“Once again I was right on the mark and dear Kostas fell into my trap,” said Daphne about an hour later, as she was closing the car door.
No response. ”
What’s wrong with you?” she asked, her tone of voice immediately changing from proud to worried, “You’ve hardly uttered a word since we saw the corpse. It’s not a pleasant sight, of course, but I don’t think you’ve ever been so upset before.”
“You are always right on the mark about these things, you know how to read people,” he replied, “Damn it! The car won’t start!”, he added, more irritated than he really was, in an attempt to ignore the second part of her statement. However, she kept looking at him inquiringly.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asked again, more emphatically this time.
“Didn’t you feel strange?”
“What do you mean strange? I didn’t feel well, that’s all I can say for sure, but it was like it always is in these cases. I wouldn’t rule out a minor existential crisis tonight, but we both know that I don’t necessarily need an excuse for that. I’m not the issue now, though. It would be absurd or rather worrying, if we weren’t affected by all this, but I feel that this time there’s something else.”
Jacinth took a deep breath, trying to organize his thoughts. “I felt like I knew him. I…I don’t mean that he reminded me of someone I knew, there was just something…familiar about him”
Pause. There were more things he wanted to say, but he didn’t know how. He didn’t know why the moment his gaze fell on the dead man in the dark-blue suit he felt, as if everything went silent, as if there was no one and nothing else around him in the glade. For some seconds it was as if he was watching the same scene through his own eyes, but also through the eyes of somebody else. He was looking at the body on the ground, but at the same time he felt as if he could see himself looking at it. He has obviously imagined all of this, right? It must have been in his imagination! Games of a mind that hasn’t slept well. Yes, that was the only logical explanation! No need then to upset Daphne any further.
“It was just in my mind”, he finally chose to add, his gaze following a leaf traveling on the wind outside the windshield. “In my mind”, he repeated, muttering, and tried again to start the car.
“FINALLY!”, he exclaimed, “I would have been forced to call Chris, if it hadn’t started!” he said, trying to lighten the mood. Chris was his cousin, a car mechanic, and most importantly-as it had turned out, since this is a small world-Daphne’s childhood sweetheart, which probably exceeded childhood, even if she stubbornly denied it.
“It would be faster to walk back home than to wait for him to answer your call,” she replied, and continued to stare Jacinth down thoroughly.
“Don’t do that,” he told her, as they were entering the ring road, “You know how nervous it makes me to be stared at, while I am driving. I’m fine!”
She knew how nervous it made him. At the same time, she also knew he wasn’t fine, but she decided to give him some time to calm down and later she would ask him again. She picked up her phone, synced it to the speakers, picked the most cheerful playlist she could find and turned the volume up almost to the max. After all, that’s what they used to do on the way home after a murder reportage, they used to turn the music up so loud, they couldn’t hear their thoughts and around the 5th-6th song they normally felt a little better. She would definitely ask him again later, because she realized that maybe she had also felt like she knew the dead man in the dark-blue suit.
He hadn’t even realized how fast the day had passed. Jacinth’s mind was continually fixated on it. No matter how hard he tried to convince himself that there has to be a perfectly reasonable explanation, he couldn’t stop thinking of the same scene over and over again. The clearing, the police tape, and in the middle of it a lifeless body on the frozen ground. Slowly, he started to notice other details, even though he couldn’t figure out if they truly existed or if they were a result of his raging imagination. He remembered when he left the house this morning, but on his way back it was really windy. In the forest though, there was no wind…
“The trees”, he thought, “The trees functioned simply as wind fences.”
Then, there was this other thing, where had all the birds been? He didn’t hear even one birdsong while he was there…
“Perhaps I didn’t notice it.”, the voice of reason inside his head tried to add.
The main question however was what the heck happened with this stranger, and why did his death have such an impact on him?
Around 4:30 pm, he decided that he could no longer fight his irrational urge to go back to the forest. He didn’t know if he would find any answers, he wasn’t even sure what his own questions were, but he felt like something was summoning him to return.
By the time he arrived, the sun had started to set. The blue tones dominating in the morning had now been replaced by playful orange details of light and the scenery had almost transformed. Once again though, this eerie silence prevailed. The only audible sounds were his heart, ready to explode, and the leaves crunching as he walked. He walked hastily on the path, constantly looking behind, being under the impression that he was being followed. He didn’t see anyone. In reality, there wasn’t any other movement around him. If someone was actually there watching him, he might remark that Jacinth was the sole moving element in a series of similar, consecutive, motionless pictures.
He felt like the route to the clearing lasted several hours but simultaneously only a few minutes. He took a look around. There was no indication that this very morning a dead body was there, with the homicide department, and two “nearly-newcomers” sent from the local TV channel. Suddenly, several meters away from where he was standing, something between the trees caught his attention. The glimpse of the lining of a dark blue coat. And that was the last thing he remembered…
He was awakened by his ringing phone. He turned around in his bed and in this blur of sleep he managed to get a glimpse of the time and name appearing on the screen before answering the call, 5:47, Mr.Nick – work.
It hadn’t even been half an hour when he parked with the hazard lights on outside Daphne’s house and texted her to come down.
“I can’t understand why in movies the corpses are discovered in normal working hours, while we are always called at the crack of dawn. They told me to choose crime reportage, they told me that it would be fun…,“ she nearly soliloquized as she was cosying up on the passenger seat.
All this seemed familiar… no, he must have been wrong.
“Good morning to you too. Maybe because crime never sleeps,” he replied with artificial bombast.
“Yes, but I sleep,” she had mumbled with a frown before she took the coffee he offered her, “Good morning,” she added in a slightly more cheerful tone as the car began…
THE END
#PHOTOEPISODES
