The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

house. That was months ago and still I hadn’t heard a thing about them, but it was too much to hope that the crime could be concealed forever. Oma Warner was old but she was definitely not senile. There was no way she could miss those calls when the bill came in, which it must do any day now.

Worse, the defense I had so blithely imagined at the time, that the deceit was for the greater cause of solving the mystery blighting the town, was patently not going to hold up.

The stray bits of information we had gathered had singularly failed to coalesce into anything solid; instead it was like trying to do a jigsaw, not realizing that you actually had two or three different jigsaws at the same time with all the pieces muddled up together. Here there was a section with a sleek black cat curled up in someone’s armchair; here there was one depicting a ruined castle by moonlight, and a boy running white-faced down the hill from it. Here was a single piece with a child’s shoe on it. None of them seemed to fit together to make a recognizable scene.

I shook my head despondently. “So maybe he didn’t do it.”

“Or maybe they just don’t have proof,” said Stefan.

I slid off the wall. “This is stupid. We’re just going around in circles.”

There was a gentle thump as Stefan’s sneakers also hit the ground. He hauled his bag off the wall and slung it over his shoulder.

“So let’s get some proof.”

I stared at him. “Very funny.”

“No, I mean it.”

I put my hands on my hips. “What are you going to do? Break into Herr Duster’s house while he’s out, and search it?” A hot little prickle of excitement ran through me even as the words left my lips. It was the thing to do, of course; it was the thing all this had been leading up to. The question was whether we would really, really try to do it. This was in a whole different league from using Oma Warner’s telephone when she was out at bingo. This was like climbing to the highest platform at the swimming pool and deciding whether to dive off-no: this was like climbing up to the top of a cliff and deciding whether to dive off. Just contemplating the idea was like anticipating that sickening plunge.

Now it was Stefan’s turn to stare. “I was going to suggest we follow him,” he said. “But you’re right, we should try to search the house.”

“Stefan-” Hearing the idea on someone else’s lips, suddenly it sounded real and also completely crazy.

“What?”

“We can’t just break in… What if we get caught?”

“We won’t get caught. And, anyway, who says we have to break anything?”

I hugged my schoolbag to my chest. “Well, what else are we going to do? Knock on his door and ask if we can search the house?”

“We could get in through the cellar.”

“No way.” Now Stefan had me seriously concerned. We were discussing this as though we were really and truly about to get into Herr Duster’s house and turn it upside down looking for dead girls. I shivered.

I knew exactly what he was proposing about the cellar. Most of the old houses in the town had a grille or even a little trapdoor somewhere at ground level, leading into the cellar. In times gone by it would have been used to deliver fuel. Nowadays most of them were rusted up, covered with cobwebs-but still there. Now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure Herr Duster’s house had the trapdoor sort, two little doors set at an angle to the wall and fastened with a padlock. If we could find some way of removing the padlock it would be easy to just open the doors, hold on to the top of the frame, and slide one’s body down into the darkness below…

“We’d never get in that way,” I said as firmly as I could.

“Yes, we would.” Stefan’s voice was earnest. “Look, Frau Weiss is off sick today, anyway, so who’s going to notice if we’re not in class?”

I looked at him in horror. “You think we should do it now?”

“No, I just think we should go and look.” Stefan rolled his eyes. “I’m not that stupid. We’d never get in there in broad daylight, not with Thilo Koch’s Oma watching the whole street. When we get in there, it has to be at nighttime. After dark.”

Chapter Thirty-six

Walking up the Orchheimer Strasse I felt as though every eye in the street must be upon me. I dared not think what would happen if we ran into anyone we knew-such as Frau Kessel, for example. What a field day she would have if she found out the pair of us were playing truant.

“This is a crap idea,” I hissed under my breath.

“Stop worrying,” said Stefan. He smiled beatifically at a passerby. “Guten Morgen.” He sounded disarmingly polite and as innocent as a lamb.

Herr Duster’s house was almost opposite Hilde Koch’s. There was no sign of the old lady, but still I felt uncomfortable, as though the small windows of her house concealed piggish little eyes that were watching our every move. Even the drooping remains of flowers in the window boxes seemed to be craning forward to listen.

“Look.” Stefan nudged me in the ribs, then gave a low whistle of wonderment.

Someone had indeed broken one of Herr Duster’s front windows; it had been hastily boarded up with what looked like a piece of white Formica. Never the tidiest house in the street, now it looked positively disreputable, like an old seaman with a dirty patch over one eye.

Stefan wandered over to the house, with me following, trying desperately to restrain the urge to shoot furtive glances around me.

The cellar trapdoor was more or less as I remembered it: two small doors that had once been painted crimson but were now the color of dried blood. There was a small metal handle on each; fastening them together was a heavy padlock. Looking at it, I felt relief.

“We’ll never get that open.”

Stefan squatted on the cobblestones and fingered the padlock. “We won’t have to.” He hooked a finger under one of the metal handles and pulled. “Look.” The handle was coming away from the door, flakes of rust crumbling off it.

“Stefan!”

“Shhhh…” He got to his feet, brushing the brown flakes from his fingers. I opened my mouth to tell him exactly how crazy I thought he was, but before I managed to get a single word out, someone interrupted me.

“Pia Kolvenbach.”

For a moment I really felt as though my knees would buckle under me.

“Frau Kessel.”

I turned with a horrible sensation of inevitability and found myself staring at a familiar Edelweiss brooch of quite stunning ugliness pinned firmly to a brown woolen bosom. With reluctance I raised my eyes to Frau Kessel’s face. Under the towering confection of white hair, the twin lenses of her glasses flashed as she tilted back her head, the better to look down her nose at me.

“What are you doing?” She regarded me with distaste, but the glance she shot Stefan was pure poison. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

It was Stefan who saved us both from a fate worse than death, namely, being hauled back to the school in public by Frau Kessel, probably by the ears.

“We’re doing a project.”

Frau Kessel swiveled toward him with the oiled precision of a machine-gun post rotating to face its target.

“Indeed. Didn’t your mother teach you any manners, young man?” When Stefan looked at her blankly, she added tartly, “I have a name.”

“We’re doing a project… Frau Kessel,” said Stefan with a sangfroid that took my breath away. How he could