She was a hero. “East River Rescue Cop,” ran the tabloid headline the next morning, even though she had rescued no one, not even herself. It took a week for the lost body of the doomed fifteen-year-old to turn up.
Brand let the lie ride about her rescue attempt. She didn’t have to tell anyone that she had jumped into the water to save a boy. They all just assumed. Feeling like a fraud, she accepted the departmental commendations and honors. Willie Urrico, one foot out the door into retirement by then, looked at her slantwise. But he made no move to challenge her.
For a while, in the wake of all that, Brand put the bottle down. Quitting her every-night swan dive into a river of vodka took all the strength she had left. After a few years of sobriety she was able to take a sip of alcohol now and then without slipping directly back into binge-drinking. But one result of her death plunge held on. She stopped her occasional visits to swimming pools altogether.
All her previous life she had been a fish. The dip into the East River cured her. Flashbacks to her suicide attempt made her whole body shake. Eventually she found herself shying away from open water of any sort. Even to glance at the isvak cut into the lake outside Hammar’s cottage had made her gut roil.
If Brand had been a different person she might have gone to a behavioral therapist to get over herself. Deep down she knew some sort of shadow lay across her soul. It had been there since childhood. Maybe from birth. Parents always bequeath their miseries to their kids. The pain felt truly embedded, anyway. It was too deep to heal and too deep to reach. Like the bottom of the East River.
If she had summoned the courage to face her demons, perhaps Brand could have made a stab at a half-sane existence. Maybe that evening on the frozen lake would have turned out differently. She would have been able to take the après-sauna plunge with Krister Hammar. Her mental block had stopped her cold.
33.
Brand was on a slow bell the next morning. Remaining under the covers, trying to make herself disappear, she sank further in the pillowy goose-down mattress. Sounds of Hammar moving about came from the kitchen area of the cottage. Dread arose in her at the thought of facing him.
In Sweden during winter, the sun rises late and sets early. The light now was milky and dim. The darkness outside slowly changed without Brand being able to catch it happening. Only a slight modulation in the atmosphere signaled the dawn-less beginning of a new day.
Her walk of shame that morning brought her out of bed and out in the cold to visit the outhouse. She slunk past Hammar, who crouched in front of a blazing hearthfire. He had already spread a low table with food.
“Morning,” she mumbled. She was unclear about her feelings. Ambivalence had settled in during the night. In the harsh light of the morning after, Hammar appeared to be no more than a helpful guide during her Swedish visit. No romantic attachment adhered to the man. Getting naked in a sauna wasn’t sexual. So, okay. She would treat the whole world as if it were a sauna. No matter how hot it got, nothing was sexual. Nothing meant anything.
Seated atop the wooden throne in the outhouse, the urgency of her sojourn in Sweden appeared to be draining away with her morning pee. She felt lost, confused, directionless. Her offhand reaction to the site of the Nordic Light arson fire now struck her as inhuman. The skinhead’s mocking question reasserted itself.
“What are you doing here, bitch?”
Good question, she thought. What am I doing here? Brand’s purpose seemed to evaporate in front of her eyes.
Then she realized she had just ventured sleepy-eyed through the snow to an outdoor toilet and hadn't thought twice about it. Oh, my God, she thought, I'm Swedish. She headed back into the cottage and settled into an oversize, comfy-looking armchair. Hammar ignored the atmosphere of awkwardness. His secret smile served to anger Brand. Say it! she wanted to shout. Say what, she didn’t exactly know.
Hammar sensed her mood and didn’t speak, serving her coffee silently. They were wordless for a long beat.
“What was that last night?” Hammar finally asked.
Brand realized the directness of the question left her wide open. Don’t say it, she told herself. She said it anyway. “It was what it was.”
They both winced at the cliché. Brand hurried to change the subject. “Surely, Hammar, you do have clients? And what, they can all go hang while you take time off to pal around with little old me?”
“You are not old,” he said. He added a simple three-word statement. “You interest me.”
Brand laughed. “So that’s what that was last night, interest.”
“Deep and abiding,” he said.
“Listen, no big changes, okay?” she told him. “We go on like before. I don’t want you mooning over me. None of this white knight business, like you have to protect the lady from harm. Nothing like that, okay?”
“I would never presume,” Hammar said gallantly. “However, you may protect me from harm whenever you wish.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.”
And that was that. Actually, Brand well understood that no “that” was ever really only “that,” especially when it came to the boy and girl thing. Maybe her read of the situation was wrong, and she was making a total fool of herself.
The strange sense that had visited her before struck her once again. She first experienced it venturing into Elin Dalgren’s deserted bedroom on the day after the family reunion. Something didn’t add up. The events that had occurred since she arrived in Sweden had a logic that seemed to hover just out of her reach. Brand thought she might be able to straighten out the links in the chain, but when she went to try, everything remained stubbornly jumbled and disjointed.
Without consulting each other, Hammar and she both began to dress for the weather. The brilliant sun of the previous day only weakly broke through a tough, leathery cover of lowering cloud. A dull cold without wind. They left the cottage together. Brand automatically climbed into the driver’s seat. When she attempted to start the Saab’s cold engine she found she didn’t have the knack.
“It’s just the low temperature,” Hammar commented needlessly. He exchanged places with Brand. Working the car’s choke, he got the engine to turn over. Then he got out, walked around to the passenger’s side, and again yielded the wheel to her.
“So, Västvall,” she said. “Like a dog returns to its vomit.”
They drove on deserted roads, punctuated only occasionally by signs of human habitation. Most structures appeared empty and abandoned. They saw no one.
They crested the familiar ridge and left the highway on the small approach road to the village. Plunging again into the spooky, all-enveloping old-growth forest, Brand had the sense of history recycling itself. She tensed as they passed the point where the child had dashed out of the woods in front of the Saab. But the woods remained vacant, with no footprints or other signs of the bizarre incident, which after all had happened only two days previous.
The recent blizzard had stacked drifts of snow everywhere.
“This morning, while you slept, I checked into things on the web,” Hammar said. “There’s still no report of a recent death or homicide in Västvall, or none that I can find from a fairly thorough search of the news feeds.”
Brand made no comment. She puzzled over a pair of events that appeared linked. Sofieborg Manor House, with two dead. Then Västvall, with one more. Now the return to the little farm village triggered vivid memories. Her thoughts seemed to trip over each other, running quickly through her mind.
The nagging, elusive perception suddenly burst forward. Brand almost pulled the car over, the idea presented itself so clearly.
“They’re tracking her somehow,” she said.
“What? Who?”
“I don’t know yet,” Brand said, excited.“But think about it. We try to follow the traffickers, right? We go to the manor house, then to the Voss village. Both times we run into the big blond beast. So someone else is following the chain, too. Someone else has to be on her trail.”
“
Well, I have to ask again, who might that be?”
Brand didn’t have an answer. “Someone.”
“All right,” Hammar said. “What do we do with this new understanding of yours?”
“I don’t know that, either.”
It wasn’t much, but it was something. A couple of links in the chain had become firmly connected in Brand’s mind. She steered the Saab onward, down to the floor of the little valley. Maybe they would find the truth there.
They halted the car where the small lane split to the right and left. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it,” Brand muttered, recalling the Yogi Berra line favored by Willie Urrico.
“Västvall village is that way,” Hammar indicated, pointing.
“The other way?”
“A right turn will bring us to a river that streams into a large lake,” Hammar said. “But I think we look at a third way. There’s something odd up there that you ought to see.”
He gestured to a snowy track that Brand hadn’t noticed, leading up a slope before curving away into the woods.
“That isn’t even really a road. I’m not sure we’ll be able to get back down.”
“You’re right,” Hammar said. “Pull over. We’ll leave the car and walk.”
That option also struck Brand as questionable. The forest appeared dense. A nattmara could well be abroad. They were defenseless and unarmed.
She remembered seeing an old black-and-white movie western starring Jimmy Stewart. The hero quelled violence in an unruly frontier town without ever carrying a sixgun. He remained totally weaponless throughout the movie. Marlene Dietrich was in it.
But that was fantasy, and this was real. She was again a little disconcerted to discover how naked she felt without the Glock. It was like the common dream where the dreamer is onstage without clothes. She would be venturing out vulnerable and exposed. She found herself rubbing Moro’s stone like a worry bead, but the little magic charm was no replacement for real-world firepower.
At least they were well shod and warmly encased in parkas. She and Hammar proceeded up the single-lane track. They moved into the urskog once more. Brand had to steel her mind against more flashbacks. Her companion stopped once, ungloved his hands, and pulled the hood on Brand’s parka tighter, snapping the clasp at her neck.
“There is no bad weather in Sweden,” he pronounced solemnly. “Only bad equipment.”
They continued on. In the narrow, snow-covered lane lay a few frozen clumps of what looked like animal dung.
“Nattmara,” Brand suggested, not quite seriously.
“Horse,” Hammar corrected her.
The surrounding forest began to feel dense and threatening. Brand had disturbing memories of the afternoon of the blizzard. A sense of dread overtook her. She and Hammar mounted a small rise to encounter a bizarre makeshift memorial that stopped them dead in their tracks.
34.
A flat, circumscribed clearing. All the snow and underlying vegetation had been burned away. A bald patch remained in the middle, a scorched circle twenty meters wide. Coming upon it suddenly, as she did, Brand had difficulty understanding what she was looking at.
Stuck in the ground stood a collection of wooden crosses. They were not Christian-style crossed T’s, but X-shaped ones. Weathered boards nailed together formed an intersecting overlap. Each cross rose a dozen feet or more from the blackened earth.
The drifts of the recent blizzard had melted off the charred section. Items of clothing draped across each cross. The empty-sleeved arms stretched out as if nailed to the wooden planks. Skirts splayed out below the shirts and sweaters. Leggings or slacks were also fastened in place. The scarecrow figures, one after another, filled the whole clearing. Some of the crosses had shoes attached to them, small handbags, a necklace of coins or a cheap ornament.
Diminutive, crucified figures. Wearing children’s clothing, or that of a young person, anyway. Teens, young adults.
Placed at the necks of a few of the shirts and sweaters were round paper portraits, curled and stained by the weather, drawings or photos of the faces of young women. Several had their lips outlined in garish red. The moon-shaped heads had been fixed to the wood where the X-planks crossed. The paper rustled and flopped forward in the light breeze passing through the surrounding forest. The scarecrows seemed to be bowing their ghostly heads to Brand.
She counted eleven.
“This is what you wanted to show me?” Brand asked.
Hammar shook his head. “I don’t know what this is,” he said solemnly. “It certainly wasn’t here last year when I visited. There was an encampment of travelers somewhere around here.”
Brand wondered what she would find, if she moved forward to examine the homemade Golgotha more closely. Would the face of Varzha Luna stare out at her?
Then, oddly, she encountered herself as a child. Although, not really. On the far side of the clearing Brand saw a tiny human being.
She recognized the little figure even without the tattered black dress.
“Hey,” she called out impulsively.
The imp bolted.
“It’s her,” she blurted out to Hammar. “The little thief who stole my backpack.”
The two of them scrambled after the girl as she dashed into the woods. They came up behind a half dozen women wearing layers of sweaters over long skirts, their shoulders draped with heavy blankets against the cold. The women stopped to turn and stare at the interlopers. The child whom Brand had just seen buried herself in the skirts of one of the women.
Splashes of color, red kerchiefs and bright garments, showed against the snowy expanse of the forest. The group seemed to have just returned from gathering firewood. Retreating quickly, taking their child and their bundles of tinder with them, the women followed a foot-path beaten into the snow. Together they headed further into the forest.
One of the wood-gatherers wore an orange-yellow skirt and a gold-patterned jacket of padded silk. She proved easy to track. The woman moved unerringly on the snowy pathway. For Brand and Hammar, it was like pursuing a slash of sunlight in the midst of a stark-white polar sea. Eventually, the woman began turning from time to time to check on her pursuers. She seemed oddly unconcerned about being followed.
Brand and Hammar reached a second clearing, this one much larger than the first. They entered into another world, a sprawling encampment in the woods. Centered around an old half-collapsed wooden barn and a pair of outbuildings, the camp included several trailers and improvised lean-tos.
“Romani,” Hammar said.
Amid the cluster of structures stood an old-fashioned tent made of drab, olive green canvas. This was decorated relentlessly with bits of color, plastic flowers, banners, flags, ribbons, until the tent fabric sagged beneath all the festoons. Everywhere there were stretched tarps of black plastic, held in place by ropes and thick wooden supports.
No dogs, and no nattmara. Brand realized they were being confronted not by animals but by the assembled women they had just followed through the forest. The female Roma stood with arms folded, forming a colorful tableau in their patterned skirts and scarves, garbed head to toe in contrasting prints, stripes, checks and dots. With sober, expressionless faces, they gazed at Brand and Hammar. The attitudes on display seemed an example of Romani dominance, of Romani determination, as if the women knew they had strength in numbers.
No dogs, and no men, either.
From among the assembled women Brand heard the murmur of the word “gadje,” meaning outsiders, non-Roma people. With a sudden jab of memory, she recollected the little stone talisman that Moro had presented her, a charm against the evil eye.
She searched in her pocket, located the stone, and held it out. The murmuring went silent.
The woman in the gold-patterned blouse who Brand had followed into the camp stepped forward. “American detective?”
Brand cursed inwardly. Did every single person in the country know who she was and what she did?
“Moro,” she s
aid. “I know Moro Part.”
The pronouncement of the name spurred a wave of chatter in Romani.
“You come from America?” the woman in the gold-patterned jacket asked.
“Your English is very good,” Hammar said, evading her question.
“Polis,” the woman said, indicating Brand.
The effect was immediate. One of the others spat on the ground. Several more gave Brand their backs, turning away in a manner that implied ostracism or rejection.
“Please,” Brand said. “We want to help.”
A half dozen women stayed where they were, crowding sullenly together.
“I want to help,” Brand said again. “We saw…”
She gestured back over her shoulder, in the general direction of the ritualistic crucifixion shrine. Using her forefingers she formed a cross.
“Eleven crosses,” Hammar said. “Crucifixes.”
“Who made the shrine?” Brand asked. “Who put the crosses there? The missing girls. In the forest, in the meadow burned by fire, who made the crosses?”
The women looked at her without speaking. One of them stepped forward. “Vi har gjort allt själva,” she said in very clear Swedish. We made it by ourselves.
A couple things happened at once. The crack of a rifle shot sounded, breaking the heavy silence of the urskog. The women scattered, instantly disappearing into the surrounding forest.
Hammar and Brand turned to see a lone male figure standing behind them. The man stationed himself where the path led into the encampment clearing, cutting off their retreat. He wore a white canvas camo suit, heavy boots, a knit cap, and snow goggles. A hunting rifle rested on his hip, held negligently so the barrel pointed skyward.
“Kom hit,” he commanded. Come here.
35.
To visit Gammelhem, “Old Home,” the not so old Härjedalen lodge of Baron Gösta Kron, Brand had to take a journey into the past. It was as if some sort of private historical reenactment was underway.
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