by Lena Bourne
“Let’s just go into the house, Rado,” Renata says softly, so it’s most likely the former.
He huffs then stomps across the knee-high grass towards the front door, waving for us to follow him once he’s about halfway there.
We do and meet him at the foot of the three concrete steps that lead up to it. He goes first and as soon as he pushes open the door, that scent I smelled through the window yesterday wafts out. Jasmine, I’m almost certain. But the damp cold also wafts out, smelling strongly of rot—that earthy smell I associate with churches and deep holes in the ground.
The hallway is dark, but he presses the switch and a yellowish light comes on. It’s still dim, but better. As we follow him across the creaking floorboards through the dark, cold hallway, the thing that’s been bothering me about this house since yesterday and I couldn’t quite put my finger on, suddenly clicks into place in my mind. If he’s supposed to be taking care of this house, why are the windows broken, why is the grass not mowed, why does it smell so strongly of mildew, dirt, dust, and rot? Yet the electricity is on. Odd.
A dark stairway with a metal railing and wooden treads leads to the upper story. And behind it, there’s a narrow door, white, but streaked with dirt. The basement. I’m sure of it. Rado has already moved on and he and Renata are waiting for me at an open door through which light is streaming.
I walk over to join them and peer into the living room. There’s a sofa, two armchairs, and a TV stand in there, all covered by dirty white sheets so soiled by cobwebs and dust they’re streaked with black. There are several other pieces of furniture in the room, but I don’t recognize them, because they’re covered by dirty sheets too.
Our next stop is the kitchen, where nothing is covered by sheets, but everything is streaked with dirt and dust too, including the light brown wooden table which is black in places. The interior smells strongly of rotting wood.
In each room, Rado gives us a couple of moments to look inside before stomping onwards across the creaking floor. He doesn’t turn on any more lights, but there’s no need since enough light comes in through the windows in this part of the house. He walks right past the bathroom door without even looking inside, and I realize most of the strongest and nastiest smell is originating from there.
Next, we enter the addition to the house. Here, the floorboards don’t creak as badly, and they’re a slightly lighter color than in the rest of the house. The source of the fresh, beautiful smell of jasmine becomes apparent as soon as he pushes open the door to the first of the bedrooms. It’s the one in which the window isn’t broken, and compared to the rest of the rooms we’ve seen it’s positively sparkly clean. The pink blanket on the bed shows no signs of dirt, nor does the lace trimming on it, though it has yellowed with the years. There are some massive, dust-laden cobwebs hanging in the corners and off the ceiling, but I’m pretty sure the floor has been swept recently. The source of the jasmine scent is a clear mason jar of potpourri on the small white wood desk by the window.
“This was Esma’s room?” I ask as I walk into it.
Rado jerks like he’s about to grab my arm and pull me back, but he just runs his fingers through his hair the way Mark often does when he’s thinking hard.
“Yes,” he says.
I wait a few moments for him to say something more and when he doesn’t, I walk to the bed. The oak tree where his brother hung himself dominates the view from the window beside the bed and behind it is a gently rolling green hill. A lovely view.
I walk over to the single closet. It’s carved as intricately as the headboard of the bed, with butterflies, flowers of all kinds, leaves, and vines. The double door is slightly ajar, and the closet is empty. As is the matching dresser next to it.
“Nothing is in here,” he says. “Anita packed it all up before she left.”
“And hers is the bedroom next door?” I ask.
He nods and stands aside so I can exit the room and enter that one. Anita’s bedroom isn’t as clean as her sister’s and there’s no jar of potpourri on the desk. The furniture is identical here, as is the bed, but the closet isn’t empty. From what I can see through the cracked door, large, bulging, black garbage bags, which I assume contain clothes. The room smells of dust and mildew, but there’s a faint scent of jasmine over it all here too. He must change that potpourri in Esma’s room often for the scent to override all other scents like that.
I walk over to the desk and reach down to open the little drawer with a snail shell for a knob.
“Are you done looking now?” Rado asks harshly. I have the drawer open halfway, but I leave it and turn to him.
“If you take care of this house, how come that window is still broken?” I ask, indicating the one over Anita’s bed.
He scoffs. “I just make sure the house doesn’t fall down. But if you must know, yes, I did put some plastic over the broken windows, but the wind keeps tearing them off.”
“Does the brother, the one who lives in Austria, come often to check on the house?” I ask.
He shakes his head with a twisted grin on his face. “No. He hasn’t been here in at least five years now. But he pays the bills, sends me money for repairs, and has some lofty notions of moving back here for retirement. I have no idea why he’d want to. Everyone here is glad to see the back of that family.”
Harsh words spoken by the guy who keeps their house standing. “Is the jar of potpourri in remembrance of Esma and you brother?”
If looks could cut like knives I’d be lying on the floor bleeding right now. “I don’t want to be associated with this book you’re writing. At all. Don’t even want to be mentioned in it. Is that understood?”
I nod, opening my mouth to assure him I’ll do as he asks.
“You’ve seen the house, so leave now,” he says. “I have a lot of work left to do.”
We’ve barely glanced at the house as far as I’m concerned, but Renata takes my arm gently and starts pulling me out of the room. I follow her although his reaction did sort of root me to the spot. I have so many more questions for him. I could tell him I’m investigating Anita’s past in a more professional capacity than just to write a book, but I’m sure that’ll just make him even angrier right now.
So I follow Renata out of the house, and we reach the front lawn a few moments before him. He’s standing in the doorway as we turn back, growling it looks like, his face all in shadow, only his eyes burning with black fire. I have no idea what to make of it. Is it just because my presence here and questions are dredging up painful memories, or is he afraid I’ll find out some dark secret?
“You’re coming for dinner tonight, right?” Renata calls to him. “Around seven?”
He grumbles something that could be taken as agreement and disappears back into the house.
“He’s a pretty intense guy, isn’t he?” I ask in a whisper as we start walking away from the house.
She sighs and glances back over her shoulder. “I think he blames himself for his brother’s suicide. He thinks he should’ve done more to help him. But that’s just what I assume. He never talks about it at all and gets angry when I mention it. I also think he keeps Esma’s room nice because his brother loved her so much.”
Somehow I’m not seeing this kind, remorseful man in the one I just met. And Renata is seeing him through rose-colored glasses, of that I’m sure. But that’s about as much as I know for certain from this encounter.
After the visit to Anita’s house, Renata suggested we have a cup of coffee in the town center. We’ve been sitting in a café just off the main square, nursing our coffees for the past two hours. This leisurely enjoyment of having coffee for hours on end is one of the best things to have come from this region. The small café we’re at—named Rio for some reason—the coffee is served in a copper pot on a silver platter, along with a pot of sugar in cubes, and a little pitcher of milk. That’s the old way of serving coffee though. Quite a few of the people around us are drinking regular cappuccinos like the kind you ca
n get anywhere else in the world.
The sun is warm, people are friendly, the buzz of conversation is a pleasant constant, and even though the spindly metal chair with a thin cushion I’m sitting in leaves a lot to be desired in terms of comfort, I could think of few better ways to spend the afternoon.
Renata’s friends and relatives have been stopping by frequently, some even taking the time to sit and chat with us for a while.
Several more people reiterated that the Rajić family wasn’t well-liked, and most of them believe Esma just left on her own. As for Anita, I got the feeling that most of them think she had it coming. No one has that kind of brutal death coming! Especially not a young woman with her whole life in front of her. But I somehow managed to not start an argument with those who alluded that she might have.
I also got the sense that Rado is considered something of a weird loner by most people around here, but generally harmless. While he was wild in his youth and did leave town for a while, he is something of a local handyman now, as in the one you call when you have an emergency. Renata and I haven’t been alone for long enough so I could ask her about him some more.
I just called the waitress over to pay, when Renata starts waving at a woman on the other side of the narrow square with a wishing well-type fountain in the middle of it. I’ve been watching it all afternoon, or more like watching the people of the town stop by it and toss a few coins into its acid green water. I remember such fountains from when I was a child, but I can’t remember the last time I’ve seen one. I think it’s considered non-ecological these days, but I think I’m going to toss a few coins in there before we leave anyway. I just haven’t decided what to wish for. Something to do with Mark, probably.
The woman Renata called over is a short, dark-haired busty lady wearing black skinny jeans, ballet flats, and a red and white striped shirt. She’s carrying two heaping white plastic bags and they’re swinging precariously as she strides across the square to join us.
“That’s Marina, Rado’s cousin,” Renata tells me excitedly.
She’s grinning at me like she’s just given me the best present in the world and I hope she’s right.
Renata introduces us and invites her to take a seat. It takes a bit of convincing, but Marina finally relents. Instead of paying, I order an orange juice when the waitress comes, while the other two both get coffees. Renata then spends the next five minutes explaining to Marina who I am. The gratitude that always fills her voice whenever she’s talking about how I saved her in Berlin makes me uncomfortable to the point of blushing. But Marina seems very impressed.
“What can I say? I wish Esma and Anita, and all the other girls were lucky enough to have met someone like you,” she says once Renata is done talking. “But most people just want to take advantage of girls like that and then they cast them aside like trash, don’t they?”
I shrug and nod because I agree with her completely. Extreme poverty and no prospects drove hundreds if not thousands of Bosnian women abroad, seeking a better life. Some were duped into it by human traffickers offering them modeling jobs and such, others left knowing very well that they’ll have a hard go at it. Countless ended up on the streets of big cities like Berlin, just like Renata and Selima did. I’m glad that I don’t get any questions about the former.
“Renata tells me you were good friends with Esma,” I say.
“I wouldn’t say good friends,” Marina says, fixing her brilliant green eyes on mine after giving Renata a sharp look. “We hung out for a while and I dated her brother briefly.”
Not exactly what I hoped for, but at least she’s close family with Rado and Milo.
“Do you think Esma just up and left and never returned?” I ask. “Your cousin Milo didn’t, right?”
