CHAPTER

26

THE DRIVE UP to Rørvig took an hour and a half, which was significantly longer than it had taken in Martin’s Tesla on a snow-free highway the week before.

Heloise had picked up the Ford from the newspaper’s vehicle pool at around ten and was now slowly rolling through the neighborhood of summer vacation homes looking for something she couldn’t quite put her finger on, just something that would make all the pieces in her thoughts fall into place.

There was more snow up here than in Copenhagen, and most of the small wooden houses looked as if they had been closed up for the winter, dark and deserted. Several of them had shutters over their windows, and there were no footprints to be seen in the snowy front yards. Only prints from roe deer hooves, mouse feet, and hare paws.

Heloise drove up and down the narrow, bumpy lanes for an hour and was losing her enthusiasm when she came by an uneven forest road on her right side. She hit the brakes and looked down the road, which curved a little farther in, heading into the dense, coniferous forest, which began right behind the set-back properties. It was hard to see what was hiding at the end of the road. The snow hadn’t been plowed and there was a sign by the entrance.

Private property. No access.

Heloise remembered having seen the sign the previous weekend and ignoring its prohibition. She had turned onto the road anyway. Was that where she had seen the house with the barn?

She turned off the engine and got out of the car. The snow crunched loudly beneath her boots as she walked, and the dark branches above her stole the light from the sky as she made her way farther into the woods.

Heloise spotted a house wrapped in overgrown ivy and years of dirt, and she scanned it for signs of life. All the windows in the main house were covered with red linen curtains and nothing was visible through the cracks other than coal-black darkness.

Heloise looked at the name that hung on the door.

Van Dolmens, it said, a Dutch-sounding last name.

She started walking around toward the backyard and had made it to the corner of the house when she heard a voice behind her.

“What do you want?”

Heloise turned with a start toward the front door, which was now ajar. She could see a thin strip of an elderly woman’s face. The woman’s one visible eye stared coolly at Heloise.

Heloise nodded politely. “Hi there! I was just walking by and saw that—”

“Didn’t you see the sign out by the road?” the woman asked. “This is private property. You’re trespassing.”

Heloise continued unabashedly. “There’s a barn out back, isn’t there?” She pointed around behind the house and took a couple more steps in that direction.

The woman opened her door a little farther. She was wearing a light gray terrycloth bathrobe, and a Norwegian forest cat rubbed playfully against her bare ankles. From somewhere inside the house, Heloise could hear the faint tones of an old Supremes song.

Baby, baby. Baby, don’t leave me. Please don’t leave me. All by myself.

“It’s not a barn,” the woman said. “It’s a shed.”

“Okay, we’ll call it a shed.” Heloise smiled. “Could I see it?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, and she tilted her head back. “Can you see it? Why?”

“I take pictures of old barns. I’d really like to take one of yours … of your shed. If you don’t mind?”

The woman reluctantly eyed her up and down. “But you don’t have a camera with you …”

Heloise pulled her iPhone out of her pocket. “I use this.”

The woman hesitated for a second and then shook her head. “The shed collapsed. The snow was too heavy and … Bad construction, old piece of junk.”

“Could I just go around and see?” Heloise took another couple of steps farther from the house.

“No, I’m going to ask you to move on. This is private property.”

Heloise ignored the woman’s wishes and proceeded around the house.

“Hey!” The woman leaned out the door and called after her. Then she rustled around in her entryway and put on a pair of boots. “Hey, you there!”

Heloise quickly rounded the corner of the house. Then she slowed down.

There wasn’t much to see back there. What had once been a shed now looked like a pile of pick-up sticks, dropped by a careless hand. The boards lay jumbled in a big pile and were covered with snow. It was impossible to tell what the building had looked like before it had collapsed, and Heloise looked for those two round windows she had seen in the picture in the case file.

She walked over and started lifting off boards and brushing aside snow, but before she had time to find a line or detail in the wood that she recognized, the woman caught up to her and grabbed her upper arm.

“This is private property,” she repeated. “Get out of here!”

Heloise pulled her arm back and showed her a picture of Lukas Bjerre on her phone.

“Have you seen this kid?” she asked. “He’s missing.”

The woman looked at the picture. Then her eyes softened a little.

“Is that why you’re here? You’re looking for that boy?”

“He took this picture the other day.” Heloise showed her the picture of the barn. “And then after that he disappeared, and now coincidently your shed has collapsed … His name’s Lukas Bjerre.”

“Yes, I know who he is.”

Heloise’s heartrate sped up. “You know him?”

“Are you with the police?”

“No, I’m a journalist.”

The woman was quiet for a moment. Then she nodded. “I’ve been following the case. Come inside and I’ll show you what the shed looked like before it collapsed. I have a couple of old pictures of it in the house somewhere.”

Heloise cast a hesitant glance at the main house. She stood in the snow up to her mid-calves and her feet wouldn’t budge.

“It’s all right,” the woman said, holding out her hand. “I’m Rita.”

Heloise took the woman’s hand. “Heloise Kaldan.”

“I didn’t mean to be rude just now, but I thought you were from the municipality.”

“The municipality?”

“Yes, from the permit office. They’ve started dropping by and calling nonstop with their tape measures and building codes. What do they care if my house sticks out ten inches too far in one direction or the other? It’s been like this for thirty years. And who’s it going to bother anyway? There’s no one around!” She flung out her arms and started walking back to the front door. “You comin’?”

The woman left her door open as she disappeared into the house.

Heloise looked around for a moment and then followed her.

