This Land is no Stranger

by Sarah Hollister

  The rooms downstairs were silent and empty. No evidence from the reunion party remained. The entire house appeared tidied up and swept clean. Wooden chairs that had been set out for guests were now stacked neatly along the walls. Where was everybody? She glanced outside. The front lane and side yards, parked thick with vehicles the evening before, were deserted.

  A green antique mora clock in the big front room indicated the time was 12:17. Brand had a difficult time believing she had slept so long. The clock had to be simply decorative. Feeling like an idiot she watched the clock face to make sure the hands were indeed moving. Then it hit her. With the six hour time difference, it was six a.m. in New York, her normal waking hour when she was on the job. It still seemed impossible that it was already past noon. The mid-day light came in through the windows feeble and diminished.

  She gazed out on the property. In daylight, she saw that the house stood among its outbuildings on the slope of a fairly high hill, not quite a mountain. The view was of a long sweep of snow-covered forest. In the distance was a lake, flat and white.

  She dimly remembered the location of a downstairs bathroom. Her duffel had been thoughtfully placed there, parked against a wall. Next to it were her boots. She relieved herself and splashed water on her face, rubbing her skin vigorously with a rough towel. Her eyes were rimmed with red, her eyeballs, marbled with red veins. There was no shower or bathtub. Brand desperately needed to wash the stench of travel off herself. Her own pores accused her of abuse. The aquavit or slivovitz or whatever the hell the clear liquid was that the Dalgrens drank the previous night turned poisonous in her bloodstream.

  A sense of shame settled in. Had she said things or done things the previous evening that were mawkish or offensive? She drank far too much. By the end of the night she was so inebriated it was as if her eyes were looking at each other. She had been guilty of patronizing her relatives, privately considering them a collection of yokels. The phrase in English was “bull in a china shop.” “A New Yorker among Swedes” would amount to the same thing.

  After a single day in the country, she had already botched her Swedish visit. She addressed her haggard image in the bathroom mirror. “You have wasted your life.”

  Brand made a solemn, silent promise to lay off the booze. She rooted in her duffel, fished out a baggie, and popped a couple of light yellow twenty-milligram pills into her mouth. Adderall—one of the most popular drugs in America, prescribed for both child and adult ADHD. Adderall—“attention deficit disorder for all.” Brand had tried alternatives, Modafinil and Vyvanse, among others, but there was nothing like the real thing.

  She felt restless. She had come thousands of miles, only to want immediately to escape the stifling confines of the Dalgren homestead. Delving into her family’s past had been the vague goal of her visit. She recalled the previous evening, Elin Dalgren banging imperatively with her cane, the woman grasping her hand as if afraid to let go.

  She wandered the empty house alone. She hesitated at the door of Elin Dalgren’s apartment. The scent of an invalid hung faintly in the air, fusty and dense. Heavy curtains blocked out the already winter-weakened exterior light. Feeling like a thief, Brand ventured in. Even though the room was gloomy, she refrained from turning on the lamps.

  Where was the old woman? Where was everybody? The whole house threw off a post-apocalypse vibe. A ninety-five-year-old matriarch disappeared. The previous evening she didn’t appear to be able to move a single step on her own, much less vanish into thin air.

  Unless the strain of the reunion was too much, and the guest of honor took sick.

  The quarters felt close and crowded where the more modern upstairs spaces had been spare and empty. Stacks of books and papers covered most of the surfaces. A vintage breakfront with glass doors showed off Elin’s treasures: several carved, colorfully painted wooden horses of different sizes, an elegant set of silverware inside an open leather box, a pocket watch suspended in a small bell jar.

  Amid the clutter on top of an old wooden desk, Brand was surprised to discover an envelope with her own name written on the outside. “Veronika,” spelled out in shaky-handed script. The flap had been left unsealed. Inside was a single, age-faded photograph.

  The snapshot showed five teenagers, four of them grinning and goofing for the camera. Two boys, three girls, grouped side by side in light summer clothes. The wardrobes, the haircuts, and the yellowed age of the photograph indicated an earlier time. The 1930s, Brand guessed. She recognized the two Dalgren sisters, her grandmother and great aunt, Klara and Alice. She thought the third figure had to be Elin.

  The trio of girls leaned into each other, eyes sparkling, mid-laughter. Klara wore an improvised wreath of spring flowers in her hair and a white mid-length dress, with a slightly-scooped neckline and loosely gathered at the waist. Alice had on an even more modest version of her sister’s dress. Elin stood stiff and shy, her shoulders hunched.

  In the center of the tableau stood Gustav Dalgren, arms akimbo, staring into the lens with such a look of youthful exuberance that his aura dominated the group. Of the five, he was the one you would bet on to do great things in the world. In the picture of a bare-chested, vigorously healthy boy, Brand could discover no trace of the brooding, bitter grandfather she knew. At the Jamestown farm a half century after the snapshot, the smell of whiskey had always been on Gustav Dalgren’s breath. A violent outburst was always only a random hair trigger away.

  There was another youngster in the photo, standing separate, the image blurred and darker, as if the boy hid in the shade. His scowling face contrasted with the happiness of the others. He looked to his right and seemed to be beckoning to Klara. Brand could hardly make out his features.

  The old photograph represented a perfect portrait of carefree adolescence, a sweet moment adrift in time. Death had no dominion. In a few short years, the Second World War would descend on Europe, but at this moment, the darkness to come was only a bare whisper on the wind. One might extract the ink from the photo, distill it, and thereby create a tiny sip from the fountain of eternal youth. Flipping the fragile photograph over, Brand saw writing. The light was bad. She could barely make out the faded handwriting of her great aunt Alice.

  Five names: Elin, Alice, Klara, Gustav, Loke.

  She stared into the unsmiling eyes of the boy in the shadow to the right of the others. Yes, here was the scion of the celebrated Voss family, one of Sweden’s wealthiest, Loke Voss. He had grown up friendly with her grandparents.

  Brand heard a sound behind her. She turned to see Krister Hammar standing in the doorway of Elin’s apartment.

  “Doing some snooping, Detective?”

  “Um, no, not at all,” Brand said hurriedly. She slipped the old photograph into her pocket. “I was just…”

  She let the words trail off.

  “I have some bad news,” Krister said. “I’m afraid we’ve had a death.”

  7.

  Elin Dalgren, Hammar informed her solemnly, had taken a fall during the night. She suffered a “cerebral event” and passed away quietly in the early morning. They sat together in the kitchen of the homestead, at a long kitchen table made of varnished yellow wood.

  “She was gone before the ambulance arrived,” Hammar said.

  The news hit Brand like a heavily cushioned blow. Through the fog of her hangover and her overall feelings of depression and dislocation, she struggled to latch onto a sense of grieving and loss. She had not known the old woman, not really. Just that odd phone trans-Atlantic phone call that had summoned her to Sweden.

  “Kom hit.”

  Come here. The fierce insistence in Elin’s voice rendered the words more than a sweet and sunny invitation to a family get-together. Or at least that’s the way Brand had come to think of it.

  Sanna had told her that Elin had family secrets to tell, “probably cake recipes,” she had said, laughing. But cake recipes did not require the level of urgency Brand heard in the old woman’s voice.

  “
I should have spoken to her,” she said, half talking to herself and not Hammar.

  “It’s okay,” he said.

  “I tried, and then she was whisked off. And why was that? The woman was afraid. You saw that!”

  The words spilled out of her mouth before she could catch them. She was aware she sounded suspicious, even paranoid.

  “Elin was old, Veronika,” Hammar said gently. “Old people die.”

  All right, Elin, Brand thought. You ordered me to come, and I am here. But now you are gone. A brief meeting, and that was all the two of them had managed. How had Hammar translated the old woman’s words? You are here to kill the devil.

  Hammar explained that Sanna and Folke sent her their apologies. They would be staying in town with relatives for several days, making arrangements for the memorial service.

  “So you must extend your visit,” he said. “The ceremony and burial will be in a few weeks.”

  “Weeks? Really?”

