The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

by Helen Grant

“Of course, Frau Kessel,” said Stefan politely.

  “We promise not to touch anything,” I added.

  Frau Kessel regarded me with disfavor. “I should think not, Pia Kolvenbach.” She turned on her heel, and we trooped after her into the house.

  Frau Kessel’s kitchen proved to be just as intimidatingly tidy as it had the first time I had been inside it. Stefan and I sat together on one side of her table, pens dutifully poised to take down whatever pronouncements she cared to make: these poured forth in such abundance that I could barely record a third of what she told us.

  She began with the history of her house, which as far as I could see was almost phenomenally boring. It had never been inhabited by the town alchemist, it had never had treasure hidden in it during the French invasion or been burned down during any of the wars that had touched the town during its long history. Ghosts sensibly chose somewhere else to haunt. It had experienced a brief moment of excitement in the 1920s when Frau Kessel’s Great-Aunt Martha’s pet dog had fallen in the well in the cellar and drowned, but disappointingly the well had been capped in the 1940s when running water was installed.

  “What about the other houses in the street?” asked Stefan, which earned him a disapproving look; Frau Kessel hated to be interrupted once she was in full flow.

  “The wells in those were capped too,” she said shortly.

  “No, I don’t mean about the wells. Can you tell us anything about the people?” asked Stefan. “How about the house we were looking at before?”

  “Which house?” said Frau Kessel sharply. Stefan glanced at me. “Herr Düster’s house.”

  There was a pause that stretched out uncomfortably while I looked up at the crucifix hanging over the countertop, at the brown wallpaper, out the tiny window, anywhere in fact but at Frau Kessel.

  “What do you want to know?” said Frau Kessel. Her voice was hard.

  “Well…” Now that he had the opportunity, Stefan seemed lost for words. “How long has he lived… I mean… has the same person been in it…”

  “Since before the war, yes.”

  Stefan looked down at the scrawl on his notebook as though consulting a list of interview questions. “And did anyone else live in it…?” I think Stefan meant, Who lived in it before Herr Düster? but Frau Kessel replied, “No, he’s always lived on his own. No family.” She laid a curious emphasis on these last words, as though they explained everything.

  Stefan said nothing; he seemed uncertain how to proceed. I guessed he had assumed that once we were sitting cozily around Frau Kessel’s kitchen table she would let fly with a torrent of local gossip, out of which deluge we would pick some critical nuggets of information, like miners panning for gold. Instead the conversation seemed to be grinding to a halt. Frau Kessel looked at each of our faces in turn, her eyes bird-bright behind her spectacles, her arms folded ominously across her brown woolen bosom.

  “Suppose you show me that file,” she said eventually.

  “Which file?” said Stefan.

  “The one with your school project in it.”

  Instinctively Stefan clutched the top of his schoolbag, holding it closed. “Umm… it’s not finished.”

  “I know it’s not finished,” said Frau Kessel acidly. “Nevertheless, give it to me, please.”

  For a moment I almost thought Stefan might reach into his bag and extract a ring binder full of notes about the old buildings in Bad Münstereifel; up until now he had seemed so confident, so in control, that I could imagine him having prepared the whole thing as backup. Instead he just sat there gaping at her.

  “I thought so,” said Frau Kessel. She leaned toward us like an ancient eagle craning forward on its perch. “There is no project, is there?” Her voice was steely. “I may seem old to you, but I’m not stupid. What did you think you were going to get out of me?”

  “Nothing,” stammered Stefan. “I mean… we just wanted to ask you some things, that’s all.”

  “About my house?”

  “Well…”

  “I don’t think so.” The lenses of Frau Kessel’s glasses glittered; I could not see her eyes behind them. “You wanted to know about Herr Düster, didn’t you?”

  Reluctantly, Stefan nodded.

  “Well, I’ll tell you all I know about him.” Frau Kessel squeezed her bony hands together, as though crushing something between her palms. “But first I want to know something. I want to know why you were trying to break into his house.”

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Stefan was the first to recover. When he spoke, his voice was unexpectedly clear and strong.

  “We weren’t trying to break in, Frau Kessel.”

