Chapter 93
Tiina feels like a robot when she arrives home on Saturday morning after an early long walk with Zelda.
She couldn’t sleep, so shortly before six o’clock she gave up, got dressed, and took the dog to the forest. It is usually Ogge who takes Zelda out before breakfast, it’s their special time, but Tiina still has no idea where he might be.
It is Easter Saturday.
Three days have passed since Ogge came home in the middle of the night and she began to suspect that he was seeing someone else.
The following morning he took off, and she doesn’t know where he is.
People ask after him, and she has nothing to say.
He isn’t answering his phone and is ignoring her text messages; she has lost count of how many she has sent.
The house is empty when she opens the door.
The scooter is there, but Ogge’s car is missing.
Zelda dances around while Tiina fills her food bowl and gives her clean water.
Then she goes down to the cellar to put on a wash.
Everyday tasks are all she can cope with right now.
If she sits at the kitchen table brooding, she will go crazy.
The tears begin to flow as she makes her way down the stairs. She switches on the light and starts loading the dirty clothes into the machine. Her shoulder aches when she bends forward. It is so stiff that she can’t reach properly, in the end she has to kneel down to push things into the drum.
When she gets up she notices something white in the gap between the tumble dryer and the washing machine. She grabs hold of it and out comes a white sports sock. It is Ogge’s; it must have been the one that was missing when she did his laundry the other day.
As she brings it into the light she stiffens. It is covered in dried patches of something red. If she didn’t know better she would think it was . . . blood.
She sniffs cautiously. It smells unpleasant, and it frightens her.
Tiina stares at the sock. There is no doubt that it is the one that she couldn’t find on Sunday night.
She drops it as if it is red hot. Then she goes over to the drying cupboard where she had hung everything up. Nothing is left. That can mean only one thing.
Ogge has fetched the washing himself.
This is another thing he never does, and Tiina leaves the cellar and rushes up to the bedroom.
She yanks open the door of his closet and checks the drawer where he keeps his T-shirts.
The freshly washed top is lying there. He hasn’t bothered to fold it properly as she does, just bundled it in with everything else.
She picks it up and holds it in front of her. Goes over to the window to see better. It has been washed, but it isn’t as clean as it might be. In the bright daylight she can see faint shadows of something that appears to have splattered all across the chest.
She sinks down on the bed.
Her head is spinning.
If there was blood on the sock, there could have been blood on the T-shirt too.
There could have been blood on all his clothes, which was why he washed them right away.
But he has got bloodstains on him before.
She doesn’t know how many times he has come back from the moose hunt with clothes that needed several washes before they were clean.
If he had put everything in the laundry basket on Sunday night she would have found it the following day, and she would have thought nothing of it.
Or would she?
The hunting season has been over for a long time.
Last night she was convinced that Ogge was having an affair. It would explain so much—his irritability, the mysterious scooter trips in the middle of the night, the increased alcohol consumption over the past year, the growing bitterness.
She had thought that the worst that could happen would be him wanting a divorce.
Now there could be another explanation, one that is far more terrifying.
One that she hardly dares think about.