The Forgotten Girls (12 page)

T
HE SMALL COMMUNITY
gardens were so tightly spaced that it was practically like having dinner with the neighbors, Louise thought as she got up to clear the patio table. She had to concede, though, that Grete Milling’s friend’s small, black-painted wooden alcove and the garden had a calming effect on her. She still felt guilty about playing hooky from work and ditching on Jonas, even though he hadn’t noticed. She was shocked to discover that the past continued to have such a hold on her.

She put the salad bowl on top of the stack of plates and carried everything into the small kitchen area behind the living room.

Melvin was making coffee the old-fashioned way on the stove, and the two older ladies were rinsing the dishes. Everything was a bit too tight but sufficiently relaxed that it wasn’t really an issue, Louise noted, suddenly enjoying having people
around to drown out the silence that had overcome her since she fled the cemetery. On her way home in the car, she had felt so empty and ashamed that she couldn’t even manage to put some flowers on Klaus’s grave.

“You’ll have to remind me if you take sugar?” Grete said, looking at her questioningly.

Louise shook her head and replied that just milk would do fine.

She hadn’t mentioned her visit to Hvalsø. When Melvin asked if they wanted to go to the community gardens for dinner, all she wanted to do was get back into her bed and pull the covers over her head. But Jonas wanted to go; he’d been there a couple of times and loved it. So, to make her son happy, and keep herself even, Louise decided to join in. Jonas took off right after dinner to see some friends he’d made there the last time.

Melvin handed Louise a blanket and swatted a couple of mosquitoes off his arm. They had agreed that they could sit outside a little longer as long as they bundled up.

“Do you think Jonas is smoking?” she asked after they sat down.

Almost absurdly, she hoped that he would say yes because then she would have a concrete reason to focus her thoughts on something other than herself.

Melvin shook his head and smiled. “Right now that boy has only one thing on his mind,” he said, “and that’s his music. If he were smoking, he would have been doing it with Markus the other day because that kid smokes like a chimney and has for a while.”

Louise looked at him with astonishment. “Why didn’t you say something?”

Her downstairs neighbor hesitated for a moment before answering. “I think the kids should be allowed a little privacy,”
he finally said. “They’re about that age when it becomes quite natural to have little secrets.”

“But Melvin, you have to tell me when you find out stuff like that!” Louise said. For once she felt resentful of her neighbor.

They heard Jonas and his friends approaching on the garden path, and Melvin lowered his voice.

“Didn’t you keep any secrets from your parents when you were that age?” he asked.

About to shake her head, Louise stopped herself. When she was fourteen, she and her friends hid Martinis in the bushes outside the community parties at the local sports center. And then hadn’t she lit up her own first cigarette down by the old gravel pit when she was in the sixth grade? As images from her years in Hvalsø flooded her mind, she stood up as if she could shake them off.

“My advice to you is that you give the boy a little space if you want to hold on to him. If things get too suffocating, he’ll only pull away and live his own life.”

“I’m cold,” said Jonas, who returned after saying good-bye to his friends and took a seat next to Melvin.

Louise handed him her blanket and noted that it was getting dark already. They’d better get going. She was still shaken by Melvin’s disclosure. She would have to talk to Camilla about it, but she wanted her friend to have the chance to enjoy her wedding first.

Melvin and Grete had promised Grete’s girlfriend to return the next day to help her paint the fence facing the path. It was Louise’s understanding that it had to be done by June 1 or you would be setting yourself up for conflict with the other garden owners. Melvin had already gotten involved with several of the other members of the garden association and had promised to
come help out for the work weekend as well because the common areas needed cleaning up.

He was completely hooked on the whole community garden life, Louise thought, watching him get up and walk over to test the soil of a small raised bed by the hedge along the neighboring lot.

“I think I might have a temperature,” Jonas mumbled, feeling his forehead.

Louise looked at him. She worried about him feeling anxious and sick as a reaction to her skipping work and acting depressive.

“You’ll have to go downstairs to Melvin’s if you’re going to stay home from school tomorrow,” she said as the four of them walked to the car together.

