We Know You Remember (91)

“So what was Lina really doing that evening?”

“She was going to leave,” said Elvis. “Clear off for good with that guy. I thought that was what she’d done, so I didn’t say anything, and then all that stuff about Olof came out, about what really happened . . .”

“Who was he?”

“She never told me his name.”

“Did Magnus know?”

“If I know Lina, she probably threw it right in his face. She told me that the sex was amazing, that the guys round here had no idea . . . And poor little me, the ‘retard,’ who had no idea about sex . . . Well, I was just thinking about Magnus, about how upset he’d be. But she was wrong, by the way. He was great in bed. Oops, sorry, you probably didn’t want to know that.”

“So he wasn’t from round here?” said Eira.

Elvis shook her head.

“How did they meet?”

“She was hitchhiking.”

“He had a car?”

“Yeah, I guess he must have, because they’d fucked in it—assuming that was true. Lina was always saying stuff like that to tease me, because I didn’t have a boyfriend, and then she’d make me swear not to tell anyone. I was meant to just, like, coo over her secrets and feel jealous. She even told me he was wanted, to make it even more exciting, like he was in some American film or something. It was so typical of her, to make up something like that to make me feel stupid and inexperienced.”

Eira wondered whether she would put two and two together once the picture of Kenneth Isaksson was made public. The next day or the day after, it wouldn’t be long.

She pulled out her phone and opened the payment app, entered the ID number from the poster on the wall.

“I forgot to ask how much it would be,” she said.





Chapter 51





There they were, chatting about the weather. Eating individual portions of oven-baked salmon. Eira thought her mother seemed slightly skeptical, poking at her food. Salmon was supposed to come fresh from the river, caught by someone you knew, not wrapped in plastic from a farm in Norway, shipped via the local grocery store to your kitchen table.

“What did you say his name was?” Kerstin had stopped chewing.

“Lars-?ke, he lived down by the old customs house. Don’t you remember him, Mum? I got the impression the two of you were pretty close.”

Her gaze was distant, elsewhere, lingering for slightly too long.

“I really should scrape the paint off these windows this year.”

Eira couldn’t work out what her mother had forgotten and what she was running away from, or whether they were sometimes the same thing.

She walked down to the river after dinner, past the blue house where the man called Lars-?ke supposedly once lived. It was empty, though it didn’t seem to have been abandoned. Perhaps they had children who couldn’t agree on the inheritance. There were countless reasons why a house might be left vacant: families falling apart, people dying, memories no one wanted to touch.

Eira followed the shore, thinking back to the summer when they threw their dolls into the water there, wanting to see them float—or sink. The river grew darker and the ocean that took over to the east was infinite, though it was really just an inland sea. She wasn’t used to how quiet the area had become. From time to time she could still hear the traffic roaring through the community like it had when she was younger, before the new bridge was built along the coast and the E4 was redrawn. Eight minutes had been shaved off the journey between north and south, and Lunde had ended up on a back road and withered away.

With the river so low, there were small pools of water dotted along the bank. They were all stagnant and cloudy, dragonflies dancing over the surface. Eira had caught a few once, while they were still nymphs. Three of them, in glass jars on her windowsill, with air holes poked in the lids. She had wanted to watch them develop, to see their wings take on color, emerald green and sky blue.

But when she woke the next morning the jars were gone. She found them in the grass outside. Magnus had let her nymphs go.

Never trap a living thing. If I catch you doing it again, I’ll give you a smack.

Eira dialed his number again. Still no answer.

She saw one of the dragonflies dart and catch an insect midair. Back when she was younger, she had only ever found them beautiful. Enchanting. She hadn’t realized they were predators.

Don’t you get that they can die?

A moment later, her phone started ringing.

Magnus’s number, but a woman’s voice. “He’s not here. I don’t know where he is.”

Marina Arnesdotter, the woman he was staying with. It was hard to hear what she was saying; she sounded like she was crying.

“I saw that you’d called,” she said. “I’ve been trying to reach Magnus all day but I’ve just realized his phone is here. Why would he leave without his phone?”

“What happened?”

Eira sat down on a rock by one of the pools. The blackflies quickly became unbearable, the swarm following her when she got back to her feet.

Magnus had started drinking a few days earlier, got incredibly drunk. They had argued. About the alcohol at first—Marina knew he had a problem, he had never tried to hide that from her, but he had promised to stop—and then about everything else: Magnus felt like she didn’t want him there anymore, that he wasn’t good enough for her, and then he had started accusing her of the most insane things.