The Silent Forest E-Book

Wolfram Fleischhauer

• Herausgeber: hockebooks
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 575

Beschreibung

“I’ve still got a real bad feeling,” mumbled Heinbichler. “And I’ll tell you all one thing: This Grimm girl can read the forest like none of us.” Forestry Student Anja Grimm is working on a soil-mapping project in a remote region in Bavaria where her father disappeared when she was just eight years old. A few days into the work, the nightmare of her childhood seems to repeat itself. Deep in the woods she runs into mentally disturbed Xaver with whom she often played when she was a child. Just hours after they meet, he hangs himself. And Xaver’s suicide will not remain the only disturbing event connected to Anja’s reappearance. An emotionally charged thriller about guilt and denial. “The Silent Forest” is set in a present day idyllic German region still haunted by terrible events that transpired there during the last days of the war – a moving story about a young woman who cannot help but read the mute testimony of the horrors of history written in the silent language of nature.

Leseprobe

Wolfram Fleischhauer

The Silent Forest

Thriller

1

She didn’t have any clear sense of what the sight of the town would stir up inside her. The images she’d carried with her for the past twenty years were varied. A landscape of gently rolling hills. Small farms. Fields stretching off in every direction until they met walls of dense evergreen forest. They were vague memories that had always triggered mixed emotions. Fear, suspicion, but also a melancholy sense of longing.

Her hands tightened on the steering wheel when they passed the town sign, and she read the name. But as soon as she caught sight of the first few houses, it became clear to her that her premonitions must have been based on an illusion. Otherwise, the farms and fields appearing before her eyes would have had to inspire some sense of familiarity. But there was nothing. What she saw was alien to her, even if it did reflect something that she had pictured to herself, again and again, ever since she was eight years old.

“LOOK OUT!”

Anja gave a start and jerked the wheel to the right. The man in the passenger seat lost his balance. His strong left upper arm pressed against her. The left front wheel got the worst of the pothole. A hard jolt shook the VW bus and it started to swerve. Anja spun the wheel sharply in the opposite direction. The man next to her flew hard into the passenger-side door. He shot her a look that could have meant a lot of different things, but for the moment, she didn’t even want to guess.

“Why’d you unbuckle your seatbelt so early, anyway?” she asked irritably.

Without a word, Obermüller fished for his seatbelt, which he’d unbuckled as soon as they’d passed the sign for the town, and rammed the metal tongue into the buckle. At the same moment, the right front wheel hit the next pothole, and the sound of metal rods clanging against each other immediately filled the interior of the car.

Anja winced and thought of her shocks, and about how she had absolutely no money for new ones. Then she turned her head and glanced back at the cargo area, annoyed—two heavy soil probes were rolling this way and that across the metal floor. But they were almost there. It wasn’t worth stopping now just to secure the probes.

She rolled the window down a bit. The fall air was cool. Early fog nestled between the wooded hills, but apparently the weather was supposed to clear up later. There were no people in sight. In a field at the edge of the forest stood a combine harvester. Part of the crop had already been cleared. It probably wouldn’t be long before the combine was in operation, and the noise would follow them deep into the forest. What a shame! The silence in the forest was the best reward for the huge amount of work they had ahead of them.

They would fight their way through the worst thickets imaginable, upright, crouching, or, if necessary, on all fours. Every fifty meters Obermüller would hammer a soil probe into the ground, twist it back out, and then set it down for her to look at. By that time, she would have used her compass to determine the next sampling point, and he would march off fifty meters in the direction she gave him and extract the next sample while she analyzed the soil horizons from the first probe and entered them into her chart. Maybe there would be unpleasant surprises? An angry swarm of wasps or a rabid fox? And just how many ticks would she have to pick off her skin that night?

She had managed to settle down into a bit of a routine in the three weeks since her internship began, but really every day had been different. That they were even surveying in this area to begin with hadn’t been planned. But the area where they’d been stationed up until now had been so hard hit by a fall storm over the weekend that there wouldn’t be any hope of working there for months. She had learned of the switch only yesterday, and hadn’t let on that it might affect her; she just went and got new maps and spent her whole Sunday working out how they’d plan to approach the new terrain. Saying nothing. Focused. Ignoring any sense of unease she might have felt.

She hadn’t told anyone why she was here. The only person who knew was Dr. Venner-Brock. These double names! The age of indecision. You couldn’t even tell which name belonged to whom. Had she been in therapy for four months with a Herr Brock who had married a Frau Venner? Or was it the other way around? The man knew just about everything there was to know about her, and she didn’t even know his last name. Around here, no one had double names. Folks had names like Fuchs, Huber, Bauer, Riedel, or indeed Obermüller, like the man next to her, who was now staring sullenly through the windshield. Really she wouldn’t have had any objection to calling him Michel—but Michel Obermüller was in his mid-forties and unmarried. There was, she knew, a question that had come up for discussion more than once at the bar in Waldmünchen, where Obermüller was a regular: who would get to take the young forestry student out to the woods and drill her first real hole for her. Around here, there was little room for experimentation on the gender relations front.

Anja brought the VW bus to a stop and peered down a country road that came to a fork a few yards ahead of them. To their left, cowering at the edge of the wood, was an old farmhouse with an ugly extension that looked like it had been dragged across the border from what, ten years ago, had been the East. To their right, a dirt road led straight into the forest. Anja reached for the maps on the dashboard.

Yesterday, in the rush of things that followed the hastily improvised change of plans, she had sometimes had to make do with old maps. Northeast LLX 34 was printed in big letters at the top of the old chart. Faunried, Leybach, Haingries, Hinterweiher. The boundaries and property lines were all there, but whether they were all still accurate was doubtful. Over the last few decades, people had died and been born; property had been sold and inherited. Of course, compared to the enormous timescales present in the soil they were about to start poking around in, the reckoning of time here above ground was hardly worth mentioning, but still indispensable if they wanted to have a rough sense of where they were.

