Itsy Bitsy Spider (Emma Frost #1) (25 page)

Lari Soerensen
enjoyed her job as a housekeeper for the Rosenfeldt family. Not that she liked
Mr. Rosenfeldt in particular but she liked taking care of his summer residence
by the sea. They barely ever used it, only for a few weeks in the summer and
whenever Mr. Rosenfeldt had one of his affairs with a local waitress or his
secretary. He would escape to the house in Karrebaeksminde for “a little
privacy” as he called it.

But otherwise there wasn’t much work in keeping
the house clean, and Lari Soerensen could do it at her own pace. She would turn
on the music in the living room and sing while she polished the parquet floor.
She would eat of the big box of chocolate in the kitchen. She would take the
money in the ashtrays and the coins lying on the shelves and put it in her
pocket knowing the family would never miss it. Sometimes she would even use the
phone to call her mother in the Philippines, which normally was much too
expensive for her. Her Danish husband didn’t want to pay for her phone calls to
her family anymore, and since he took all the money she got from cleaning
people’s houses, she couldn’t pay for the calls herself.

It was a cold but lovely morning as she walked
pass the port and glanced at all the yachts that would soon be put back in the
water when spring arrived. All the rich people would go sailing and drinking on
their big boats.

She took in a breath of the fresh morning air.
She had three houses to clean today and she would begin with Mr. Rosenfeldt’s
since he probably wouldn’t be there. It was only five thirty, and the city had
barely awakened. Everything was so quiet, not even a car.

She had taken a lot of time to get used to
living in the little kingdom of Denmark. Being from the Philippines, she was
used to a warmer climate and people in her homeland were a lot more open and
friendly than what she experienced here. Not that they were not nice to
her—they were. But it was hard for her to get accustomed to the fact that
people didn’t speak to you if they didn’t know you. If she would talk to a
woman in the supermarket she would answer briefly and without looking at Lari.
It wasn’t impolite; it was custom. People were busy and had enough in
themselves.

But once people got to know somebody they would
be very friendly. They wouldn’t necessarily stop and talk if they met in the
street. Often they were way too busy for that, but they would smile. And Lari
would smile back, feeling accepted in the small community. If people became
friends with someone they might even invite them to dinner and would get very
drunk, and then the Danes wouldn’t stop talking until it was early in the
morning. They would tell a lot of jokes and laugh a lot. They had a strange
sense of humor that she had to get used to. They used sarcasm all the time, and
she had a hard time figuring out when they actually meant what they said or
when they were just joking.

But Lari liked that they laughed so much. She
did too. Smiled and laughed. That’s how she got by during the day, the month,
the year. That’s what she did when the rich white man from Denmark came to her
house in the Philippines and told her mother, that he wanted to marry Lari and
take her back to Denmark and pay the family a lot of money for her. That’s what
she did when she signed the paperwork and they were declared married and she
knew her future was saved. She smiled when she got on the plane with her ugly
white husband who wore clogs and dirty overalls. She even smiled when he showed
her into the small messy house that hadn’t been cleaned for ages and told her
that was her new home. That her job would be to cook and clean and be available
to him at any time. She was still smiling, even at the end of the day when she
handed over the money that she earned from housecleaning while her husband sat
at home and was paid by the government to be unemployed. And when Mr. Rosenfeldt
grabbed her and took her into his bed and had oral sex with her she still
smiled.

Yes, Lari Soerensen always smiled. And she still
did today when she unlocked the door to Mr. Rosenfeldt’s summer residence.

But from that moment on she would smile no more.

I awoke
feeling like I was lying under a strange comforter in a foreign place in an
unknown city. Slowly my memory came back to me, when I looked at my sleeping
daughter in the bed next to me. When I came home from work she told me the first
day of school had been a little tough. The teachers were nice, but the other
kids in the class didn’t want to talk to her and she had spent the day alone
and made no new friends. I told her she would be fine, that it would soon be
better, but inside I was hurting. This was supposed to be a fresh start for the
both of us, a new beginning. I now realized it wouldn’t go as smoothly as I had
hoped.

My dad had prepared a nice breakfast for us when
we came downstairs. Coffee, toast and eggs. Soft boiled for me and scrambled
for Julie. We dove into the food.

Before mom died he wouldn’t go near the kitchen,
except to eat, but things had changed since then.
He’s actually gotten pretty good at cooking
, I thought while
secretly observing him from the table. Ever since his fall down the stairs last
year, he had to use a cane, but he still managed to get around the kitchen and
cook for us.

“You know, Dad, with me in the house you could
catch a break every once in a while. I could take care of you, and cook for you
instead.”

He didn’t even turn around, but just snorted at
me. “I know my way around. You would only mess the place up.”

Then he turned around, smiling at Julie and me,
and placed a big plate of scrambled eggs on the table in front of us.

I sighed and rubbed my stomach.

“Sorry, Dad, I’m too full. Julie, go get your
bag upstairs. We are leaving in five.”

Julie made an annoyed sound and rushed up the
stairs.

My dad looked at me seriously.

“She misses him, you know,” he said nodding his
head in Julie’s direction. “Isn’t it about time she got to call him, and talk
to him?”

I shook my head. I hated that she had told her
granddad she missed her father. Since I couldn’t leave my job until late in the
afternoon, he had suggested he would pick her up every day and they could spend
some quality grandpa-granddaughter time together catching up on all the years
they missed of each others’ lives. I liked that, but I didn’t care much about
him meddling in my life.

“I can’t have him knowing where we are.”

My dad sighed. “You can’t hide down here
forever. If he wants to find you, he will. Whatever happened to you up there,
you have to face it at one point. You can’t keep running from it. It will
affect your daughter too. No matter what he did, he is, after all, still her
dad.”

Now it was my turn to sigh. “Just not right now,
okay?”

As I got up Julie came down and dumped her bag
on the floor before sitting down again and taking another serving of eggs.

Where she would put it in her skinny little body
I didn’t know but I was glad to see her eat despite being so nervous about
another day alone in the schoolyard with no one to play with.

“She must be growing,” my dad said with a big
smile. “That’s my girl,” he said and winked at her.

I looked at the clock and decided that I too had
the time to sit down for another minute. The radio played an old Danish song
from my childhood. My dad started humming and tried to spin around with his
cane. He almost fell but avoided it in the last second and we all laughed. I
began to sing along too and Julie rolled her eyes at me, which made me sing
even louder. The old cat stopped licking herself and stared at us from the
window. She would probably be rolling her eyes too if she could.

It was one of those beautiful mornings, but a
freezing cold one too. The sun embraced everybody, promising them that soon it
would triumph over the cold wind. Soon it would make the flowers come out of
hiding in the ground and with its long warm arms it would make them flourish
and bloom. I really enjoyed my drive along the ocean and the sandy beach. The
ocean seemed  angry.

I had promised headquarters to do a story today,
an interview with an Italian artist, Giovanni Marco, who lived on Enoe, a small
island close to Karrebaeksminde. It was connected to the mainland by a bridge.
The artist had made a series of sculptures that made the public angry because
of its vulgarity. The artist himself claimed that it was his way of making a
statement, that art cannot be censored. He had displayed the sculptures in the
county’s art festival, shocking the public and making people nauseous from
looking at them.

He was the same artist who once had displayed
ten blenders each with one goldfish in them in a museum of art, waiting to see
if anyone in the audience would press the button and kill the fish. He loved to
provoke the sleepy Danes and outrage them. At least they then took a position
and cared about something. I remembered he said he wanted to wake them from
their drowsy sleep walk. I was actually looking forward to this interview with
this controversial man on the beautiful island.

Giovanni Marco lived in an old wooden beach
house  that looked like it wouldn’t survive if big storm should hit the
beach. Fortunately big storms are rare in Denmark. We had a big one in 1999 as
strong as a category 1 hurricane. It was still the one people remembered and
talked about. It knocked down trees and electric wires. At least one tree hit a
moving car and killed the driver inside. That was a tragedy. It could
definitely get very windy, but the artist’s house would probably stand for
another hundred years.

Barefooted, he welcomed me in the driveway with
a hug and a kiss on my cheek, which overwhelmed me since I had not been happy
about male physical contact lately. So I’m sure I came off stiff and probably
not very friendly toward him.

He was gorgeous and he seemed to know that a
little too well. I never liked men who thought too much of themselves, but this
one intrigued me anyway, which made me nervous and uncomfortable in his
presence.

His blue eyes stared at me while he invited me
inside.
It’s rare for an Italian man to have
blue eyes like that
, I thought. Maybe he had Scandinavian genes.
Maybe that’s why he had escaped from sunny Italy to cold Denmark where the sun
would hide all winter. His hair was thick and brown and his skin looked very
Italian. But he was tall like a Scandinavian. And muscular. I hated to admit
it, but it was  attractive.

Inside I was stunned by the spectacular view
from almost every room in the house: views of the raging ocean, of the wild and
absorbing sea. I used to dream about living like that. Well I used to dream
about a lot of things, but dreams have a tendency to get broken over the years.

Giovanni, in a tank top and sweatpants, smiled
at me and offered me a cup of organic green tea. I am more of a coffee person,
but I smiled graciously and accepted. We sat for awhile on his sofa, glancing
out over the big ocean.

“So you have just returned from the big city?”
he asked with an irresistible Italian accent. His Danish was good, but not as
good as I expected. BI had read that he had lived in the country for more than
30 years. “What made you come back?”

News of my return traveled fast in a small
community, I knew that, but how it got all the way out here, I didn’t know.
Overwhelmed by his directness I shook my head and said, “I missed the silence
and the quiet days, I guess.” It wasn’t too far from the truth. There had been
days in the end, when the city got to me, with all its smartass people drinking
their Coffee “Lattes”. It used to be just coffee with milk. I didn’t get that.
But then again I didn’t get sushi either. Even in the center of Karrebaeksminde
they had a sushi restaurant now, so maybe it wasn’t a big city thing.

“I miss that too when I’m away from here.”
Giovanni expressed his emotions widely with his arms, the way Italians did.
“Especially when I go back to Milan. I get so tired in the head, you know? All
those people, so busy, always in a hurry. To do what? What are they doing that
is so important?”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said knowing that I used to
be one of those busy big-city people always rushing off to something. Rushing
after a story to put on the cover. Never stopping to feel the ocean breeze or
see the flowers pop up at spring. But I wasn’t like that anymore. I had
changed. Having to go off to cover the war for the newspaper had changed me.
Being a mom changed me. But that was all history.

I began my interview with Giovanni Marco and got
some pretty good statements, I thought. I began to see the article shape in my
head. But it seemed more like he wanted to talk about me instead. He kept
turning the conversation to  me and my past. I didn’t like to talk about
it, so I gently avoided answering. But he kept pressing on, looking me in the
eyes as if he could see right through me. I didn’t like that and he began to
annoy me. His constant flirting with me was a little over the top. Luckily, my
cell phone started ringing just as he began asking about my husband.

“I better take this,” I said.

“Now? In the middle of our conversation? Now,
that is what I think is wrong with this world today. All these cell-phones
always interrupting everything. People using them on the bus, on trains, in the
doctor’s waiting room, rambling about this and that, and playing games. God forbid
they should ever get themselves into a real conversation. They might even risk
getting to know someone outside their own little world.”

He got up and looked passionately in my eyes,
and I couldn’t help smiling. He was indeed over the top, but it was  sweet.

“Now, tell me, what could be so vital that it
cannot wait until we are done?” He thrust his long Italian arms out in the air.

“It might be about my daughter,” I said and got
up from the couch.

It wasn’t about Julie. It was Sara from the
newspaper. She was almost hyperventilating, trying to catch her breath. She was
rambling.

“Take it easy Sara,” I said while holding a
finger in my other ear to better hear her. “Just tell me calmly what is going
on.”

She took a pause and caught her breath. “A dead
body. The police found a dead body. I just heard it on my radio.”

“So?”

“Are you kidding me? That’s like the biggest
story of this century down here.”

I didn’t get it. Normally when we received news
like that at my old newspaper they just put in a small note on page five, and
that was it. If the police thought it was a murder and an investigation took
place we would make a real article about it, but still only place it on page
five. And Sara didn’t even know if it was considered to be a murder case or
not. It was just a dead body. For all I knew he could have died of a heart
attack.

“Don’t people die in this place?” I challenged.

In Aarhus people died every week. With the gangs
of immigrants fighting the rockers people got shot and stabbed all the time. Of
course they would bring the story if a dead body was found. But it wasn’t like
it was one of the big ones.

“He might have fallen drunk or even had a heart
attack,” I said trying to close the conversation. “I will call the police and
get something for a small article when I come back, okay?”

”No, no, no. It is not okay at all. I called
Sune. He is already on his way down there. You have to be there before anyone
else. I got this from the police radio, remember? That means no one else in the
country knows anything yet. It is what you would call a solo story.”

I  liked the ring of that. I might get it
on the cover of the morning paper. Not bad on my second day.

“Okay, give me the address.”