Miss Polly had a Dolly (Emma Frost #2) (28 page)

I awoke
feeling like I was lying under a strange comforter in a foreign place in an
unknown city. Slowly my memory came back to me, when I looked at my sleeping
daughter in the bed next to me. When I came home from work she told me the
first day of school had been a little tough. The teachers were nice, but the
other kids in the class didn’t want to talk to her and she had spent the day
alone and made no new friends. I told her she would be fine, that it would soon
be better, but inside I was hurting. This was supposed to be a fresh start for
the both of us, a new beginning. I now realized it wouldn’t go as smoothly as I
had hoped.

My dad had prepared a nice breakfast for us when
we came downstairs. Coffee, toast and eggs. Soft boiled for me and scrambled
for Julie. We dove into the food.

Before mom died he wouldn’t go near the kitchen,
except to eat, but things had changed since then.
He’s actually gotten pretty good at cooking
, I thought while
secretly observing him from the table. Ever since his fall down the stairs last
year, he had to use a cane, but he still managed to get around the kitchen and
cook for us.

“You know, Dad, with me in the house you could
catch a break every once in a while. I could take care of you, and cook for you
instead.”

He didn’t even turn around, but just snorted at
me. “I know my way around. You would only mess the place up.”

Then he turned around, smiling at Julie and me,
and placed a big plate of scrambled eggs on the table in front of us.

I sighed and rubbed my stomach.

“Sorry, Dad, I’m too full. Julie, go get your
bag upstairs. We are leaving in five.”

Julie made an annoyed sound and rushed up the
stairs.

My dad looked at me seriously.

“She misses him, you know,” he said nodding his
head in Julie’s direction. “Isn’t it about time she got to call him, and talk
to him?”

I shook my head. I hated that she had told her
granddad she missed her father. Since I couldn’t leave my job until late in the
afternoon, he had suggested he would pick her up every day and they could spend
some quality grandpa-granddaughter time together catching up on all the years
they missed of each others’ lives. I liked that, but I didn’t care much about
him meddling in my life.

“I can’t have him knowing where we are.”

My dad sighed. “You can’t hide down here
forever. If he wants to find you, he will. Whatever happened to you up there,
you have to face it at one point. You can’t keep running from it. It will
affect your daughter too. No matter what he did, he is, after all, still her
dad.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Just not right now,
okay?”

As I got up Julie came down and dumped her bag
on the floor before sitting down again and taking another serving of eggs.

Where she would put it in her skinny little body
I didn’t know but I was glad to see her eat despite being so nervous about
another day alone in the schoolyard with no one to play with.

“She must be growing,” my dad said with a big
smile. “That’s my girl,” he said and winked at her.

I looked at the clock and decided that I too had
the time to sit down for another minute. The radio played an old Danish song
from my childhood. My dad started humming and tried to spin around with his
cane. He almost fell but avoided it in the last second and we all laughed. I
began to sing along too and Julie rolled her eyes at me, which made me sing
even louder. The old cat stopped licking herself and stared at us from the
window. She would probably be rolling her eyes too if she could.

It was one of those beautiful mornings, but a
freezing cold one too. The sun embraced everybody, promising them that soon it
would triumph over the cold wind. Soon it would make the flowers come out of
hiding in the ground and with its long warm arms it would make them flourish
and bloom. I really enjoyed my drive along the ocean and the sandy beach. The
ocean seemed  angry.

I had promised headquarters to do a story today,
an interview with an Italian artist, Giovanni Marco, who lived on Enoe, a small
island close to Karrebaeksminde. It was connected to the mainland by a bridge.
The artist had made a series of sculptures that made the public angry because
of its vulgarity. The artist himself claimed that it was his way of making a
statement, that art cannot be censored. He had displayed the sculptures in the
county’s art festival, shocking the public and making people nauseous from
looking at them.

He was the same artist who once had displayed
ten blenders each with one goldfish in them in a museum of art, waiting to see
if anyone in the audience would press the button and kill the fish. He loved to
provoke the sleepy Danes and outrage them. At least they then took a position
and cared about something. I remembered he said he wanted to wake them from
their drowsy sleep walk. I was actually looking forward to this interview with
this controversial man on the beautiful island.

Giovanni Marco lived in an old wooden beach
house  that looked like it wouldn’t survive if big storm should hit the
beach. Fortunately big storms are rare in Denmark. We had a big one in 1999 as
strong as a category 1 hurricane. It was still the one people remembered and
talked about. It knocked down trees and electric wires. At least one tree hit a
moving car and killed the driver inside. That was a tragedy. It could
definitely get very windy, but the artist’s house would probably stand for
another hundred years.

