Chapter 65

When we reached the shelter of the trees, I asked, “You sure you know the way from here?”

“Yes. There’s a path. I used to run back and forth between the cottages and the house all day long.”

She walked on ahead of me, holding back branches so they wouldn’t smack me in the face. Once my eyes adjusted, I could see the path, bordered by the stumps of trees felled decades ago. In summer, the ground would be thick with ferns and wildflowers and tall grass, difficult to navigate. Now thin snow covered everything. The dense firs provided some protection from the wind.

I was running on fumes. It had been hours since I had a drink. My skin itched, my eyes swam with random blots of light, eyes and arrows and indecipherable letters.

“Your app,” I said. “I think it imprinted on my brain.”

“It’s supposed to do that.”

“Why? It’s horrible. Like an acid flashback forty years after the fact.” She remained silent, so I tried another tack. “Back there—what were you saying about someone else, a girl?”

“In the kitchen. Freya said, ‘We can’t have another one,’ and they argued about it.”

“Who argued?”

“Her and Erik.”

“Shit.” I struggled to process this information. “So this guy Birdhouse, he assaulted you when you were a kid, and you’re telling me he kidnapped someone else and murdered them?”

“I don’t know. I think so.”

“Do you know who it was?”

“That’s all I heard. They stopped talking when Ville came in. I think that’s when he drugged me.”

“Freya and Erik—I saw them at the rally in London. Who are they?”

“Erik worked the farm when he was younger, for my father. They were very close, like brothers. This was before my father met Ville. I think Erik, maybe he was my mother’s boyfriend—I think they had an affair, but I didn’t understand. I was too young. Maybe I’m wrong. But I always thought that was why Erik seemed to hate his own wife. And when my father died, he left the farm to Ville, not Erik.”

“Why?”

“Ville had enough money to keep the farm alive. It never earned much—the holiday cottages, that was how we made money when I was little. Then my mother died, and Solstrålens Stugby closed. And my father met Ville and gave him the farm. Erik was upset, but he got over it. Now he and Freya run the farm for Ville.”

“She’s his wife?”

“Yes. But he treats her like a slave. Like an animal. He beats her.”

“How do you know?”

“I saw it.”

I recalled how Erik had spoken to Freya in Victoria Park; how the sleeve of her sweater rode up to expose a valknut tattoo and a band of raw skin above her wrist. I started when Tindra touched my arm.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” I scooped up more snow and pressed it against my knee. “Tell me what happened, whatever you remember.”

“First, tell me how you found me.”

I gave her an abbreviated version. When I stopped, Tindra frowned.

“Meth? I can’t believe you gave me meth. Is there more?”

“No. How much further?”

“A while—it’s over two miles to the house. When I was a girl, I could get there in twenty minutes.” She glanced at my leg. “Maybe you need a doctor.”

“Why didn’t you tell me your father was dead? And a white supremacist?”

“My father? Why would I even think of telling you that?”

“How did he know Birdhouse? Was he a fan?”

“I don’t know. Probably. I was too young to know about his music then. My father met him at a dog breeder’s in Scotland. They were both raising Kalkö sheep—they’re quite popular in Scotland. There was a woman who bred border collies, she had a litter, and my father and Ville were looking at the puppies on the same day. They both wanted the same dog. They ended up going to the pub to decide who should have her. By the end of the night they were friends.”

“Who got the dog?”

“My father. But he said Ville could have breeding rights when she was old enough. Ville started coming to the island to visit. He and my father had some kind of business arrangement—Ville gave him money. Ville kept sheep, too, but he was more of an amateur—what do you call that?”

“A gentleman farmer?”

“Yes. It was a hobby for him. But Ville’s sheep did really well, better than ours, because someone else actually ran the farm for him. When I was eleven, he started spending his summers here on Kalkö. He was at our house all the time. He always paid a lot of attention to me, and I crushed on him—he was good-looking and still kind of famous, right?”

She ripped a curl of birchbark from a tree, tearing it into ribbons as we trudged through the snow. She spoke quickly, but her tone remained detached. I wondered how many times, if any, she’d told this story; if Ludus Mentis had truly made it possible for her to overcome the traumas she’d experienced, or simply deadened her, the neurochemical equivalent of smack.

“What about the Nazi stuff?” I asked. “Did Ville turn your father on to that?”

“My father believed in a fairy-tale Sweden, the way white Americans believe in a dream. After my mother died, he got very angry about everything. The holiday cottages failed. The sheep died. He worked for a while at the cement plant, but then that failed, too. After Ville came, things got easier, but that was when my father began to talk more about Swedish identity. Vikings, the stone ships, folk music. He was too old for the skinheads—Odium, bands like that. He thought they were immature, too violent. He liked Viking rock.”

“Is that black metal?”

“Of course not. It celebrates our heritage—myths and the sea, how fate rules us all, whether we like it or not. Some of it’s very good. Also very loud. But my father mostly liked folk music. Swedish folk music, and Bob Dylan. Ville would bring CDs for us to listen to, and sometimes he’d play tapes of his own songs. He talked about how it was important that we Swedes treasure our own ways and beliefs, otherwise they would be lost, the way traditions were being lost in England. My father and Erik, they agreed with that—they didn’t need to be convinced.”

Her voice grew more thoughtful. “I don’t know if my father was always racist. I never heard him or my mother say anything about it. In school we were taught that all people are equal, but that was easy to say. There were no black people on the island then. I never saw a person with brown skin till I went to Stockholm. And when the cement plant brought in migrant workers from Bulgaria who would work very cheaply, my father wasn’t happy about that. But I was gone before the refugees started arriving.”

“Did you know he had a podcast on the Herla Network?”

“One of my cousins in Stockholm told me—she was horrified. I was, too, but I wasn’t surprised.”

We walked in silence. An owl called, and something small chittered in the underbrush.

“How did it start?” I asked. “With you and Gwilym?”

“We would have a bonfire on the beach at night, and he would sing to me. I loved that, though some of the songs were frightening. Ravens picking out dead people’s eyes, ghost women. He said that folk songs were supposed to be scary. There was one about two dead sisters and a bone harp that used to give me nightmares.”

She twisted her dreadlock around a finger. “I was really smart, but no one ever thought I was pretty. But Ville always told me I was beautiful. He’d bring me presents, clothes he bought in London. CDs. He took pictures of me, he said I could be a model if I wanted to.”

“He was grooming you.”

“Yes.”

Her voice was controlled, her face composed. She seemed untouched by the cold, or any of the events of the last thirty-six hours. Except for her pallor and the lack of an artisanal sweater, she might have stepped from one of those ads for Kalkö wool. I sensed that same chilling absence as when I first spoke to her in the garage: the void left when someone has ceded emotion to something even more powerful and destructive.

She cocked her head at me. “You really don’t look good.”

“I’m fine,” I said. I knew I wasn’t.