The Lost Village(51)

“But surely that happens mainly in winter?” Elsa can’t help but ask. “Not spring?”

“Eh,” Dagny says with a dismissive wave of the hand. “With weather like this I suppose it makes no difference.”

Elsa is itching to tell Dagny why she’s wrong, but she doesn’t have it in her to explain bears’ responses to the seasons to Dagny today.

By now they are approaching Dagny’s house, and she slows down. Elsa feels compelled to do the same.

“Now, there was something I wanted to talk to you about, Elsa,” Dagny says, looking slightly discomfited. “You see, there’s been rather a din coming from Birgitta’s hut of late.”

Elsa’s heart starts to pound.

“A din?”

“Late in the evenings and at night—we can hear it all the way from our house,” says Dagny. She purses her lips, turning them into a plum-colored line across her thin face.

“Well, you know I’m not one of those who—I’m not one to run around spreading nonsense about Birgitta,” she says. “And I daresay some of the things people in the parish are saying about her are outrageous. She’s sick. It’s not her fault she’s the way she is.”

Dagny looks so pious as she says this, so sanctimonious that Elsa almost wants to give her a piece of her mind, but she forces herself to bite her tongue.

“But please, do try to make her understand that she must keep the noise down,” says Dagny. Then she lowers her voice and looks around.

“The way people are talking…” She shakes her head. “I think it would be good for her to be careful,” she says, casting a long, anxious look in the direction of Birgitta’s hut.





NOW



Emmy doesn’t stop running until we’re almost three blocks away. She takes a right behind some buildings, and I follow her. All I can hear are the hard slap of soles against the cobblestones, the ringing in my ears, the swish of Emmy’s jeans, and her hair flicking with every step.

She stops a little further down the side street, then bends double and starts hacking and whooping. The smoke has embedded itself like a film across my tongue and down my throat, but the coughs don’t want to come. My lungs feel constricted, pressed to shriveled kernels in my chest.

I hear Max’s and Robert’s footsteps behind me and stop. I bend double and allow myself to close my eyes for a second. To make the world stop. Ground myself in my body. Everything feels so far away. Numbed.

A strange tingle runs up through my rib cage. In detached curiosity I let it rise in my throat, until it comes out as a shrill giggle. I open my eyes and put my hand to my mouth to hold it inside, push it back down. Kill it.

“What happened?” Max asks.

Something about his flat, reasoned tone helps me to get my insane giggle under control, and I drop my hand again. I see Emmy cough one last time, then spit on the ground before straightening up.

What happened?” I hear someone ask. In the distance I realize it’s me.

“How could it just explode? Vans don’t just explode!”

I want somebody to do something. To take me by the shoulders, shake me, slap me. Force me to get a grip.

But none of them move. We just stand there, speechless and breathless, staring at each other.

“The lighter fluid,” Emmy says quietly.

I look up to see her staring at the wisps of smoke still coiling their way up over the rooftops.

“What?”

“The lighter fluid,” she says again. “There were containers of lighter fluid in there, for the campfire. And we had an extra can of gas for the vans. It was on the list.”

Oh, right.

“Someone must have set fire to them. Somehow. It’s the only explanation.”

We all look at each other, one of those rare moments when three or four people are hit by the same thought at exactly the same time. I look at Robert, and then Max, who says: “Emmy was with me,” just as Robert says:

“I was with Alice.”

“It wasn’t one of us,” Emmy says. “It can’t have been one of us four.”

There’s an added weight to the final word.

“Tone.”

It’s Max who says it.

I stare at him, fear and surprise forming a sickening whirlpool in my belly.

“Max…” I start.

“Come on, Alice. They have a right to know.”

“Know what?” Emmy asks sharply.

Max gives me a lingering look. His lips are narrowed, his asymmetrical features tense. When he turns to Emmy, I already know what he’s going to say.

“Tone’s mom is the baby they found in the school,” he says. “That’s how she and Alice first met. Alice found her two years ago while she was doing research for the film.”

“Is that true?” Emmy asks, her voice subdued but sharp.

“You didn’t need to know,” I say. “Tone didn’t want to say anything, and I respected that. It was up to her to tell you, not me.”

“But that wasn’t the only thing you didn’t tell us, Alice,” Max says.

The smell of fire, soot, and burning steel still hangs in the air; a sharp, piercing odor that makes my eyes water. We’ve carried it with us, haven’t made it far enough to lose it. It clings to our clothes and makes my nose itch.