“Hi, Joakim,” said Michael. “Are you in Stockholm?”
“No, we’re still on Öland. How are things?”
“Fine. Good to hear from you.”
And yet Joakim thought Michael sounded wary. Perhaps he was embarrassed over what had happened the last time they met.
“You’re feeling okay?” said Joakim. “And what about work?”
“Everything’s going really well,” said Michael. “Lots of exciting projects. Things are a bit hectic right now, coming up to Christmas.”
“Good… I just wanted to check up, make sure everything was okay. I mean, it was a bit of a hasty departure last time you came down here.”
“Yes,” said Michael, and hesitated before going on: “Sorry about that. I don’t know what it was…I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep…”
He fell silent.
“Lisa thought you’d had a nightmare,” said Joakim. “That you dreamed someone was standing by the bed.”
“Did she say that? I don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember who you saw?”
“No.”
“I’ve never seen anything strange around here,” said Joakim, “but I’ve felt things sometimes. And out in the barn I’ve found a wall in the hayloft where people-”
“So what about the renovation?” Michael interrupted him. “How’s all that going?”
“What?”
“Have you finished the wallpapering?”
“No… not quite.”
Joakim was confused, until he realized that Michael had no desire whatsoever to discuss unusual experiences or bad dreams. Whatever had happened to him that night, he had closed and locked the door on the memory.
“What are you doing at Christmas?” Joakim asked instead. “Will you be celebrating at home?”
“We’ll probably go to the cottage,” said Michael. “But we’re intending to be at home for New Year.”
“Maybe we can get together, then.”
The conversation didn’t last much longer. When Joakim had hung up, he looked out of the kitchen window, toward the film of ice on the sea and the empty shore. The frozen desolation almost made him miss the crowded streets of Stockholm.
“There’s a hidden room here,” said Joakim to Mirja Rambe. “A room without a door.”
“Really? Where?”
“Up in the hayloft. It’s big… I’ve paced out the barn, and the floor of the loft stops almost four yards before the outside wall.” He looked at Mirja. “You didn’t know?”
She shook her head.
“The wall with all those names on it is enough for me. That’s all the excitement I need.”
Mirja leaned forward on the big sofa and poured Joakim a steaming cup of coffee. Then she picked up a bottle of vodka and asked, “A drop in your coffee?”
“No thank you. I don’t drink spirits and-”
Mirja gave a short laugh. “Then I’ll have your ration,” she said, pouring the vodka for herself.
Mirja lived in a spacious apartment close to the cathedral in Kalmar, and had invited the family over for dinner this evening.
Livia and Gabriel finally got to meet their maternal grandmother. Both were quiet and wary when they walked in, and Livia looked suspiciously at a white marble statue of the upper half of a man’s body, standing in one corner. It was a while before she started talking. She had brought Foreman and two teddy bears with her, and introduced all three to her grandmother. Mirja took the family into her studio, where finished and unfinished paintings of Öland lined the walls. They all showed a flat, blossoming green landscape beneath a cloudless sky.
For someone who had hardly bothered about her grandchildren up to now, Mirja was remarkably interested in them. When they had eaten their meat-filled dumplings, she worked hard to get Gabriel to come and sit on her knee, and finally succeeded. But he only stayed put for a few minutes before running off into the TV room to watch children’s programs with Livia.
“So it’s just the two of us,” said Mirja, sitting down on the sofa in the main room.
“Fine,” said Joakim.
Mirja had none of her own paintings on the walls, but two of her mother Torun’s pictures of the blizzard hung in the main room. Both depicted the snowstorm approaching the coast, like a black curtain about to fall on the twin lighthouses. Just like the picture at Eel Point, these were winter
paintings that exuded hidden menace and the premonition of evil.
Joakim looked in vain for traces of Katrine in the apartment. She had always loved bright, clean lines, but her mother had decorated the rooms with dark, flowery wallpaper and curtains, Persian rugs, and black leather sofas and chairs.
Mirja had no photographs of her dead daughter or her half siblings. She did, however, have several large and small pictures of herself and a young man, perhaps twenty years her junior, with a blond goatee beard and spiky hair.
She saw Joakim staring at the pictures and nodded toward the man.
“Ulf,” she said. “He’s off playing indoor hockey, otherwise you could have met him.”
“So you’re a couple…” said Joakim, “you and the hockey player?”
A stupid question. Mirja smiled.
“Does that bother you?”
Joakim shook his head.
“Good, because it bothers a lot of other people,” said Mirja. “Katrine, certainly, even if she never said anything… Older women aren’t supposed to have a sex life. But Ulf doesn’t seem to be complaining, and I’m certainly not.”
“On the contrary, you seem proud of it,” said Joakim.
Mirja laughed. “Love is blind, or so they say.”
She drank her coffee and lit a cigarette.
“One of the police officers in Marnäs wants to carry on with the investigation,” said Joakim after a while. “She’s called me a couple of times.”
He didn’t need to explain which investigation he was talking about.
“Right,” said Mirja. “She’s welcome to do that, I suppose.”
“Sure, if it provides any answers… but it won’t bring Katrine back.”
“I know why she died,” said Mirja, drawing on her cigarette.
Joakim looked up. “You do?”
“It was the house.”
“The house?”
Mirja laughed briefly, but she wasn’t smiling. “That damned house is full of unhappiness,” she said. “It’s destroyed the lives of every family that has ever lived there.”
Joakim looked at her, surprised by the comment. “You can’t blame unhappiness on a house.”
Mirja stubbed out her cigarette.
Joakim changed the subject.
“I’m having a visitor next week, a retired guy who knows the house. His name is Gerlof Davidsson. Have you met him?”
Mirja shook her head. “But I think his brother lived close by,” she said. “Ragnar. I met him.”
“Anyway… Gerlof is going to tell me about the history of Eel Point.”
“I can do that, if you’re so curious.”
Mirja took another huge gulp of her coffee. Joakim thought her eyes were already beginning to look slightly glazed from the alcohol.
“So how did you end up at Eel Point?” he asked. “You and your mother?”
“The rent was low,” said Mirja. “That was the most important thing for Mom. She spent the money she earned from cleaning on canvases and oils, and she was always short of money. So we had to find places to live to fit in with that.”
“Was the place already looking shabby by then?”
“It was getting that way,” said Mirja. “Eel Point was still owned by the state at that stage, but it was rented to someone on the island for a small amount of money… some farmer who didn’t put a penny into fixing it up. Mom and I were the only ones who were prepared to live in the outbuilding in the winter.”
She drank some more of her coffee concoction.
The children were laughing loudly at something in the TV room. Joakim thought for a while, then asked, “Did Katrine ever talk to you about Ethel?”
“No,” said Mirja. “Who’s Ethel?”
“She was my older sister. She died last year… almost exactly a year ago. She was a user.”