The Shadow Woman (20 page)

She lingered outside the office and read the sign, just to be sure. She was a little nervous once she was standing there. Speaking to a stranger about that girl and her mother—it felt silly now. What business was it of hers? It was better to go back and che—

“Mrs. Bergman, you shouldn’t be standing out here in the rain,” the girl who had come out from the office said. “Can I help you with something? Do you need help with anything from the store, Mrs. Bergman?”

“No. No, thank you,” she said, recognizing the girl from her courtyard. They had said hello a few times. “You know my name?”

“Well, you’ve lived here for such a long time, Mrs. Bergman,” the girl said. “We’ve spoken to each other. My name is Karin Sohlberg.”

“Lived here for a long time? Since it was built.” That was true. They’d moved here in 1958, when everything was new and filled with light. Elmer had never explained how they had been able to afford it, and she hadn’t asked. She hadn’t asked about anything at all, and that had been foolish.

“You’re getting wet, Mrs. Bergman.”

“Could I come in for a moment? There was something I wanted to ask you about.”

“Sure. We shouldn’t stand out here any longer. I’ll take your arm, and we’ll walk up the steps.”

Inside the desk lamp was on, illuminating a surface covered with papers. She was offered a comfortable chair to sit in.

The telephone rang, but by the time the girl picked up the phone there was nobody there. She put down the receiver and turned to her visitor. This could take a while, and that didn’t matter.

“The weather really turned around.”

Ester Bergman didn’t answer. She was thinking about what to say.

“It really feels nice,” the girl said.

“I wanted to ask about those two who were living in one of the units farther up from me. A mother and her daughter.”

The girl looked at her as if she hadn’t heard, as if she wanted to keep talking about the weather. It used to be old people that talked about the weather—now it’s apparently young people, thought Ester Bergman. “A little girl with red hair,” she said.

“I’m not sure I understand, Mrs. Bergman.”

“There’s a little girl with red hair I haven’t seen for a long time. And her mother. I haven’t seen them and that’s why I’m asking about them.”

“Are they friends of yours, Mrs. Bergman?”

“No. Do they have to be?”

“No no. But you want to know something about them, Mrs. Bergman?”

“I haven’t seen them for some time. Do you know who I mean?”

The girl stood and walked over to a filing cabinet, returning with a thin pile of papers, which she laid on the table in front of her. Then she looked at Ester Bergman again. “This is the list of all the apartments on your courtyard, from number 326 to 486.”

“I see.”

“You said a little girl with red hair? And her mother? What did she look like?”

“I don’t know that she actually was her mother. She had fair hair, but I don’t know any more than that. I never spoke to her. Not once.”

“I think I remember,” the girl said. “There aren’t that many girls with red hair, after all.”

“Not in my courtyard anyway.”

“A single mother with one child,” the girl said, and flipped through her records.

“I saw the notice from the police,” Ester Bergman said suddenly.

The girl looked up. “What did you say, Mrs. Bergman?”

“There’s a notice from the police out here on the bulletin board. They’re looking for a young person.” She hadn’t thought about that before. “They’re looking for a woman with light hair.”

“They are?”

“Haven’t they handed them out to this office? The police? They should have, surely.”

“I’ve been on vacation. The office was closed for a while for renovation. You might still be able to smell the paint, Mrs. Bergman.”

“No.”

The girl looked in her files again.

“We have a number of single mothers with small children. You only saw the mother with the one child, Mrs. Bergman?”

“The mother had fair hair and the girl had red—”

“I mean, did she have any more children. Or a husband.”

“Not that I saw.”

“And you don’t know which entrance was theirs?”

“No. But it was down a bit from mine.”

The girl looked in her files again, flipped through them a ways. “Judging from the apartment numb—” The girl looked up. “I’m looking for possible apartment and personal identity numbers from the list here,” she said.

