The Vanishing of Katharina Linden (8 page)

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.

T
ell us another story, Herr Schiller.” This was from Stefan, who was sitting on the edge of a claw-footed and overstuffed armchair that looked as though it had been made for Herr Schiller’s grandmother.

“Bitte,”
I corrected him in a disapproving tone that Oma Kristel would have been proud of. Not that I was such a stickler for manners—but I knew people of Herr Schiller’s generation were.

“Please.”
Stefan corrected himself. “The one about the cats was cool.”

Herr Schiller raised one eyebrow and regarded Stefan quizzically over the top of his spectacles. “I seem to remember that at the time you told me it was not scary at all, young man.” His expression was stern but his voice was cheerful.

Stefan looked down, temporarily at a loss, but when his head came up again he was smiling, rather shyly. He and Herr Schiller regarded each other in silence for several moments, and then I was surprised to see Herr Schiller’s craggy face break into a smile, too.

A little flush of annoyance ran through me, like a tiny electrical charge traveling along a wire. Sometimes the two of them made me feel like an unwelcome third. And besides (said a mean little voice at the
back of my mind), who did Stefan think he was, anyway? He was still StinkStefan, the most unpopular boy in the class, if not the entire school.

“I don’t want to hear a story today,
actually,”
I cut in, and instantly felt self-conscious at the edge in my voice. Still, it worked; both their heads had turned my way and they were now looking at me, Stefan with a look of irritation at the interruption and Herr Schiller with a smooth expression that betrayed no recognition of my rudeness.

“I wanted to ask Herr Schiller something,” I declared.

Stefan sighed. “Go on, then.” The suffix
dummy
hung unspoken in the air.

“Well …” Now that I had center stage I was not at all sure I wanted to deliver my soliloquy. But I saw one of Herr Schiller’s bushy white eyebrows starting to lift as though being drawn up his forehead by an invisible string, and so I plunged ahead.

“I wanted to ask you about … well, about the things that have been happening.”

“The things?”

“Yes, well, you see, my mother said we should look out for anything that was
seltsam
, and then I started to think about all the stuff you told me about, about the cats and everything, and how they just went through the walls, and how Pluto did it too. I don’t think it’s right—I think there’s something strange going on, Herr Schiller, and since you know so much about all that kind of thing I thought maybe you might know who or what did it, and where we should start looking.”

This was a relatively long speech for me, and I had got to the end before I realized that Herr Schiller was looking at me with an expression of total and bemused noncomprehension.

“Start looking for what?”

“Katharina Linden,” I said, as though it were self-evident.

There was a long silence.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” said Herr Schiller at last.

“You know,” I persisted uncomfortably. “The girl from my school who disappeared.”

Embarrassment loosened my tongue and I found myself running on
uncontrollably. “The thing is, she was there by the fountain, we all saw her, and then she wasn’t there anymore and Frau Linden said she couldn’t find her and had we seen her? And no one just vanishes into thin air, so it’s obvious it must have been …”

My voice trailed off and I fell silent without finishing the sentence.

“It must have been …?” prompted Herr Schiller, but I was unable to complete the phrase. I had been going to say
magic
, but I now realized how stupid that sounded.

“It just didn’t seem right,” I finished in a small voice.

Herr Schiller regarded me for a very long moment. His lips were tight shut but I could see a little muscle in his jaw working, as though words were struggling to get out. Looking at him with my cheeks reddening, I was suddenly struck by how ancient he looked. The lines in his face looked as though they had been carved there, the bright-blue eyes sunken into shadowy hollows.

Then he turned to Stefan and made an odd little movement like a bow. “Young man,” he said, in a tone that had joviality smeared all over the stiffness underneath like greasepaint. He turned back to me. “Fräulein Kolvenbach.” He sighed. “Forgive the rudeness of a very old man. I am very tired and I’m afraid I must ask you to leave.”

I gaped at him. Behind Herr Schiller I could see Stefan making
you idiot
faces at me.

I was not sure what I had done, but I had evidently put my foot in it to a cataclysmic extent. “I’m really sorry,” I stammered. “I didn’t mean to—”

“Please don’t apologize,” said Herr Schiller in a weary voice. “I am simply tired, my dear. I
am
over eighty, you know.” At that precise moment he looked more like a hundred and ten. “Go now, but come and see me again soon, won’t you?”

Stefan and I got to our feet, and before we knew it we were once again out in the frigid air, with cobblestones under our feet and a firmly closed door at our backs.

“Nice one, Pia,” said Stefan with heavy irony.

“I didn’t do anything,” I said defensively.

“You must have,” Stefan pointed out. “You must have offended him really badly or he wouldn’t have asked us to leave.” He looked at me speculatively. “What were you trying to ask him, anyway?”

Now that I had to put it into words again, it really sounded stupid.
“Well, since he’s an expert on all that sort of stuff, I thought he might know something about people disappearing.”

“All that stuff? You think a witch got Katharina or something?” he said incredulously.

“Shut up,” I told him helpfully. I glanced around me, as though looking for someone more interesting to talk to. “I don’t want to talk about it. I’m going home now, anyway.”

Stefan shrugged. “All right. See you tomorrow.”

I didn’t reply; I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing that I would be hanging around with him for yet another day of social leprosy, even though we both very well knew I would be. In defiance of my mother’s instructions to stay together, I walked off, once again leaving him standing alone.

“You’re home early,” said my mother as I let myself into the house.

“Hmm,” I said discouragingly. Of course, my hangdog looks and low state of mind did not pass unnoticed under the maternal radar. My mother was out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a tea towel and ready for action, before I had made it to the foot of the stairs.

“What’s up?” Her tone was brisk. I sighed and shrugged my shoulders.

“Nothing, really. I just … Herr Schiller …” My voice tailed off. There was no way to explain without my mother reaching the inescapable conclusion that I had somehow been rude to the old man.

“Herr Schiller what?”

“Oh …” I shuffled my feet uncomfortably on the wooden floorboards. “We had to leave, that’s all. He said he wasn’t feeling well.”

I must have sounded unconvincing because my mother cocked her head and said, “Have you two been making a nuisance of yourselves?” I did not reply. “Herr Schiller is over eighty, you know,” she went on. “I’m not sure he can cope with two youngsters for hours on end.”

“It wasn’t that,” I said defensively, and then instantly realized that I had dropped myself in it.

“So what was it?” was my mother’s immediate riposte.

I gave a deep sigh. “I think I—I think he was upset about something I said.” I looked at her earnestly. Her lips were pursed. “I didn’t mean
to upset him. I mean, I’m still not sure what was wrong.” By this time my mother’s mouth was drawn so far to one side of her face by skepticism that she looked as though she had been painted by Picasso.