The Shadow Woman

35

IT WAS DARKER NOW. WINTER WAS BACK IN HIS OFFICE. BULOW was ready to hold off on writing certain things. You owe me a favor, he said when they parted. I just did you one, Winter had answered.

The music from the CD was louder than the other sounds in the room. Michael Brecker was blowing ice-cold notes from the tenor sax on “Naked Soul” from Tales from the Hudson.

He thought about Helene’s face and body. Her soul had left her body. Thinking about her name now was no different than it had been before. He had known. How had she let him know? How had she communicated her name to him?

He picked the topmost drawing from the pile on his desk. It showed a figure, who might be a child, with its arms reaching upward. There was no ground. The figure was hovering in the air.

Winter studied the next image. In the middle of the picture, a car was driving along a road that went through trees. There were no faces in the windows of the car, since it didn’t have any. The car had no color, was white like the paper. The trees were green and the road brown. Winter picked up the next drawing, which also showed a car. It was driving among houses that were drawn like tall blocks with windows that were irregularly square. The road was black. Winter flipped through the drawings until he found another with a car in it. It was driving on a brown road. In five drawings the car was driving along a black road. The cars were uncolored, left white like the paper. He saw a person with red hair in one of the windows. None of the cars had any drivers.

He looked for any letters or numbers on the cars. She had written her name, “jeni.” She could recognize and copy a letter or a number. Weren’t there five-year-olds who could read and write fluently?

He closed his eyes. The music helped his concentration.

He opened his eyes and laid the drawings with cars in them to the right. There were also other vehicles- something that looked like it could be a streetcar, in some of the drawings. The carriages were long and lined with windows, like the high-rises he had seen earlier, only lying down. One drawing showed something that could have been a streetcar seen from the front. The number 2 was drawn at the top, above a large window.

Winter laid the drawing aside and looked for more streetcars in the pile. After ten drawings, he found one. It didn’t have a number. He flipped past a few more and saw the number 2 written on yet another streetcar, only this time on the side. A face with red hair could be seen in one of the windows. Eyes, nose, mouth.

Checking his watch, he reached for the pink commercial section of the telephone book and looked up the number for the public transport information center. The office at Drottningtorget was still open. He called and waited. A woman answered. He asked about the route of the number 2 streetcar, was told, and hung up.

It fit. That number 2 passed North Biskopsgarden. Clearly they would have taken it. Maybe on a daily basis. Or else the number 5, which he’d learned also went through there. Maybe he would see a 5 in the drawings. He’d started sweating, a thin film he could feel from his hairline to his eyebrows. He stood and went out to the toilet without turning the light on and splashed cold water on his face.

The telephone rang. He walked over to the desk and picked up the receiver.

“Winter.”

“It’s Beier here. I figured you’d still be there.”

“What is it?”

“I don’t know. But there’s a slip of paper that’s centuries old. Or pretty old, anyway.”

“A slip of paper?”

“A piece of paper with something written on it. We took everything that was in her storage room back with us, including two boxes of clothes. One of them had some children’s clothes in it, and we found this slip of paper in the pocket of one of the dresses.”

“I see.”

“It’s an old dress and an old slip of paper.”

“You’ve already been able to determine that?”

“Yes, but no more than that. We haven’t started analyzing it yet, so we haven’t established exactly how old it is.”

“You sound like a doubtful archeologist.”

“That’s just what you are in this job. But coming up with a precise age is very difficult. So, what’s it gonna be? Do you want to come up and take a look at it? I’m leaving pretty soon.”

Winter looked at the drawings that he had started to sort into piles. He felt interrupted. “Should I?”

“It’s up to you. It’s not going anywhere. But-it’s a little odd-I’m feeling some kind of vibes here.”

“Intuition,” Winter said.

“An impulse,” Beier said.

“Then I’d better come up.”

“So, what do you say?” Beier said.

Winter looked at the dress and the slip of paper lying next to it on the illuminated examination table. The dress could be Jennie’s, but it had an old-fashioned feel to it, as if it belonged to another time. Winter couldn’t say which one, but that kind of thing wasn’t hard to establish.

The paper was four by four inches and looked like it had been folded a thousand times. It was yellowed with age and seemed incredibly delicate. A Dead Sea Scroll, thought Winter. “It certainly looks old,” he said. “Do you have the copy?”

Beier handed it to him.

“It’s still legible,” he said.

“Is it ballpoint?”

“Felt-tip, we think. But don’t ask me anything difficult yet. We’re going to check it out, just like everything else. If there’s any point.”

“Well,” Winter said. “People hang on to old stuff sometimes. There’s nothing unusual about that per se.”

“No.”

“Then they get murdered or disappear and suddenly we’re poring over their personal effects.”

“That’s when a child’s dress becomes interesting,” Beier said. “Or a piece of paper with a mysterious message.”

Like a cry from the past, thought Winter. He held the copy in his hand. Written on it was “5/20.” On the line below was a dash about a quarter of an inch long followed by “1630.” The third line read “4-23?” and after that came a blank space of an inch or so and then “L. v-H, C.” The C had been circled. On the right side of the paper were lines that looked to Winter like some kind of map. Next to one line, in the upper left- hand corner, was something that could be a cross or short lines.

“This could be a map,” he said.

“The horizontal lines start next to that C,” Beier said.

“It could be a road. A street or a country road. Or just a line.”

“It could be anything,” Beier said.

“One of them ought to be the time; 1630, that’s a time.”

“And 5/20 could be a date,” Beier said. “May 20.”

“The twentieth of May at four thirty,” Winter said. “What happened then, Goran? Can you tell me what you were doing then?” he said, dead-pan. “Well. We’ll just have to think about it. Can you determine how old they are? The dress and the paper?”

“That all depends. The older a piece of paper is, the easier it is to find out how old it is. But this isn’t a hundred years old.” Beier looked down at the slip of paper again. “So the margins we have to work with are smaller, since the methods of manufacturing paper won’t have changed much over such a short period of time. We’ll have to check with paper manufacturers about watermarks and such. We’ll have to look at the quality of the paper.”

“But nothing more?”