As I was driving away from the Wilson house, a Volvo came past me in the other direction. It was Jonathan. I don’t think he saw me. He didn’t stop.
When I reached the top of the hill, I looked back. I saw the Volvo go down the driveway to the house. A moment later, two more cars reached the drive from the opposite direction and joined the first. Jonathan got out and then David and Lucy and Rosemary. They all came together, hugging and kissing and shaking hands.
I left them to their reunion. Let them live in the past, not me. I wasn’t going to waste my one and only life wallowing in remorse about Amanda.
Although I must admit, as the years go on, as I move toward the end of middle age, I find myself wondering about that sometimes. Whether this is, in fact, my one and only life, I mean. Death wasn’t the end for Amanda, after all. Recently, more and more often, I hear her in the night, in the dark, in the distance, singing in that wistful voice:
“I wait for you. I wait for you.”
I believe she does.
Copyright © 2010 by Andrew Klavan
Previous Article Passport to Crime
Passport to Crime
THE WOOD THIEF
By Liza Marklund
Swedish journalist, columnist, and publisher Liza Marklund is also one of Sweden’s (and Europe’s) bestselling novelists. She is best known for her novels about the series character of this story,...
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Fiction Reviews
Passport to Crime
THE WOOD THIEF
By Liza Marklund
Swedish journalist, columnist, and publisher Liza Marklund is also one of Sweden’s (and Europe’s) bestselling novelists. She is best known for her novels about the series character of this story, journalist Annika Bengtzon. Her latest book to see print in the U.S. is a novel she co-wrote with bestselling American writer James Patterson. Entitled The Postcard Killers, it became the number one bestseller in Sweden and was published in the U.S. in August 2010.
Translated from the Swedish by Marlaine Delargy
The dark figure slipped like a shadow among the trees, silent, breathless, watchful. The moon shone cold and blue over the forest, exposing every movement.
She looked around cautiously as she hurried along, shivering. Warmth was a long way off.
When she reached the glade, she stopped behind a fir tree. Nothing was moving. The chimneys pointed up towards the night sky, cold and mute. No smoke rising towards the stars.
It must be bloody freezing for the old man, she thought.
She stared at the kitchen window for a long time, watching the moon glittering on the uneven, hand-blown glass. Not a single movement.
She made her decision, walked calmly over to the shed, and pulled out the sack.
The old man was woken by the cold; it had crept through the blanket and down into his lungs, heavy and damp. Slowly he allowed the pain to reach his brain; he groaned and coughed quietly. Then he took a few harsh, deep breaths as he lay there on the sofa bed listening to the clock. The starlight outside the window splintered the darkness into myriad shades of black and grey, sometimes almost blue. He bent his head and peered over at the box of wood by the iron stove, the tiles above it catching the light.
“Blackie,” he said.
The cat emerged from the shadows by the stove, took two agile leaps across the kitchen floor, and landed on the man’s chest. He laughed out loud.
“You’re getting fatter and fatter, puss.”
The cat stomped around in circles several times on top of the blanket before settling down with her nose tucked in the hollow at the base of the man’s throat. He could feel the heat of the little body radiating down through the blanket, easing the pain in his chest. They lay like that for a while, the old man and the cat. His bladder was bursting; he would have to get up soon.
There was a rustling noise over by the wood box and the cat shot up. With an enormous leap the animal landed on the floor and started chasing the mouse. The rugs ended up in a heap as the old man lay motionless, listening with great concentration as the hunt unfolded. Then came the terrified squeak of pain and death, the cat’s triumphant yowl, and the subsequent crunching of the mouse’s bones. The old man chuckled.
“Good girl, Blackie.”
But there was nothing for it—he had to get up. He pushed aside the blanket and carefully lifted his legs over the edge of the bed, using his right hand to help. He stepped straight into his trousers; he kept his long johns and thick socks on in bed. With an enormous effort he pushed with his hands and managed to get to his feet, his back aching. The situation was urgent now. He staggered onto the porch, pulled on his Helly Hansen top, his cap, and his boots, and headed for the steps.
It was sparkling with cold outside, and the rime frost had made the steps slippery. He almost fell on the millstone at the bottom. Leaning on the wall with his right hand he made his way around the corner and released the urine in a crooked stream, aiming at the forest. He closed his eyes, enjoying the relief. When he had shaken off the drops and tucked it away, he took a few deep breaths and gazed out across the landscape. Dense forest to the north, but over to the east there was a more open aspect towards the marsh where the sawmill had once stood. The moon and stars made the frost sparkle; he could make out the light and the colours.
Then the cold struck his lungs again, making him cough. He tore his gaze away from the view and made his way back indoors. He switched on the lamp in the porch and the fluorescent light in the kitchen, the sudden brightness making him blink. The cat was licking her lips over by the larder, a few tufts of hair and splinters of bone bearing witness to the recent slaughter.
