To her surprise, he didn’t reply, taking a step backward into the light instead.
Wilma’s cries got louder and suddenly she became impatient. How hard can it be to move the table aside?
A church clock chimed somewhere. The sound was altered, tumbling around inside the big belly of the van, transformed into a tinny, distant clanging.
“Did you hear me? We have to move the table a little. Otherwise I can’t get out.”
The scent of motor oil was stronger now, and kind of like something else. It smelled like some kind of solvent, and suddenly she felt sick to her stomach and wanted to get out into the sunshine and the fresh air, out to Wilma.
The Man in the Cast
She was his. She was in position in the van, and she wasn’t going to get out until he wanted her to.
He took a deep breath and looked around at the street. People were moving, in groups or alone, but no one seemed to have noticed him. The screaming coming from the baby carriage on the sidewalk was unrelenting. He could hear the church bells chiming in the distance.
Time to go.
“Did you hear me? We have to move the table a little. Otherwise I can’t get out!”
He paid no attention to her complaints. Instead he took a step backward out onto the street to admire his handiwork, to etch the image into his mind forever, so that he could conjure it whenever he wanted and look at it, enjoy it the way you would enjoy any work of art.
He took another step back.
“Hey,” she yelled.
He backed up another step. All he had to do now was shut the rear doors.
“Hey,” she bellowed from inside the belly of the van, but he never understood that her cry was a warning and not a protest. When the car hit him from behind and he was flung against the van like a rag doll, all he felt was surprise.
The Third Woman
Someone had draped a blanket around her shoulders. A policewoman was carrying Wilma around, and she wasn’t screaming anymore. The pool of blood in the street had almost reached her feet.
“So, you were helping him?”
“Yes,” she said with a sigh and turned to the friendly but in every other way unremarkable police officer—too old, too fat, breath too bad—who was squatting next to her on the sidewalk.
“He seemed really nice. Apparently he had a son named Anton, but no, I didn’t know him. He was a total stranger.”
She contemplated this for a little while and was filled with sorrow at the thought of what could have been but would never be. Their paths had crossed for a brief while, but now that moment was over. Maybe, just maybe, they had actually been meant to get to know each other better. Maybe they could have played a role in each other’s lives.
We will forever remain strangers, she thought.
Don’t miss the American debut
of the internationally bestselling series
from Swedish sisters
Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff
Meet Siri Bergman.
Thirty-four-year-old psychologist Siri Bergman is a dedicated therapist whose position as a healer, a seemingly wise and benevolent spiritual adviser to her patients, helps her to mask an uncomfortable truth: She’s haunted by plenty of demons of her own. Still grieving the untimely death of her husband, Stefan, Siri tries valiantly to heal the wounds of others from her office in central Stockholm—everything from addiction to obsessive compulsion to anxiety disorders. But the human mind is a dark place, and somehow Siri’s investigations keep leading her away from the safety of the therapist’s couch and onto the trail of a killer.
“Grebe and Träff break new ground in the Scandinavian crime literature genre, and they do it brilliantly.”
—Kristina Ohlsson, author of Unwanted
Some Kind of Peace
Paperback (ISBN 9781451654615)
eBook (ISBN 9781451654622)
More Bitter Than Death
Coming June 2013
Paperback (ISBN 9781451654608)
eBook (ISBN 9781451654646)
Available wherever books are sold.
Meet the authors, watch videos, and more at SimonandSchuster.com
Turn the page for an excerpt
from Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff’s
Some Kind of Peace
The first thriller featuring “delightfully flawed”
(Publishers Weekly) psychologist Siri Bergman
A thirty-four-year-old psychologist with a troubled past, Siri Bergman works in central Stockholm and lives alone in an isolated cottage outside the city. Terrified of the dark, she leaves all the lights on when she goes to bed—after having a few glasses of wine to calm her nerves—but she can’t shake the feeling that someone is spying on her through the blackened windows.
When the lifeless body of Sara Matteus—a young patient of Siri’s with a history of drug addiction and sexual abuse—is found floating in the water near the cottage, Siri can no longer deny that someone is out there, watching her and waiting. With the help of Markus, the young policeman investigating Sara’s death; Vijay, an old friend and psychology professor; and Aina, her best friend, Siri sets out to catch the murderer and finally put her past to rest. But as their investigation unfolds, virtually everyone Siri trusts will become a potential suspect.
“Tense and chilling, this is a thriller for readers who also enjoyed Camilla Läckberg’s The Ice Princess.”
—Booklist
“A fast-moving psychological thriller . . . Camilla Grebe and Åsa Träff spin a tantalizing story of menace and longing in this provocative and richly rendered novel.”
—Lee Martin, author of Break the Skin and The Bright Forever
Available wherever books are sold.
It seems so idyllic.
An insidiously calm, dew-damp morning. The rays of the sun slowly but relentlessly take possession of the art nouveau building’s clean plaster façade, triumphantly embracing it with their indifferent heat and giving it a sheen the night had hidden.
As if nothing had happened.
