Elsbeth had no interest in leaves of gold. She pictured the squinty-eyed shrub woman coming out from between the fir trees, grabbing Elsbeth with twisted fingers. She pictured the shrub woman pushing Elsbeth’s hand into her matted hair so she could find the lice—but how on earth could the shrub woman expect her to see anything in the dark? Then Elsbeth pictured how, and above all, where, the shrub woman would want to be scratched, and then she thought about mind-blowing sex with Renata and how a skillet to the head and a shrub woman could both blow one’s mind as well, which doesn’t necessarily reflect on the quality of their relationship, if you ask me, and she remembered that she had decided to save the optician and that saving the optician meant saving Palm.

Elsbeth did not have appropriate footwear. She was wearing fake leather pumps with the toes split open and the heels worn down. Elsbeth never wore rubber boots because they weren’t flattering, and whenever she went out, even if just to Selma’s or the general store, Elsbeth tried to look chic because, she always said, you never know who you’ll meet. The dampness of the fallen leaves crept up over the edges of her pumps and into her black nylons, making them even blacker.

The forest suddenly opened up. In our region, there are no transitions. There’s no gradually clearing forest, no slightly lower trees as intermediaries between forest and meadow. In the middle of the abrupt meadow, Palm’s hunting blind rose like an unfinished monument, like the crow’s nest on a ghost ship. As she approached the blind, Elsbeth wondered if anyone had ever been here so late at night, anyone who was not a fox, a deer, or a wild boar, anyone the shrub woman could have asked to scratch and delouse her. The meadow was very still. Elsbeth longed for the cracking and creaking of the forest, because it’s scary being the only one making noise. Her steps and her breathing were suddenly as loud as in a Tatort episode just before the victim is overcome and mangled with such barbarity that even the taciturn pathologist blanches and the police commissioners who had come running have to vomit.

Elsbeth stepped up to the stand’s rear posts. On both posts, she felt for the spot the optician had sawed. The posts were almost completely severed. Severed, Elsbeth thought, and the throat of the young girl in the last episode flashed before her eyes. She unscrewed the tube of superglue and squeezed the contents first in one crack, then in the other. Don’t think of the shrub woman, she thought, don’t think of severed things. Most of all she was afraid of her own breathing, which was much too rapid and improbably loud.