The air was already soft with the promise of heat by mid-morning. A shimmer rose over the fields, and the wooden planks beneath Katja’s feet were still damp with morning dew.
She paused, squinting into the sunlight, breathing in the scent of thyme in the pots and Marit’s freshly baked herb bread.
“Oh wow! Not even a five-star hotel could do it like you, dear Marit!” Katja laid the printout with the symbol on the table.
“Why’s the table so far from the house?” Sven asked beside her. He wiped sweat from his forehead, eyeing the lawn below. Under the apple tree stood a large garden table, six chairs around it, but only four place settings: fine ceramics, colorful napkins, fresh orange juice, steaming coffee, quark, sliced cheese, butter, milk and sugar, ham, honey, jams, rolls, light sweet bread with and without raisins, Marit’s herb bread, and in a bowl, brown and white eggs like little treasures. A red-and-white checkered tablecloth fluttered in the breeze.
“Just wait,” Marit murmured. She looked toward the house, as if she were about to give a gift she wasn’t sure would be received.
As they drew closer, Marit gestured to the lawn. “Sit down. Sina’s still inside.”
“How is she?” Katja asked carefully.
Marit hesitated. “Yesterday she told me a great deal. Things she swears are memories. She’s convinced she lived in the year 1489, that she was executed. The way she described it, with such detail, such vividness—it chills you to the bone.”
Katja raised her brows. “As if she’d really lived it?”
“As if she were right there,” Marit whispered. She poured Katja and Sven coffee. “Milk, sugar, and everything else is self-serve.” She set the porcelain pot back down, took her seat at the head of the table, and looked at Katja. “And you know what’s most unsettling? She doesn’t seem confused. She doesn’t think she’s insane. She thinks… we are.”
“So… she believes we’re the ones who don’t belong?” Sven scratched his chin, eyeing the bread basket. “What does she think this place is?” He chose a slice of sweet raisin bread. “You baked this too?”
“Everything but the rolls. I know what a sweet tooth you are.” Marit gave him a teasing smile.
Sven grinned, spreading butter. “So, what does she think this place is?”
Marit’s eyes flicked back toward the house. “I’m afraid you’ll see for yourself in a moment.”
Sven had just dipped into the sea buckthorn jam when a sound made him glance toward the terrace. The bathroom window cracked open, and a hand, barely visible, emptied a white enamel bowl with practiced ease right out onto the terrace.
Silence. The click of the window shutting. The jam dripping onto Sven’s plate.
He stared at Katja. “That did not just happen. Tell me I didn’t just see that.”
Marit calmly stood, grabbed the hose, and began rinsing the terrace without a word. “Now you understand why the table’s under the apple tree,” she said.
Katja burst out laughing, patting Sven’s arm. “Your face! Priceless.”
Sven grimaced, determined to spread his jam across the bread. “Perfect. Just perfect.”
He wasn’t sure he even wanted to take a bite when Sina came out onto the terrace. She wore a simple blue-flowered dress, clean and plain, her hair cropped short by Marit’s hand but neat. Her skin looked paler than yesterday, touched with a yellow hue that made it seem almost translucent in the morning light. Katja saw Sven notice it too.
“You’re seeing her like this for the first time,” Marit said softly. “Early yesterday morning, I got a call. From Dr. Henrik Jessen.”
“The plastic surgeon from Binz?” Katja asked, trying to ease the tension. “He only takes wealthy private patients.”
Marit nodded. “Yes, but he’s a friend of mine, and he can do more than smooth wrinkles. He agreed to examine Sina for free. Blood work, ultrasound, liver scan.” She poured Sina a glass of orange juice. “Last night he called with the results: autoimmune hepatitis, final stage. We’re supposed to go back to the Helium Clinic tomorrow.”
Katja glanced at Sven. The roll she’d started to cut she put back on the plate. “Faris had pancreatic—”
Sina interrupted quietly. “This is not my body.”
Katja turned to her. “What exactly do you mean?”
Sina studied her hands, lifting them slightly. “I can feel it. My skin is yellow and pale, my belly swollen though no new life grows inside me. Something is wrong. There are birthmarks I never had. And the scar I carried from the wound before Alina’s birth—Matthes tended it himself, it was deep. Now… nothing.”
She laid her hand over her chest. “I speak your language, yes. But I think in mine. I understand every word, but the thoughts are not the same. I am not me. This body, sick and strange, it does not belong to me. My body swung from the gallows.”
Sven muttered, “She’s even crazier than I thought.”
A sharp kick caught his shin under the table. “Ow!”
Katja blinked at him innocently. “Less judgment.”
Marit leaned forward slightly. “Please, have patience with her. I know what you’re thinking: state clinic, psych ward, sedatives for her own safety. But what if it’s something else?”
“Marit, she just dumped her business out the window,” Sven replied dryly, jerking a thumb toward the bathroom window. “That’s not normal.”
