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“No.”

“Do you read the paper?”

When Laura made no attempt to answer, Lindell continued.

“Maybe you’ve heard about the two farmers who were murdered last week? They were the same age as your father.”

Laura smiled at her and Lindell’s feeling that the woman in front of her was unwell was strengthened.

“I’m thinking of going away. There are beaches that . . . my father . . .”

She stopped in the middle of a sentence, her mouth half open as if the words didn’t want to leave her mouth. Lindell had an impulse to shake her so they would fall out.

“Can we go in and talk? The fire looks like it will take care of itself.”

They sat down at the dining room table. Lindell noted the mess but decided not to ask more about Laura Hindersten’s cleaning project. Instead she tried to get her to talk more about her father.

After a moment of hesitation Laura became more animated. Lindell could listen, study her features and shifting expressions as the narrative progressed at a comfortable pace. She had the feeling that she was listening to a public radio lecture, the type of program that she all too often turned off, but that at those times when the tempo around her were conducive to listening, were an invitation to closeness to another person and a restful reflection.

Ann recalled how she had listened to a conversation between two women who had both been abused by their husbands and how that dialogue had taught her more than all of the seminars, arranged by various lecturing professionals, that she had participated in.

She fairly soon developed a kind of understanding for why Laura was burning her father’s possessions and although she found it wasteful and unethical to burn books as if they were junk, she could identify with Laura’s feelings and motivations. She used the word “free” on several occasions and then her voice took on a special quality, like a chord that a newcomer to the guitar has just learned and strums again and again with pride and wonder at the harmonious sound.

“You see,” Laura said and brushed her hand across the table, “love and knowledge, Augustine’s words. Ulrik had ideas, but most of them were borrowed.”

Lindell looked at the hand on the dark tabletop. Laura sighed and the hand stopped.

“You didn’t want to walk in his footsteps?”

“For a while, maybe. You saw the books; I’ve read most of them. When I was twenty I knew three languages, besides Swedish and Latin, and a little colloquial French.”

She laughed a little.

“But I don’t have any words for the simplest things.”

“I can speak Eastern dialect pretty well,” Lindell said.

“Stick with that,” Laura said.

Lindell again looked at Laura’s hand on the table, thin, almost transparent, with well-groomed nails, a round smudge of soot on the back of her hand that spread into a fine-veined pattern when she balled up her fist.

“Would you like a glass of wine?”

Ann shook her head.

“No, of course not,” Laura said with a smile.

She got up, walked over to a small table in one corner of the dining room, and took out a bottle of red wine.

“One of best things about Ulrik was that he taught me to appreciate wine. Only the best was good enough. This is a La Grola from 1990.”

She put out the half-empty wine bottle.

“Bought in a small place north of Verona,” Laura went on, and pulled out the cork. “Smell it! Produced by Allegrini. They became our friends, like many others in Valpolicella. We traveled around the vineyards and wineries. Ulrik could really charm people.”

Ann leaned forward and positioned her nose over the bottle. It smelled different than the cheap red wines she usually drank.

“We were often guests of the Alighieri family. One of Dante’s sons bought the property and it is still owned by the family. The thirteen hundreds,” she added when she saw Ann’s quizzical expression.

“You have to spend more than one thousand kronor for this, maybe more, I don’t know. The cellar is full of bottles.”

Laura stopped and looked at the bottle.

“I think my mother knew more about life and love than Ulrik,” she