‘How were you at her age?’ he asked, trying to downplay this.
‘I had friends,’ she replied irritably.
‘Well, I had a spotty face and spent all my time strumming a guitar. Just think, I thought that learning to play the guitar would help make other people accept me.’
Clea, though, didn’t buy it. She was genuinely anxious about her daughter. It isn’t healthy for Monica, she told herself, pensively. ‘Do you think she’s hiding something from us?’
‘Yes, but I don’t think it’s a problem,’ Martini said. ‘At sixteen, it’s normal to have secrets.’
23 December
The day of the disappearance
At six in the morning, it was still dark.
Martini had woken early. While his wife and daughter slept, he made himself coffee and drank it standing up, leaning against a cabinet in the kitchen, savouring the warmth of the drink in the yellowish glow of the light over the dining table. Slowly, lost in thought. Then he put on thick clothes and hiking shoes. The previous evening, he had told Clea he would be going up to the high mountains.
He left home about seven. Outside, it was cold but pleasant. The air was brisk and the smell of the woods wafted down into the valley, ousting for a while the unpleasant odours that came from the mine. As he loaded his rucksack in the four-by-four, he heard someone call his name.
‘Hey! Martini!’
His neighbour was waving at him from the other side of the street. Loris replied to the greeting. From the start, the Odevises had been friendly to him and Clea. Husband and wife were the same age as them, although the couple’s children were much younger than Monica. From what Martini had gathered, he was involved in the construction business, but his money had come from the sale of land to the mine. They got along well. He was a little arrogant but fundamentally harmless. His wife was an intangible, finicky woman, who seemed to have come out of an advertisement for Fifties housewives.
‘Going anywhere nice?’ Odevis asked.
‘I’m heading up to the pass, then continuing along the east slope. I’ve never explored it before.’
‘Damn, maybe next time I’ll come with you. I could do with losing a few kilos.’ He laughed and patted his prominent stomach. ‘Today, I’m taking my baby out for a ride.’ He pointed to the open door of his garage and the blue Porsche parked inside. It was the latest in a long line of expensive toys he had purchased, because Odevis loved to spend his money and show off what he had bought with it.
‘Maybe next time I’ll come with you,’ Martini replied.
Odevis laughed again. ‘So, are we still on for Christmas?’
‘Of course.’
‘We really do want to have you join us.’
Clea had accepted the invitation without consulting him, but Martini didn’t blame her for it. His wife spent her days at home, and it was understandable that she wanted to socialise a little. And he had the impression the Odevises were also in search of new friends. Maybe because of their new lifestyle, their relations with their old acquaintances had cooled.
‘Well, have a good hike,’ Odevis said, walking to the Porsche.
Martini returned the farewell and got ready to climb into his old white four-by-four, which by now had accumulated too many kilometres and was beginning to display unmistakable signs of fatigue, in the form of noisy vibrations and overly dense exhaust fumes. He started the engine and set off towards the mountains as the darkness of the night started to fade.
By the time he got back, it was dark again. He opened the front door and was assailed by the unmistakable aroma of soup and roast meat. It was almost eight o’clock and that smell was the prelude to a reward that was well deserved after an exhausting day.
‘It’s me!’ he called, but nobody replied. In the corridor, the only light came from the kitchen. The noise of the extractor hood must be preventing Clea from hearing him. Martini put down his rucksack and took off his hiking boots in order not to dirty the floor. He had mud everywhere and there was a makeshift bandage on his left hand. He was still bleeding. He hid his hand behind his back and headed in his stockinged feet for the kitchen.
As he suspected, Clea was completely absorbed in her cooking, though glancing every now and again at the portable TV set that stood on a shelf. Martini came up behind her. ‘Hi,’ he said, trying not to startle her.
Clea turned for a moment. ‘Hi,’ she replied before again looking at the TV. ‘You’re late.’ She said it almost casually, not as an accusation. Her mind seemed elsewhere. ‘I’ve been trying to call you on your mobile all afternoon,’ she added.