Barefooted, he welcomed me in the driveway with
a hug and a kiss on my cheek, which overwhelmed me since I had not been happy
about male physical contact lately. So I’m sure I came off stiff and probably
not very friendly toward him.

He was gorgeous and he seemed to know that a
little too well. I never liked men who thought too much of themselves, but this
one intrigued me anyway, which made me nervous and uncomfortable in his
presence.

His blue eyes stared at me while he invited me
inside.
It’s rare for an Italian man to have
blue eyes like that
, I thought. Maybe he had Scandinavian genes.
Maybe that’s why he had escaped from sunny Italy to cold Denmark where the sun
would hide all winter. His hair was thick and brown and his skin looked very
Italian. But he was tall like a Scandinavian. And muscular. I hated to admit
it, but it was  attractive.

Inside I was stunned by the spectacular view
from almost every room in the house: views of the raging ocean, of the wild and
absorbing sea. I used to dream about living like that. Well I used to dream
about a lot of things, but dreams have a tendency to get broken over the years.

Giovanni, in a tank top and sweatpants, smiled
at me and offered me a cup of organic green tea. I am more of a coffee person,
but I smiled graciously and accepted. We sat for awhile on his sofa, glancing
out over the big ocean.

“So you have just returned from the big city?”
he asked with an irresistible Italian accent. His Danish was good, but not as
good as I expected. BI had read that he had lived in the country for more than
30 years. “What made you come back?”

News of my return traveled fast in a small
community, I knew that, but how it got all the way out here, I didn’t know.
Overwhelmed by his directness I shook my head and said, “I missed the silence
and the quiet days, I guess.” It wasn’t too far from the truth. There had been
days in the end, when the city got to me, with all its smartass people drinking
their Coffee “Lattes”. It used to be just coffee with milk. I didn’t get that.
But then again I didn’t get sushi either. Even in the center of Karrebaeksminde
they had a sushi restaurant now, so maybe it wasn’t a big city thing.

“I miss that too when I’m away from here.”
Giovanni expressed his emotions widely with his arms, the way Italians did.
“Especially when I go back to Milan. I get so tired in the head, you know? All
those people, so busy, always in a hurry. To do what? What are they doing that
is so important?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said knowing that I used to
be one of those busy big-city people always rushing off to something. Rushing
after a story to put on the cover. Never stopping to feel the ocean breeze or
see the flowers pop up at spring. But I wasn’t like that anymore. I had
changed. Having to go off to cover the war for the newspaper had changed me.
Being a mom changed me. But that was all history.

I began my interview with Giovanni Marco and got
some pretty good statements, I thought. I began to see the article shape in my
head. But it seemed more like he wanted to talk about me instead. He kept
turning the conversation to  me and my past. I didn’t like to talk about
it, so I gently avoided answering. But he kept pressing on, looking me in the
eyes as if he could see right through me. I didn’t like that and he began to
annoy me. His constant flirting with me was a little over the top. Luckily, my
cell phone started ringing just as he began asking about my husband.

“I better take this,” I said.

“Now? In the middle of our conversation? Now,
that is what I think is wrong with this world today. All these cell-phones
always interrupting everything. People using them on the bus, on trains, in the
doctor’s waiting room, rambling about this and that, and playing games. God
forbid they should ever get themselves into a real conversation. They might
even risk getting to know someone outside their own little world.”

He got up and looked passionately in my eyes,
and I couldn’t help smiling. He was indeed over the top, but it was 
sweet.

“Now, tell me, what could be so vital that it
cannot wait until we are done?” He thrust his long Italian arms out in the air.

“It might be about my daughter,” I said and got
up from the couch.

It wasn’t about Julie. It was Sara from the
newspaper. She was almost hyperventilating, trying to catch her breath. She was
rambling.

“Take it easy Sara,” I said while holding a
finger in my other ear to better hear her. “Just tell me calmly what is going
on.”

She took a pause and caught her breath. “A dead
body. The police found a dead body. I just heard it on my radio.”

“So?”

“Are you kidding me? That’s like the biggest
story of this century down here.”

I didn’t get it. Normally when we received news
like that at my old newspaper they just put in a small note on page five, and
that was it. If the police thought it was a murder and an investigation took
place we would make a real article about it, but still only place it on page
five. And Sara didn’t even know if it was considered to be a murder case or
not. It was just a dead body. For all I knew he could have died of a heart
attack.

