A gray, hot, humid morning. A window was opened onto the main street.

Dansevise. Jørgen and Grethe Ingmann in a dark, melancholy duet about the terrible farewell waved out through the open window, but nobody answered when I rang. The low house was located on the town’s lifeless main street, windows at hip height, and right out onto the broken sidewalk tiles. Dusty plastic blinds blocked out both light and wandering eyes. A few potted plants with thick waxy leaves sweated on the windowsill.

I opened the door, which gave without resistance, and called out into the narrow hallway.

“Hello?”

No response, but from where I stood, I could see into a tidy but uninventive kitchen. The tabletop in gray laminate, plank flooring and white kitchen elements. Some pictures on the fridge and yellowed pine chairs around a small dining table.

I called again, and this time there were steps on the upper floor, a creak from a staircase in the living room somewhere. The radio was switched to Anne Linnet—I still had time to change my mind. Suddenly, I didn’t even know why the hell I was standing here, beyond the obvious. That I had to find an answer to it all.

“God, you don’t look so good.”

She appeared in the door of the living room, looking at me with quiet seriousness. Then she took a bag of ice out of the freezer and laid it against my hot, thumping jaw. It hurt after last night’s meeting with the floor of Karsten’s house. When I moved my tongue, two of my molars wobbled with a squelching sound, leaking a taste of iron and salt. She half smiled, crossed the floor and turned off the radio with a grimace that could be out of irritation.

“I heard about your uncle. You could probably use a drink?”

I nodded. Today was a good day to drink myself into a little stupor. That was why I’d come. That, and the company.

“A whiskey, if you have it.”

“Of course.”

She shut the door to the living room behind her and threw out her long hands. Found whiskey and a glass in the fridge and poured a couple of fingers for each of us.

“Thanks.” I stopped and pulled out a chair so she could sit, even though she was the host.

She took her glass and drank like a man, with neither grace nor vanity. Sitting in her wet T-shirt and loose, gray pants over her wide, bony hips. Her hair was damp from sweat and pulled back into a tight ponytail, and despite her holding her arms close to her body, the large, dark patches were clearly visible on the T-shirt. She ran a hand over her hair and smiled, looking strangely uncomfortable.

“Sorry for looking like this,” she said. “I haven’t had a shower yet, and it’s been a hot night. Menopause and this summer is a bitch. Personally, I’d have preferred a little ice age if you absolutely had to mess around with climate zones.”

She poured a new glass and sent me an expectant look. “Why are you here?”

“You knew Ellen?”

She nodded slowly and leaned back in the chair, her glass resting on one hot cheek.

“We all knew each other back then. It’s a small town.”

“But you never said anything.”

“She doesn’t want to be found, Jacob. Not by you or anyone else from that time.”

“I’d like to talk to her.”

Laurel wrinkled her forehead.

“It’s been years since I spoke to her. I don’t even know if she’s still alive.”

I took a deep breath and thought it was time for me to go back to Copenhagen. Perhaps I should never have come. I could have gotten drunk under much more comfortable conditions in Nørrebro. There was no forgiveness for sins here, no cleansing fire. I wasn’t sure why I’d tried to tell myself anything different.

“What happened after . . . the accident? Can you tell me that, at least?”

“That day?”

I nodded, eyes down.

“Anton arrived at the same time as the ambulance, and Ellen stayed until they’d driven Anton and Anders off. It all happened fast, because he was bleeding so much. There were injuries to everything, because he was naked, you know? Or half-naked. So Ellen watched them drive off. Afterward, she came to visit the commune, then left town.”

“I’d like to talk to her. It’s important to me. And to Anton. He thinks she’s dead. And then there’s Anders. I think she might know where he is.”

Laurel leaned back, looking at me thoughtfully over the edge of her whiskey glass.

“Have you ever thought Anton might not only be interested in Ellen, but also in you? That he’d like to know why it happened, why you all did it? He was good to you; never went to the police, didn’t say anything to the neighbors. What I know, I know from Ellen.”

“He knows damn well why, and so do you. Lise. Anders was the one who did it, and Anton knew it. If he’s saying otherwise, it’s because he’s lying to himself. He knew Anders couldn’t stay away from the girls. It was dangerous.”

Laurel emptied her whiskey glass, watching me curiously. My own glass sat on the table, untouched.

“You think she knows where Anders is?”

“It’s possible. She was closer to him than anyone, and I think he was in love with her. He told her things he didn’t tell us.”

She nodded and got up. Disappeared into the living room and closed the door again. I could hear her talking for a while in a hushed voice.

Ellen.

Her voice reached me like a weak, but clear song through time and space. My imagination, of course. Like re-creating the guitar solo from “Stairway to Heaven” by way of just closing your eyes and remembering. The feeling of dying and being healed in the same fire.

“Here?”

“This was Ellen’s best guess,” said Laurel.

I parked the car and looked at the farm on the other side of the road. It had three wings. A farmhouse in red brick with dusty, double-paneled windows from the ’70s. Red-and-white for sale signs were stuck to the two facing the road. Pared of soil, machinery and other vital internal organs left behind to the flocks of crows and jackdaws.

Part of me wanted to just stay in the car with Laurel. Smoke a ridiculous number of cigarettes and laugh about that time I’d touched her nice young breast. Amazingly, the thought still made me blush. The teenager and his delicate nerve endings hadn’t been completely scratched from my bones yet.

I laid my head back and closed my eyes. Tried to curb the shakes with long, deep breaths. I missed Kirsten’s calm, warm breath, her cool fingers on my temples and down over my eyelids when I had a headache like I did now. I’d become too old to drink beer every day and get away with it.

Laurel opened the car door and smiled in relief when the wind caught her hair.

“Too hot,” she said. “It’s always too hot, isn’t it? That’s just how it is now.”

I looked at the purple-black sky above the forest. The rain that was on its way would drown the meadows, viaducts and freestanding houses. It would thrash the dusty soil, rinsing a piece of the world into the ocean. With childish euphoria, I looked forward to the first tap on the car window.

But first, there were things that had to be done; I stepped out onto the dry grass that crunched under my feet and walked up the overgrown driveway with Laurel a few steps behind me. The glass in the front door was dark yellow sun spirals in green panels. I pressed down the handle, and the door opened with a weak protest from its hinges.

The hall was solar-heated and bare. There were nude, darkly varnished floorboards and veneered doors to the kitchen, and the large, empty living room farther on in. The original wall-to-wall carpet still covered the full length of the room, light green with something that had once been thickly woven flower petals and crowns. The wallpaper in green-and-gold stripes down from the low ceiling. Faded oak beams and cracked windowsills; the house was trying to work itself out of its own form. Here, just like at the brothers’, people had been sung out for the last time, and life would never really return.

I stood in a sunbeam, looking out at the lawn where an enormous copper beech spread its branches in all directions. And there he was. A collapsed figure, half leaning up against the tree trunk, eyes closed and palms facing the sky.

Laurel reacted faster than me. She pushed open the door to the porch, ran across the lawn and was already kneeling beside him with her bottle of water by the time I reached them. His eyes were closed, and at some point he’d taken off his shirt. Leaves and small flies were crawling over his white chest and soft stomach.

“Anders?”

He opened his eyes and looked at us calmly. Drank willingly from the water bottle that Laurel put to his lips. His forehead was dry under my hand.

“I couldn’t find my way home,” he said. “You were all gone.”

A heavy drop landed behind us, the introduction to a quickly accelerating drum on the roof of the house and grass and bloodred leaves above us, making it hard to hear what I was saying on the phone when I called 112.

When I finally disconnected, Laurel had turned her face toward the rain and loosened her ponytail. She sat next to Anders, who’d closed his eyes again. For the first time in a long time, she looked like someone comfortable in her own skin. The fields steamed, and the world smelled of wet hay and soil and dried thistles, and the black sky thundered, low and distant. It had grown dark, like on a late autumn night.

I sat down on the other side of Anders and let him rest his head on my shoulder.