February 8, 2019
When Nora returns that evening, Agnes has created a mess of her research papers in the living room. Folders splayed open, papers strewn in every direction. She’s hidden the crime scene photos, but there are others. Geological surveys of the land. Maps. She had been searching for something and it had, unfortunately, been at the bottom of the pile.
“What,” Nora asks, frozen in place, “are you doing?”
“Did you talk to Óskar?” Agnes asks. She has lived entire lifetimes in this one day. She has no time for pleasantries.
“He wasn’t there.”
“Was he with the police?”
Nora shakes her head, her eyes tracking all the papers on the floor. “He apparently has driven down to Reykjavík already, for his show tomorrow. Can you explain what’s going on?”
“I know something,” Agnes tells her. She’s shocked to hear how steady her voice is. She has an idea, and she hopes, prays, that she’s right.
“What’s that?” Nora asks. She folds herself onto the couch opposite Agnes, hands braced on her knees.
“Thor Senior,” Agnes says from the floor. She holds up the photograph she’d been searching for. “The first-generation Thor.” A portrait of a middle-aged man, all high cheekbones and thin eyes. The larger version of the son. “He and my grandfather shared an ancestor, or whatever you call it. Right? The two sides of the family split this land up, but they fought over it. They hated each other.”
“From what I’ve learned,” Nora says, “it wasn’t like the Hatfields and the McCoys. The two neighboring families in West Virginia, the blood feud? No? Well, this wasn’t a violent rivalry. It was more like, Thor’s people wanted to buy the land back from your family and consolidate the wealth. Your side said no, until the murders.”
“What if,” Agnes says, “what if Thor Senior killed them to get the land?”
Nora plays along. “Why not just kill Einar?”
“Because that’s too obvious.”
“All murder is obvious.”
“If he killed Einar,” Agnes presses on, “Marie and the kids would stay in the house, right? She’d probably remarry and someone else would take over. Maybe he wanted to run Einar out of town.” It’s a wild, desperate idea. But she clings to it, hard, like a life raft.
“Or kill Einar and marry Marie himself,” Nora says.
“Yeah.” They’re close to the truth. Agnes wonders, suddenly, if Nora knows some of this already. If she’s just keeping her cards close to her chest.
“That’s diabolical,” Nora says. “Sociopathic.”
“Maybe he was. Thor Junior told me his father was a horrible man. He moved out of here when he could, and he only came back when his father left.”
“When did he tell you that?”
“Today.” Agnes tells her about their walk across the river.
Nora doesn’t speak.
“What?” Agnes asks. “Did I do something wrong?”
“No,” Nora says, a touch too quickly. “It’s just—you’ve done a lot today. Good job. I’ve arranged a dinner for us with Thor Junior when we get back from Reykjavík. We can ask him more about his father then.”
“There’s something else,” Agnes says. The phone’s already on the coffee table between them. She hands it to Nora. “It’s Ása’s.”
Nora doesn’t move. She doesn’t even appear to be breathing.
“Lilja,” Agnes says. She does her best to explain, about inviting her in for a coffee, about the party, about Ása’s drunken journey home. She doesn’t tell Nora about their plans for later. The fact of their texts. But she tells her about the two phones. When she’s finished, she says, all too aware of the symmetry of the gesture, “Take it. Give it to the police. You know them.”
Nora holds it strangely, like she’s never before held a phone. “She just gave this to you?” she repeats.
“Yeah. Not right away. But she wanted to get rid of it, I guess.”
“Why did she give this to you?”
Agnes’s mouth dries up. Because there’s an undercurrent of something else happening between us, Nora, because I think she’s as attracted to me as I am to her, and she’s terrified and lonely and so am I, and if you’re swept up in a river and drowning and you spot a point of safety, you don’t think about it, you just swim for it. But that’s impossible to say. Impossible to vocalize for this woman whose entire life is held secret. Agnes doesn’t know much about Nora, but she likes her. She thinks they could be friends, genuine friends, outside of this podcast. But that doesn’t remove the fact that she feels she knows more about Lilja, a woman she’s spent all of two hours with, than the woman sitting across from her. Nora’s a glacier. There’s so much underneath the surface, stuff she doesn’t want to share. And that’s fine. Agnes doesn’t blame her. In fact, she likes her more for it.