She put the car back in gear, drove forward till she was even with the first few trees, then pulled over to the right and turned off the engine.

“Are we here?” Obermüller asked impatiently as Anja continued to study the map in silence. “What’s on the docket for today?”

“Leybach and Haingries,” she answered and pulled the compass out of her shirt pocket. “We should be able to manage it in a week. Then it’s Hinterweiher after that.”

“And Faunried?”

“Hasn’t got any forested areas left. Not many people here, but not much wilderness, either.” She pointed at an ugly biogas silo behind them. “I don’t need a probe to tell you what the soil looks like back there.”

Obermüller’s eyes followed Anja’s finger on the map, which now pointed at three small shaded rectangles in the middle of the forest. “The Leybach place,” she said, then moved her finger to another spot. “The Gollas place.”

She turned around and looked over at the little cluster of buildings at the edge of town, which came right up under the eaves of the forest. They built an extension, she said to herself. But from the looks of it, they’d run out of money. Only some of the walls were finished. In the rear of the new addition, panels of particle board were nailed over the windows. The plaster was flaking off the walls of the main house.

“We’ll start here for now and then keep going along this axis until we get to the Haingries. After that, we’ll see which side we branch out towards. Let’s go.”

Anja got out and took a few steps into the forest while Obermüller got the gear out of the bus. When he was standing next to her, all packed up and ready to go, she checked her bearings one last time and then said, “Here.” Obermüller planted the tip of the soil probe on the forest floor and pushed it down a ways into the soil. Next, he lifted a white plastic hammer. Anja looked around, anxious. No. Not now. An unpleasant, numbing sensation crept up the back of her neck and slowly began to close in on her chest. She reached into her pants pocket, but it was empty.

“I’ll be right back,” she said in a strained voice to Obermüller—but he wasn’t paying any attention to her; he was eyeing the probe and getting ready to start hammering. She made it to the car just in time. The medicine was in the glove compartment. She ripped it open, reached for the inhaler, bit down on the mouthpiece, pressed down on the top, and sucked the cool, moist spray deep into her lungs. The constriction eased immediately. Relieved to feel the medicine taking effect, she stood there for a few seconds breathing in and out, marking every breath, still a little leery of whether the attack might pick right back up again, then increasingly relaxed and grateful that the pressure in her lungs was gone.

Obermüller’s hammering echoed dully in the morning stillness. When she got back to where he stood, he was driving the metal probe to the desired depth with two last powerful strokes. He tossed the white plastic hammer aside, bent down to the remaining part of the shaft that still stuck out of the ground, and stuck a round rod through a narrow opening in its head, forming a handle that allowed him to twist it back out. The probe was about halfway out of the ground when from a distance, there came a rattling and droning.

The combine was awake.

2

The sample that Obermüller had pulled out of the twenty-fourth hole and set down next to it looked almost exactly like the ones from the three prior sampling points. Anja grabbed a new datasheet, wrote down the sample number, measured the extent of each successive soil horizon, and filled out the rest of the column.

The humus layer in the topsoil measured eleven centimeters. In the A horizon, fine-grained loam predominated. In the B horizon, silty loam rich in mica, alternating with loam that was reddish and ocher-brown. Even in the C horizon, at a depth of 116 centimeters, the soil was still loose, with no rock to speak of and only sporadic signs of compression, and contained a fine network of roots that was clearly visible. Anja entered all the details and then gently tapped the bottom of the soil probe a few times. A thin film of moisture appeared. She wrote down “good” and “solidly moist” in the Water Balance field and, under Location, entered the code 204+. Then she heard Obermüller’s hammer pounding again on the other side of the thicket ahead of her.

But suddenly, there was something else, too. Here the beech trees gave way to conifers. The last time she’d thought to take notice, brief glimpses of sunlight could be seen shining sporadically through the crowns of the beeches, still covered in leaves ahead of the approaching autumn.

By now, though, the moisture in the air had driven the sun away again and lain a heavy, cool haze over the wood. Anja paused and listened. The combine wasn’t running anymore. Was that what made her feel like something was different than before?

She looked around. You didn’t often see a forest like this. There was dead, rotten wood lying all over the place. Sloe and blackberry bushes grew wild and unchecked and, at times, made it almost impossible to make headway. Several times over the last few hours, she’d come close to tearing her hair out as she tried to keep at least halfway to the general framework of the sample extraction plan she’d drawn up at her desk. But despite these difficulties, she enjoyed the unspoiled surroundings, sometimes pausing to let her eye wander into the enchanted depths between the densely clustered trees, further and further into a world in which clearly no human hand had altered anything for years. But if all this here was untouched and deserted, why did she have this strange feeling all of a sudden?

She took her clipboard and pinned it under her arm. By some instinct, she tightened her grip on the soil probe and took a few steps in the direction of where Obermüller was. He couldn’t be far. But then again, he was completely out of sight, past the thick wall of conifers ahead of her. And she didn’t hear any hammering, either. But should she call out? Nonsense. Obermüller would make fun of her. In two minutes, she would have caught up with him. Suddenly she stopped. Something had moved among the spruce trees. She stared at the spot. And then she saw the man. He was standing, well hidden, in a cluster of squat spruce, looking right at her through a pair of binoculars. Now he seemed to have realized that she’d seen him; he lowered the binoculars and stood motionless, staring at her. Anja raised her right hand. The man made no response. A bit startled, but still without suspicion, she started heading towards him. She had a friendly greeting ready on her lips when the stranger abruptly spun around and vanished among the tree trunks. The last she saw of him was his broad back and the barrel of a rifle that jutted out over his shoulder.