  “So what were you doing, trying to open the lock on the cellar doors?” she cast back at him tartly. “Don’t think I didn’t see that, young man. You wanted to get in, didn’t you?”

  “We wouldn’t really do that, Frau Kessel,” I butted in. The basilisk eyes were instantly upon me, but with an effort I kept my cool. “We were just… thinking about it. We wouldn’t really do it. It was just… a game.”

  “Quatsch,” she snapped back. “You know,” she added, and her voice was low and poisonous, “I really should report you to the school. Or perhaps the police.”

  “Please, Frau Kessel-”

  “But I’m not going to,” she went on, without acknowledging me. “And do you know why? Because someone ought to break into that house. It’s about time that old”-(and here she used a word that actually shocked me; I had heard it from Stefan’s cousin Boris but had never expected to hear it from someone of her age)-“had his comeuppance.”

  She tilted her head back self-righteously. “So if you want to know about that man, I’ll tell you. I’ll tell anyone who asks me. And then, finally, maybe someone will do something.” Abruptly she fell silent.

  Neither Stefan nor I spoke; what was there to say? I was not about to admit that we had really been thinking of trying to get into Herr Düster’s house, but still I wanted to know what Frau Kessel could tell us. Underlying my curiosity was the uncomfortable knowledge that my mother had expressly forbidden me to listen to any more of the old lady’s gossip. If she knew we were sitting in Frau Kessel’s kitchen listening to the old woman’s venomous outpourings I would be grounded for weeks. I could just imagine her telling me how disappointed she was that I had disobeyed; the thought made me squirm.

  “He was in love with Hannelore,” said Frau Kessel, plunging without prelude into her story.

  Hannelore? Stefan shot me a puzzled glance.

  “Hannelore Kurth,” said Frau Kessel. “Beautiful girl, the beauty of the town. She was the May Queen two years before she married Heinrich Schiller.” Stefan still looked confused; she gave him an impatient look. “Even then, that other one was making trouble. Two May trees outside the house! He should have stood back and let the better man win.” She pursed her lips, her shoulders stiff. “As though she would look at him.”

  “Was he ugly?” I asked.

  “Oh, I suppose he had looks in a superficial sort of way,” replied Frau Kessel derisively. “I imagine that is why he fancied Hannelore would look at him. But she had better sense.”

  She spoke with authority, as though she had been privy to Herr Düster’s every unwelcome move. But when she had told me about Herr Düster and Hannelore that first time, when I had carried her shopping home for her, hadn’t she said her mother told her all about it? I found myself staring at her. Was she older than she made out? Or had she started out very early on her prurient quest for information about other people’s lives? I rather thought it was the latter. It was not difficult to imagine that face as a pale spiteful moon framed by brown hair yanked into plaits, eyes narrowed to slits as she inhaled the heady and poisonous incense of gossip. A whisperer in the back row of the classroom, a peeper around corners.

  “When she married his brother, he was supposed to have been heartbroken. Some people in this town think that’s when he went to the bad.” She did not say wha
t people. “But he was bad long before Hannelore Kurth turned him down. She was right to do it, but he wouldn’t leave it alone. There were dozens of young women in the town, but it had to be her.”

  Something flickered in Frau Kessel’s wrinkled face like a lizard looking out from a hole in a stone and whisking back inside again. I saw it, but at the time I could not think what it meant. Now I think of the clawlike hands with every finger encrusted with rings except one, and I think perhaps I know.

  “I saw them together,” she hissed.

  “Saw who?” I was confused.

  “Hannelore and that man. You’d think when it was his own brother’s wife… and she had the child by then. Gertrud.”

  “What were they doing?” asked Stefan.

  “Doing? Hannelore wasn’t doing anything. You don’t think she’d meet him on purpose? But him… he was ranting away like a mad thing. Taking her hand, and trying to kiss it…” Frau Kessel sounded as though she had just bitten into something disgusting. “She wanted to get away, but he wouldn’t let her. Oh, he was sly, cornering her there. He thought no one would see them, but I did.”