“Hrhhmm,” Melvin cleared his throat. “I kind of figured on borrowing a mattress in Dragør.”

Louise smiled; she found it sweet that Melvin still had a hard time saying he planned to spend the night with Grete.

“You know—because we’ve got an early start out in the garden tomorrow,” he tried to explain himself.

“I can take care of myself,” Jonas cut in, and Louise thought that it might not even be something that would last until the next day after all. The boys had been running around in short sleeves, and maybe they had just gotten chilled. Maybe it was a case of nerves he could sleep off.

B
UT LINGER IT
did. The following morning, Jonas woke up with shiny eyes, his skin burning up with fever. Louise called Hanne to let her know that she would be late because she had to put Jonas on a train to Hvalsø, where her parents could pick him up at the station.

“You’ll probably need to have someone else take care of that,” Hanne cut in curtly. “Attendance at the monthly managers’ meeting is mandatory, and it starts in twenty minutes—which you would have known if you had been here yesterday when I handed out the agenda.”

Hanne raised her voice a little before playing her trump card:

“And I personally put it on your desk.”

“I can’t be there in twenty minutes,” Louise answered quickly, not even bothering to comment on the fact that she had not been informed about these monthly managers’ meetings, either.

“You’ll have to pass on that message to the national commissioner yourself,” Hanne cut in. “That’s not part of my job description.”

“Don’t even worry about it,” Louise snapped, straining to contain her anger. Right now she didn’t give a damn about Hanne or the national commissioner.

“The meeting runs until noon and after that there’s lunch at Restaurant Posten as usual, and I already ordered for you.”

“Then you’ll have to cancel the order or send Eik in my place,” Louise hissed and hung up. She was no longer in a hurry to get to the Rathole and decided that she would drive Jonas to Lerbjerg herself. Then he wouldn’t have to rattle around on the train with a fever.

L
OUISE HAD JUST
seen off her parents and their grandson when Mik called to tell her that the Forensics Department had run the test results from the body of the child care provider through the system.

“No match,” he sighed, sounding as tired as he had looked when they ran into each other in the woods. “So now we’ll have to go searching.”

They had performed an autopsy on the child care provider, and the medical examiner had noted indications that she had put up a hard struggle.

“Large tufts of her hair had been ripped from her head and she had several pronounced hematomas. It seems so brutal that it got me thinking that maybe there was more than one attacker?”

“Did they find semen from anyone else?” she asked with interest.

“No,” Mik admitted. “Just from one person, but I find it confusing considering the amount of violence inflicted.”

“What about the runner; has she turned up?”

Louise had seen neither the news nor the papers since she left the investigation in the woods. It suddenly occurred to her that she hadn’t even spoken with Eik. She was well aware that she owed him an explanation for her absence and an apology for making him attend the meeting this morning.

“No,” Mik exclaimed, clearly frustrated. “The forensic officers have combed her regular route and there’s indication that she was attacked a couple hundred yards before the Troll’s Oak, down by the Deep where the road turns,” he explained. “Do you know the place?”

“Yes,” Louise mumbled, picturing the road with its steep descent and how you had to stand up and pedal hard to make it back up the hill. Tall pines lined both sides of the road, throwing the wooded area into shade. Someone must have told Mik that they called it the Deep, she thought.

“They found her iPod down there, and bloodstains at the spot, which of course need to be checked for DNA. The ground was torn up from resisting feet,” he continued and quickly added: “The forensic officers think she may have dug her heels in and been dragged away from the road. Unfortunately, the tracks weren’t deep enough to make imprints from the shoe prints. And there’s nothing else to indicate that a crime may have occurred because no one has seen her or heard anything.”

“Not even the people who live in Starling House?” Louise asked. “It’s not far from there.”

Back when she lived out there, an old lady owned the small house in the middle of the woods. It wasn’t far from the gamekeeper’s house; in fact, it was right between that and Verner Post at the Snipe House. When she and her brother were kids, they used to call it the Gingerbread House. They were convinced
that the old lady was a witch because she never left the house, so they imagined that she lived off the children who played in the woods.

