Lene Kaaberbol - Invisible Murder

But Anton was loving it.

He was standing over by the campfire with Benjamin poking the embers with a long stick. They had finished their twist bread long since, and Benjamin’s mother had chased them away from the flames several times. Nina had given up without even trying. Boys had been playing with campfires since before recorded history, and it was presumably part of their DNA. They poked at the coals, pushing twigs into the flickering, orangey yellow flames, sending little clouds of sparks and ash up into the blue sky at regular intervals.

Nina knew she ought to be doing something. Clearing the table, making coffee, or at least chatting with the other parents. But right now she didn’t have the strength for anything other than nursing her headache and holding it together. She missed Morten. He would have been so much in his element. Right now, he would have been laughing and talking with the other dads, and no doubt he would also have had the energy to bake a proper cake for the group instead of the hastily purchased store-bought version she had brought along. He would have loaded the car full of balls and bats and got a pickup game going on the lawn in front of the cabin. Morten was good at this kind of thing, and when he was along, he provided a peaceful refuge from all the socializing whenever she got tired of smiling.

Behind the cabin there were newly grown, knee-high stinging nettles under the beech trees. She walked a few steps farther away from the cabin, carefully bending the nettles to the side with her feet, and sat down on a large boulder with her phone in her hand.

An international number had called. Twice. Nina guessed it was the little boy’s mother out in Valby even though there was nothing on her voicemail aside from white noise and a faint murmur.

She sat with her phone in her hand and listened to the raucous drone of the kids and grownups on the other side of the building. A woman laughed shrilly, and Nina again noticed her headache, which came rolling in like a heavy wave from somewhere in the very back of her skull, moving forward toward her eyes.

She had promised to return to the garage if they needed her. The forest floor swayed very slightly as she stood up and started walking back toward Anton. Hopefully he would insist on staying.

The boys were still standing by the fire with their sticks, and Nina decided to exploit her casual acquaintance with Benjamin’s mother, a short, sympathetic looking woman who looked to be no older than thirty.

“Excuse me.” Nina attempted to smile weakly, but bravely. “I think unfortunately we’re going to have to head back home. I’m coming down with the worst headache.”

Benjamin’s mother stepped out of the little cluster of parents she had been standing in and looked at Nina with compassion.

“Oh, that’s too bad,” she said. “The boys are having such a good time. Don’t you think Anton would like to stay? I’d be happy to watch him.”

Nina smiled gratefully and glanced quickly over at Anton.

“Oh, would you? That’s so sweet of you,” she said. “I’ll just go ask him.”

“Yes, by all means.” The woman gave Nina a serious look. “But are you sure you can drive? You don’t look well.”

When Nina climbed in behind the wheel of her Fiat seven minutes later and glanced in the rearview mirror, she saw what Benjamin’s mother had meant. She was pale and her skin gleamed damply in the light refracting through the windshield, painting rainbow-colored stripes on the dashboard. She waved to Anton as she backed down the narrow drive, her skull feeling as if it was about to explode. He waved back with a cheerful grin and then took off, galloping after Benjamin into the trees. She couldn’t see him anymore as she pulled out onto the paved road. Just before getting on the highway, she stopped the car, walked all the way over to the drainage ditch and threw up the sausages, twist bread, and mediocre coffee onto the fresh green dandelions.

W HEN NINA PARKEDthe Fiat in front of the garage, a man was standing by the chain-link fence by the road. The sun had sunk farther in the sky and hung behind his head like a glowing halo that made it impossible for her to make out his facial features. All the same, she had the sneaking sense that he was watching her as she walked across the cracked asphalt.

A muffled bass line with a techno beat hammered at her as she opened the door into the shop. There were only a handful of men in there. The nice weather apparently meant longer workdays in the city. The few that had returned home were sitting on a set of rickety lawn chairs just inside the door and were so preoccupied with their card game that the only scrutiny she received was a scowl as she scooted around them. At the back of the room, there was a slightly overweight teenage girl in pale blue jeans that were far too tight, a bright-yellow top and ponytail leading an impromptu chorus line of younger girls. Nina saw two little girls who hadn’t been at the garage the previous evening. They must be seven or eight, she guessed, as she saw them carefully copying the teenager’s not-entirely-unrefined dance steps with dark-eyed concentration. A couple of the boys, slightly younger, were fiddling with the source of the noise, a greasy ghetto blaster that had been plugged into a socket next to the door to the kitchenette. One of them was trying to sabotage the girls’ dance with a big, impudent grin, swaying hips and holding a chocolate cookie in his right hand, but the rest of the group gathered around the ghetto blaster looked wan and limp.

The little boy was nowhere to be seen.

Nina proceeded down the length of the garage, her steps wobbly. Objects kept floating off to one side whenever she tried to focus on them. The cold, blue light from the fluorescent tube blinked irregularly as she made her way back down the rows of mattresses, rolled-up bedding, and sleeping bags. Then she spotted the boy’s mother. She was huddled up against the wall, tiny. The boy was lying next to her, and when Nina got close enough, she saw that he was awake. His eyes were big and dark in his pale face, but it reassured Nina to see that he was conscious. His mother looked like someone who hadn’t slept in days, which she probably hadn’t. She was pale and colorless in a pair of worn jeans and a pink fleece jacket that looked too warm for May. She pointed to a little phone she wore hanging around her neck and flashed her cavity-ridden teeth in something that was meant to resemble a smile.

“ Ápolónö, telefonál !” she said.

Nina nodded and slid down beside the woman. The nausea, which had been lying in wait the whole way to Valby, came back when the stench of the boy’s sickbed hit her nostrils. What is this damn thing, she wondered, aware of how the question drifted around inside her aching head in an oddly aimless way. The boy’s pulse was a little too high, but that wasn’t a big deal. He could definitely use a new unit of saline, but his mother had apparently succeeded in getting him to drink some fluids. There were a couple of empty half-liter water bottles rolling around next to the mattress. Not critical, Nina thought, but the boy wasn’t healthy either. Far from it. The boy’s mother looked like she had read Nina’s thoughts.

“ Kórház ,” she said. “Hospital?”

Before Nina had a chance to respond, the woman stood up in a wobbly, exhausted motion and gestured to Nina to follow her outside. They walked past the men playing cards and out into the parking lot, where darkness had now settled over the industrial neighborhood. The woman continued around the corner of the garage and down the uneven concrete pavers of an overgrown walkway that led to the garage’s boarded-up office shack. A tall, untrimmed beech hedge was leaning across the path from the neighboring property, and Nina was on the verge of losing her balance as she ducked to pass underneath the branches. The pavers were wobbling. The whole world was wobbling now. The woman stopped about halfway down the path, squatted down, and separated the leaves in the hedge. Then she pulled out an old, plastic bucket that she held with just two fingers on the handle, cautiously placing it on the cobblestones between them.