by Karin Nordin
Kjeld quickened his pace to his car so as not to be bothered by any more tourists and pulled out of the service station just as another bus turned into the car park to continue the cycle of the never-ending toilet queue. It wasn’t until he took the exit onto the E45 heading north that he realised he forgot to remove the lens cap.
* * *
November was usually a rainy month in Jämtland, but an early cold front had moved in, glossing the roads with a thin layer of ice. The gravel road that led up to Kjeld’s old family home was unmaintained, interrupted with patches of long grass, fallen tree limbs, and potholes that could snap the suspension of a small car. In truth it could hardly be considered a road at all. It was more a narrow winding path cut out of the surrounding forest with so many sharp turns that Kjeld imagined his great-grandfather must have been three sheets to the wind when he decided to pave the old horse trail connecting his property to the township limits. The story was that his great-grandfather was so enamoured by the beauty of the birch and spruce trees that he refused to chop down a single one to build the drive from the town to his home. But Kjeld’s impression of the story after hearing it ad nauseam during his childhood was that his great-grandfather was either too damn stubborn to cut down any trees or he just wanted to limit the possibility that anyone would visit him.
And if Kjeld looked to the other men in his family, himself included, for insight into which explanation was more likely, he would put his money on the latter.
The drive dipped downward just before reaching the house. Kjeld parked his car further up the road on the hill, not wanting to risk the possibility of getting snowed in should the weather take a turn, and walked the rest of the distance to the house. There was a bitter chill in the air that nipped at his neck and he hunched his shoulders against the cold.
It was a typical Norrland farmhouse with the red exterior and white trim, although much of the paint on the northern side had chipped and peeled over the years. Most of the clay roof tiles were covered in moss and the rain gutter on the right side had fallen and was lying in a pile of uncut brush beside the house. The picket fence that he’d painted as a child was missing some planks and someone had permanently tied the gate to an open position against the remaining pickets where it was overgrown with ragweed and arctic violets whose petals had broken off and withered due to the unnatural wetness of the season. In the distance Kjeld could see a spiral of smoke coming from the chimney of the nearest house, which was at least eight kilometres away.
He walked around a fallen garden gnome that he vaguely recognised as once belonging to his mother, and up the steps to the porch. When the doorbell didn’t work, he rapped his fist against the metal screen that someone had recently fit over the yellow door. It was loosely hinged to the side of the house and made a hard clanking sound as it hit against the wooden frame.
Kjeld looked out over the yard. The disarray of weeds, abandoned garden tools buried beneath a pile of broken shutters and rotten firewood, and an overturned wheelbarrow once filled with shattered kitchen tiles caused his face to burn with anger and guilt.
What the hell was he doing here?
It was late afternoon and the sun was just beginning to dip towards the horizon, sending an orangish-yellow gleam through the trees. He was kicking himself for leaving Gothenburg in the middle of the night. It had been an impulsive decision. Now he was tired and regretting making the drive at all. If he got back in his car right now, he could probably make it to Östersund before the local businesses closed and get himself a room for the night. If he could find himself a decent cup of coffee then he could probably make it all the way back to Mora. Neither coffee nor desperation would get him back to Gothenburg before tomorrow, but at least he wouldn’t be here, questioning his good sense.
He was already down two porch steps when the front door opened. Kjeld turned around and looked back at his sister as she stared at him through the mesh of the metal screen. Her expression was rigid, the age lines in her face pulled taut around thin pursed lips. After an uncomfortable pause that seemed to Kjeld to last minutes she pushed open the screen door with her hip and snorted a laugh.
‘Well, I’ll be damned,’ she scoffed. ‘It must be snowing in hell.’
Chapter 2
Kjeld sat at the yellow Formica kitchen table and watched as his sister, Sara, peeled potatoes at the sink. He was surprised by how little had changed in the room since he was last there. Pressed flowers and plants in dusty frames still hung on the walls and his mother’s hand-knit potholders were looped over the oven door and the pantry handles. The only things that were different were the padlocks on many of the cupboard doors and Sara herself. She was bigger around the middle than he remembered, but Kjeld imagined having two kids would do that to a person. Or was it three?