Later on, Louise’s father told her that the old woman suffered from sclerosis and couldn’t get around much the last several years. She used to get her groceries delivered from the store in Hvalsø. So it wasn’t that much of a mystery after all, Louise thought. By now the woman had been dead for several years and the house had been thoroughly renovated.

There was nobody home at Starling House when she and Eik stopped by on their tour of the houses around the woods. Louise had noted that a large patio had been added in the back with an outdoor hot tub. A motorcycle was parked in an open shed, too, so clearly someone had taken over the place.

“No,” Mik replied. “The wife out there was home and drinking coffee on the back porch when her husband left for work around eight, but she didn’t hear anything. But of course by then it may have already happened.”

There was silence at the other end of the line for a moment, then he cleared his throat.

“So in other words: We’ve got nothing. So we have to hurry up and find out whose DNA we’ve got from the blood. We just sent out a press release asking for the public’s assistance in finding any people who regularly visit the woods. Then we’ll have to see if they’ve noticed anything. It’s obviously going to scare them, but I don’t think we have a choice. As long as the perpetrator is out there, we have to do everything we can to catch him and warn others against walking around alone.”

Louise heard his other phone ringing and barely had a chance to say good-bye before he hung up.

She called her mother. She could easily have turned around
and driven the short distance back to her parents’ three-winged farm but then she would have to go inside again and she just didn’t feel up to it.

“Don’t go out in the woods,” she warned when her mother picked up the phone. “I don’t know what you’ve heard but it seems that there are now two victims and they have no lead on the perpetrator.”

“Sure, but isn’t that overreacting a bit?” her mom said, a smile in her voice.

“I don’t know about that,” Louise replied. “The police are sending out a press release warning women against walking alone in the woods. I just thought I should let you know.” She hung up, wondering why she always felt the need to sound so surly when her mother was merely trying to calm a worry.

For a moment she closed her eyes, leaned her head back, and tried to collect herself. She needed to get out of here. The door to her past had been opened and she was unable to control her thoughts so close to where it all happened.

She had put so much energy into denying and rejecting the parts of her past that were too painful to remember that it had never occurred to her how easily they could be roused. She considered, very objectively, what her options were for moving on. To her dismay, there were only two: She either had to hand the case over to Eik, or stuff all her feelings and get on with it. The first would be the ultimate admission of failure, and against everything she stood for. So as she reached Hvalsø and turned right at the roundabout as usual in order to avoid Main Street, Louise realized that she had only one choice.

She drove past the pharmacy and the old stadium, which had given way to a row of town houses. That’s where she used to play handball. She thought of Morits, their coach back then,
and Arvid, who was the stadium manager and ran the concession stand.

This was where she lived her life. The memories came rushing in, but it all happened so long ago and she had done everything in her power to distance herself from her youth. Maybe that was a mistake. Maybe that was why it hit her so hard now. Because after all, a lot of it had been good. She had kissed in this town, gotten drunk, and gone to plenty of parties.

But she did all of those things with Klaus.

T
HEY STARTED GOING
out when Louise was a freshman. She didn’t have to strain to picture his face, his chestnut-brown hair and grayish-blue eyes, which were always warm even though he wore a leather jacket and tried to look tough.

He had been one grade ahead of her through her school years in Hvalsø, and she’d had a secret crush on him since the seventh grade—so much so that she didn’t even notice the other boys who tried to catch her attention. And her heart was about to break when he left school after sophomore year to become a butcher in Roskilde because she felt certain that once he went there, he would forget all about her.

But he didn’t. He faithfully held on, always asking if she wanted to come along whenever he made plans to go out.

She lost her virginity to Klaus. There had been a bonfire out by Avnsø Lake that evening. They rode their bikes home through the woods, and the next morning she lay in bed with her eyes closed for a long time, trying to determine if she felt different somehow; if maybe she was more grown-up or loved him deeper. And it was probably a little of both.

