Keeper of the Mill

by Mary Anne Kelly

“I was until I found out I’m being duped. You mean you sent me all this way under false pretenses?”

  “Certainly …” The line went fuzzy. Then Iris’s harsh, laryngitic voice tuned back in with a blast of clarity. “… till I got rid of this verdammte arthritis. Such a terrible thing, to be cursed with arthritis. You cannot know because you are young. I don’t complain about it, but believe you me, I could. Plenty of days I can just about barely make it out from the bed. Young people don’t understand. That’s why I always say, Claire, enjoy your life while you still can.”

  Claire waited impatiently while Iris went on for a while about her arthritis. Then she said, “Iris, I’m hanging up now. I just want to tell you I’m furious with you and your tricks. I can’t believe you would do this to me. I can’t believe it. Are you serious? Do you mean to tell me there never was a treasure? There never were diamonds?”

  “Well, that was years ago. Sometimes we old folks forget the way things really were, you know.”

  “I’m hanging up,” she said, and did. She stood there getting wetter and wetter. She had the strangest feeling that Iris hadn’t lied before, but that she was lying now.

  Her bag, wedged between the phone and the post, fell with a thud, and the contents spewed all over the wet ground. “Shit,” she said and bent down to collect the lot. The photograph of the snowy Mill, propped up against the outdoor phone, melted and shimmered in the spring rain. Claire ran off, crablike, without looking back, almost knowing, as she did, she had forgotten something.

  6

  Claire found the curved wooden gates in the fine stone house of the Rectory locked. She knocked. Birds called wildly in the trees behind her in the rain. It was twilight now. Lilac bushes on each side of the gates were filled with heady drooping blossoms. She gave the rusted bell a good push, then again another. She turned and watched the path. An oboe-like sweetness drenched the very green and empty pasture with glistening rain. After a while she could hear footsteps down a staircase within. The door. There was old Father Metz himself just as the rain let go and came down cats and dogs.

  “Hi!” she cried.

  “Ja so was!” He took her hand in his fat one and shook it heartily. “Komm! Kommen Sie ’rein!” He invited her in, practically pulling her across the threshold. They went together up the curving wrought-iron stairway to his chambers. “I am so happy to see you,” he told her again and again. “Kaffee oder Tee?”

  “Hmmm,” Claire deliberated. In the last few days she had consumed more caffeine and alcohol than she would normally in months. Never mind. She’d been through the mill, ha-ha, she’d have yet another coffee.

  Father rang a little communion bell. He had been busy, she noticed, cutting out Christmas-card fronts for bookmarks. A stout, aproned lady with water in her legs and a furry mole on her cheek appeared at the door and was told to prepare “einen schönen Kaffee und etwas kleines Süsses, bitte schön.” She was gone and they were left alone. It was a nice big room. Too big, probably, when winter came and you had to heat it. Tall ceilings and too loosely lead-paned glass diamonds. Charming but drafty.

  “Did you know,” he chatted as he straightened the room, looking for papers she would need, “the car was made after the war, but from prewar materials? That’s why the running boards. It was the Bishop’s car. I inherited it from his chauffeur. So you know the car’s lineage,” he said.

  “Did you come from Munich, Father?”

  “Me? Ach, nein. I come from Warteweil. Ja, ja. Das schöne Warteweil. It’s quite near Aidenried.” He peered at her over his glasses. “You’ve been to Aidenried, I hear.”

  She shivered. He put another log on the fire and it blazed cheerfully up.

  Father had a nice lumpy sofa and an even lumpier easy chair. There was a good bronze standing lamp beside it and a table overflowing with books and missals and parish information. There was a worn leather hassock with a pouchy groove for his slippered feet. He’d been listening to Mendelssohn. He turned it off.

  “I’m glad to find you home,” she said. “I was afraid I might have missed you in the crowd at the wedding.”

  “That I couldn’t do, nein.” He sucked in his breath. “I wish them very well, but until the new Frau von Osterwald gets an annulment from her first marriage, I cannot sanction the union, na?”

