Читать книгу The Girl in the Woods - Camilla Lackberg - Страница 6

It was impossible to know what sort of life the girl would have had. Who she would have become. What kind of work she might have done, who she would have loved, mourned, lost and won. Or whether she would have had children and if so who they might have become. It was not even possible to imagine how she might have looked as a grown woman. At the age of four nothing about her was finished. Her eyes had changed from blue to green, her dark hair she’d had at birth was now light, though with a touch of red in the blond, and no doubt the colour would have changed again. That was especially difficult to determine at the moment. She was lying face down at the bottom of the lake. The back of her head was covered with thick, congealed blood. Only the strands floating outward from her skull revealed the subtle hues in her fair hair.

There was nothing particularly gruesome about this scene with the girl. It was no more gruesome than if she had not been lying there in the water. The sounds from the woods were the same as always. The light filtered through the tree branches the same way it always did at this time of day. The water rippled gently around her, the surface disturbed only when a dragonfly occasionally landed, spreading tiny rings in its wake. The transformation had begun, and gradually she would become one with the woods and the water. If no one found her, nature would run its usual course until she became part of it.

So far no one knew she was gone.