Itsy Bitsy Spider (Emma Frost #1) (24 page)

 “We’re
going
to be too late. Do you want me to be fired on my
first day”? I yelled for the third time while gazing up the stairs for my
six-year-old daughter, Julie.

“Go easy on her, Rebekka. It’s her first day
too,” argued my father.

He stood in the doorway to the living room of my
childhood home, leaning on his cane. I smiled to myself. How I had missed him
all these years living in the other part of the country. Now he had gotten old,
and I felt like I had missed out on so much and that he had missed out on so
much of our lives too. It was fifteen years since I left the town to study journalism.
I had only been back a few times since and then, of course, when Mom died five
years ago. Why didn’t I visit him more often, especially after he was alone?
Instead I had left it to my sister to take care of him. She lived in Naestved
about fifteen minutes away.

Well there was no point in wondering now.

“You can’t change the past,” my dad would say.
And did say when I called him crying my heart out and asking him if Julie and I
could come and stay with him for a while.

I sighed and wished I could change the past and
change everything about my past. Except for one thing. One delightful little
blond thing.

“I’m ready, Mom.”

Her.

Julie is the love of my life. Everything I‘ve
done has been for her and her future. I sacrificed everything to give her a
better life. But that meant I had to leave it all behind—her dad, our
friends and neighbors, and my career with a huge salary. All for her.

“I’m ready.” She ran down the stairs looking
like an angel with her beautiful blond hair braided in the back.

“Yes, you are,” I nodded and looked into her
bright blue eyes. “Do you have everything ready for school”?

She sighed with annoyance and walked past me.

“Are you coming or not?” She asked when she
reached the door.

I picked up my bag from the floor, kissed my dad
on the cheek, and followed my daughter who waited impatiently.

“After you my dear,” I said as we left the
house.

I found a job at a local newspaper in
Karrebaeksminde. It wasn’t much of a promotion since I used to work for one of
the biggest newspapers in the country.
Jyllandsposten
was located in Aarhus, the second biggest town in Denmark. That was where we
used to live.

When I had a family.

I used to be their star reporter, one of those
who always gets the cover stories. Moving back to my childhood town was not an
easy choice, since I knew I had to give up my position as a well-known
reporter. But it had to be done. I had to get away.

Now, after dropping off my daughter at her new
school and smoking two cigarettes in anxiety for my daughter’s first day, I found
myself at my new workplace.

“You must be Rebekka Franck. Welcome to our
editorial room,” said a sweet elderly lady sitting at one of the two desks
piled high with stacks of paper. I looked around the room and saw no one else.
The room was a mess, and so was she. Her long red hair went in all directions.
She had tried to tame it with a butterfly hair clip, but it didn’t seem to do
the job. She got up and waddled her chubby body in a flowered yellow dress over
to greet me.

“I’m Sara,” she said. “I’m in charge of all the
personal pages. You know, the obituaries and such. People come to me if they
need to put in an announcement for a reception or a 50-year anniversary
celebration. Stuff like that. That’s what I do.”

I nodded and looked confused at all the old
newspapers in stacks on the floor.

“You probably would like to see your desk.”

I nodded again and smiled kindly. “Yes, please.”

“It’s right over there.” Sara pointed at the
other desk in the room. Then she looked back at me, smiling widely. “It’s just going
to be the two of us.”

I smiled back, a little scared of the huge
possibility of going insane in the near future. I knew it was a small newspaper
that covered all of Zeeland, and that this would only be the department taking
care of the local news from Karrebaeksminde. But still … two people. Could that
be all?

“Do you want to see the rest of your new
workplace?” Sara asked and I nodded.

She took a couple of steps to the right and
opened a door. “In here we have a small kitchen with a coffeemaker and the
bathroom.”

“Let me guess. That’s it?” I tried not to sound
too sarcastic. This was really a step down for me, to put it mildly.

Sara sat down and put on a set of headphones. I
moved a stack of newspapers and found my chair underneath. I opened my laptop
and up came a picture of Julie, me, and her dad on our trip to Sharm el-Sheikh
in Egypt. We all wore goggles and big smiles. Quickly I closed the lid of the
laptop and closed my eyes.

Damn him, I thought. Damn that stupid moron.

I got up from the desk and went into the break
room to grab a cup of coffee. I opened the window and lit a cigarette. For
several minutes I stared down at the street. A few people rushed by. Otherwise
it was a sleepy town compared to where I used to live. I thought about my husband
and returning to Aarhus, but that was simply not an option for me. I had to
make it here.

