The Murder Farm Read Free Page B

a hurry.
    I pedaled away like mad. I didn’t want to stop again.
    The house, the farm, no, I wouldn’t even want to be buried there, I said to myself. It shook me, that place did.
    How can anyone stand it out there with those people? Poor Marie, how would she be able to stand it? I was so upset, my chest felt tight, but what else was I to do? Marie couldn’t sleep on our sofa anymore, and Erwin was tired of it all, too; he’d wanted to be rid of her long ago. I pedaled and pedaled. I didn’t stop. I just wanted to get away, right away!
    I wanted to get away from my guilty conscience as well.
    After a while there was water running down my cheeks. I thought at first it was because the cycling made me sweat so much. But then I realized it was tears.

M arie goes to her room next to the kitchen straight after supper.
    It is a small room. A bed, a table, a chest of drawers, and a chair, there’s no space for anything else.
    The washbasin and jug stand on the chest of drawers.
    A small window opposite the door. If she goes to the window, which way will she be looking? Maybe toward the woods? She’ll know in the morning. Marie would like to see the woods from her window.
    The windowsill is covered with dust. So is the table, so is the chest of drawers. The room has been standing empty for some time. The air is stale and musty. Marie doesn’t mind.
    She opens the drawer in the table. There’s an old newspaper cutting inside, yellow with age. And a pillowcase button and the metal screwtop of a preserving jar. Marie closes the drawer again.
    The bed stands to her right. A simple brown wooden bed frame. The quilt has a blue-and-white cover, and so does the pillow.
    Sighing, Marie sits down on her bed. She stays there for a while, looking around her room.
    Giving her thoughts free rein.
    She misses Traudl and the children. But it’s nicer sleeping in a bed than on the sofa, and she won’t have to see Erwin for a while now either.
    Erwin didn’t like her, Marie sensed that as soon as she moved to Traudl’s place at New Year. It was the way he came through the door, no greeting, no handshake, nothing. He just asked Traudl, “What’s she doing here, then?” And he jerked his head Marie’s way without even looking at her.
    “She’ll be staying with us until she finds a new job.” That was all Traudl said.
    “I don’t like other folk living off of me,” was all he said in return.
    She, Marie, acted as if she hadn’t heard him say that. But it hurt, because Erwin is such an oaf. She’s never told her sister so, but she’s thought it all the same.
    He thought she was “stupid,” and “simple,” “mental,” “not quite right in the head,” she’s heard him say all those things and more, too, but she’s never protested. Because of Traudl and because of the children.
    Thank God there are children here on this farm, too, thinks Marie.
    She gets along well with children. She once found a motto on a page in a calendar saying, “Children are the salt of the earth.” She took note of that. She likes those old calendar mottos, and when she meets an especially nice child she takes out the page from the calendar and reads the old saying over and over again.
    Marie sighs, gets off the bed, starts putting her things away in the chest of drawers. Begins settling into her room. She stops again and again. Sits down on her bed. Her arms keep dropping to her lap, limp, heavy as lead. She keeps thinking back to the past. Thinks of Frau Kirchmeier and how much she liked working for the old lady. Even if she was getting more and more peculiar.
    Thinks of her brother Ott. He was the same sort as Erwin. You had to watch out with him. She’d been helping at his home a few weeks back when his wife was doing so poorly. She was glad to get away again.
    She pulls herself together. No use sitting around all the time thinking about life, Marie tells herself. She must finish settling in and go to sleep, so that she can get up early in