The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

dragged out to visit one of Oma’s ancient friends, and later on I was quite happy to go with her anyway. Herr Schiller’s house was fascinating, full of strange old items, such as a sepia funeral photograph from about 1900, showing someone lying in their coffin surrounded by flowers, and a miniature ship in a bottle, tacking eternally across a sea of frozen blue putty.

Herr Schiller himself was an absolute mine of weird and interesting information. I don’t remember how he first fell into the role of storyteller; perhaps Oma Kristel had marched off to the kitchen to take charge of coffee-making, and he had felt obliged to amuse me somehow. At any rate, it soon became a regular thing of ours, that I would demand that he tell me “a scary story” and he would bring out some nugget of local history or some gruesome snippet of Eifel legend.

The story of Unshockable Hans and the cats, told to Stefan and me after Katharina Linden’s disappearance, was his most lavishly embellished so far. He set out to thrill us, to take us with him into a world of darkness and spirits, a realm of ghosts, witches, and monsters, where danger lurks but a stout heart and a strong faith will always conquer, where Good wins and Evil can be vanquished with a flourish of a rosary. And for a while it worked and we were comforted. That is, until later, when the next child vanished.

Chapter Eleven

In some far-off, terminally optimistic part of my mind I had thought that the disappearance of Katharina Linden, which was naturally the talk of the town, would have superseded the sorry tale of Oma Kristel’s combustion. If this sounds callous, I can only say that at that time none of us as yet really believed in her disappearance. Bad Munstereifel was, after all, the town where Pluto’s attack on an overfed dachshund was front- page news.

I hoped in vain, as was evident from events on the first morning back at school after Karneval. It did not make anything better-if anything, it made things worse.

The headmistress, Frau Redemann, had called a meeting in the school hall for all classes. A good deal of elbowing and whispering went on while we waited for Frau Redemann. Even the first grade knew what had happened, though I doubt their parents would have been edified to hear the loving and entirely fictitious description Thilo Koch poured into their waiting ears, of how Katharina Linden’s corpse had been found in the Erft, chopped into such tiny pieces her own mother didn’t know her. By the time Frau Redemann appeared we had worked ourselves up into a fever pitch of anticipation.

“Good morning, everyone,” she began. “I am sure you all know why you are here this morning. Katharina Linden, from fourth grade, has been missing since the Karneval parade on Sunday. We are, of course, hopeful that Katharina will be found in the near future, safe and well.”

She paused, and some of the smaller children turned around to look at Thilo Koch rather dubiously. Thilo smiled smugly, like an odious policeman who has been first to discover the corpse.

“Obviously, this is an extremely worrying time for the Linden family. Daniel Linden is not attending school today. However, when he does return I do not want any of you mentioning Katharina’s disappearance in front of him. In particular, I do not wish to hear repeated any of the unpleasant and lurid stories that I have already heard being circulated in the school this morning.” At this, Thilo’s smile wavered a little. “I would also urge anyone who thinks they may have any genuine information about Katharina’s whereabouts to come and see me in the school office.

“I would like to add that until we know exactly what has happened, we should all take a little more care than usual.” Take care of what? I wondered. That Thilo Koch’s mad axeman doesn’t sneak up on us?

“I also ask all of you to remember: Never go with anyone you don’t know. Go straight home after school. Keep your parents informed of where you are going. And if you see anything that seems strange in any way, come and talk to me or to your teacher.”

Again that word seltsam. As we all trooped out of the hall, I wondered what Frau Redemann would say if I told her about Pluto’s sudden and sinister appearance, which now seemed like some sort of omen, a sign that something malevolent was afoot. However, I was not able to pursue this train of thought for very long before my own woes overtook me again.

“Look, it’s her,” said a voice from behind me that I recognized instantly as Thilo Koch’s. “The exploding girl.”

“The walking bomb,” said another voice, that of Thilo’s arch-ally Matthias Esch, a boy who was almost as tubby and malicious as Thilo himself.

I feigned deafness, but knew the reddening of the back of my neck would show them that I had taken in every word. I put my head down doggedly and began to mount the stairs to my classroom.

“The walking bomb,” repeated Thilo’s repellent voice from close behind me. There was a scuffle on the staircase as he jostled Matthias. “Hey, maybe that’s what happened to Katharina Linden. Maybe she just got too close to the exploding girl here, and she caught it.”

“Caught what?” Matthias Esch was as dim as he was nasty.

“The exploding, stupid.” Thilo’s voice was ecstatic; he had tapped into a new vein of spite and it proved to be a rich one. “Maybe that’s why they can’t find her. She just exploded-went off like a tonne of dynamite, and blew herself into such little bits you wouldn’t know it was her.”

“Klasse,” said Matthias, overcome with admiration for the concept so neatly described.

“We definitely shouldn’t have to sit next to her,” continued Thilo in a voice that probably traveled the length of the school. “It might be one of us next.”

“Yeah, sure,” cut in a voice. “It probably will be one of you two. Eat one more Wurst and you most definitely will explode, you Fettsack.”

It was Stefan; StinkStefan to the rescue. My heart sank further; it seemed it was still me and StinkStefan against the World.

The days ran on, and before you knew it we were at the end of a week and Katharina Linden had still not been found. As far as the adults’ conversations went, the gloves were now off, and her disappearance was being freely discussed on every street corner and in every boutique as an “abduction.”

Those of us who were still walking to school, as opposed to being driven by anxious parents, were treated to a gauntlet of photographs of our former schoolmate on the newsstands and the police posters scattered about the town. There was even a blurry one of Katharina in her Snow White costume under the terrible headline Who Gave Her the Poisoned Apple?

Green-and-white police cars appeared at every corner or cruised slowly past the school bus stops, and on Friday morning Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf, one of the local policemen, came to give us a talk at the school. His usually jolly face was sober as he went over the by-now familiar ground of not getting into anyone’s car and not talking to strangers.

Looking back, I don’t think at that stage anyone expected another child to disappear. The police cars, the escort to the school buses, the serious talks were all meant to make the local community think that something was being done. Even assuming that something sinister had happened in the first place and Katharina hadn’t fallen down a manhole or something, no one believed that anything else would happen.

My mother still allowed me to walk the short distance to school, but on the second or third morning, when I happened to glance back, I caught her hanging out of the front doorway to keep me in view until I had come safely to the corner of the street and within sight of the school gates.

School itself was dismal. Thanks to Thilo Koch I was even more of a leper than before. Home was little better, since my mother was reluctant to let me go out alone. I sometimes thought that were it not for the diversion of Stefan and my visits to Herr Schiller’s house to hear his gruesome tales, I would have died of boredom. As it was, though, I nearly wrecked my chances of going there again.