The American Girl (42 page)

Micke let go of Doris and looked around.

“What, who?”

“Oh,” said Doris. “I was just kidding. It was a joke.”

What was happening? What was she talking about? Why was she carrying on saying those things when she should have said, “Sometimes it goes around in my head. Sometimes I’m frightened. Maybe the cousin’s mama was right. You shouldn’t root around in old things.”

Don’t play with fire, Doris Flinkenberg, the cousin’s mama had said once a long time ago when she understood what Doris and Sandra were doing, the Mystery with the American Girl, all of that.

“There aren’t many who have the ability to crush my heart,” the cousin’s mama had also said, “but you, Doris, are one . . .”

And it was then, exactly right there at the marsh, that Doris Flinkenberg finally understood what she had been suspecting for a long time. And she finally got it out of her as well: “I
shouldn’t . . . But it’s like this. I can’t love you. There is something wrong between my ears.”

“It’s damned helpless,” she said while Micke Friberg just stood there next to her struck dumb. “I won’t become happier because of it. Namely.”

Because of the shock Micke Friberg had not been listening so carefully, but he certainly caught the important bits in any case.

“Is it over?” Micke Friberg said loudly and clearly, in an utmost sober tone of voice.

Sister Night
. And she was standing there. Sure enough. In the bushes, spying.

Or, was she?

“You mean it’s over?” Micke Friberg repeated when Doris did not answer.

Doris nodded and whined, “Yes.”

Then Micke understood everything. He left Doris Flinkenberg on Lore Cliff and went on his way.

“Sandra!” Doris yelled, weakly. But she was not there. Just silence. Nothing.

Doris searched for Sandra in the woods. She made her way to different places where Sandra might be. Sandra was nowhere. But she did not go to the house in the darker part of the woods. She did not want to set foot there anymore for alleged reasons. But she came pretty close.

And it did not really surprise her when from where she was standing in the reeds by the marsh she could see into the basement through the panorama window and saw that the pool was filled with water now, a completely ordinary swimming pool. And for a moment it rushed through her that it had always been like this, nothing terrible, nothing had ever happened.

But it was just a flash through her head as said.

Back to reality. Otherwise it was empty and dark in the basement. Only a few lamps shining in the water, cold and blue.

And the next time she saw Sandra it was in the schoolyard. Sandra came out during the break in one of those girl gangs that consisted of Birgitta Blumenthal and other silly and rather meaningless girls—this in other words according to Sandra’s AND Doris’s highly subjective opinion, during the time they were still together, Sister Night and Sister Day.

Doris was off to the side now, alone in the schoolyard. Micke Friberg, with his broken heart, was allowed to stay inside during the breaks and play guitar in the music room. He had an exemption and avoided being forced outside because he was seen as being so musically talented—and musically talented he was of course. Micke’s Folk Band was disbanded for the time being. It was taking a break because of current circumstances. Micke Friberg made no secret of the fact that Doris had hurt him deeply, crushed his heart. He wanted to be left alone now. But he was also careful about pointing out that they had separated as very good friends, in any case.

That Micke made no secret of the fact that it was Doris who had left him and not the other way around made Doris more exciting in everyone’s eyes of course. But she shook off everyone who came near her.

Doris off to the side, the girls with Sandra Wärn, Sandra Wärn as a girl among others, and all of them glanced furtively and rather interested in Doris’s direction. Sandra did not stand out in that group in any way, she was just there.

But so, it happened once that Sandra broke away from the group and came up to Doris Flinkenberg. They talked to each other for a while, a rather short moment because then it was time to separate, they were going to different classes, but also for other reasons.

And very concrete ones. Sandra was going away, she said, to Åland again, to visit her relatives again.

Doris did not say anything. Now she had a hard time carrying on. No one but she knew how hard. On the one hand she understood, as soon as she started talking with Sandra whom she had not properly spoken to since . . . the summer (and she was the one who had gone on her way, “home,” to Micke Friberg, all of that), that she would not be able to continue . . . with anything . . . before everything would be finished. Before all of the questions inside her got answers. And it was a pop song that for once was so true it did not tug at the corners of your mouth, whether you liked that kind of music or not.

