This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  In her white cotton nightdress she rushed downstairs. She slipped on a pair of rubber boots in the mud room off the kitchen and stepped outside. Her first emotion, before she knew the full scope of the tragedy, was one of excitement.

  The old barn—that’s what they always called it, to distinguish the ancient structure of gray, weathered wood from the new barn and the cow barn—would not be that much of a loss. No livestock were ever housed in it. The haymow was full of moldering bales too rotted to offer much good nutrition to the cows. A lot of useless junk packed the lower floor. The structure practically pleaded to be put out of its misery.

  So Brand’s eyes were shining as she crossed to the spectacle in the lower yard. Divorced from the natural human concern over property loss, a fire in an unoccupied barn can be a magnificent sight. She halted to stare, shivering like a human tuning fork. A whole crayon box of tints, shades, and colors blew out of the barn roof. Deadly looking whips of yellow, orange, blue, illuminated huge billows of sooty smoke. The fire rolled upward into the night, accompanied by a hellish freight train of a roar.

  “I will never forget this night,” thirteen year old Brand whispered to herself.

  The fat bellow of the fire at first drowned out what her grandmother was shouting. She and Great-Aunt Alice clutched each other, sinking to their knees at the very edge of the blaze, screaming and moaning. Brand saw their silhouettes framed by the flames. It took her a moment to grasp Klara’s words.

  “Gustav, Gustav, Gustav!”

  Outlined in the square of the barn’s open double doors, the fire painted the interior a bright sun yellow. Brand could see all-consuming heat turning everything inside shimmery and strange.

  In the middle of the roaring tableau, a figure hung by the neck on a rope attached to a beam that crossed the roof of the barn. The black form looked Biblical twisting there in the midst of the fire. Brand had thoughts of the Book of Daniel’s Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, servants of the Most High God.

  In the instant that the rope burned through and the body collapsed in a heap to the burning floor of the barn, Brand finally understood the true extent of the horror. The dead man was her grandfather, Gustav Dalgren. She powered forward and joined the weeping females, thrusting herself in between Klara and Alice as if they could shield her from grief. The three of them all huddled together while the flames still sent out waves of intense heat. Days later Brand’s face was still red as if from radiant burn.

  More odd than death, her first reaction was a stab of extreme guilt. The thought floated up in her mind unbidden, a shot of psychological venom.

  He did it because of me.

  Oh, no, Veronika, another interior voice answered, attempting to smother the crazy notion before it took another life—before it took her life.

  No, no, no. Klara would certainly not want Veronika to feel guilty, Alice wouldn’t, her mother wouldn’t. It was just a stupid wayward brain wave brought on by the extremity of the situation. She managed to beat the idea back, but it simply retreated into her mind’s darkest recesses, not exactly alive but never extinguished.

  Grandpa Dalgren always ran hot and cold with his only granddaughter. In his drunkenness he’d sometimes seize Brand up, holding her squirming in his arms, slobbering and telling her he was sorry. For what, he never said.

  Other times she caught Gustav staring at her from across the farmhouse kitchen, bleary-eyed from whiskey. The slack expression on his face tilted into an almost evil sneer. He was not in control of himself. The sight of him looking at her would give Brand a skin-crawling impression.

  He hates me. My own grandfather hates me.

  The suicide was hushed up. The roof of the old barn gave way. The whole structure fell into a charred jumble. The body of the deceased was cooked in thousand-degree heat. Neighbors came running to find Klara, Alice and Veronika still knotted together in a weeping heap.

  Gustav had run into the burning barn to try to save the structure, Klara told everyone. The neighbors and the fire crew came too late. Such was Klara’s story and she stuck to it. Law enforcement authorities showed up throughout the remainder of the night. No one seemed much interested in challenging the accepted version of the incident. There was no investigation, no autopsy.

  “Death by misadventure,” read the post-mortem medical certificate, listing heat shock as the cause. As with any burning, Gustav Dalgren’s body had retracted into what is termed a boxer’s pose or the pugilistic posture, elbows and knees flexed, fists clenched and raised. For a man who had began his life as a fighter for social justice, the end was somehow fitting.