  “That’s right.” Claire remembered. “Isolde’s first marriage was Catholic, wasn’t it.”

  A gargantuan television was placed dead in front of his space, and a hefty volume of Lives of the Saints had its place in the crook of the arm of the chair. There was a pastel, hand-crocheted shawl cast discreetly behind the chair but sticking out by its few giveaway tassels.

  “Also denn.” He snuggled into his spot. Claire sat on the sofa. “For what can I do you?” he asked politely, looking to see if she had brought her purse. It took Father a while to get into the gear of speaking English. Once he got going he did very well, but the getting there was a bumpy road.

  “I’ve come to give you your money.” She smiled.

  Father Metz was so delighted with this news, she had a sudden realistic doubt as to what she’d done, but at last she remembered the dashboard and was happy again.

  After they completed their paperwork, they exchanged pleasantries for a while until the housekeeper came and went, leaving them with roasted coffee and a Bienenstich, a sticky conglomeration of honey-toasted almond clusters atop a custard-filled, sliced yellow layer cake.

  “I couldn’t,” she vowed.

  “Ach, komm!” Father Metz became so childishly deflated at the prospect of having to wait till she left to enjoy it, she let herself be coerced.

  “Oh, all right,” she said.

  They sat dividing their sweets.

  Claire cleared her throat. “You know,” she said, “I feel a little guilty.”

  Father stopped his eating, fork midair. He was used to this and good at it. He waited.

  “I found, well, stole would be the more appropriate word here, something from Hans’s room.”

  “Is this, as you Americans say, ‘off from the record’?”

  “You mean am I asking you to hear my confession?”

  “Ja.”

  “Okay. If we can do this like this. In here. I mean I haven’t been to confession for a while.”

  “Just say what is in your heart, my child.”

  “Well, here I was, snooping around Hans von Grünwald’s room, and I came across this.” She handed the priest the old list of names and addresses.

  Father took it from her. He readjusted his glasses and read it carefully. “Tya,” he said. “I’m afraid I don’t—”

  “I think it’s a list of old clients from the Mill. People who used to stay there years ago. I believe someone, Hans probably, hid this, well, stuck it under his desk blotter; and when I came across it, I found something someone, maybe the murderer, was looking for.”

  “Nana, na, na, na!” Father held up his hand to put a stop to this. “First let us get one very thing straightened! Hans did not was murdered! For heaven’s sake. No wonder you are all upset. This all happening just when you first arrived! Mein Gott! Alles auf einmal! Everything at once. Everyone upset at one time! Cosimo and Stella Gabriella don’t know what to do about the Mill! There are bills. Fräulein Wintner complaining why all the bills? Money going out to England, to the Church, for fuel to heat. What does she think, the Mill owes no money to the Church? A tenth of the income should go automatically to the Church! This is something every civilized person knows. The minute a person starts tithing his income with the poor, his luck will change. This is known fact. The most successful people in the world will tell you this. You have to give to get!” He was out of breath. He sat back with a whoosh. He remembered Claire. “And you, poor little Amerikanerin, coming into the middle of this. Of course you are feeling upset! No wonder!”

  And so she told him briefly about Iris and the diamonds story in New York, and then her abrupt denial they’d ever existed.

  “
First, I don’t know of any treasure.” This almost burst out of him, as though he couldn’t wait to get that off his chest. “You know,” he then said more kindly, “lots of people come back here to Germany. It is not only because what they lived through here was so terrible but because it was so intense. People have, how can I put this, people have a hard time feeling anything as they go along in life. That is the terrible thing. Oh, I’m not talking about people who have grave, painful illnesses. That is different, of course. No, I mean, sometimes, when people have lived through a war, nothing else in their life can compare with its intensity, and they spend great amounts of time reliving that. Going over and over the terrible and wonderful moments. When, perhaps, they should be moving on. You know, getting on and enjoying what it is, what is happening now. You get what I mean?”