  The venom in Frau Kessel’s voice was making me feel queasy. She did not say where she had seen Hannelore with Herr Düster, but the picture was plain enough in my head: the two of them altercating in some secluded spot, and the teenaged Frau Kessel watching them unseen, her eyes glinting with malice. Had she followed them? I wondered. Had she hidden on purpose?

  “I’ve never told anyone that before.” Frau Kessel’s hand strayed to her bosom and the bony fingers clasped the spiked Edelweiss brooch. Her eyes were impenetrable behind the reflective lenses of her glasses. “But it always comes out. Everything comes out in the end.”

  “Yes,” said Stefan politely; it was impossible to do anything but agree with her. She was hardly even talking to us anymore; she was lost in the plot of a story that had been told more than half a century before.

  “Then Hannelore died,” said Frau Kessel. “And he couldn’t get at her anymore. There was only Gertrud. His brother’s daughter-his own niece. When she disappeared, it was all equal, don’t you see? Herr Schiller lost the only person he cared about, the same as that Düster lost the woman he wanted. I wonder if he was happy then.” Her voice was hard.

  “Didn’t anyone suspect?” asked Stefan incredulously.

  “Suspect? Of course they suspected. But there was no proof, that was the thing. No body; they never found her. And after the war everything was in ruins. Rubble everywhere, every second building a deathtrap, people struggling just to survive. There was no one with time to investigate it.”

  “Didn’t Herr Schiller try to find out?” asked Stefan.

  “Herr Schiller is a true Christian,” said Frau Kessel. “He said that if Herr Düster had taken Gertrud, the knowledge that he was responsible would be punishment enough.”

  “Frau Kessel?”

  “Yes?” She turned and looked at Stefan.

  “Does everybody think Herr… does everybody think it was him? Who took Katharina Linden, I mean, and the other girls?”

  “Not everybody.” The old lady’s voice was cold. “Your father, for example, Pia Kolvenbach. He and his friends actually protected him.”

  So my father’s side of the story was true; he really had tried to prevent anyone from taking the law into their own hands that night.

  “Papa thinks…” I began, and ground to a halt under Frau Kessel’s icy glare. I tried again. “He thinks the police should do it.”

  “Does he?” Frau Kessel pursed her lips. “It’s easy to say the police should handle it, if you’re not involved. If you’ve never lost anyone.”

  “My mother says there has to be proof,” I protested, stung at the criticism of my father.

  “Proof? Of course there’s proof,” snapped Frau Kessel. “How much more proof do they want?”

  Stefan and I looked at each other. “What proof?”

  Frau Kessel looked at us as though we were terminally stupid. “The shoe, the shoe they found in the woods on the Quecken hill. From the little Voss girl.”

  “They found it on the Quecken hill? Where the old castle is?” This was news. I had heard that it was found in the woods, but most people seemed vague about exactly where it had been discovered. I wondered by what arcane route Frau Kessel had come by this nugget of information.

  “How do they know it was hers?” asked Stefan. He was rewarded with a withering glance.

  “Because the other one was still in the school,” said Frau Kessel, as though this were self-evident. “They both had her name in them. Though,” she added, “they say you could hardly make it out on the one they found in the woods, it was so badly burned.”

  “How do you know it was burned?” Stefan asked.

  Frau Kessel stared at him. “I-” She started, then stopped. “Someone told me.” Her expression forbade further inquiry. I wondered who the someone was: the daughter or niece of one of her cronies, working in the police station, or the wife of one of the officers. It was hard to believe that anyone could be so indiscreet as to share the information with Frau Kessel; they might as well have printed it in the local paper, or announced it on Radio Euskirchen.

  “It’s horrible,” I blurted out before I could stop myself.

  “Doch,” agreed Frau Kessel in a brittle tone. “To think that he is living here in the town, right among us, as free as a bird.”

  I nodded sickly, but that was not what I had meant. I had had a sudden vision of Marion Voss’s shoe, charred and blackened, lying on its side in a tangle of undergrowth, and I was thinking about the Fiery Man of the Hirnberg, and how the very touch of his hand would crisp your skin up instantly, and make the flesh sizzle. How he could take you into his fiery embrace, and wrap himself right around you until every inch of your skin was a mass of fire. I wondered how anyone could stand such pain.

