“Yes. Hanne has been placed there temporarily. Until social services finds another solution. I think that’s a good thing—it means we can go talk to her if we need to. If and when she starts to remember.”
“Does she?” I ask. “Remember anything, I mean?”
“Not a damn thing.”
Manfred looks down at his coffee cup. He looks sad; his entire walrus-like body radiates grief.
I want so much to comfort him, but I don’t know how.
“I still don’t understand how she kept it from us,” I say. “I mean, if you can’t even remember where you are, you must be pretty sick. How could you hide it?”
Manfred shakes his head, then says, “I know. It’s strange. But I think she had her strategies for managing life. Remember the journal she always had with her?”
I nod.
Of course I remember the brown book. When it wasn’t tucked under Hanne’s arm, she was writing in it. When she wasn’t writing in it, she was reading it.
“You think she wrote things down?”
“Yes,” Manfred says, and takes a sip of his coffee. “I’m pretty sure she did. Otherwise, she never would have been able to handle the job.”
“Then she must have documented everything. What people looked like, what the…”
Manfred doesn’t answer. Instead, he stares out through the small, dirty window. Outside, day has surrendered to night, and darkness reaches inside as well. A bare lightbulb, hanging from a temporary cord in the ceiling, and the faint glow of the laptops are the only illumination.
We’re sitting in what used to be the back office of the grocery store. The adjacent room was the actual store part. Shelves still stand there, and an old checkout counter. The walls are covered with graffiti, and we had to clean out piles of empty beer bottles, cigarette butts, and used condoms when we moved in. At that point we thought it was sort of fun. Manfred called it Chateau Ormberg, the house of sin in deepest Södermanland. And Hanne…Well, Hanne took out her book, probably to write down what he said.
Manfred pushes a broad finger on the map. When he pulls it away, a small coffee stain sits on the paper.
“Hanne was found here on the road that goes south of Orm Mountain. We searched the forest within a one-kilometer radius and talked to the people who live nearby. The Brundin family, relatives of yours, were apparently in Katrineholm on Friday night. They were home on Saturday, but didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary. And what about the Birgersson family—they didn’t see anything, either? Right?”
I shake my head, then add, “I talked to the father, Stefan Birgersson. And the daughter, Melinda, who’s sixteen. They didn’t see anything. The daughter was with her boyfriend on Saturday night at the time Hanne was found, and the father was at a friend’s playing video games.”
“Video games?”
“Yep. And then there’s the son, Jake. He was home alone on Saturday night. “
“Jake. Jake Birgersson? That’s his name?”
I nod.
“Classic Ormberg name,” I add.
Manfred smiles uncertainly, as if he’s afraid to insult me by laughing.
We’ve gotten to know each other over the two weeks we’ve worked together, but not well enough to navigate where the fine line between joke and insult lies. Especially when it comes to a sensitive subject like my hometown.
I smile a little. Not a cheerful smile, but rather an I-think-we-should-change-the-subject smile.
Manfred takes the hint and says nothing more.
“What about the woman who found Hanne?” I ask. “Has anybody followed up with her?”
“Yes. She lives in Vingåker. I called her this morning. She confirmed everything, but had nothing new to add. She was on her way to a friend’s home in Ormberg at eight o’clock on Saturday night, took the wrong turn by mistake just before Orm Mountain, and turned around when she realized she was on the wrong road. On her way back, she encountered Hanne, stopped, and then picked her up when she noticed something bad had happened to her.”
“And the girl she saw?”
“She still claims Hanne was with a woman. Young, maybe in her twenties, wearing a gold dress or skirt and a dark top, which she thinks might have been a cardigan. No coat as far as she could make out.”
“I don’t get it. Why would you be dressed like that in the middle of the forest at this time of the year? And in such awful weather?”
We both fall silent while we consider it.
“Maybe we should talk to Hanne again,” Manfred says, in a quieter voice.
My thoughts return to Hanne: Peter’s lover, a behavioral scientist who specializes in criminal profiling. Manfred told me quite a bit about her during those three days we were working on the case before Hanne and Peter arrived. He said he’d never met anyone as sharp. That it was almost uncanny how accurate her predictions were—apparently she was called the “witch” by some of their colleagues in Stockholm.
She really fooled us: Neither of us saw any sign of her illness or sensed the depth of her handicap.
I’m not sure what I think about Hanne.
I often felt like she was staring at me strangely, especially when I spoke to Andreas. Those eyes, stuck to me like chewing gum, made me feel vaguely uncomfortable.
“We have to at least try to find Hanne’s book,” Manfred says. “If she wrote everything that happened down maybe it can help us find Peter. I did call and ask her where it was, but she didn’t remember. And Berit had no idea, either.”
“It’s not here, and it wasn’t at their hotel,” I say. “Svante and I went there to check.”
“Maybe she had it with her when they disappeared,” Manfred suggests. “Could have dropped it in the woods.”
“It’ll probably show up in the spring, after the snow melts.”
Manfred sighs.
