More Bitter Than Death: A Novel Part 12

Tilda's voice is shrill now and her little fists are clenched hard against her kneecaps. Her legs have stopped swaying, her little body is stiff and unmoving. Her hair has fallen out of her ponytail and it hangs soft and thin over her skinny shoulders.

"Then what happened, Tilda?"

Carin's voice is calm, almost stoic. Suddenly Tilda slides from her chair and stands in front of the table with her hands over her ears. She screams at the top of her lungs, "Stop it, stop it!"

Carin steps over to her, puts a hand on her shoulder, waits until she quiets down, takes the girl's little hands in hers, and squats down so that her eyes are level with Tilda's.

"Should we draw a little, you and me? Then we can go back to talking about your mom in a little while."

Tilda nods. They sit down at the table again. Carin takes out crayons and paper.

"Should I draw my house?" Carin asks.

Tilda nods.

"Okay, it's a really little house. Like this." Carin draws something on the paper in sweeping strokes.

"Where's the cat?" Tilda asks.

Carin laughs. "Ah, so you remember that I have a cat? Yeah, we can't forget about Adolf." Carin draws something small, then reaches for an orange crayon and fills in the outline. "There, that's what he looks like. And then there's a tree. There's only one tree, because the yard is really small. But it's a good tree, because it's got tons of apples every year. And you can climb the tree too, because it has really good climbing branches."

"We don't have a yard where Mama lives." Tilda's voice is calm again.

"No, well, not all buildings have yards, but maybe you have something else that's good?"

"Our TV is huge. It hangs on the wall and it's almost totally flat, like a pancake."

"Wow, that sounds really nice. Do you remember what you were doing that night, before the knock on the door?" Carin asks.

Tilda looks down again, clenches her fists again, and squirms in her chair. She starts kicking her feet. "I . . . don't know," she says.

"Okay, that's good. That's what you're supposed to say when you don't know. I'd like you to try to think a little now about the guy who hit your mom. Did you see what he looked like?"

"I don't know," Tilda says.

"Had you met or seen that man before?"

Again Tilda writhes as if the question were uncomfortable to answer. "I don't know."

"Did the man say anything?" Carin asks.

"The man and Mama were screaming."

"Do you remember what they said?" Carin asks.

Tilda hesitates. "They screamed a lot."

"Could you hear what they said?"

"I don't know."

"Okay, that's great, Tilda. You're doing a great job. Did you recognize the man's voice?"

"I don't know."

"But you think it was a man, not a woman or a girl?" Carin asks.

"He was . . . a magician."

"How do you know he was a magician?"

Tilda sits there in silence again, serious, studying Carin.

"Why do you think he was a magician, Tilda?" Carin repeats.

"He took the coin."

"What did he take?" Carin asks.

"The coin."

A pause. "He took money?" Carin asks.

"Yes."

Carin is surprised, quickly looking in their direction through the one-way mirror. "Was that before or after he hit your mom?" Carin asks.

"First he hit Mama, then he did that."

"First he hit your mom, then he took money?" Carin says.

"Yes."

Sonja sighs. She really hadn't suspected robbery homicide. The violence was too brutal for that. But if that's what it was, then that is really depressing-a single mother kicked to death in front of her own child because a junkie somewhere needed a quick fix. When it came right down to it, it was totally conceivable; it happened all the time.

Roger leans over to Sonja and whispers, "Not bad. Her bush is growing a little in my eyes."

Even though she doesn't want to, Sonja can't help but smile, filled with an unreserved tenderness toward her hopeless, lazy, male-chauvinist colleague. She gives him a friendly nudge in his side and looks over at Tilda's father, worried that he might find their kidding around inappropriate, but he isn't paying attention to them. He is just staring through the pane of gla.s.s as if hypnotized, the sweat at his temple gathering into little beads.

VaRMDo.

OCTOBER.

A perfect Sat.u.r.day.

A long walk along the sh.o.r.eline, the sea chasing our feet.

Thick knit hats now, mittens, wool sweaters under our jackets. The sky is gray and heavy, like a slab of concrete, above us. Black birds circle over our heads, as if scouting out a potential meal.

Afterward we drink hot chocolate on my couch. The woodstove crackles in the corner and the radio is on. They're talking about flooding, about how part of highway E18 just floated away like a child's toy boat. It took two cars with it. Both drivers died. A female pa.s.senger survived by escaping through a broken winds.h.i.+eld and climbing up onto the roof of a hot dog shop. She had also survived the tsunami in Thailand in 2004 and says, her voice quaking, that this was worse. Her husband, Rune, never made it up to the surface of the muddy water. After forty years of marriage and after beating both cancer and the tsunami, she lost the love of her life to a wave of muddy gruel along the E18.

