ago.” Crisp clean air like the scent of apples. The cobbles, blood. Only he might not be dead after all. And Magyar had said we.“September. Right. So we’ll look at all the murder reports from three—”
But I wasn’t listening. I might not have killed him after all. “Do you have any idea what this means to me?” I said suddenly.
Her voice was soft. “Why don’t you tell me?”
I put my hand on hers, the one still wrapped around her glass. Neither of us said anything. We both pretended our hands weren’t warm and soft together, palm to back, finger on finger, the hair of her forearm touching the underside of my wrist.
“I want to tell you something. About my family. Why Stella killed herself. No one else knows.” Not even Spanner. Do you know what I’m entrusting to you? I think she did. “My father loved me. That’s what I thought. But then I found out my sister Stella had been . . .” I couldn’t say it. It was as though there were a clothespin crimping that part of my mind together. I had to talk about it. “I had bad dreams about a monster. My older sister, Greta—she was already grown by the time my mother married my . . . Anyway, she understood what was really happening. She gave me a lock for my door, so. . .” the monster “my. . .” the monster “so Oster couldn’t come into my bedroom when I was alone. Stella went into therapy. Tok said she was getting better, but then she killed herself. And I hadn’t known. Anything. All that time, he was doing that to her. Had been. And then when she got older, when she wasn’t a helpless child anymore, he tried it on me. But Greta knew.” Greta, always gray and stooped, hesitant as though something was about to come around the corner and get her. “I think it had happened to her, too. What I can’t understand. . .” The air in the bar seemed too thick all of a sudden, the oxygen all used up. I wanted to go belly to the ground, where it was safer, where it was easier to breathe. “What I can’t understand is why no one told me. Tok knew. Stella knew. Greta knew. I didn’t. I should have guessed. There were all these clues. He even . . . He even took me for a walk and asked me what I knew, what I had been told.”
What did Stella say? he had asked.
No one tells me anything, I replied.
But Greta had tried. Or at least she had got me the lock.
Magyar was frowning. “I’m trying to understand something. You said you thought Oster turned to you when Stella was too old. . .”
“Yes.”
“But you think Greta was abused, too.”
“Yes.”
“Lore.” Her eyes were soft, trying to tell me something, but I had no idea what. She sighed. “Tell me about the time . . . Tell me about the night the monster came to you.”
“I dreamt. At least that’s what Katerine said when I woke up with her hand on my shoulder.”
“Katerine was there when you woke up?”
“Yes.” I was puzzled.
“Lore.” She took both my hands in hers. “Just think a minute. You dreamed about the monster, and when you woke it was Katerine who was there.” I looked at her blankly. “You say Greta had been abused, too. But she was an adult by the time your mother and father married.”
“Yes. . .” I said slowly.
“Then if the abuser likes them young, it couldn’t have been Oster.”
Absurdly it was Tok who came to mind, his laugh of disbelief when I shouted at him about being mean to Katerine, demanded to know if he realized what he was doing to her: What I have done to her?
“It’s too hot in here. I have to go outside.” The air was so thick I felt as though I was swimming toward the door, fighting for breath. I leaned against the wall outside, gasping. I had forgotten to bring my coat. Through my thin shirt the bricks were hard against my shoulder blades.
Katerine on the bed, fully dressed. “It’s a dream,” she said to Oster. Oster, who was just stumbling into the room.
Magyar came out, our coats draped over her arm. She held mine out silently.
“But she’s my mother,” I said finally.
“Yes.”
My mother, the monster. Which meant Oster wasn’t a monster after all. This time I had to bend forward, head nearly