Before the Frost (9 page)

Henrietta followed her out.

“Come back sometime.”

Linda promised to do so, and then drove away. She saw storm clouds heaped up in the distance, out over the sea in the direction of Bornholm. Linda pulled over after a while and got out of the car. She had a sudden desire to smoke. She had quit smoking three years earlier but the desire still hit her from time to time, even if it was getting more rare.

There are some things mothers don't know about their daughters,
she thought.
Henrietta doesn't know that Anna and I told each other everything during those years. If she had, she would never have told me about Anna always seeing her father on the street. There are a lot of things I'm not sure of, but I know Anna would have told me that.

There was only one possible explanation. Henrietta had not been telling her the truth about Anna and her missing father.

10

She pulled back the curtains a little after five o'clock in the morning and looked at the thermometer. It was nine degrees Celsius, the sky clear with little or no wind.
What a wonderful day for an expedition,
she thought. She had prepared everything the night before and it didn't take her long to leave her apartment across from the old railway station in Skurup. Her forty-year-old Vespa was waiting for her in the yard under a custom-made cover. She was the original owner and, since she had taken such good care of it, it was still in mint condition. In fact, word of it had spread to the factory in Italy and she had received several solicitations over the years asking her if she would consider letting the company put it in their museum. In return, the company would supply her with a new Vespa every year.

Year after year she had declined the offer, intending to keep this Vespa that she had bought when she was twenty-two years old as long as she lived. She didn't care what happened to it after that. One of her four grandchildren might want it, but she wasn't about to write a will for the sake of an ancient Vespa.

She adjusted her backpack, strapped on her helmet, and kick-started the old machine. It instantly roared into life. Half an hour later she arrived at the small parking lot by Led Lake. She walked the Vespa in behind some bushes beside a large oak tree. A car drove past on the main road, then silence returned.

As she prepared to walk into the forest and become invisible to the outside world, she wondered if this wasn't the most satisfying way of expressing one's independence: by daring to abandon the well-trodden path. To step into the underbrush and vanish from the eyes of the world.

Her brother Håkan had taught her that there were two kinds of people in the world: the ones who always chose the shortest distance between two points, and the ones who looked for the scenic route where the curves, slopes, and vistas were to be found. They had played in the forests around Älmhult when they were growing up. After her father was severely injured by a fall from a telephone pole while repairing a phone line, they moved to Skåne. Her mother got a job at the Ystad Hospital. That was where she spent her adolescence and forgot all about exploring, until the day she stood outside the gates to Lund University and realized she had no idea what to do with her life. She turned to her childhood memories for inspiration.

It was a day during that first difficult fall semester when she had enrolled as a law student for lack of a more interesting alternative. She had cycled out toward Staffanstorp and found a small unpaved road by chance. She left her bike there and continued on foot until she reached the ruins of an old mill. That was when the idea had come to her—or rather—tore through her mind like a bolt of lightning. What was a path? Why does a path go to this side of a tree and not the other? Who was the first person to walk here?

She knew in that instant it would become her life's mission to chart old trails. She would become the protector and historian of old Swedish paths and walkways. She ran back to her bike, quit her law studies the same day, and started studying history and cultural geography. She had the good fortune to meet a sympathetic professor who appreciated the originality of her interests and supported her cause.

 

She started walking along the path that curved gracefully around Led Lake. The tall trees shaded her from the sun. She had mapped this particular path quite a while ago. It was a standard walking path that could be traced back to the 1930s, when Rannesholm Manor was owned by the Haverman family. One of the counts, Gustav Haverman, had been an enthusiastic runner and had cleared bushes and undergrowth away from the edge of the lake to establish this trail.
But a little further on,
she thought,
up ahead in this old forest where no one else sees anything but moss and stone, I am going to turn off from this trail and follow the path I found just a few days ago. I
have no idea where it leads, but nothing is as tempting, as magical, as following an unknown path. I still hope that one day I'll find a path that is a work of art. A path that has been created without a destination in mind, just for its own sake
.

She paused at the top of a hill to catch her breath, looking down at the glassy surface of the lake between the trees. She was sixty-three years old now and, according to her own calculations, she needed five more years to complete her life's work:
The History of Swedish Walkways
. In this book she would reveal that paths were among the most important clues to ancient settlements and their way of life. Paths were not laid out only for the simplest way of getting from A to B. On the contrary, she had ample evidence for the numerous religious and cultural factors that determined where and how paths made their way across the landscape. Over the years she had published regional studies and maps, but the conclusions of her many years of research had yet to be set down in final form.

She slowed down when she found the spot. Where the untrained eye saw nothing but grass and moss growing at the edge of the path she spotted the clear outline of a trail that had been out of use for many years. She started climbing up the side of the hill, looking carefully before she stepped. Last year she had broken a leg when she fell exploring a trail to the south of Brösarp. The accident had forced her to take a long rest, which stood out in her mind as a particularly difficult time. Even though it had given her more time to write, she had simply become restless and irritated, especially without her husband to care for her. He had died shortly before the accident occurred and had always been the one to take care of things in the home. She had sold the house in Rydsgård after that and moved to the little apartment in Skurup.

She pushed some branches aside and moved in under the trees. Once she had read about a meadow in the forest that could only be found by someone who had lost their way. To her mind this captured some of the mystical dimension of human existence. If only one dared to get lost, one could find the unexpected. There was a whole other world beyond the highways and byways—if you just dared to take the turnoff.
And I'm the caretaker of these old forgotten paths,
she thought.
Sleeping beauties waiting for someone to wake
them from their slumber. If paths remain unused for too long, they die
.

