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Now the contractor is telling me we’re back to square one with it all. He wants to replace not just the roof, but the beams themselves.
So in a way, Eva’s call and request actually sounded welcome. It would be a distraction from this mountain of a problem that we’re facing at home.
If Milo really isn’t the killer, then we might actually have a serial on our hands—a serial killer no one is aware of. Eva seems pretty certain of that and she’s something of an expert at uncovering those kinds of killers, I have to admit that.
But on the flip side, I hadn’t planned on taking on any big cases after the last one the task force just wrapped up. I’d planned to begin easing my way into an easy life in which I can be there for my daughter. So the pull to head back to Ljubljana and start looking into a possible serial killer is as welcome as it is worrying.
What if I can’t actually stop working so much? What if there’s no life for me beyond catching killers?
I push those thoughts away into the darkness of my mind and step out of the house to call Brina. The sun is shining brightly, its blinding white light mocking me after all the torrential rain that destroyed my home last night.
“OK, I’ll make some calls and try to find out as much as I can,” Brina tells me after I explain what I need.
“Try to set up an interview with the suspect too,” I say. “Eva will want to talk to him. And so do I.”
She assures me she will and hangs up.
Brina has been incredibly helpful, since the case we investigated last autumn on which she could’ve handled some things better. I don’t exactly blame her for what happened, but I don’t fully trust her anymore either. Though she has been working hard to regain my trust, I have to admit that too.
My phone rings again just as I’m putting in back in my pocket. I answer it without checking who’s calling, figuring it’s either Brina needing more info, or Eva.
So when I hear my mother’s voice greeting me, I kind of freeze mid-step and stop breathing for a moment or two.
“I’m flying in next Saturday,” she says brightly. “You’ll be able to pick me up, right?”
“Flying in? What?” I ask, completely disoriented.
“I’m coming to visit you two,” she says. “It’s high time I met Eva, don’t you think? And my granddaughter?”
We had talked about her coming to visit. But we’ve been doing that for years. Just talking about it. She’s never met Eva in person, they’ve only spoken on the phone a few times. I didn’t expect her to come to visit until after the baby was born.
“Yes, of course I can pick you up,” I say and clear my throat because it’s suddenly very dry. “But you can’t stay with us at the house. It’s not… habitable right now.”
“Oh, I’m staying at a hotel,” she says and laughs. “Did you think I’d impose myself on my daughter-in-law five minutes after we met?”
What I thought was that she’d give me more than a week’s warning before descending on us. But that’s not how my mother is. She decides to do something and then she does it right after. And what happens, happens, come what may. I suppose that’s how she had me too. I never knew my father because she got pregnant at some festival when she was twenty years old.
So I won’t even bother complaining about her lack of forewarning of this visit.
“All right, I’ll see you Saturday, I guess,” I say.
“Can’t wait,” she says and proceeds to give me all the flight details.
I’m actually kind of happy she’s coming. I haven’t seen her in going on ten years. And by the sounds of things, she’s not bringing her husband, which is a double win in my book. I do feel like a petulant teenager thinking that, but some things are harder to shake than others. Marrying him was another one of her overnight decisions, and I detested him from the start. Especially because her marriage was the final nail in the coffin of what was my family.
But all that’s far in the past now.
And between fixing the house and my mother’s visit, maybe Eva and I will succeed in not getting sucked into another case.
