Invisible Murder

ICK. TICK. TICK. Skou-Larsen could hear the antique French table clock on the linen cabinet tick loudly in the silence. He was sitting on the third step of the hallway stairs and couldn’t make himself move any further.

She would be home soon. They rarely sang for more than two hours. Supposing she was actually singing.

I could call Ellen Jørgensen and ask, he thought. Mrs. Jørgensen lived a few streets away and was in the choir, too. Sometimes he drove her home after practice if he was picking Helle up anyway.

He didn’t get up. The nitroglycerin had helped a little, even though he still wasn’t feeling quite right. But the reason that he kept sitting there was … the real reason was that he just wasn’t up to it. What was he going to do if Ellen told him he had made a mistake, that they didn’t have an extra choir practice tonight?

Then he heard the garden gate click, and though he couldn’t see out into the front yard from where he was sitting, he could hear the crunchy click-click-click sound of the gears on Helle’s bicycle. His hearing was the only thing that still worked more or less as well as when he was younger. He struggled to his feet. His legs were all pins and needles; the hard staircase had taken its toll on the already poor blood supply to his lower extremities.

She realized immediately that something was wrong. Her eyes flitted from his face to the open vacuum closet, to the envelope sitting behind him on the steps.

“Give it to me,” she said.

“Helle, we have to talk about this. What were you going to do with the money?”

“I hate it when you snoop in my things,” she hissed, trying to push her way past him.

He propped his hand against the wall so she couldn’t walk past him. Her face looked like it usually did when she had been out of the house—tastefully made up with a touch of light eye shadow and a bit of pale pink lipstick, just a hint, nothing vulgar. She had pulled her hair back into a loose bun, and she was wearing her Benetton shirt, the one he had bought based on the careful instructions from her wish list last year. He remembered how Claus had complained—“Mom, this isn’t a wish list, this is an order form. Can’t you just let us surprise you?”—but Skou-Larsen thought it was nice and reassuring to have such neat directions to follow. That way you wouldn’t get it wrong.

She looked the way she always did. Completely the way she always did.

“This wouldn’t have been necessary if you had done something,” she said. “But you never actually get anything done, do you?”

“I’m going to put that money back in the bank tomorrow,” he said patiently. “And then we need to have a power of attorney drawn up so Claus or I will also have to sign something before you can withdraw it again.”

She wasn’t listening to him anymore. He could tell from the distant but focused look that made him feel like just a random object standing in her way.

Suddenly she shoved him hard to one side, not with her hands, but with her shoulder. He staggered and tripped on the bottom step, landing badly on his hip and heard the dry, little crack as he felt his thighbone snap and slide.

“Aaarhhh,” he moaned and then again when the pain came, “Aaaaaaaarhh.” The air wheezed out of him in an undignified, barely human sound.

She grabbed the envelope with the money.

“Call,” he said through clenched teeth. “Call the ambulance.”

She looked down at him with that sharp, concerned wrinkle between her brows.

“I don’t have time now,” she said. “You’ll have to wait until I get back.” And then she left, with the envelope clasped to her chest. Skou-Larsen heard the door slam but was no longer able to see it or her. It wasn’t the pain from his broken femur now; it was a bigger, more all-encompassing pain radiating outward from the back of his head, obliterating the contours of his body and shutting down all his other senses.

I won’t be here, he managed to think. When you come back, I won’t be here anymore.

A black tide was swelling irresistibly within him. He couldn’t hold on any longer and had to let it bear him away.