At another time I might have been tempted into a digression at this point, agreeing how disgraceful it was that Frau Kessel had made me carry all her things home, hamming it up a bit: my back had never stopped aching since, you wouldn’t believe how many things she made me carry… however, for the time being the question of Caroline Hack was still more interesting than the possibility of dropping Frau Kessel in it.
“She says Caroline Hack just vanished, like-like Katharina Linden did.”
“Hmph.” My father straightened in his armchair, and looked at me rather severely. “Pia, I am not happy about this. Frau Kessel has no business frightening children with such stories.”
“I wasn’t frightened, I-”
“If she asks you to carry her shopping again, you tell her your papa told you to come straight home, verstanden?”
“OK… but Papa?”
“Yes, Pia?” My father sounded a little weary.
“Can you just tell me about Caroline Hack-please? I’m not frightened,” I added hastily. “I’m just… interested.”
“Ach, Pia! There really is nothing to tell. She was at the Grundschule at the same time as I was, but I really didn’t know her; she was in the fourth grade and I was in the second or third, I don’t remember which. She just didn’t come into school one morning, and eventually it got around that she had run away. She didn’t get on with her mother, I think.”
“Her stepmother, Frau Kessel said.”
“Frau Kessel said! Frau Kessel should mind her own business. Pia, I mean it quite seriously, I do not want you listening to such tales.”
“Yes, Papa.” Even I could see that any further questions were going to rouse my father’s ire; reluctantly, I retired from the field.
• • •
The following morning I cornered Stefan at the break. We loitered in a corner of the playground, away from the jungle gym where the first-graders were flinging themselves around like monkeys, and a safe distance from the corner where Thilo Koch and some other fourth-grade boys were standing in a huddle.
“What’s up?” said Stefan.
“It’s not just Katharina Linden and Marion Voss,” I told him without preamble. “Other girls have disappeared.”
Stefan glanced about him, as though he might notice who had vanished from among our number.
“Who?”
“Not now,” I said. “It was years ago, when my papa was at school.” Stefan’s shoulders relaxed when I said this: years ago, when my papa was at school-that was a time so remote as to be meaningless.
“Really?” he said, without excitement.
“Yes, really. There was a girl called Bianca Schmitz, that was before Papa was at school, I think, but there was another one called Caroline Hack, who was here at the same time as he was.”
“And what happened to them?”
“They just vanished. Frau Kessel told me.”
“Frau Kessel told you? Pia, you can’t believe a word that old Hexe says.” Stefan sounded quite irritated; no doubt the Breuer family had suffered from Frau Kessel’s hyperactive tongue in the past.
“No, really. It’s not just her-my papa knows about it too. He says she just didn’t turn up for school one morning, and everyone thought she had run away.”
“Why would she do that?”
“She didn’t like her stepmother.”
“Well, maybe she did run away.”
“Frau Kessel doesn’t think so. She thinks someone took her.”
“Someone?”
“Well…” I lowered my voice, glancing around me. “Frau Kessel thinks Herr Düster did it.”
“Old Düster?” Now Stefan’s interest was piqued.
“Yes. She says he took Gertrud out for a walk the day she disappeared-”
“Hang on, hang on…!” Stefan looked bewildered. “Who’s Gertrud?”
“Herr Schiller’s daughter,” I said impatiently. “The one who also disappeared. Herr Düster took her for a walk in the Eschweiler Tal and she never came back.”
“Well, if it was so obvious, why didn’t anyone do anything?”
“Frau Kessel says Herr Schiller stood up for him.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I don’t know.” I thought about it. “Frau Kessel says he took Gertrud to get at Herr Schiller, because he wanted to marry Herr Schiller’s wife, before she got married to Herr Schiller, I mean.”
“So why did he take the other ones?”
“Maybe it was like a man-eating tiger,” I suggested. “Once he tasted blood, he had to do it again.”
“Or a vampire,” said Stefan. “You know, like Dracula. I saw a film about him once. He could turn himself into a bat, and fly into people’s bedrooms through the window.”
“I don’t think Herr Düster turns into a bat,” I protested. “And anyway, none of the kids has disappeared from their bedroom.”
“Maybe he turns into a wolf.”
“And nobody notices a wolf in the middle of the street?” I asked sarcastically.
“Or a cat. A big black cat with glowing eyes.”
“Like Pluto, you mean?” I suggested.
Stefan gasped. “Of course.”
“Oh, come on.”
“No, really.” Stefan looked at me, his face alight with the advent of a new idea. “Listen, has anyone ever seen Herr Düster and Pluto at the same time?”
“How should I know?”
“I bet they haven’t.” Stefan considered. “You remember that time we were at Herr Schiller’s, and Pluto got in, and Herr Schiller just went mad? Like the cat was a devil or something.”
I thought back; Stefan was perfectly right. A sliver of cold slid through me.
