They are both screw-ups. That is about everything that they have in common. Apart from it, they would have had no reason to ever speak: they don’t like the same people, not the same movies, not the same music. Grunge rock horror kind of girl meets hip-hop stand-up type of guy, and that this combination is painful at best, has been common knowledge ever since those grunge rap days, meaning they should have stayed as far away from each other as Kurt Cobain and Eminem.
It worked out differently, though.
Now she is meant to sleep in his broken bed which feels about double as bad as a broken home: bad enough, in fact, to chase her out the squeaking door on a sunny afternoon and make her want to keep running.
She might have been better off following her instincts. Then maybe right now she wouldn’t be drifting in a bent, cold river, trying to fight her way up, as if she were a child with a hot air balloon, who is constantly jumping off the ground in the desperate attempt to float away with it. Then her feet would hit the hard asphalt again to remind her that she is too heavy to make it, and even if it were different, what good would it do? She wouldn’t know anyone up there, because screw-ups like her are not meant to go to heaven but supposed to travel the opposite way.
Her grandmother’s huge and shiny cupboard out of highly polished wood, where she used to play hide and seek with her cousins when she was five years old, is the last thing she ever thinks of. Accordingly, the last thing she ever hears is her grandmother’s voice, as back then she told her with a warm bear fur coat in hand that for beautiful things like this someone sometimes simply has to die.
These are her last thoughts: random, but maybe the last things you ever think of are supposed to be that, because eventually life in itself is just a pile of randomly gathered moments and the last one that falls on top of it unhinges the steeple to cause a collapse.
On the plain and hoarfrost covered stone bed next to the gurgling river a dog walker in ridiculously green shorts and a matching hoodie finds her dead body at six am the next morning. The dog barks, the owner throws up, about which the police officers called won’t be too happy, but this isn’t a crime scene, after all: it is, at most, the site of a suicide, because of which contamination isn’t really relevant.
"Did you touch her? Did you move her?" They want to know, even though, as they arrive. No, none of that, but the now no longer barking dog might have licked her frozen face, which the owner keeps quiet, though, since his dog’s DNA wouldn’t be in their database, anyway.
Ruled an accident. That’s what the file on Marta Lotter’s death confidently states, which is somewhat funny, because if there is something that Marta has never believed in it is accidents. Never mind, now she is dead and has no say in it, either way. Her witty tongue and heart shaped lips have fallen to ashes long ago, and the rest of her, as well, as she went to the crematory the other day.
Usually, her file would have just been put away in an old and dusty folder that would never have seen the light of day again. The reason why it is lying on the cram-full desk of a detective now is a second case like this. Another girl as old as her, no job, no kids, no husband. Another screw-up, so to say, and given the similarities, Detective Stanton doesn’t believe that both of these could have been accidents.
“Suicides, so,” his colleagues try to shrug the oddities away, unwilling to admit that there could be more to it. In fact, there is: so much more than anyone can handle, and all of it started 35 years ago, when a woman called Eva Rice gave birth to a not entirely healthy son.