But that doesn’t mean she’s entitled to all of Agnes’s secrets, when she’s shared nothing of herself.
“Lilja’s lonely,” Agnes says carefully. “Sometimes you need a friend to talk to. I think I gave that to her.”
“Why not hand it over to the police? Did she say?”
“She’s dug herself into a hole,” Agnes says. “She lied to the police, before she knew it was serious. The night of the party, Ása pushed her away. It sounds like she’d been pushing her away for weeks. Lilja was hurt. She thought Ása was with her boyfriend. She kept her friend’s secrets, and then, when she realized what was going on, she couldn’t figure out a way to tell the police the truth, not without looking even more suspicious. Sometimes, you lie for stupid reasons, and then it gets out of your control. It becomes bigger than you, you know?”
Nora rotates the phone in her hands. Examines every smooth edge. “There are a lot of reasons to lie.” She comes to standing. “Okay,” she says. “I have to think about this. Thanks.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Think,” Nora tells her. “And make us some dinner.” She stows the phone in her bedroom, somewhere hidden now, not in the pile of papers that Agnes has riffled through. Nora returns to the kitchen, heading straight for the alcohol. She pours Agnes a generous glass of wine and a healthy dose of gin for herself, before she starts to cook.
Nora taps her glass against Agnes’s. “It’s nice to have a partner in crime. You’re better than Hildur—who, by the way, is desperate to talk to you. I told her we’ll arrange something, but she’s probably just going to show up soon, if we don’t arrange a time for you two to talk.”
“Maybe I don’t want to talk to her.”
Nora ignores this and throws herself into preparing their risotto. The smell of food still turns Agnes’s stomach, so she focuses on her wine. By the time Nora’s doling out their portions, they’ve both blown past tipsy to something close to drunk. It’s still early, but the sun had vanished from the sky hours ago, leaving them in complete and total darkness. Nora has set the lights low to make the fire in the center of the room the brightest source of light.
She joins Agnes at the cluttered dining table with a sigh. “So you hate Hildur, is what I’ve gathered. Any particular reason why, other than some bluntness?”
“You don’t like her, either,” Agnes says. “Be honest.”
Nora barks out a laugh. “Am I that obvious?” She sips her drink. “It’s not that I don’t like her. She’s been so helpful, getting me in the right rooms, making introductions. She’s everything you’d hope for, in a situation like this.”
“But…” Agnes prompts.
“But for every reason she’s great, she’s a hindrance. She helped act as a bridge at the beginning, but now she’s a reminder of the town to everyone we speak to. People here are so connected. They know each other in so many ways that you and I can’t even fathom. Hildur’s an authority figure to Óskar and Lilja, she and Thor went to school together, I’m sure they all know each other’s parents and cousins and they’ve all seen everything there is to see of each other. Sometimes, this kind of connection helps establish a sense of ease in an interview. But most of the time, she’s like a fact-checker. Part of the reason why people share so much with me is because I’m an outsider. I don’t have a bias. They can editorialize and narrate their own lives however it suits them, and it doesn’t matter because I’m a traveling circus. Their sins leave with me.”
“But their sins are recorded,” Agnes says. “And then you release them on a very popular podcast.”
Nora tops up their drinks. “Does that bother you?”
“Would you understand if it did?”
“Yes and no. It’s your life.” Nora swallows down more gin than risotto. Agnes has hardly touched her own plate. “It’s your family. You’ve got an uphill battle, because clearly your father does not want me to do this. And he has good reason, of course he does. So it’s tough on a personal level, I get that. But in the grander view, it’s not as though you’ll be persecuted. You’re in the sweet spot. You’re so connected, but you aren’t. And, frankly, you’re not really telling me any sins, are you?” In the dim light, Nora’s pink frames seem to glow in the dark. “Unless there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Agnes rubs at her bottom lip, feeling the raw, chapped skin. She hadn’t wanted to tell Nora what she’s learned. What she’s suspected. But the words spill out of her now, almost against her will.
“What if,” she says, unaware of the tremor in her voice, “I learned something today? What if I—What if he—” She falters.