She froze in mid-step. She’d heard enough about strange run-ins in the woods to know that the best thing for her to do now was to go find Obermüller as quickly as possible. She felt uneasy. At the same time, though, she could hear a mocking voice in her head. What was she so worried about? It was just some guy with binoculars who’d been looking at her while she worked. It was probably a curious local who didn’t want to have to explain himself for watching her. But a second voice took a very different tack, reminding her that her own rifle was back in the car and that you could never know who might be prowling around in an isolated patch of forest a few hundred yards from the Czech border. This was a pretty remote area, and the manner in which this man had suddenly taken off once she’d noticed him made all her alarm bells go off. And even before she had reached the thicket she had to pass through to get to Obermüller, she was suddenly crying out loud and clear: “HEY! HEY! HEY!”

It took a few seconds. But then there came a clear reply: “YEAH?”

She fought her way through the branches and then looked ahead towards Obermüller, feeling both relief and surprise. He stood waiting in a clearing, and looked back at her in surprise. The soil probe lay before him on the ground; he held the rod in his hand. Now Anja was even more confused. Why was there a meadow here?

As she hurried to join Obermüller, she kept looking around, checking whether the man with the binoculars was anywhere to be seen. But the forest had swallowed him back up. She quickly closed the last few feet that lay between her and Obermüller.

“What’s up?” he asked. “We stopping for breakfast?”

Anja pulled some spruce needles out of her hair and rubbed her dirt-caked fingers off on her dark green pants. “There was a man in the forest just now. He’s armed. Did he come by here?”

“No, Frau Grimm,” Obermüller replied formally and gave her a look, studying her. “There wasn’t anyone here.”

Anja consulted her map. Had they gotten off track? Or had she overlooked this clearing? But a second, closer look assured her this wasn’t the case. No doubt about it, they were standing on the parcel of land marked Haingries, a good two hundred yards from the Leybach place and about twice that much from the Gollas place. But on her map, spruce forest was clearly indicated. She looked around. Not far from the spot where she’d come out of the forest was a hunting blind. The platform was so old and rotted away that it seemed almost to have become part of the forest. She turned around and took in the rest of the field. A short ways away from her stood something that looked like a crate. Anja walked up to it. Someone had taken old planks of wood and nailed them together to make a square hutch, maybe forty centimeters tall. Inside, tied to a wooden stake, lay what was left of a dead chicken. Bait for a fox, she thought. Apparently, they were standing on a hunting ground.

She went back over to Obermüller, who still stood there, soil probe in hand, watching her with bewilderment. Then they heard footsteps. They both spun around in surprise. The man came out of the woods on the eastern edge of the meadow and marched straight towards them. Muttering a faint “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Obermüller shrank back, while Anja stood there as if rooted to the spot.

The stranger’s gaze was fixed rigidly upon them. He charged toward them, and all the while, his eyes remained locked, unmoving; there was nothing reassuring to be found in them. His attire was as strange as his demeanor was menacing and unsettling. He wore heavy dark brown boots, dark green knickerbockers, and a short, black leather jacket with belts and buckles all fastened. Not at all matching this ensemble was the blue fabric baseball cap on his head, upon which could be seen, even at a distance, the logo of a well-known fertilizer company. A three-barreled rifle hung from a wide leather strap slung over his right shoulder. The muzzle of the gun was pointed at their legs, and Anja was quite cognizant of the fact that from this position, it would take just a single motion of the hands to raise the barrel.

Anja and Obermüller stood there stock-still and couldn’t say a word. Anja was struck by the thought that this man seemed to be wearing the full span of his years on his body: shoes and pants from the post-war era, a leather jacket that called to mind the Stasi and East German police, and on top a fertilizer company gimme cap that had probably been made in China. Taken all together, it fit the impression that the man was about sixty years old. Now he had reached them. He planted himself about six feet in front of them and started shouting. Just what the hell did they think they were doing here?

Or, in any case, that was what Anja took to be the gist of the words flung at them in a scarcely intelligible dialect. The mouth which opened briefly to speak had revealed an incomplete set of front teeth. The broad forehead was creased. Around the dark eyes, full of boundless anger, but also, Anja thought, a trace of bewilderment and utter incomprehension, the skin was slack and scored with wrinkles. An untrimmed gray beard covered the man’s face and completely obscured his lips. Only when he spoke could his mouth be seen.

“Please put the gun down right now!” Anja ordered with a vehemence that surprised even herself. “And I mean RIGHT NOW. Do you hear me?”

But the man didn’t respond. He kept looking right at her, didn’t move an inch, and seemed not to understand what she’d said—then he launched back into his tirade. The gun dangled at his side, but thankfully he seemed uninterested in it—at least for the moment.

Anja felt a cold sweat on her back. She turned to Obermüller for help. Apparently, he had just been waiting for her to let him take over because he immediately started shouting back.

Whatever he said—he’d also spoken dialect—the stranger went quiet. But the situation was unchanged. The man still looked like he could lose control at any moment and gun them both down, just like that.

Anja glanced over at Obermüller, who kept speaking, probably trying to explain to the stranger what they were doing there. Anja still couldn’t understand the actual words, no more than she could understand the man’s tirade, which he now resumed. Anja could only gather that they were dealing with the owner of this particular patch of forest, who had neither been informed of their activity here nor did he approve of it.

As the exchange between Obermüller and the stranger grew ever more heated, Anja’s fearful gaze kept wandering to the man’s right hand, which gripped the strap of his gun and twitched nervously. That clipped ring finger! Anja stared at the man’s face, twisted with rage. Was that him? Unsure, her eyes wandered between the face completely alien to her and the right ring finger with its missing tip, which was perfectly familiar.

Making up her mind, she interrupted the intense shouting match between the two men by blurting out suddenly: “Xaver?” The stranger went silent. Obermüller also stopped talking and crossed his arms over his chest, disappointed, maybe, but in any case, astounded that this single word of Anja’s should be so much more effective than all he’d said.

“Xaver?” Anja asked again, this time in a calmer, gentler tone since she no longer had to make herself heard over an argument, and plus, now she was entirely certain this person posed no danger to them.

