The Lost Village(13)
“Does she know?” Tone asks out of the blue, all trace of laughter gone from her voice.
“Who? Emmy?” I ask.
She doesn’t reply.
“I haven’t told her anything,” I say, as the silence starts to expand. “About anything. All she knows is what’s in the information pack.”
“Didn’t sound like it,” says Tone. “When she was talking about DNA-testing the baby, trying to find her…” She trails off, her voice taut as a violin string.
“I haven’t told her anything,” I repeat. “You asked me not to say anything, so I haven’t.” When she doesn’t reply, I go on: “Max knows, but he did from the start. And he’s promised not to say anything.”
“How much?” Tone asks, an unexpected edge to her voice.
“What do you mean? He knows your mom’s the Silvertj?rn baby—I told him I’d found you before we even met. He asked if you or your mom would like to be involved, and I said I didn’t know but that I didn’t think so.”
“Mom would never do it,” says Tone, as she has done so many times.
“I know,” I say. “I never asked.”
I’ve thought about it, of course. Wanted to. But I never have asked. Tone’s made it clear that her mom has no interest in raking up that part of her past. She doesn’t want to be the Silvertj?rn baby, the mystery’s sole survivor, the newborn found crying in the abandoned schoolhouse less than thirty yards from where we’re lying right now.
It was Tone’s mother I found first. What I told the others wasn’t technically a lie: all the information on what happened to the Silvertj?rn baby really is classified, impossible to access. I’m not even sure if the documents still exist, and if they do, they’re probably buried deep in some archive.
But Grandma’s letters aren’t.
I didn’t put all of Grandma’s letters in the packs I gave to the others. I’ve kept a few to myself. Among them her correspondence with Albin Jansson.
Jansson was one of the policemen investigating Birgitta Lidman’s murder—and, by extension, the Silvertj?rn case. He and Grandma must have met at some point during the investigation, and for a while I wondered if there might have been something more between them—a secret affair, perhaps—but that’s probably wishful thinking on my part. I found six of his letters among her old papers, all of which are professional and to the point. It seems as though Jansson mostly just felt sorry for Grandma and wanted to keep her informed of their progress on the investigation.
And that happened to include the baby.
Grandma must have asked after her, or else Jansson just assumed she would want to know what happened to her, because he mentions her a lot in his letters: that she seemed hale and hearty, and that several hundred families across the country had offered to take her in, even if his personal opinion was that most of them were out after fame. In his fifth letter, he writes that they had found a family who had agreed to keep her identity a secret and “… raise her as one of their own.”
He goes on to give the family’s name: “… a family by the name of Grimelund…”
And the name they had given the child:
“You will be pleased to learn that they have named the girl Hélène.”
Had their surname been Andersson I might never have found Tone. But Hélène Grimelund was unusual enough for me to track down.
It took me sending an unseemly number of emails to Hélène to realize that she was never going to reply. By that point I was close to giving up. My grief over Grandma had started to catch up with me, and everything felt like a dead end. I was having to do temp work to keep myself afloat after my speculative résumés hadn’t had any takers, and I could hardly face social media anymore. It seemed as though all of my old classmates were racing up the career ladder two steps at a time, winning prizes for their short films and getting jobs in Paris or London, while there I was sitting my days out behind a reception desk, my fantasy project hardly more than a fever dream.
But then, on yet another late night spent scrolling hopelessly through Facebook, I noticed a photo on Hélène’s timeline. It was right down near the bottom of her page, one that she hadn’t posted—someone else had tagged her in it. It showed a gray-haired woman with a severe ponytail and a stiff, vacant smile, her arm around a girl in her late teens.
“Hélène and her beautiful daughter brighten up my birthday dinner! <3” read the caption.
The girl was tagged as Tone Grimelund.
Two years on, I still haven’t met Tone’s mother. I don’t know how much Tone has told her about this project, and I haven’t asked, either. From what little Tone has said and what I’ve read into Hélène’s radio silence, my guess is she isn’t too keen on the idea of digging up the Silvertj?rn story.
My friendship with Tone is one of my life’s more unusual relationships. For the longest time Tone didn’t want anything to do with the project, either, beyond telling me what little she knew. But even from that very first day, when we made awkward small talk over cheap coffee, I could detect a reluctant curiosity there.
Would she have let herself act on it if it hadn’t been for what happened?
That I don’t know.