February 6, 2019
Agnes isn’t conscious of turning off her flashlight. She stands in place, in the halfway dark of the blanket of snow and sky, and she tries to think. All she can do is breathe, and even that is a bit of a stretch. There’s someone inside the house. It’s just one solitary flashlight beam, moving in meandering circles in the second-story windows.
It can’t be Nora, can it? She’s still asleep, isn’t she? Agnes hadn’t checked in on her before she’d left, but she’d seen the woman’s bedroom door, closed, on her way out. No, Agnes has been awake, restless, for a while now. She would’ve heard Nora leaving.
The only alternative she can think of is Thor. That must be it. He’s the owner of the house now. It can only be him. Hadn’t Nora said that he was fixing up the place?
But would he really start work so early in the morning?
Agnes can’t quite believe it.
She considers hiding. If whoever is in there decides to peer out the window, they’ll no doubt see her and her bright red jacket, standing in the open expanse of the clearing.
But she doesn’t move. She doesn’t hide.
Instead, she switches her flashlight back on. Aims its beam through the second-story window, jiggling it from side to side. Heart beating in her throat, she fights the urge to laugh, hysterically, at her own stupidity. Ása, the missing student. What if Nora is right? What if someone actually did hurt her? What if they’ve decided to return here, to the Murder House, to finish her off?
What had Nora said?
People do strange things in the dark.
There’s no running away. Literally. Agnes doesn’t think she could do it at all, let alone fast enough to outpace whoever lives here.
There’s no time to run now, though. They’ve seen her.
The light inside the house has disappeared.
Agnes waits.
The front door jerks open. From within the darkness emerges a bear of a man. Agnes can only make out his silhouette, but his shoulders fill out the doorframe. He has to duck through the doorway so as not to hit his head. His flashlight is off, tucked away somewhere. Both his hands are empty, held open by his sides.
Agnes shines her light on his legs, as though it were a physical gesture to keep him back.
He speaks and she can discern the word, “Hello,” but the rest is an unfathomable jumble of sounds.
“I don’t—” she says. Her voice comes out hoarse. She clears her throat. It’s still raw from last night. “Do you speak English?”
“Yes,” he says. She can see the outline of his face, only through the contrast of his black hair. It frames the circle of his head, both on top and below as a cropped beard, the sharp eyebrows cutting a straight line on his forehead.
She’s leaving space for him to elaborate. To translate what he’s said before. But he doesn’t offer her anything. “What are you doing here?” she asks him belatedly.
“Seems like we could both ask that question,” he says.
She bites back a childish response—I asked you first, asshole—and tries again. “Who are you?”
“Ingvar.”
“Ingvar Karlsson?” she asks. She feels silly asking, but she had just read about him this morning. Ingvar Karlsson, the boy who found her grandmother’s and aunt’s bodies in the snow. The second-generation neighbor.
To her surprise, he flashes his teeth in a smile. “Yes,” he says. “And you are Agnes Magnúsdóttir.”
“Agnes Glin, actually,” she says. “But, yeah. How do you know that?” She can’t slow the beating of her heart.
“Nora,” is all the explanation he gives. “Is Magnús here, too?”
“No,” she says. “Only me. I guess you knew him?”
He considers this. Or otherwise he’s just standing there, inert.
He’d been six, she supposes, when her father was nine. That’s an immeasurable distance when you’re in it; when you’re out of it, it seems impossibly close.
“I knew him,” Ingvar says finally. He doesn’t elaborate.
“So you know what I’m doing here,” she says. “What are you doing here at”—she checks her phone—“six in the morning?”
“There’s a missing woman from town,” he tells her. “We have been looking for her.” He gestures to the abandoned house behind him. “I thought, maybe if she had been running away, she would come back. She might think this is safe.”
It strikes Agnes as an odd explanation. Not that this wouldn’t be the right place to search for Ása. But the rationale is so specific. If she had been running away. And Agnes is painfully aware of how alone she is, right now, with this man. If he’s dangerous, she’s in serious trouble. She has her phone, but it’s on airplane mode, waiting for the next time she’s in a Wi-Fi oasis. Nora’s inside the house that’s built like a fortress. Agnes doubts Nora would hear her screaming for help. And Agnes doesn’t imagine she’d get far on foot.
“Is this your first time seeing the house?” Ingvar asks her, interrupting her spiraling panic.
She hesitates. “Yeah.”
“Would you like to come inside?” He takes a step backward, inviting her in. “I spent time here as a child. I can show you.”