The stranger stared at her as if she were some supernatural vision. “Xaver?” she asked a third time and even took a step towards him. “It’s just me. The Grimm girl. Anja.”

It was him! Or was it? But who else could it be? Why else would he have gone quiet as suddenly as he had? This man was Xaver Leybach, son of Anna and Alois Leybach, the brother of Traudel Gollas. Just like that, the names all came back to her.

“We’re testing the soil here,” she added since Xaver continued to show no response; he just stared straight ahead, silent, grim, not moving. “I’m from the Waldmünchen Forestry Office,” she calmly continued. “We’re just surveying here. That’s all. Look.” She held her clipboard out toward him and then pointed at her soil probe, which she continued to grip so tightly that her fingers were starting to hurt. He let out a snort. That was it.

Anja wanted to add that he actually had been given advance notice, just like all the other property owners in the district, but Xaver seemed to have decided that for him, the conversation was over. Without another word, he spun on his heel and walked off.

“Xaver . . . Herr Leybach,” Anja called out and hurried a few steps after him. But the old man just waved his hand down by his waist, as if he were shooing away a fly. Anja stopped and watched him go, totally at a loss.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Obermüller swore behind her.

3

She enjoyed the sharp taste of toothpaste in her mouth and brushed until her gums started to bleed. Before showering, she had checked her body for ticks with the help of a hand mirror and then thoroughly washed her hair to get rid of the greasy, smoky stench of the restaurant where she’d eaten dinner. But it wasn’t enough. The smell was everywhere. She took her pajamas off and slathered lotion over her body from top to bottom. Only then did she realize that it was her clothes befouling her small room with this rank tavern smell. Sullenly she looked around. It was already past ten o’clock. Climbing down the creaking stairs was out of the question. Frau Anhuber had already eyed her suspiciously enough with those close-set little pig eyes of hers when she didn’t get home till 8:30 instead of the usual seven o’clock. Without further hesitation, she stuffed her clothes in a plastic bag, opened the window, and pinned the bag’s handle under the bottom edge as she closed it again. Tomorrow morning she just had to be sure not to forget that the bag was hanging there.

The encounter with Xaver had left her more shaken than she’d expected. Naturally, Obermüller had asked her how in the world she knew this crazy whack job’s name. But thankfully, he hadn’t pressed her any further after the vague answer she gave. Xaver of all people. And of all the ways to run into him. She hadn’t been at all prepared for it. Should she go ahead and call Dr. Venner-Brock and ask if there might be any significance to it? And also, if, according to his theory, it was beneficial for her condition that she’d run into Xaver Leybach?

Her cell phone finally had service again. But she didn’t dial her therapist’s number; instead, she scrolled through the names until “Sonja” appeared, and then hit the call button.

“Hello hello,” came the sound of her bright voice after the second ring.

“How was it today?” Anja asked, skipping the small talk.

“No change. She ate a little at lunch. ’Fraid I couldn’t get her to eat any dinner, but she did have some tea. I think she’s asleep by now. Do you want to talk to her? Should I check?”

“No. Not necessary. There’s nothing to report here. Did she ask about me?”

“Well, to be honest . . .”

“You should always be honest with me, Sonja.”

“Then no. She hardly said a word all day. The medication is pretty strong.”

“Not too strong, I hope.”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think you should take any risks in her case.”

“Thanks for everything. I’ll check in tomorrow. Are you making good progress?”

“Oh yeah. I’m living like a monk here. It’s glorious.”

It was good to hear Sonja’s voice. What a lucky break it was to have found her! She would stay for two more months, looking after her mother and cramming for med school in the many hours when there was, thankfully, nothing at all to do. And then what? What was supposed to happen after that? Should she have her mother placed under observation for the rest of her life to make sure she didn’t try to harm herself again? Would she always have to be on medication from now on?

Anja let her arm drop and looked morosely around her room. The sight of it depressed her almost as much as the thought of her depressive mother. If only she could at least be there in their house in Planegg, just outside of Munich. There they had shelves full of books, a fireplace, cozy, comfortable couches, and paintings on the walls. These accommodations she’d found here were awful. Someone must have been having a clearance sale on pinewood paneling when this room was built. A sauna was nothing compared to this place. She looked around for her socks so she wouldn’t have to walk barefoot on the green needlefelt carpet. When she found them, she put them on, stepped in front of the mirror, undid the towel she’d wrapped around her head, and let her wet hair down. The view out the window didn’t lift her spirits any. No matter how she looked at it, no matter what kind of spin she might try to put on it: sooner or later, she would wind up having to live in some boring town exactly like this one. People who worked in forestry tended not to live in Munich or Hamburg; no, they mostly lived in places like this. And Waldmünchen was still relatively large, with a population of almost seven thousand and its own water park. She’d only been here three weeks, and already, the place was getting her down. Or maybe the town had nothing to do with it; maybe it was something else entirely?

She lay down on the narrow bed and closed her eyes. Maybe she would just go right to sleep tonight. After all, she’d gotten up at six o’clock that morning and had spent the whole day mapping the forest. But as soon as she closed her eyes, the scene in the clearing lay waiting for her. Xaver came marching out of the woods, gun at his side, mad eyes staring right at her. Like some kind of wood gnome, she thought. That’s what the past twenty years had turned him into. That’s how people aged here. What would the others look like today? Lukas? Rupert? The whole Gollas family? Would she run into them, too? What was she supposed to do next? How was she supposed to act? Should she just keep on working and hope for a miracle?

She thought back on the past few months, above all, that horrible weekend in April. For three days and nights, she’d sat in the intensive care unit and prayed that her mother would survive her suicide attempt. She’d felt sick with fear. She’d wept with despair. And at some point, this rage had welled up within her. Her mother’s life was a fiasco. And her own? She’d been having these asthma attacks for more than two years now. Was there anything to Dr. Venner-Brock’s theory that the root of it all could be psychological? Wouldn’t the attacks have had to have started when she was eight years old, shortly after her father’s disappearance? Why so many years later?