She took off her winter boots in the front hall and followed the woman into the living room in her socks. It was nice and warm inside, cramped and dark in a way that made Heloise think about the forts she used to build as a kid out of sofa cushions in her dad’s apartment on Suensonsgade. She would lie inside in the darkness with a flashlight and read comic books and eat cookies while the other neighborhood kids played outside. Heloise had opted out of the sunshine and the rest of the world—and loved it.

“Now, let me see. Where did I put those pictures?” the woman said. She opened the curtains and let the winter light into the room. She walked over to a tall bookshelf, its shelves filled with stacks of books, binders, knickknacks, and ceramics, and pulled an old wooden beer crate off the bottom shelf.

“I bet there’s something in here,” she said and dug through its contents. She pulled a Kodak photo envelope out of the crate. She handed it to Heloise and then went out into the kitchen, where a coffee maker had started making hissing and gurgling noises.

Heloise opened the envelope and browsed through the pictures. They were photos of family life, and she recognized the woman of the house in her younger years. She paused at a picture that looked like it was taken on a summer day on the patio behind the house. A man was sitting at a picnic table—a middle-aged man in shorts, a polo shirt, and baseball hat—and a lanky teenage girl in a Metallica T-shirt with long, henna-red hair. Heloise could see from the date stamp on the back of the picture that it had been developed in 1999, the same year she had graduated from high school. Memories of that day flashed through her mind: the victory dance around the statue in the center of Kongens Nytorv with Gerda. Cans of beer, laughter, and Pearl Jam on repeat.

Dreaming about the life that awaited them …

“I’ve been following the case in the news,” the woman said with curiosity. She had reappeared beside Heloise. “Do you think the boy is in our neighborhood? In a barn?”

“Is this your family?” Heloise asked instead of answering her question. She held out the picture.

The woman smiled. “Yes, that’s Diederik and Stine, my husband and daughter.”

Heloise looked around the room for signs that the woman lived with someone. “Does he live here, your husband?”

The woman set the coffee pot down on the table and reached for the stack of photos. “No, Diederik passed away in 2008. Prostate cancer. I’ve been on my own ever since.” She started flipping through the pictures.

“And your daughter?” Heloise asked. “Does she live in Rørvig?”

“No, Stine works for the Danish embassy in Mozambique. So she lives in Maputo—that’s the capital down there. She’s been there for, what, I guess it’s been eleven or twelve years now.” The woman pointed to the mantle, where there was a picture of three boys with dark skin and longish hair. “That’s Zas, Bryce, and the little one with the ring curls is Alick, the youngest of my grandkids.”

She pulled a photo out of the stack.

“Ah, here it is. See, this is what the shed looked like before it collapsed. I would have cleaned up the mess out there, but what’s the hurry, right? Now I’ll wait until the snow is gone.” She handed Heloise the picture.

It was the right kind of wood, Heloise could see, but there were no windows in the barn door. No iron clasp that looked like a mouth.

“I’m sorry, Rita,” she said and set the picture down again. “I must have been wrong. This wasn’t where I saw the barn I’m looking for.”

“No need to apologize. I’m sorry, too, that I was so rude earlier. I don’t get very many proper visitors out here, so … coffee?”

“No thanks, I’d better be going.”

The smile lines around the woman’s eyes faded some and Heloise thought that maybe it wouldn’t be as nice to live out here all by yourself as she had imagined. She looked at the woman’s grandchildren again on the mantle.

Wasn’t one of the arguments for getting married and having kids that you wouldn’t have to be lonely in your old age, that there would be someone to take care of you, someone to share your life with? But what guarantee was there that your life would have a happy ending, Heloise thought. The woman across from her appeared to have played by the rules, done what was expected, lived a traditional, bourgeois life. But now her husband was six feet under, and her daughter lived on another continent while she sat here, disappointed and lonely, in a hovel with a cat as her only company.

Heloise was prepared for the loneliness. She was at peace with it. But she never wanted to put herself in a situation again where she risked being disappointed by someone or something.

She looked at the woman. “Do you know of any other places in the area where I could find the barn I’m looking for?”

“Hm, there are a lot of houses out here in the woods along the coast, but unfortunately I can’t point you in the right direction. I don’t get out that much anymore.”

Heloise thanked her for her help and walked back to her car with a strange lump in her stomach.

She got in her car and was about to turn the key when her phone rang. The caller ID didn’t display a number.

“This is Kaldan,” she said.

“It’s me.” Gerda’s voice sounded tense.

Heloise closed her eyes for a second, simultaneously relieved and angry.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hi. Listen, I know you’re mad at me, but I don’t have time to talk about that right now, and that’s not why I’m calling.”

“Then why?” Heloise looked puzzled.

“I need a favor.”

Heloise waited to hear what Gerda wanted without saying anything.

“Something has come up here at work and I can’t leave. But I can’t get ahold of my mother. She’s not answering her phone and Christian is in the U.S. and …”

“I’ll pick up Lulu,” Heloise said.

She heard Gerda exhale in relief.

“Thank you.”

“I’ll bring her home with me after work and she’s welcome to spend the night if it gets late.”

“Thank you,” Gerda said again. “I don’t know when I’ll be able to leave.”

“What happened?”

“I can’t tell you, not right now, anyway. I don’t have a handle on the situation yet, so …”

“Okay.”

“You just need to trust me when I say that—”

“Okay,” Heloise repeated. “I trust you, of course I do.”

Heloise hung up and turned the car key in the ignition. She looked down the bumpy wooded lane one last time. Rita stood in the snow watching Heloise.

There was something about the place that felt familiar and yet not.

Heloise knew that she had seen that barn. If it wasn’t here, then where was it?

She put the car in reverse and turned to look out the rear window.