  “Gustav was never the same after we came here,” Klara told Marta when she came up from New York City for the funeral. It was as close as either woman ever came to an explanation. “Leaving Sweden broke him. Here he is, another victim of the troubles during the war, but fifty years later.”

  His American neighbors called him Gus. They had always found him distant. No one knew his history. The funeral was sparsely attended, the casket, of course, closed, the mortician’s art not up to the task.

  Klara, Alice and Veronika remained quiet about what they had seen. The three of them never colluded, never agreed that this was what they would say, and that was the brave face they would present to the world. In fact, Brand had bitten her tongue for years, since she never spoke to Klara or Alice about the lie, and never confessed the particulars of the death to her own mother, the dead man’s daughter.

  But in her mind the lie grew until it achieved capitalization, the Lie. Fed on fear, grief, and memory, it became a beast that haunted her well into adulthood. She mostly kept it contained, but every once in a while it broke loose, appeared in the mirror looking like the very spit of her, and stalked abroad dressed in Brand’s clothes.

  52.

  The Voss family gathered in Stockholm for the 70th anniversary of Voss Trucks. The day marked Loke Voss’ first truck purchase, a fleet which would eventually grow into a European transportation giant. Tributes, both floral and otherwise, flowed in from around the country. Everyone honored the economic and social contribution of the company and the distinguished public service of its founder, Loke Voss. The celebrations at the Stockholm Cathedral would attract luminaries from government, military and business. Since the Voss transportation empire reached well beyond Sweden, representatives from the international community attended as well. The King sent best wishes for the affair.

  The unstated sentiment behind the festivities held that the founder was after all ninety-eight years old. There would not be that many more occasions to celebrate. The next opportunity for such a commemoration might well be a funeral.

  Within the family, the only discordant note was sounded by Ylva Voss. “Do you think farfar is strong enough for this? He’s been looking a little rattled lately.”

  Her father, Gabriel Voss, knew the real source of Ylva’s feelings on the matter. She believed it would be unseemly to hold a party so soon after the death of her cousin Malte. But the huge fête had been planned long before the incident on the Hede River. It wasn’t just close relatives, either. The whole family-owned trucking company was involved. A hundreds strong convoy of vehicles from Voss Transport had been organized.

  “The celebration has taken on a life of its own,” Junior told her. “I’m sure Malte would have wanted it to go forward.”

  So Ylva kept her own counsel. She had noticed that her grandfather had changed lately. His face had taken on a haunted look. Hearing the approaching footsteps of mortality, that had to be it. The paper-thin walls of the old man’s heart could rupture at any moment. But was there something else? Ylva caught him pawing through mementos, photos from the past, including some from periods better left buried. He often sobbed like a child.

  It was an open secret in the family that Loke had been the unseen hand behind the Nordic Light arson. Of course, he hadn’t meant for anyone to die. He wasn’t a murderer, for pity’s sake, not of children, anyway. The inflamed passions of the ti
me were to blame. The Nordic Light newspaper was clearly an organ of Soviets, a treasonous outlet in a time of war and an extreme danger to the state. Nordic Light had to be silenced, it was that simple. No doubt if Loke could go back, he would do it all over again.

  Ylva wondered that an obvious clue to her grandfather’s involvement in the arson had always been ignored. It had happened on 3 March, Loke’s birthday. She actually appreciated the arrogant quality of scheduling the arson attack on that exact day. It made her laugh, like hanging a sign around your neck declaring “I’m guilty!” and daring the world to do anything about it. In his youth, her grandfather had been a real pisser. He wasn’t one to apologize, ever.

  No, there was something else bothering him, Ylva felt sure. Amid the flurry of organizing the anniversary celebration, it often seemed she was the only one paying any real attention to the man himself. The rest of the family rushed around busily, treating the patriark like the still eye of the storm.

