Free The Dark Monk by Oliver Pötzsch, Lee Chadeayne

tell me, Simon will. So tell me!”
    “You’d better keep a close eye on your Simon.”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “You know exactly what I mean. He’s doing more than just making eyes at this woman from the city.”
    Magdalena blushed. “How can you say something like that? You have hardly ever seen them together,” she cried. “And besides…I don’t care who Simon flirts around with, anyway.”
    “Then it’s all right.” He walked over to the stove and threw another piece of wood on the fire, sending sparks into the air. “It’s much more important for us to learn who the workers were in the church.”
    Magdalena had trouble focusing her thoughts on anything but Simon. They had been a couple for more than a year, even if they couldn’t act like one openly. She cursed her father for suggesting that Simon might have something to do with another woman.
    “Why are you concerned with the workers?” she said finally, trying to pick up the thread of the conversation. “You certainly don’t believe that—”
    “You heard it,” her father interrupted. “The workers opened the crypt, and even if Baumgartner swears up and down that none of them were down below, I don’t believe it. Someone poked around down there.”
    “And then killed the priest?” Magdalena gasped.
    “Rubbish!” Kuisl exclaimed, spitting on the floor, something he only dared to do when his wife, Anna Maria, wasn’t home. At the present, she was up at the market in town with the twins.
    “Naturally, none of them is responsible for what happened to the fat priest,” he continued. “But they weren’t able to keep their mouths shut, either. We’ve got to find who they spoke to, and I’m sure we’ll have the murderer then.”
    Magdalena nodded. “The murderer learned about the crypt and was afraid Koppmeyer would find out too much, and that’s why he killed him. That could be what happened,” she said, mulling it over.
    The hangman opened the door so that clouds of tobacco smoke and fumes from the stove could drift out, and an ice-cold breeze blew through the room.
    “So what are you waiting for?” he asked.
    “What do you mean?” Magdalena said, with some irritation.
    “You wanted to help me snoop around, so go find the workers who were in the Saint Lawrence Church and talk with them. Talking with men and making eyes at them is something you can do, can’t you?”
    Magdalena grimaced at him, then put on her cape and walked out into the cold.
    When Simon walked in the front door, he realized it would probably be some time before he would be able to continue reading the little book about the Templars. Sitting on the bench by the stove were three citizens of Schongau, all of whom looked like they needed more than just a few words of consolation and a cheese compress. Simon knew them all. Two were farmers from the area whom he had often seen in the marketplace. The third was the Schongau blacksmith’s journeyman. He was coughing up reddish-yellow mucus, which he thoughtfully spat into some brown rags. Nevertheless, some kept spattering onto the wooden floorboards, which were only sparsely covered with dirty reeds. The faces of the patients were drawn, beads of sweat stood out on their foreheads, and all of them had dark rings around their eyes and faces the color of wax.
    To drive away the poisonous miasma, old Fronwieser had been burning lavender and balm, and it smelled like Easter mass in the little room. Simon didn’t think these vapors did any good. He had read, in fact, that diseases were carried by dirt and bodily fluids, but his father considered this to be just newfangled nonsense. As the blacksmith’s journeyman on his left went into a new fit of coughing, Simon cautiously moved one step to the side.
    “Isn’t it nice that the young gentleman finally showed up. What kept you so long in Altenstadt? A nice little supper with the priest?” Bonifaz Fronwieser entered from the adjacent room holding a smoking