I returned to the path and continued walking, clapping my gloved hands in an attempt to warm them. Even with two pairs of socks, my feet prickled with pins and needles. I’d gone too far now to turn back.
To steady myself, I counted my breaths. After nearly a thousand, I saw a metal sign nailed to a tree. Freckled with rust, it looked like it dated to the early 1960s—a picture of two primitive log cabins surrounded by pine trees. A hint of blue in the background suggested water. I swiped snow from the metal to read the faded printing.
SOLSTRÅLENS STUGBY
I saw no sign of buildings, not even ruins. I kept walking, curious. The wind grew stronger, flattening my hair across my scalp. Colder, too, carrying a brackish smell—I must be very near the sea. The trees grew more sparsely, their limbs twisted into corkscrews. The persistent low thunder in my ears became the sound of waves.
Before me stretched a vast darkness, white fringed with spray. Waves crashed over onto a pebble beach as I walked to the water’s edge. Miles and miles away, fairy lights glimmered, diamond bright: the running lights of container ships and ferries that plied the Baltic between Sweden and Estonia and Finland. Huge clumps of bladder wrack littered the beach, like bodies washed onshore. Plastic bags and bottles were everywhere, lengths of yellow nylon cords snagged on driftwood. Heaps of dirty snow turned out to be chunks of broken Styrofoam. A dead seagull lay atop a sheet of metal, its foot trapped in a refrigerator grating. I smelled rotting fish, a whiff of diesel fuel.
I hugged myself, my leather jacket little protection from the unrelenting wind. Icy water oozed through the soles of my cowboy boots. I took out my camera, turning sideways to shield it from the spray, popped the lens cap, and shot a few pictures of the ruined beach. There wasn’t enough light, but that didn’t matter. The process of focusing, of framing the world as I wanted to see it, was enough. I replaced the lens cap and walked farther along the shore, searching for the cabins pictured on the metal sign.
I nearly missed them, hidden within a dense stand of cedars a hundred yards from the beach. The trees and cabins occupied a miniature peninsula, separated from me by a twenty-foot-wide channel. During high tide or severe weather, it would have been impassable without a boat.
Now the water was only an inch or two deep. Patches of ribbed sand rose above the surface to provide solid footing. I saw no lights in any of the cabins, just a wash of pale gray that stood out in stark contrast to the black cedar. I gave a cursory glance over my shoulder, then splashed across the channel.
The frigid water flowed more swiftly than I’d anticipated, sucking hungrily at my boots. I found purchase on a small sandbar and stood for a moment, buffeted by the wind, before making my way to the other bank. I scrambled onshore and hurried up the beach, my knee ablaze from the icy water and the Baltic wind. I slipped and skidded on wet rocks before I reached hard-packed sand, then a wild hedge of dwarf rugosa roses and bayberry, and finally sandy soil feathered with pine needles.
The sky was noticeably lighter now, the silhouettes of evergreens faintly green against indigo. A memory of summers past still clung to the lonely spit of land, the smells of balsam fir and bracken. Fist-sized stones marked out a path now thick with moss and pine needles.
The point had been scoured of snow by the steady wind, but my boots squelched as I ran the last few steps to the closest cabin, nearly invisible behind the cedars. I slowed, looking for the door. Tree limbs had overgrown the roof and walls, as though seeking to protect the structure from the wind, leaving only a glint of windows.
I limped to the side of the cabin. An immense cedar had fallen during a storm, a mass of crushed branches and dead greenery the size of a bus, exposing the cabin’s side wall. This was what I had glimpsed from the beach—weathered siding that had originally been rust colored, now gray. It appeared older than the log cabins depicted on the sign, more like a prefab cottage from the 1940s with board-and-batten siding. The torn tar-paper roof revealed uninsulated rafters and crossbeams.
I rubbed at the only window, frosted with grit, and peered inside. A single unfurnished room, open to the rafters. Its stained plank floors were spattered with the husks of insects. I could see the sky softening to violet through holes in the ceiling.
I turned and walked to the back of the cottage. Four other cottages stood within view, all as overgrown as this one, each with its own weather-beaten privy. They’d been sited to allow a discreet distance between them, screened by spruce and pine and the ubiquitous cedar. Beyond the four cottages was another channel, easily twice as wide as the one I’d crossed. The narrow peninsula was practically an island, connected to the mainland by a slender spit of land. In heavy weather, it actually would become an island.
Whoever used to vacation here valued privacy. On the far side of the channel was the forest. A mile or so through those trees was the homestead, guarded by a one-eyed god whose ancient worshippers might have built the stone ship I’d seen.
The cabins appeared neither nostalgic nor threatening. Like the homestead, the scene was disconcertingly mundane. Gazing at them, I felt the prick of damage, like a single hair plucked from my skin, and when I ran my tongue across my parched lips, I tasted something more acrid than salt or meth: the chemical afterburn of trauma. If Tindra Bergstrand was still alive, she was here.