by Andrea C. Busch

In November of 2007, EQMM published a delightful sailing mystery (“Baltic Bail-Out”) by German writer Andrea Busch. Only a few months ago, we received the sad news that Ms. Busch had died suddenly in 2008. She was not only a writer but one of her country’s noted anthologists; someone who’ll surely be missed in the mystery field.

Translated from the German by Mary Tannert

With some people, it’s their own fault that they shuffle off this mortal coil so early, thought Hans-Dieter Janssen as he listened grumpily to the racket from the shredder in the garden next-door. The garden that was actually his garden. And just what was there in that garden to keep a shredder running so long, anyway? It couldn’t possibly all be from the spring pruning!

Well, okay, the whole place had become a little wild and overgrown. It had taken longer than usual this last time to find a buyer for the house. But the basic form of the garden was intact and perfect. There were apple, cherry, and plum trees; there were currant bushes and raspberry bushes and a hedge of blackberries that turned the garden into a nearly unbreachable fortress. There was a wonderful rose pavilion tentacled with a great variety of clematises and beautiful old climbing roses that outdid themselves in a breathtaking show once a year. There were beds for kitchen plants, there was a romantic cottage garden with peonies, snapdragons, cosmos, hollyhocks, monkshood,and larkspur—in short, everything to delight a true gardener’s heart. But it was the roses that meant the most to Hans-Dieter, the roses whose blooming splendor he admired every May and June from his attic window.

He snuck along the high hedge of boxwood at the end of his tiny garden. It stood back-to-back with the blackberries and together they formed an almost impenetrable protective wall. He pushed aside the branches at the spot where he had carefully thinned the boxwood and peered through the blackberry canes, which sported spring’s first shimmer of green. But still he couldn’t see what was being shredded in there, and to judge by the noise, it could be anything—old rose canes, tree trimmings...

Hans-Dieter was sure the man in the neighbor’s yard was going about the job allwrong, butchering the garden in the process. None of the frequently changing owners of the imposing old brick house had known how to take care of that botanic splendor. His botanic splendor. The house and garden ought to be his; after all, he was the last twig on the tree of a dynasty founded on a fortune made in sugar beets, the last of the family that had built the house and designed its magnificent garden for use and delight alike. But he was, unfortunately, an illegitimate twig: His mother’s pregnancy had resulted in her immediate dismissal by old Meyerink personally, and he had never acknowledged Hans-Dieter as his son.

The trees in the garden were older than he was; the roses and bushes had been lovingly planted by his mother herself, whose beauty was then also in bloom, whose wide hips and gentle curves had promised fruitfulness. Old Meyerink probably hadn’t been able to resist.

Hans-Dieter felt anger flush his cheeks when he thought of how the Meyerink villa and grounds had been sold to that snob from Dusseldorf who wanted to tear up the garden to make room for a swimming pool. Luckily he and his plans hadn’t gotten much further than the construction estimate. A tragic accident. A marten, they said, had chewed through his brake lines.

And then that harebrained Munsterland hussy who just had to move to the Lower Rhine because she’d read somewhere that the people who lived there were particularly broad-minded. She was very broad-minded too, she was fond of pointing out. She had an opinion on everyone and everything. She’d never held a shovel or a rake in her hand, but that didn’t stop her from knowing better than anyone else when it came to gardening. Within five minutes of Hans-Dieter’s meeting her, she had begun to confide the details of her digestion. Unappetizing details. It didn’t take long before people in the village avoided her; probably no one was broad-minded enough. And nobody really grieved when she fell from the top floor while washing the windows and broke her neck. The whole village turned out for her funeral to be sure that her powers of speech were really buried along with the rest of her. Hans-Dieter remembered that the minister spoke of a tragic accident and that her soul would surely find its rest with God. “Not even God will be able to put up with that chatter!” one of the congregants had joked, and for the first time in the many centuries of the little cemetery chapel’s existence, laughter filled its walls.

Hans-Dieter’s mother had never said a word as to whether she’d taken old Meyerink into her bed of her own free will. She’d never said a bad word about the man at all, and yet Hans-Dieter knew she was disappointed that Meyerink didn’t ask her to come back to the big house after his wife died. Instead, he’d taken the servants’ quarters, where Hans-Dieter grew up, and a tiny piece of garden and parceled them off from his grounds and planted dense hedges between the two. This strange arrangement ensured that mother and son were out of sight but still not so very far away. And he’d gotten Hans-Dieter an apprenticeship as a gardener, as if he instinctively knew where the seventeen-year-old lad’s heart lay. But he’d never acknowledged him as his son, and instead of leaving the house and garden to him, he’d willed the place to his much younger sister, who wanted nothing more than to peddle it to the nearest buyer, take the money, and get herself a condominium in the city.

After the Munsterland hussy, there’d been a family with lots of children. Hans-Dieter had had to watch helplessly as the little monsters carved their initials into the bark of his beloved fruit trees. But he was even more horrified at what he heard one day, spying through the thin spot in the boxwood hedge. The children’s mother announced that she wanted to get rid of the old climbing roses. It wasn’t enough for her that Annchen von Tharau, Paul’s Himalayan Musk Rambler, and Félicité et Perpétue bloomed once a year as if their lives depended on it, unfolded their beauty in dense clusters of spectacular flowers that took your breath away. She wanted hybrid tea roses that bloomed all year long and were easier to arrange in vases than the rambler roses with their floppy stems. His gardener’s heart bled as he heard the woman speak so disrespectfully about his darlings. Those roses had been growing there since before she was born! One ancient legend said they’d arisen out of a fleck of foam from the sea, and another claimed they’d been born of a drop of sweat from the prophet Mohammed. Innocence and purity, fiery love and passion were united in them. You don’t simply eradicate such wonderful creations as if they were pests!

Naturally he’d felt sorry for the children, who’d had to find their mother dead in the rose pavilion one afternoon after school. That must have been a dreadful shock for them. She lay, limbs all twisted, next to the overturned ladder, the secateurs still in her hand. At least, that’s what the villagers said. Her husband took the children and moved to the city.

All this time, the village had been whispering that the house had not been blessed since the Meyerinks left it. Meanwhile, the mere absence of blessings had developed into a positive curse. Most of the interested parties had asked aroundthe village to find out why the house was priced so affordably. And even if everyone claimed not to believe in curses, all the deaths did scare people off. The onlyperson who seemed not to be bothered was the man with the shredder. Did he perhaps not know how dangerous an old shredder like that can be? That a person can accidentally get caught in the branches and be pulled in up to his elbow? And some shredders have technical defects. An electric shock can happen so quickly!

* * * *

Four weeks later, Hans-Dieter Janssen stood studying the real-estate ads displayed in the plate-glass window of the realtor’s office. The price of the Meyerink villa had sunk to less than a third of its original asking price, and thus moved into the realm of possibility for him. Maybe he should approach the grieving widow directly so as to save the realtor’s fees? Surely she would be pleased to get rid of the house and all its sad memories.

It was with sincere gratitude in his heart that Hans-Dieter thought of his mother. “I don’t have much to leave you, son,” she’d said on her deathbed. With a great effort she’d pushed herself up to a sitting position and reached into the depths of her nightstand, drawing out a tiny velvet bag that she pressed into his hand. “Those are the keys to the house that ought to be yours by rights. The locks are good solid old security locks, and they’ve never been replaced. I think you know what you need to do.”

Lovingly he patted the ring of keys in his pants pocket. Oh yes, he’d always known.

“What you inherit from your fathers, earn it first to make it yours.”—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe