Death with the Taste of Milk

In the village of Kuropatkino, my friend Svetka is killed by her own husband—and he does it in an unusually strange way: he drowns her in a bucket of milk. The evidence and circumstances seem to point unambiguously to him. But why would Kostik, a quiet and seemingly harmless man, take the life of the wife he loved so much?

The village simpleton, Dunyka, keeps repeating the same mysterious phrase over and over. Where did she get it, and is it connected to the murder? And what does the warning from the local witch, Grandmother Klopikha, mean: “There’s one blood, but there are two faces?”

It’s up to me—Aglaia Zhuravlyova—to make sense of these oddities.