She shakes her head, her eyes wide and full of passionate fire. “I never believed that, and I supported poor Milo as much as I could in trying to find her. I wish I’d done more to help him. He was in a bad way and we all should’ve done more as a community to help him. But it was a different time back then around here, and the Rajić family wasn’t popular. Nor were Milo and Rado, for that matter. Too wild, too loud, and boisterous. They were raised by their grandmother on the family farm after their parents were killed in a car crash. She couldn’t control them.”
“What do you mean that it was a different time?” I ask.
Marina shrugs. “This place was a ghost town for one thing. Bleak and hopeless. Most of the younger people left, taking their families with them. There were no jobs, nothing was happening, we were all scared and scarred by the war. All this that you see around us, this wasn’t here fifteen years ago. Or five years ago, for that matter. It’s only just recently started picking up.”
She sweeps her arms wide to encompass the square, which is teeming with people strolling by in the warm afternoon sunshine. I count five cafés and at least ten shops, all of which are full of customers. But the buildings lining the square all show signs of dangerous neglect. Peeling, discolored facades, boarded-up windows, missing front doors in some cases. The cobbled ground could use some repair too, since huge chunks of it are missing in places.
“People only recently started coming back here to live?” I ask.
“There’s no place like home,” she says with a wry smile. “I’m thinking that even if Esma had left like people are saying, she’d be back by now. At least for a visit. Everyone thinks she wasn’t in love with Milo, but that’s not true. They were what you might call childhood sweethearts. And they were well suited, he was wild at heart and she was more down to earth. They completed each other, I think.”
Opposites like that don’t always make the best couples. That’s just a popular myth. But that’s neither here nor there, so I don’t say it.
“So something must’ve happened to her,” Renata says and shudders at the thought, probably remembering how close she herself came to that fate.
Marina gives her a very sympathetic look as she rubs her arm affectionately. “You’re home, and you’re safe now.”
Marina picks up her cup and takes a small sip of her coffee.
“Another thing is that Milo would’ve gone with Esma anywhere,” she says. “He was trained as a carpenter, so finding work wouldn’t have been a problem. In fact, I know he wanted to leave, but because she wouldn’t, he stayed too. For all her partying and carrying on, Esma was devoted to her family. She wouldn’t just leave them.”
“So why is everyone saying she did?” I ask, looking at both of them in turn.
They both shrug.
“Because it’s easier to believe she found a better life somewhere else than to think something bad happened to her here,” Marina says.
She makes a very good point.
“But some people do think that, don’t they?” I ask in that conspiratorial tone, which usually works to loosen people’s tongues and tell me secrets.
Marina nods and turns to Renata. “A lot of them do. Your grandma Fata is one of them.”
Renata gives her a wide-eyed look. “Are you serious? She never mentioned this to me.”
“No one talks about it so much anymore. And you were gone, while the worst of it was going on,” Marina tells her.
“So what are the main rumors?” I ask, taking a sip of my juice.
Marina gives me a sharp look. “Will this end up in some newspaper if I tell you? I don’t want that. My country gets a bad enough rep as it is. And now that tourism is starting to happen for us, I don’t want to be responsible for any bed press.”
“Marina here works at the town hall,” Renata says. “She’s head of the tourism office.”
“All I’m interested in is solving the mystery of Esma’s disappearance,” I say.
She doesn’t look convinced, so I take another sip, weighing my options in my head. But I’ve taken the pretense as far as I can, I think. I knew from the get-go that just posing as a writer won’t get me far in investigating this case.
“I’m not actually writing a book
at the moment. Or an article,” I say. “I am part of a special Europol task force and we’re currently looking into the murder of Anita Rajić.”
Marina turns a few shades paler right before my eyes. “That poor girl. I had heard that they never caught her killer. The way she died is the only reason I’m glad Esma never returned home. If she’s alive somewhere, I hope she doesn’t know about the gruesome way her little sister died.”
“Do you think her death and Esma’s disappearance are connected?” Renata asks me.
“That’s what I’m here to find out,” I say and grin, not even sure why. Probably because they’re both very pale and have nearly identical serious/worried looks on their faces.
“There’s those who believe that someone from town killed Esma and hid her body,” Marina says in a quiet voice. “There’s also those who believe that someone was Milo. That he just put on that song and dance of looking for her to make himself look less suspicious.”
“But you don’t believe that?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Milo was a gentle soul underneath his wild ways. He didn’t kill her, I’m sure of that.”
“And the other part?” I ask.
She looks at me with serious, narrowed eyes. “The other part is something I’d rather not believe. Who wants to think that a murderer is living among us?”
She peers at me and I nod in agreement.
“There’s also a theory that she was kidnapped by someone,” Marina says. “As you probably know, all sorts of sleazy, nasty men prowled around here tricking pretty young girls into going with them with promises of a better life abroad. Sometimes, if the girl they were after wouldn’t go, they’d just take her.”
I had heard stories like this before.
“But detectives came to investigate, didn’t they?”
Marina scoffs. “Too little, too late, I say. They weren’t interested in finding anything. Just enough so they could say she left of her own accord.”
“And they found evidence of that?” I ask.
“As far as I know, they did determine that she packed a small bag and they couldn’t find her passport,” Marina says. “According to Milo, Esma didn’t have a passport, but she could’ve crossed the border with just her ID and she had that.”