  “Here the cremation takes place first, then some weeks after we gather to celebrate the life. Often only the closest relatives attend the final burial at a later date. Your presence is not expected at the burial, our grieving is a far more private affair.”

  “Nice and controlled then,” Brand said.

  “Yes, that way might sound indifferent, but eventually, goes the reasoning, the loss will become real.”

  He hesitated. “You will have all this time, Veronika, so you can occupy yourself with the other thing I spoke about.”

  The disappearing Romani girls. Mulling over her own concerns, Brand mentally dismissed the suggestion.

  What do I do now? She posed the question without asking it aloud to Hammar. Skip the funeral? That didn’t seem right. Go back to Stockholm? For what purpose? Fly home? No, that would be like jumping back into the frying pan from out of the fire. Hammar sensed her uncertainty.

  “I’m very sorry such a bad event happened during your visit.”

  A death on her watch. The loss deepened Brand’s mood of gloom. “I thought Swedes were silent and moody,” she said. “Last night everyone was pretty chatty.”

  “Alcohol,” Hammar said.

  He got up and crossed the kitchen to the huge cast iron stove. “But you want coffee.” A statement, not a question.

  “Yes, please.”

  The man brought her a ceramic mug and a steaming glass carafe. He pushed a small pitcher of cream toward her.

  “Black,” she said. The brew was strong and scalding. “Now the rumors of this country having excellent coffee are confirmed.”

  Hammar nodded. He returned to the stove. A steel pot simmered above a low flame on a front burner. He shut off the heat. Using a wooden spoon, he dished warm rolled oats into a bowl. He added a splash of milk and set the bowl down in front of Brand.

  Brand’s gut churned. She didn’t think she could stomach food. At the first spoonful, though, she realized she was ravenous. She helped herself to one of the half-dozen cheese smörgåsar that Hammar had arranged on a platter. As she ate she felt herself slowly coming back to life.

  Cheese sandwiches for breakfast. Another of the sharp, intoxicating memories came to her, like the ones that had hit her before on the approach to the homestead. She was sitting at a kitchen table, not here in Sweden but in Klara and Gustav’s farmhouse in upstate New York.

  As a child, she ate the sandwiches greedily, even though she understood that they were not really breakfast food. No one in Queens, where she grew up and spent much of the year, ate this way. Cheese sandwiches for breakfast was not an American thing. But to her they meant summer mornings, the farm, the sound of Swedish being spoken by two people whose blood ran through her veins.

  She and Hammar ate in silence, the creak and tick of the walls around them sounding like old bones settling.

  “There’s another issue.” Hammar winced, as if afraid to tell her. “Lukas Dalgren returned home this morning.”

  Brand received the news with a stab of dismay. “He said he’d be here for several days. He was supposed to drive me back to Stockholm.”

  “I think it was the other way around,” Hammar said. “You would drive him, no?”

  He smiled wanly. She didn’t respond. A sense rose in her that was almost claustrophobic. “Marooned here in Härjedalen then,” she murmured.

  “Well, Lukas is a very busy man,” Hammar said. “Places to go, things to do.”

  “You have the American idiom down very well.”

  Hammar bent his head slightly to acknowledge the observation. “I’m sure Sanna and Folke will be happy to host you longer, despite the circumstances. After all, you’re the first to return home in more than seventy years, ever since Gustav and Klara left for America.”

  Brand didn’t know how to respond. Her family’s past had clutched at her with icy hands, and now she had no obvious way to struggle from its grip, not with Elin gone. Brand had counted on the old woman to make clear certain things she had never been able to understand, such as why her grandparents had abruptly fled their home country during the war.

  “There are buses?” she asked. “Trains?”

  “I return to Stockholm today myself,” Hammar said. “You could go with me.”

  “Oh, I couldn’t possibly impose. I can’t believe Lukas left me here.”

  “In Stockholm, I would be glad to take you around. I’m off work this month, and free as a bird. You can benefit from someone like me. Have you thought of that? Someone who knows the country and the culture, the angles and sharp edges that aren't shown in the tourist brochures and slick international marketing.”

