The Seventh Child (67 page)

I’d never seen Taasing so out of sorts.

He leapt to his feet. “We have to warn the others.” He grabbed his brown schoolteacher’s bag and exited the sunroom, in a near run—just about as melodramatically as
he’d
once thought the whole affair with the anonymous letters was.

I called Dorah. She was the only person I felt an urge to warn.

After nearly a minute she answered the phone.

There was no doubt she feared another threatening voice from the unknown—but she was also thinking of her son,
who’d
become involved in a game that she, sitting in her small house in Stødov, had no way of understanding.

Her disappointment was as evident as her fear had been the first time I’d talked to her.

“Yes,” she said simply.

I got straight to the point. “Dorah, go to your son and talk to him. He’s seen the coverage from Kongslund too. It’s the best thing you can do now.”

She could tell I was lying. I was talking to her about her safety, but the message was
get out while you can
.

“Dorah?”

But she didn’t respond. I imagined her hunched up in the darkness beneath plumes of dust.

“Go to your son now, Dorah.”

“I never should have told him.” Her voice was a whisper.

I didn’t know what to say.

“I never should have told
anyone
.”

“But somebody knows, Dorah
…
and they’ve always known!” The old lady didn’t realize the caliber of secrets
she’d
seen a glimpse of. Now I was seriously scared.

“
Go to your son!”

“But
…
”

“What?”

“He moved to Copenhagen.”

I opened my mouth to urge her one final time, but I couldn’t manage it.

She hung up.

I sat with the phone in my hand for a moment, until I finally hung up the receiver.

Maybe I was waiting for some guidance from above, but that didn’t come. Of course not: Magdalene had left the stage to her successor. The games people play almost always end up spinning out of control. And now I knew that better than anyone.

We were sitting on the patio in front of the door to the infant room, and one of the assistants served tea with vanilla cookies, Magna’s favorite dessert.

Peter Trøst had arrived right after Knud Taasing’s warning. For a long time, the two journalists stood together at the foot of the slope, under the twelve beeches.

I’d watched them from a distance, in the Giraffe Room where the older kids lived, and I could see how frustrated they were. There was nothing they could do; I could see it in their faces as they ambled back to the house.

I let my guests sip the fine tea. Even though the sun was shining in a clear blue sky, the feeling of being a hostess (something I’d never been before) gave me goose bumps along both arms and a strange swishing sound in my ears. I felt like I had back when I’d dragged my Japanese pull-along elephant about on its rusty chain in the corridors, and the childcare assistant
who’d
found me on the stairs had shouted: “Look! Marie is taking off to see the world with her friend the elephant!” It wasn’t meant to be mean-spirited, but of course it had been thoughtless and incredibly stupid. “Remember to come back home tonight!”

I pulled a bright-green woolen shawl—a gift from Gerda Jensen on my eighteenth birthday—around my shoulders and waited for someone to speak. I wouldn’t get up from the table or walk away, and that gave me an odd thrill that nearly paralyzed my ability to think. I desperately needed Susanne or Asger to intervene and end the silence; it didn’t help that Orla Berntsen, for the first time, sat across from the two journalists who for years had been a thorn in his side.

His mumbled hello had merged with a sniffle and was followed by complete silence. Now he sat nervously sipping his tea, spilling precious drops on his chin.

“Is the ministry really wiretapping people?” It was Taasing who finally spoke, asking Orla Berntsen directly, and accusatorily.

Søren Severin Nielsen quickly came to the aid of his old friend. “Of course they aren’t, certainly not with Orla’s or any other official’s approval. I can vouch for that. It must be Carl Malle’s methods
…
and right now they’re desperately trying to find Orla.”

Severin had rediscovered his old battle spirit after two days of uninterrupted rest.
He’d
even chatted amiably with a couple of two-year-old boys making figure eights with their three-wheelers around the driveway.

“As far as I know, there is no search for Orla
…
not officially,” Peter said, a note of cheerfulness in his voice. “But on the other hand, they’re saying that they’d like to hear from anyone who knows of his whereabouts. Discreetly.” He smiled, as if to underscore the absurdity of the request.

“If there is a search for me—well, I’ll of course turn myself in to the authorities
…
I have nothing to hide,” Orla said quietly. Nevertheless, he sniffled, and the sound of the fear that had always followed him contradicted the last part of his statement.

“Let’s summarize this whole mess we’re in—not the least thanks to Marie,” Taasing said, pulling an orange spiral-bound notepad from his brown bag, which rested on the flagstones at his feet. His glasses balanced on the tip of his nose. The first three or four pages were scribbled with illegible notes, and he flicked back and forth as though the words had fallen onto the different pages, disappearing from his view. Finally he found the right place, and in a somewhat official tone of voice began his recap.

“In short, the facts of the Kongslund Affair are as follows: In 2001, Marie mistakenly received a letter intended for Magna. A woman named Eva Bjergstrand wrote the letter. Shortly after sending it, she came to Denmark, where she died suddenly. She was found on the beach just north of Bellevue, quite close to Kongslund. Her death coincided with the terrorist attacks on September 11, and for that reason few people ever heard of it. In the meantime, Marie tracked down part of the story of Eva’s life, including her son, John,
who’d
been adopted under very strange circumstances and has since disappeared.”