A thrill of fear and, again, horribly, laughter runs through her. She can say no. She knows that. She can just say no and turn around and walk back to the safety of the big house. But she’d hate herself, the minute she got away from him, for her cowardice. This is her chance to see her family’s home, with someone who knew it well.
Agnes crosses the distance to the door. She tries to bend her knee naturally, but of course, there’s the limp. Ingvar steps aside, indicating Agnes should go first. She braces herself for the smell, but today, with a few pills in her system, she can breathe the stale air without fainting. That’s an improvement, at least.
Their boots squeak and grab at the old, beaten-up floors. Tracing her flashlight beam along the floor, Agnes checks behind her to see if she’s left a trail of wet boot prints—yes, but they’re in good company. The rest of the hallway, as far as she can tell, is a mosaic of them. There are stains on the wood, too. Spilled beer, vomit, she’s not sure. If it were something important, there’d be more than one line of police tape on the door, right?
Agnes kicks one foot into the other, trying to clear the snow from her shoes. The wood floors are destroyed, sure, but they’re still remarkably beautiful, and she’s suddenly certain her grandfather is about to walk out from the kitchen, furious at the sight of water on his precious hardwood. When she was younger, she ran into his apartment in the Oakland Hills in dirty shoes. She’d been searching the garden for his cat, Pip, and had forgotten to take her shoes off at the door. She remembers even now the yank on her shoulder, her grandfather’s big fingers twisting her ear, her yell of pain, more at the shock than actual sensation, and then her father’s rage. It was the only time she’d ever heard Magnús raise his voice to Einar.
They’d left after that. No visit.
It had taken two weeks for Agnes to convince her father to let her visit Einar again.
I’ll be good, she promised.
“Your grandparents had a tapestry on this wall,” Ingvar tells her, calling her back to the present. He’s indicating the stretch of wall to her left. “This”—he means the wall on her right—“had pegs for coats and boots. But the tapestry, it was handwoven by Marie’s mother. It was a fairy-tale scene.” He sidles past her, into the living room. “Very beautiful.”
“What happened to it? Do you know?” Agnes asks, though she realizes straightaway it probably had been taken by her grandfather. Stored away in the same place where everything related to Iceland, to his wife and daughter, had been buried.
She regrets her frantic kicking. Her grandfather is dead. This home hasn’t belonged to him for forty years. There’s no point in preserving it for him.
“Not for me to know,” Ingvar says. He shines his own flashlight beam down the hallway, mapping out the ground floor for her. There’s an enclosed staircase straight ahead. To the left is the living room. To the right, through a doorway with broken hinges but no door, is the kitchen.
Agnes chooses the living room. There’s no furniture in it other than a decrepit couch with faded upholstery. Ingvar sketches out the space, where two chairs had been, one for Einar, one for Marie, where they’d arranged the photographs of their wedding on the wall, where the baby’s toys had been carefully stowed to one corner, where the record player had sat on its own perch for Magnús. Ingvar describes each item with loving detail.
“It sounds like you were here a lot,” Agnes says. Actually, it sounds like he has this place memorized. Agnes isn’t sure she can remember anything this clearly from when she was six.
“I was,” he says. “My mother and Marie were close friends. They traded children, for babysitting.”
“Is your mother,” she says, uncertain, “Júlía?”
“Yul-ya,” he corrects her. He flips his hand between the two of them. “Yes. Neighbors.”
“Still?”
“My mother needs the babysitting now.” He considers her, his face cast once again in shadow. “You should come visit. She loved Magnús very much. It would make her happy to know you.”
This is more than Agnes could have hoped for. The chance to speak to someone from the first generation, her grandfather’s neighbor and peer. “I’d like that,” she says. “I’m not sure what Nora has planned, but—”
“No,” Ingvar says, cutting her off. “Not Nora. Just you.”
“Oh.” Agnes waits for the man to explain. He doesn’t. “Why?”
“My mother is fragile. Better to do these things one at a time.”
Agnes says, “All right,” because it’s just as well. She hasn’t quite made up her mind on Nora Carver. Nora’s been kind to her—Agnes remembers the woman’s care last night and thinks, Very kind—but they are strangers still, and Agnes is hyperaware of their roles as interviewer and interviewee. It’s in Nora’s best interests to keep Agnes happy, for her show.
Ingvar seems pleased. “Today?”
Agnes says, “Yes,” without hesitation. She isn’t here to create a good show; she’s here to find out the truth.
