Read Invisible Murder for Free Online Page A

across the dusty square in front of the school and the local council office and continued a short distance down the village street before they stopped.
    “That’s your house,” Tibor said. “What are they doing there? Your stepfather isn’t back, is he?”
    “No,” Sándor whispered. For the first time he felt a ripple in his stomach that wasn’t curiosity or anticipation. His stepfather, Elvis, was in the district jail in Szeged and wouldn’t be home for at least another six months. That couldn’t be why the police cars were here. Unless he had escaped?
    “Maybe we ought to stay put?” Tibor suggested.
    Sándor shook his head. “It’s only me now,” he said. “When my stepdad is away, there’s only me to look after Mama and the girls.”
    “And your little brother.”
    “Yeah, him, too.” Sándor’s feelings for his one-year-old baby brotherweren’t exclusively tender. It had been less obvious with the girls, but his stepfather had been unable to able to hide his excitement at finally having a “real” son. At his baptism they had let the stubby-fingered baby touch one instrument after the other, carefully watching for signs of excitement and familiarity, and when Grandpa Viktor had finally proclaimed that “the boy would be a great violinist like his father,” his stepfather had been bursting with pride.
    No one had made that kind of fuss over Sándor.
    But now his stepfather was gone, and four white vans were parked outside the house. Sándor could see Grandma Éva telling off two of the men who had got out of the cars. She had positioned herself in the doorway and was trying to fill it completely even though she wasn’t quite five feet tall, and the two men towered over her like giants.
    Then more men climbed out of the cars, and Sándor couldn’t see his grandmother anymore. They rolled a gurney out of the back of the ambulance and into the house. Sándor accelerated, sprinting the last few yards down the street. By now there were so many people, the men from the cars and villagers too, that he had to push and squeeze his way through.
    His mother was lying on the gurney. The gurney was being rolled back to the ambulance.
    For a second, Sándor stood stock still, his heart hammering against his ribs. “Mama,” he said.
    Even though he didn’t say it very loudly, she heard him. In spite of the noise and the angry voices, in spite of the engine noise from the vans, whose motors hadn’t been turned off even though they were parked.
    “Sándorka,” she said. “My treasure. Come here.”
    He ducked under the arm of a man in a gray EMT uniform and made it all the way over to the ambulance and the scratched aluminum gurney. He thought his mother looked the way she usually did. Yes, she had been sick, but why was it suddenly so bad that she had to go to the hospital?
    When his other grandmother, Grandma Vanda, whom his oldest sister had been named after … when she had gone to the hospital, she hadn’t come back. She died.
    Sándor couldn’t say a word. He couldn’t even make himself ask. He just walked over to her so she could grab hold of his hand.
    “Watch out,” the ambulance attendant said. “We’re lifting the gurney now. Don’t get your fingers pinched.”
    His mother had to let go of him again.
    “It won’t be for very long,” she said. “Then I’ll be home again. You’ll take care of the girls and Tamás until I get back, right? Along with Grandma Éva.”
    Then the doors closed, and the ambulance started driving away. The other cars stayed. And it quickly became apparent that the
gadje
hadn’t come only for his mother.
    I T WAS SO wrong to see Tamás standing here, outside Sándor’s room, in the middle of a life that had nothing to do with him. Grown up, or almost—he still had a gangly teenager’s body, and there was a softness to his features that didn’t seem as tough-guy as the rest of him. Couldn’t he at least get his hair cut? Did he have to look