The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

his feet, folding the newspaper he had been reading, and extended his hand.

“I didn’t see you in church this morning, Wolfgang,” was the first thing Frau Kessel said to him once the greetings were out of the way. She spoke in an arch tone.

“No,” answered my father, refusing to be drawn; Frau Kessel knew perfectly well that my father went to church only when absolutely necessary-for family weddings and funerals, for example-and that my mother being Protestant, evangelisch as it is called in Germany, she was not likely to see the rest of us in Sts. Chrysostom and Daria at all.

Still, she was never one to pass up an opportunity to needle someone; she kept the hundred-candle power smile going for half a minute as the silence stretched out between them, before finally conceding defeat and saying, “I do so miss seeing dear Kristel there every week.”

“Yes,” said my father, and sighed.

“Would you like some coffee, Frau Kessel?” interposed my mother, before the old woman could advance further on the topic of Oma Kristel’s churchgoing habits. “Freshly ground coffee,” she added, seeing Frau Kessel hesitate.

“Thank you, I will,” said Frau Kessel with the gracious air of one granting a favor.

She took the seat my father offered her, and settled herself in it with some care, like an elderly hen preparing to lay.

My mother departed for the kitchen, still smiling tautly-she couldn’t stand Frau Kessel-and my father and I looked at the old lady expectantly. We were under no illusion that this was a purely social visit. Frau Kessel had come over because she had Something to Say.

“Nun, it has been an exciting week for the town, don’t you think, Wolfgang?” was her opening sally. I looked at my father, puzzled. What was so exciting? My father also looked blank. Frau Kessel looked from my father to me, and then back to my father again. Her eyebrows lifted a little, and she cocked her head to one side, as though considering; could it really be that we were the only people in Bad Munstereifel not to have heard?

“An exciting week?” repeated my father eventually. There was something inevitable about conversation with Frau Kessel; she would throw out the bait, and then wait until the victim couldn’t bear not to bite. Now she sat back in her armchair, as though to express astonishment, folding her hands together in her green woolen lap.

“Where there’s smoke, there’s also fire,” she said in a voice loaded with meaning.

“Did something catch fire?” I asked.

“No, Schatzchen,” said Frau Kessel, giving me a soulful oh-you-poor- child look.

“Then why-” I began, but she cut me off.

“I really think you can’t have heard,” she announced in tones of artificially heightened surprise; her eyebrows were now so far up her forehead that they looked as though they might scurry into the towering thicket of white hair. She looked at my father reproachfully. “Of course, if you had been in church this morning, you would have heard Pfarrer Arnold mentioning it.”

She put up a hand and patted her hair. “That is to say,” she went on, “he didn’t mention it directly, but we all knew what he was referring to, and there were those who thought that it was in rather doubtful taste to be launching straight into a sermon of forgiveness.” She sniffed. “I mean, it isn’t as though they’ve found the child, is it?”

Frau Kessel, whose confidences were always labyrinthine, had now lost me completely. I looked at my father again; he appeared mystified too.

“Found the child?” repeated my father ponderously.

“Doch, the little Linden girl.”

My father considered for a moment, then gave in. “Frau Kessel, what are you trying to tell us?”

Frau Kessel looked slightly affronted. “About Herr Duster, naturlich.”

“What about Herr Duster?” asked my father patiently.

“Why, they’ve arrested him,” said Frau Kessel with relish. “Yesterday morning, at eight.”

“They’ve arrested him?”

Frau Kessel made a little moue of impatience; she was clearly tired of my father repeating everything she said, and wanted to get to the meat.

“Yes, they came yesterday morning and took him away in a police car.” Frau Kessel spread out one hand and studied her immaculately manicured fingernails, as cool as the expert witness in a murder trial.

“Did you see it?” I asked with interest.

“Not personally,” said Frau Kessel, in tones that implied this fact was of no consequence; she had her spies everywhere. “Hilde-that is to say, Frau Koch-saw it, with her own eyes. She was watering her flowers at the time.”

Frau Koch was Thilo Koch’s grandmother, and almost as toxic a personality as her grandson. Of course, the flower watering was a pleasantry; Hilde Koch was very likely up at dawn spying on her neighbors, and at the first sign of anything as interesting as a police car she would have been out of doors with all sensors on red alert.

“What happened?” asked my father.

“Well,” said Frau Kessel, “Hilde said that they came at eight o’clock, two of them, in a police car. She thinks they came early in order not to be seen. Of course,” she continued conspiratorially, “not everyone would feel happy about living next door to someone who… well, you know. So perhaps it was as well. She said she knew Herr Duster was at home; he’d already been out once, to take the paper in or something. When they knocked, he opened up straightaway, and they all went inside. They were in there for quite a time; Hilde said she had watered all the flowers twice before they came out again, but she couldn’t go inside; she said she was transfixed.

“Anyway, eventually they came out and Herr Duster got into the back of the police car and off they drove; Hilde said he was sitting there as rigid as a figure on a meerschaum pipe, didn’t show any sign of emotion at all. She said it made her feel quite ill.”

“Well,” said my father, at a loss for any other remark. Then he looked up thankfully; my mother was in the doorway, carrying a tray laden with coffee cups, a pot of coffee, and a stack of cookies, the standard offering to placate visiting demons. He rose to help her.

“It’s all right, I can manage,” she began when Frau Kessel’s voice rose above hers.

“I was just telling Wolfgang-Herr Duster has been arrested.”

“Really? What for?”

Frau Kessel flashed her glittering false teeth. “The little Linden girl-what else?”

My mother set down the tray on the coffee table, her face serious. “That’s terrible. Are you sure?”

Frau Kessel gave her a look that should by rights have curdled the cream in the milk jug. She hated her nuggets of gossip to be questioned. “Hilde Koch saw him being driven away by the police.” She accepted a cup of coffee with a large quantity of cream and spiked with two lumps of sugar. “Of course,” she added, after taking a cautious sip, “it did not come as a surprise to those of us who have lived in the town as long as I have.”

A wrinkled hand embossed all over with rings hovered for a moment over the cookies, and then retreated without selecting one.

“Once you have seen Evil in Action, you never forget it.” You could hear the capital letters in that portentous voice; Frau Kessel’s delivery was nothing if not dramatic.

I reflected that if she wanted to see Evil in Action she had only to look in the mirror every morning, but wisely I kept this to myself.

“Well, he is a little-er-unfriendly,” suggested my mother cautiously.

“Unfriendly!” Frau Kessel was outraged at this understatement. Then she collected herself, leaned forward, and patted my mother on the knee.

“Of course, you could not be expected to know.”

She managed to make the remark sound insulting; my mother could not be expected to know anything because she was a foreigner, probably with a comically poor grasp of German. Seeing my mother heating up for a tart retort, my father stepped in and rescued her.

“I don’t know either, Frau Kessel.”