It wasn’t until he got an apprenticeship in Tølløse that he started hanging out with Big Thomsen and his crowd. Klaus
was still the same person, but Louise didn’t care for the rest of them. They made her feel insecure because she was never sure if they were serious or just playing crude jokes. As she recalled, they always took it right to the line and sometimes they pushed their followers over it. Luckily Klaus didn’t adopt the same superior attitude or their relationship would have been over.

Louise wondered what the gang thought of her. She had never really mingled with the group—she mostly stayed with Klaus when there was a party, and otherwise they usually stayed in, spending time in her room or his, unless they were hanging out at the stadium. They got engaged on her eighteenth birthday. He had bought two thin silver rings from the jeweler on Main Street and surprised her when they retired to her bedroom after dinner with her parents.

When his apprenticeship ended, he was able to continue working for the butcher in Tølløse. One evening they had been sitting by Avnsø Lake, thinking about moving in together. As she recalled, it wasn’t much more than a month later that Klaus stopped by one afternoon to tell her about the farmhouse in Kisserup. The rent was just 1,625 kroner a month.

The house was vacant when they went to see it, and Louise loved it even though it needed cleaning and paint. An elderly man had lived there for the past several years before going to a nursing home. Later that same day, after signing the lease, they sat on the lawn beneath the large heritage apple tree, dreaming and making plans for the future. She had shaken her head at Klaus when he pointed out that the two smaller bedrooms behind the living room would make good nurseries.

Her only concern was whether Big Thomsen and his gang planned on moving in as well. It was always a great draw when someone got their own place; friends no longer had to hang out at their parents’ house and be careful to keep the volume down.
As they sat there in the grass, she had told Klaus that of course he could keep seeing them. She just didn’t want to live with them.

W
ITHOUT GIVING IT
much thought, Louise signaled and turned off toward Kisserup and drove past the gravel pit with a knot slowly growing in her stomach. She hadn’t been there since that summer. There were more houses now, she noted, slowing down a little. The road to the thicket by the house was just after a row of closely spaced trees, which all but obscured the small sign.

The house was at the end of the road. Louise’s palms felt sweaty against the steering wheel as she pulled over and decided to walk the last part of the way. There weren’t many houses along the narrow road, and theirs had been a bit farther down than the rest. The trees still hid the house from view like they did back then; it wasn’t visible from the road, which turned slightly just before the sloped driveway.

Louise walked along a row of tall trees that followed the field next to the property. She could hear voices. It sounded like children playing with water, whooping and cheering when they got splashed.

She felt cold inside as she stepped between the pines and pushed through the close branches.

The red timber-frame house had a new thatched roof; a large patio had been built in the back. Toys were scattered across the yard and two children squealed with delight as their father turned the water hose in their direction.

Louise slumped down, staying hidden behind the heavy bottom branches of a pine tree. The remains of breakfast were still on the table and a woman sat under a sunshade, nursing an
infant. The family was probably enjoying their parental leave with their newest addition.

Louise noticed that they had planted small bushes in the spot where she had planned to put an apple tree. It would have grown big by now, she thought.

She didn’t cry as she sat there, breaking inside. It was no longer the kind of sorrow that brought tears. It had settled in a deeper place, and she realized that it had eaten away a bit of her life—or at least the life she had dreamed of having.

T
HEY HAD MOVED
in on a Friday, having spent the previous weeks out there painting. Louise’s mother had helped them clean the house, and Klaus borrowed a van from his boss to move their things. They had spent their first night in the house on the living room floor because Klaus had started to unbutton her blouse and then they never really got any farther. At one point during the night, he had dragged in a mattress for them to lie on but they didn’t get much sleep. The way she remembered it, they made love until morning.

The following evening she had made plans with Camilla to spend the night at her studio apartment in Roskilde. A rock band was playing at the high school in Himmelev, and Klaus would never let her drag him along to something like that. So she left him with the boxes to unpack and promised to be back Sunday before noon so they could finish settling in.

T
HE MOTHER WITH
the infant stood up. The baby appeared to be sleeping.