A Nearly Normal Family(49)

The quiet game starts now.

We sit there looking at each other. Now and then Shirine poses questions I don’t answer: “How are you doing in here? Have you gotten to talk to your family? Are you sleeping okay?” The hour passes so ridiculously fast, I almost suspect she’s fudging with the time somehow.

“Maybe we’ll see each other next week then,” she says, rising to summon the guard.

“I’m sure we will,” I say, and Jimmy picks me up by the door and herds me like goddamn livestock back through the corridor. He stares at me with eyes of ice as he lets me back in my room.

I hate the solitude. It scares me. Everything creeps so uncomfortably close to you in here. I can’t escape my thoughts and feelings when Jimmy turns the lock and leaves me alone with the walls and the smell. Inside, my mind is screaming. I’m about to explode.

I don’t know if it’s worth it, if I can handle it. I know there are a lot of people who never get out of here alive.





43


They were dressed in civilian clothes, sure, but you didn’t need to have watched that many episodes of Criminal Minds to figure out that they were cops. Two broad-shouldered clichés wearing guarded expressions, jeans, and running shoes. All that was missing were the walkie-talkies on their belts.

There was only about an hour until closing, and after a pretty busy Saturday the stream of customers had begun to slow to a trickle. I was working the register, taking payment from a gray-haired lady in a denim jacket who had finally decided to pull the trigger on the purple tunic she had come in to finger earlier that morning.

“Receipt’s in the bag,” I said, handing over the hideous tunic. It would be perfect for her.

The lady lingered at the register, lifting her thick-framed glasses and inspecting the receipt. She almost got run down by the two policemen.

“Stella Sandell? That’s you, right?”

I looked at their IDs. The tunic lady’s jaw dropped.

“Has something happened?” I asked.

A multitude of potential catastrophes passed through my mind.

“It’s not…?”

“We need to talk to you,” explained the older officer, scratching at his beard. “I’m afraid you’ll have to come with us.”

He had kind green eyes and looked like the sort of guy who liked slow food and talking about his feelings even though he must have been born in the fifties. Probably he’d married young and had a wrecked relationship behind him, started dating online once the kids moved out, but belonged to that restless category of people who know the grass is always greener somewhere else, so his romances never lasted more than a couple months.

“Is there anyone who can cover for you here?” asked the other officer. Twenty years younger, but his eyes were much more exhausted. Judging from the cancer-level tan on his face, he had just returned from two weeks in Turkey. He looked like a person who jumps feet first into everything—vacation had to be vacation. Late nights, Efes and Raki, card games on the balcony. It would probably take at least a week to recover.

“Anyone who can take over here?” asked the older officer, as if I hadn’t heard his colleague.

“It’s fine,” I said. “We’re closing in an hour.”

Malin and Sofie both offered to take over my register. Then they stared after me in horror as I followed the officers out.

“What’s going on?” Sofie whispered.

I never heard whether she got an answer.



* * *



The woman who questioned me was called Agnes Thelin. If I’d seen her around town I don’t think I ever would have guessed she was a cop. She looked more like a visual merchandiser or a creative director. She definitely didn’t shop at H&M. She probably lived in an architect-designed house with an open floor plan and Danish lighting. She was the kind of person who would never admit that she didn’t like sushi. The type who claimed to love brutal honesty but was completely destroyed if someone gave her any straightforward criticism.

I liked her immediately. Maybe because I could identify with her in certain ways.

“What does the name Christopher Olsen mean to you?”

I looked her in the eye and shrugged.

“Do you know him?”

“I don’t think so.”

Agnes Thelin cocked her head.

“It’s a pretty simple question.”

I clarified that I know thousands of people, from school and handball, people I meet out or online, friends and friends of friends. Plus, I’m pretty shit at names. Some people, obviously, I know their full names, but other people I only know their first names or nicknames, and some people I have no clue at all.

“Did you say Christopher?”

“Christopher Olsen.” Agnes Thelin nodded. “Most people call him Chris.”

I considered this.

“Chris? Yeah, I know at least one Chris, I guess. A slightly older guy, right?”

Agnes Thelin nodded. And then—I was completely unprepared—she placed a photo of him on the table and asked if he was the person I was thinking of.

My heart beat harder. I looked at that picture carefully, for a long time. I picked it up and inspected it at close range.

“Yeah,” I said at last. “I know him.”