Читать книгу Shadows of Sören - Nicola Stöhr - Страница 23

Clarice was just about to grab her car keys and head for the door when the phone rang.

Who the hell could that be? Basically she only got calls from work or from people trying to sell her something. She picked up. It was Tilda, that was unusual. And there was something wrong with her voice. She sounded like someone who had a bad cold. And then Clarice realized she was crying. “Tilda, what happened? What´s wrong, is it Oscar?”

Oh, please don´t let it be Oscar, Clarice prayed silently.

“No, Clarice, it´s my brother”, Tilda sobbed, “He´s dead, he died in his sleep. I visited my mother this morning and found her by the side of his bed holding him and she wouldn´t let him go. I called the police, I didn´t know what else to do.”

Clarice was sincerely shocked. “Oh God, Tilda, how awful. I´m so sorry.”

“Clarice, can you pick Oscar up from the dagis today? It’s just that I can´t leave my mother alone here, but I don´t want to bring Oscar here either, because everything is such chaos right now. I´m sorry, but I have no one else to ask.”

”Tilda, don´t worry about a thing. I´ll cancel my afternoon lectures and look after him all day if you like, until you come home. You just take care of your mother.”

“Thank you Clarice, that´s very good of you.”

Clarice immediately phoned the university and cancelled her lectures for the day. When the time came she picked Oscar up from his dagis and tried to answer his curious questions about the whereabouts of his mother as truthfully as she could. She never had a problem keeping him entertained. In fact she enjoyed playing with him almost as much as he did. “Wow, Clarice, you´re really good at memory, Mama isn´t so good, I always beat her,” Oscar said admiringly.

Memory was actually one of the games Clarice least like to play, because it was so hard for her not to win all the time. She had a photographic memory and could of course memorize the position of all the cards instantly. But that would be really boring and frustrating for Oscar, so half the time she had to act like she couldn´t remember where the cards were and pretend to turn over the wrong cards. And she had to be convincing, because children noticed when you were trying to lose on purpose. But apparently she was doing a great job of it.

They had played three rounds already, apart from painting pictures together, building a flashlight and talking a walk to the ostrich enclosure.

Even Clarice was slowly running out of ideas. “Oscar, how about we go and see Nanna in the big house? Maybe she´s baked something nice today, like a chocolate cake or something?”, she suggested.

“Oh, yes, lovely. I love chocolate cake.”

“Well, I don´t know if she baked chocolate cake but she usually bakes something.”

So they had made their way over to the big house and Nanna had been very pleased to see them. She and Oscar had immediately set about baking a tray of muffins.