I look at Markus, sitting there next to me in his jeans and hoodie on that old, worn couch. His face is as smooth as a child's. His eyes, with those pale lashes, look vaguely worried. I wonder if I'll ever let him get close enough to me to be as vulnerable as the woman on the radio.

"Are you okay?" he asks gently in his sing-songy northern accent and I prop my feet up on his knees. He ma.s.sages the soles of my feet, contemplating me in silence.

"Yeah, I'm okay," I say.

"I wish you didn't have to deal with stuff like that at work."

"Stuff like what?" I ask.

"Violence and all that c.r.a.p. The kind of stuff I see day in and day out," Markus says.

"What do you think I should be doing at work then? Therapy for arachnophobes or shopaholics? These women really need help. We're making a contribution, Aina and I. And Vijay, my G.o.d, he has actually dedicated his life to this stuff."

"But this guy seems more disturbed than average," Markus says.

"Do you mean more disturbed than the average man or the average perpetrator of domestic violence?"

Markus pushes my feet off his knee, insulted, and says, "Nice, really nice. Honestly!"

I laugh, take a sip of hot chocolate, lean against him, kiss his soft mouth, let my tongue run along his lips. "Did I make you mad?" I ask.

He relaxes, puts his arms around my waist, and says, "Not mad, just worried about you."

"I don't want you to worry about me. I'm so over having people worry about me."

"I know that, but this time maybe it's justified. I talked to the woman in charge of the investigation into that grisly murder in Gustavsberg. That was obviously a totally heinous crime. The level of violence was . . . unjustifiably brutal. He had obviously . . . kicked her whole face off; it was, like, lying next to her. Do you understand? In front of her daughter and everything."

Suddenly I feel uncomfortable. Take another big sip of my hot drink. "Did she see anything?" I ask.

"The little girl? I don't know yet. They were going to question her yesterday, I think."

"Vijay says you can't question a child that young," I say.

Markus shrugs. "I don't actually know. I'm sure they'll get a witness psychologist or child interview specialist to help."

"Did they catch him? The woman's boyfriend?" I ask.

"No, you can't just arrest someone like that. It's not even definite it was him."

"Obviously it was him. It's always the guy," I say.

"No, it's almost always the guy."

"Same difference."

"Not in a legal sense."

"How can you say that? He kicked his girlfriend to death in front of her daughter and you're just . . ."

"But, Siri." Markus looks at me in surprise. "What is this about? When did you get so personally involved in this?"

Suddenly I feel the nausea rising in me like a wave. I almost spill my cup on the couch and am forced to rush out into the hallway. I only just manage to get the thin wood door open before vomiting onto the front steps. The cold air creeps in, through my thin clothes, stopping the nausea for a second. I'm breathing hard.

Then his hand is on my shoulder. "Siri, what's going on? Are you sick?"

I lean my forehead against the cold facade of the house, feeling the frost melt from the heat of my skin. "I think . . . I think talking about that murder was a little too much for me. Could we talk about something else?"

He doesn't respond but carefully leads me back into the warmth of the cottage.

Autumn nighttime sounds outside our bedroom window: the wind racing over the skerries, thin branches sc.r.a.ping against the body of the house, like fingernails. Rain drumming on the roof. A faint scent of wood smoke that lingers in the room.

Markus lifts me up on top of him, so that I'm straddling him, fondles my b.r.e.a.s.t.s, lets his hand sink down toward my hips and rest there a second. Then he strokes my stomach and b.u.t.tocks with his wide hands.

"You've put on a little weight, haven't you?" he asks, his tone accusatory.

I pull away, withdraw to the other end of the bed, bury myself deep under the down comforter as if that could hide the truth. The unmentionable.

I know I have to tell him, but I can't find the right words. Because how do you tell someone something like that?

I want your baby, but I don't want you.

Morning as black as night.

No wind.

Not a sound to be heard as I shuffle out to the outhouse in Markus's enormous rain boots and oversize down parka. It must have been below freezing last night, because the puddles are covered by a thin layer of ice that shatters like gla.s.s as I crunch my way along, completely unimpressed by this wondrous landscape, decorated with a brittle milky white membrane from the cold.