February 6, 2019
The house is awake when Agnes returns. The entryway light, now on, illuminates the last stretch of her walk, and when she opens the front door, she’s greeted by the overpowering smell of frying eggs and brewing coffee. Agnes struggles out of her boots and walks into the kitchen.
“And where have you been?” Nora, her voice cutting through the pleasant rhythms of domesticity. She has the air of a bemused parent. Not angry, just concerned. When she catches sight of Agnes, she steps away from the stove and brings her a glass of water. “Are you feeling better?”
“Yeah,” Agnes says, grateful for the water but embarrassed by Nora’s concern. “I just needed some fresh air.”
“You like the cold, then? I guess it’s in your blood.” Nora frowns at her. “How are you feeling, really?”
“Fine,” Agnes insists. “Thanks for your help. I think it was just all the traveling, maybe something I ate…” She trails off. She doesn’t need to explain. She was sick. That’s it.
“I made you some dry toast,” Nora tells her. “The only food my ex-husband could handle the morning after.”
Agnes dutifully accepts the plate of toast and takes a seat at the kitchen island, but she doesn’t touch her food. Nora serves herself fried eggs and toast and a large mug of coffee, then sits down at the dining table with a happy sigh.
From across the room, Agnes scans Nora’s body, searching for the bulge of a microphone pack, the kind she’s seen on reality TV stars, tucked into their bras or the waistbands of their pants, but the soft, well-worn black jeans and billowing sweater hang off Nora’s body uninterrupted. For the moment, for whatever it’s worth, it’s just the two of them. Alone.
Nora catches the stare. Returns it with a smile. “You went to the house by yourself, right, didn’t you?” She’s quick on the uptake. “How does it feel,” she asks, conspiratorially, “to see the things your family kept from you?”
Agnes doesn’t deny it. “It’s not like they kept it from me to exclude me,” she says, hearing the defensive note in her voice, unable to help it. “My grandfather couldn’t ever come back here, not without being treated like Jeffrey Dahmer. This was his home. He wasn’t allowed to go home. That’s what I’m feeling, when I look at this place. It isn’t that I’m seeing something my family kept from me. I’m seeing what was kept from them.” She hadn’t realized this was how she felt, not until she said it aloud. She looks at Nora, almost startled by the force of her emotion.
“You’re in a lot of pain,” Nora says. “Aren’t you?”
“I miss my grandfather. That’s all.”
“That’s what I meant,” she says gently. “This is real to you, in a way it can never be to me. I’m so glad you’re here.”
Agnes turns away, suddenly self-conscious. Nora takes the hint and focuses on her breakfast. She pulls out her phone, flipping through her emails and texts while she chews.
With Nora preoccupied, Agnes slips the metal army man she’d stolen from her father’s room out of her pocket. She hadn’t been able to make it out clearly in the dark, abandoned house. Now, under the kitchen’s bright lights, she can see the little flag-bearer’s paint has chipped away, either from time or heavy use, she can’t be sure. The man is no longer wearing a uniform, and his flag is nothing but a thin sheet of rust. There’s something on the flag, though, that compels Agnes to look more closely. A splash of something red.
Blood?
Agnes fumbles with the figurine, and it drops to the floor, bouncing underneath the table.
“What was that?” Nora asks, through a mouthful of eggs.
“Nothing,” Agnes says quickly. She slips off the stool and crouches to see where the figurine went. “One second.” She has to crawl, painfully, on hands and knees, to get to it.
“You need some help?” Nora leans over, awkwardly, in her chair, her hair spilling almost to the floor.
“It’s fine,” Agnes says from the shadows.
Nora’s phone chimes, and she straightens up to check it. “That’s my alarm,” she says. “I have to get going.”
It’s there, underneath the table, where Agnes can only see Nora’s socked feet, that she remembers what’s been bothering her. “You said the police want to talk to you.”
The toes curl inward, forming a strange fist. “In twenty minutes,” Nora says. The toes relax, then flatten, as she comes to standing. There’s the clatter of silverware. A loud gulp as she finishes her coffee.
“Why do they want to talk to you?”
“They’re talking to everyone who was at the party,” Nora says. “Well, everyone who was at the party and is still in town. Most of the out-of-towners are long gone.”
Agnes grabs the flag-bearer and crawls back out from the table. It’s an effort to stand, her knee popping extravagantly when she straightens it. Her joints ache, but that’s nothing new for her. No, the strain she feels today is muscular. She hasn’t asked so much of her body in a year.