‘Where’s Dad?’ he asked, running his finger along a crack at the edge of the table.
Sara shook her head, laughed again but with less amusement than when she’d seen him at the front door, and dropped a potato into a bowl on the counter. ‘Really? Is that how you want to start?’
She turned and wiped her wet hands on her apron, sending him a disappointed sneer as she canted her hip to the side and weighted her balance by gripping the edge of the sink with her hand. ‘Where’s Dad? Seriously? When was the last time you even saw him? Ten years ago? Twelve?’
Kjeld watched as her face turned a heated shade of red. It made her look sweaty and out of breath like she used to get when they would race each other from the back porch to the barn as children. It wasn’t an attractive look on her. Then again, Sara had always been a plain-looking girl. Now she was a plain-looking woman. She had a stocky build and her hair was that same dull shade of brown their father had when he was younger. The length couldn’t have been much longer than her shoulders, but it was pulled back in a messy bun making it difficult to tell. She didn’t wear any make-up aside from a clumpy layer of mascara on her upper eyelashes and a slim brush of pink eye shadow. Unlike Kjeld’s face, which had their mother’s sharp angles, particularly around the jawline, Sara’s face was round and flat. She had too much of their father in her face.
‘He called me,’ Kjeld said.
Sara stared at him as though using the sudden silence between them to determine whether he was telling the truth.
‘What do you mean he called you?’ she asked.
‘I got a message from him the other day. It went straight to voicemail, but it was definitely from Dad.’
Sara took another potato out of the sink and dragged the peeler along the edge, scraping off the skin in long pieces. ‘What did he say?’
‘I don’t know.’ Kjeld sighed. ‘I didn’t even know he had my number.’
‘What do you mean you don’t know? He left you a message. What did he say?’
‘It was just a bunch of nonsense. Something about the barn and the birds. It sounded like the ramblings of a drunk.’
‘Dad’s not a drunk,’ Sara said, tossing the potato skin in the sink. ‘I want to hear the voicemail.’
Kjeld took out his mobile phone, set it to play on speaker, and pulled up the message. After a pause his father’s voice, frantic and confused, began to speak.
‘Kjeld, it’s your … It’s me. You need to come home. I saw … someone out in the barn. You must come home. I have to tell you about the ravens. They were out there. Fighting. I don’t know what to do. I can’t let your mother find out. She can’t know. Please. You must listen to me. They were out there. I saw it. Your mother can’t know. She can’t. I promised her I would take care of things. They know, Kjeld. The ravens. They know.’
The message cut off.
Sara’s expression hardened, her gaze fixed on the bowl of potatoes.
‘Sara? Are you all right?’
She rubbed the back of her hand against her right eye as though fighting off a tear. ‘I’m fine. It’s just difficult to hear him talk that way. About Mum. Like she’s still alive.’
‘That’s why I came all
the way out here,’ Kjeld said. ‘Does he still have those damn things out in the barn?’
‘The ravens, you mean?’
‘Those things always creeped me out as a kid.’
Sara laughed again, honest and hearty this time. ‘I remember that time you got stuck in the barn. Do you remember that? God, you must have been yelling for hours. Mum and I were upstairs with the windows closed and Dad was off doing who-knows-what so nobody heard you. I remember you were practically catatonic when he found you.’ She bent down and removed a large pot from a lower cupboard, dumped the peeled potatoes into the pot, and filled it with water before setting it on the range.
‘If you’d been there you would have been scared, too,’ Kjeld said. He looked away from her and out the kitchen window, which offered a view of the backyard and the long empty field that led up to the barn at far end of the lot. It seemed odd to him suddenly that there would be a large treeless expanse on the property after the care his great-grandfather took to wind the road leading up to the house, but that’s how it had always been.
‘There’s still a few out there,’ she said after a pause. ‘Not as many as there used to be. They’re a pain in the arse to take care of. Sometimes I think about letting them all out, but that would break Dad. Those damn birds are the only thing left that he gives a shit about.’
