The following morning when I came downstairs my father had already left for work. My mother was in the kitchen making waffles, a rare treat for breakfast. Sebastian was chomping happily, a heart-shaped waffle with a crescent bitten out of it clutched in his chubby fingers. My mother closed the waffle iron with a hiss and a little puff of steam.
“Yours will be ready any second,” she said, and smiled at me. She sounded bright this morning, like a mother in a TV commercial, the sort who smiles cheerfully when her son gives her the whole team’s muddy football uniforms to wash.
I slid into my habitual place behind the table.
“Where’s Papa?”
“He had to leave early.” She opened the waffle iron and slid a frying fork under the waffle to lever it out.
“Oh.” I was disappointed; I had wanted to ask him about the night before. “Why did he have to go so early?”
“Oh, you know.” She put the waffle on a plate and set it on the table in front of me. “Work.”
“Hmmm.” I tried the waffle; it was warm and delicious. For a while I gave myself up to the enjoyment of it. Eventually, however, when the edge of my hunger had been dulled and I was starting to think that perhaps waffles were not so wonderful after all, in fact more than six of them was positively off-putting, I said, “Mama? Where did Papa go last night?”
“Oh, Pia.” She yanked the plug of the waffle iron from the outlet before answering the question. “If you must know, and I suppose you’ll soon find out, considering what a hotbed of gossip this town is, your father went round to Herr Düster’s.”
“Herr Düster’s? Was it his windows that were broken?”
“Not windows,” said my mother. “One window. And yes, it was his. It was Jörg Koch who did it. Why am I not surprised?” she added with heavy irony.
“Why did Jörg Koch break his window? Was it an accident?”
“No.”
My mother picked up a cloth and began to wipe down the countertop, which was splattered with waffle batter. With her back to me, and her elbow working like a piston, she did not look very approachable. All the same, I persisted.
“Why did he break it?”
“Because he…” She paused, turned around, and looked at me. “Because some of the kind citizens of this delightful town have decided that Herr Düster is a criminal.”
“Hmmm.” I thought about it. “Frau Kessel says it was probably Herr Düster who took Katharina Linden and the other girls. She said some girls disappeared in Bad Münstereifel when Papa was at school too, and it was Herr Düster then as well.”
“Pia.” Now my mother’s gaze had acquired a laserlike intensity. “Frau Kessel is a poisonous old-well, never mind. I don’t want you listening to her stories about who has done what in this town, and I particularly don’t want to find out you’ve been passing them on to anyone else. If it wasn’t for her and her cronies, we probably wouldn’t have had a bloody lynch mob on the streets last night. She’s a witch.”
The literal-minded side of my personality, inherited from my father, struggled to digest this last nugget of information.
“Didn’t Herr Düster do it? Take the girls, I mean?”
“Oh, Pia. I don’t know. Nobody knows. And even if he did, it still wouldn’t be right for people to just go round there and attack him. In civilized places,” she added more to herself than to me, “people are innocent until proved guilty.”
“But if he did do it…?”
“Then it has to be handled properly. The police have to question him, and if it looks as though there is enough evidence that he did it, then it has to go to court. Do you know what that means?”
I nodded.
“And a court can’t decide to punish anyone unless there’s proof that they did something wrong. You can’t just decide that someone looks guilty, or that you think they did it. You have to be sure. And being sure means you have to have proof.”
“Like what?”
“Pia, I hardly think the breakfast table is the place to be discussing forensic science,” said my mother drily. I was used to her occasional digressions into Baroque vocabulary, so I simply waited for her to explain.
“In this case we don’t even know exactly what happened to Katharina or those other girls. It’s always possible that they went with someone quite happily and that they are still…” My mother stopped herself. “That they will eventually show up safe and well. And then how would everyone feel if they had turned up on Herr Düster’s doorstep and beaten him up?” She sighed. “Isn’t it about time you were off to school? Another five minutes and you won’t be in before the bell rings.”
I slipped out from behind the table. “But, Mama, what would be proof?” I persisted, reluctant to leave without closing the conversation to my satisfaction.
“Well, it’s things like someone actually seeing the person committing a crime… or maybe finding stolen goods in someone’s house,” said my mother.
“Or a body?” I asked.
“Or a…? Pia, I don’t think anyone is going to find dead bodies in anyone’s house in Bad Münstereifel. Can we drop the subject? It’s gruesome. And some little people”-she nodded meaningfully toward Sebastian-“are starting to understand more and more these days.”
“Mmm-hmm.”
Reluctantly, I went into the hallway to find my coat and the backpack that had replaced the now-babyish Ranzen. It was raining outside and I had three minutes to get to school before the bell rang. With a sigh I stepped out into the rain.