But she wouldn’t have found herself an internship in Waldmünchen just because she occasionally had some shortness of breath. What had done it was her mother, after Anja had found her at the last minute and taken her to the emergency room in Großhadern with an overdose of sleeping pills. She wouldn’t die without finding out what happened to her husband, Anja had sworn to herself. She would search for her dad. No matter how hopeless it was.

She thought about the day ahead of her. In the morning, she had to stop by the office and drop off her data sheets. At 8:30, Grossreither, the director of the Forestry Office, had a meeting with some Chinese lumber importers in the Hochbrunn Municipal Forest, and she was supposed to accompany him. The Chinese wanted to have a look at beech lumber. She wasn’t particularly excited. She found working with Grossreither unpleasant; it was no secret what the man thought of the fact that women were starting to turn up in Forestry Office jobs. On the other hand, maybe she should try to get used to bosses like him. After the meeting, it was back to soil surveying. Obermüller was standing by for tomorrow. And in Faunried, of all places. Chance had willed it that she and Xaver had crossed paths on the very first day. Would the pattern continue? Would she run into the rest of them, too? And what did she expect would come of it?

She listened to the church bells strike eleven. When they struck the half-hour, she was still wide awake. She was tempted to take one of the sleeping pills she’d gone through the house and gathered up after the catastrophe with her mother—she hadn’t gotten rid of all of them. She figured it couldn’t hurt to have a few handy for emergencies. But she thought better of it, got up, went to the little table by the window that served as her desk, and started getting her data sheets in order. She tried to estimate the time it would take them to map the rest of the Leybach woods. A few days, at least.

Then she froze. What had she put down on sheet 25? She compared the data with sheets 24 and 26, then looked back at 25. The soil layers were conspicuously different than those of the samples in the immediate vicinity. She looked for the spot on the map and tried to think where the discrepancy might be coming from. Then it hit her what the most obvious explanation was: she’d messed up. No wonder. It was the sample that Obermüller had drawn just before Xaver had turned up. Had she even really looked at the soil probe? She couldn’t remember. All she could remember was that she’d been pretty flustered. Could there be more than one faulty entry?

She cursed softly. She couldn’t very well turn in a set of botched samples. She separated the data sheet from the rest, drew a question mark at the top of the page, then put it on top of the stack. She put the stack in her bag. She would take another sample tomorrow and turn in the sheets at the end of the day. Then all of a sudden, the weariness hit her, and she dropped down onto her pillow, exhausted.

4

The interpreter was clearly having trouble with the vocabulary. The mood was growing tenser by the minute. The Chinese didn’t want these beech logs; that much was clear. Or they didn’t want them at this price. So the municipality would have to sell the three stacks to another lumber buyer. But the Chinese didn’t like that either, since they still needed beechwood to make piano legs out of. And so they very much wanted to buy this beechwood from the municipality, were even particularly interested in Bavarian beechwood, but something was wrong with it, which the interpreter either didn’t understand or just didn’t know how to translate into the German language.

“So what’s wrong with it then, huh?” Anja’s boss asked, annoyed. “The logs are flawless. No forks, no Chinese beards. Nothing of the sort. So what’s all this about? Where’s the problem?”

The interpreter’s face went rigid. “Chinese beards?” she asked uneasily. “Excuse me, what are Chinese beards?”

“This right here,” Manfred Grossreither explained and pointed to a log set aside from the rest and placed on the other side of the aisle. It had an unsightly bulge. “This here. Chinese beard.”

Without knowing it, he had switched into the somewhat clipped manner of speaking that Germans often use with foreigners, even those who happen to speak German. Thankfully he hadn’t yet started speaking at especially high volume while distinctly enunciating every single syllable, but that was sure to be the next step.

The two Chinese men stared at the interpreter expectantly as she frantically searched for words. Suddenly a few lines burst from her mouth, and she pointed at the bulge in the log, repeating a word several times as she did so, then shaking her head, pointing at the spot again and waiting nervously for how her employers would react. The two men exchanged a brief glance; a thin smile came to their lips, and they launched into a long counterargument.

“Quality is not good,” the interpreter translated succinctly, thus making it clear once and for all that the main problem wasn’t the lumber; it was the communication.

Grossreither waved his hand in resignation. Anja felt sorry for the interpreter. Where had the two men found this young woman? Was she a student? She spoke good German. But lumberyard-German wasn’t German. And having to explain to Chinese men that knots on German beeches were called Chinesenbärte—Chinese beards—was bound to be a bit tricky. Maybe you’d have to render the term “German’s nose” in Chinese—maybe that was how to remedy the situation? But the interpreter didn’t seem very quick on her feet. More than anything, she looked overwhelmed; she’d probably have liked nothing more than to sink down into the forest floor. Had the two men not told her what to expect? In all likelihood, they were trying not only to push down the price of lumber, but also to scrimp on the cost of an interpreter, and so for a pittance, they’d hired this poor student who was completely out of her depths.

The sound of a motor revving up interrupted the awkward pause in the negotiations. About a hundred feet away from the logs they were discussing, a lumberjack was busy pulling newly felled trees out of the forest. A giant unmanned bulldozer moved noisily back and forth along the logging road, pulling a long steel cable taut that stretched back to the spot on the steep wooded hillside where the lumberjack stood with his remote control, trying to unwedge a giant tree that had gotten snagged when it fell. The bulldozer’s engine roared again and again, accompanied by the rattling of the steel cable as it tightened and the creaking of the logs as they knocked together. The lumberjack cursed. They could hear him from where they stood. The bulldozer backed up a bit, turned slightly, and ate into a dozen feet of forest. A pained expression came over Anja’s face.

Suddenly Grossreither was shouting. “PAVEL! God damnit! Keep the bulldozer on the road.”