“That’s crazy,” I said, shaking my head. Pluto was just a cat. A very large, very mean-tempered cat, but just a cat all the same. He had made Herr Schiller jump, that was all…
The bell rang for the end of break and as we went inside I dismissed the idea from my mind altogether; it is only in retrospect that I believe that was the point when the germ of an idea began to sprout, the idea of somehow getting into Herr Düster’s house and searching for the lost girls, searching for the truth.
Chapter Twenty-four
At last the school term had finished, my time at the Grundschule had come to an end, and now the glorious vista of Gymnasium without Thilo Koch was opening before me. But first there were six weeks of vacation to get through, four of which were to be spent in the exotic environment of Oma Warner’s semidetached house in Middlesex. My mother loaded me up with gifts for Oma Warner, and then put me on an airplane at Köln-Bonn airport. Oma Warner picked me up at the airport at the other end, and that was that. I was caught, with no prospect of parole for four whole weeks. Once we were in the taxi, I handed over the little parcels for Oma Warner like a prisoner giving up his personal possessions before being incarcerated.
“Ooh,” said Oma Warner, peering into one of the little bags. “What’s this then, Pia?”
“I think it is to eat,” I said.
“Dear me, I hope it isn’t one of those smoked sausages,” she said doubtfully.
“Mmm,” I said noncommittally.
I hazarded a glance out the taxi window. England seemed
very much the same as last time we had visited: an endless vista of gray streets, slick with rain. Even though it was summer, it was still drizzling. Everyone seemed to be scuttling along leaning slightly forward as though trying to push their way through the wind and wet. My mother claimed there were parts of England that made Bad Münstereifel look like the Ruhrgebiet, an area of Germany legendary for its factories and coal mines; she described villages with chocolate-box thatched cottages and old Norman churches, and rolling hills and meadows with cows dozing under trees. Looking out at Middlesex, I wondered whether she had got it mixed up with some other place.
Added to my woes was the fact that I was divorced from everything going on at home in Germany. Supposing they found one of the missing girls? Or they caught someone-Herr Düster, for example-disposing of evidence of the crime? Deprived of facts, my imagination ran riot, and I imagined the police bursting into his house on the Orchheimer Strasse and finding him crunching up the bones between his teeth. They would drag him away screaming, and when they searched him in the police station they would find that his body-the bits hidden by his clothes-was all covered in black fur. No one would ever see Pluto again, of course. And when they looked in his fridge, it would be full of bottles of blood-
“What are you thinking about?” asked Oma Warner.
“Nothing,” I said.
A week passed, and then another, and I resigned myself to captivity. Oma Warner’s house was a prison, but it was quite an interesting one; there were three bedrooms and a box room to explore, as well as the dining room with its cabinets full of curious ornaments and old photographs in frames. In the living room there was a dark wood bookcase crammed full of novels by Barbara Cartland and Georgette Heyer; Oma Warner was a fiend for romance.
“You can read one if you like,” she said, coming up behind me suddenly as I was perusing a cover depicting a flame-haired woman in a green velvet dress repulsing three lovers at once. I almost jumped out of my skin, and slid the book back onto the shelf as quickly as I could.
“No, thank you,” I said.
Oma Warner cocked her head and stared at me with her bright old eyes, like an intelligent bird. “Suit yourself.” She held something out to me. “There’s a letter for you from Germany.” She turned the envelope over in her hands. “From Stefan Breuer, it says.” She chuckled, handing the letter to me. “Got yourself a swain?”
“A what?”
“A boyfriend,” said Oma Warner, raising her eyebrows meaningfully.
“No,” I said shortly. Mentally, I added another imprecation to the long list of curses I had heaped on Stefan’s head since our unwilling partnership began. StinkStefan; trust him to embarrass me again. Only he could drop me in it from a distance of five hundred kilometers.
I went upstairs to the bedroom Oma Warner had given me, and closed the door. Before I opened the letter I turned it over as Oma Warner had done, and examined it as though for clues. Stefan had dire taste in stationery, or perhaps he had purloined it from his mother; it was decorated with simpering mice, prancing along a graduated background of pink and yellow. With all that dripping sentimentality, it was no wonder Oma Warner had taken it for a love letter. Stefan had addressed it to Mrs. Pia Kolvenbach.
I opened the letter and read as follows:
Liebe Pia,
Are you having a good time at your grandmother’s? I went to the summer camp last week but it was not as good as last year. They wouldn’t let us go anywhere out of sight. Something happened on Wednesday. A group of people went to Herr Düster’s house and shouted at him. The police came and told them to go home. Boris says Herr Düster is going to die. I wanted to tell you about it. It’s a shame you’re not here. I asked if I could telephone you but my mother said No.
Dein, Stefan
I read the letter through again. A thousand questions came seething up in my brain. Who had gone to Herr Düster’s house, and why? I wondered whether Frau Kessel’s accusations against the old man had finally become common currency, and whether she had been among those who gathered on his doorstep. Somehow I thought not; at ten I was years off understanding adult behavior, but even I could see that Frau Kessel’s favored modus operandi was the behind-the-hand remark, the whisper behind closed doors. I could not see her as the leader of a torch-bearing lynch mob.
