by Sara Blaedel
Camilla cooled down. She knew he was right. The doctor had said it was a miracle her injuries weren’t severe. He’d added that the next few days she would probably feel like she’d gone twelve rounds in a heavyweight fight. But no bones were broken. Her black-and-blue eye looked bad. The doctor thought she must have hit a tree trunk after being flung into the air. The right side of her face was swollen, closing up her eye. Camilla had been shocked when the nurse handed her a mirror.
“Tønnesen went out and put the chains up so nobody can drive into the forest now. Once in a while, someone ignores the signs and drives down to the creek. But this happened on one of the small roads, and I’m thinking we may have a poacher. What did the car look like?”
Camilla thought for a few moments, then shook her head. “It was bigger than most cars, but I don’t know if it was a van or a four-wheel-drive. It came at me like a big, black shadow.”
That’s all Camilla could remember. She had no idea how long she had been on the ground. Didn’t know whether it was Frederik’s voice or the ambulance’s siren she’d heard first. Her entire world had consisted of pain. She’d cried when they lifted her up on the stretcher.
“By the way, how did you find me?” she asked Frederik.
“I didn’t. It was Elinor. She came up to the house and demanded I follow her. I didn’t realize until I got out there that there’d been an accident.”
In her head Camilla saw the old lady with the long gray braids. She shuddered.
She put her hand on Frederik’s thigh and moaned loudly when they took a sharp right just after the Viking Ship Museum. “It was a good thing you went with her,” she said. She asked if he’d spoken with Louise.
“She and Eik have already looked around out there. They went back to their office, but she insisted on coming out to stay the weekend. She just had to pick up Jonas and the dog.”
Camilla nodded. She was happy that her friend had investigated the scene instead of showing up at the hospital with flowers and chocolate. “And Eik! What about him? Is he coming, too?”
She couldn’t figure out if Louise still had something going with her colleague. Camilla liked him, a lot. Louise and Eik as a couple—that she hadn’t seen coming, but they got along very well. Though Louise hadn’t mentioned him since that night at the gamekeeper’s. Maybe it was a good idea to get him back in the picture, now that so much from Louise’s past was flaring up again.
“Anyway, I’ll call and ask,” she said.
“Shouldn’t you maybe—” Frederik began, but Camilla had already called the National Police Department and asked to speak to the Search Department.
“Eik sounded happy for the invitation,” she said a few moments later. “He’ll see if they can’t take off early. What about Markus?” They turned into their driveway. “Is he home this weekend?”
“I don’t really know,” Frederik said. He shrugged.
Lately it was as if someone had stuck a rocket up Markus’s rear end. Her fifteen-year-old son was out constantly with his friends, and on the rare occasions he was home, he lay around on his bed wrapped up in Facebook while his TV blasted away. It was more or less impossible to come into contact with him. At least for her.
They drove up to the house. Camilla swung her legs out of the car. “Oh shit,” she moaned.
Frederik came around and pulled her up. Unable to stand straight, she hobbled slowly toward the house.
“We better get you in bed,” he said. Despite her weak protests, he carried her up the broad steps to the front door. “If you take a few of the pills the doctor gave you and rest awhile, maybe you’ll feel better when Louise comes.”
Camilla relented; it was too painful to walk anyway. Frederik carried her to their second-floor bedroom. He helped her out of her clothes and tucked her into bed. He sat for a while, stroking her cheek. Then he fetched a glass of water and handed it to her.
“Thanks,” she whispered, and kissed him. His longish hair fell over her face, his stubble tickling her chin.
She swallowed the pills and nodded when he said he would check on her later.
18
Sleep, pain, awake. Sleep, pain, awake. Short sequences of each state wove in and out of each other.
Camilla’s head spun as she lay with her eyes closed, waiting for the pills to work. Maybe she’d dozed off, she wasn’t sure, but suddenly she sensed someone standing beside the bed.
