Open Grave: A Mystery (28 page)

Agnes did not understand the curious attachment she felt for Greta. They had never been particularly close, but now the cottage and her sister stood out in a light shimmer that perhaps was not completely grounded in reality. The cottage was crooked and drafty, cold in the winter, the kitchen was old-fashioned, and her sister was often peevish and incommunicative.

But none of that mattered. She wanted to go home. She also wanted to settle down on the couch in front of the TV.

She did not know what Greta would think about having company, but there was no turning back. With that conviction she got up, turned on the ceiling light, went over to the telephone, and dialed the number to the island. Her sister answered after a couple of rings, which meant she had not yet sat down in front of the TV.

Agnes told her quite briefly and without superfluous comment that she would be quitting at Ohler’s and coming out to the island within a couple of days. She said nothing about the future, if her intention was to stay for good or if the visit was to be seen as an interim stop before she got something of her own.

To her great surprise Greta had no comment but instead simply asked if Agnes needed help. Perhaps Viktor’s cousin’s grandson Ronald could come with his big car so that Agnes could take everything with her? After a moment of hesitation Agnes accepted the offer and they decided that Ronald, if he was able, would come on Saturday morning. Greta insisted that she herself would show up during the day tomorrow to help pack. Agnes understood that Greta also wanted to see the house one last time.

Agnes’s hand was shaking when she hung up the phone. Something awful was in the process of happening, she felt it in her whole body. During the call with her sister she had taken great pains not to let her inner tension be known, but now she let out the worry and anxiety. She was forced to lay down, only to get up a short time later and restlessly wander around the room. At any moment the bell might ring, or perhaps more likely, Birgitta would knock and in her gentlest voice ask if everything was all right.

But they left her in peace. The whole house seemed to be holding its breath. Her decision to give notice had shaken things up properly.

It struck her as she stood looking out over the dark garden that Greta’s suggestion to come into town was also a way to support her little sister. Greta surely sensed that it was not a completely painless maneuver to leave the professor. The tension in her stomach remained but the trembling decreased somewhat. She was holding steady.

The lights were on at Bunde’s, likewise at the associate professor’s, but at Lundquist’s it was dark. She wondered for a while about the gardener but not for long, for why should she care about the professor’s apple trees and bushes? And his remark about time was not so astounding, it was surely more common than she had thought.

Instead, in her thoughts she planned her packing. She had not accumulated much and that was just as well. Ronald would carry it out to the car in a jiffy. The thought made her smile. How quickly they would disappear. Before the others really understood what had happened, she would be sitting perched in the passenger seat alongside Ronald in his gigantic car. Greta would do all the talking from the backseat. Ronald would as always sit silently. They had last met at Viktor’s funeral and she happened to think about everyone who had gathered at Gr
ä
s
ö
Church. The majority she recognized, the others Greta had identified. Stronger than ever she felt that she wanted to go home to the island.

For the first time in many years, perhaps decades, she lingered in her drawing room for an entire evening and went to bed without having asked whether the professor wanted something before bedtime.

Thirty

Friday was going to be
rainy. It was pouring down already early in the morning. Karsten Haller cancelled all plans for tree pruning. The maples in
Å
rsta would still be there after the weekend. And if they weren’t it didn’t matter to him.

Instead he took the bus down to the city to visit a travel agency on Drottninggatan. There he had been well treated before, and he felt that a friendly reception was even more important this time. Perhaps he would never need the services of a travel agency again. He was on the point of leaving the country and now every human contact and every transaction had significance. These were the memories he would carry with him and he did not want to have bitter thoughts now at the end.

He stepped into the agency’s office with a smile and half an hour later he stepped out with a smile.

He walked along the street with the quiet exhilaration of a person who has just made a life-altering decision—a mixture of reverence, euphoria, and an absolute conviction of having chosen the right path. But despite the light-heartedness, every step, every thought, was of the greatest importance. Even the rain drumming against his umbrella seemed to have a message. For Karsten Haller rain was something good, it made the semidesert bloom and fish that had been lying still, apparently dead, in the mud of the rivers waken to life. But even the absence of rain could be good. Then the animals flocked by the few waterholes. The clouds of dust on the horizon heralded migrating hordes of grass-eaters.

Now he was not stirring up much dust on Fyristorg. It was still raining intensely. He had decided to exchange the bundle of five-hundred-kronor bills from Ohler’s safe. It went more smoothly than he thought.

“Have a nice trip,” the young woman behind the security glass chirped, as she pushed over the yellow packet of money.

He had said something about visiting his relatives in the United States, with a vague sense that he had to justify his transaction.
LUDMILLA
, as it said on the woman’s name tag, did not think there was anything strange about his wanting to exchange twenty-five thousand kronor to American dollars.

Crime is encouraged, he thought, smiling back, left the premises and headed for the next exchange office, which was in a shopping arcade.

There it went just as smoothly. He quickly stuffed the money in the inside pocket of his jacket and set a course for the exit. When he caught sight of his own mirror image outside a store he did a double take; he looked like he had shoplifted something. He slowed down and looked around. Did someone perhaps think that he was behaving strangely? But no one seemed to take any notice. A teenager bumped into him, but did not apologize, on the contrary he glared at Karsten as if to say “Get out of the way, old man.”

He went into the pharmacy in the next arcade. He was sweating but did not want to unbutton his jacket. Now he realized that the theft was irrevocable.

He picked up aspirin and sunscreen. In the line to the register he suddenly became fretful. He wanted to shove the other customers to the side, throw a couple of hundreds at the clerk, and rush away.

Once out on the street he made the decision that he’d been tossing around ever since the last visit to Ohler: He would return and steal the rest of the bundles in the safe. Why should the rapist have so much, and in a couple of months a few million more in prize money?

He hailed a taxi that was passing. He wanted to get home as quickly as possible, get away from the people, the clamor in the stores, and the noise on the streets.

The taxi driver was black and Karsten took that as a good sign. During the ride he leaned back, closed his eyes, and the images from Namibia came to him. He smiled. Everything was falling into place. The old man would be punished. He would let himself be swallowed up by the interior of Africa. He opened his eyes. The rain was lashing against the windows of the taxi. It’s spring in Etosha now, he thought.

Thirty-one

“Do you remember
Evert
Gustavsson?”

Agnes was staring at her sister. She did not understand how Greta could make small talk the way she had done most of the time since she came to the house. She shook her head.

“You must. Evert was part of the congregation. Father was lighthouse keeper before he went to sea again. He was torpedoed.”

Now Agnes remembered. Evert had been in love with Anna in that innocent way, surely never expressed but obvious to anyone and everyone. When Aron became increasingly fierce in his attacks against his own daughter Evert left the congregation; the visits became less frequent and then finally stopped completely.

“He died this week,” Greta reported.

Agnes sighed. Death was one of the few things that could really liven up her sister.

“He collapsed. Just like Father.”

They were packing. Greta carefully folded up her sister’s clothes and placed them in garbage bags that she had been sensible enough to buy on the way. She had also brought with her a couple of shopping bags and a suitcase, borrowed from Ronald, and in it Agnes packed small things she had collected over the years.

She was grateful anyway for her sister’s carefree talk. Greta seemed to be taking it lightly that Agnes so unexpectedly and hastily was going to leave Ohler and Uppsala. It made the leaving less troublesome.

Greta had also taken the worst blows with the professor, because at first he refused to believe Agnes when she told him that she was going to leave for good the following day. It was only when Greta showed up that he realized the seriousness and started blustering about breach of contract. Then Agnes chose to go upstairs, although she overheard Greta’s impudent reminder that the Master and Servant Acts had been repealed. The professor’s response consisted of an inarticulate roar, after which they continued to quarrel for quite some time. It did not stop until Birgitta started crying loudly.

