Rain Girl

by Gabi Kreslehner

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2010 Gabi Kreslehner

  Translation copyright © 2014 by Lee Chadeayne

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Rain Girl was first published in 2010 by Ullstein Buchverlage GmbH, Berlin, as Das Regenmädchen. Translated from German by Lee Chadeayne. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2014.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781477823118

  ISBN-10: 1477823115

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2013923378

  Cover design by Lindsay Heider Diamond

  CONTENTS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  48

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  59

  60

  61

  62

  63

  64

  65

  66

  67

  68

  69

  DEDICATION

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  1

  She staggered along the northbound shoulder of the autobahn in the mist of the rising dawn unaware of the danger hurtling toward her. She was blind to the harsh light reflecting on her dress, making it glitter and sparkle one last time before being swallowed up by the dirt and the rain.

  She screamed when she was sent flying through the air—into the open sky—but no one heard her on the A9 just outside Munich on the morning she would not live to see. As if she were waking up on any normal day, her body rolled over. Her eyes were wide open, staring into the sky.

  By the time the car finished lurching wildly back and forth and screeched to a stop, she was dead—killed pursuing her dreams on her way to Berlin.

  Help came too late for the girl lying in the middle of the road—her name not yet known, she was just a ghost in the drizzling rain, broken and still.

  2

  He was bent over, leaning against his BMW, his heart racing. He felt like he was going to throw up—like he was going to spit out what had happened—but at the same time he knew he couldn’t. Knew that this would stay with him for the rest of his life.

  His entire body shook, and he wished he were back in his girlfriend’s cozy apartment, dreaming in her comforting arms. He didn’t belong here—not on this morning, not in this shaking body, not on this autobahn toward Berlin.

  She had appeared so suddenly. For a fraction of a second, he had seen her eyes and her mouth opened to scream. The impact was muffled, yet loud enough to resonate in his ears forever after. She had flown across the car and yards into the air—her body strangely weightless, like a rag doll.

  He’d tried to get control of his car, stop its careening from side to side, and he didn’t see where she landed.

  Music was booming through his open car door as Aida and Radamès sang their swan song—one last bit of familiarity linking him to his former life.

  Suddenly the music stopped and someone was shaking him by the shoulders.

  “Get ahold of yourself, man!”

  He looked up to see someone standing beside him, looking at him intently. “What happened?”

  He began to shake his head, slowly, in a daze. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know. All of a sudden she was there, out of nowhere, like a ghost.”

  The man shook his head and left.

  Out of nowhere—yes, that’s how it happened, out of nowhere, like a ghost. He suspected he would be saying that often from now on. Out of nowhere, like a ghost.

  Slowly he began moving, climbing back into the car, closing the door carefully behind him, and restarting the opera. Aida, he thought, sing for me; sing me back into my old life. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the headrest. Gradually, calm came over him.

  3

  They did it once more standing up before she switched her cell phone back on. They didn’t need words, never had. When they were together it was thorough and precise. Silence was their bed, silence the only soft and gentle part of it—nothing else.

  Afterward she said, “Your back tastes like Portugal.” He laughed.

  “Yes,” she said, “like Portugal, salt, the Atlantic. Laugh all you want.”

  “I know,” he said, laughing. “Tides, wind, sun. You always say that.”

  They didn’t talk in the bathroom. He watched her as she showered, though he knew she couldn’t stand it.

  Then her cell phone rang. He handed it to her as she turned the water off. It was Felix and he sounded excited. Probably annoyed.

  “Jesus, Franza, finally! Why can’t I reach you? What the hell are you doing? I’ve been calling you for half an hour! A body was found on the A9. When are you coming in? It’s nine thirty!”

  She nodded but didn’t feel bad that she was late. “Yes,” she said, but was thinking what’s fifteen minutes? “All right, calm down, I’m coming. Twenty minutes. Are you going to wait for me?”

  She’d needed a break—suddenly, urgently—a break from death, from dirt, from all that crap, and what was wrong with that? So instead of driving straight to work she’d switched off her cell phone at the red light and turned onto the road past the theater—toward him, toward Port.

  She heard Felix sigh. “Twenty minutes! Where the hell are you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “twenty minutes. Exactly.” She hung up, ignoring the rest of his question.

  A body on the autobahn. Sounded like an accident. Why were she and Felix involved? They were homicide detectives.

  She turned the water on again. It was cold. It ran over her face, and her teeth began to chatter. So out there in the spring rain that was supposed to make things grow there was a dead body.