“You were at the party?” she asks Nora, belatedly. Had Nora told her this yesterday and she’d just forgotten? Somehow Agnes doesn’t think so.
“Of course. Can’t miss an opportunity like that. The police want to know if I saw anything suspicious. No one knows what happened to Ása after she left—apparently, no one even noticed her leaving. So that’s the focal point of the investigation.”
“Did you?” Agnes asks. “See anything suspicious?”
Nora shrugs. “Nothing that comes to mind.”
“Do you know her?”
“Who? Ása?”
Agnes waves the hand that isn’t holding the metal figurine. Obviously.
“No,” Nora says. “I noticed her at the party, but I noticed everyone who was there. I haven’t had much of a chance to talk to the students yet.”
“You didn’t talk to her at all?” Agnes doesn’t know why this bothers her. Maybe it’s the way Nora’s focusing more on Ása’s disappearance than her grandfather’s case. Nora seems to care about this missing woman.
“Hardly,” Nora says. “She stopped me when I walked in. She said something in Icelandic, and when it was clear that I didn’t understand, she said, You’re the American. I said yes, I am, and she warned me not to let a guy named Óskar know. Then she brushed me off. That was the only time we spoke. Not much in the grand scheme of things, but significant in a murder investigation.”
“Do you really think it’s a murder investigation?” Agnes asks. She thinks of Ingvar’s desperate search for the missing woman. Meanwhile, Nora has already resigned her to death.
“It’s tricky,” Nora says. “The feeling in town—you’ll see—it’s as though people are afraid to say it. Murder. They’d rather it be anything else. I can’t say I blame them, but suicide is violent, too.”
Agnes recoils. “Those are the only two options?”
“The two most likely, I’d say. It’s all a guessing game until we know more.”
“We? Are you working with the police?”
“Nope. The police haven’t exactly been forthcoming with me. I can’t really blame them for that. I’m running my own investigation.” Nora eyes Agnes’s full plate on the kitchen island. “What will you do while I’m gone? Rest?”
Agnes checks her phone. No messages from Ingvar, not even one to give her his number so she can contact him. She considers her options, while the fact of the day spreads out in front of her. She pictures the bottle of pills, nestled safely in her bed.
She can’t stay in the house. Not alone.
“Are you going into town?” she asks Nora. “To the police station?”
“Technically the closest station is in Borgarnes,” Nora says. “You passed it on your way up. They’re about thirty minutes away by car. But they’ve set themselves up temporarily on campus for the interviews.”
“I’ll follow you into town,” Agnes says. “Look around. Do you have a spare set of keys for me? Or can we leave the door unlocked all the way out here?”
“I’d say yes,” Nora says, “except I’m a true crime podcaster. Never leave the door unlocked, no matter how isolated you think you are. The Vampire of Sacramento said he only murdered people whose doors were unlocked, because he thought they were inviting him inside.” She takes her plate, cleared, to the sink. “What will you do in town?”
“I’m not sure yet,” Agnes says, sickened by the moniker Vampire of Sacramento. Did her grandfather ever get such a nickname? The Butcher of Bifröst, maybe? She shudders.
“I wish you’d wait for me.”
Agnes doesn’t know how to answer that, not without displeasing Nora. This is her life. Her family. She’s not waiting around. And she can’t stay in here all day. Not when she’s trying, desperately, not to backslide into the bottle of pills.
Nora concedes with a sigh. “Just keep all your impressions of the town fresh, okay?”
With breakfast done, they move quickly. Or rather, Nora moves quickly. Agnes sits by the front door, her puffy jacket hanging over her shoulders, while Nora fusses with her folders and her hair and her layers of warm clothing. Agnes takes the opportunity to examine the flag-bearer. The red splash on the flag is too luridly red, she decides, to be blood. She slips it into her jacket pocket, next to her phone. That was the last chip of paint from the flag, she tells herself. Nothing else.
“Ready?” Nora’s holding out a spare set of keys for Agnes.
Finally, they’re outside. Nora in the gargantuan truck, and Agnes in the rental car.
The drive off the property is meandering, the winding path through the snowy woods somehow longer than yesterday, and then the highway, empty, is a breeze. It’s a short commute to town, but Agnes tries to absorb every second of it. The lava fields to either side of the road, the great expanse of craggy black rock interrupting a soft blanket of white. Where Ingvar says he found her grandmother and her aunt.
Is this missing woman, Ása, there, too?