Now, all of a sudden, she was scared again. She stepped toward the hole the wild boars had made. Clothes. There were clothes under the mud, clothes someone must have thrown away … a red shirt, a blue raincoat … she kneeled, close to the pit, too close. Hair, there was hair in the mud, long strands of tangled hair. A doll, she prayed … please, God, I haven’t prayed since I was a child in church on Christmas, but please, please … listen to me … please, let it be a doll.
She realized that she was shivering. Her teeth shattered uncontrollably, as if she had a high fever. She forced herself to take a branch, to free the clothes of leaves and sticks with it, to scrape the earth away. Look, look … don’t look away … you’ve got to look now. There weren’t only clothes. Of course not. Not only. There, under the earth, lay the body of a woman. It might have been lying there a long time or might have been buried hours ago. She couldn’t see it that clearly; everything was smeared with mud. And she was thankful for that, thankful that she couldn’t see the face beneath the layers of mud. The woman lay on her back—she could see that. Long blond hair … she thought of Micha’s teacher. Micha’s teacher, Mrs. Milowicz, the cutter, who wanted to form and thereby destroy the diamond—or so Abel thought. Mrs. Milowicz, with her spring-green coat. Maybe she owned a blue coat as well, or had owned one—she was the only one who’d followed the little queen to the end. She was her last threat. Everybody else had either been killed or fled. Anna leaned forward. The branch she held found a hand, though it was barely recognizable as a hand. Even in the earth beneath the snow, there were insects at work, microorganisms, time. This body had been here for more than a day. Anna averted her eyes. She felt sick and cold. There’d been something, something that had attracted her attention … she looked again. And suddenly, she knew. It was the fact that the woman had been buried on her back, as if someone hadn’t so much disposed of her as buried her. And then, she discovered something else. Something lay next to the body, something that might once have been placed on the dead woman’s breast: two thin planks of plywood, like parts of a fruit crate, held together with a simple piece of cloth, now half-decayed. It looked as if it had been ripped off something else; had it once displayed a pattern of flowers? She knew this flower pattern, blue and white … she’d seen it before … but where? The cloth held the planks together in the shape of a cross.
Anna pulled the cross out of the hole without touching the body or the clothes. She wasn’t cold anymore, she was sweating. Her heart racing, the forest spinning around her head. Someone had written big letters onto the planks, with a black marker. Letters, words, now nearly faded away into nothingness. But that wasn’t true, of course. She could read the letters. The cold had conserved the neat block letters. They looked as if it had been very important to someone that they be readable.
MICHELLE TANNATEK
12.4.1975–14.2.2012
Anna’s brain started calculating like a machine: nineteen. She hadn’t yet celebrated her nineteenth birthday when she’d had Abel. She’d died at the age of thirty-six.
Anna closed her eyes, and what she saw among the leaves and the twigs and the mud wasn’t a dead body but a white cat. She was blind and asleep, sound asleep. One of the answers the answering man had repeatedly given came to her mind: under the beeches, where the anemones grow in spring. The asking man must have asked the right question at least once, but not at the right time: where is Michelle?
She hadn’t ever left on a trip.
Or maybe she had, on a very, very long one …
“Why?” Anna whispered. “Why did you do that? Did you do that?”
She opened her eyes, got up, realized that she was still dizzy, and staggered back. Then she doubled over and threw up. In her head, everything was tumbling into and onto each other—thoughts, words, sentences from the fairy tale. It had started with the doll, the doll she’d found under the sofa in the student lounge. Mrs. Margaret. Mrs. Margaret wore a white dress with a pattern of blue flowers. The hem of Mrs. Margaret’s dress was frayed, as if someone had torn off a piece of it. What for? For some kind of souvenir? For a greeting? And had he then tried to lose Mrs. Margaret so that he wouldn’t have to explain anything to Micha? Michelle couldn’t see that souvenir anymore, couldn’t ever understand the greeting. She was too fast asleep to ever wake up again.
What else had the answering man said? All these senseless answers he’d given, so a few of them hadn’t been senseless. Remember, Anna, remember, that he’s been telling you the truth all this time … without telling you the truth. There was another answer that was given again and again … in the box on the bathroom cupboard. Then she remembered the asking man’s last question, also asked seemingly out of context: where is the weapon?
She saw Abel standing in the bathroom again, searching for a Band-Aid, the box in his hand, angry that she’d followed him there instead of waiting in the living room. “No,” she whispered. “No, I … I don’t want this. I don’t want this to be true. I … I was so sure …”
And then she thought of Micha’s teacher. The last pursuer of the little queen. She dialed Linda’s number as she hurried back through the forest, stumbling, running.
“Hello.”
“Linda, it’s me. Have you got Micha’s teacher’s telephone number? Did she leave her number?”
“No, I …”
“Linda, you’ve gotta get it. Right now. It’s important. Call her. Tell her she has to be careful. No. Tell her not to leave her apartment. Tell her …”
“Anna, what’s the matter? Where are you? Weren’t you going to visit Abel? Has something happened?”
“Yes. No. I’m on my way there now. Call the teacher, Linda. Please. Do it now.”
Her hands were shaking so much she almost couldn’t unlock her bike. You could open the lock anyway, without knowing the combination, Abel had said that. But she, she couldn’t do that. She lived in a different world, and he’d been right about everything. Go away, princess. Leave your outlaw alone. You won’t change him … go away, Anna, far away, and don’t ever come back. The fairy tale doesn’t have a happy ending. He’d warned her. He’d warned her the whole time, exactly as he’d done in the boathouse. And she hadn’t listened to him. Why had he warned her? Had he loved her despite everything? And what did that even mean, despite everything? Was a murderer able to love? She wasn’t certain. She wasn’t 100 percent certain, and she had to be certain, or else she’d never believe it. She couldn’t tell anyone if she wasn’t certain. You’re crazy, a small, reasonable voice said inside her. You’ll ride home now, little lamb … You’ll call the police, and then you’ll go home as quickly as you can. Heavens! Wasn’t that Gitta? Gitta’s voice of reason in her head. Gitta of all people! She nearly laughed.
So what’re you gonna do, little lamb? Ask him? Just straight out?
No. No, I’m not that stupid, Gitta. I’m going to go to the bathroom and look through the contents of the box on top of the cupboard.
And then? When you’ve done that? When you’ve found out? What then?
Anna didn’t answer Gitta’s last question, and Gitta wasn’t there anyway.
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.