The old man went over to the sink and picked up the water scoop. He took a swig as the cat leapt up and began to lap from the bucket.
“Delicious,” said the old man, smacking his lips.
Then it was time to fetch the wood.
The thought made his guts twist with apprehension.
First of all, he lit the stove with the kindling he had brought in the previous evening, the iron of the door cold to his touch. As he struck the match he noticed that his hand was shaking. He knew what was waiting for him. Laboriously he got to his feet and picked up the basket and the flashlight.
Holding his left hand straight out in front of him to help him balance, he shuffled across to the woodshed, the flashlight rolling around in the bottom of the basket. On the other side of the ditch he stopped and switched it on, pointing the beam at the ground. He blinked. Damned eyesight. Even if there were tracks in the rime frost, he couldn’t make them out. When he lifted the hasp and opened the door, he knew. He couldn’t have explained why, perhaps the smell of another person somehow lingered, perhaps there was the faintest rise in the temperature left behind, but he was certain. Someone had been here very recently.
He swept the beam of the flashlight across the piles of wood, the carefully sawn, split, dried, stacked, sorted, and stored logs, all exactly the same length so that they would fit the kitchen stove, cut into the different dimensions necessary to catch quickly and then keep the fire going. Alder, aspen, birch, pine, and fir, different piles for the different kinds of wood, boxes of birch bark and other types of bark.
When the beam reached the pile of birch logs, he gasped out loud. So it was the birch tonight. He staggered across to the pile and ran his hand over the wood; yes, he was right. His eyes might miss things, but his hands remembered; there were logs missing from here. Rage and impotence twisted like cramps in his abdomen, and he groaned out loud. Clenched his fists, the nails burrowing into his palm to overcome the pain. His wood! The birch that he had worked so hard on last spring. The sections of trunk he had dragged all the way from Gorgsjö, where the birch tree had been brought down by the wind. It had been a fine tree, right by the shore of the lake, with rustling leaves and plenty of thick branches. He had made use of every one, chopping up the tree and bringing home every last scrap. His entire spring lay in these piles
of wood. He sniffed loudly as the tears overflowed. Bastard! Some bastard was stealing his wood! Bastard wood thief!
He sank down onto the chopping block and wept.
Annika Bengtzon kissed her grandmother’s hair.
“I won’t be long.”
Her grandmother patted her on the cheek.
Annika looped her bag over her shoulder and picked up the plastic carrier. Out on the steps she stopped, screwing up her eyes in the sharp winter light and taking several deep breaths. The lake down below Lyckebo had frozen; if it stayed this cold she would be able to go ice skating after Christmas.
The rime frost crunched beneath her feet as she headed for the turnpike, past the rented car from the garage at Norrtull. Old Gustav lived on the other side of the track in a cottage next to the marsh where the sawmill had been; it was known as Lillsjötorp, and she had visited him every Christmas Eve for as long as she could remember. He had already been ancient when she was a child.
Annika walked quickly and purposefully along the forest track; she knew it well. She had grown up in these Sörmland forests around Hälleforsnäs, had lived here all her life until last autumn. For the last two months she had been working nights on Kvällspressen, a newspaper in Stockholm. The autumn’s events, especially her investigation of a young woman’s murder, had meant that she had been unable to come home for some time. But the job had created a vacuum in her life that could be filled only by solid traditions such as Christmas at her grandmother’s cottage by the shores of the lake.
Lillsjötorp sparkled like a little jewel on the edge of the forest, the frost glittering on its walls, so picturesque you could almost weep. White and Falun red, leaded windows, blue door, mossy apple trees.
But as Annika drew closer, the deterioration became obvious. The garden was overgrown with lupins, the black stems bearing pods surrounding the house like rotting exclamation marks. The odd tracks on the ground had been made by Old Gustav’s shuffling gait and bad hips; one led to his pissing-place around the corner, one to the outside toilet, and the deepest, of course, to the woodshed. The outside walls needed brushing down and painting. The putty had started to come away around the windowpanes; Gustav appeared to have repaired it with cement. On the edge of the forest she could see a mountain of empty tins and empty schnapps bottles.
Annika sighed and knocked on the door. No response. She knocked harder.
“Uncle Gustav!”
A coal-black cat came skittering out of the trees, ran up the steps, and started rubbing around her legs.
“Hello Blackie, is your daddy not at home?”
She tried the handle; the door wasn’t locked.
“Hello ...?”
She stepped onto the porch, blinking in the darkness, and discovered she was staring straight down a double-barrelled shotgun. She deafened herself with her scream, and the barrel jerked.
“For Christ’s sake, Gustav, what the hell are you doing?”
