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And then? When you’ve done that? When you’ve found out? What then?
A
Her head was strangely light when she reached Amundsen Street; her feet weren’t touching the ground, as if she were moving along in a dream. Not a nice dream.
The door to tower number 18 was open. She kicked one of the empty beer bottles in the stairwell, to make Mrs. Ketow come to the door and stick her head out and listen, so that someone would know that she was upstairs. But how much help could she expect from Mrs. Ketow? When she rang the doorbell on the fourth floor, she was ice-cold again, shivering, her body temperature seemed to be shifting rapidly between hot and cold … maybe she did have a fever after all.
The door opened. A
“Hi, A
A
“Sure,” said Micha. “I’m just reading a book. I can read a book all by myself now, or almost. It’s difficult, but it’s exciting, too. There’s this dog … Did he tell you that they’re standing in front of a stream now? I mean, in the fairy tale? I wonder how they’ll get over it. If there’s a way.”
“I don’t know if there’s a way,” A
“Hey, you’re crushing me!” Micha said as she slipped out of A
And then she disappeared into her room, disappeared into the story of a dog, a different dog, one that wasn’t silver-gray. A
“Micha?” she called, taking off her shoes in the hall. “Where is he?”
“He went to buy something!” Micha called back. “He’ll be back in a minute! I have to keep reading!”
A
Packages of pills. Loads of packages. Not the ones he sold … Children’s Tylenol. Dramamine. Rohypnol … maybe that was something he sold? Teddy-bear Band-Aids. A thermometer. Cotton balls. She took a deep breath. She pushed aside a few blister packs. The box was deep. And beneath all the silvery foil of the blister packs, there was something black.
A gun.
Her heartbeat grew loud again. She felt it in her toes now, like she’d felt the bass in the dining hall the other night. She took the gun out of the box. She didn’t know anything about guns. About weapons in general. She stood in front of the mirror and tried to hold it the right way. It looked ridiculous in her hands. She put it back in the box. And she would have pushed the blister packs over it again.
But at that very moment, the bathroom door opened.
The door of the apartment must have been opened first … there must have been footsteps in the hall. Her heartbeat had been too loud for her to hear them. She took a step back.
“A
Bertil hadn’t ever climbed down from a hunting blind that fast before. With each rung of the ladder, his binoculars swung against his chest. In his head, there was only one word, and that was a name: A
And suddenly, he wondered why he was alive.
If what he’d suspected all along was true, then Ta
He’d almost stopped. Now, he was glad that he hadn’t, glad that he’d followed her out here as well. He felt nauseated when he kneeled next to the pit the wild boars had made. He’d never seen a dead body before. A
Where was A
So he’d tell them to come here first. They wouldn’t believe him anyway if they didn’t see this.
She couldn’t say anything. She just stood there, in the middle of the tiny bathroom, motionless. She watched his blue eyes wander. Their pupils were back to their normal size, but he looked tired. Exhausted. He looked like someone finished up. He was carrying a plastic shopping bag. His eyes, his bleary ice-blue eyes, slid from A
He looked at the weapon. He looked at A
“So,” he said.
She was still mute with fear. Scream, A
He nodded as if she’d asked him something. “Yes, A
She realized that she’d kept her voice low, too. Where had she found her voice? And if she’d found it again, why didn’t she speak louder?
“I found Michelle’s grave, Abel. The grave in the forest.”
He nodded. “The thaw.”
“The wild boars have been digging there, in the mud.” Why did she tell him? To gain time? Time to do what? “She never called. She never withdrew money. She’s been lying in the earth out there the whole time.”
“Of course. I told you. The white cat is sleeping.”
He was still playing with the weapon. “Micha …,” she began.
“Is asleep, too, by the way,” he answered. “I just looked in on her. She fell asleep reading. That book about the dog.” He smiled, and it wasn’t a mean smile. It was a smile that she still liked a lot. The lines of a song appeared in her head, a song from Linda’s LP collection: