The Lost Village(74)

Emmy will like it. She has always liked old things, flowery vintage pieces that contrast with her ripped jeans and ugly T-shirts.

Emmy would have liked it.

She will never like anything again.

What would Emmy have done?

She would have pulled herself together; she would have taken charge.

The floor is steady underfoot as we leave the room. Robert hasn’t come back yet, and she’s still lying there, small and still.

Reality wavers here, but I force my feet to keep moving.

Max and I stand on either side of her, like in some sort of ritual. I unfold the sheet to its full length, while Max straightens out her legs and arms.

I carefully take the golden heart around her neck and lift the hem of her T-shirt to slip it back underneath, where it should be, but Max stops me.

“Wait,” he says.

“What?”

My voice is rusty. Unfamiliar, unused.

Max leans in over her and pushes my hand away from her neck. I flinch at his touch, pull back as though burned, but he doesn’t seem to notice.

His eyes are fixed on the base of Emmy’s neck. On the dark marks on her pale skin.

It’s beautiful, somehow: the suggestion of a bird, ghostly dark tracks winging out and around her neck.

I want to ask what is that, but the words don’t come because they don’t need to. Because I already know the answer.

They’re hand impressions.

Max straightens his back a little. Then he reaches out and puts his hands over her eyes. He opens them again, and that more than anything feels wrong, somehow, and I want to turn away because those still, staring eyes are worse than her stiffening limbs and cold skin, but Max looks for the both of us, he leans in and stares.

“They’re bloodshot,” he says, his voice strange. “I’ve read that the whites go bloodshot if a person’s been…” He swallows the last word.

Strangled.

No broken ribs that pierced soft, vulnerable tissue. No unlucky fall.

No accident.

The marks of someone’s fingers, like a necklace tightened around her neck.

Rage and horror combined have a sour, stale taste, I learn.

I look for Max’s eyes, but he isn’t looking at me. Suddenly tense, he scrambles to his feet and looks at the doors to his right. The realization of what he’s thinking drops into my lap just as I hear him shout: “Robert!”

Someone managed to do that in the ten minutes that elapsed between Emmy answering our last question and me climbing through the second-floor window. Someone was either following us or waiting for us.

Someone who might still be here in the school.

Here upstairs.

And Robert is alone in the classroom.





THEN



The afternoon heat has given way to a cooler evening air. They haven’t been able to open the windows in Ingrid’s office for fear of the baby’s cries being heard, so some trace of the day’s oppressive heat remains. Between that and the stench, the air in the room feels thick as syrup.

Elsa leans against the basin and, for the first time, allows herself to feel her exhaustion. Her knees are almost shaking, her hands are sore and tender, and tears she doesn’t remember crying have left salty trails down her cheeks.

“Here,” says Ingrid. Her voice sounds just as flat as Elsa feels, and when she walks over to the basin to fill a chipped pewter mug with water, Elsa notices that her skin is sallow and droops from her face. Her normally so neatly curled hair is straggly and damp with sweat, and all she is wearing is a vest and slip.

It’s only when Elsa looks down at herself that she notices that she has taken off her cardigan and shoes, too. It must have happened at some point in the last few hours. Bruises have started to blossom down her left arm. During the worst of the labor pains Birgitta had started to flail and struggle; she must have hit Elsa when she tried to hold her to calm her down.

Elsa drinks in large gulps. The water tastes flat and metallic.

The twilight that has started to sneak in through the windows colors everything a mild blue. Birgitta is still curled up on her side on the bed. Her face is turned away, and her hair is a bird’s nest of dirt and sweat. She isn’t making any noise now; perhaps she has fallen asleep.

Dagny is standing over by one of the windows. The light behind her throws her silhouette into sharp relief. You can barely see the baby in her arms.

She’s beautiful; a perfectly formed little girl with thick, dark hair, albeit slightly smaller than what Elsa remembers her own as being. She has the cloudy blue eyes and strangely shaped head of a newborn, and she had showed off a good set of lungs when Ingrid had clapped her on the behind.

Elsa had held her while Ingrid cut the umbilical cord. Neither of them are doctors, but in the past Ingrid has helped Silvertj?rn girls in childbirth, if the doctor wouldn’t make it in time. Elsa has never been present at any other deliveries than her own, and had she imagined being at one, she would have thought it would be Margareta’s, or even Aina’s, one day.

A bustling sound swells outside the window. At first it’s so quiet that it scarce seems real, but then, slowly but steadily, it grows. Words begin to emerge from the mass, from the hymn rising over the village. It breaks the flat spell that has settled over all of them.

Dagny looks up from the baby. The girl has started to whimper slightly at the sound of the congregation’s evensong. Perhaps, tiny as she is, even she understands the danger.