Martini searched in one of his jacket pockets and took out the phone. The display was off. ‘The battery must have run out in the mountains and I didn’t notice. I’m sorry.’
Clea didn’t even listen to him. Yes, her tone of voice was different. Loris always knew immediately when something was worrying her. He went closer to her and lightly kissed her neck. Clea reached out a hand to caress him, but didn’t take her eyes off the TV screen. ‘A girl has gone missing in Avechot,’ she said, pointing at the local news. The noise of the hood covered the voice of the newsreader.
Martini leaned over her shoulder and peered at the screen. ‘When did it happen?’
‘A few hours ago, in the afternoon.’
‘Well, maybe it’s a bit too early to say that she’s missing,’ he said to reassure her.
Clea turned to him, an anxious look on her face. ‘They’re already searching for her.’
‘Maybe she just ran away. Maybe she quarrelled with her family.’
‘Apparently not,’ she retorted.
‘Kids that age are always running off. I know them, I deal with them every day. You’ll see, she’ll come straight back as soon as her money runs out. You always take things too much to heart.’
‘She’s the same age as our daughter.’ That was why she was so worried, Martini realised now. He put his arms round her waist, pulled her to him and spoke to her softly as only he could do. ‘Listen, it’s just a local channel. If it was something serious, all the news bulletins would be talking about it.’
Clea seemed to calm down a little. ‘You may be right,’ she admitted. ‘Anyway, she attends your school.’
Just then, the image of a teenage girl with red hair and freckles appeared on the screen. Martini stared at her, then shook his head. ‘She’s not one of my pupils.’
‘What happened to you?’
Martini had forgotten all about his bandaged hand and Clea had just noticed it. ‘Oh, nothing serious.’
She took his hand to get a better look at the injured palm. ‘But you seem to be bleeding a lot.’
‘I slid down a ridge, and to stop myself I grabbed hold of a branch sticking out of the ground and cut myself. But it’s superficial, nothing to worry about.’
‘Why don’t you go to A and E? It might need stitches.’
Martini pulled his hand away. ‘Oh, no, there’s no need for that. It’s nothing, don’t worry. I’ll clean the wound now and change the bandage, and you’ll see, everything will mend by itself.’
Clea folded her arms and looked at him grim-faced. ‘Stubborn as usual. You never do what I tell you.’
Martini shrugged. ‘Because then you get angry and that makes you even more beautiful.’
Clea shook her head, but any impulse to blame him was about to transform into a smile. ‘Wash yourself, anyway: you stink like a mountain goat.’
He raised his injured hand to his forehead and gave her a military salute. ‘Yessir!’
‘And hurry up, dinner will be ready soon,’ Clea admonished him as he walked towards the hallway.
In the living room, husband and wife looked at each other in silence. The dinner was getting cold on the table.
‘I’m going up now,’ Clea said. ‘She’ll listen to me.’
Martini reached out his hand to stroke hers. ‘Let her be, she’ll come down soon.’
‘I called her twenty minutes ago. Then you
went and knocked on her door. I’m tired of waiting.’
He would have liked to tell her that that would only make things worse, but he was always afraid of interfering in the delicate dynamic between mother and daughter. Clea and Monica had found a way of communicating that was entirely their own. They often clashed, frequently over stupid matters. But most of the time they reached a kind of tacit armistice, because both were proud but knew they had to continue living under the same roof.
They heard the door of Monica’s room close, then her steps on the stairs. Monica came into the living room, dressed entirely in black, including a cardigan that was too big for her. She had put on black eye make-up, which made her generally sweet face look decidedly nasty. Maybe that was why she put it on, Martini thought. He would often tell his wife that the girl was going through a Gothic phase, but Clea always retorted that this period had already lasted too long. ‘She looks like a widow, I can’t bear it,’ she would say. Mother and daughter were identical, not only in appearance. Martini found in them the same youthful attitude, the same way of approaching the world.
