February 6, 2019
Sometime around five a.m., Agnes surrenders to her jet lag and turns on her light. Her body creaking and protesting, she reaches for Nora’s folder and unearths the supposed timeline.
There’s a woman named Júlía, mentioned right at the top, her name underlined in ink. First-generation neighbor, it reads. Ingvar Karlsson’s mother. Agnes has never heard of Júlía before. The rest of the timeline, though, matches with the bare bones of what she already knows.
Two bodies found frozen in the snow. The woman had her throat cut, deep and wide, close to the point of decapitation. Bruises dotting her upper arms, as though someone had handled her roughly. The infant, drowned, had bruises, too.
The obvious suspect, the husband, could account for his whereabouts on the day of the ninth. They were the same as every weekday. He woke up before his wife, leaving her to sleep in, and he had witnesses who corroborated that he arrived at the office early, sometime around seven a.m., and had taught his morning classes, had eaten in the common area, had spent the rest of the day in department meetings or student conferences, eventually spending the rest of the afternoon alone in his office, but his coworkers had all confirmed that he’d stayed in there the entire time. It had been on the third floor of the building, so impossible for him to leave from anywhere except the door. He went straight home from work.
As for the evening before, the eighth, he only had his son as his witness. They had had their usual dinner. Father and son played chess after eating, while Marie cleaned and the baby fussed on the carpet next to them. The son went upstairs for bed. Husband and wife soon followed at their normal time—ten p.m. The baby cried throughout the night, as per her routine, as well. She had colic.
The son confirmed that his father had driven him to school the next morning, that he hadn’t seen his mother on the morning of the ninth, but that was not unusual.
Most of the town had been interviewed. Júlía and Karl, the neighbors from across the road, with their son, Ingvar, the boy who found the bodies. And the two Thors, father and son, nearby. Everyone had spoken well of the victim and her family. The husband had a reputation for standoffishness, but he clearly loved his wife.
There’s a quote from Júlía. Einar always surprised her with cinnamon buns from the bakery. Sometimes she’d come over smelling of cinnamon, and you know they’d had a good day together.
And yet everyone had concluded that it could only have been Einar who killed Marie and the baby. There had been rumors of financial trouble, Nora writes, but nothing came from that. No murder weapon found, no blood on the property. No witnesses. Only a feeling. A certainty. The town closed ranks, and there was no further investigation. Then the departure, months later.
There’s no DNA evidence, so all Nora has to go on are the crime scene photos, the testimonies. The skeleton of a case.
Agnes reaches the end of the file. There’s so little here. So little evidence to accuse someone of murder.
Restless, she pushes herself off the bed. Before the accident, she had never been able to sit still for very long. The recovery time and the pills had all slowed her momentum down to nothing. Now, even through the creaking hell of her body, she can taste the edges of something beyond the inertia. She’s had a year of downtime. It’s time to move.
She stacks Nora’s photographs and bare outlines on the small writing desk. She separates the family portrait from the pile and props it up against the wall so she can admire it. Then she dons layers upon layers of socks and shirts, preparing, this time, for the cold. She leaves the bottle of pills behind, but not without swallowing one more. Just enough, she tells herself, to keep the nausea at bay. She wants to go inside her grandfather’s house this time. She knows she’s doing what’s right. She can’t go cold turkey. But still, she’s ashamed of herself. She’d promised herself she’d get clean, for her grandfather and for herself. She hadn’t even made it twelve hours before she’d given in.
On her way out, Agnes grabs the flashlight Nora gave her yesterday, and she stows her phone in her jacket pocket, even though it’ll be useless. It’s nice to have a safety net, if a lousy one.
Once outside, she follows the path she and Nora had made yesterday, her feet crunching in the snow. The moonlight illuminates just enough of the white earth for her to go without her flashlight if she wanted to. But she feels better with the flashlight’s beam guiding her way. There aren’t any predators out here. Just sheep and horses. Or so she thinks. Maybe it’s like the forests, though. They say there aren’t any, but out here, in the middle of nowhere, the world is on its own. It operates by its own rules.
It’s a relief to reach the farmhouse. Until she sees the light, flickering, in one of the windows.