Julia realized she was looking at Ernst Adolfsson’s work.
Behind the stone statues stood a wooden house, a dark red rectangle out on the alvar among the low-growing trees and the juniper bushes, and beside the house stood Ernst’s bulky, rounded Volvo. Lights showed in several windows of the house.
She decided to take a closer look at Ernst Adolfsson’s artwork the following morning, before leaving Stenvik.
From here she could also make out Blå Jungfrun, a small blue-gray mound on the horizon. Blåkulla was another name for the island, where according to legend the witches would go to celebrate with Satan. No one lived there, the whole island was a national park, but you could go there on a day trip by boat. Julia had gone there as a little girl one sunny day, along with Lena and Gerlof and Ella.
There had been lots of round, pretty pebbles on the shores there, but Gerlof had warned her against taking any of them away with her. It would bring misfortune, he’d told her, so she hadn’t done it. But of course she’d had misfortune in her life anyway.
Julia turned her back on the witches’ island and turned back toward the boathouse.
Twenty minutes later she was sitting on the bed in the boathouse, listening to the wind and not feeling tired in the slightest. At around ten o’clock she tried to start reading one of the love stories she had with her, entitled The Secret of the Manor, but it was slow going. She closed the book and stared at the old compass on the table by the door.
She could have been in Gothenburg now, sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of wine and looking out at the streetlamps illuminating the empty road.
In Stenvik it was pitch dark. She had gone out for a pee, stumbling about on the stones and almost losing her bearings in the darkness just a few yards from the boathouse. She could no longer see the water down below her; she could only hear the sighing of the waves and the rattle of the pebbles as they reached the shore. Above her dense rain clouds scudded across the sky over the island like evil spirits.
As she squatted out there in the darkness, her bare bottom exposed to the wind, Julia’s thoughts turned involuntarily to the ghost who had turned up here on the shore one night at the beginning of the 1900s.
She remembered one of her grandmother Sara’s tales in the twilight hour: about how her husband and his brother had gone down one stormy night to haul their little fishing boats up to safety, away from the crashing waves.
As they stood there by the foaming water, hauling and dragging at their wooden gigs, a figure suddenly emerged from the darkness, a man wearing heavy oilskins, who began to tug one of the boats in the opposite direction, out to sea. Grandfather had yelled at him, and the figure had yelled back in very broken Swedish, repeating one word over and over again:
“Ösel!” he’d screamed. “Ösel!”
The fishermen had held on tight to their boat and the figure had suddenly turned and dashed out into the heaving waves. He had disappeared into the storm without a trace.
Julia quickly finished peeing beside the path outside the boathouse, then hurried back into the warmth and locked the door behind her. Then she remembered there was no running water down here; she’d have to go up to the cottage to fetch some.
Three days after the terrible storm, there came news from the northern tip of Öland: a ship had run aground at Böda and had been smashed to pieces by the waves three days earlier. The vessel had come from the Estonian island of Ösel. All those on board had perished in the storm, so the seaman that the fishermen in Stenvik had met and spoken to had been dead by that time. Dead and drowned.
Grandmother had nodded at Julia in the twilight.
A ghost of the shore.
Julia believed the story; it was a good tale, and she believed all the old stories she’d heard in the twilight. Somewhere along the coast the drowned seaman was surely still wandering, lost and alone.
Julia had no desire to go out again. She had no intention of fetching water; she’d just have to do without brushing her teeth tonight.
There were thick red candles in the windows of the boathouse. She lit one with her cigarette lighter before she went to bed, and left it burning for a while.
A candle for Jens. It was burning for his mother too.
In the glow of the flame she made a decision: no glass of wine and no sleeping pills tonight. She would fight against her grief. It was everywhere anyway, not only in Stenvik. Every time she met a young boy on the street, she could still be overcome by a sudden surge of grief.
When she saw her little address book lying on the bed beside Lena’s old cell phone, she picked up both of them on an impulse, flicked through the address book to find a number, and dialed it.
The phone worked. Two rings, three, four.
Then a muffled male voice answered. “Hello?”
It was already ten-thirty on a normal weekday evening. Julia had rung too late, but she had to continue now.
“Michael?”
“Yes?”
“It’s Julia.”
“Right... Hi, Julia.”
He sounded more tired than surprised. She tried to remember what Michael looked like, but couldn’t get a picture in her head.
“I’m on Öland. In Stenvik.”
“Right... Well, I’m in Copenhagen, as usual. I was asleep.”
“I know it’s late,” she said. “I just wanted to tell you a new clue has turned up.”
“A clue?”
“To our son’s disappearance,” she explained. “Jens.”
“Right,” he said.
“So I’ve come here... I thought you’d want to know. It probably isn’t an important clue, but it might...”
“How are you, Julia?”
“Fine... I can give you a call if anything else happens.”
“You do that,” he said. “You still seem to have my number. But if you could call a little earlier next time, that would be good.”
“Okay,” she said quickly.
“Bye, then.”
Michael hung up, and the telephone was silent.
Julia sat there with the cell phone in her hand. Okay. So she’d tested it out and found that it worked, but she knew she’d chosen the wrong person to call.
Michael had moved on long ago, even before they separated. From the beginning he’d been certain that Jens had gone down to the water and drowned. Sometimes she’d hated him for that conviction, sometimes she’d just been crippled by envy.
A few minutes later, when Julia had turned out the light and got into bed, still wearing her pants and sweater, down came the torrential rain that had been hanging in the air all evening.
It started very suddenly, hammering rapidly and frantically on the tin roof of the boathouse. Julia lay there in the darkness, listening to small streams beginning to babble along down the slope outside. She knew the boathouse was safe; it had survived every violent storm up to now, and she closed her eyes and fell asleep.
She didn’t hear the rain stop half an hour later. She didn’t hear any footsteps over by the quarry in the darkness; she didn’t hear a thing.
Öland, May 1943
Nils has owned the shore, he has owned Stenvik, and now he owns the whole of the alvar surrounding the village. When his mother doesn’t need his help in the house or the yard, he roams across it every day, taking long strides. In the yellow sunlight he walks over the Öland steppes with a rucksack slung over his shoulder and his shotgun in his hands.