But Pavel seemed not to hear anything.

“Frau Grimm, go tell that idiot to keep the damn bulldozer on the road!” Anja hurried off. But the lumberjack had already straightened the bulldozer out and was now waving his hand apologetically. Anja stopped. Then there was a loud crack, and a giant tree trunk came tumbling down the slope. Anja winced again. Theory and practice, she thought, resigned. What Pavel was doing to the delicate forest soil was nothing short of a massacre.

“Why do we have to sell beech to China anyway?” Grossreither groused on the drive back to the office. “Can’t they grow the lumber for their own piano legs?”

“Globalization,” said Anja.

“My ass. By the time the log makes its way to China and back, it’s put ten times more pollution in the air in transit than the tree could filter out in a hundred years. The whole thing’s bullshit. And then they try to push the price down on top of that.”

“Was that all they were doing, do you think?”

“What else? It’s the same thing every time. Bad mouth the quality and buy cheap. Those logs were Grade A.” He went silent, rummaged in the center console next to the handbrake, and pulled out a piece of caramel candy.

“Want one?” he asked.

“No thanks.”

Grossreither had quit smoking a few weeks back, but in light of his candy intake since then, Anja wondered which addiction was more detrimental to his health. The man was in a miserable mood, which couldn’t have just been on account of the Chinese. He drove jerkily, stomped on the gas, waited too long to shift gears, and muttered curses to himself.

“How’s it going in Hinterweiher?”

“We’re still in the Leybach woods.”

“Hmm. I see. You’re not exactly the fastest, are you? Is Obermüller that slow?”

“No. But we had a weird incident yesterday. Xaver Leybach. Do you know him?”

Grossreither snorted. “’Course I know him. What was the trouble?”

“He’d been watching us from somewhere out of sight. Then he came up to us in the Haingries with a gun in his hand and started shouting, telling us to leave his woods alone. It was pretty unnerving.”

“Did he not know you were coming to map the soil?”

“The notices went out in April. There weren’t any objections, I checked.”

Grossreither chewed on his candy a while before saying anything else. “The Gollases are about at their wits’ end with old Xaver.”

“Are they?”

“They’re really struggling just to make ends meet. If they had the Leybach woods, they could do something with them. The son, Lukas, wants to turn the woods into an eco-forest, with catwalks built up in the trees, thinks it’ll help boost business by taking in guests in the summers. Apparently, they’ve started doing it in America.”

“Australia,” Anja corrected.

“Whatever. In any case, tourism is pretty much the only option left for making any money around here these days.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“Xaver. He doesn’t want any part of it. You saw for yourself. He’s always wandering around like a ghost and scaring people.”

“Who actually owns the property?”

“The parents. Anna and Alois Leybach. But they’re not in the picture. Anna’s been sick for years, holed up at the Leybach place, and is liable to die any day now. Xaver’s not actually of sound mind, legally speaking. I can’t imagine him being allowed to run around on his own for much longer. But having him committed is easier said than done. He’s the one who looks after his mother, see.”

“And Alois Leybach? Why isn’t he dealing with it?”

Grossreither let out a groan, as he sometimes did before saying something. It could mean any number of things. “He took off ages ago. That’s why everything’s gone to the dogs.”

Anja didn’t say anything. She just looked out the window. Gone to the dogs? The choice of words made it plain how different her and Grossreither’s conceptions of what a forest was were. She let her eye wander over the landscape. The hillsides were a lush, bright green. The corn was high, everywhere the harvest had begun. The sun warmed the earth, and all the trees were full of ripe fruit. The Bavarian coniferous forest stretched off into the landscape for miles, like a dark green ocean. Grossreither’s approach to forestry. Monocultures as far as the eye could see.

Full of uneasiness, she thought back on the scene in the clearing. Always wandering around like a ghost and scaring people. She tried to call back the memory of the Xaver Leybach she’d known as a child. He’d been odd, but never as aggressive as she’d seen him yesterday in the Haingries. Xaver had been harmless, sweet to her and the other children. He’d been gentle with the animals, too, tender, even, unlike the other boys. Especially that oaf Rupert. So Lukas was planning a catwalk through the treetops. And Rupert? Franz and Waltraud? What did they look like today? Would her name mean anything to them?

“Are you going to need to be in Faunried for long?” Grossreither pulled her away from her thoughts.

“Three or four days,” she replied absently. She was silent for a while, then asked, “Why is Xaver Leybach so strange? Do you know him well?”

“Depends what you mean by know. He’s a poor sap. He always was odd, and since his father’s been gone, it’s only gotten worse.”

“How long’s he been gone?”

Grossreither thought a moment. “Ten, fifteen years. I don’t know exactly. At first, he only came around every now and then. Was in business with Heinbichler.”

“Who’s that?”

“He holds the hunting lease.”

“Ah.” Anja’s sarcastic tone didn’t escape Grossreither.

“Say whatever you want,” he said drily. “Did you see the wildlife damage?”

“Yeah. Pretty bad.”

“All he does is shoot a little here and there. There’s no rhyme or reason to it,” he groused. “Sometimes he does what he’s told, of course. But often enough, he’s not around for months on end because he’s off hunting big game. He’s got a lot of money.”

“Is he also related to one of the families?”

“No. There’s no relation at all. Heinbichler is an old buddy of Albrecht Gollas, Franz’s father. They’ve known each other forever, going back to before the war. Guess you’re interested in the Gollas family, huh? Well, just wait till you see that Lukas.” He looked at her and winked. “Him you might like.”

Anja had to laugh.

“You’re laughing now, but just wait. A sharp kid, that one.”

“Sure,” she replied, and asked herself what could ever have brought Grossreither to assume she might be interested in any of the men around here. But nevertheless, the mention of Lukas hit home. She tried to remember the towheaded eight-year-old she played with almost every day for two whole summers. But the only thing she could remember now was the dialect he’d spoken: his o’s sounded like i’s.