  Claire moved in her chair. “Yeah, well, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I just can’t come to terms with what the Germans did to all those Jews, you know? I mean, I lived here ten years, and I never met anyone who admitted to being a Nazi.”

  “Well, what did you think? Someone would come and tell you, exactly you, what it was happened to them back then? I mean you think it was only the Jews went through the hell? Lost their whole families? Nein, nein. Everybody lost their families, my Fräulein. It was easier to watch it happen to the Jews, perhaps, because the Jews had so much before the trouble started. It’s easier to see someone destroyed if they have everything you want and cannot get your hands on. For example, if you wanted to have a university career before the war, it was hardly possible if you weren’t a Jew. So people resented that they could not become a doctor in their own country when the Jews could. Never mind that the Jews might have been more clever and earned that privilege and were Germans since hundreds of years. What I am meaning to say is that people let terrible things happen to people they are jealous of more easily.”

  “I appreciate what you’re saying, Father. I just wasn’t really talking about that, I mean, we could go on and on about this for days. I was thinking of the treasure.”

  “All this talk of treasure. I, myself, was in Italy during the war. But of course, over the years, I too have heard the stories, the dreams of finding a treasure at the Mill. But it all always comes to nothing. Nothing but frust.”

  “Frustration.”

  “Yes, frustration.” He laughed at his faulty English.

  “But there are stories,” Claire went on. “I mean, everyone believes them. Or part of them. And what about the haunting? Some people say the Mill is haunted because of the treasure. Stella Gabriella says her grandmother, Kunigunde, won’t rest until the treasure goes where it belongs. She says she’s the ghost.”

  “Was? Nein. That comes from the child that was killed.”

  “Child? What child?”

  “Well.” Father snuggled into his chair. “I will tell you what I know.” The rain continued to beat down outside. “There was a woman kept secretly at the Mill. She was a Jew. She was the mistress of old Adam von Grünwald.” He noticed the sudden flush on Claire’s pale cheeks. “Oh yes, it’s true. Enough people knew about her after she was discovered. But for a long while, she was kept secretly in the attic over there. She became pregnant. But because the woman was a Jew, it was said that Adam’s mother gave her something, made her so sick that the baby died. It was something a woman could take to abort. Only the fetus was almost full term.”

  “What! You mean the woman who was Adam von Grünwald’s mistress years ago almost had his child?”

  “That is the story.” Father Metz shook his head sadly. Human nature could do very little to shock this old fellow.

  Claire clapped one hand over her mouth. She was stunned. So Iris had lost a child! How horrible. And she had never told her! Never told anyone, probably. That explained so much. People her age didn’t go about telling stories of their lost children the way they did nowadays. She would have held on to that grief all these years. She closed her eyes in silent mourning for Iris’s grief. No wonder she drank. Poor thing. Everyone she’d loved around her killed. Murdered. All except for Adam. And she’d lost him as well. No wonder she had never returned. After his mother had murdered her child! And he continued to live with the mother. That must have been the most unforgivable part.

  Claire shivered. Temple was right. This was a horrible place. With the ghosts of children murdered.

  “You know, Father,” she said, “I really am beginning to wonder if Hans was murdered. I am. I can’t prove it and I don’t even know who to suspect, but I believe he could have been murdered.”

  Father shook his head sadly. “If he was murdered,” he whispered, “it could have been almost anyone who did it.”

  “You’re right. It seems everyone had a reason, didn’t they?”

  “He was not an easy man.” Father Metz removed his spectacles and rubbed his tired eyes. He remembered his own feelings of dislike for von Grünwald. He was a man devoid of faith. But more than that, he’d despised those who had it. Father Metz wished, at times, the world would leave the past alone.

  “I was wondering if you knew of some private greed that would make someone hate him enough to kill him,” Claire pursued.

  “No.” Father shook his head. “Not greed. No, it must have been love. Love is far more treacherous than greed, farther-reaching.”

  Claire watched him, her mouth open. She realized he was right. “There’s something else I’d sort of like to talk to you about, if you have another minute.”

  “Of course, of course.” He knew this was what was really on her mind.

