The Vanishing of Katharina Linden by Helen Grant

Author:Helen Grant [Grant, Helen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 978-0-440-33961-8
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2009-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Thirty-one

Winter came early that year. I always used to think of St. Martin’s Day, November 11, as a high point in the approach to Christmas. That year, the year when Katharina Linden and Marion Voss vanished from the streets of the town, it was a cold St. Martin’s.

My mother dressed us in layers and layers of warm clothing: sweaters, down jackets, thermal boots, scarves, and mittens. I had a pink fluffy hat with a bobble on the top and Sebastian had a little navy-blue fleece hat with earflaps. We looked like a pair of fat gnomes. All the same, it was necessary; during the short walk to the Klosterplatz we could feel the biting cold on any centimeter of exposed skin. Even through the thick insulation of my mittens, the cold was seeping into the hand that held the lantern.

As a grown-up Gymnasium pupil, I would normally have dispensed with a lantern as being seriously uncool, but at the last minute my mother had bought me one and I hadn’t the heart to refuse it. It was a round yellow sun face made of crimped paper. Sebastian had a much grander lantern, constructed by my mother along with the other parents at his playgroup. It was a green caterpillar with pink and purple spots, made of tissue paper on a skeleton of black cardboard. The caterpillar had an insane leer on its face because my mother had cut the pink mouth out as a wiggly line. She said it was “a blow against uniformity;” my mother never could stand the German fad for sitting in a group and all making exactly the same item. In fact she hated arts and crafts. Sebastian should probably have been grateful that my mother had made a lantern for him at all, considering the agonies she had to go through to do it.

When we got to the Klosterplatz it was already full of people milling around, stamping their feet and blowing on their hands. The fire brigade was there as usual, the firemen hanging around the gleaming fire engine parked at one side, and doing their best to look nonchalant. An enormous bonfire had been built in the middle of the square. It would be lit by the firemen when the procession was under way around the town, so that it would be burning merrily when we all got back.

As well as the firemen, there was an unusually high number of policemen. Normally Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf and perhaps one of the other local policemen would be in attendance, just in case anything went awry, like the time Thilo Koch’s brother Jörg set off a fire alarm and the firemen had to abandon their posts by the bonfire and dash off to the rescue. This year, however, the police seemed to have dragged every spare officer from here to Euskirchen into the town for the evening, including the granite-faced one from outside. They were being discreet, but they were everywhere.

I noticed Herr Wachtmeister Tondorf talking quietly to one of the schoolteachers who was supervising the Grundschule children.

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