Once Upon a Crime Read Free Page B

Gesternstadt, and the day seemed to have been pulled all out of shape. As if by way of confirmation, Gretel opened the front door to the smell of breakfast.
    â€œFull English!” cried Hans from the kitchen. “Want some?”
    Gretel did, and yet she did not. She did because she hadn’t eaten all day and was fiercely hungry. She did not because the calorie fest Hans would present to her would do nothing to diminish her ever-widening girth. She did because the aroma of frying bacon was making her salivate and taking her mind off her headache and her itches. She did not because the part of her that kept her from walking off the top of a cliff, or stepping in front of a speeding carriage, was reminding her of the toxic levels of filth in which the repast had been prepared. Temperance spoke to greed. Greed shouted it down.
    â€œExtra black pudding for me, Hans, and don’t stint on the sausages,” she yelled. An hour later she was slumped on her daybed. She had changed back into her favorite house robe, fumigated her clothes, anointed her bites with balm, devoured Hans’s splendid breakfast, and was picking contentedly at her teeth with a fork.
    â€œWhat I don’t understand,” said Hans, his words distorted by the stout stump of a cigar he was smoking, “is why a person who was setting fire to some-person-else’s carriage workshop for some as yet unknown reason would be bothering himself with some-other-person-else’s hitherto unconnected cats.”
    Gretel frowned. “Darling brother, you have a way of cutting through the fatty tissue of a problem and—”
    â€œGetting right to the bone?”
    â€œI was going to say causing the patient to hemorrhage wildly, flooding the previously simple wound with so much blood no one has a hope in hell of fixing it.”
    â€œAnd that’s clear thinking, is it?”
    â€œCompared to the solid opacity of yours, it is.”
    â€œCan’t answer me question, though, can you, eh?”
    Gretel was too tired and too well fed to argue. Besides, it did no harm to let Hans believe he was capable of a clever thought from time to time. She understood, when she could be bothered to think about it, that his drinking problem was inextricably linked to his chronically low self-esteem. It had been thus for so many years. After all, who would want to be famous for getting his little sister lost and then having to be rescued by her? The minor celebrity status the pair had enjoyed since the case had become public knowledge had, for a time, brought freedom from poverty, but memories of those dark hours in the witch’s cage still haunted Hans. As a teenager, enjoying a school every bit as posh and ridiculous as the one to which Gretel had been sent (also at the behest of the king), Hans had turned to food for solace, and the result had been a build of such proportions as to make his sister feel slender in his presence. And then, at twenty-one, he had discovered beer and schnapps, and the pattern of his adult life had been set. Get up; pancakes and coffee laced with brandy in the Kaffee Haus; home for a nap; cook a little lunch to have with beer; to the inn for cards and beer; a walk to the grocery store for provisions; home for more food to soak up more beer; back to the inn for schnapps. This routine could be interrupted, for instance, by Gretel demanding he cook her something, or her giving him an errand to run, so long as she used the word “run” figuratively. But such disturbances to the established rhythm of his days were only ever temporary hiccups. The natural order was born of many years of practice so that it had become both instinctive and entrenched.
    Gretel would never have admitted it to anyone, but she liked having Hans around. Aside from his skills in the kitchen (aroom into which Gretel herself never ventured), his unchallenging companionship was a comfort, even if he did insist on dressing like every other