It wasn’t the first time somebody had asked about someone who hadn’t been seen for a while. Last spring a neighbor had started to wonder why he never saw the gentleman who lived in the apartment just below him, even though the light was on. After a week, the neighbor had come to see the unit super. Karin Sohlberg went over and rang the doorbell, and when no one opened the door, she peered through the letter slot at a pile of mail. Since the man had no family she could contact, and she didn’t have the authority to enter the apartment herself, she called the police. The old man was sitting there dead in his chair. Afterward she thought about how she hadn’t detected any smell.

She continued to run down the columns on the list.

“Find anything?” Ester Bergman asked.

“It could be Helene Andersén you’re wondering about. She lives two doorways up from you.” She muttered an apartment number that Ester Bergman couldn’t catch.

“Does she have a red-haired girl?”

“It doesn’t say, Mrs. Bergman.” The girl looked up. “But I wonder if she doesn’t—wait a minute.” She eyed the list again. “She has a little daughter named Jennie. It actually says so here.”

“Jennie?”

“Yes. That might be them. I can’t really say what they look like until I’ve seen them.”

“But they’re not here anymore. They’re gone.”

“How long has it been since you last saw the girl? Or the mother?”

“I can’t say for sure, but it was a month or so ago. When it was hot. And it was hot for a long time after. And now it’s been bad weather for a while too.”

“They may have gone away on vacation. Or to visit someone.”

“For so long?”

The woman made a gesture signaling that stuff like that could happen.

“I thought perhaps they had moved,” Ester Bergman said.

“No. They haven’t moved.”

“I see. But they’re not here anymore.”

“I know what we can do. I can go over there and ring the doorbell and see if anyone’s home.”

“What are you going to say if somebody answers?”

“I’ll have to think of something,” the girl said, and smiled.

 

Ester Bergman didn’t want to go along, so Karin Sohlberg entered the stairwell alone and walked up to the second floor. She rang the doorbell and waited. She rang the doorbell again and listened to the echo inside the apartment. It was still echoing when she opened the letter slot and saw the little pile of junk mail and other correspondence she couldn’t identify. You couldn’t see how much was lying there.

She headed back down the stairs and a minute later rang on Ester Bergman’s door. The old woman opened up at once, as if she’d been standing just inside the door.

“Nobody’s home.”

“That’s what I’ve been saying the whole time.”

“There was some mail lying just inside the door, but that could have a number of explanations.”

“I just want one,” Ester Bergman said.

“There’s one more thing I can do for you, Mrs. Bergman.” And for myself, she thought. I want to know too. “I can go to the district office and see if the rent has been paid.”

“You can see that?”

“We’re far enough into September now that we can see whether the rent has been paid or if a reminder has been sent out to Helene Andersén.”

“I’m mostly concerned about the little girl.”

“Do you understand what I mean, Mrs. Bergman?”

“I’m not stupid and I’m not deaf,” Ester Bergman said. “You go to that office. That’s fine.”

Karin Sohlberg walked to the district office in the old central heating facility on Dimvädersgatan and checked on the computer whether Helene Andersén’s last rent had been paid. It had, on the second of the month. Technically one day late, but it had been a weekend. In any case, the rent had been paid at the post office less than two weeks ago. Just like usual. Helene Andersén apparently always took her preprinted payment slip to the post office and paid first thing. Many people did this, and most of the tenants in the area used the post office at Länsmanstorget, thought Karin Sohlberg.

Ester Bergman had said the mother and the girl had been gone a long time. That sort of measure was relative. Old people could say one thing and mean something else. In that sense perhaps they’re not much different from anybody else—but to them a week can feel like a month. Time could pass slowly and yet all too quickly. Karin Sohlberg had sometimes thought about the elderly who sat there all alone with their thoughts, with so much inside of them that has to come out or else get bottled up.

She stood outside her office again. It was past opening hours. She tried to remember the face that belonged to the apartment, but she couldn’t recall seeing anyone with fair hair. Maybe a little girl with red hair, but she couldn’t be sure. She’d just had a long vacation with a lot of different faces around her.

