The Lost Village by Camilla Sten (best fiction novels TXT) 📗

face, her mouth just a limp dash between her cheeks.

A bit like Max looks now, come to think of it.

Me too, I’m sure.

“What is it?” Max asks, a hint of confusion in his voice. He stops behind me, and I feel his shadow fall over me when he leans in to take a look.

“Kristina Lidman,” I say. “Birgitta Lidman was the mother of the baby they found here. Birgitta Lidman was Tone’s grandma.”

“Who…” he begins.

“Gitta,” I say quietly. “Look. It’s dated August 18, 1959.”

I look at the two blurry pictures. Though they aren’t in focus, I can still see what they show.

One of them is the same child again, shot from the side. The other shows her lying on a naked breast. The figure she is lying on is large and shapeless, and her face is turned away. Her long, dark hair winds down over her shoulders and chest.

“Where did you find that?” Max asks.

I nod at the desk.

“In the nurse’s records,” I say.

The folder is still lying open in front of me. The scrawls on the lined paper float in front of my eyes. I didn’t want to read them, but I couldn’t help myself. Anything to distract me from the throbbing, pulsating truth hanging over me like a red mist:

Emmy is dead and it’s my fault. Tone is gone, lost, insane, and it’s my fault.

The scrawls don’t offer much. The birth weight and length. I don’t know what’s healthy for an infant, but it looks normal to me. And the name. Kristina Lidman.

So that was her first name. Before she became Hélène Grimelund.

I wonder what Tone’s mother would say if she could see her own baby pictures. What Tone would say.

Another note, jotted right at the bottom:

FATHER: UNKNOWN.

I shut the folder. It’s a breakthrough. Explosive. It would have made the documentary a success.

But that doesn’t matter anymore, none of it does. There will never be any documentary. No one will ever get to know.

And none of it matters because Emmy is dead.

“I really believed in the film, Alice. Just so you know. I think it would have been fantastic. We could have made something really special.”

“Have you found anything to cover her with?” Max asks quietly.

There it comes, barging in again. The truth. The real world.

“I was going to check the cabinet,” I say quietly, pointing limply at the one in the corner.

He doesn’t say anything, just walks over to it and looks at the doors.

“It’s locked,” he says.

I open the bottom drawer of the desk. There it is, neat and compact, a small brass key on a twisted string.

I pick it up and walk over to the cabinet. The key glides in and turns so effortlessly that it feels as though my hand is following the key rather than vice versa.

The cabinet is unbearably tidy, with bandages and Band-Aids sorted into small compartments. The lower section is taken up by towels and sheets. I pull out the top sheet and hold it for a second.

It’s white, cotton. It has yellowed slightly with age, and is stiff in that way that sheets only get from mangling. An embroidered trim of dainty white flowers lines its edge.

Emmy will like it. She has always liked old things, flowery vintage pieces that contrast with her ripped jeans and ugly T-shirts.

Emmy would have liked it.

She will never like anything again.

What would Emmy have done?

She would have pulled herself together; she would have taken charge.

The floor is steady underfoot as we leave the room. Robert hasn’t come back yet, and she’s still lying there, small and still.

Reality wavers here, but I force my feet to keep moving.

Max and I stand on either side of her, like in some sort of ritual. I unfold the sheet to its full length, while Max straightens out her legs and arms.

I carefully take the golden heart around her neck and lift the hem of her T-shirt to slip it back underneath, where it should be, but Max stops me.

“Wait,” he says.

“What?”

My voice is rusty. Unfamiliar, unused.

Max leans in over her and pushes my hand away from her neck. I flinch at his touch, pull back as though burned, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

His eyes are fixed on the base of Emmy’s neck. On the dark marks on her pale skin.

It’s beautiful, somehow: the suggestion of a bird, ghostly dark tracks winging out and around her neck.

I want to ask what is that, but the words don’t come because they don’t need to. Because I already know the answer.

They’re hand impressions.

Max straightens his back a little. Then he reaches out and puts his hands over her eyes. He opens them again, and that more than anything feels wrong, somehow, and I want to turn away because those still, staring eyes are worse than her stiffening limbs and cold skin, but Max looks for the both of us, he leans in and stares.

“They’re bloodshot,” he says, his voice strange. “I’ve read that the whites go bloodshot if a person’s been…” He swallows the last word.

Strangled.

No broken ribs that pierced soft, vulnerable tissue. No unlucky fall.

No accident.

The marks of someone’s fingers, like a necklace tightened around her neck.

Rage and horror combined have a sour, stale taste, I learn.

I look for Max’s eyes, but he isn’t looking at me. Suddenly tense, he scrambles to his feet and looks at the doors to his right. The realization of what he’s thinking drops into my lap just as I hear him shout:

“Robert!”

Someone managed to do that in the ten minutes that elapsed between Emmy answering our last question and me climbing through the second-floor window. Someone was either following us or waiting for us.

Someone who might still be here in the school.

Here upstairs.

And Robert is alone in the classroom.

 THEN

The afternoon heat has given way to a cooler evening air. They haven’t been able to open the windows in Ingrid’s office for fear of the baby’s cries being heard, so some trace of the day’s oppressive heat remains. Between that and the stench,