I raise my eyes from the screen and meet Debby’s pointed look. For some reason she doesn’t seem as nice now.
“According to our timeline, she stopped writing to open the door for the killer.”
I feel a stabbing pain when I imagine Dina bent over her keyboard, writing her reconciling words. I more than anyone know how hard it was for her to apologize, she never owned her mistakes, no matter what price she had to pay. “Only losers apologize, or stupid women,” she used to say with that famous determination of hers, but here it is, this apology, this pregnancy. Dina is the proof that people can change.
Who knows, maybe you can too, one day.
“We’re assuming that with her pregnancy, Dina decided to reach out to more people from her past, and it very well may be that one of them is our murderer.” Debby takes a noisy sip from a giant cup of coffee that I only now notice, and says, “So we want to go over the list of people you and Dina both knew again.”
She takes another slurpy sip and gives me a conspiratorial look. I feel like telling her, “Oh, so now we’re best friends?” but I don’t have time for that. There’s someone on the list of “people you and Dina both knew,” knew very well indeed! that I’m going to see the moment they let me leave this place.
24
THE UGLY GREEN ceramic sign on his door announces: Yarden.
For a moment I feel a surge of relief. At least that’s his real name, at least that wasn’t a lie. At least he’s not a figment of your imagination.
Thrump, thrump! Thrump, thrump! I knock as hard as I can, pounding with balled fists. Thrump, thrump! My hands are starting to hurt, but I’m not giving up, I know he’s in there.
“Open up! Open the door, you piece of shit!” I shout, “Open the door, arsehole!”
When my shouts become too loud (had I known how liberating it is to scream at the top of your lungs, I would have started shouting a long time ago), the door opens abruptly, and he pulls me inside.
Once my eyes adjust to the blinding neon light, we stare at each other silently. He’s wearing an old, loose-for-wear wife beater, looking grubbier than usual, his stubble darker than usual and eyes lighter than usual – their gaze flat and strange. The gaze of a dead snake.
“I know you know,” he says quietly, almost whispering, his voice as flat and strange as the look in his eyes. The overly calm tone is enraging – he has no right to be calm.
“You have no idea what I know!”
“I know you know I’m not an official investigator on this case,” he says, still with the same flat tone.
“You’re not anything on this case! You’re a nobody!”
He slowly pulls away and settles into the armchair, almost sinking into it. Only now do I pause to sweep my gaze across the apartment, which is awash with a glaring light and sharp angles. It looks very new. Too new. Everything around us is glowing with surgical sterility, and there’s not a single personal item in the place apart from a giant wall clock, polished white, its enormous second hand sweeping across the dial. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
Micha is still fixed to the armchair, looking like a wax figure lifted from the museum. Staring into space in a spectacular display of indifference, he ignores my presence, as if all at once he just stopped caring, or maybe he could only get his groove on when he was lying and pretending to be someone else. He looks like he’s mourning something. Someone.
“I’m a volunteer in the detective division,” he says as if that explains everything.
“A volunteer? So how did you get access to all that information?” I want to kill him, pummel him with my bare hands, rip him apart, tear off the cloak of indifference, sully this clean, impersonal apartment, which looks uninhabited. Although I can sense he lives here, that he’s exactly the type to leave no trace behind. Unlike me, with my breadcrumb trail wherever I go, for the children who’ll never follow…
“Sheila, relax,” he says, and I have to wonder whether there’s a single person on the planet who ever responded well to that directive, let alone actually relaxed.
“Relax?” I almost scream. Scream, scream.
“My uncle is Amiram Yarden.” When he sees my blank expression, he adds, “The precinct commander.”
“So the illustrious commander is okay with fraud?”
His rapid blinking gives him away.
“Ah, so he doesn’t know?” I jeer. “He doesn’t know what a lying loser his volunteer nephew is?”
Shut up, you won’t get anything this way, shut your trap already, do a clean job and get what you want out of him.
But shouting feels oh-so-good, so freeing. I realize how much I’ve been holding back in his presence, how hard I’ve been trying to be everything I’m not, everything I thought he wanted me to be, so much so that I made up some kind of ghost-Sheila that doesn’t exist. And since he came up with a fictional character for himself, I guess you could say we’re two peas in a fake pod. Or maybe four peas.
I look up at the wall clock and notice that the giant hands resemble two sharp knives, and the second hand a thin scalpel spinning much too fast. Tick-tock, tick-tock.
“He knew I was involved in the investigation in my own way,” he notes with carefully chosen words, “I had his unspoken consent.”
We stare at each other again. Even with his body sunken in the soft white armchair, he still manages to look tall and straight-backed. I picture the boy who was ensnared in a back brace that forced him into sitting like this. Now he doesn’t need to be forced, the body has learned its lesson; there’s nothing the body doesn’t remember.
“And why would the precinct commander allow you to meddle in the investigation in such an ugly way?”
The