And that she, if Sandra did not take the initiative, needed to start asking these questions. Herself. And how would that go?

Because it was obvious Sandra would not be taking any initiative.

On the other hand she understood, and it chilled her inside when she realized it, just like it did on that day in the schoolyard when she and Sandra carried out their last conversation with each other while Doris Flinkenberg was still alive, that it was impossible quite simply impossible not to continue with Sandra.

SandraPandraHarelipSisterNight&Day and all of it, highly beloved.

Such terrible things. Such an insight. What was happening? Whom do you ask? Whom should you turn to?

The boat
. The same fall Doris died, a boat with five youths on board sank sixty miles to the west, in the middle of the sea. All on board drowned. The accident and the circumstances surrounding it bewitched Doris Flinkenberg the last weeks she was alive.

The accident happened on a Saturday night at the beginning of October. The youths had the intention of celebrating the weekend on board a rather large motor boat, a Nauticat.
Witnesses who saw the boat at a gas station in a sound in the inner archipelago would later explain that the mood on board had been merry but in no way exaggerated.

The wind had already been hard during the day. Toward evening it reached storm force. The boat went aground at eleven o’clock and started taking in water. At two thirty, almost four hours later, it went to the bottom.

It had in other words been a rather slow course of events. The youths had plenty of time to fire off flares, all that were on board. When no help came and the boat slowly, slowly started filling with the water, they moved on deck and lit a fire.

When the fire had been put out by the water that started washing over the deck they understood that all hope was gone.

Why did no one come? Where was the coast guard?

The boat sank, and the youths died, one after the other. All of the people on board drowned or froze to death in the ice-cold water.

When all was said and done it was this event that Doris Flinkenberg had spoken to Sandra Wärn about in the schoolyard, that last time—which neither of them knew—they were in conversation with each other.

“I’m always going to remember what I was doing in that moment,” Doris said to Sandra there in the schoolyard, for some reason one of the first things they had spoken about, properly, in a long time.

“I slept with Micke it was the first time it’s over.”

She glanced at Sandra quickly and in secret, who registered and registered, but still, it was not as though she was really listening.

And yet she was.

“I was at Blumenthal’s,” Sandra said dully. “A pajama party. Me and all the girls.”

And then Sandra started talking in detail about the party and what had happened. There had been a party at Birgitta
Blumenthal’s. Just for the girls. A pajama party, an idea someone had gotten from a foreign magazine, the kind of thing you did in other places, for example in America. But what you were supposed to do, actually, at a party like that was more unclear. So they put on their pajamas and “romped” in pajamas in different ways, among other things EVERYONE nipped at the bottles in the Blumenthals’ well-filled bar—the parents were teetotalers but they needed all of this liquor for appearances, Sandra explained as if she were reading from an instruction manual for the normal life for her friend—a sip or two.

And they voted Birgitta Blumenthal the most beautiful woman in the universe in a game that Birgitta Blumenthal herself had initiated, a beauty contest where the result was known ahead of time, “like it happens in reality too of course, you agree ahead of time who is going to win.” Birgitta Blumenthal had shed tears of joy where she was sitting on the edge of the bed with a red towel over her and a paper tiara, and then they danced in the dark, all of them, and told each other secrets.

“You know what their secrets are like,” Sandra stated, dully. “Tobias Forsström pinched my butt, but I didn’t tell anyone.

That kind of stuff.”

Sandra laughed and Doris laughed and Doris thought again about how much she appreciated Sandra’s stories, not what she was telling, but her manner.

And then they had played Truth or Dare. Sandra was dared to French-kiss Birgitta Blumenthal. A lasting memory: how it felt to have Birgitta Blumenthal the bookworm’s learned tongue in your mouth.