  “Is something bothering you, farfar?” she asked, kneeling next to Loke’s wheelchair. She looked into her grandfather’s eyes, trying to discern the source of the shadow on his life. All the Vosses had pale blue eyes, but Loke’s were extraordinary, a kind of unflecked gray that was the rarest eye coloring of all. “Goat eyes,” was the insult flung at him in his youth, one for which he made his schoolmates pay in blood.

  “Are you happy?” Ylva persisted. “You know, if the celebration is too much for you, you can go home after the church ceremony, we can have you watch it on TV. You could stay right here at home. Would you like that?”

  They were in the Stockholm townhouse in Östermalm, the whole family filling the rooms of the luxurious and grandiose city space. Elias Voss kept his son Jarl elsewhere, monitoring the boy closely, since he always seemed to fall into some kind of trouble whenever he was in the capital, which was all the time. By hook or by crook, Elias would see to it that Jarl was present and sober for the gathering at the Cathedral.

  At that moment, with Ylva staring into Loke’s arresting eyes, she thought he resembled a stroke victim, trying to articulate but unable to speak.

  “I’ve done wrong,” the old man moaned.

  “Oh, no, no, farfar, you’ve been good! So good! Look at the whole world lining up to honor you! Would they do that for a bad man?”

  “I loved her,” he said, his voice a hoarse whisper. He began to weep.

  All the tears a man’s man holds back in his early years, Ylva thought, all those left unwept because after all boys don’t cry, well, the dam always breaks eventually and they pour forth in old age.

  “She…she…she…” Loke stuttered.

  “What is it? You can tell me,” she said in her most comforting granddaughter’s voice, the one that nearly always got her what she wanted. But she couldn’t get anything more out of him. Then Junior had come in, angry at her for upsetting his father.

  As the anniversary celebration approached, Ylva made her own preparations. She considered that she had come at the American detective and her Sami sidekick twice now, both times with blades. It was time to employ a proper weapon, one that she trained herself in for years, winning shooting competitions all over Sweden.

  The Anschütz 1827F biathlon rifle, manufactured by a German company, looked like it was put together by a committee of the insane. At the thing’s heart lay an ordinary .22 long rifle, rendered extraordinary by the demands of the sport. Add-ons, appurtenances, and modifications attached themselves to every section of the weapon, from a cheek guard fastened to the stock, to a snow cover on the front gun sight. The special biathlon magazine poked awkwardly up mid-barrel. The 1827F was a rifle in the sense that the international space station was an airplane.

  The Vosses owned one of the colorful buildings off the Stortorget, the Great Square. The top story was given over to a tower arrangement. The cramped, belfry-like interior contained an apartment, now empty, that had been used over the years by this or that family member. It was a measure of the Voss wealth that such a gem located in a neighborhood of outrageously pricey real estate was left vacant. But the building’s elevator did not reach to the top floor apartment. One had to climb a narrow flight of stairs. What a bother! No one wanted it.

  Hours before the anniversary celebration, Ylva set herself up in the tower apartment. Her worry over the public event was not limited to concerns about her grandfather’s health. She knew that the American detective was still running free somewhere, sniffing around, bound to make trouble. The combined efforts of the polis, the military (Frans Voss had set the Särskilda operationsgruppen on her trail), and the formidable security corps of Voss Transport had so far failed to locate Veronika Brand.

  In the aftermath of their encounter at Voss Medical Center, Brand had either left the country or holed up somewhere. Either way, Ylva did not feel like taking chances. Something had set the madwoman against the Voss family and against Loke Voss senior. Brand was the granddaughter of Gustav Dalgren, the editor of Nordic Light. Ylva didn’t believe anyone (apart from herself) could nurse a grudge over an event that happened that far in the past.

  What was Veronika Brand’s problem? Perhaps the bitch just wanted to talk over old times with Loke. Perhaps she was compiling an oral history of her family.

  Uh-huh. Ylva didn’t think so, and she didn’t much care about motivations anyway. She liked the idea of covering her granddad’s ceremony in case Detective Brand thought to crash it. Granted, taking the woman out might mar the anniversary festivities somewhat. Then again, it could also be seen as the ultimate tribute to Loke Voss. It depended how you looked at it.