Sara turned on the gas and tapped a dash of salt into the pot. Then she removed her apron and hung it over a hook on a wall beside a framed black orchid. The classification Gymnadenia nigra, the provincial flower of Jämtland, had been handwritten underneath the stem by his father years ago. She sat down at the table across from Kjeld.
‘Where is Dad anyway?’ Kjeld asked.
‘He’s upstairs. Resting.’
‘At this hour?’
Sara sighed. ‘Most of the time it’s a miracle if I can even get him in bed at all. But I’ll have to wake him up soon if he doesn’t get out of bed on his own. Otherwise he’ll be up all night.’
‘You stay here at night?’ Kjeld glanced back out the window.
‘Only when he’s having a bad day,’ she said. ‘I mean, don’t get me wrong. He probably needs round-the-clock care, but I can’t be here every minute of the day. It’s hard enough on Tom that I’m here as much as I am. Not to mention the kids.’
‘Can’t you just leave him on his own?’
Sara shook her head and Kjeld could see she was trying her best not to make some kind of sarcastic remark. She looked tired. War-weary. And it was then that he noticed the dark patches of skin under her eyes and the grey hair at her temples. It had been a few years since he’d last seen her, not as long as it had been since he’d seen their father, but she seemed to have aged decades in that time.
‘It’s Alzheimer’s, Kjeld.’
Kjeld looked down at the table. The message on his voicemail started to make sense. The confusion in his father’s voice. The disorientated sentences. The nonsensical rambling.
Sara leaned back in the chair and crossed her arms over her chest. ‘One minute he’s fine and normal, talking about the good old days. The next minute he’s almost burning the house down because he thinks the sofa in the living room is the old wood stove.’
‘But he must have good days,’ Kjeld said.
‘That would be a good day.’
He pinched the bridge of his nose. ‘How long has this been going on?’
Sara sneered. ‘Chrissakes, Kjeld. I forgot how completely out of touch you were with things up here.’
‘Well it’s not like you ever picked up the phone to tell me. Or left me a note in one of your yearly Christmas cards. Would that have been so difficult? Happy Holidays. P.S. Dad’s got dementia.’
‘Don’t you dare put this on me. You’re never available. Besides, Bengt knew.’
Kjeld scowled at the mention of his ex-husband. He clenched his teeth behind his pursed lips, adding to his quickly building tension headache. ‘Really? Bengt knew?’
‘He answers his phone, Kjeld.’
A heavy thunk of something hitting the floor echoed from upstairs. Kjeld turned his attention to the doorway. Sara held her breath and for a brief moment Kjeld wondered if she was waiting for their father to fall down the stairs and solve her problems. Then a hoarse voice called out from the other side of the house.
‘Sara! Sara! Would you ask your mother where she put my blue shirt? Sara!’
Kjeld raised a brow and gave his sister a questioning look.
Sara sighed and stood up. ‘It starts.’
‘Why is he asking about Mum?’
‘Don’t be daft. It’s because he doesn’t remember. Do us both a favour and don’t talk about Mum. Please. I’ve got enough shit to deal with. If you bring her up then I’ll never get home.’
The pot of potatoes began to boil and Sara turned down the heat. From upstairs Stenar’s yelling changed from calling out Sara’s name to calling out the name of their mother. Another heavy thunk, probably a dresser drawer hitting the floor, echoed down the hall.
Kjeld stood up, hooking his thumbs in his jeans pockets. ‘Sara?’
‘What?’ she snapped. Then she took a deep breath. ‘Sorry. I’m not getting much sleep. And I don’t know how he’s going to react to seeing you.’
Kjeld nodded. Their father had never reacted well to seeing him when he had all his faculties about him. It wasn’t lost on Kjeld that him showing up unexpectedly could cause problems. He watched his sister try to keep her composure in the kitchen and thought about Esme dealing with the Aubuchon mess on her own, covering for him out of some misplaced sense of loyalty. Just like Sara taking care of their father because of some antiquated notion of familial responsibility. As if they had ever been a real family. He mentally cursed himself for driving all this way on the whim of a phone call from a demented old man.
‘I have to go check on him,’ Sara said, heading towards the doorway.
‘Do you know why he called me?’ Kjeld asked.