  She sighed. Apparently no accident then, or at least a suspicious one. The usual questions came to her: Who was it? What happened? How? And why?

  “Do you have to go?” Port asked. “Too bad. I thought we’d have breakfast together.”

  Franza shook her head and got out of the shower. “Would you give me a minute, please?”

  He was leaning against the dining-room table with a dog-eared script in his hand. There was a shadow in his eyes, a hint of mockery.

  For a moment she touched the crook of his neck, held her nose to his chest, and breathed in h
is smell. His lips tickled her ear as he recited a passage from the play he would soon star in.

  Outside, the rain smelled of the approaching summer, and she stopped to enjoy its fragrance. She remembered something they used to say as children when walking in the rain: Make me grow. Make me grow.

  That’s what she had believed as a child, and even as a teenager. Rain in June makes things grow. It makes everything better, and it is as soft as velvet.

  There weren’t many things she still believed in. She had seen too much in her life, with her job. But the magic of rain in June had remained, and she ran out into the raindrops whenever she could—when it wasn’t too embarrassing. She would stand with her eyes closed, face and arms toward the sky, hoping everything would be good and soft, and that everything would grow.

  Port was a bit like rain in June year-round. He made everything easier to bear, even the coming heat of summer and the dead bodies, which would look sweaty and tired.

  Ever since Franza had become a police detective she’d longed for the cold. When the snow crunched and the ice glittered in the sun, the dead looked different. Not as dead. More solemn. Better.

  Felix Herz was standing outside the police station. “A girl,” he said as he jumped into the car. “At first it looked like suicide. According to the driver of the car that hit her, she just appeared all of a sudden out of nowhere. But then things get mysterious: they found blood.”

  Franza frowned. “Blood? How is that mysterious? That’s what you expect in a car accident.”

  “True,” Felix said, “next to the body and around it. But not a hundred yards away in a rest area.”

  “Oh,” Franza said, thinking it over for a moment. “But it’s been raining for hours. Everything would have washed away.”

  “Right again,” Felix said, “but not underneath a shelter.” He paused and grinned. “Water usually comes from above, not below.”

  She was grinning, too. “We’re onto something,” she said.

  Almost all of their work was in the field. Their jobs were hard. There were more and more dead bodies: the man who shot his wife and child, the junkie in the dumpster full of slaughtered pigs. The girl on the autobahn.

  4

  Ben saw Marie on the side of the road, noticed her nice tits. He zoomed past at a hundred miles an hour, the road a blur.

  5

  They had covered her with a tarp to protect her from the rain and the prying eyes of passing drivers, who were slowly being directed past the accident scene.

  She was so young, too young to die, and she had a tenderness about her—the tenderness of the dead who were still between worlds, neither here nor there. The newly dead were still able to communicate what Franza needed to know to tell their stories. If she didn’t listen, who would?

  In two days’ time the girl would be completely transformed: anything still linking her to this world would fall away, and she would be as clear and straight as never before, and truly gone. By then, everything in the girl’s life would have passed on to Franza.

  Felix didn’t understand, he thought her introspection was a waste of time. But he always let her have those moments, left her the time to ask what had happened, even if the dead weren’t answering yet. They just lay there, twisted or straight, dirty or clean, but always taken by death, always silent.

  “Prepare yourself,” Felix had said, “she’s young.”

  But she was never sufficiently prepared. Franza shook her head, no, never enough, and she held back a sob.

  I can’t do it anymore, she thought. I can’t do it anymore. I’m too old. I need a different job.

  That was what she always thought before examining a body, before looking into its eyes and receiving its messages—and then she stayed, and investigated, and solved. It was like an addiction. Or a mission.

  The girl was lying on a grassy strip alongside the road, small and skinny, a little bird fallen from the sky—and from life.

  Rain had soaked her face, filled her still-open eyes—hazel eyes. They seemed to be staring into an endless space, understanding something that no one still living could know.

  Her hair was a tangled mess of blood, rain, and dirt—impossible to tell the color, dark brown maybe, bordering on black. A strand lay across her face, dividing it into two halves. Franza kneeled next to the girl and carefully brushed the strand of hair to one side, putting the halves back together.

  Sleep, Franza thought, sleep. Rest, my darling. She paused for a moment, looking down into the girl’s open eyes before closing them.

  Finally she got up and took a step back. The girl had no shoes on, no stockings, and her dress was pushed up on her thighs. It must have been a party dress, with its spangles and strings of pearls on silver fabric. It was like a precious gem that was no longer sparkling, smashed and soaked with blood and dirt—like its wearer.

