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Therese Peters went to the town hall first thing in the morning and asked after her husband in the planning department. When she found out that he had not arrived at work, she reported him missing.
    In the days that followed, the police established that Wilhelm Peters had not been seen since the Saturday night, and that some patrons had observed a heated altercation between him and his wife in front of the marquee. There were further reports that Wilhelm Peters had taken his leave, somewhat inebriated, after midnight. Soon it was being said that he was probably no longer alive, and Therese Peters came under suspicion.
    Rita Albers looked up as a policeman brought her a cup of coffee.
    “Oh, thank you,” she said, smiling at him. “Tell me.” Rita cleared her throat. “Your colleague in Kranenburg . . . Is he always like that?”
    The man grinned broadly and nodded. “You mean Karl van den Boom? He’s all right. He never loses his cool, and under the worst kind of stress he restores calm. He always says, ‘If people would just do everything at half the speed, only half as much would happen.’ We always send Karl out to domestics. As far as we’re concerned, de-escalation has a name: Karl. And he has his own particular sense of humor.”
    “I’ll say,” Rita growled.
    She leafed through the thin paper of the files, which rustled beneath her fingers, and found the record of the interview. Some of the typed characters seemed to have embedded themselves in the almost transparent pages over the years; they were pale and barely legible. The carbon paper had left halos around the lowercase n ’s and r ’s, and they lay scattered across the pages like small planets.
    She pointed at the signature. “The reports are all signed by Sergeant Theo Gerhard. Is he still around?”
    The man shrugged. “Certainly not in the police force, but he may still be alive. You’d best ask Karl.” Rita groaned quietly to herself.
    An hour later, having read the files, she snapped them shut. Therese Peters had remained the prime suspect to the end. She had been interviewed several times but had stuck to her story. There had been neither a body nor sufficient evidence.
    Toward the end of the file were two handwritten notes.
Dec. 28, 1950
Frau Therese Peters did not comply with the summons of Dec. 21 of this year. Today, her home was found to have been abandoned. There were no personal items or clothing to be found. Her current place of residence is unknown.
Police Sergeant T. Gerhard
Feb. 15, 1951
Efforts to establish the whereabouts of Therese Peters have been unsuccessful. Since the circumstantial evidence against her in the case of the missing Wilhelm Peters has not been corroborated, we are abandoning the police search.
Police Sergeant T. Gerhard

Chapter 8

    April 21, 1998
    Therese Mende stared out at the moonless night, and the images rose up of their own accord from the blackness of the water.
    At first she resisted, closing her eyes and trying to evade them. But random memories continued to dance, unchecked, beneath her eyelids. A keen, stabbing pain ran through her body, as fine as silk thread and cutting. She knew it, and she had felt it, along with a pounding heart, after her telephone conversation with Hanna. The period she had forgotten was breaking powerfully over her, crushing her with the weight of old images. In the distance, the orange lights of a containership proceeded slowly across the calm water, the only sign that time was not at a standstill, even now. So peaceful. So detached.
    July 1939
    For years, the six of them had been riding their bicycles the almost eight miles to school in Kleve together. The boys rode to Freiherr von Stein High School, the girls to the girls’ secondary school.
    Alwine, from the Kalder estate, had red curls and a loud, irreverent laugh, which she would let out over the schoolyard like a fanfare, and for which she was regularly entered in the discipline book.
    Her older brother, Jacob,