  “Pia?” Stefan’s voice seemed to be coming from a long way off. “Are you sick?”

  I shook my head, but I felt as though my head were a child’s snow-dome, roughly shaken so that the liquid slopped from side to side and the snowflakes flew everywhere in a wild blizzard. My mouth was full of saliva; I thought I might vomit, right there on Frau Kessel’s kitchen table.

  There was a scraping sound as Frau Kessel hauled the table away from me, and the next moment her clawlike hand was on the back of my skull, pushing my head down between my knees. She was surprisingly strong, and her rings dug into my scalp. Suddenly I was looking at a patch of spotlessly clean tiled floor framed between my thighs.

  “Stay there,” she ordered, although to my relief she removed the hand. A few moments later I heard the tap running; Frau Kessel was getting me that time-honored cure-all, a glass of water.

  “Pia?” Stefan’s anxious face moved into my line of vision; he must have been contorting himself on the floor to do it. “What happened?”

  “I don’t know,” I said to the upside-down face. I couldn’t dredge up the words to describe what I had been thinking about-the fiery man, the charred shoe. “I felt sick.”

  “Are you OK?”

  “What an idiotic question,” said Frau Kessel’s acid voice. I heard a click as she put the glass of water on the table. “Stand up,” she added. “You needn’t roll around on my floor like a badly behaved dog.”

  As Stefan scrambled to his feet, one of Frau Kessel’s hands came down on my shoulder, with all the finesse of a vulture landing on its prey. “Do you still feel faint?” she asked me.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Then sit up and sip this.” She handed me the glass. I looked at it dubiously. It was an old lady glass, decorated with a faded design of titmice perched on a blossomy branch. I took a sip. She hadn’t let the tap run for long enough and the water was unpleasantly tepid. I didn’t want it but I couldn’t think of any reason to refuse it, so with a grimace I drained the glass.

  “Well?” said Frau Kessel. Her tone was brusque: she might have been Frau Eich
en, inquiring about the answer to a math problem, rather than someone asking about my current state of health.

  “A bit better,” I hazarded.

  “Hmm.” A claw swooped down and removed the glass. “I can’t say I’m surprised it happened. The idea makes me feel sick too.”

  I didn’t bother to contradict her.

  “And I think that you had better take Pia home in a few minutes’ time when she’s recovered,” Frau Kessel observed to Stefan in a disapproving tone, as though he were personally responsible for my state.

  I risked an upward glance at her face; her lips were pursed and her eyes hard. Any other person might have suffered pangs of guilt if a child had fainted in their home as a result of listening to their gruesome insinuations. Not Frau Kessel. I expect that if she had lived to be a hundred and twenty, then in all those twelve decades she would never have apologized once, for anything. In Frau Kessel’s eyes she was totally blameless; it was other people who did all the reprehensible things.

  “All right, Frau Kessel.” Stefan sounded resigned. He offered me his arm, as though we were two old-age pensioners out for a stroll.

  “I shan’t mention this visit,” said Frau Kessel in the same high tone.

  “Thank you, Frau Kessel.”

  “All the same, I don’t expect to see you hanging around in the street during school hours again, otherwise I might have to say something.”

  “Verstanden.”

  Stefan and I shuffled toward the front door. Frau Kessel had her hand on the doorknob, ready to usher us out into the street, when Stefan said, “Frau Kessel, why is it so important to you?”

  Why is what so important? I thought. Getting us out of the house? Not seeing us in the street again? But Frau Kessel knew exactly what he was asking.

  “Because Caroline Hack was my niece,” she said crisply. We stepped out into the street, and I turned to say goodbye, but she had already closed the door.

  The following day after school Stefan and I went surreptitiously back to Herr Düster’s house to reexamine the cellar doors. The aim was to wander nonchalantly past them, and if we were sure no one was watching, to try the loose handle again. But the visit proved futile. In the intervening time, someone had removed the old handles completely and replaced them with gleaming new ones, firmly screwed onto the doors and fastened with a padlock even bigger than the old one.