Chapter 14: The Waiting Room

Vincent drove me to Herrsching in his own car.

At five to nine we pulled up outside the doctor's surgery.

Dominik's truck was already at the curb.

He sat on the stone steps in the same shirt he had worn to dinner.

A brown pill bottle stood on the step beside his boot.

He had been there since dawn.

The woman who sold newspapers next door told me so, and she gave me a look I could feel on my skin.

"I'll wait in the car," Vincent said.

"No," I said. "You'll come in and sit down."

He turned off the engine.

The waiting room had fourteen chairs, and eleven of them were taken.

A man with a bandaged hand. Two mothers with small children.

An old woman with a cane, who had nodded to me outside the bakery every morning.

She looked at me, and then she looked away.

They all knew. The village had known since midnight.

Dominik stood in the doorway behind me with the bottle in both hands.

The doctor's door opened. He came out in his white coat and did not greet him.

"Here," he said, and pointed to the middle of the room. "Where they can all see you."

Dominik walked to the middle of the room.

The children went quiet. One mother put her hand over her daughter's ears.

"My name is Dominik Reuter," he said. His voice cracked on the first word. "I own the Seehaus."

"Louder," the doctor said.

"I told this doctor I couldn't sleep." He cleared his throat. "I lied. I wanted the pills for someone else."

Nobody coughed.

"The woman who lives in my attic," he said. "I put them in her wine."

"I drugged her, so that three other men and I could touch her while she lay in her bed."

The man with the bandaged hand stood up and walked out.

Dominik did not look after him.

"I did it for weeks," he said. "I called it love, but it was theft."

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