Authors: Hakan Ostlundh
“How did you react to the fact that he was back here?” said Fredrik. “Besides being surprised.”
“Isn’t that enough?” she answered in a joking tone.
“If I were to put it a little more clearly,” said Fredrik, “how did you feel about running into him here in Fårösund?”
Stina’s eyes wandered off; she thought before she answered.
“Of course it felt a little strange after not having seen him for years, but … Well, I don’t know what I should say. It wasn’t really a big problem. I was more curious about what made him change his mind.”
“Did you stop your car outside the Fårösund school on Monday morning?”
Stina looked in amazement at Fredrik. She waited to answer.
“Yes…”
“What were you doing there?”
“Is she the one who said that? Malin?”
Fredrik sat quietly, waiting for an answer to his question.
Stina sighed.
“I caught sight of the car when I was on my way to work. Their red Mercedes SUV. They’re the only ones who have a car like that here, so … It was far away on Strandvägen. I suddenly had the desire to talk with Henrik, I thought it was him who…”
She stroked her hand across her cheek again, slowly and meditatively, stopped with the nail of her middle finger on a flake of skin.
“When I turned up from Strandvägen the car was parked outside the day care. I stopped a short way from there and got out and waited.”
“Why didn’t you stop next to Henrik’s car if you wanted to talk with him?” said Fredrik.
“I don’t really know.”
“What happened then?”
“Yes, then she came out. For some idiotic reason it’s like I took it for granted that it was Henrik in the car. I was at a total loss. I just stood there staring for a long time before I thought of getting in the car again. I assume it seemed strange. Did she say that? That I’m strange in some way?”
Fredrik ignored the question.
“What was it you wanted to talk about with Henrik when you decided to follow the car?”
“I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember? That sounds strange, I think. If you took the trouble to follow him in order to talk with him, there must have been something you wanted to say, right?”
Stina Hansson squirmed worriedly in the chair and looked out through the window.
“I don’t remember,” she repeated.
Malin hung up the phone. Her sister had made up her mind at once when Malin told her what had happened. She would come down and stay at least until Henrik was back from his trip.
Malin looked out toward the big ancient sundial that was squeezed between the treetops and a dramatic cloud formation to the west. The apples shone green and red in the warm glow and the pears had started to turn yellow. It was time to harvest. It surprised her that they could grow at all there in the stony ground.
Far away Kalbjerga’s metal roofs glistened above the pines. The family on the farm and Ann-Katrin and Bengt were their only neighbors. Then nothing. Just forest and meager meadows with bleating sheep. When the sun went down they were alone in the dark.
That thought was easier to bear since Maria said that she would come.
Everything that was whirling around in her head quieted down enough that she could think. She and Maria had always been close. From the very start it was mostly Malin who pitched in and took care of her little sister. But with every year that passed the three years between them meant less and less. Not even when Malin was fifteen or sixteen and should have thought it was awkward to have a little sister hanging at her heels did she push her away. That probably made Maria a little precocious, but also secure and self-confident. Confidence that Malin could lean against when she needed it.
Maria was the only one who had been on Malin’s side when she quit medical studies to open a café instead. Stubbornly, she had wrangled with Mother and their big brother, Staffan, who thought she was an idiot. Say no to becoming a doctor. How stupid can you be? She had probably never completely recovered from those quarrels.
Superficial
and
bourgeois,
Maria’s words echoed in the dining room during the family’s Sunday dinners.
Mother and Staffan had become a little more conciliatory when they saw that things were going well for her, anyway. The third year with Kakan she had received an award from the
Entertainment Guide
.
Maria would arrive on the eleven o’clock boat tomorrow. She would be on Fårö before four o’clock. Malin counted the minutes. It would feel so nice to have someone there who understood her one hundred percent and who made her feel safe.