Stefan’s letter was infuriating in the details it left out. The police had come-but what had they done, apart from telling everyone to go home? Had they arrested anyone-Herr Düster himself, for example? And what did it mean, Boris said Herr Düster was going to die? Was it a threat? I read the letter again, but there was nothing else to be gleaned from it. I went downstairs.
“Oma? Ich meine… Granny?”
“Yes, dear?” Oma Warner was enthusiastically scrubbing out the oven but she stood up when I came into the kitchen.
“Can I telephone?”
“Well, your mother’s going to call you this evening, Pia. Can’t it wait?”
“Mmm.” I looked at Oma Warner, then away at the cluttered countertop. “I wanted to telephone…” I thought about it. “A friend.” I hoped she would assume it was a female friend. But Oma Warner was not that slow.
“Your boyfriend, eh?” Before I could say anything, she was shaking her head. “I’m sorry, dear. It’s much too expensive.” She gave me a conciliatory smile. “You’ll have to write back to him. That’s what your Grandpa Warner and I always did, you know.”
“Um.” I shrugged. Nowadays, of course, I might have e-mailed him. But in 1999 the technology in Oma Warner’s house did not even extend to a dishwasher. A public call box was no good either: a single international call would have taken more than the entire contents of my purse. That left only one option.
Chapter Twenty-five
Stefan?”
“Who is this?”
“It’s me, Pia.”
“Pia? Are you back?”
“No, I’m calling from my Oma’s house.”
“In England?”
“Yes…” I paused. “She doesn’t know. I can’t stay on the phone for very long in case she comes back.”
Stefan whistled. “What’s she going to-”
“Never mind that,” I snapped back in an urgent whisper; even though I had seen Oma Warner depart with my own eyes, I still felt as though I had to keep my voice down. “I got your letter. What’s been going on? What’s this stuff about Herr Düster?”
“Oh, that was crazy. There’ve been rumors going around about Herr Düster for ages, ever since he got picked up in that police car. It seems like someone has been stirring them up again-”
Frau Kessel, I thought sourly.
“-and, anyway, a whole group of people went to his house and were shouting at him to come out and explain himself.”
“Did you see it?”
“Nee. Boris was there, though.”
“Boris thinks Herr Düster did it too?”
“No, Boris just thought it was cool to be there, and see what they did.” That made sense; terrorizing an old man who was outnumbered ten to one sounded just Boris’s style.
“Did he come out? Herr Düster, I mean.”
“No. I mean, would you? But he was definitely in there, Boris said; they saw him looking out the window.”
“Who was there?”
“Well, apart from Boris… Jörg Koch was there, and he said Herr Linden, you know, Katharina’s father, he was there as well. But I don’t know who else. He said Herr Linden was knocking on the door and shouting at Herr Düster to come out. Herr Linden said if he had nothing to do with it, he had nothing to be afraid of.” Stefan paused, thinking. “Then I think the police came.”
“Who called them?”
“I don’t know. Maybe Herr Düster did. But he still didn’t come out, even when they arrived. It was Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf, and the other one, the younger one.”
“What did they do?” I had visions of Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf laying into Boris with a club, and Herr Linden shouting about his d
aughter, and trying to beat down the door…
“Just talked to them.”
“What did they say?” I couldn’t make this out at all.
“I don’t really know… Boris heard it, but he was mostly just annoyed that they didn’t make Herr Düster come out or anything.” That I could imagine; Boris would have loved the ensuing row. “I think they said it wasn’t him.” Stefan paused. “Then Jörg Koch shouted why did they arrest him before, if it wasn’t him?”
“And?”
“Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf said they didn’t arrest him, but it was confidential, you know, they can’t say anything.”
“They did arrest him, though, didn’t they?” I said. “Frau Koch saw it.”
“Yeah, I know it doesn’t make sense,” agreed Stefan. “I’m just telling you what Boris said. Anyway, then Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf said they had to go home and stop bothering Herr Düster because he was ill. He said they should leave it to the police.”
“Did they just go?” I asked. It was hard to imagine the bereaved father and the local bullyboys departing like lambs when they had heard about Herr Düster’s supposed ill health.
“Well, Boris said they gave Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf a hard time back, told him what could he expect if the police didn’t catch the person who was taking all these kids, and a load of stuff like that. But you know Boris.”
“Doch,” I agreed. I thought for a moment. “Has anything else happened?”
“What, you mean, has anyone else disappeared? No. I wish Thilo Koch would, but no such luck.”
We both laughed. “They haven’t found Marion Voss?”
“No.”
“Have you seen Herr Schiller?” I asked, hoping a little jealously that he would say no.
“Yeah, I saw him a couple of days ago. He told me this really cool story about some treasure. He said when the town got attacked the nuns hid all the treasure, and so far nobody’s found it. It could still be somewhere in the town, millions of marks’ worth of it-well, thousands, anyway. Herr Schiller says-”
“Stefan, I have to go.” I dared not stay any longer on the phone; every minute racked up a further enormity on Oma Warner’s telephone bill, and a greater risk of discovery. “Can you call me if anything else happens?”