He turned to the next page in his notepad. Neither he nor Peter had touched their tea. The breeze from the sound carried with it the faint odor of cheap wine.

“After that, Marie postponed her inquiry,” he went on, pausing briefly in reproach. “For no less than seven years.” He made an irritated noise with his tongue. “As Magna’s sixtieth anniversary approached, she retrieved the old letter and resumed her investigation. Maybe you thought you owed Eva another go at it, since, after all, it was your fault that the letter never reached Magna. Or anyone else.” Again he looked at me reproachfully over the rim of his glasses.

“I just wanted to know,” I said, instantly realizing how silly that sounded.

“Since you knew the names of the seven children in the infant room in 1961—and you yourself were one of them—you sent the five boys an anonymous letter a few days before the big anniversary party, when you knew there’d be maximum focus on the nation’s finest refuge for distressed children. With each letter, you enclosed four prompts that were at your disposal: a photo of Kongslund, a photo of the seven orphans from Christmas 1961, a copy of the adoption form with John Bjergstrand’s name, and finally a pair of baby socks that
you’d
found in the attic
…
here at Kongslund.” Taasing gestured by nodding his head in the direction of the towering black roof. “You made it as dramatic and sensational as you possibly could by cutting hundreds of multicolored letters from a magazine that had announced your own arrival to Kongslund, and you glued those to the envelopes
…
it was like something lifted from an Agatha Christie novel. So melodramatic.” Taasing was getting his verbal revenge on me.

“I don’t have a computer or typewriter,” I said. “And I didn’t dare write it by hand. I felt the anger driving forth a forceful lisp between my teeth. He really wanted to cast me as an amateur, so he could cast himself as Hercule Poirot.

Severin, who, unlike Taasing, was highly skilled in the field of foreign entities, stared intensely at me, as though I were yet another lost creature in one of his long columns of failed missions. I sensed his skepticism.

Taasing shook his head and resumed his monologue. “So, Marie, you knew that at least two journalists would receive your strange and melodramatic message—and just to be certain, you mentioned in the letter to the
Independent Weekend
that Orla Berntsen had already received a copy. You knew without a doubt that when I saw that, I’d react—you knew of my history and my clash with Berntsen and Almind-Enevold.”

I bowed my head and settled my dark and guarded gaze at the bottom of the deep green fluid in my cup. For a second Orla looked up from his mug, but then sank back down in silence.

“And then everything started going wrong—or it went well, depending on your point of view. Because the ministry panicked. We have to assume that it was the very name—John Bjergstrand—that made someone in the ministry call a crisis meeting to order and even bring in Mr. Fix It, Carl Malle. Your throw hit the mark, Marie. And at that moment, both Peter and I knew there was a story worth pursuing.”

Against my will, I blushed like a ten-year-old girl and felt the blood rush up my neck, spreading from my twisted shoulders all the way to my forehead. It startled me that I—after all my years with two remarkable women, who neither praised nor condemned anyone—would react with so little control.

But Taasing didn’t notice, he just continued his recounting. “And somewhere—Marie—that fear triggered a reaction with fatal consequences. At any rate, your foster mother is now dead—after receiving a visit from an unknown guest—and yet another mystery has been handed to us with the woman from Helgenæs. She really shouldn’t have anything to do with this case, but somehow she is connected. Finally, at long last, I think Marie has gotten a load off her mind
…
case in point is the final document that none of you have seen. I didn’t see it until an hour ago.”

He shifted a little to the right. And then very slowly—and I couldn’t help but think with a good deal of drama, mastered in his professional life—retrieved a yellow folder from his tattered bag.

The yellow folder contained four copies of Eva’s letter to the child
she’d
never met. Rather ceremonially, he pushed three copies across the table toward Peter, Orla, and Severin, kept one for himself, and handed me back the original.

Casually, he set his copy on his untouched teacup. “This is the paper it’s all about, the epicenter of the case
…
these are the words that never made it, and which caused Eva to travel back to the country she hadn’t set foot in for forty years. Something she clearly shouldn’t have done.”

He raised the two sheets closer to his face. “This letter was no doubt written to one of you—the Kongslund children—here at this table, or to one of the other three who aren’t here right now but who’ll be back tonight or early tomorrow. Susanne and Asger are with their parents at the cape and in Jutland. I’ve tried to get ahold of Nils these past few days, but he’s not picking up. I’ll get ahold of him, though. I’m sure he’s talking to his parents—for good reason.”

He emphasized the last word as if to once again protest my brutal revelation of Nils’s adoption.

“But why do you include
Susanne
?” said Peter Trøst. “We’ve got the adoption form that shows that the child was a boy
…
John Bjergstrand is a boy’s name,” he continued somewhat naively.

“That’s true,” Taasing said. “I just don’t want to rule out anyone from the Elephant Room at this point, anyone from this completely mysterious and bizarre place.” He half turned toward the patio doors a few meters away. “Magna had full control of the information that accompanied the children who came from the Rigshospital—the names they went by, their arrival dates—and maybe even more than that. I just can’t rule out the possibility that she
…
”