Monica sat down at the table without deigning to look at them. Head bowed, with a fringe falling over her eyes like a protective screen. Her silences always seemed like defiance.
Martini cut the roast and served the portions, saving the last one for himself. As he did so, he tried to distract Clea’s attention so that she wouldn’t go into attack mode, but it was obvious from her expression that she was on the point of exploding. ‘So, how was school today?’ he asked his daughter before the quarrel could break out.
‘Same old same old,’ was the terse reply.
‘I heard there was a surprise maths test.’
‘Yeah.’ Monica was playing with her fork, constantly moving the food about on the plate and raising only small mouthfuls to her lips.
‘Did you sit it?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What mark did you get?’
‘Six.’ The lazy tone was deliberately provocative, as was the laconic nature of the replies.
Martini couldn’t blame her. When it came down to it, she was the only one who hadn’t had a say in the matter of the move to Avechot. Nor had they given her too many explanations about the reason. Monica had had no choice but to endure her parents’ absurd, incomprehensible decision, but she was too clever not to realise that she had been asked to pay the price for their running away.
The thing, Martini remembered.
‘You should find something to do, Monica,’ Clea went on. ‘You can’t spend all afternoon lounging about in your room.’
Martini could see that his daughter wouldn’t reply. But his wife had no intention of letting go.
‘Take up a hobby, anything. Go skating, join a gym, choose a musical instrument.’
‘And who’ll pay for my lessons?’ Monica had looked up from her plate and now her eyes were boring into her mother. But Martini knew that the accusatory question was actually addressed to him.
‘We’ll find a way, won’t we, Loris?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He didn’t sound encouraging. Monica was right: on his salary, they couldn’t afford it.
‘You can’t spend all your time alone.’
‘I could always go to the brotherhood. That’s free.’ Her voice was bitingly sarcastic.
‘All I’m saying is that you need to make friends.’
Monica pounded the table with her fist, making the dishes clatter. ‘I had friends, but guess what? I had to say goodbye to them.’
‘Well, you’ll soon make new ones,’ Clea prevaricated. Martini detected a slight surrender in her, as if she had no counter-attack for this.
‘I want to go back, I want to go home,’ Monica said.
‘Whether you like it or not, this is our home now.’ Once again, Clea’s words were strong, but the tone in which she had uttered them betrayed weakness.
Monica stood up from the table and ran upstairs, going to ground again in her room. From below, they heard the door slamming. There was a brief silence.
‘She didn’t even finish her dinner,’ Clea said, looking at her daughter’s still full plate.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll go upstairs later and take her something.’
‘I don’t understand why she’s so hostile.’
But Martini was sure that Clea understood perfectly well. Just as he was sure that, out of spite, his daughter would reject the food he brought her. It didn’t use to be like that. Once upon a time, he had managed to mediate between mother and daughter. Now he felt he was just the strange awkward fellow who lived with them, shaved his face rather than his legs, didn’t lose his temper over trifles one week in the month and occasionally tried to have his say. The role of the taciturn but understanding father had always worked with Monica before. Then something in their family had broken.
He was convinced, though, that he could fix it.
He saw that Clea was on the verge of crying. He could always tell when her tears came from nervousness. Right now, they were tears of pain.
It’s because of the missing girl, he told himself. She’s thinking the same thing could happen to our daughter, because she doesn’t know her as well as she used to.
Martini felt guilty. Because he was only a secondary school teacher, because he had a wretched salary, because he hadn’t been able to offer a better life to the two women he loved most in the world and, last but not least, because he had shut his own family up in the mountains, in Avechot.
Clea resumed eating, but the tears started sliding down her cheeks. Martini could no longer bear to see her in that state.
Yes, he would fix everything. He vowed that he would make everything right.