As if this summer morning heralded a day like any other. A day full of life: sweaty bodies on bicycles; suppressed giggles in front of the ice cream stand by the harbor; steaming, sunburned shoulders; clumsy summer sex as light-blue twilight seamlessly turns to daybreak; the nauseating smell of white wine and lemonade in the pine needle–carpeted edge of the forest north of the pizzeria; the cold water of the lake against skinny child bodies with ribs that seem ready to burst out of their cages, through the soft, paper-thin, milk-white skin.
Gawky teenage boys swim races to the island and back, outlined like pale frog people, amphibious sailing vessels, against the water’s saturated blue-brown darkness. They howl as they jump off the rock. The air is filled with the aroma of grilled meat and the sound of distant motorboats.
Mosquitoes. Wasps. Insects with no name: in your hair, in your mouth, on bodies, itchy, sweaty bodies.
As Swedish as it gets.
A summer without end.
As if nothing had happened.
Even the building appears indifferent. Heavy and listless, it sits in the lush garden, bedded in leafy, dew-covered greenery. Its massive three-story-high body reaches toward the blue of the brightening summer sky. The plaster has not flaked in a single spot. The gray-green paint that covers the windowsills and doors is fresh and still glossy. There are no cracks or dust in the leaded, stained windowpanes with their coiling organic flower patterns. The roof is covered with old emerald-green copper plate, the kind roofers no longer use.
It seems so idyllic.
But something is out of place.
In the neatly raked gravel parking area is a dazzlingly clean black Jeep. The paint of the Jeep reflects a clematis with large pure white blossoms climbing up a knotted old apple tree. Someone is lying under the low trunk an
d crooked branches of the tree.
A young woman, a girl.
She is curled up in the grass like a bird, her red hair covered by a thin film of dew. Her slender, pale arms are thrown out along her sides, her palms turned upward in a gesture of resignation. The blood that has seeped from her body is congealed in reddish-brown patches on her jeans and in the grass. Her open eyes seem to be inspecting the crown of the apple tree.
Up there, in the branches, there are small green apples. There are many: The tree will bear plenty of fruit in just a few months. Above the apple tree the swifts and gulls fly unaffected—what do they care about a dead human child?
Under the body, the smallest inhabitants of the garden have already discovered what no person has yet seen. A small black beetle creeps between the waistband and the cold, pale skin in search of something edible; flies have set up camp in the lush red forest of hair; and microscopic creatures are moving slowly but steadily deeper and deeper into the windings of the ear.
In a little while, the inhabitants of the house will wake up and look for the girl. When they don’t find her, they will search for her in the garden, where they will see her in the grass under the tree, her eyes gazing toward the sky.
They will shake her as if trying to wake her from a deep sleep, and when that doesn’t work, one of them will slap her hard across the cheek, staining her face red with her own uncoagulated blood on his hand.
They will take her in their arms and slowly rock her back and forth. One of them will whisper something in her ear, while the other one buries his face in her hair.
Later, the men who never knew her, who don’t even know her name, will come to get her. They will put their calloused hands around her slender, rigid wrists and ankles and lift her effortlessly onto a cold stretcher, cover her with plastic, and drive her far, far from home.
She will be placed on a metal table, alongside the surgical instruments that will open her up and—hopefully—solve the mystery, explain the unexplainable, restore balance. Bring clarity to something no one understands.
Create closure and perhaps peace as well.
Some kind of peace.
AUGUST
Date: August 14
Time: 3:00 p.m.
Place: Green Room, the practice
Patient: Sara Matteus
“So, how’s your summer been?”
“Is it okay if I smoke?”
“Sure.”
Sara roots around in her camouflage-pattern cloth bag and pulls out a red pack of Prince cigarettes and a lighter. With chapped, trembling fingers she lights a cigarette and takes two deep puffs before she fixes her gaze on me. She inspects me awhile in silence before blowing out a cloud of smoke between us—a carcinogenic smoke screen—which for a moment conceals her heavily mascaraed eyes. There is something demonstrative about the gesture, something both playful and provocative that makes me decide not to release her gaze.
“Well?” Sara says slowly.
“Summer?”
“Oh, right. Summer. It was good. I worked at that bar in Gamla Stan, you know, by Järntorget.”
“I know. How have you been feeling?”
“Good, really good. Just great. No problems.”
Sara falls silent and looks at me with an inscrutable expression. She is twenty-five but doesn’t look a day over seventeen. Bleached-blond hair in various shades of white and butter-yellow curls down her slender shoulders, forming tangled ringlets along the way. Ringlets. She twists them with her fingers when she gets bored and sometimes slides them in and out of her mouth as she bites or chews on them. When she’s not chewing on her hair, she smokes. She seems to always have a cigarette ready in her chapped fingers.
“No anxiety?”
“Nah. Well, maybe a little . . . at times. I mean, Midsummer and that kind of shit. Doesn’t everybody get anxiety then? Who doesn’t get anxious at Midsummer?”