She was deep into the forest now, a long way from the main trail. She stopped and listened. A branch broke some distance away, then all was quiet. A bird flapped noisily and flew away. She walked on, hunched over the ground, moving very slowly. The path was nearly invisible. She had to search for its contours under the moss, the grass, and the fallen branches.

Soon she started feeling disappointed; this wasn't an old path. When she first saw it she had been hoping it was part of the ancient pilgrim's trail that was rumored to pass close to Led Lake. On the north side of the Rommele hills it was still visible. It disappeared around Led Lake only to pop up again northwest of Sturup. Sometimes she was tempted to think the pilgrims had used a tunnel, but she knew that was not their custom. They walked on trails and one day she hoped to find it. Unfortunately it wasn't going to be today. After a mere hundred meters she was convinced the path was newly established, no more than ten or twenty years old. She hoped to be able to say why it had been abandoned when she figured out where it led. She was about three hundred meters into the forest by now and the trees and the undergrowth stood so thick and close together it was almost impossible to make her way through them.

Suddenly she stopped and squatted. She saw something that confused her. She picked at the moss with her finger. She had seen something white lying there: a feather. A dove? she thought. But are there white forest doves? They were usually brown or blue. She stood up and continued studying the feather. Finally she realized it came from a swan. But how could it have turned up so deep in the forest? Swans came ashore from time to time but never this far inland, not in thick forest.

After only a few more steps she stopped again, this time because the ground in front of her was curiously flattened. Someone must have walked here only a few days ago. But where exactly did the prints start? She examined the area for ten minutes and decided someone had come out of the forest and only joined the path at this point. She continued on slowly. She was no longer as curious about the path as she had been when she thought it might be the old pilgrim trail. This path was probably simply an extension of the
paths Count Haverman had put in to satisfy his outdoor tastes, but that had fallen out of use since his time. The prints she was following probably belonged to a hunter.

After another hundred meters she arrived at a shallow ravine, a crack in the earth covered by bushes and undergrowth. The path ran straight down into it. She removed her backpack, tucked a flashlight into her pocket, and carefully scooted down into the ravine. She started lifting up branches in order to get past them and saw to her surprise that several of them had been cut and placed here in order to conceal the entrance to the hollow.
Boys,
she thought.
HÃ¥kan and I often made forts in the forest
. She pressed on past the undergrowth and sure enough, there was a small hut. It was unusually large to be the work of children. She was reminded of a news item HÃ¥kan had shown her from a magazine, pictures of a shack in a forest that served as the hideout for a wanted criminal by the wonderful name of Beautiful Bengtsson. He had lived in his hideout for a long time and had only been found out by a person who stumbled upon it by accident.

She walked up for a closer look. The hut had been constructed out of planks of wood, with a sturdy aluminum roof. To the back it bordered a steep part of the ravine. She felt the handle of the door—it wasn't locked. She knocked and felt like an idiot. If someone was there they would have heard her by now. She started feeling more and more confused. Could someone be hiding out in the Rommele forest?

Warning bells started going off inside her head. At first she dismissed these. She was never one to get scared easily. She had run across unpleasant men in remote areas before and although it had sometimes frightened her, she had always managed to control her fears and put up a tough front. Nothing had ever happened, and nothing was going to happen today. But she couldn't help feeling she was ignoring common sense by investigating this hut on her own. Only someone who needed to hide from prying eyes would have chosen a place like this. On the other hand, she did not want to turn back without finding out what was in here. Her path had indeed had a destination. No one without her trained eyes would have spotted it. But the person who used the hut had not even followed the
old path. That was strange. Was the old path she had found simply a backup, the way foxholes had more than one exit? Her curiosity got the better of her.

She opened the door to the hut and looked in. There were two small windows on either side, but they only let in a little light. She turned on the flashlight. There was a bed on one side and on the other side a small table with a chair, two gas lamps, and a camp stove. Who lived here? How long had it been empty? She leaned over and felt the blanket on the bed. It wasn't damp.
Someone has been here recently,
she thought.
In the last couple of days
. Again she thought she had better leave. The person who had stayed here was not the kind to welcome visitors.

She was about to turn and leave when the beam of her flashlight fell on a book lying on the ground next to the bed. She bent down. It was a copy of the Bible. She opened it and saw a name that had been scratched out. The book was well-thumbed and torn in places. Various verses had been underlined and annotated. She carefully put the book down where she had found it. She turned off the flashlight and immediately realized that something had changed. There was more light now than before. Someone must have opened the door. She turned, but it was too late. The blow to her face came with the force of a charging predator. She was plunged into a deep and bottomless darkness.

11

After her visit to Henrietta, Linda sat up in the apartment waiting for her father to come home. But by the time he softly pushed the front door open at two o'clock in the morning, she had already fallen asleep on the sofa with a blanket pulled up to her ears. When she woke a few hours later it was from a nightmare. She couldn't remember what she had dreamed, just that she felt as if she were being suffocated. Low snores rolled through the apartment, like breakers on the shore. Her father's bedside light was still on. He lay flat on his back, wrapped in his sheet, not unlike a large walrus comfortably stretched out on a rock. She leaned over and checked his breath between snores. Definitely alcohol.

She wondered who he could have been drinking with. The pants that lay on the ground were dirty as if he had walked through patches of mud.
He's been out in the country,
she thought.
That means a night of drinking with Sten Widén. They've sat out in the stables and shared a bottle of vodka.