“Mom!” Sara ran toward Helen, stumbling over the uneven ground.

Werner froze. His rage gave way to complete bewilderment when he saw his daughter.

Sara fell to her knees and drew her mother’s head onto her lap. “Mom?”

Werner remained still, taking in the tableau of his wife with his elder daughter. His shoulders sagged. The stick slid from his fingers and fell to the ground. Slowly, jerkily, he sank to his knees and bent forward, holding his hands over his face.

Ralf kept the pistol trained on Werner. All he could hear was his heartbeat growing louder and more insistent, like a kettledrum in his head. The gun felt cold and heavy in his hand.

“Ralf? Give that to me.” Helen was suddenly standing next to him. Her eyes were bloodshot and her hat was askew, but her voice was strangely calm. “We aren’t going to shoot anybody here.” She gently pushed his arm down and took the pistol from his hand.

He watched her tuck it into the pocket of her coat. Behind her, Werner had scarcely stirred. Sitting there like that—huddled on the edge of the cliff, his face in his hands—he suddenly looked so small and vulnerable. All energy and aggression seemed to have drained out of him.

“Come on; we’re leaving,” said Helen. She put a hand on Ralf’s arm.

Ralf hesitated. He looked at Werner again. His back was hunched, his body shuddering. He might have been crying, but the wind carried the sound out to sea.

Broken, thought Ralf. A broken man.

“Ralf, are you coming?”

He looked up and saw Helen and Sara walking down the hill. Hurried after them, without looking back.

The fall sun . . .

The fall sun hung low over the hills and cast long shadows on the fields. The rolling landscape seemed friendly, gentle. All the villages in this region had complicated names and lay remarkably far apart. Between them, the landscape was dominated by rugged wilderness and farmland, with just the occasional house dotted here and there—at the end of a long, muddy driveway leading through a thick coniferous wood, or on top of a freshly plowed hill and surrounded by open barns full of farm equipment being stored until spring. Settlements that looked like they had been built in the Middle Ages, assembled from large red or sand-colored stones, with shutters over the windows and a well in the yard.

The surroundings made a great contrast to the congestion on the freeway. A whole other world—a silent world, seemingly outside time. Ralf hadn’t seen a single person in the last twenty minutes, although he had spotted packs of long-eared hunting dogs. They were scavenging by the side of the road, their noses sniffing along the ground. Just now, a deer had jumped out of the path of the Mercedes.