25 December
Two days after the disappearance
On Christmas morning, the centre of Avechot was full of people. They all seemed to have decided to leave it to the last moment to buy their presents.
Martini was wandering amid the shelves in a bookshop, peering at the inside flaps of novels, looking for something to read over the holidays. He had homework to mark and had fallen behind with writing the end-of-term reports, but even so, he didn’t want to give up on a little time for himself. Actually, there was a lot to do around the house. Odd jobs he’d been constantly postponing and which he was sure Clea would remind him to complete. Like the gazebo in the garden. When they’d chosen to live here, his wife had fallen in love with that small patch of green behind the house, which she was thinking of using to grow vegetables or plant roses. The gazebo was dilapidated, but Loris had suggested turning it into a greenhouse. Unfortunately for him, Clea had welcomed the idea with rather too much enthusiasm. She didn’t want him to wait for the summer before refurbishing it, she’d rather he got it ready that very winter. He would have to spend quite a few hours out there in the cold, but it would be worth it just to see the grateful smile on her face.
Just then, Clea walked into the shop and searched for him along the aisles. She was carrying a small bag tied with a ribbon, and her eyes were sparkling.
‘So, have you found them?’ he asked once she had joined him.
She nodded enthusiastically. ‘Exactly the ones she wanted.’
‘Good,’ he said approvingly. ‘That way she’ll stop hating us … for a while, at least.’
They both laughed.
‘And what would you like?’
She put her arms round him. ‘I’ve already had my present.’
‘Come on, there must be something else.’
‘“I possess or pursue no delight, save what is had, or must from you be took.”’
‘Stop misquoting Shakespeare and tell me what you want.’
He noticed that the smile had vanished from his wife’s face. Clea had spotted something over his shoulder. Martini turned.
Not far from them, the bookshop owner was putting up a flyer behind the till, bearing the face of the missing girl.
‘I can’t begin to imagine how the Kastners must feel,’ a customer
said. ‘All these hours not knowing what’s happened to their daughter.’
‘It’s a tragedy,’ another said.
Martini gently took his wife’s chin between his fingers and made her turn back to face him. ‘Would you like us to go?’
She nodded, biting her lower lip.
Before long, he was standing by a full trolley. They had taken advantage of the Christmas special offers to do at least a month’s worth of shopping. After a great deal of insistence from her husband, Clea had made up her mind to go to a clothes shop and pick out a present. He waited for her, hoping to see her come out with something. As he stood there, he looked down at his bandaged left hand. It had hurt all night and he’d been forced to take painkillers, but they hadn’t been strong enough to let him sleep. This morning, he’d changed the dressing again, but he needed an antibiotic because there was a risk of the wound getting infected.
A familiar face in the distance made him forget about his hand.
Priscilla was sitting on the back of a bench next to a hotdog stand. She was with her friends, just hanging about. They were joking, but seemed bored. Martini stared for a long time at his prettiest pupil. She was chewing gum and every now and then biting her nails. A boy whispered something in her ear and she gave a wicked smile.
‘It took all my imagination to find anything I really liked in that shop.’ It was Clea, jolting her husband out of his reverie. She showed him a small red bag. ‘Ta-da!’ she announced.
‘What is it?’
‘A scarf made of the finest acrylic.’
Martini gave her a kiss on the lips. ‘I never doubted you’d criticise even the present you picked out for yourself.’
Clea took him by his good hand and pushed the trolley. She looked happy.
‘It’s what I always say.’ Odevis was speaking as he stirred the fire in the large stone hearth with a poker. ‘In business, you have to grab the opportunities.’
Loris and Clea were sitting on one of the white sofas in the living room. There was an equally white fur rug at their feet and a glass coffee table. Behind them, the table was still lavishly spread with the leftovers of Christmas lunch, and the ornamental red candles were slowly burning down. There was also a big decorated tree that almost reached the ceiling. In general, everything in the house was opulent, verging on gaudy.
The Girl in the Fog Page 11