She opened her eyes to a wrinkled face staring down at her. It was the old woman from the forest.
“The wagons are rolling on the Death Trail,” she said with the same weird little-girl voice that had nearly scared Camilla to death down by the creek.
She froze, so frightened that she almost began whimpering. She stared back at the narrow mouth mumbling the same message again and again. Finally the old woman backed away, but instead of leaving, she walked over to the window and the small dent in the wall next to where Camilla had placed her large wardrobe.
Camilla realized she was holding her breath; she let it out slowly. Her heart was pounding. She stared in shock at the bowed back of the woman, then threw her comforter off to the side and, despite her pain, hopped out of the door in her short T-shirt and panties. She made it down to the kitchen and plopped onto a chair before finally moaning loudly.
Frederik must have heard her staggering around, because he came to the doorway looking very worried. “Couldn’t you sleep?”
“She’s up in the bedroom,” she managed to say. She hunched her shoulders. “How did she get in?”
“Who? What are you talking about?” He walked over and put his arms around her. Camilla knew that he thought she’d been dreaming.
“The old woman from the forest. She’s up in our bedroom!”
“Elinor?” Frederik didn’t seem all that surprised. “Oh no! Not again.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘again’?”
“Are you cold?”
Frederik was already on his way to the living room. He came back with a blanket and covered her with it.
“What do you mean, ‘again’?” Camilla repeated. She pulled the blanket tight.
“Elinor lived here back when it was a home for girls,” he said. “Mom said she couldn’t have been more than two years old when she came. Sometimes she forgets she lives in the gatekeeper’s house now. She’s harmless, and besides, she’s part of the history of the place. It’s nice when she shows up, too.”
Camilla didn’t totally agree with that last part.
“I’ll call Tønnesen,” he said. “He can follow her home.”
Camilla drew the blanket around her again and closed her eyes while he talked to the manager.
“She kept saying that the wagons are rolling on the Death Trail,” she said when he came back. “What does she mean?”
Frederik shrugged. “No idea, but it’s what they call the path here from the house down to the girls’ graves, and then on to the sacrificial oak. It’s always been called that.”
“Girls’ graves?” Camilla sat up in her chair, but Frederik was on his way upstairs to get Elinor.
The front door opened, and Camilla was about to call out to Tønnesen when she heard dog feet galloping over the tiles in the hallway. A second later two dog snouts were sniffing her legs.
“What in the world, whose mutt is this with my favorite dog?” she cried out. She tried to cover her legs with the blanket before the big German shepherd slobbered all over them.
“Get that dog out of here,” she heard Louise say. Someone whistled, and the dog turned and ran out of the kitchen with Dina on his tail. Her friend appeared in the doorway.
Louise looked as if she was about to say something about her face, but she held back at the last second and instead mumbled, “Jesus.” She hugged Camilla very carefully. “It’s going to be a while before you run your next marathon.”
“It’s not so bad, really,” she said. But her friend was right. The pressure on her eye was excruciating, and water kept running out o
f it.
Louise stroked her hair. “The car must have hit you at a relatively high speed. I called the hospital, and they told me that you’d been knocked several meters from the impact.”
“You’ve talked to them?” Camilla tried to smile, even though it felt like she was grimacing.
“Of course. I wanted to know what happened. Though I had to say it was in connection with a police investigation, otherwise they wouldn’t have told me.”
“Have you reported it?” Eik asked. He’d just come back inside. He sat down on a kitchen chair. “Louise and I were out in the forest, but we couldn’t find anything except tire tracks where the driver definitely floored it.”
Camilla nodded.
Frederik said something out on the stairway, then came into the kitchen with Elinor on his arm. Both Louise and Eik rose so she could sit.
But Elinor didn’t want to sit down. She stood beside Camilla’s chair, her lips moving as if she were talking to herself, her hands in the pockets of her loose summer jacket. She didn’t look at anyone, she simply stood mumbling.
