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2
EVA
Echoesof the loud crash that woke me are still reverberating in my ears as Mark and I stand in the doorway of the small room that used to be my office. Though the whooshing in my ears could be from the fact that my heart is racing, pumping blood through my body that’s still trying to wake up. Or even more accurately, I think I’m refusing to fully wake up because I’m still hoping this is just a dream.
There is only a pile of white mortar, orange brick and dark wood where my desk used to be and white flecks of dust are still falling from the ceiling like soft snow. None of the lights in the house work because the falling ceiling took out the electrical wires, so Mark is shining his phone’s flashlight at the mess, which is giving everything a bluish tint. So the whole scene is actually very whimsical and makes me hopeful that I’m dreaming.
But I know I’m not.
“How the hell did this happen?” Mark asks, shining a light at the gaping black hole in the ceiling.
He’s asked this a couple of times already. I haven’t answered. Again, because this is just a dream. It has to be. Because if it’s not, then the roof of our home, the house in which we hope to raise our daughter who is coming into the world very soon, just caved in on us.
“An earthquake?” I suggest, because I’m wide awake and this is real.
“I doubt it,” he says and examines the ceiling more closely by shining the light this way and that. “It’s been raining like crazy the last couple of days. There must’ve been a leak we didn’t know about. Damn those incompetent construction workers.”
Mark put a lot of time and effort into making this hundred-plus-years old house habitable when he decided to retire here almost three years ago. The retirement didn’t work out, but the home part did. I love this house, I love sharing it with him, and I can’t wait to start a family here. Even my writing has gotten better since I moved in.
This house had belonged to his family before they immigrated to the US and was part of his mother’s inheritance. It’s in a small, quiet village near the Adriatic Sea coast and overlooks sprawling vineyards and rolling hills in the distance. And for the last six months or so, we’ve been busy fixing it up even more. Our baby girl is kicking like crazy right now, she must know something awful has happened too. Though to be honest, she’s never still for long.
Mark turns to me sharply, his dark brown eyes are very wide. “What if you’d been in there…”
It’s not even a question. Just a very terrifying statement of fact. If I had been in there, I would have been sitting right where the ceiling came down the hardest.
I smile at him and run my hand over my belly. “Slim chance of that. Lana here absolutely hates it when I try to sit in an office chair. She likes the sofa and the dining chairs fine though. Go figure.”
Which is also why my laptop is sitting on the dining table and isn’t buried under the rubble. That is one of the main reasons why I’m not freaking out right now. Because all my work and all the research I’ve been buried in for the last two months are on that laptop.
There have been two stabbings in Ljubljana in the last three months, which I think are the work of a serial killer. A man and a woman. Both stabbed in the heart and found posed on the bank of Ljubljanica River. The police think the deaths are drug related. That the victims were buying drugs late at night and got robbed. I think they were killed by a serial killer who has been active for the last twenty years or so and who has gone undetected.
I’ve been trying to get Mark to have the Europol task force he’s running look into the murders, but he’s staunchly defending the work the local authorities are doing on this one and says we should let them handle it. I’m sure he’s just saying that because he doesn’t want me to get immersed in a new case now that I’m so close to my due date. A little too late for that. I’m already neck deep in this one, and it’s the reason I’m carrying my laptop around the house and setting it down wherever my daughter allows me to sit at the moment.
Mark lays his hand on my belly too. “Seems like she already knows what she’s doing. But I’m not a fan of the name Lana.”
“Me either,” I admit. We’ve been trying out different names for our child to get a feel for them, but so far we haven’t struck gold yet.
“What are we going to do now?” I ask, the full weight of what’s happened and what it means finally catching up with me.
Our child will be born in a month, possibly sooner. And now we have no roof over our heads.
“Well, we can’t stay here,” Mark says, sounding calm, which works to calm me too. “Let’s go get dressed and pack some stuff. We can spend the night at a hotel and figure this out in the morning.”
It’s barely two AM, so it’s actually amazing that I was asleep when the ceiling came down. That’s another thing our daughter has an issue with… letting me lie down and sleep.
I doubt we’ll start figuring this out in the morning, because I don’t think either of us will get much sleep tonight. But he’s right, it’s probably best if we don’t stay here, waiting for more of the ceiling to come crashing down.
So, less than fifteen minutes later, we’re in the car. The night is pitch black and rain is pouring down so hard even the wipers on full speed aren’t doing much to help with visibility.
“Well, no one can claim we have a boring life, that’s for sure,” I say, because the shock has now given way to giddiness.
“No, that we do not,” he says absentmindedly, which means he’s more worried than he’s showing.
He just wrapped up a case and has been talking about starting to wind down, since the baby is coming soon and there’s really no reason for him to work so much anymore. He’s fully intending to not work when the baby is born, but I wonder if he’ll be able to stick to that.
When we met almost eight years ago now, he was already a veteran investigator for the US Military, and apart from a brief attempt at retiring, he’s been solving crimes for almost two decades now. It’s been his life since he was in his early twenties. Just like investigative journalism and writing true crime books about serial killers has been for me.
We might be able to slow down, but I doubt either of us is actually able to stop working. But maybe that’s another thing that our daughter will change.
