The Vanishing of Katharina Linden

that it had moved was encouraging; if it had been bolted in place from the other side I doubted it would have moved at all.

Stefan pushed past Herr Duster and hurled himself at the door, thumping it with his shoulder like an American football player so that it rattled in the frame. But still nothing happened. Herr Duster and I crowded onto the lower steps to give him more room.

This time Stefan aimed a mighty kick at the lock. I listened in frank amazement to wood splintering. More and more I had the impression that Stefan lived his life in some sort of imaginative action movie. He launched another kick and with a mighty crack! the door gave way and swung open, almost precipitating him on the other side. He steadied himself and would have started through the doorframe, but Herr raised a finger to his lips to indicate that we should stay silent and listen first.

I could see very little of what was on the other side of the door, since both Stefan and Herr Duster were now crowded into the frame. I could make out a wall papered with a rather old-fashioned design, and the side of a light-brown lampshade lit from within by a low-wattage bulb. The lamp was nondescript but the wallpaper pattern gave me pause: it was somehow familiar. Wreaths of stylized foliage, faded green and brown against an ivory background. Every so often there was a curling leaf shape faintly reminiscent of a fish.

Gently, I pushed at Stefan’s back. “Let me out.” As he moved forward I stepped out into the room behind him. We stood, side by side, Herr Duster’s presence forgotten. I could hear Stefan panting from the exertion of kicking in the door; he sounded as though he had been running. He was staring about him like a tourist in a cathedral, as though he couldn’t quite take in everything he was seeing. At last he turned to me, with the words on his lips, but I got there first.

“I know this house.”

Chapter Fifty

How can it be?” said Stefan. He looked dazed. “How can we be… here?”

I glanced at Herr Duster, as though being the only adult he might produce a rational explanation. Herr Duster was the only one of us who didn’t look as though he were overwhelmed with surprise. He looked grave and incalculably sorrowful, like a doctor at a deathbed.

“My brother…” He pronounced the words strangely, as though rolling an unfamiliar and bitter taste around his mouth. “My brother’s house,” he said eventually.

“But it can’t be,” I said, as if I were pointing out an obvious fact to the very stupid. “It can’t be Herr Schiller’s house. I mean…”

My voice trailed off. I looked around me again. We were in a narrow hallway, one that I knew. I had stood very close to this spot a hundred times, perhaps more, shrugging my coat off my shoulders so that Herr Schiller could hang it on one of the pegs. I put out a hand and touched the shining dark surface of the hall table. It felt hard and cool under my fingers.

“Did he-you know-” I didn’t want to say the murderer “-I mean, how did he get in here? How could he go through the cellar without Herr Schiller-” I looked from Herr Duster to Stefan, not understanding their expressions “-without Herr Schiller knowing?” I finished.

There was a long silence. The two of them, old man and boy, were staring at each other. Something was passing between them that I didn’t understand.

“He’s gone,” said Stefan in a tight voice.

“Yes,” said Herr Duster, but his lips barely moved, and his voice was very low.

“I’ll look…” said Stefan, and he went to the front door and tried the handle. It opened easily and the door swung open. Stefan leaned out. I could see that a considerable amount of snow had fallen since we entered Herr Duster’s house; everything outside was blanketed with pure white. It was still falling; when Stefan pulled his head back inside, his hair was covered with melting white flakes. He came up to Herr Duster like a foot soldier reporting to his sergeant.

“I couldn’t see him-but there’re tracks.”

Herr Duster nodded, almost absently.

“I’m not sure, but I think they went around the side of the house.”

“The car, yes,” said Herr Duster, almost inaudibly. He seemed sunk in thought.

“What car?” I asked, but no one answered me.

“Do you know where-?” asked Stefan, and I shot him a look of frustration; everyone seemed to be talking in code.

Herr Duster nodded. “I think so. Yes, I think so.”

“What are you going on about?” I was almost hopping with annoyance. “Look, why don’t we wake Herr Schiller up?”

“Pia-”

“We’re in his house, after all.”

“Yes, his house,” said Herr Duster with gentle emphasis. Still I didn’t get it.

“Pia,” said Stefan in a tired voice, “it’s Herr Schiller. Don’t you see?”

“What do you mean?” I stared at him. “What do you mean, it’s Herr Schiller?”

“It’s Herr Schiller who…” Stefan changed tack at the last moment, as though swerving to avoid an obstacle. “It’s him we have to follow,” he said. “He’s the one who’s gone.”

“I don’t understand-” I began, but suddenly I did. A wave of nausea swept over me. I sagged back against the wall with the pattern of foliage on it. “No,” I said in a strangled voice.

Stefan looked at me helplessly. Then he turned back to Herr Duster. “We have to go. We have to go right now.” I was being dismissed.

“Stefan, this is a joke, right?” I said. My voice sounded unconvincing even to my own ears. “Where are we going? Shouldn’t we call the police-if someone-?”

“We don’t have time.” His voice was cool, but he was not trying to be unpleasant. He was stating a fact: if there were even the remotest chance of finding the owner of the boot before it was too late we had to leave now. If we waited we would lose any chance of catching-him. The one who had taken all those girls. The one who had left me in the well to drown among the wallowing horrors. I could only think of him as the one, not as Herr Schiller. It was impossible.

“Pia, you stay here.”

“No! No way, no…” I was stuttering in outrage. “No, you’re not leaving me here! I’m coming with you.”

“Pia.” Herr Duster sounded remarkably calm, although he must have been as aware as Stefan was of the seconds ticking by, the minutes trickling away, snowflakes twirling lazily down from the black sky and blanketing the tracks in snow. “You are soaked through. You can’t go out in the snow. You’ll freeze to death.”

“You said a car,” I pointed out sulkily.

“His car,” said Stefan.

“Yes, but you can’t follow him unless you go in one too,” I retorted. I glared at Stefan. He regarded me for a moment and then turned to Herr Duster.

“We have to go.”

Herr Duster looked at me for a long moment. If he were any other adult in the world I think he would have insisted that I stay inside in the warm. But either Herr Duster had been out of the company of other adults so long that he had forgotten the way things were supposed to be done, or he was one of those rare people who do not treat children as though they are completely incapable. He nodded sharply to me and said, “Pia, you may come with us, but you must stay in the car. Verstanden?”

“Yes.” I was breathless in my gratitude.

“Stay here, both of you, while I fetch the car.”

“But-” I started, but he cut me off.