I drank the rest of the coffee and killed my
cigarette on the bottom of the mug. Then I closed the window and stepped back
into the editorial room.

I need to clean this place up
,
I thought but then regretted the idea. It was simply too much work for one
person for now. Maybe another day. Maybe I could persuade Sara to help me. I
looked at her with the gigantic headphones on her ears. It made her face look
even fatter. It was too bad that she was so overweight. She actually had a
pretty face and attractive brown eyes. She looked at me and took off the
headphones.

“What are you listening to?” I asked and
expected that it was a radio station or a CD of her favorite music. But it
wasn’t.

“It’s a police scanner,” she said.

I looked at her surprised. “You have a police
scanner?”

She nodded.

“I thought police everywhere in the country had
shifted from traditional radio-scanners to using a digital system.”

“Maybe in your big city, but down here we still
use the old-fashioned ones.”

“What do you use it for?”

“It is the best way to keep track of what is
happening in this town. I get my best stories to tell my neighbors from this
little fellow,” she said while she leaned over gave the radio a friendly tap.
“We originally got this baby for journalistic purposes, in order to be there
when a story breaks, like a bank has been robbed or something like that. But
the past five or six years nothing much has happened in our town, so it hasn’t
brought any stories to the newspaper. But I sure have a lot of fun listening to
it.”

She leaned over her desk with excitement in her
brown eyes.

“Like the time when the mayor’s wife got caught
drunk in her car. That was great. Or when the police were called out to a
domestic dispute between the pastor and his wife. As it turned out she had been
cheating on him. Now that was awesome.”

I stared at the woman in front of me and didn’t
know exactly what to say. Instead I just smiled and started walking back to my
desk, when she stopped me.

“Ah, yes I forgot. We are not all alone. We do
have a photographer working here too. He only comes in when there’s a job for
him to do. His name is Sune Johansen. He looks a little weird, but you’ll learn
to love him. He’s from a big city too.”

Didrik
Rosenfeldt
thought of a lot of things when he got out
of the car and went up the stairs to his summer residence. He thought about the
day he just had. The board meeting in his investment company went very well. He
fired 3000 people in his windmill company early in the afternoon without even
blinking. The hot young secretary gave him a blow job in his office afterwards.
He thought about his annoying wife who kept calling him all afternoon. She was
having a charity event this upcoming Saturday and kept bothering him with
stupid details, as if she would ever be sober enough to go through it. Didn’t
she know by now that he was too busy to deal with that kind of stuff? He was
humming when he reached the door to the house by the sea.

A tune ran through his head, his favorite song
since he was a kid. “Money makes the world go round. A mark, a yen, a buck, or
a pound. That clinking clanking sound can make the world go ‘round.” Didrik
sighed and glanced back at his shiny new silver Jaguar. Money did indeed make
the world go around. And so did he.

A lot of thoughts flitted through Didrik’s head
when he put the key in the old hand-carved wooden door and opened it. But death
was not one of them.

 “You!” was his only word when his eyes met
the ones belonging to a guy he remembered from school. A boy really, he always
thought of him. The boy had nerve to be sitting in his new leather
chair—“The Egg” designed by Arne Jacobsen—and wearing his
despicable grubby old blazer from the boarding school.  The boy was about
to make a complete fool of himself. Didrik shut the door behind him with a
bang.

“What do you want”? He placed his briefcase on
the floor, took off his long black coat and hung it on a hanger in the entrance
closet.  He sighed and looked at the man with pity.

“So”?

All the girls at Herlufsholm boarding school had
whispered about the boy when he first arrived there in ninth grade. Unlike most
of the rich high-society boys, including Didrik Rosenfeldt who was both fat and
red headed, the boy was a handsome guy. He had nice brown hair and the most
sparkling blue eyes. He was tall and the hard work he used to do at his dad’s
farm outside of Naestved had made him strong and muscular and Didrik and his
friends soon noticed that the girls liked that … a lot.

The boy wasn’t rich like the rest of them. In
fact his parents had no money. But in a strange way that made him exotic to the
girls. The poor countryside boy, the handsome stranger from a different culture
who might take them away from their boring rich lives. They thought he could
rescue them from ending up like their rich drunk mothers. How his parents were
able to afford the extremely expensive school, no one knew. Some said he was
there because his mother used to do it with the headmaster, but Didrik knew
that wasn’t true. This boy’s family was—unlike everybody else’s at the
school—hardworking, earnest people. The kind who people like Didrik had
no respect for whatsoever, the kind his father would exploit and then throw
away. He and his type were expendable. They were workers. And that made it even
more fun to pretend he would be the boy’s friend.

