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 Andersen 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 Andersen.”
“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 Dimvadersgatan and checked on the computer whether Helene Andersen’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 Andersen 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 Lansmanstorget, 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 Andersen’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 Andersen’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 Andersen’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
