We Know You Remember (8)

“Do you think it was someone he knew?” August continued, backing over to the window and looking out onto the driveway, where the American car was still parked. “Someone who could just walk straight in. It doesn’t look like anyone broke in, but they might have known where he kept the key.”

“If it happened on Monday,” said Eira, “then he’d been out to get the paper. He might’ve left the front door unlocked after he came back in. And the kind of lock on the bathroom door is easy enough to turn with a knife or a screwdriver—assuming he even locked it. Why would he bother if he lived alone?”

“Shit.”

August raced out. Eira caught up with him by the porch. Olof Hagstr?m was no longer sitting in the car. The driver’s side door was wide open.

“I couldn’t see him through the window,” her colleague panted. “Just that the car was empty. He can’t have made it very far, not in the shape he’s in.”

Hadn’t they told the neighbors to go home? Kjell Strinnevik certainly hadn’t listened, in any case, which was fortunate for them. He was standing slightly farther up the road, pointing into the woods. Towards the river.

“Where did he go?”

“Said he was going to take a leak.”

They each rounded one side of the house, but there was no sign of Olof Hagstr?m. The rocks sloped sharply downwards, the forest dense and pale, young trees that had grown since a clearing some twenty or so years earlier, raspberries and fireweed. Eira called for backup as they took the first path down the slope, running as hard as they could through the piles of rocks and brush.

“My mistake,” said Eira. “I didn’t have him down as a flight risk.”

“Why did he wait for us, if he is?”

Eira swore as the branches of a fallen tree tore at her shins. “Welcome to reality,” she said. “Not everything makes sense here.”

They spotted the dog first, through the birches, standing a few meters into the water. Then the man. He was sitting on a log by the edge of the river, completely motionless. Her colleague waded through the meter-high stinging nettles ahead of her. A few gulls lifted off into the air, screeching.

“We need to ask you to come with us,” said August Engelhardt.

Olof Hagstr?m peered blankly across the river. A gust of wind crept over the surface of the water, shattering the mirrored sky.

“The boat used to be pulled up here,” he said. “But I guess it’s gone now.”





Chapter 3





“No, Mum, Midsummer’s Eve was yesterday,” Eira explained for the third time as she opened the jars of herring. “I told you we’d celebrate today instead.”

“Yes, yes, it doesn’t make any difference.”

Eira tore back the plastic from the salmon fillets and set the table, cut the chives. She had managed to get her mother to sit down and scrub the potatoes. Participation. Familiarity. The kind of thing it was important to cling to.

“Are the other potatoes really not ready yet?” Kerstin Sj?din muttered. “I don’t know how these will be enough for everyone.”

“It’s just the two of us today,” said Eira. Through the window, she saw the weeds in the potato patch, the drooping tops. She didn’t tell her mother that the potatoes she was cleaning were from the supermarket.

“But what about Magnus? And the boys?”

Wrapping her up in cotton wool and bending the truth was hardly the right way to deal with worsening dementia, was it?

“I invited him,” said Eira. “But he’s not coming. Magnus isn’t in great shape at the moment.”

The first part was a lie. She hadn’t called her brother. The rest was true, however. She had spotted him in the main square in Kramfors a few weeks earlier.

“So he doesn’t have the kids this weekend?” Kerstin stopped her stubborn scrubbing and her eyes became hazy, heavy. Her hands limp in the muddy water.

“Not this weekend,” said Eira.

Their shadows fell over the table set for two. The bouquet of Midsummer flowers and buttercups looked so childish. I’m here, Eira wanted to say, though she knew it wouldn’t help.

“Do you remember Lina Stavred?” she asked instead, as the potatoes boiled and they nibbled on strawberries. She opened a couple of beers—lager for her mother, an IPA for herself, from the new microbrewery in N?ssom. You had to do whatever you could to support anyone brave enough to start a business in the area. “You know, the girl who went missing?”

“No, I don’t know . . .”

“Come on, Mum, you remember. The summer of 1996, she was only sixteen. It happened up in Marieberg, on the path along the river there, by the woodyard belonging to the sawmill, near the old workers’ bathing hut.”

She was careful to name specific locations. The significant and the concrete, things her mother had once known and could cling to. Her maternal grandfather had worked at the sawmill in the sixties, before it closed down; her mother’s first childhood home was nearby. It struck Eira that almost every part of the area could be described as old, former. Memories of what used to be.

“You had a friend over there, Unni. She rented a flat in one of the old workers’ barracks, Paradise they called it. I remember she came here—she lived alone, so she stayed with us while all that stuff was happening.”