She wanders into the kitchen. The space is shabby, the hub, she supposes, for all the illicit parties. There are beer cans everywhere. There’s still the counter, the old rusted sink. The cupboards hang open, messy and vandalized. There’s a back door, but it appears to have been boarded up as well.
Agnes tests the plywood against the door. It comes away easily. She tries the doorknob. It doesn’t even stick. The door glides open, inviting in a gust of freezing cold air.
Two ways out of the house. One right to the river.
Agnes turns to find Ingvar lingering in the kitchen threshold, observing the room with a distant expression. Seeing it as it was, perhaps, forty years ago, when he was a child.
“Were you there?” she asks him. “At the party?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
He doesn’t answer. Probably it’s an insulting question.
Agnes shuts the back door. “Was Marie a good cook?”
“Yes.”
“What did she make you?”
“Soup.” A sigh. “Cookies.”
Agnes switches hands on her flashlight. The fingers of her right hand sting from the cold. She really should have bought gloves. She’d like to ask Ingvar to tell her more, but she’s not sure he’s capable of more. Not that his English isn’t perfect, but he seems to think one-word answers are sufficient.
She calls out an involuntary “Hey!” and throws up a hand to block a searing white glare from her eyes. It’s his flashlight, blinding her.
The spotlight drops. “Sorry,” he says, but there’s a hint of something in his voice. Laughter? “You look like her.”
She blinks away the ghost image burned on her retinas. “Yeah, great.”
Ingvar ducks out of the room. She follows, only a second behind, irritated but curious. “The staircase is very old,” he warns her. “We will have to be careful.”
Agnes gestures for him to lead the way. The stairs creak under Ingvar’s weight, but they hold. Behind him, Agnes clutches the railing for support. She’s abused her leg these past two days, first on the flights, then with all this walking on uneven ground. Every step upward bears a heavy price on the hardware in her ankle, the tenuous threads holding her kneecap together. She’s out of breath already, and there’s still more staircase to go.
On the landing, Agnes takes a break. She shifts all her body weight onto her right leg and pretends to consider her options while her left leg throbs. Ingvar waits patiently beside her, flicking his flashlight into each room for her inspection. There are three rooms. Two of them are bedrooms, with sagging mattresses and overturned chairs or dressing tables, and the third is a simple bathroom. Someone, at some point, wrecked the toilet, the sink. Shards of ancient porcelain litter the floor. Black dust shadows the white and blue tiles.
Agnes chooses the room on the far left. The master bedroom, Ingvar tells her. In the corner of the room, underneath the window, stands a small, handmade crib.
The crib draws her forward. She wraps a hand over the rail, feeling the soft, sensitive wood. She doesn’t know if her grandfather made this himself. Einar had grown up out here, in the countryside, but he’d been a studious person, not exactly one to work with his hands. He left Iceland to study in Denmark. A high honor, Magnús had told her. Expensive. That’s how Einar met Marie, though Agnes realizes she doesn’t know if Marie had also been a student or what. All she knew about that story was that Einar, a twenty-six-year-old in Copenhagen with great ambitions, met a seventeen-year-old girl, married her, and less than a year later, brought her back to Iceland, with a child on the way.
Magnús must have been in this crib. His sister, too. Agnes is aware of Ingvar’s presence behind her. But she is alone.
She’s disconnected. From her father. From his history. Her mother has no family. Her parents died when she was young, leaving her to the foster system. Agnes thinks that’s part of the reason why her father fell in love with her, because he craved that blank slate.
Marie, married at seventeen, dead at twenty-six. A kid, like Nora had said.
Maybe that’s why her father had Agnes when he was so young. Too young, he’d said. I wouldn’t do it any differently, he’d assured her, but we didn’t know who we were or what we were doing.
Agnes runs a finger down the length of the rotted mattress pad. She draws a fingertip through the years and the dust, and something ripples with her, as though in her wake.
For a moment, she’s mesmerized.
Then, all at once, she hears the scratching and she feels the distinct movement of a body beneath her fingertip, and she shrieks, jumping backward.
“What?” Ingvar asks her. He’s beside her in an instant, grabbing her shoulders roughly and pulling her away from the crib. “What is it?”
Agnes breathes hard.
“What?” Ingvar insists, alarmed.
“Rats,” she says, stepping out of his grip. “Or mice. Something’s made a home in there.”
Ingvar looks down at her, bemused. “Mice,” he says.
Agnes exits the room, fast. She wants to see her father’s bedroom and she wants distance from whatever creature she’d just been petting.