“And Peter’s car?”
I nod and take a look at my notes.
“It hasn’t been found yet, but they’ve issued a description. They’re tracking Hanne’s and Peter’s cell phones as well. And checking to see if Peter’s bank or credit cards have been used.”
Manfred falls silent. He looks angry again, closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.
“I’m still wondering about Hanne’s hand,” I say.
“The numbers, the ones she wrote in the palm of her hand?”
“Yes. If she was the one who wrote them. It said ‘363’ and then something illegible. What could it have meant? We have to try to figure it out.”
The door flies open and Andreas comes in. He’s wearing jeans, a fleece shirt, and a puffy vest. His dark curly hair is damp and his shoulders and upper arms are wet.
“Burning the midnight oil, I see,” he says, and stands with his legs wide, just a little too close to me for comfort.
Andreas is the kind of guy who thinks he’s God’s gift to women, just because he was born with a penis dangling between his legs. He probably thinks I find him irresistible.
I don’t.
I’m not the least bit attracted to Andreas. I think he’s pathetic, or more so, pitiful. He’s like a little boy screaming for his masculinity to be confirmed, but I won’t give him the satisfaction.
I look down at the map again. At the squares that represent houses and the winding line of the creek. At the height lines that illustrate the topography and which get tighter and tighter around Orm Mountain.
Andreas clears his throat and takes another step closer to me, so that his leg almost grazes my arm.
“I just came from the task force center. They found something in the woods, right next to the place where Hanne was picked up. I have no idea if it has anything to do with her and Peter, but…”
He leaves his sentence unfinished and roots around in the pocket of his puffy jacket. Pulls out a small plastic bag that l
ooks empty and lays it on the table next to me.
A drop of water falls from his sleeve onto my hand.
We lean forward to see what the bag contains while Andreas continues:
“I sent the technicians there to be on the safe side. The guy from the task force claimed he saw footprints there. They put some sort of blanket over them, so the snow won’t cover them again.”
I squint at the little bag, scrutinizing it. Something glitters inside it.
A tiny golden sequin.
Jake
The Eiffel Tower is 324 meters high, weighs nearly ten thousand tons, and consists of twelve thousand iron beams, which are joined together by over two million rivets. They were all produced in Värmland. It took them two years to build it, and only one worker died during construction—and he wasn’t even working when it happened. He was showing the tower to his girl a few days before it opened in 1889, trying to impress her, but fell down from the second floor and died.
He must have been very surprised. The girlfriend, too, of course.
I read all of that online.
It’s important to know the background in order to make a really good copy of the Eiffel Tower.
I stare at my miniature tower, still not quite satisfied. There’s something about the top section that doesn’t work. It seems a little lopsided, and when I try to straighten it out with the pliers, it slants in the other direction instead.
It’s really, really difficult to make it perfect, even though I’ve googled pictures and drawings and spent hours building this tower.
The door swings open, and Melinda comes in. She’s wearing a tight black dress that ends mid-thigh. It’s cute, really cute considering it’s Melinda. So cute the thought of trying it on pops into my head as soon as I see it. And then I can’t stop thinking about it.
That’s how it works with The Sickness.
It won’t leave me alone. It’s like a stubborn puppy who follows me around all the time, nipping at my legs. And it doesn’t matter how many times I tell it to stop. That just makes it more eager, as if I were playing a game.
That’s not what I want.
I want The Sickness to go away. Leave me alone and disappear into the forest, like that cop did.
Melinda throws her hands in front of her mouth and stops midstride. She smells like perfume and hairspray.
“Oh my God. What the hell. That’s amazing! Did you build that all by yourself?”
She takes a few steps closer and trips over the mountain of butchered beer cans on the floor. They rattle around, and she grabs the edge of the desk to keep her balance.
“It’s for school,” I explain. “We’re supposed to build something famous from recycled material.”
Her eyes shine with excitement as she bends over my homemade Eiffel Tower and gently runs her finger along the top.
“It looks so real. How did you do it?”
I point to the ragged beer cans.
“Smart,” Melinda says, and smiles crookedly. “Very smart. We have plenty of those around here. How do they stick together?”
“First, I built a kinda frame thing for these parts.”
I point to the seam that runs around the upper edge of one of the beer cans and continue:
“It’s stronger and more stable than the metal in the cans. I pounded that part down and wired those parts together with steel thread. Then I cut up pieces of thin metal and glued them to the frame.”
“That’s insane. You should be…What’s it called when you draw buildings?”
“Architect?”
“Exactly. You should be an architect.”
The realization that I might grow up someday hadn’t occurred to me yet. And the thought of becoming an architect seems almost unimaginable.
“There are no architects in Ormberg,” I say.
That’s the truth.
There are only old people and the unemployed in Ormberg.
And the Stillmans, who sell dog clothes on the Internet, and the Skogs, who breed those ridiculous tiny horses. And then in the summer the Germans and Stockholmers come. They wander around in the woods in military-style clothes and paddle canoes down the creek.
