Blood Ties: A Novel (Clara) by Ruth Lillegraven

Author:Ruth Lillegraven [Lillegraven, Ruth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Amazon Crossing
Published: 2022-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 32

* * *

ANDREAS

The letter had no ending. Dad must have forgotten to finish it, or changed his mind; he could be a little scatterbrained. Still, he’d kept it. We read it together, out loud. Now and then, we glanced at one another.

Sabiya worked with Dad. He’d told us that she had three children, two who were our age and one a little younger, and that she lived on the other side of the city. We understood that Dad liked her. Sabiya was his best friend at work, and his voice always got strange when he talked about her. Yeah, sometimes his eyes even got shiny, like when he was going to tell people about something Nikolai or I had done or said.

We’d met Sabiya several times, mostly when we were with Daddy in his office. I liked her. She was nice and easy to talk to, always smiling. The way she and Dad looked at each other almost gave me a jabbing feeling in my stomach, as if they had some kind of big secret.

‘I can’t do this anymore,’ Nikolai sounded out.

‘I can’t take anymore,’ I sounded out.

‘Life is like a desert,’ Nikolai read.

‘Where I find water only when I’m with you . . .’ What does he mean by that?

‘I love you . . .’

‘And I’ve always loved you . . .’ Geez.

‘I’ve been trying to hang in there, but I won’t manage another ten years of this.’

This? Nikolai said, and looked at me. This?

He means Mommy, I said.

Toward the end of the letter, he wrote that Clara was becoming more and more cold and manipulative and that he didn’t think she was wholly right in her head.

Good grief, Nikolai said angrily. He is writing about Mommy.

Yeah, I said. But it’s sort of true, too . . .

‘I dream . . . that one day we and . . . all our children will live under the same roof,’ Nikolai read.

Afterward, we sat there staring at the letter. It was as if Dad had come back to us through it, to talk to us, even though we knew it had been written a long time before he died.

Should we call her? Nikolai asked. Ask if she wants to meet us?

Why? I said. Besides, she’s in jail.

Oh, Nikolai said, and slumped. That’s right . . .

Shortly after Dad died, we had seen on the internet that somebody else had been taken into custody under suspicion of the same murders for which he had been arrested. The article said the new detainee was a female colleague of a former suspect. We understood that it had to be Sabiya. We were even more sure when we checked her Instagram account. She usually posted all kinds of things, but now there was no activity.

But could she really have killed someone? I couldn’t believe that any more than I could believe that Dad supposedly did it. The pieces didn’t fit.

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