Greta surprised her. Agnes would be eternally grateful for her unconditional support.

“What if he’d married Anna?” Greta continued her monologue on Evert Gustavsson. “Then they would have stayed on the island. Evert was a builder later, you know that?”

Agnes stopped. In her hand she was holding a silk cloth she had received once from the old professor’s wife. She sensed that Greta’s talk about Anna was because they were now in the process of ending an era that had been started by their big sister. But it felt unpleasant anyway. Anna had not been heard from in all these years.

She considered herself betrayed, Agnes understood that, but she thought that was unjust. She had only been a child and Greta a teenager, and they had not judged Anna. It was Aron and the congregation that rejected her.

“Why didn’t she ever call or write?” Greta asked, as if she was reading Agnes’s thoughts.

“She couldn’t bear to,” Agnes maintained. “The wound was too deep. It never healed.”

“We’ll never know,” said Greta sadly.

“We’ll never know,” repeated Agnes, who thought that the wound still persisted. The time when Anna lived with Viola was the period that they could remember with a certain measure of joy. Anna had been happy the times the little sisters defied their father’s prohibition and sneaked over to Viola. But then, when Anna disappeared from the island, all contact ended.

They looked at each other. This unexpected openness between them, airing a mystery they had actually never discussed, filled Agnes with a number of conflicting thoughts. She realized that they only had each other, and her sister had surely realized the same thing. Hence her support and involvement in the move.

She threw the cloth in the garbage bag.

“Are you going to throw it away?”

“I got it from Lydia,” said Agnes.

“I know, I got one like it. She must have found some excess inventory.”

Agnes smiled mournfully. Perhaps Anna got a cloth too? she thought, turning around to hide her emotion.

Packing Agnes’s belongings did not take long. They made the revolutionary decision not to clean the bedroom and drawing room,
Birgitta could just as well do that
, Greta thought.

Instead they sat down in front of the TV. They were both waiting for Birgitta to show up. The professor would never humble himself to knock on the door. He had not, as far as Agnes could remember, set foot in the drawing room since it was transformed into her living room.

Birgitta came after half an hour. Quite certainly she had listened through the door and heard that the TV was on. She knocked and opened the door at the same moment. Her attempt to look unconcerned made an almost comic impression, or else she had been tricked by the sound of the TV, thought they had canceled the plans for retirement and now were staring at TV. But when she caught sight of the suitcase and the garbage bags Birgitta turned pale and the mask fell.

“Is this the thanks we get, Agnes?” she whimpered in a broken voice.

The crushed expression and the outstretched arms—Agnes happened to think of a biblical figure depicted in the illustrated scriptures of her childhood—completed the spectacle of a theatrical composition, presented to create a bad conscience, nothing else. Birgitta no doubt understood at that moment that Operation Persuasion was meaningless. If nothing else Greta’s discouraging expression and posture vouched for that. The sister was also the one who answered.

“Thanks for what?”

Birgitta took a few quick steps into the room. Agnes knew what was coming. The spitting image of Papa Bertram. Now the heavy artillery is waiting.

But she did not have her father’s perseverance, because after only a couple of minutes she fell silent, apparently drained. The final argument was that she was really the one who had arranged that Agnes got access to the drawing room.

“And how many domestic servants can live so regally?” she concluded the tirade.

Agnes stared at Birgitta. She remembered a ten-year-old girl who came running into the kitchen to seek shelter or consolation, or was simply eager to tell something, perhaps with a schoolbook or a drawing in hand. She remembered their chat in the kitchen only a few days ago.

Neither of the sisters commented on Birgitta’s outburst, which was followed by increasingly loud and uncontrolled sobbing. Agnes withstood the impulse to get up, but said something to the effect that it would surely work out. Greta glowered. Clearly she had firmly decided not to lift so much as a little finger for Birgitta.