AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m going for—my badge—and ID,” she stammered.
He picked his head up off the butt of the shotgun. “You police?”
“I work for Private, Private Berlin.” She showed him the badge.
He made a motion for her to come down the stairs toward him.
“The gun, sir?” she asked. “It’s making me nervous.”
At last he lowered the gun, and then pulled back the hood, revealing a rawboned man in his late thirties. He said, “I saw the car after I quit plowing. You’re not supposed to be in here. They’re demolishing this place next month.”
“I’m sorry,” Mattie said, her wits returning. She started down the stairs toward him. “This was an orphanage. A…a close friend of mine lived here.”
“Lot of people lived here. Can’t say many liked it, from what I’ve heard.”
She stuck out her hand. “Mattie Engel.”
“Darek Eberhardt,” he replied, not taking her hand. “You should leave, Frau Engel. This place is dangerous. Floorboards are all rotted. You could go through anywhere. Break a leg. Or a neck.”
“My friend is…dead, murdered,” Mattie said. “He was more than my friend. He was my fiancé, and I’m just trying to understand his childhood.”
Eberhardt studied her without emotion. “I’m sorry for your loss, but you won’t learn anything here. This place was abandoned twenty years ago. Looters stripped most of it. Took the government forever, but they finally got the land sold to some green energy company.”
“I heard that. Lightbulbs.”
Eberhardt turned without comment and started down the hall.
Mattie hurried after him, saying, “The records about Waisenhaus 44 that are in the Federal Archives, they’re…they’re incomplete.”
Eberhardt said nothing as he headed toward the front door.
Mattie called after him, “I was hoping I could find someone who knows about the orphanage, someone who might have known Chris.”
Eberhardt went out the front door. The rain had slowed. The thunder boomed and the lightning flashed to their east now.
“I’ve got to get back to my tilling,” Eberhardt said.
Mattie followed him, saying, “I’m sorry. I’d hoped…” She started to choke up. “It’s just so hard not understanding…why he died, who he was, this place.”
She wiped at her tears with the sleeve of her rain jacket. Eberhardt had turned to face her, the shotgun held low at his side, his face a mystery.
“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I’ll be going. I’m sorry to have bothered you and taken you away from your work.”
Mattie pivoted and took several steps down the overgrown driveway toward the road.
“Hariat Ledwig,” the farmer said. “She lives in a nursing home in Halle.”
Mattie stopped and looked at him, puzzled. “Who is she?”
“My father’s second cousin. She ran this place for twenty-two years.”
CHAPTER 56
THIRTY-FIVE MINUTES LATER, Mattie knocked and entered a room that reeked of old age, disease, and an antiseptic that smelled like citrus.
Hariat Ledwig sat upright in a chair by a hospital bed, connected by a tube to an oxygen tent. A little bird of a woman in a nightgown, robe, and slippers, she was having a coughing fit. A blanket covered her legs. There were books stacked around her. One lay open in her lap cradling a magnifying glass.
Whe