  “We don’t have a name,” Felix said. He had approached quietly and for the last few moments had been standing next to Franza. “She had no ID on her, no bag, no backpack, no cell phone—nothing.”

  “She’s not much older than Ben,” Franza said.

  “I know,” Felix said.

  The sky was a muted blue, a halfhearted melody. The rain had ceased.

  6

  Marie on the side of the road, tits like honeydew melons.

  “Hey, Ben!” she said, after he had turned around and pulled up beside her. “Can I get a ride?”

  When Marie laughed with her mouth wide open, you could see a tiny moon, sparkling jewelry against her white teeth.

  She asked whose car it was. “It’s my dad’s second car,” he said. “But I can use it when he doesn’t need it. And he pretty much never does since he has another.” He grinned.

  “Great!” she said. “That opens up the possibilities.”

  He shot her a sideways glance and struggled to keep the car on the road. “You think?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “I think.”

  She turned away and looked out the window, smiling faintly, tapping her foot to the beat of the song that filled the car, leaving no room for anything else.

  “Let’s run away,” she said finally, but too softly for him to hear. He turned the music down.

  “What’s that?”

  “Run away!” she repeated. “Let’s just take off! Anywhere. Somewhere where no one knows us, where we’re strangers.”

  He was startled. He didn’t like the idea at all, but didn’t want to let it show—he liked her, and he wanted her to like him. So he just shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Are you serious?”

  She turned to face him, still tapping to the beat. Her eyes were shining like freshly polished apples. “I want to take a bite out of you,” she said. “I think you’re sweet.”

  Her hand brushed down his arm to his knee, and he felt shivers running down his spine. His pants tightened. He pulled over to the side of the road.

  Marie chuckled quietly. “Yes,” she said, “very sweet indeed.”

  Then she kissed him. On the ear. It went BANG. She kissed him in the hollow just above his collarbone. Light as a breath of air.

  “You are . . .” he whispered breathlessly, “I don’t know.”

  She laughed quietly and he stopped talking. The tip of her tongue gently circled his eye. He was trembling. Just a little, but still.

  7

  “Tell me what happened,” Franza said, trying to engage the man. He looked terrible—tired and pale, his tie loosened, and brown stains on his otherwise immaculate shirt.

  An hour earlier when he was getting tired of waiting around a policeman had given him a cup of coffee from a thermos. It had been so hot he’d burned his lips and then spilled it, ruining his shirt.

  Now this woman was standing in front of him, a homicide detective, and he couldn’t understand why he had to repeat everything all over again, and why everything was taking so long. It’s just typical, he thought angrily, government workers! Regular salary, regular hours, al
l the comforts!

  He longed for his office, for his secretary, even for his wife—simply for something from his normal life.

  It had taken forever for this detective lady—Franza Oberwieser, if he’d gotten the name right—and her partner to show up. What a strange name. They didn’t even bother apologizing for keeping him waiting. Typical cops, did as they pleased and he had to pay for it.

  “Listen,” he said, his anger rising. “I’ve told this to you guys a million times now.”

  She gave him an understanding smile. “Yes,” she said, “Herr Bohrmann, I know. But please tell me again anyway.”

  He took a deep breath. “All right,” he sighed. “All right. I was on my way home, not really thinking of anything, listening to music, and then all of a sudden she was just there. Out of nowhere. Right in front of me, in less than a second—like a ghost. Believe me, there was nothing I could do. She just ran right out in front of my car. Just like that. Smack.”

  He fell silent, pain showing in his face. Franza prompted him. “And then? What happened then?”

  He lifted his head and looked at her, pulling himself together.

  “Then?” he asked quietly. “Nothing. I saw her eyes, just briefly. Almost not at all. It was raining. And she screamed, I think.”

  He fell silent again and looked down at his shoes.

  “Where did she come from?” Franza asked.

  He shrugged and pointed in various directions. “I don’t know. From . . . somewhere. Maybe from somewhere back there. I think it might have been the rest area. Yes, that’s right, the rest area. Where else could she have come from? From the fields? At night? I don’t know.”

  Franza nodded. “Did you notice anything else?”

  He shook his head. She could see he was confused and tired, but she kept asking questions anyway. She had to. First impressions were crucial.

  “Is it possible she was being followed? Did you see anyone?”

  “What? Followed? No idea!” He was startled, beginning to shake. “No! How should I know?”