The other ones?” I repeated slowly.
Frau Kessel looked at me sharply, as though I were being purposely obtuse. “Yes, of course. There was the little Schmitz girl, I don’t remember what her first name was. And Caroline Hack. Not,” she added, “that it was a surprise when she disappeared. Always running around the town on her own at all hours, and her stepmother never doing a thing about it-though I suppose perhaps she was pleased to have Caroline out of the way.” Frau Kessel’s sniff of disapproval implied that she could barely begin to imagine the depths of depravity into which other inhabitants of the town might fall.
“I’ve never heard of anyone called Caroline Hack,” I said doubtfully. “I don’t think there’s anyone in the Grundschule called that.”
“Silly girl, of course there isn’t,” said Frau Kessel. “This was years ago. If Caroline Hack were still alive, she’d be nearly your mother’s age.”
“Oh.” I thought about this. “The Schmitz girl, is she also the same age?”
“No, younger-well, she was younger at the time,” said Frau Kessel. “Though I suppose she would be older than Caroline Hack now.” She brushed her hands together, removing invisible dirt. “You do ask a lot of questions, Pia Kolvenbach. Do you ask as many questions in class?”
“Um…” There was no answer to such questions posed by Frau Kessel, none at any rate that would not merit another lecture.
“Well, I suppose you think I have nothing better to do than stand here gossiping,” said Frau Kessel. “Come along, Pia; I’ll show you out.” I was dismissed. She led me back down the brown hallway and let me out the front door.
“Bianca, that was her name,” she said suddenly, poised with one hand on the doorknob.
“Wie, bitte?” I looked at her in confusion.
“The little Schmitz girl.”
“Oh,” I said, and then: “Tschüss, Frau Kessel,” as I stepped thankfully into the sunlight.
“Auf Wiedersehen,” said Frau Kessel emphatically, managing to inject disapproval of my informal language into her tone. Then she shut the door.
It was too late to visit Herr Schiller now, I decided; and though I wanted to find out a little more about Caroline Hack and Bianca Schmitz, Herr Schiller was the last person I could ask, considering the furor caused by my inquiry about Katharina Linden. Instead I went home, scuffing my shoes along the cobblestones and mulling over what I had just heard.
Was it true? My mother always said you had to take what Frau Kessel said with a pinch of salt. She was prone to take a very small seed of rumor and grow it into a veritable aspidistra of supposed fact, like the time that Frau Nett’s teenage daughter had gastric flu and threw up at school one morning, and Frau Kessel told at least six different acquaintances that she had it on good authority that Magdalena Nett was four months pregnant. Frau Nett had not spoken to Frau Kessel for months after that enormity. All the same, it was hard to imagine her making up someone’s disappearance. Either a person was there, or they weren’t. I wondered whom I could ask.