I THOUGHT UPON THE ITEMS I’d seen and made a guess:
“The biblical quote from the hermit’s farm?”
My mum was pleased. She reached into the satchel and placed the quote on the bed beside me:
“I stole it. But not from Ulf, from Norling!”
“How did the doctor have it?”
Exactly! Here it was, on his table! Spread out, the quote, with the mysterious coded message, stitched in the days before she hung herself in the barn that no longer exists, before an audience of pigs. I grabbed it, forgetting my promise to remain calm, turning to Norling, fist clenched, and demanding to know who’d given it to him. Norling pressed home his advantage, relishing my emotional response, his soft voice tightening like hands around my neck, claiming that Chris had informed him about my fascination with these words, describing how I’d written out these lines many hundreds of times, how I’d mumbled them, chanted them like a prayer. Norling asked what these words meant to me, goading me to tell him what I thought was going on in this quiet corner of Sweden:
“Talk to me, Tilde, talk to me.”
His voice was so alluring, and he was right, I wanted nothing more than to tell the truth, even though I knew it was a trap. Sensing that my will was faltering, I closed my eyes, reminding myself not to speak, to stick to the plan!
Norling picked up the bottle of water. He poured me a glass. I meekly accepted the water even though I was worried that he might use mind-altering chemicals, invisible to the eye, with no taste, a chemical that might make me speak and incriminate myself. I was so thirsty I raised the glass to my lips and drank. Within seconds I felt an instantaneous and overwhelming urge to talk, not a compulsion that came from my heart but an artificial desire, chemically stimulated. The idea occurred to me that this room was rigged with video cameras, tiny cameras, the size of buttons, or hidden in the tops of pens. Despite my fears the urge to speak grew stronger and stronger. I tried to keep the words down but it was no good. If I couldn’t control the urge to speak I could, at the very least, control the content of what I said, and so I spoke words that couldn’t hurt me, a description of my vegetable garden, how it was the largest vegetable garden we’d ever planted, producing lettuces, carrots, radishes, onions, red onions, white onions, chives, and fresh herbs, basil, rosemary, and thyme. I must have spoken for five, ten, twenty minutes, I don’t know, but when I turned around Norling was seated in the exact same position, on that exquisite leather sofa, giving off the impression he was happy to wait forever. My defenses crumbled.
I told him everything.