Ester Bergman wasn’t confused. Her eyesight may not have been what it once was, but it was still sharp in its way. She wasn’t the type to go around jabbering about things for no reason. It must have taken her a long time to decide to come to the service office. What she’d said—that the little family hadn’t been there for a long time—might well be true. The question was what this meant. The rent was paid. But that didn’t mean they had to live there every single day.

She may have met a man, thought Karin Sohlberg. She met a man and they moved in with him, but she’s not ready yet to let go of her apartment because she’s unsure. She doesn’t trust men because she’s been burned before. Maybe. Probably. It’s probable because it’s common, Karin Sohlberg thought, glancing down at her left ring finger, where a thin band of white skin still shone against her tanned hand.

She walked over and looked at the notice. It was laminated, which suggested the police wanted it to be able to hang there through all kinds of weather. At first she didn’t understand what the connection was to this area, but then she thought about Ester Bergman: If she can see a possible connection, then I suppose I can too. But still, the rent was paid. She read about the missing woman again then unlocked the door to her office. She didn’t have time. If she remained sitting there, someone was bound to come in and then she’d have even less time.

She walked back to the courtyard and entered Helene Andersén’s stairwell and stood once again at her door and rang. The echo of the doorbell chime never faded out completely. Through the letter slot she could only see the brightly colored junk mail and a few brown and white envelopes. They look like bills, but I can’t be sure, she thought. But I can be sure that nobody in there has opened the mail for quite some time.

She didn’t see any newspapers, but that didn’t mean anything. Many people couldn’t afford a morning paper anymore, or had given it up for something else instead.

Eventually it felt strange standing there, sort of spooky—as if she expected to see a pair of feet come toward her. She recoiled with that thought and returned to the courtyard and looked up toward Helene Andersén’s kitchen window. The blinds were drawn, and that distinguished her window from those adjacent, above, and below. During the heat wave, the blinds in all the windows had been down, but now the window she was looking at was virtually the only one.

She exited through the building’s main entrance and tried to locate Helene Andersén’s window from the outside. It wasn’t difficult, since the blinds were down on that side too. It was a natural thing to do when you went away. After half a minute she had that same unsettling feeling and closed her eyes in order not to see a shadow suddenly appear in the window. My God, here I am getting myself all worked up, she thought, and looked away in order not to see that movement, the shadow. It was a powerful sensation, this dread, as if she’d lost her skin in a split second. Then it was over and she was herself again.

 

Sohlberg felt foolish as she rang the doorbell of the Athanassiou family in the apartment immediately below. Mr. Athanassiou opened the door, and it was a familiar face. She asked as simply as she could about the woman and the girl upstairs. The man responded by shaking his head. They hadn’t seen them for a while, but who could know when the last time had been? No, they hadn’t heard anything. They had always been quiet up there, the whole time they had been living there. The girl may have run around a little sometimes, but nothing they had reason to complain about. My ceiling is someone else’s floor, after all, the man said, and when he pointed upward, Karin Sohlberg thought about the Greek philosophers.

She was drawn to the notice board again but stopped at Ester Bergman’s window when she saw the old lady through the glass. Mrs. Bergman opened the window, but Sohlberg said nothing to her about the rent having been paid. Perhaps she wanted to keep the mystery alive a little longer for the old lady. Maybe I want to keep it alive for myself too, she thought.

Now she stood in front of the notice board and wrote down the phone numbers for the district CID’s homicide department.

At the window, Mrs. Bergman had said she wanted to write a letter to the police. Could the young lady help her?

“If you would like to contact the police, Mrs. Bergman, then maybe you can call them,” Sohlberg had answered. “I could help you.”

“I don’t like the telephone. Nothing gets said.”

SITTING WITH ESTER BERGMAN WHILE THE RAIN BEAT AGAINST
the kitchen window, Karin Sohlberg imagined that this, more or less, must be the old lady’s world. Or was that a preconceived notion? She was often here in the kitchen, at her window. She must notice quite a lot in her world of faces and voices that she saw and heard but didn’t know.