“Don’t people die in this place?” I challenged.

In Aarhus people died every week. With the gangs
of immigrants fighting the rockers people got shot and stabbed all the time. Of
course they would bring the story if a dead body was found. But it wasn’t like
it was one of the big ones.

“He might have fallen drunk or even had a heart
attack,” I said trying to close the conversation. “I will call the police and
get something for a small article when I come back, okay?”

”No, no, no. It is not okay at all. I called
Sune. He is already on his way down there. You have to be there before anyone
else. I got this from the police radio, remember? That means no one else in the
country knows anything yet. It is what you would call a solo story.”

I  liked the ring of that. I might get it
on the cover of the morning paper. Not bad on my second day.

“Okay, give me the address.”

Half an
hour later, I arrived at the scene. As I got near the address, I immediately
knew this was no heart attack or just a drunken man. Four police cars were
parked in front of the same house, two of them called in from Naestved, the
biggest city nearby. I recognized a big blue van as one the forensic team from
Copenhagen used.

This was big stuff.

The entrance to the house was blocked by crime
tape. On the other side of the tape policemen searched wearing suits and
gloves, writing in their notebooks, marking trace evidence, dusting for
fingerprints, and marking shoeprints.

According to the radio report Sara had heard on
the scanner, the victim was a white male, 46 years old. But I already knew that
when I got there. I recognized the house and knew that it could only be Didrik
Rosenfeldt. The house used to belong to his parents when I was a kid. And
Didrik would come down here on summer vacation from boarding school. He was my
sister’s age, and I remembered them hanging out together one summer. But
something happened and she dumped him and never spoke of him again. He was a
real asshole as far as I knew. He used to come down here and flirt with almost
anything that had a pulse. He spent his time hanging out on his parent’s yacht
in the port, drinking with his friends from the boarding school, harassing
people who were different than they and had less money. A real prick, I would
call him. That probably hadn’t changed a bit.

I looked around at the small crowd of
neighborhood kids who had gathered in front of the house, peeking in. In the
middle, a tall skinny guy stood out. He had a green Mohawk and wore a leather
band with spikes around his neck, a leather jacket, and several piercings in
his eyebrows, lips and nose. He wore black make-up on his eyes and lips. He
stood out in stark contrast to this crowd of high society upper-class kids. In
his hands he held a camera that never left his eyes, constantly taking a series
of pictures. As I got close to him I noticed that he was missing two of his
fingers on his right hand.

“You must be Sune,” I said when I approached
him.

He didn’t look down at me, just kept on taking
pictures non-stop.

“Mmm …”

“I’m Rebekka Franck. Did you see anything yet?”

“Nope.”

“Has the body been taken out yet?”

“Nope.”

Great
,
I thought. Then there was a chance we could get a picture of the covered body
on the way into the ambulance. That was always a good shot for an article of
this kind.

“Don’t you think it’s  weird, since the
body was found at six o’clock this morning?” Sune asked me.

Now that he said it, I did. It was three in the
afternoon. Weren’t they in a hurry to get the body to the lab right away and
find the cause of death?

“Yeah, what does that mean?”

“That the body has been hard to get out. Maybe
it was lying under something or was tied to something.”

I nodded. This guy knew how to use his head. Not
many could do that these days without getting hurt.

“Sounds likely.”

“It must at least be a messy crime scene since
it has taken them so long. There are a lot of people in there.”

I nodded again. This guy had been at a crime
scene before. And it probably wasn’t here in Karrebaeksminde where he got that
kind of experience.

“You’re not from around here, are you?” I asked.

“Nope.”

”Copenhagen?”

”Christiania. Have been and always will be a
Christianite.”

Ah, a free spirit from Christiania. Also known
as “fristaden,” the free-state. It was an area in Copenhagen that had around a
thousand inhabitants. They lived by what they liked to call a collectivistic
anarchy. Some called it a socialist anarchy. It meant that everybody living
there got to take part in all the decisions. To the Christianites, as they
called themselves, it meant they were different from the rest of the society
and that they lived by their own rules. To the rest of the world it meant that
this was a place you could go and buy pot on the streets of Christiania where
they sold it out in the open even if it was illegal in the rest of the country.
They were a state within the state that the police didn’t touch. They even had
their own flag, red with three yellow dots. Today things had changed though.
The liberal government had sent in the police and tried to fight the illegal
drug trade, and they wanted to remove all the houses that the Christianites had
build themselves.

