The box contained all kinds of treasures: letters that she and Iben had written to each other, a friendship ring that Hedda had helped them to craft out of silver wire. And a long black feather they’d found in the middle of the lake.
‘A swan’s feather,’ Hedda had said. ‘From a black swan. A cygne noir.’
‘What does it mean?’ Laura had asked.
‘That nothing is impossible,’ Hedda had replied with the smile that meant you couldn’t tell if she was joking or serious. ‘I think it’s a present for you from the nymph.’
To be honest, Laura was pretty sure the present was an ordinary crow’s feather. She’d never seen a black swan, not in a zoo or on TV, and certainly not here at Vintersjön. But she kept the feather anyway.
Outside it had begun to snow again, bigger flakes this time. Laura stood by the window contemplating the snowfall for a while, rolling the feather between her fingers as her breath misted up the glass. The lake shimmered faintly, and against the sky by the western shore it was just possible to make out the lights of the village. Opposite the house, far away on the northern shore, the solitary lamp on Miller’s boathouse shone out as usual. Laura breathed on the glass and wrote her initials, then Jack’s, in the condensation with the feather. She just had time to draw a heart around them before the whole thing disappeared. The silent snow was falling more thickly now.
She was about to go back to bed when she saw a movement outside. Some of the exterior lights in the holiday village were still on, and for a second she glimpsed something among the trees – a silhouette with flowing hair, moving almost unnaturally quickly through the shadows before being swallowed up by the darkness. A young woman.
Laura gasped.
Sometimes, especially in the winter, the nymph comes ashore, searching for someone to lure into the deep water. In order to ease her loneliness.
She pressed her face to the glass, but the forest was once again dark and still.
12
Laura is woken by George the eighth, or whatever number the cat might be, rubbing her face against Laura’s own. It is light outside, and it takes a few seconds before she realises that she’s slept the whole night on top of the covers.
She needs a pee, her mouth is as dry as dust, and her jaws and teeth ache because she didn’t use her mouth guard.
She pushes the cat away and drags herself to her feet. The bathroom is more or less what she’d expected. A single dirty towel, yellow stains in the washbasin from the dripping tap. The toilet seat is broken. She puts paper around the rim of the bowl before cautiously sitting down. The bath tap is within reach, and she can’t resist trying to turn it, but it refuses to move. She can’t see any soap, shampoo or bath towels, so presumably Hedda used to shower in the sauna block by the pontoon.
Somehow the house looks even more depressing in daylight. The knowledge that she’s slept here makes her skin crawl. She ought to go to the hotel and scrub all this misery away, as she’d planned to do last night, but her curiosity has been aroused again, and mixed with a dose of nostalgia, it keeps her here.
She nudges open the doors to the remaining rooms. Hedda’s bedroom door barely moves because of all the crap. Judging by the blanket and pillow on the sofa, she’s been sleeping in the living room for the past few years. It’s possible to get into the studio/office, but it’s full of cardboard boxes, one piled high with blue bookkeeping files in no particular order.
Laura goes into the living room, gazes at the chaos. Most of the stuff has probably come from the holiday cabins. She thinks she recognises some pine chairs and various items of kitchen equipment, and when she spots several of Hedda’s home-made ashtrays on top of an old fridge, she’s certain.
Presumably Hedda had tried to salvage anything worth saving. She might even have had a plan for all this stuff, at least in the beginning – but that must have been many years ago.
Laura goes back to her bedroom, an island of tidiness in a sea of chaos. She runs her fingers along the bookshelf and finds only a thin coating of dust. Hedda must have cleaned in here quite recently, maybe only a few days before her death.
But why?
Why clean a room for someone who never comes? Someone whom Hedda has made no attempt to invite for thirty years, yet she still seems to have been expecting Laura.
Yesterday’s anger has given way to other feelings.
Mainly melancholy.
The faded photograph of her and Jack as children is still on the shelf. They are very much alike. Both blue-eyed, Laura with red hair, Jack blond. Her eight-year-old self is smiling, stealing an admiring glance at Jack out of the corner of her eye. He is three years older, and has just moved in.
This is Jack. He’s going to be living with us.
Why?
Because this is his home now. We’re his family.
She’s never actually heard the full story from Jack. Hedda simply said that Jack’s mother couldn’t take care of him, and that he’d been with a couple of foster families. At Gärdsnäset Jack had finally found a place where he was welcome. Loved.
She puts down the photograph and goes over to the wardrobe in the corner. Inside she finds a pair of dungarees and a T-shirt that must have been hers. It’s covered in a multitude of stains in different colours, and the sight of it makes her heart contract.
Oil paints, pastels, charcoal.
Even strokes, my little princess. Be patient.
She kneels down. The piece of foam rubber is still there. She lifts the plastic matting, opens the inspection hatch and uses the torch on her phone to illuminate the crawl space.
The first thing she sees is a large, unfamiliar object. Some kind of fan, humming quietly. Beyond it a metal ventilation shaft stretches all the way to a grille on the side of the house facing the lake.
Laura tries to find her treasure, but the cigar box is gone. It doesn’t really matter. She can hardly remember what was in it, apart from the black feather that her aunt claimed came from a black swan. A cygne noir.
These days Laura knows exactly what the term means. She’s heard it used in business circles. A black swan is an anomaly, something that is totally unexpected and has far-reaching consequences. Like getting pregnant when you’re over forty, even though the doctors had said it was impossible.
Nothing is impossible, my little princess. Not even the impossible.
As soon as Laura steps outside, the crows begin to caw loudly, sounding the alarm. The darkness of the previous evening had hidden all the nests in the trees near the house and the pontoon. The black birds with their almost ridiculously large beaks sidle to the ends of the branches, flapping their wings and staring at her. Some of the more nervous ones are already circling in the air above. To her annoyance she discovers that she has parked her car right under one of the trees. Needless to say, the roof is spattered with bird shit, which contains not only harmful bacteria, but also corrosive ammonia.
She must find a car wash, as soon as possible. But there is one more place she needs to check out before she leaves.
The steep wooden steps on the side of the boathouse are covered in snow, and the wooden handrail is broken in places. She begins to climb, then stops and flexes her knees to assess the stability. The steps don’t move, they merely creak a little.
The door to the upper floor is locked, and the window beside it is covered with a sheet of plywood. She tries the keys in the bundle Håkansson gave her, and finds the right one at the fifth attempt. The handle squeaks as she cautiously opens the door.