There’s a hand covering hers on the table. “Take a deep breath,” Nora instructs her. “What is your biggest fear, in all this? It’s not the public’s reaction to my podcast, or you wouldn’t be here at all. It’s something else.”
“You know what it is,” Agnes says.
“It helps if you say it. I don’t like guessing.”
“If you—” Agnes begins, stumbling over the words. She steadies herself with another sip of wine. She forces herself to say it all: “If we keep going down this road, Nora, I think we’re going to find out that my grandfather was a killer. And that’s unbearable.”
Nora tightens her grip on Agnes’s hand. “What did you learn today? What’s changed your mind like this?”
It requires so much effort to explain. Agnes hears herself telling Nora everything about her time with Júlía, as though she were talking about someone separate from her. An acquaintance who learned about Marie’s possible affair with Thor Senior and passed it along to Agnes.
“What would you say, then?” Agnes asks Nora. “Einar found out his wife was sleeping with another man. His neighbor. His cousin, or whatever. What would you say happened?”
Nora pushes herself to standing and makes her way to Agnes, quickly. She wraps her up in an awkward hug.
Agnes pushes her away, and not gently. “What then?” she asks. “What about this affair? What happens when you put all the pieces together, everything that Júlía told me? He and Marie are arguing all the time, he hates the baby, then one day they’re both killed. Maybe he finds out his wife has been sleeping with the neighbor, the neighbor who he also hates, and maybe he thinks the child isn’t his, and then—What, then?”
“I’d say,” Nora says, returning to her seat, “that I need to talk to Thor Senior.”
This pulls Agnes up short. “What?”
“Thor Junior said his father left,” Nora says. “Not that he died. I’ll find him, and I’ll talk to him. That’s how this job works, Agnes. You follow the threads. You don’t find one and say it’s all over, that explains everything. Not until you reach the end of it all.”
“Don’t you realize,” Agnes says, speaking through a lump of unshed tears, “that if you do this, if we keep following this thread, you’re taking away the one person who loved me?”
“Then you get to join the club,” Nora says, her voice unbelievably tired. “I’ve been a member of it since I was ten.” The shadow of a smile, humorless and grim, passes over her face. “Don’t look so confused.
“I don’t talk about it,” Nora says, “so I can’t really blame you for not knowing, but I wonder how you can spend all this time with me and think that I have no idea what you’re going through. I grew up with an older sister. I told you about her. I worshipped her. It was just us and our mom, who had to work all the time to keep us alive, so I spent more time with Chloe than I did with my own mother. For the first ten years of my life, Chloe was my mother, my sister, my whole world. And then she disappeared.”
Now Agnes is the one reaching out to grab Nora’s hand. It remains limp in her grip.
“Chloe dropped me off at school,” Nora continues. “It was on the way to her high school. She went to her morning classes, and then she left at lunch. She didn’t tell anyone where she was going. They never found her. Not even a trace of where she went, after she left the school grounds. I don’t know … if she’s alive. If something terrible happened to her. But that’s what I have to think. Something terrible happened to her.
“A man happened to her.
“I went to school to become a public defender. I was one, for a while. Then my divorce happened, and I was alone again. And I couldn’t stop thinking about Chloe. I started this podcast as a way to help the families of missing girls. So no one has to go through the torture of not knowing. So you have to believe me when I say I know what you’re going through. But you need to recognize just how lucky you are.”
“Lucky,” Agnes echoes, stunned. “Lucky for what?”
“You know where they are,” Nora says. “And the world knows who they are. There are books about your family. Theories. Songs. No one’s written anything for my sister. I know you’re afraid of finding out your grandfather was a killer. But you had twenty-six years with him, twenty-six years of him loving you. Twenty-six years of ignorance. You’re so lucky, and you don’t even realize it.”
Nora doesn’t give Agnes any room to respond. “I’m going to regret saying all this in the morning,” she says with a sigh. “But I’m driving down to Reykjavík tomorrow. If you still want to join me, then great. I’ll be up at seven. If not, I understand.” Without waiting for an answer, she takes her glass and the bottle of gin, and leaves the room.
Agnes lets Nora go, feeling a deep sense of loss. How sad it is, she thinks, to compare personal tragedies and to lose.