Camilla didn’t know what to do. She had the strange feeling that the old woman was keeping an eye on her, and she didn’t like it. She closed her eyes and rested her head on the back of the chair. Louise asked what the doctor had said before releasing her. Finally the pills began to work; her body tingled pleasantly as the pain subsided.
She tried to smile again when Tønnesen walked in and caught sight of her face. Elinor livened up, and without so much as a glance at the others she took the manager’s arm and walked outside with him.
Frederik smiled in resignation, then he shook Eik’s hand before giving Louise a hug. “Where’s Jonas?” He looked around.
“He’s already upstairs,” Louise said, nodding at the stairs and Markus’s room. Camilla asked how their estate’s manager had become the caretaker for the old crone.
“Elinor came here in 1922, back when the house was an orphanage for girls,” Frederik said. “When the orphanage was shut down, the district wanted to move Elinor to a closed institution—they didn’t have anywhere else to put her. But the old manager and his wife wouldn’t hear of it. They took care of her until my grandparents bought the place several years later. They let Elinor live in the gatekeeper’s house. Since then it’s been one of the manager’s duties to take care of her, and in fact I think Tønnesen enjoys it.”
The woman must be over ninety, Camilla thought.
Frederik offered Eik and Louise a beer. “Or would you rather have coffee?” he asked from beside the refrigerator.
They both shook their heads, and Camilla nodded when he asked if she’d like some elderberry juice. “I don’t think alcohol is the best thing for you,” he said, smiling at her.
She felt better now that the pills were working, and wanted to hear more about Elinor and the history of the estate. They helped her to the sofa. “How much do you actually know about it from back then?” she asked.
“I have photos.” Frederik walked over to the bookshelves and opened a drawer below. “My parents took over the estate in 1972, from my grandparents. They’d owned it since 1954, when the orphanage was shut down. My mother was very interested in the history of the place; once in a while she scared the daylights out of us with some of the stuff she dug up. I remember having nightmares for a whole week about the big tree in the front courtyard burning.”
“Why?” Camilla asked. She’d never known her mother-in-law, Inger Sachs-Smith, who’d died shortly before she met Frederik.
“It’s a warden tree,” Frederik said, as if that explained everything.
“And what the hell is that?” She sat up and looked outside.
“It’s also called a fire tree,” he said. “According to superstition, the manor will burn down if you chop a limb off the tree or fell it. Mom thought that was fascinating; also the sacrificial oak.”
He told Louise and Eik about the big partly hollow oak tree in the forest. “The tree is a sacred object that appears in several of the old legends and myths from this area. The manager back then was very interested in the old tales, and he reinstated the old traditions. They became a part of the estate’s history.”
Eik was looking out the window at the yard. “Isn’t there something about the warden trees, that you take a chunk of the timber frame from the house and graft it onto the tree?”
“Mom said that they removed a section of bark and drilled a hole in the trunk of the tree, and it was filled with a plug from the timber frame,” Frederik said. “Then they replaced the bark and it grew back. That was a hundred and twenty years ago, and I’m sure no one has touched a limb on that tree since. As far back as I can remember, there’s been a lot of respect for it and the old superstition. When I was a kid I was afraid lightning would hit it, or something else would happen, something out of our control. I really believed that all hell would break loose!” He laughed.
Camilla leaned forward when he opened the old photo album. The manor was easy to recognize, majestic and white, though without nearly so many trees and bushes as now. The forest was visible, of course, but the area around the yard was much barer.
“Is that the Death Trail?” She pointed to a path in the photo that entered the forest on the manor’s gable side.
Frederik nodded. “It was called that in the old days, because they used it to haul the dying down to the sacrificial oak on wagons. The director of the orphanage revived the old tradition. Back then, a lot of the young orphans were weak. They didn’t make it. They’re buried down there.”
He pointed to the spot where the path vanished into the forest.
Camilla hunched her shoulders. Though all this had happened many years ago, the thought gave her the jitters.