“Damn,” Sandra said in the schoolyard, and she was angry. “Damn. Like some freakin’ dyke.”

And Doris got a chill inside because—did Sandra mean her?

And then they had, Sandra said just as dully and lightheartedly, played cops and robbers.

And Doris got a chill inside, again.

And the school bell rang.

“I have to . . .” Doris had immediately started moving toward the entrance, almost half running.

“Hey, Doris! What happened?” Sandra squeezed out, calling after Doris. Doris turned around quickly, or was it her imagination, in Sandra’s eyes there was suddenly all pain, like an injured animal.

Dearest, dearest. Everything is coming to nothing. We were going to be together. What’s happening, now?

She should have asked a lot of questions, then, in the schoolyard. She did not. Sandra went to Åland. Doris was left with everything she now had to find out for herself. And she would. She did.

At the end of the same month, October, the Rats vandalized the Glass House.

A few weeks later the baroness died. But then Doris was already dead.

And the second Saturday in November Doris took the pistol that she had never returned to Rita and Solveig’s cottage after the summer and went up to Lore Cliff at Bule Marsh and shot herself there.

Things were happening pell-mell in Doris that last period.

It was these questions which should be answered and that she, lacking anyone to ask, tried to find the answers to herself.

Why was there no water in the pool?

All normal people have water in their pools, right?

You could start like that. And so, further. Like the twin detective you had also once been:

“Sandra, that telephone number to Heintz-Gurt in Austria, it doesn’t go anywhere.

“I mean. It doesn’t exist. I know because I’ve tried.”

Then the one question, the one about the pool, automatically leads over to the other questions:

“Lorelei Lindberg. Where is she really?”

“That story about the helicopter, what was it actually? Was it true?”

And then you came to think about certain other stories that had actually been told. The one about the ring with the tablespoon-sized ruby that fell down into the pool and that Lorelei Lindberg called to Sandra to look for.

But she did not.

So Lorelei Lindberg went down into the pool herself. And where was the Islander then, who was so angry at Lorelei Lindberg? The Islander with his rifle?

But: there was Bencku’s map. Doris Flinkenberg started suspecting something about the map on the whole. That it was not as innocent as it looked. That it hung there in Bencku’s barn like a shield: “I know this,” like a message.

Not images of how it actually was, as Inget Herrman had characterized Bencku’s maps. “But images as expression of.” That meant what was on the maps was not necessarily true, had not necessarily happened.

Well. Now Doris Flinkenberg had reason to doubt it worked that way. After the American girl’s death . . . there had not been any image. She had been there, on the bottom. Doris had found her.

Not to mention wearing the plastic coat. That terrible coat.

And now there was something else on Bencku’s map. Doris was there and checked it just before she shot herself. A woman in the pool. And she was dead. So dead.

Was it Lorelei Lindberg?

Where was she?

And then there was all of that which would later be in the farewell letter.

“. . . it was the game with Heintz-Gurt. What a name. The happy pilot. I found that too. In one of her scrapbooks. Almost word for word. I found, when I started reading other stories properly too. There is one, I have it in front of me now.
Father and daughter hid the mother in a brick wall. This macabre crime united them for many years
.

“I don’t know what’s happening. I can’t live with it anymore. And then there’s so much else. The red raincoat the American girl was found in. It’s in a photograph in the Islander’s bedside table. Of the girl and her mother. And she, the mother, has the coat on.”

And Doris wrote so much more in her last letter. But it was not a letter to Sandra.

She did not write a letter to Sandra.

But she went to the house in the darker part one last time.

It was empty, it looked like. She got in using the spare key as she had always done, already the first time, a long time ago when she came to the house in the darker part of the woods. It was only a matter of knowing where it was. And Doris knew. It was just that simple.

She had gone to the house in the darker part of the woods. She had gotten in there, in secret. She had her boots with her, she was going to leave them by the edge of the pool.

And suddenly a voice could be heard behind her: