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Her eyes sparkle and there’s a very lewd look in them, so yes, I know what she means. But it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
“She was treated for depression, wasn’t she?” Mark asks, taking the words right out of my mouth.
“Manic depression,” Lea corrects him. “She was wild, happy and carefree and then she’d crash and saw no reason for living, until the cycle repeated. Her mother was the same way, only not as bad. These days they have great medications to treat it, but back then… ”
Her voice trails off and she looks down at her hands, shuddering slightly. “I could’ve done more for Tina. Instead, I lied for her. We were out partying together that night, but she was off her meds and acting crazy. So when she told me she was meeting someone elsewhere, I just let her go.”
“It wasn’t your responsibility,” I say on impulse and she shudders again, but fixes her wide, light brown eyes on me with a very grateful look.
“Try telling that to her mother,” she says. “She’s still refusing to speak to me.”
“Do you know who she was meeting?” Mark asks.
“She wouldn’t say, just that it was someone she wanted to see for the longest time,” Lea says.
“Could it have been one of the two doctors?” Mark insists.
Lea shakes her head. “What? No. It was that man who killed her. The Kern guy, the one who only got seven years for killing her and was out in five for good behavior.”
“From the police reports and the trial material, I understood that she didn’t really know him that well, and that she didn’t want anything to do with him,” I say. “Would she really go meet him in the middle of the night?”
“Honestly, I don’t know,” Lea says. “He annoyed her because he chased her so much, but then again, Tina liked to be chased. She liked guys in general, especially when she was on one of her highs. And she didn’t have to know them well to agree to be alone with them, if you know what I mean.”
She takes hold of the small gold crucifix hanging from her gold necklace.
“Was Tina religious?” I ask over the loud, persistent honking that starts outside.
Lea scoffs. “She was just religious enough to fool her mother, who was practically a fanatic. She’d even attend church every Sunday and went to choir practice with her mother. But the things she got up to outside of church, well, those weren’t very in keeping with the teachings of God.”
“So she lived something of a double life?” I ask and Lea nods.
“She was young, pretty and vivacious,” she adds. “And wanted to live her life to the fullest.”
“Which church did she attend?” Mark asks. “The one on Kajuhova Street?”
She looks at him like she doesn’t know what he’s talking about. “We lived in Bizovik, so we attended the church there.”
Bizovik is a tiny settlement just outside of Ljubljana city limits, and actually not very far from the church Mark was asking about.
Honking intensifies outside. Mark leaves us to check if it’s his car that’s causing it. A moment later a gust of cold air against my back tells me he left the store to move the car.
“You know, come to think of it, Tina had been mentioning Dr. Lap more and more around the time of her death,” Lea says. “And the way she was all cagey about who she was going to meet that night, and acting like the person was quite a catch, maybe it wasn’t Kern after all. He was just a car mechanic from our area who was obsessed with her. She did try to avoid more often than not.”
“But she was with him often enough too,” she adds. “Just maybe not as often as he would like.”
“Did she know a Father Ignatius?” I ask. “Or did her mother?”
“I don’t know if they did, but I know him,” she says and smiles for the first time. “He taught both my kids in bible school. He and his assistant, Sister Tereza, are very popular with the children. My daughter even wanted to be a nun for a while because she liked Tereza so much, but I’m glad she grew out of it.”
The smile on her face as she says it is serene and contagious. But it’s wiped right off my face as I catch sight of a tall woman glaring at me through the window. She has the hood of her grey parka pulled low over her face and a black scarf done up tight around her nose and mouth. Her eyes, though shaded, are the only thing I see clearly and they’re piercing me right through.
But as soon as I notice her, she seems to smile, nods her head and walks away, as though a little ashamed that I caught her looking.
The door opens again and Mark says, “We should go. Sojer has something.”
The clipped way he says it tells me it’s more than just a little something, so I quickly thank Lea for her time and give her my number to call if she thinks of anything else.
Mark already has the car running when I get outside and peels away from the curb as soon as I strap on my seat belt.
