The Memorist

Chapter 54

Tuesday, April 29^th-5:06 p.m.

As she and Sebastian hiked up the hill and into the densely wooded mountains, everywhere Meer looked she saw another postcard image: a herd of goats grazing in a glen, a rough-hewn stone wall and a scenic overlook dangerously hanging above a thirty-foot drop, offering an expansive view of the town below. The vista was exactly how she’d imagined it earlier when Sebastian first mentioned Baden.

“You can look all the way out there but no one can look up and see you,” he said softly.

Meer was surprised to feel his hand on her shoulder.

“You’re getting too close to the edge. The overhang is unprotected. People have fallen.”

“Death in the Vienna Woods,” Meer said. “Johann Strauss would be distressed.”

“Especially since the waltz was known as the flight from death. But there’s been more than enough tragedy here for someone to write that version, too. Mayerling’s not far. You know about that?”

She shook her head.

“The Archduke Rudolf of Austria and Hungary and his mistress, Baroness Marie Vetsera, committed suicide a few kilometers away at his hunting lodge. He was married and she was only seventeen. The building’s a convent now but locals say the lovers’ ghosts haunt these hills.”

“My father wasn’t kidding when he said people are preoccupied with death in Vienna. That’s not the first time you’ve brought up ghosts. Do you believe in them?”

“I never wondered about ghosts or life after death before Nicolas-” he broke off and checked his watch. “We should keep going. There’s only about an hour of good light left.”

As they walked away from the overlook Meer veered right as Sebastian took the left.

“No, it’s this way,” he called out.

“Can’t we take this route?”

“I don’t know that way. This is the main trail. I don’t want to get us lost.”

“We won’t get lost.”

“How do you know that?”

Meer shrugged. “Can we just see what’s this way?”

They climbed for a few minutes more, and after another turn in the road, arrived at a small yellow, three-walled hut. An almost life-sized wooden Jesus affixed to a large cross hung on the back wall behind a rough stone altar flanked by statues of Mary and Joseph.

Meer stared at the shrine in the middle of the woods as if it were an apparition.

“I’ve seen this place…” she whispered as she walked into the shadows of the structure, knelt down and ran her hand along the edge of dirt where the ground met the wall. Closing her eyes, she tried to see backward through time again, but couldn’t. She had no idea what this place might once have meant to her. Even so she kept running her hand over and over the dirt as if she would be able to divine some message from the ground.

“Meer, what are you doing?”

She turned to Sebastian to explain and saw a deer run by, followed by a buck. Their hooves cracked small branches and crumbled layers of dried leaves.

Sebastian asked again: “What are you looking for?”

“I’m not sure but I think-” Her voice had dropped in register and was as low as the dark blue-greens of the conifers casting shadows all around them. “Margaux…helped him…she helped Beethoven hide the flute and the music. I think she might have hidden one of them here.”