She looks searchingly at me in silence. A smile plays at the edge of her mouth before she continues.
“You can bet your ass I get anxious.”
“And what did you do?”
“Nothing,” says Sara, looking at me through the cigarette smoke with an empty stare. She seems strangely indifferent in the face of the emotions of anxiety and estrangement triggered, she claims, by the Midsummer celebrations.
“You didn’t cut yourself?”
“Nah . . . Well, just a little. On my arms, that is. Just my arms. Had to, couldn’t put up with the Midsummer thing otherwise. But. Not much. I promised you that I wouldn’t cut myself anymore. I always keep my promises, really. Especially when I promise you something.”
I notice Sara hiding her forearms in a presumably unconscious gesture.
“How many times did you cut yourself?”
“What do you mean? Like, how many cuts?”
“No, on how many occasions?”
“Ahh, a few. A couple, maybe three times during the summer. I can’t remember . . .”
Sara’s voice trails off and she puts out the cigarette in the blue flower vase that I had put on the coffee table in an attempt to make the room more inviting. I must be the only psychologist in Sweden who allows a patient to smoke, but Sara gets so restless otherwise, it’s almost impossible to carry on a conversation with her.
“Sara, this is important. I want you to return to those occasions when you cut yourself. Try to remember what happened, what it was that triggered the feelings that made you do it.”
“Uh . . .”
“Start with the first time. Take your time. When was it? Start by telling me when it happened.”
“Must have been Midsummer Eve. At the Midsummer celebration, that is. I already said that!”
“What did you do that night? I mean, beforehand?”
“I went to see my mom. It was just her and me. She had made some food and stuff. And she bought wine.”
“So you weren’t at a Midsummer party?”
“Nah, that was more like a, what’s it called . . . a metaphor. A metaphor for how fucked-up Midsummer is. Everyone’s so happy. You have to socialize with your family and be happy. It’s somehow so . . . forced.”
“So the two of you weren’t happy?”
Sara sits quietly for a long time without speaking and for once holds her hands calmly in her lap while she thinks. The only sound in the room is the humming of the video camera as it records our conversation. She sighs deeply, and when she starts talking again, I can sense her irritation despite the calm, expectant tone of voice.
“Nah, but I’m sure you get that. I really don’t understand where this is supposed to lead. I’ve talked about my old lady at least a thousand times. You know she’s a drunk. Hello, do I have to write it down for you? It was like it always was. Everything was going to be so nice . . . and then . . . she just drank, and then she started bawling. You know that’s how she gets when she drinks. Sad and . . . like . . . She’s, like, sorry. Like she regrets everything. Like I should sit there and forgive her because she hasn’t been a good mother. Do you think I should forgive her?”
“What do you think?”
“Nah, I don’t think so. I think it’s unforgivable, what she did to me.”
“So what did you do?”
Sara shrugs, and I can tell by her posture that she no longer wants to talk about either her mom or herself. Her voice has become shrill, and pink patches are spreading on her neck like spilled wine on a tablecloth.
“I split. I can’t stand it when she’s bawling.”
“And then?”
Sara squirms and lights yet another cigarette.
“Home, I went home.”
“And?”
“But you KNOW what happened then. It’s the old bag’s fault. It’s like I can’t . . . can’t breathe when I’ve been there.”
Now Sara is getting angry. T
hat’s good. I’ll try to hold on to that feeling. When Sara is angry, the truth often comes out. The protective shield of self-manipulation disappears, replaced by the raw honesty of someone who doesn’t have much to lose, who doesn’t care what you think of her.
“You cut yourself?”
“Damn straight I cut myself.”
“Tell me more.” I say.
“But, seriously, you know what happened.”
“This is important, Sara.”
“I cut myself on the arm. Satisfied now?”
“Sara . . . listen to me! What you’re describing, what you’re feeling, it’s completely understandable. It’s Midsummer, you see your mom, she is drunk and asks you for forgiveness, this stirs up a lot of emotions. Can you see that?”
Sara looks down at her fingers, closely studying every fingernail. She nods, as if to confirm that she too thinks that maybe her emotions and reactions are understandable.
“The problem is that when you start feeling anxious, you want to cut yourself, which is not a good solution, especially not in the long run.”
Sara nods again. She knows that the cutting, the drinking, the impulsive sexual relationships provide relief only for the moment, and that the self-loathing and pain come back with redoubled force. Her desperate attempts to try to keep the anxiety at bay only seem to increase it.
“Did you try to do what we talked about before? You know, trying to put up with the anxiety. In itself, anxiety is never dangerous. It just feels that way. That’s what you have to work with, putting up with that feeling. Just for a while, because then it passes.”
“I know.”
“And the other times?”
“What other times?”
“That you cut yourself.”
She sighs and looks pointedly out the window. Fury has partly been replaced by fatigue in her voice.
“Oh, yeah. One time I was drunk, so that doesn’t really count. I’m not really myself then. It was at a party in Haninge, with a guy from work.”
Strangers: An Exclusive Short Story Page 2