She thought about Stina Hansson. As if it was not already bad enough as it was, perhaps this woman who carried off Ellen in her car had some sort of connection to Henrik. Had even had a relationship with him. Fifteen years ago, to be sure, but only three years before he met her. Malin had a hard time believing it was true. That he could have slept with that woman. Whispered that he loved her. Or maybe he hadn’t done just that. She hoped it wasn’t the case.
When Henrik had told about her it was as if she was suddenly there in their home. Moved in with them. Stina Hansson. Why hadn’t he said that he had seen her? Didn’t you do that? Would she have done that herself? She thought so anyway.
Maria had dismissed all such thoughts. Why should he have said anything about it, an old ex from when he was twenty? Knock it off.
Malin had Googled Stina Hansson. She wanted to see what she looked like. But she was nowhere. No Facebook page, no sports club, nothing. The slender figure with the light long hair, jeans, and military-green jacket who stood staring at her outside the school had etched herself in her memory. But the image was incomplete. The piercing, cold eyes continued to stare at her from a face that was no more than a light speck of skin.
Henrik must have pictures of her. Without a doubt. But Malin was reluctant to ask him. She was not sure she wanted to see Stina Hansson smiling lovingly at the man behind the camera.
Simon swore at a setback in the game and yelled out a comment via Skype to a classmate who was sitting at home with his computer taking part in D-Day, or was it the Ardennes offensive? Fredrik had learned to interpret the sounds that penetrated the closed door to the boy’s room. He had also realized that Simon had quietly learned to set the router so that his own computer was prioritized. With both Web games and Skype with images it ate up all the bandwidth. Fredrik’s and Ninni’s computers just sat and churned when they tried to get on the Internet.
He knocked on the door and heard a mumbled yes between the considerably more emotionally charged shrieks.
Simon gave him a quick look over his shoulder as he came into the room.
“How’s it going?” asked Fredrik.
“Justfinehowaboutyou,” mumbled Simon in a single long, hard-to-decipher string of words.
“It’s fine,” said Fredrik. “How are things at school? Have you gotten started for real?”
“Yes.”
Simon tossed a hand grenade, changed weapons, and advanced, quickly shooting four Germans who were trying to hide behind a burned-out tank.
“You don’t have any homework you have to do?”
“We have a theme week.”
“So you don’t have any homework then?”
“No!” shouted Simon as a red half-circle became visible on the screen.
He had been hit, lost power. When the circle was complete you were dead. Now it turned pale instead.
“You didn’t answer,” said Fredrik.
“No. Or yes, but I’ve done it.”
“So what’s the theme?” Fredrik asked.
“Marie Curie,” said Simon.
“That sounds like a narrow theme.”
“No, but women in history, that is. I’m working on Marie Curie.”
Simon sounded irritated. He hammered on the keyboard. Fredrik could not say for sure whether he was irritated at being disturbed or because the game was going poorly.
“Speak up if you need any help.”
His dreary questions about homework were not much to offer compared with defending Bastogne. But Fredrik had a strong feeling that he would have no chance against the game whatever he had to offer.
“Listen,” he said. “I have to get on the Internet. Can you think about taking a break?”
Simon took a deep breath, but held back the sigh.
“Sure,” he said, sounding surprisingly cooperative. “Just five minutes.”
* * *
It took more like fifteen minutes, but finally Fredrik managed to capture a little space on the family broadband. “Malin’s Table,” which was under Coop’s home page, showed Malin Andersson in the kitchen at home in Kalbjerga. She stood smiling behind a small marble table that was loaded with vegetables and fruit, carefully arranged with a metal can of Greek olive oil. On the kitchen counter in the background a large loaf of bread and a couple bottles of red wine could be seen.
Fredrik had been to the site before, but only in haste to get a sense of what Malin did. Now he studied it more carefully. He clicked through the registry of recipes. Many were simplified variations on familiar dishes, primarily from French and Italian cuisine, mixed in with some Swedish home cooking.
