Death Drinks Darjeeling: A Helen & Martha Cozy Mystery Series by Sigrid Vansandt

Author:Sigrid Vansandt [Vansandt, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781542601177
Publisher: Tightlines Publishing
Published: 2016-12-25T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Five

Tübingen, Germany

Once everyone was gone, Annalena sat waiting for the inevitable. She didn’t go to bed though she was tired. Instead, she reclined in her favorite chair watching the fire burn in the fireplace. Tom had been unwilling to leave Annalena behind. He was such a kind person, but she was firm that if he didn’t leave, they had no chance of their plan working.

With the two young people on their way to Copenhagen, Cara safely at her own home, the night was complete and quiet. Being alone didn’t bother Annalena, nor did the dark. Both were like old friends. It was easier to think and to let her mind wander. It caught at the thread of a long ago memory and without hesitation, she followed it back to another time when human evil had also lurked and preyed upon the innocent, the weak, and the honest.

Near the end of the last world war when she’d been a little girl, they’d had very little food to eat. So many bombs had fallen and Hitler’s soldiers had been told to kill everyone whether they were American, Russian, German, Polish or Czech it didn’t matter. People no longer knew who was friend and who was foe. If it walked on two feet, according to those who made war, it needed to die.

A popping sound from a burning log in the fireplace wrenched Annalena back to the present. She pulled the blanket around her shoulders tighter and shut her eyes in an effort to recapture the lost thoughts. It was a favorite pastime, trying to remember the childhood she had shared with her mother, who was not much more than a child herself when she gave birth to Anna at eighteen.

Mutti, her mother, was a bright, loving creature who would dab upon her little daughter’s neck a faint trace of perfume. It had been sent as a gift by her young husband, Anna’s father, who had long since departed from both of them and the world. He’d died in the war, gunned down in one of a thousand campaigns, engagements or indifferent skirmishes that had required the blood of the young as payment for the transgressions of the greedy and the insane. His youth was used up in a microsecond of the human story, with the only repercussion being that he never held, laid his lips upon or even knew the name of his only child, a tiny girl, Mutti named Annalena.

The remembrance of the smell of gardenias and warm embraces tugged Annalena’s memory to sink deeper, making her smile as the sweet face of her mother, so familiar for one gone such a long time, formed itself in her memory.

They had continued to live with Oma and Opa working in the gardens, the kitchen and the fields of the old estate even after the war had begun. Their people were the servant class and had been so for generations. Practically on the Czechoslovakian border, the farm was set among hills covered

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