And they grill.
On windless summer evenings the smell of roasted meat hangs over Ormberg, a giant cloud of smoke that stinks of BBQ.
It smells like city slickers, Dad usually says, and wrinkles his nose.
“Could you help me straighten my hair?” Melinda asks.
“Sure,” I say, hoping she doesn’t notice how happy that question makes me.
Boys aren’t supposed to straighten hair.
Only gay hairdressers in Stockholm do stuff like that, or maybe pop stars, who want all the teenage girls to follow them on Instagram.
I go with Melinda to her room. Her floor is covered with clothes: thong underwear in bright colors and lacy bras. There’s a pair of inside-out jeans draped on the chair. She picks them up and throws them across the room and they land at the foot of her bed.
The scent of perfume is even thicker in here, and the desk is covered in makeup.
So much beauty: glittery rouge, eyeliners, eye shadow in every possible color, and small mysterious tubes, all of it piled into a makeup bag with the word “Bitch” written on it.
I wish I had one just like it.
At the same time: I know that would be totally fucking mentally disturbed.
I swallow hard and grab the straighteners from the floor, get a slight whiff of burned hair and feel the warmth of the handle.
“Okay,” Melinda says. “Let’s go!”
She puts the top layer of her hair up in a clip, and I start to straighten. It’s become a ritual of sorts for us, me helping Melinda with her hair before she goes out.
“You’re sweet,” she murmurs, and reaches for the nail polish.
“Where are you going?” I ask.
“Meeting Markus,” she says absently while opening the nail polish and starting to paint her long pointed nails.
Markus is Melinda’s boyfriend. He’s eighteen and he drives an old Ford he restored himself. He bought it at the scrapyard a year ago. Melinda usually says it started as a rust bucket, but he turned it into a sweet ride.
I don’t really know what I think about Markus. He never says a word when he’s here, just sits with his hair hanging in front of his face. I don’t even know what he looks like under that hair. Dad doesn’t like him, because I’ve heard him and Melinda fighting about Markus many times. But I think he’s mostly afraid of Melinda getting pregnant. Or that’s what he yells at her. “…and don’t expect me to support your damn kid.”
“And what are you gonna do tonight?”
“Don’t know,” I say. “Stay home, I guess.”
“You’re not gonna go meet Saga?”
The thought of Saga makes my stomach flutter. As if a very small insect were crawling around in there.
“She’s going to the school party.”
Melinda puts down the nail polish with a bang.
“Why are they having a party in the middle of the week?” she asks. And then, more gently:
“Aren’t you going?”
“Don’t want to.”
I don’t feel like explaining it to Melinda. Don’t feel like telling her what Vincent and his buddies would do to me if I went. But as usual, she understands anyway. That’s Melinda’s superpower. She always knows what I’m thinking, even before I do. As if my thoughts are radio waves she can receive and listen to in her head.
I suppose my superpower is building things out of old beer cans.
“It’s Vincent, right?” she asks.
I don’t respond. It sizzles a little as I press a damp strand of hair between the metal plates of the straightener.
“I’m gonna kill that asshole if
he doesn’t quit it,” she growls.
“Please. Don’t do anything!”
“No. I will kill him if he doesn’t leave you alone.”
* * *
—
After Melinda leaves, I go down to the kitchen to grab a Coke. Dad’s asleep on the couch again, so I turn off the TV and throw a blanket over him. Grab a couple of empty beer cans and take them to my room.
They’ll end up recycled.
But first I’m going to read some more of the diary.
I take out the book and curl up in bed. Run my hand over the brown spine.
It’s really weird. When I read it, it feels like I’m inside Hanne’s head. It’s almost as if I become her, even though she’s really old and a woman. As if I had Melinda’s superpower and could read thoughts.
I don’t even know if I like Hanne, but I feel sorry for her. It must be horrible to lose your memory and have to write down everything that happens. But she’s smart—it took me a while, but then I figured out why she made the index. She can’t read through the book every time she forgets some little thing.
Yes, Hanne is smart. Smart and lonely, because she can’t tell anyone what she thinks.
Especially not P.
It’s just like The Sickness, I think.
You have a secret, Hanne, and I do, too.
We’ve just been to the site where the body was found.
The road there: narrow, full of potholes, lined by large spruces. No buildings.
No people.
The cairn itself was two, maybe three meters wide, and twenty meters long. It consisted of tall moss-covered rocks of varying sizes.
Behind it: a slope, which turned into a steep hill—Orm Mountain.
On the other side: the dark water of the creek.
We hunched down in the moss. Trying to take in the incomprehensible. That the skeleton of a five-year-old girl was found under the stones of this cairn, with her hands clasped across her chest.
I note that the perpetrator must have been very strong, because the stones are quite large and heavy. Probably, the perpetrator had local knowledge and knew about the cairn before he buried the girl here. Finally: the fact that the girl was buried with her hands clasped says something about the perpetrator’s relationship to her. It’s almost tender, as if the perpetrator liked her.
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