The door opened. Anna’s heart was beating with such force that the roar filled her head completely.
“Hi, Anna!” said Micha. “Abel isn’t here.”
Anna breathed in and breathed out again. “Can I come in anyway?”
“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,” Anna replied and wrapped her arms around Micha and hugged her very tightly. “I really don’t know.”
“Hey, you’re crushing me!” Micha said as she slipped out of Anna’s arms, laughing. “I’ve gotta go read now. About the dog.”
And then she disappeared into her room, disappeared into the story of a dog, a different dog, one that wasn’t silver-gray. Anna remembered how Bertil had told them about a kind of silver-gray dog: a Weimaraner. It was a Weimaraner. He had become too sharp. Too dangerous. He’d attacked a jogger. He’d thought he was saving his family … Abel was that dog. If it was all true …
“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!”
Anna didn’t take off her coat. She went to the bathroom and shut the door behind her. The box was sitting on top of the bathroom cupboard. It wouldn’t mean anything, she thought, if she didn’t find something. He could have stored the weapon somewhere else, or even be carrying it with him. She had to stand on her toes to reach the box. She put it on the dresser next to the sink, a dresser Abel had painted green and Micha had decorated with a yellow flower. She opened the lid of the box.
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.
“Anna,” said Abel.
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: Anna. Anna, Anna, Anna. He’d given up following her around. He’d been an idiot. What he’d done in that snowstorm had been stupid—stupid and dangerous. He should never have scared her on purpose. The announcement at school had been even more stupid.
And suddenly, he wondered why he was alive.
If what he’d suspected all along was true, then Tannatek had no problem shooting people. He couldn’t imagine it. How it felt to shoot someone. He’d never told anyone, but whenever his father fired at an animal in the forest, he looked away. He was a coward. He knew it. The only thing he could shoot at was the bull’s-eye on a target. Hennes was different. Hennes was perfect. Hennes went hunting with his father for real, and he had a hunting license. He didn’t have glasses that slid down his nose. He could have any girl he wanted … any girl but Anna, that is. Not that Hennes had wanted Anna. But it was Tannatek, of all people, who’d got her in the end. Wasn’t that strange? Bertil’d been following her for so long—and following Tannatek, too. He’d found out so many things but not enough.
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. Anna probably hadn’t either, he thought. His glasses were slipping again. He didn’t need to read the name on the wooden cross to know whose body it was, but he read it anyway. Then he dialed the police. But where would he tell them to go? Here?
Where was Anna? Had she gone home? Had she gone to the police herself? He hadn’t followed her out of the thicket. He’d let her leave on her own. A mistake, Bertil, he told himself, an unforgivable mistake.
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 Anna to the green dresser next to the sink to the open cardboard box to the shining black of the weapon inside. His movement was so fast she didn’t even really see it. He let go of the bag. Then he was leaning against the doorframe, the gun in his hand. He was playing around with it—like people do in the movies.
He looked at the weapon. He looked at Anna.
“So,” he said.
She was still mute with fear. Scream, Anna, she thought. Scream for your damn life. Downstairs, Mrs. Ketow is eavesdropping … She couldn’t scream.
He nodded as if she’d asked him something. “Yes, Anna. Yes, I know how to shoot. Self-taught, I’d say. The guy they nicked for the first murder, do you remember? The guy who was trading weapons? He’d sold me this gun, a while back. He must have forgotten he did because he didn’t tell anyone. But it explains why he had another like it.” He’d been speaking in a low voice, low enough to keep Micha from hearing his words.
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:
… it’s written in the scriptures, it’s written there in blood
I even heard the angels declare it from above
There ain’t no cure
there ain’t no cure There ain’t no cure for love …
All the rocket ships go flying through the sky
The doctor’s working day and night
But they never ever find a cure for love …
“Tell me,” she said. “Tell me the whole story. If you’re going to shoot me, I at least want to know the story first.”
“Are you crazy?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“You think I’d shoot you?”
“I do. I haven’t believed any of this for a long time … but now I do.”
He looked at the gun. “Aren’t you afraid?”