The villagers, surly and hard at work mending their nets and caulking their boats, told them that a German couple had in fact arrived a few days before and shortly afterward the man had left alone because the woman had drowned. Where had the man gone? They didn’t know. The baroness and the editor asked the village priest, but he didn’t know anything either. They also asked the gravedigger and he repeated like a litany what they had already heard: the German had left a little while ago and the German woman wasn’t buried in the cemetery, because she had drowned and her body was never found.
