The Cruel Stars of the Night - Kjell Eriksson [87]
No, that would be wrong, Lindell decided. Fredriksson would have to stand there with the shame.
Lindell laid the photo on the coffee table and then started flipping through all of the books in the small library. If he missed one clue there might be more, but the result was zero.
One photo, one woman, was the day’s yield. Lindell locked the door behind her, very satisfied, and steered her course to the neighbor’s house.
Dorotea Svahn looked at the picture for a long time and then shook her head, but kept it in her hand and Lindell hoped that the old woman wouldn’t turn it over.
“You don’t recognize her?” Lindell asked and took the photograph out of her hand.
“No, I’ve never seen her before.”
“Are you sure?”
The old woman nodded.
“So this is what she looked like,” she said. “I’ve always wondered.”
Twenty-six
The stovepipe chimney howled. It usually did in gusty weather, but only if there was a westerly wind. The whistling sounds from the fireplace sounded like someone was sitting in there playing a variety of out-of-tune instruments.
When Laura was little they would make fires there. It was always Alice who arranged the wood to make sure it caught fire. When the flames were well established she would pull out an ottoman cushion and sit so close she grew red in the face after a while. Laura would lie on the floor, not quite so close but still close enough that she would grow warm, which one otherwise seldom did in this drafty house. Sometimes she stretched out an arm to feel her mother’s bare underarm.
One day a chimney cleaner came for an inspection. He declared the stovepipe unfit. It was cracked, not functionable, and if they kept making fires there was a chance the house would burn down. Down to the ground, as he put it. Ulrik grumbled, but her mother knew better than to argue with the chimney sweep. She was raised in the country and knew about chimney fires.
“To the ground,” Laura repeated to herself.
She sat in the armchair at whose side her mother’s basket of wool and knitting needles usually was. It was called the resting chair but Laura never saw Alice rest there.
“Down to ground.” It was a child’s phrase. She didn’t know then what the ground of the house would be exactly, but sensed it meant that everything would be destroyed, all furniture and books, her toys, her mother’s collection of seeds and pressed plants, yes, she saw everything before her and could even touch it. It was a dizzying thought. Frightening and alluring at the same time.
She had dozed off. These last few days sleep seemed to come and go as it pleased. She was becoming more and more tired but blamed it on the work with cleaning all the junk out of the house. She was unaccustomed to this much physical labor.
The chimney whistled. She stared into the open mouth of the fireplace. Now there were no sticks there, just a brass candelabra. It glimmered like gold against all the black.
She had been dreaming. A strange dream that she had traveled to a foreign land in order to find out about their old habits and customs. Laura had brought several older women together in a cobblestone yard, perhaps it was in front of a barn because you could hear the rattling of chains, the thump of hooves, and the occasional melancholy mooing. The women tried to explain what their lives had been like seventy, eighty years ago. They gesticulated and spoke with an intensity that made their wrinkled and weather-beaten faces appear youthful. The problem was that Laura had trouble with the language. Admittedly she had studied this foreign tongue, taken several courses, and could even adequately understand written texts but here she came up short.
The old ladies chattered on. Laura strained herself to her breaking point but was only able to snap up fragments of their vividly related narratives.
Laura picked up a pad and pen from her bag and the torrent of words slowed somewhat. The group grew completely silent when she asked one of the