My wreath was the only memorial on the mounded earth above his grave. It looked cold and lonely; only the dainty footprints of the cat crisscrossed the white covering. The funeral flowers had been tidied away after they withered—probably by poor old Herr Müller. She wouldn’t have bothered. Thank heaven for the kindliness of snow; it covered raw earth and weedy neglect with a benign white mantle.

Frau Hoffman’s grave was equally stark at this season, but there were pathetic evidences of someone’s tending. The stem of a small climbing rose twined around the dark granite. The rose was brown and leafless now, but during the past summer the green leaves and small fragrant blossoms would have softened the starkness of the stone. Dried brown flower heads protruded from the snow—not weeds, as I had thought, but chrysanthemums and asters—autumn flowers.

The cat ambled up to see what was taking me so long. A gust of icy wind rattled the dead stalks. She sat up on her haunches and swiped at a swaying flowerhead. I moved instinctively to stop her, but she scampered away from my hand, and I stood back, smiling wryly. Hoffman wouldn’t mind. Life goes on. Better a warm living creature, rolling and playing, than silence and icy winds.

Clara had gone into a feline frenzy, rotating in a vain attempt to catch her tail, brushing the snow aside in a wide patch that bared the withered flowers and frozen earth. A white protrusion caught my eye and I bent to examine it.

It was a bulb—probably a daffodil, to judge from its size. Freezing, the ground had heaved and thrust the bulb out and upward. One less flower to brighten the springtime and testify to the hope of resurrection; it would never survive the winter’s cold, exposed and vulnerable as it was. I knelt, thinking I would replant it, but the ground was frozen hard as stone.

Bad Steinbach looked like a teeming metropolis after the loneliness of the cemetery. I was glad to be back in civilization unscathed. My shoulders ached; I realized I had been driving with my head pulled in like a turtle’s, in anticipation of attack. Thank you, Herr Professor Schmidt.

The town was livelier than usual, and as I watched people bustling around, setting up scaffolding and booths and arranging benches under the arcade, I remembered there was some sort of festival that night. Weihnacht, fröhliche Weihnacht…Mine wasn’t looking very fröhlich at the moment, what with a frozen body in my garden at home and a number of live bodies harassing me in Bad Steinbach.

I opened the car door. The cat jumped out and went swaggering off, without so much as a thank-you for the ride or a backward glance. I wondered whether she would find John at home.

When I asked for my key, the clerk gave me a handful of messages. The first was from Tony. “Dieter and Elise came by, have gone skiing, we’ll be at the Kreuzeck, why don’t you join us?” I crumpled it and went to the next, which read, “Astonishing news! Have made great discovery! Come instantly to my room!”