Despite that he was younger than they were, they
had from time to time accepted him as their equal in the brotherhood.

But because of his background he would always
fall through. And they would laugh at him behind his back, even sometimes to
his face. Like the time when they were skeet shooting on Kragerup Estate, and
Didrik put a live cat in the catapult. Boy, they had their fun telling that
story for weeks after. How the poor pretty boy had screamed, when he shot the
kitty and it fell bleeding to the ground. What a wimp.

“So, what do you want? Can’t you even say
anything? Are you that afraid of me?” Didrik said arrogantly.

The pretty boy stood up from the $7000 chair and
took a step toward him, his right hand hidden behind his back. Didrik sighed
again. He was sick and tired of this game. It led nowhere and he was wasting
his time. Didrik was longing to get into his living room and get a glass of the
fine $900 cognac he just imported from France. He was not going to let a stupid
poor boy from his past get in the way of that. That was for certain. He
loosened his tie and looked with aggravation at the boy in front of him.

“How did you even get in here?”

“Smashed a window in the back.”

Didrik snorted. Now he would have to go through
the trouble to get someone out here to fix it tonight.

“Just tell me what you want, boy.”

The pretty blue eyes stared at him.

”You know exactly what I want.”

Didrik sighed again. Enough with these games!
Until now he had been patient with this guy. But now he was about to feel the
real Rosenfeldt anger. The same anger Didrik’s dad used to show when Didrik’s
mother brought him into his study and he would beat Didrik half to death with a
fire poker. The same anger that his dad used to show the world that it was the
Rosenfeldts who made the decisions. Everybody obeyed their rules because they
had the money and the power.

“You’re making a fool of yourself. Just get out
of here before I call someone to get rid of you. I’m a very powerful man, you
know. I can have you killed just by pressing a number on my phone,” he said
taking out a black iPhone from his pocket.

“I know very well how powerful you and your
family are. But we are far away from your thugs; and I will have killed you by
the time they get here.”

Didrik put the phone back in his pocket. He now
sensed the boy was more serious than he first anticipated.

“Do you want to kill me? Is that it?”

“Yes.”

Didrik laughed out loud. It echoed in the hall.
The boy did not seem intimidated. That frightened him.

“Don’t be ridiculous. You are such a fool. A
complete idiot. You always were.” Didrik snorted. “Look at you. You look like a
homeless person in that old school blazer. Your clothes are all dirty. And when
did you last shave? What happened to you?”

“You did. You and your friends. You ruined my
life.”

Didrik laughed again. This time not nearly as
loud and confident.

“Is it that old thing you are still sobbing
about?”

“How could I not be?”

“Come on. It happened twenty-five years ago.
Christ, I didn’t even come up with the idea.” Didrik snorted again. “Pah! You
wouldn’t dare to kill me. Remember I am a nobleman and you are nothing but a
peasant who tried to be one of us for a little while. You can take the boy away
from the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy. You have always been
nothing but a stupid little farmer boy.”

Didrik watched the boy lift his right hand,
revealing a thing from his past, something he couldn’t forget. With a wild
expression in his eyes, he then moved the blades of the glove and took two
steps in Didrik’s direction with them all pointing at him. . It scared the shit
out of him. It had been years since he last saw the glove and thought it had
been lost. But the pretty boy had found it. Now the game was in the boy’s
court.

“I can give you money.” Desperately, he clung to
what normally saved him in troubled times. ”Is it money you want? I could call
my secretary right now and make a transfer.”

He took out the iPhone again.

“I could give you a million. Would that be
enough? Two million? You could buy yourself a nice house, maybe get some nice
new clothes, and buy a new car.”

The boy in front of him finally smiled showing
his beautiful bright teeth. Phew! Money had once again saved him. At least he
thought. But only for a second.

”I don’t want your blood money.”

Didrik didn’t understand. Who in the world would
say no to money? ”But …”

”I told you. I want you dead. I want you to
suffer just as I have been for twenty-five years. I want you to be humiliated
like I was.”

Didrik sighed deeply. “But why now?”

“Because your time has run out.”

“I don’t understand.”

The boy with the pretty blue eyes stepped closer
and now stood face to face with Didrik. The four claws on his hand were all
pointing towards Didrik’s head. The boy’s eyes were cold as ice, when he said
the words that made everything inside Didrik Rosenfeldt shiver: “The game is
over.”