Read The Murder of Harriet Krohn for Free Online Page B

It’s pumping away at a terrific rate and he feels the heat rising to his head. He tries to breathe freely. Lays his head back, opens his mouth wide. Air down into my lungs, he thinks, air around my entire body. If he can only get out of Hamsund, if he can just get home, everything will be fine. My own home, he thinks despairingly. My own chair, my bed. The cool pillow against my face. The things that are mine, just as before. Can he do it? Can he manage to live with this? How could she carry on like that. She could have let him work away in peace and saved her own skin, couldn’t she? Deep down he knows that this is where he was headed. He’s known it all the time. It’s lain there like a blot on his consciousness.
    He leans back against the headrest and reflects. He’s never quite fit the pattern. And when he’s looked at other people, he’s always felt that they’ve been attached to the world in a totally different way. He’s always had the feeling that he’s ambivalent, remote. What’s just occurred couldn’t have been avoided. This acknowledgment is so dismal that he feels like the victim of something he doesn’t understand. Something to do with fate. That the crime has lain in wait for him, trapped him like some pawn in a game. Plotted by God or the devil, he doesn’t know which. He shivers. He gets out his tobacco and rolls a cigarette, lights up, and inhales deeply. Then he puts the Honda in gear and drives off.
    She didn’t survive that, he thinks. Such a frail person, fragile and brittle as plaster. Soon he’s passing the railway station. Thoughts whirl around his head, but his pulse is beginning to slow because he can’t see anyone. There’s a cozy glow coming from the windows of Hamsund. The snow is falling soft and still. People are busy with other things and he’s getting away. All at once, he’s aware of a shadow to his right, but he continues plowing on, driving carefully on the slippery surface. It’s his right of way. The shape is suddenly frighteningly close. In the next moment, there is a jolt, and he hears the noise of metal crunching against metal. The bang is loud in the silence. He is thrown against the steering wheel and feels a blow to his chest. Then everything goes quiet and the silence is unreal. Confused, he peers through the windshield and finds himself looking directly at another car. He is filled with cold terror. He remembers the revolver lying on the floor and what he’s just done, remembers it as if for the first time. Suddenly he’s wide awake. He’s fallen from the track he was moving along and into a tangled undergrowth of panic and fear. A young man is gazing at him from the other car, a pale face with frightened eyes and large, prominent ears. Charlo loses control. Without thinking, he gets out into the slush, crosses to the small white car, and tears open the door. His body is shaking ominously and he flies off the handle, exploding like a firecracker. Everything that’s pent up inside him spills out in a furious torrent. The boy seeks shelter from this storm, this vast stream of words. He holds on tight to his steering wheel and waits for things to settle down. But they don’t settle down because all the floodgates inside Charlo have opened, and his fury is pouring out.
    “I’ve got a claim form,” the boy mumbles.
    His arm moves toward the glove compartment, his thin hand trembling. Charlo panics at the thought of a claim form. Documents to fill out, his signature at the bottom. He will be placing himself in Hamsund on the night in question, November 7. He knows he can’t do that. He’s still leaning heavily on the doorframe and yelling into the car. His expletives become more personal; they erupt from him like white-hot lava. He stops to draw breath. He thought he was empty, but more emerges. It’s like vomit; he feels it in the pit of his stomach. Then his voice cracks and he begins to sob. He weeps over what he’s left behind him on the floor. He