Sara hesitated. Then she glanced back at her brother, her brown eyes moist and her expression ambiguous. ‘He got it in his head that he saw something out in the barn.’
‘What did he see?’ Kjeld asked.
Sara’s brows creased and her lips pursed again like they did when she saw him on the front steps. When she replied her tone had lowered to a different level of seriousness. It was a tone that Kjeld hadn’t heard in her voice since the night their mother died.
‘A murder.’
Chapter 3
Roland Lindqvist slammed his laptop closed and shoved it halfway across the conference-room table. At sixty-eight years old he should have been retired, spending his mornings on the golf course and his afternoons with friends, toasting the successes of their pasts and the free time of their futures over glasses of champagne while placing bets on horse races they would never watch. Standing in as temporary CEO of the family business and negotiating million-euro deals during dinnertime had never been part of that plan. Not that he was unaccustomed to the work. He’d proved himself more than capable of taking the reins from his older brother when Peter went on his sabbatical, but it was never supposed to be permanent. And it was certainly never supposed to affect his golden years.
Roland pressed the intercom at the head of the table.
‘Yes, Herr Lindqvist?’ the soft voice of his secretary answered.
‘Ah, Hanna, you’re still here. Good,’ he said. ‘Has Erik Norberg called?’
‘No, sir,’ Hanna replied.
‘Anything from Jakob Holm?’
‘Not since yesterday, Herr Lindqvist.’
‘I suppose it would be too much to hope my brother called?’ There was a pause on the other end of the intercom and Roland imagined that Hanna was trying to determine the most appropriate means of replying to an offhanded quip about Norrmalm’s elusive CEO. He saved her the awkwardness of an answer. ‘Could you go down to the filing room and pull up the hard copies of the original Norrmalm ownership documents and have them placed on my
desk before you leave?’
‘The originals, sir? From when the company first began or after it went corporate?’
‘Both, if you can find them.’ Better to be overprepared.
‘Yes, sir. I’ll do that now.’
Roland clicked off the intercom. He smoothed down the front of his button-up shirt (an anniversary gift from his wife of forty-one years) and glanced at his watch (a gift from his mistress of twelve years). 5.27 p.m. Well past the end of the traditional workday. Which meant that Roland wouldn’t hear about the rescheduling of the meeting with MineCorp until tomorrow morning if he was lucky. Early afternoon if they decided to make him sweat.
He walked over to the floor-to-ceiling glass viewing platform at the far end of the conference room. Three years ago, and at the suggestion of the board, Roland decided to physically rebrand the company’s image. The dark brick walls of the building’s western meeting rooms were replaced with a special UV-blocking insulated glass, which allowed the sun to shine through without inflicting damage to the skin. In the lead conference room where he now stood, overlooking the relatively untouched natural forest that bordered Norway in the west and Lapland in the north, Roland had an enclosed reinforced glass walkway built as an extension of the once unremarkable room. It was the same glass used in the construction of the ledges on the Willis Tower in Chicago and for those who dared step out onto the suspended platform, it offered an imposing view of the almost vertical drop into the original copper mine that was the bedrock of the Lindqvist legacy: Norrmalm Industries.
The environmentalists called it a blemish on the forested landscape, but to Roland it represented generations of tradition, backbreaking work, and entrepreneurial foresight. The horizon was awash in densely populated pines, interrupted by isolated patches of birch trees whose white bark trunks broke through the green like the strayed strands of silver in Roland’s otherwise dark hair. Immediately adjacent to Norrmalm’s corporate headquarters, however, was a deep cavern of reddish-orange bedrock, winding dirt roads excavated into the barren vista, and, beneath that, a complex system of tunnels that had collapsed some of the nearby woodland and swallowed a small region of untouched timber into its copper jaws. That was one of the many risks of mining, but to Roland and his family it was worth it. The accidental deforestation of a patch of rarely visited wilderness didn’t weigh on his great-grandfather’s conscience. Nor did his grandfather or father suffer from restless nights on that account. And like them Roland slept comfortably on his interwoven silk jacquard merino wool and hand-spun 1000-count Egyptian cotton bedsheets.