“When a girl was dying, the director brought the wagon around, wrapped the sick girl up, and drove her down that path, past the graves, to the sacrificial oak. He made a sacrifice of the sick girl’s blood so the gods would accept her when she passed away.”
“Is that the director standing there?” Louise asked. She pointed to a man at the edge of the photo standing straight as an arrow.
Frederik nodded again.
In another photo he stood surrounded by girls in identical dresses. Obviously they had been dolled up for the photographer. It all looked so pompous, but the girls did have big smiles on their faces. One of them must be Elinor, Camilla thought.
“Right when Elinor moved here, one of the small girls became very sick,” Frederik said. “The director laid her in the wagon and drove down to the sacrificial oak, where prayers were said for her. They held a vigil at her bed for several nights after that; everyone thought her time had come, but the girl didn’t die. Then an influenza epidemic hit the orphanage. It went on for over a year, and many of the very young girls died. It was said to be the gods’ punishment for not getting the girl.”
He smiled faintly. “That was one of Mom’s favorite stories. She told it to us when we were kids, and my sister got very wrapped up in it. She pretended she was the girl who didn’t die, the one everybody else shunned because she’d caused so many of the other orphans’ deaths.”
Camilla could hardly imagine her sister-in-law in that scenario. When she first met Rebecca Sachs-Smith, she’d been a businesswoman with a heart of stone. She’d changed somewhat when her daughter had been kidnapped, but even then Frederik’s sister didn’t seem to fit the role of victim.
“According to Mom, this sad story ended with the poor girl drowning herself in the fjord. Mom was serious when she claimed that you could see the girl once in a while, walking around the house or standing out in the yard, dripping wet, as if she’d just walked out of the water.”
The quiet in the room was intense for a moment.
“Quite a place you’ve settled into,” Louise said. She smiled at her friend, now lying on the sofa with the blanket over her.
19
They sat for a while, no one saying a word, absorbing the history of the place.
&
nbsp; “Can we find the spot where the girls are buried?” Eik asked. He stood up. “The dogs need to get out, and who knows, I might be lucky enough to meet the girl who didn’t die. You want to come?”
He held his hand out to Louise.
“What about food?” she asked them. “I can drive into Roskilde and do some shopping. Will it be too late if we take a walk first?”
It was almost eight.
“We’ll take care of dinner while you’re gone,” Frederik said. “I’ll get the boys to make a salad, and I’ll light the grill.”
He found a map and spread it out. “The Death Trail enters the forest here, but the part of the trail close to our house is overgrown with weeds and bushes. It’s probably easier for you to find the graves from the sacrificial oak.”
He picked up a red felt pen and marked the route for them on the map. He drew a circle. “There’s a clearing here. The Asatro’s bonfire site is in the middle, but if you walk behind the tree you’ll find the Death Trail. Just follow it to the graves. It’ll take about ten minutes.”
“Sounds good,” Louise said. “We’ll find it.”
Eik stood outside with the two dogs, who were jumping around when she came out. Louise smiled when the retired police dog rocketed off, as if he’d completely forgotten that one of his back legs didn’t work. The German shepherd was as friendly as he could be now that he was out of the office, which he considered his territory to guard. He hadn’t growled or bared his teeth at Camilla, Frederik, or Markus, and it had been love at first sight with Jonas and Dina.
* * *
They strolled toward the old oak. Louise enjoyed holding Eik’s warm hand, the way he held her fingers and stroked her hand with his thumb. The peaceful forest, the sunlight and sound of the dogs running ahead, all so beautiful and quiet. Once in a while they stopped and kissed, and she rested her chin against his leather jacket as he held her. Louise wanted to melt away into the moment.
It wasn’t difficult to find the sacrificial oak or the narrow path. Louise let go of Eik’s hand and leaned her head back to take a good look at the old oak. The trunk was so large that they couldn’t have reached around it even if Camilla and Frederik had come along.
