The Vanishing of Katharina Linden Read Free Page A

that upset you?” She might as well have said
your little friend
.
    “She’s not my friend,” I announced.
    “Well, it was nice of her to bring your homework,” said my mother.
    “It wasn’t nice at all,” I told her, feeling as though another scream might well up at any moment. “She wanted to know if this was the room where Oma Kristel … you know.”
    “Oh,” said my mother. There was a very long pause while sheconsidered. At last she patted me on the shoulder. “Never mind, Pia. It’ll be a nine days’ wonder. They’ll soon get sick of talking about it.”
    My mother was right about a lot of things, but on one topic she was spectacularly wrong, and that was the fascination with Oma Kristel’s death. Even now, so much later, and after all that happened that terrible year, I am quite convinced that if you mentioned the name of Kristel Kolvenbach to anyone in Bad Münstereifel, they would instantly say, “Wasn’t she the woman who exploded at her own Advent dinner?” A nine days’ wonder it most certainly was not.

Chapter Four

    T he
Grundschule
opened again in the first week of January. I usually walked to school with Marla Frisch. However, as I was packing my
Ranzen
, the capacious satchel that allows the German schoolchild to carry backbreaking amounts of schoolbooks, I was surprised to see Marla pass by our front windows without stopping, her light-brown pigtails bouncing. By the time I had shrugged on my winter coat and opened the front door, she had disappeared around the corner. I looked after her, puzzled. Well. Perhaps she thought I wasn’t coming back to school yet.
    I hoisted my
Ranzen
onto my back, called goodbye to my mother, and stepped out into the cobbled street, closing the door behind me. It was still not quite light, and the sky was leaden. Tiny flakes of snow whirled through the air and my breath came out in little puffs. The few people who passed me pulled their coats tight about themselves, wincing against the cold.
    As I reached the school gate I looked at my watch. It was twelve minutes past eight; the bell would ring in three minutes exactly. I hurried inside, took the stairs to the first floor two at a time, and shrugged the
Ranzen
off my shoulders. As I hung my coat on a peg, I looked up and saw the sharp-boned face of Daniella Brandt peering around thedoorframe of the classroom, a second before it whisked back inside like a rat vanishing into its hole.
    I stood there by my peg for a moment, wondering whether it was just my imagination, or could I hear a sudden outbreak of excited whispers from the classroom?
    “Frau Koch says her grandmother really did explode!”
    “Went off like a bomb—”
    “Burnt to a cinder—”
    “They could only tell who it was by her teeth, my Tante Silvia says.”
    Suddenly I didn’t want to go in. A chilling premonition broke over me. It would be no use screaming now; Frau Eichen would never stand for it and, furthermore, against a class of twenty-two ten-year-olds it would be worse than useless—it would only serve to make me an even more irresistible target of curiosity.
    Nobody cared about Oma Kristel, about the way she had tried to keep herself attractive long after Youth had packed its bags and moved out of the aging tenement, about the way she always had some little gift for me, a sample bottle of unsuitable scent or a brooch made of sparkly paste. Her love of cherry liqueur.
    None of it meant anything to them; no—what they wanted to know was whether she had
really
gone off like a Catherine wheel, throwing off sparks in all directions. Was it true that every hair on her head had been burned off? Did they really have to identify her by her rings? Was it true that Tante Britta had had an epileptic fit when she saw it happening? Was it true that—?
    The whispers stopped the moment I rounded the doorframe and entered the classroom. Twenty-two pairs of eyes, wide with curiosity, were fixed on me as I made my unwilling progress into the