  Claire took a deep breath. “Well. I’m married. I’m a married woman. And there’s this man, this man I see—” The room went white with sudden lightning.

  “You have been intimate with this man?” Father got right to the point.

  “No. Not yet. I mean, no. I’m not going to be intimate with him, either. It’s just that I feel… my feelings for him are so strong, so real.” She got up and walked across to the window. Rain poured down. “I’m almost afraid,” she said, laughing, “of myself. My weakness. I almost know that, given the chance, I would do anything, anything with him.” They both jumped at the clap of thunder.

  “That is not a given.” Father came over and put a hefty hand on her shoulder. “If that were so, you would not be telling me all this now. Is that not right?”

  Claire shook her head, not knowing anything right now.

  “Fräulein Claire.” He called her “Fräulein” as he would a child, not out of disrespect. He clasped her hands in his. “Do not be so hard to judge yourself before you’ve done the deed. Your strength and goodness might surprise you.”

  “But if I have sinned already in my heart, I have already sinned,” she said. “Isn’t that the way it goes?”

  “The way it goes is that that is the way the world gets by, living from one harmless imagined episode to the next.” He shrugged. “So long as nothing happens.”

  But it wasn’t so. He was wrong, she knew. Ideas and imaginings were real, existing forever in some underlying dimension, permanent, changing everything. How had he forgotten? He couldn’t have become a priest and not known it once. It was getting dark. She wanted to get back to the Mill.

  “Father”—she collected her camera from the floor and shook hands—“thank you so much for everything. Will I see you in the morning? May I pick up the car then?”

  “And I will have the papers ready for you,” he promised. Come anytime, ja?”

  “Okay.” She stood before him while he gave her his blessing. She started to leave.

  “Oh, and Fräulein,” he called her back. “It wasn’t ‘they’ that crucified Him. It was us. And if He could forgive us; so”—he extended his hands as if to say Voilà!—“then why can’t we?”

  “Why”—she looked into his knowing eyes—“indeed.”

  As she began her descent on the curving wrought-iron stairway, she was attacked by a dog. With no regard for its own safety on the stairs, the smal
l dog herded her with snaps and snarls until she was forced back up.

  “Hier! Komm!” Father Metz stood behind her, doing no good whatsoever, blocking her ascent and not being able to get his hands on the dog. It was, Claire saw, Hans’s old dog. She took her mesh bag of films from her vest pocket and smacked the animal lightly on the nose with it. He got the message all right and hightailed it down the rest of the staircase, yelping dramatically. By the time he got to the kitchen, Claire could hear his barks had regained their pepper.

  “I thought you were going to let someone else take that dog.” She grinned.

  Father shrugged. “Some things,” he admitted sheepishly, “Nature decides for us. It’s not forever, I know, but how long is forever anyway? Eh? Was?”

  The rain had stopped. Claire crossed the meadow. She hadn’t even mentioned Johnny to the priest. She hadn’t even thought of him, if she were honest, since she’d landed in Germany, except as a sort of necessary encumbrance. The muddy ground was rutted, and she was far from the path. She turned her ankle twice and was grateful when she saw a car coming toward her to light her way. To her surprise, Otto von Auto came rolling along. Whoever’s driving will surely give me a ride, she thought, and then realized they well might, as it was her own car. And something else occurred to her. If the dog always hacked a bark at anyone who left, and he hadn’t barked at the time of the murder, then the murderer had never left the Mill.

  She tried to peer behind the windshield. It was Cosimo. She had such a concentrated image of him at the Mill that it was almost a shock to see him like this behind the wheel, tooling about the countryside willy-nilly on his fine day out. He opened the door to her by leaning over and stretching his long self across the passenger seat. She had a moment of stark warning and then, looking into the liquid eyes beneath ferocious brows, this evaporated and she felt quite safe. She climbed irrevocably in.

  He drove a little way before either of them said anything. She felt the car slide graciously back onto the road and said, “Thank you. I was turning my ankle left and right out there.”