Chapter 3
I need a knife. She’s right there—watching me with those unnaturally large eyes, the black eating up too much of the white and making me feel like I’m falling into her—and I don’t have a knife.
It feels crucial to have something sharp and metal and real between us.
I can smell her, the icy sweetness of her breath, the promise of sleep without dreaming.
“Why?” I whisper.
“I already told you.” Her voice is the northern lights in the night sky, luminous and glowing and breathtakingly ephemeral, but coming only with cold so deep it kills.
She leans closer, so close I can’t see anything but the twin black pools of her eyes.
“He didn’t love you.” She doesn’t sound triumphant or cruel. She sounds sorry.
That’s when I find a knife in my hand and plunge it into her heart over and over, covering us both in blood as dark as ink.
“He might have,” I weep. She takes me in her arms and holds me. The ink swallows us and everything turns to the same velvet darkness offered in her eyes.
The whole world jolts. I startle awake. I’m on a train, and she’s not here.
Whenever I wake from dreams of her, I recall the shaking handwriting in one of my father’s last journals, a fevered explanation of the monsters he was chasing.
These demons, these vampires can infect your mind, turn your thoughts and dreams to them.
But he wasn’t well. There’s nothing supernatural or mysterious at work in my constant dreams of that woman.
The answer is much simpler: I chose this.
The fixation is entirely my own. Everyone else accepted my father’s death and moved on.
I cannot. Part of me actually longs for the dreams of her, dreads the day they disappear.
I know dreams are not evidence, but they’re all the proof I have of her existence.
Until now. I pat my hidden skirt pocket, knowing her image is tucked safely there.
Though my train car was empty when I boarded, I now share it with a kindly looking older woman, her daughter, and a gentleman sitting right next to me. I’m almost positive I was dozing on his shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” I murmur.
He graciously nods and says nothing about it.
“Nearly there,” the woman says in Hungarian, checking the silk scarf that holds her hair in place.
I collect languages the way my father collected pipes and paranoias, though my collection was an effort to impress him, whereas his were for himself alone.
I’m best in German, English, Spanish, Italian, French, and Greek, but I can get by in half a dozen other tongues, including Hungarian.
Under Dávid’s tutelage, though, I mainly learned the most horrendous cursing, which I have no plans to deploy today.
There’s something particularly funny about cursing in Hungarian, though, since it’s such a pleasant language.
Back when things were easy between us, I once told Dávid his native tongue sounds like chewy caramel feels, and he laughed and told me I was insane.
I do my best to gather myself in anticipation of seeing Dávid again.
It’s a relief to be arriving in Budapest. I left on the first train I could, which meant arranging with Mrs. de Groot next door to look in on Mama and bring her groceries, as well as leaving a forwarding address so that Joren could keep me apprised of any developments in the murder investigation there.
I thought the scene last night wasn’t connected to my father’s murder, despite all the connections I made.
The brutality. The bafflingly self-inflicted wounds.
The smell. Now I suspect it is. I don’t know why my father’s murderer came back or why she was in Budapest, or what the connection is between this dead family, the shipping clerk, and my father.
But she’s at the center of it all, and she was here, and I have proof.
She’s real. And I’m going to solve the murder no one cared about, at last, because I never stopped caring.
When the train arrives, I step out to no welcome. I didn’t bother sending word ahead to Dávid, as I’ve arrived before my letter would have. I hope he’ll be happy to see me. His renewed correspondence over the last few months makes me suspect the manner of our parting has been forgiven.
Because of its history, I had always imagined Budapest as a hardscrabble, battle-worn city, but to my surprise it’s the opposite.
The train station is both elegant and efficient.
Outside positively bustles with life, making Amsterdam look sleepy in comparison.
The sound of hammers and construction echoes down the cobbled streets.
Buildings everywhere are being repaired or rebuilt.
Beauty hasn’t been ignored in favor of progress, either.
The streetlamps are new, cast-iron and elegantly regal with electric bulbs.
Scrolling, floral, or columned exterior stonework is topped by domed roofs and soaring statues.
Trees have been planted along the walkways and it’s easy to imagine that in a decade or two it will all be green and shady.
The city center hums with the energy of wearing brand-new clothes to impress a suitor.
Whatever Budapest has been in the past, it’s beautiful and energetic and excited about the future.
I stop at a newsstand beneath a green-and-white-striped awning.
I wish I could read the papers to see if they’re talking about Dávid’s case, but my Hungarian isn’t good enough.
Instead, I ask for a map. Seeing that I’m a visitor, the vendor, a man with a mustache like cleaning bristles, points emphatically with one arthritic finger.
“See the castle and parliament building,” he says with pride in his voice before giving me directions to my actual destination.
I’d love nothing more than to wander this city and get to know its real personality. Maybe even a few of its secrets. But I have a mission. Thanking the vendor for his kindness, I hurry in the direction of the police headquarters.
The parliament building is across the river and I glance over as I walk.
It’s stately and enormous, with spiky points above every window as a reminder that even if things are peaceful now, Budapest has not forgotten how to defend itself.
Farther down the Danube’s banks, I take the chain bridge across.
There’s a grand basilica in the distance, and behind that, still out of view, is the castle.
But neither God nor royalty can help me.
I need the police, unfortunately. The building isn’t difficult to find once I get close.
I’ve never known anyone like officers and detectives for standing outside and smoking instead of working.
Sure enough, amidst a cloud of noxious vapors, I see the tall, lanky frame of my old friend.
“Anneke?” Dávid says, dropping his cigarette in shock.
It immediately falls apart on the pavement.
He always insists on rolling them himself, and he’s very bad at it.
Half our fights were me being disgusted at the amount of tobacco residue on every surface in his apartment.
The other half were rather more serious.
He must remember our arguments, too, because his embrace does not linger. “What are you doing here?” he asks.
We speak in German, because it’s a strong language for both of us.
Though I sometimes wonder if our separation was less because of the conflicts and more because we were speaking in a tongue foreign to us both.
We never could quite connect. I loved Dávid, and I know he loved me, but it wasn’t enough.
Not when I closed my eyes every night and dreamed of someone else.
I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to let a lover in all the way. Dávid could feel it.
“I came because of the photographs you sent me,” I say.
“You traveled all the way here to tell me you couldn’t solve it?
” He raises his scarred eyebrow in surprise.
On some faces it would look unbalanced, but Dávid pulls off messy so well.
His collar is perpetually askew, his jackets rumpled, his face stubbled, as though he’s always just gotten out of bed.
Even now as dimples pierce his cheeks, I’m filled not with longing, but with sad fondness: pressing our heads together and laughing, drunk and fumbling, finding a refuge in each other.
He wasn’t a permanent home, but I’ll always appreciate that he was a place I could rest for a little while.
I wave dismissively. “The metal hook held by the officer in the exterior photo was too big a clue, but I had already solved it anyway. The father used the hook to pierce his family’s sinuses and draw out brain matter in the way ancient Egyptians would before embalming.”
“I thought I had you.” Dávid laughs, shoving my shoulder lightly. It’s not flirtatious or angry, and I feel the last of my tension relax. Dávid is still my friend. I don’t think I realized until now just how much I needed him to be.
“That’s not why I’m here—though, what did he do with the brain matter? And how did he die? And what did he use to drug them before performing the procedure?” Even this close to at last finding the woman who’s haunted me for five years, I can’t help myself. I want answers.
I also know I’m stalling. The fear whispers in my ear like a lover. What if you’ve come all this way for nothing?
I haven’t even taken the photo of her out again since I first saw it, too afraid that if I look at it, she’ll have disappeared just like that night. She was real, she was there, and then she was gone and no one believed me.