My guess was that Sune wasn’t too thrilled about
the police in general. I guessed right.

I kept a close eye on the activities behind the
crime-scene tape and soon I spotted the detective who seemed to be in charge.
He came out of the house and headed towards one of the police cars, and I
yelled at him.

“Excuse me. Rebekka Franck, reporter at
Zeeland Times
.”

He stopped and stared at me. He then approached.

“Rebekka Franck?”

“Yes.”

Surprisingly he smiled at me.

“You don’t remember me?”

I really didn’t but wouldn’t disappoint him.
Besides, I really needed his comment for my article.

“Well, of course I do,” I lied.

“Michael Oestergaard. You used to take dancing
lessons at my aunt’s dance studio. Jazz ballet.”

“Miss Lejrskov’s class. Michael. Oh yes, I do
remember.”

I really still didn’t, but I remembered my dance
teacher. Michael looked to be at least eight or nine years older than me. How
could I have remembered him?

“Exactly. I used to hang out there with my
brother and look at all the pretty girls. So you are a big-shot reporter now? I
must admit I have been following your career. It has brought you around the
world?”

“Sort of.”

“And now it has brought you to Karrebaeksminde.
I heard from the old Miss Jensen in the tourist-information-desk down on Gl.
Brovej that you had come back.”

“And she was right.”

That woman did a little more than informing the
tourists around here.

“So you work for the newspaper down here now?”

“Yes, I do.”

“And you probably want a comment for your
article?”

“I would love that.” I was stunned. I couldn’t
believe his courtesy. Normally I wouldn’t get a single word out of the police
until they had a press conference, and then I would only get what all the other
reporters got.

“Well, I can’t say much.” He lowered his voice
and got closer. “But it ain’t pretty, I can tell you that.”

“But what can you tell me about what happened
here. Is it a murder?”

“No doubt about it. Someone broke in through the
back door and killed the guy.”

“Do you have any suspects?”

“No, but we might begin with his wife,” he
laughed. “He wasn’t exactly known as one of God’s better children, if you know
what I mean.”

“I don’t, I’m sorry. So you will be questioning
the wife in the near future?”

“Sure, but don’t write that. That would be
interfering with investigative information. You know that.”

“Then please just tell me what I can write.”

“Write that the victim has been identified as
Didrik Rosenfeldt, CEO and owner of the world-known company Seabas Windmills,
and known as a part of the famous and very wealthy Rosenfeldt family. He
apparently was killed by an intruder in his summer residence, there is an
ongoing investigation, and that … is it, I think.”

I wrote everything he said in my notebook.

“Why hasn’t the body been removed from the house
yet?” I asked.

The detective sighed deeply.

”I really can’t get into that.”

Sune had probably been right.

“How did he die?”

The detective got an occupied look on his face.

“We don’t know yet. That’s for the crime lab to
figure out. I am sorry but I really have to get on with my job …”

“But surely you must have an idea?”

“We do, but we won’t share it with the public,
yet.”

I nodded. That’s what I expected. The crime
scene must have been messy just as Sune said. I spotted Sune out of the corner
of my eye. He took pictures of the body as it was finally removed from the
house in a body bag and transported in an ambulance.

“Who found the body?” I asked Detective
Oestergaard.

”The housekeeper found him this morning, when
she came to clean the house.”

“At what time?”

”She called us at six.”

“Can we talk to her?”

“Well, I guess I can ask her.”

I had to pinch my arm. I’d never met this kind
of cooperation from the police. Were they always like this or was it because he
knew me? Anyway, he left me for a second and came back with a small Philippine
woman with an empty look in her eyes and an expression like she had seen the
devil himself and lived to tell about it. It seemed she was still in shock and
I knew I had to be careful.

I greeted her with a handshake and introduced
myself. The detective left us, his duty calling. I waved at Sune and signaled I
wanted him to come and take her picture. He came right away.

“So, that must have been real horrible for you,”
I began.

“I … I just walked in, like I normally do.
Normally he isn’t in the house. I didn’t expect … I mean, how could I know?”

“Of course you didn’t know. Can you tell me a
little about what you saw?”

She didn’t look at me but stared into open air.

“He was dead. Blood everywhere. On all the
floors in the living room. All over the parquet. It was like a slaughterhouse.
He was shredded to pieces. Ripped apart like an animal would kill its prey. No
man could have done this. Only a demon.”

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One, Two ... He is coming for you
(Rebekka Frank #1)
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