The Fire Witness

72

Flora is hurrying home with a heavy bag of groceries. The sky is dark, but the streetlights haven’t come on yet. Her stomach knots as she thinks of how the police rebuffed her. Her face had flushed with shame when the female officer told her that it was a crime to make a false report. Still, she’d called back to tell them she’d seen the murder weapon. Now she keeps going over the conversation again and again in her mind.

“Police,” said the same officer who had just given her a warning.

“My name is Flora Hansen. I just called a moment ago,” she said, and swallowed hard.

“Yes, about the murders in Sundsvall,” the officer said calmly.

“I know where the murder weapon was hidden,” she lied.

“Do you realize that I am going to report you, Flora Hansen?”

“I’m psychic. I’ve seen the bloody knife. It’s in the water-dark, glittering water. That’s all I saw, but I… I can go into a trance and find out more, for a fee. I can point out the exact place.”

“Flora,” the officer said sternly, “if you persist, you will be under suspicion for a crime and the police will-”

Flora hung up.

Now she’s walking past the halal food market. She stops and looks in a garbage can for empty bottles, then she shifts the grocery bag to her left hand and keeps walking to the apartment building. The front lock has been broken and the elevator is stuck in the basement. Flora climbs the stairs to the second floor and unlocks the door to the apartment. She walks into the hall and flicks the light switch.

There’s a click, but the light does not go on.

She puts down the grocery bag, locks the door behind her, and slips off her shoes. As she bends over to put them away, the hair on her arms rises.

The apartment suddenly feels extremely cold.

She takes her wallet and the grocery receipt out of her purse as she walks down the hall to the dark living room. She can make out the sofa, the big worn armchair, and the dark pane of the television. There’s an odor of electric dust-a short in the wiring.

Without stepping into the living room, she reaches to turn on the lights. Nothing happens when she pushes the button.

“Is anyone home?” she whispers.

The floor shakes and a teacup rattles in its saucer.

There’s someone moving through the darkness.

Flora follows. The floor is cold beneath her feet. It feels as if someone has left the windows open too long on a winter day.

The door to the bathroom is shut. As Flora reaches for the handle, she remembers that Ewa and Hans-Gunnar are not supposed to be home this evening. They are at a pizza parlor, celebrating a friend’s birthday. This means no one should be in the bathroom, but still she pushes open the door.

In the gray light of the bathroom mirror, she sees something that makes her stagger backward and gasp for breath.

On the floor of the bathroom, between the tub and the toilet, a girl is lying with her hands in front of her face. There’s a huge pool of blood next to her head and tiny red drops have spattered on the bathtub, the floor mat, and the shower curtain.

Flora trips over the vacuum cleaner hose and as her arm swings out, it catches Ewa’s plaster relief from Copenhagen. It crashes at the same time Flora does. Her head hits the hall floor.