  Brand’s guard went up. As far as she was concerned, all men’s motives were suspect. Hammar was older than she was, but not by much. She had a fine-tuned sense of whether a male might be hitting on her. Here was a new, “free as a bird” acquaintance, proposing an alliance. If Brand took Hammar up on it, it would have to be without any implications about “the boy and girl thing," as New York cops always referred to romance.

  “Let me think about it,” she said.

  “I propose the healing powers of a hot shower to clear the head,” Hammar said. He led Brand to a bathroom in the back reaches of the house, this one a modern, eye-blindingly-white tiled room with a large footed bathtub and a heated floor.

  The food and the shower rendered Brand almost human. She returned to Hammar in the kitchen. He had cleared and washed the dishes. Almost startled by her reappearance, Hammar turned to face Veronika surreptitiously slipping his phone into his pocket. She hesitated only for a moment, feeling she had interrupted a call she shouldn't overhear.

  “I’ll be glad to drive with you back to the Swedish capital,” she told him. She couldn’t imagine the pleasant, soft-spoken man she saw before her giving her any trouble. With pen and paper retrieved from a side counter, Brand composed a quick note of condolence to Sanna and Folke Dalgren. The New York Yankees ball caps she brought along as gifts now seemed pathetic.

  “They will be happy with them,” Hammar assured her. She left the hats and the note on the kitchen table.

  He announced he would go out and “take care of the car,” which Brand understood to mean scraping off ice that had frozen on the windshield the night before. His puppy-like enthusiasm to be out into the blistering cold sat in opposition to her resistance to re-enter the harsh reality of her turbulent adult life beyond the farmhouse door.

  Hammar returned, stamping snow from his feet, his face red with the outdoor chill. Carrying her own bag with the weight of her worldly possessions, Brand followed him out the front door. On the front porch she halted. Of all the vehicles that crowded the place the night before, only a lone ancient blue Saab remained.

  “That’s you?” she asked.

  “Yes,” Hammar answered. He sounded defensive.

  “Will she make it?”

  “This machine represents a high point in Swedish manufac—” he began, but Brand held up a hand to cut him off.

  “I would love to dr
ive such a magnificent vehicle,” she said.

  Hammar glanced at her. “I detect sarcasm,” he said. “But I know from Lukas that this is your way, always to take your place behind the wheel.”

  “Wait a sec,” Brand said. She opened her bag and extracted a black down vest that she had packed atop all her other clothes.

  “Yes, the temperature drops tonight,” Hammar said approvingly.

  “Drops?” Brand said, amused. “Hasn’t it already dropped?”

  “However, my car does come equipped with a serviceable heater.”

  “Wood-fired, I’m guessing,” Brand said, eyeing the antique vehicle.

  Hammar laughed. The two of them trailed out to the car in the stinging air of a mid February day. Scalloped clouds marked the sky. The sun was not much in evidence.

  “The border to Norway, that way,” Hammar said. He gestured to the west.

  Brand moved to the driver’s side of the car. She opened the door and stashed her duffel in the car’s back seat.

  “It’s a manual transmission,” Hammar warned her. “I don’t think you have many of those in New York City, with the bad traffic. Perhaps I ought to drive.”

  “I was born with a manual gear shift in my hand,” Brand replied.

  “Really?”

  “Well, no, not really, Hammar. But I learned to drive a John Deere on my grandparents’ farm.”

  “A tractor is not the same,” Hammar said mildly. But he allowed Brand to have her way.

  The ancient Saab sedan had rolled off the assembly line way back in 1970. Brand thought the fifty-year-old Model 96 looked comical. It was bulbous in all the wrong places, like a car designed by clowns for use in a circus routine. But inside and out the vehicle had the appearance of being lovingly maintained.

  Hammar had updated it with all the latest bells and whistles. When Brand opened the door, the key was already in the ignition. An alarm dinged just as it would in a modern vehicle. With the engine already running, the car was warm inside.

  Brand immediately stalled out on her first two tries at getting the vehicle moving. On the journey back to the highway, she rode the clutch mercilessly. The Saab’s owner wore a pained expression for the entire trip.