Fredrik clicked through the blog. He was surprised when he saw that the most recent entry had been made only a few hours before. It was about an Asian cucumber preserve, an obvious side dish for every conceivable Asian entrée, but which could also add a surprising zest to moose steak with cream gravy and lingonberry jam. The entry was brief, but it was still hard to understand how she managed to sit and blog about cucumber after what had happened earlier today. He guessed that a professional blogger had an archive of more or less general entries that could be tossed in if you were short on time. Or even when your daughter was kidnapped.
He heard steps behind him. Then Ninni was standing there resting her hands lightly on his shoulders.
“Are you planning dinner for tomorrow?” she asked.
The thought of lying flew momentarily through his head, but then he said what it was.
“No, it’s work. It’s connected to the girl who was taken away.”
He pointed at the screen.
“This is the mother’s blog.”
He leaned his head back and looked up at Ninni.
“I probably shouldn’t be sitting with this now, but…”
Ninni looked skeptical.
“But it’s not impossible that I’ll find something good,” he continued. “There’s quite a bit here.”
“Okay,” she said with a smile, stroking him across the neck. “Just don’t sit there too long.”
He heard her steps disappear out into the living room and tried to ignore the guilty conscience that made itself known like a little weight between his shoulder blades.
Dutifully, he selected desserts in the menu, clicked around at random, but soon settled on pear pie with gorgonzola on the side. Malin Andersson suggested, no, almost required that you should have a glass of the strong Portuguese wine Setúbal with it. That didn’t sound bad. He downloaded the recipe and went back to the blog.
Fredrik started by looking at the entries from last spring, the months before the house was rented out. He hoped to find something provocative, a critical statement about a colleague, a panning of a restaurant, anything at all that might arouse bad blood in a twisted mind. But Malin’s entries were completely uncontroversial and the little criticism that was presented was rather modest and aimed at vague groups such as “meat producers” or “the global food industry.”
The comments he read extra carefully. In the undergrowth a lunatic or two might show up. There were a couple of comments that were a bit sharp, that maintained that Malin ought to embark on a completely different career. Another stated bitterly that of course it was more important to be good-looking than a good cook. But none of them exactly made any warning bells ring.
He went on to the summer and quickly skimmed through the entries of the past few months. Besides those that were about food there were a number of comments about more personal matters. Who had been to dinner at Malin and Henrik’s, where they had partaken of Malin’s magnificent picnic basket, and what restaurants they had been to. Sometimes there were even entries about things they would do. Restaurant visits she looked forward to, that she would look for truffle oil at some place in Visby, and so on. And the whole time Malin’s broad smile in the border at the top of the page.
After Saturday the comments about personal matters ceased. No places, times, or names. Wise, he thought. Until then the blog had been a gold mine for anyone who wanted to keep track of Malin Andersson.
* * *
Ninni was sitting slumped on the couch in front of the evening’s reality show. Fredrik was certain that she was deeply dependent on those programs. Perhaps she was, too. But she was not really interested in how they turned out, who won or was voted out. It was a few minutes of emotional involvement completely without demands on any deeper thoughts. And that was exactly the way she wanted it. She could not rule out that it might work just as well with a CD of birds twittering and a calm voice saying things like “Your whole body feels heavy. You are completely relaxed. You see a beautiful summer meadow. You feel calm and harmonious.”
She wished that Fredrik could do the same. Not necessarily watch reality shows or listen to hypnotic voices, but that he could let go of work when he came home. She understood that it was hard. Someone carried off a little girl and it was his mission to find out who. That was not something that was easy to simply turn off at a certain time of day. But still. He was not alone in that and the girl had come back. And Ninni was certain that no one had asked him to spend the evening snooping through the mother’s blog.
She reached for the remote control and turned off the TV. The program did not seem to have any effect this evening. It did not clear away her thoughts the way it usually did.
Two years since the accident. The first year had been heavy, the second easy. All her apprehensions had come to naught. Step by step their life had returned to normal. Perhaps that was just what weighed her down. That they were back in the everyday.