To change the subject, she asked: “Do you know why they put a clearing in the middle of the Leybach woods? As you’re headed towards Hinterweiher, right nearby, there’s this big field. Why would someone spend good money to clear out the trees for a meadow?”

Griff reached down next to the handbrake again and fished out his next piece of candy. “Well, somebody who can afford to go big-game hunting in Africa can probably spend a few thousand to clear a patch of forest if he feels like it, right?”

“Was it Heinbichler that cleared the land there?”

“Well, it definitely wasn’t the Leybachs or the Gollases, not with all the scrimping they have to do. I’m guessing old Heinbichler wanted a place where he could lure boars and foxes. By the way, since we’re on the subject: if you could do a bit of shooting, it wouldn’t be the worst thing. You saw for yourself that Heinbichler isn’t hunting nearly enough. Why not start this evening, maybe? And you’d better steer clear of Xaver. At some point, there’s going to be trouble with him.”

“Sure, will do,” she said, firmly resolved not to follow either suggestion.

5

Obermüller was waiting for her in the Forestry Office parking lot. He didn’t look to be in a particularly good mood and, after a muttered “good morning,” didn’t say another word for the duration of the drive to Faunried. Anja made no attempt to determine the reason behind his sullen silence. Besides, she had her own worries. How was her mother doing? She had to be sure not to forget to call Sonja around noon.

Nothing came of that plan, however—by 12:30, they’d worked their way into a patch of forest with no reception whatsoever.

“Can I ask you something?” Obermüller said suddenly. They’d stopped for lunch and were eating their sandwiches.

“Yeah, sure.”

“This guy yesterday. How is it that you knew him by name?”

Anja took a sip of coffee before replying: “I came here on vacation a couple times as a kid. It was a pretty long time ago. I was seven or eight. Back then, there were a lot of kids around here that I used to play with.”

“Kids?” Obermüller asked, confused. “That nut job yesterday was at least three times your age.”

“Sure. But not in his head. He fit right in among us kids.”

“Got it,” Obermüller replied and took another bite of his sandwich.

“He would look after us sometimes, make sure we didn’t fall in a creek, that kind of thing. He didn’t look so terrifying back then, not like he does now.”

“So, how did you know it was him?”

“Part of his right ring finger is missing. The fingertip. While you were talking to him, I was watching the hand that held the gun. That’s how come I noticed it.”

Obermüller chewed on in silence. “We had something like this happen last year, too,” he said after a while.

“Oh yeah?” she said and stuck a tomato wedge in her mouth.

“We were out early,” he continued, “six-thirty maybe. Suddenly there was this loud noise, sounded like a stuck pig. And then here comes this farmer with a pitchfork, running at us and screaming his head off. Fluawereihium, he was screaming. Fluawereihium. Nobody could understand what he was saying. We just stood there like a couple of jackasses until it finally hit Grossreither. The man thought we were coming from the Flurbereinigung, you know, the people who redraw the property lines. It turned out later that the boundaries on this guy’s farm had already been completely redrawn, house, fields, pastures, forest, everything. But they were still trying to force him to take part in another round of land reallocation and pay horrible fees for it. Fifty thousand or something like that. He thought we were from the government and were trying to survey his property on the sly. I mean, if I were him, I think I’d have gone after us too.”

“I didn’t catch much of what the guy was saying yesterday, but I don’t think he was talking about land reallocation.”

“Well, sure,” Obermüller conceded. “It just made me think of it, is all. Either way, there’s more than enough reasons to get your pitchfork out when people from the government come around, right?”

“You wouldn’t have been laughing if he’d pointed that drilling at us, would you?”

“Mmm,” Obermüller replied. “You do have a point there.”

He kept on chewing in silence and looked around contentedly. Was Xaver watching them again today? she asked herself. She looked around. The undergrowth in these woods was so full and dense that she could only see a few feet ahead of her. Xaver probably wasn’t actually dangerous; surely Grossreither wouldn’t have sent her back out here if he was. But his warning still made her uneasy all the same. Maybe it would be a good idea to stop by the Leybach place after they finished today to clear up yesterday’s incident? Should she speak with Anna Leybach? Or with Waltraud Gollas? How would Xaver react if she went looking for him?

Soon after that, they got back to work. Obermüller made quicker progress than he had in the morning. Or had she gotten slower? It looked easy, hammering the soil probe in and twisting it back out again, but even with good technique, the work was taxing. After twenty or thirty samples, her arms would have been falling off. Obermüller, on the other hand, seemed to really be hitting his stride at this point. Was it the rising temperature, was that why she was starting to get tired? The sun had burned off all the haze, and the air had gotten noticeably warmer.

Ever more often, Anja would stop herself and stand still, determined not to forget, despite the monotonous work, what a beautiful forest she got to be in today. The Leybach woods were no ordinary woods. There was all sorts of dead wood lying around, a clear sign that there hadn’t been any kind of deliberate management here for a long time. This wasn’t just wooded property; it was on its way to being a real forest again: wild, enchanted, with dead trees left standing or knocked down by the wind and rotting where they lay. The body of a cow, long decayed and almost completely mummified, was stuck, grotesquely tangled up in the roots of a fallen beech, and for the life of her, Anja couldn’t figure out how the animal could have wound up there. But above all, she kept running across species of plants and vegetation that tended not to appear in a strictly managed municipal or state forest.

Again and again, she paused and took time to relish the poetic stillness of this untended tangle of nature. Obermüller’s hammering had, of course, long since driven off all the animals nearby, so she scarcely saw any birds, much less any other kind of creature—of which, judging from the signs of wildlife damage, there must have been plenty. But even the ground-cover vegetation was interesting. There were tons of wall lettuce. Greater woodrush dominated in the sunnier spots, as was to be expected. Strangely enough, she also ran across patches of blueberry, probably the result of the repeated clearing of the undergrowth in the time before these woods had fallen into their enchanted slumber. There was also lady fern and wall hawkweed. Anja paused for a while, almost awestruck, before a carpet of Japanese honeysuckle nearly thirty feet long and at least fifteen feet across and dotted with delicate white flowers; finally, she made a note of the difficult-to-eradicate invasive species on her clipboard.