“No, it’s not. But she’s not hurting anyone. And she trusts me. Please.”
Katja noticed Sina reaching for the quark, taking a piece of bread. Her movements were delicate, careful, as if she were living inside a dream. She lifted her gaze toward the sky. Something in her was so far away it hurt, and yet so close it was almost unbearable.
“Henning.” Marit suddenly let her spoon sink into her coffee cup and raised her hand in a slow, deliberate wave.
Katja turned. A slender man with sloping shoulders came slowly up the path. His clothes were plain, jeans and a pale shirt that looked too bright in the morning sun. His steps were heavy, like someone wading through deep water.
“I was just at the grave,” he said, forcing a smile as he reached the garden gate. His voice was quiet, not shy but cautious, like a man unsure if he was intruding.
“Come in, sit down,” Marit urged. “I saw you and thought maybe you’d like some breakfast. You’re wasting away.” She opened the china cabinet just inside the terrace door and pulled out another setting. “You look tired.”
Henning hesitated, then stepped through the gate. When he found himself across from Katja and Sven, a flicker of recognition crossed his face.
“Homicide One, right?” He nodded to Katja. “We worked together once, a few years back. In Stralsund, junkie killed by someone else’s hand.”
“Henning Tiedemann,” Sven said quietly, recognition dawning. “Narcotics.” He and Katja shook his hand. “My wife, Katja Sommer, you know her? She’s in Homicide One too, but she wasn’t on that case. The kid was from Rostock, throat slit. I remember it well.” Sven shifted a plate to make room for him. “Your wife was a historian, wasn’t she?”
Henning nodded, a shadow darkening his face. “Was. She died in a motorcycle accident six months ago. I brought it to you back then, but there was no chance. Everyone says it was just an accident. I’m sure it was that drug boss. Calls himself Little Bird. I put him away for life, and he swore he’d take revenge.”
Sven lowered his eyes to his coffee cup. He’d heard about a colleague insisting over and over that a drug boss had killed his wife. Sven hadn’t paid much attention. Officially, after a thorough investigation, it was ruled an accident. But Henning clearly still held on to his theory.
“It’s good you’re here,” Marit said softly. She touched his tense shoulders, then gave Katja and Sven a look that said, Have some compassion for this man. “I was at his wife’s funeral. We buried her together, didn’t we, Henning. Since then I’ve seen you almost every day at the cemetery. Would you like some coffee?”
Henning looked at her, first surprised, then grateful.
“If it’s not a bother…”
“Of course not.” Marit was already up, placing the extra setting at the table. “Sit down and have breakfast with us. An egg too, yes?”
Henning nodded silently and took a seat.
He reached for the last slice of herb bread when his eyes fell on the printout in the middle of the table.
“Hold on. I’ve seen this before,” he murmured, brow furrowed. “May I?”
Katja handed him the paper with one hand, while taking an egg from the bowl with the other.
He leaned back, narrowing his eyes, studying the runes, the eye, the tree root, as though calling up a faded memory. “A symbol.” He laid a slice of Gouda on his bread. “Maybe not exactly the same, but maybe it was. Meike once had a copy of something like this hanging in her office. Some old manuscript or something.”
Sven set his roll aside. “Your wife knew it?”
“Yes.” Henning nodded slowly. “That’s possible. She was a historian, specialized in late medieval cultural history. She could spend hours buried in those papers. Something about symbolism, secret writings. I never really understood it.”
“And you remember this exact eye?” Katja asked.
Henning shrugged. “Well, not a hundred percent. But the shape… the feeling it gave me… it was strange. I remember joking with her back then: which one of us is really the detective here, you or me? And she just grinned and said, ‘You’ll laugh, but I’m actually onto something big.’”
He paused, his voice dropping as the memory weighed on him. “I even told her, you know, that kind of eye reminds me of the dollar bill, or the Illuminati. The all-seeing eye, watching everything—that much even I knew. But she didn’t really react to my comment. Something, or someone, had changed her. Four months later came the call. The accident.”
For a moment there was silence. Only the hum of insects and the faint rustle of leaves could be heard. The printout with the eye still lay between them. Like a silent witness.
Sina didn’t look at anyone directly. Her fingers rested on the rim of her glass as though she were reading a message there only she could see. “I’d like to look through your wife’s papers,” Katja said softly, almost apologetically. Sven nodded. “So would we. There might be more in there than you realize.”
Henning hesitated, then lifted his shoulders again. “I was just about to pack everything away or get rid of it. I’ll gladly bring them to you if you want to go through them.”
At that moment, Sven’s phone buzzed on the table. He glanced at the screen, then picked up. “Yeah?”
On the other end came the clear, urgent voice of his colleague Heinrichsen. “Sven? Can you get to Stralsund? We think we know who Sina really is.”