  The small casement window in the tower apartment had a clear view of the square. Ylva was forced to lean halfway out onto the gabled roof to position herself properly, but really, nothing could be easier. She could make a shot like that in her sleep.

  The .22 long rifle bullet is not ordinarily that powerful of a load, much smaller and slower than those used in many sniper situations in the military. But Ylva did what she could to boost the speed and heft of the projectile, choosing a lead-tipped, steel jacketed magnum cartridge. With the wallop that a round like that would pack, she didn’t think she would need a second shot.

  As she sighted the rifle in, she had a thought that the distance and angle resembled Lee Harvey Oswald’s kill shot in Dallas. Eighty meters, more or less, tower window to square, though the angle—she gauged it at twenty-two degrees—was slightly greater. And of course Oswald had to hit a moving target, the presidential limousine moving at five kilometers an hour.

  As kids she and Malte had fooled around trying to duplicate Oswald’s shot on the Västvall estate. They hooked a little four wheeler ATV to a flatbed wagon with a couple of pumpkins on it, then cajoled Hans Voss into driving it slowly past where the two of them had positioned themselves atop a farm silo. Of course their younger cousin had objected to the arrangement, but they extended the length of the rope between the target wagon and the four wheeler, so there was no real danger.

  She and Malte took turns blasting away, hooting and hollering.

  “Slower!” Ylva shouted down, laughing at poor frightened Hans. “Go slower!” The boy was driving like a bat from hell attempting to remove himself from the line of fire.

  It took Malte a dozen tries, but Ylva managed a bull’s-eye on her third. Not that difficult of a shot at all, despite what the conspiracy theorists might say.

  53.

  Stockholm is a horizontal, not a vertical city, approachable on a human scale, unlike the claustrophobic soar of New York. There are no bona fide skyscrapers, The capital’s tallest building tops out at thirty-two floors. But at least Brand had an upper story view from her apartment, or hotel room, or pied a terre—whatever her quarters might be called. There were streets, waterways, and parks visible from the twin west-facing windows. The mostly gravel gray landscape displayed a few surprising bits of green, pine trees that had hung on through the long winter.

  The Stockholm archipelago made for a
city of islands and bridges, tens of thousands of islands, skerries, sea stacks, tombolos, islets, and rocks, linked by the most amazing collection of bridges in the world, and Brand had come to believe that here was a good correlative for the Swedish people, connected by numberless strong bridges of community and cooperation, but after all separate, independent, immune.

  Moro Part had assigned Brand a minder, Sandri, stationed in the long empty corridor outside her room, always there whenever she peeped out. She never seemed to catch the man coming into the room, but kaffe and food had always appeared as if by magic whenever she woke from sleep.

  Three rooms, a small suite. Brand experienced moments when it felt like a jail. Taking full advantage of the bathroom’s elaborate Jacuzzi-nozzled tub, she bathed twice within twelve hours, washing off the verminous stench of the deer shack. Black silk pajamas, her size, materialized, her filth-ridden clothes disappeared, only to show up again cleaned and neatly folded. She was a captive princess.

  Even with all that, she was shocked to find a bottle of prescription Adderall in the medicine cabinet. Moro Part, she decided, knew her all too well. She slipped back into addiction as if it were a comfortable suit of clothes. Mostly, though, Brand allowed herself to be bored, a blessing in the wake of the constant drumming, recently, of excitement, violence, and event. A feeling gnawed at her, a question she was not ready to answer. Had she joined the enemy, let go of her pledge to uphold the law, disgraced herself and the work she had done for the past twenty years?

  She stayed off social media, focusing instead on local news feeds and newscasts. She understood enough Swedish to figure out the reporting. Film footage helped. The media played the incident along the Hede River as drug violence, three Norwegian Turks murdered by hands unknown. The limited reporting made no mention of the Voss name or the incongruous presence of a spotted hyena at the scene.