When they’d finished mapping for the day around four o’clock, she sent Obermüller back to the car ahead of her and went back to the Haingries on her own. It wasn’t like she needed him to stand there and watch while she redid the botched sample. The clearing looked just like it did the day before. The dead chicken was untouched and was already starting to show signs of decomposing. It seemed like there had been some wild boar activity overnight by the metal box full of corn that hung from a beech branch at the edge of the field. Anja turned around and looked off towards the hunting blind, which stood at the southern end of the clearing. The corn bait was in ideal shooting range from the platform, but apparently, Heinbichler wasn’t exercising his rights as hunting lessee at the moment.

She didn’t want to stay long. She went to the spot where she thought she’d find sample 25 and searched the ground for the worm-like rolls of earth that were usually left behind after they’d taken their probes. She spent several minutes pacing back and forth along the stretch of ground and finally discovered a few bits of dirt, which she took to be the remnants of yesterday’s sample. She kneeled briefly to make sure, then pushed the soil probe into the ground, gave two careful taps on the blunt end to secure the probe in place, and then hammered firmly to drive it deeper. When she’d reached the 120-centimeter mark, she tossed the hammer in the grass and stuck the small metal cylinder through the hole at the top of the shaft. Then she braced herself, planting both feet firmly on the ground, twisted the soil probe several times left and right, and with an effort, pulled it back out.

The profile matched the entry she’d made yesterday exactly. She hadn’t made a mistake. Something was off about the soil. It was flipped on its head, so to speak. She took out the data sheets for the previous and following samples and found that they confirmed the discrepancy. Here the humus layer was only about half as large as it was in the others. There were grayish-green colored particles of loam present in the B horizon that appeared only much deeper in other samples from this area. Here, though . . . she paused and looked more closely at the bright deposits in the lowermost layer. She reached into her bag, pulled out a small bottle of hydrochloric acid, and poured a few drops on the bright spots. They immediately started foaming.

Anna looked in confusion at the fizzing substratum. Then she cleaned the probe, walked fifteen steps back in the direction of the previous sample point, and took an additional sample. Here there was no calcium in the soil. She looked around, puzzled, and studied her surroundings. Why did the sequence of soil horizons change so abruptly as you moved towards the middle of the clearing? She walked towards the edge of the clearing and drew a third sample a few steps to the right of the hunting blind. The profile was unremarkable. The humus layer was a bit less sizeable, which was to be expected at the edge of the wood, but the deeper layers matched the pattern that prevailed in the forest soil and almost everywhere else in the clearing. Just not at Sample Point 25.

She leaned on the soil probe and took in the whole of the cleared area. If she wanted to get an exact picture of the shift in soil profiles, she would have to draw samples in a significantly tighter grid, every five or ten meters or so, maybe even tighter than that, which would keep her busy for a good long time. But what for, exactly? It wasn’t as though they were reforesting this area. Grossreither would have her committed if she and Obermüller spent hours mapping out this clearing.

And what did the anomaly indicate, anyway? At some point, a hole was probably dug in the middle of this field and then filled in again. So what? Had she found traces of anything suspicious in the samples, anything she was obligated to report? No. Everything looked normal. No oil. No hazardous waste. Nothing, at least, that would indicate any illegal dumping or anything that would pose a threat to the groundwater. The calcium residue could have come from building material that might have been disposed of here. Or maybe there had been an accident when the land was being cleared? Maybe oil had leaked from a machine, and that was why some of the soil had been removed? But did she even have the time, or the authorization, to concern herself with this question? Why was she still standing here?

Suddenly the feeling of numbness was back. She immediately reached into her pants pocket, pulled out her inhaler, bit down on the mouthpiece, and breathed in the medication as deeply as she could. Leaning on the soil probe, she waited for the effect to kick in. The constriction in her lungs immediately eased up. But not the one in her throat. It felt like it was clamped shut. Could Dr. Venner-Brock have been right after all? What was she looking for here? A suspicious soil profile? Hadn’t she been waiting this whole time for her dad to come walking out from behind the trees and go back home with her? Was that why she was standing here, gasping for air—because her last, pitiful memories of him were lurking in these woods? The last clear images she had of him, her last vague impressions? The day before his disappearance, they had been in the forest together. In the “beech school.” He had shown her how the old beech trees raised their offspring, how even at an advanced age, their crowns would suddenly start growing again. It was their way of controlling how much light fell on the ground below, thereby maintaining order among the saplings shooting up like wild. Almost as if there was a will there, a consciousness.

She heard a sound that made her spin around. Not ten feet away from her stood Xaver Leybach, the barrel of his gun pointed straight at her head.

6

Rudolf Heinbichler didn’t move. He stared through the branches at the clearing, hardly daring to breathe. What he saw was grotesque. Xaver Leybach was aiming a gun at point blank range at a young woman he’d never seen before who a few minutes earlier had been taking soil samples in the Haingries. He’d heard the sound of the hammer and had no trouble finding her. He’d almost gone and spoken to her, but then had found it more enjoyable to watch her in secret. You didn’t see a sight like that every day. And now this! Where the hell had Xaver come from? He’d popped up behind the woman out of thin air, and when she’d spun around in alarm, he’d raised his rifle.

Heinbichler felt the sweat running down the back of his neck. His heart was pounding. Should he intervene, come out and show himself before something horrible happened? But what would happen if he were to go charging out into the clearing? Xaver was unpredictable. No one could say what was going on in that maniac’s head.

A light breeze moved in the tree tops and stirred up a rustling in the branches. He could also just slip away without anyone noticing.