The old man lowered the gun, staring at her in confusion. He was dirty and unshaven; she could smell the odour coming off his body from over three feet away. His hair was greasy, his eyes cloudy. His face looked slightly swollen.
“Gustav, what on earth is going on?”
Her heart was pounding in her chest; she had been really scared. The cat slipped past them into the kitchen, and Annika closed the outside door. The porch was in darkness; she could see the old man only as a silhouette against the kitchen doorway.
“Maria’s Annika?” he said, lowering the gun slightly.
“Of course!” she said, sounding more angry than she intended. “What the hell are you doing standing here on the porch with a shotgun?”
The old man turned and shuffled into the kitchen, with Annika following close behind. The heat was oppressive in there, the kind of suffocating heat produced by an old wood-burning stove made of iron, with the fire well banked up. The cat had curled up on the tiled edging between the stove and the wall; Annika wondered how it managed to avoid being roasted alive. Gustav sat down on a wooden chair by the kitchen table, resting the gun on his knees. Annika put her bags down next to the sofa bed; the old man hadn’t made his bed today. She walked over to him and firmly took the gun away; he didn’t protest. She broke it open; it wasn’t loaded. With a sigh, she pushed it under the bed.
“Right, Gustav,” she said, sitting down opposite him. “Start talking—what’s going on?”
The old man started weeping. His shoulders slumped and shook as he hid his face in his hands.
“Now, now,” said Annika, patting him clumsily on the arm. “Come on, Uncle Gustav, tell me what’s happened!”
“The wood thief,” the old man said quietly. “It’s the wood thief.”
He blew his nose in his hand and wiped the snot on his trousers.
“Is someone stealing your wood?” Annika asked.
He nodded. She looked at the little old man. Gustav had worked as a forester for many, many years. He had spent his whole life in this tiny cottage, first with his mother, then all alone since her death. He had electricity and cold water, which he kept in a bucket on the draining board and shared with the cat.
Gustav lived on a very small pension, so he had permission to take the trees blown down by the wind in the forest owned by the estate. He dedicated his life to these trees. To him, the woodshed was a treasure trove of memories, thoughts, nature, and work.
She remembered all the summers she had helped Gustav with the wood. He had taught her how to pile it high on her left arm, balancing it perfectly as the right hand built a tall mountain. She had learned to split great big logs with a single blow at the age of only seven, and had had her own little chopping block next to Gustav’s large one.
When they were having their snack, always perched on their own logs, Gustav would tell her about the remarkable things the trees had witnessed. He had shown her the age rings and described the trees at different periods in history, both global and local.
Look, when this one was the same size as a Christmas tree, the Bolsheviks took over in Russia. This birch was no more than a leafy twig when the crofters’ children coughed themselves to death up in Löfberga. This is where I was born, this is where you were born. The trees have seen everything, they know everything, make no mistake about that.
“Shall we go and have a look in the woodshed?” Annika suggested.
Gustav was walking very badly, she noticed.
“It started three weeks ago,” the old man ground out. “I noticed it right away. First it was the fir from the White Mountains, then the pine from the other side of the marsh. Now it’s the Gorgsjö birch.”
He lifted the hasp and pushed the door open. Inside, the logs were stacked to the ceiling, layer upon layer, as much wood as you could possibly want. To Annika and anyone else on this earth it was just firewood, any old firewood.
“Here,” said Gustav, patting one of the piles. “The birch. That’s what the wood thief stole last night.”
Annika looked around. There were several tracks outside the woodshed, made by both people and animals.
“Did you see or hear anything? A car? A motorbike?” she asked.
The old man shook his head. His eyesight wasn’t very good, but there was nothing wrong with his hearing. Annika studied the ground.
“There are no tracks made by a bike, either. The wood thief must have come on foot. So you know what that means, Gustav?”
The old man didn’t reply.
“Nobody can carry wood farther than a couple of hundred yards,” said Annika. “So it has to be someone from Hedberga.”
Together they looked over at the forest track leading down to the village.
When Annika had left Old Gustav with the Christmas ham and dried fish and gravlax and wished him a very happy Christmas, in spite of the wood thief, she set off along the track through the trees. Feather-light snowflakes had begun to drift towards the ground with infinite slowness, hovering in the air. Annika caught a few on her tongue.
After a few minutes she reached the first of the wooden houses in Hedberga. The entire village was an ancient collection of heaps of timber huddled against the backdrop of the vast forest. The odd satellite dish shattered the picture-postcard idyll.
She walked along slowly, studying the village houses, all decorated for Christmas. The electric candles dispersed a warm glow through the windows. She had some kind of relationship with every single person in this village.
There, in the biggest house of all, lived Åke and Inga Karlsson; he had been her teacher at junior school.
Next door lived Asta and Folke Nykander and their son Petter; he had learning difficulties of some kind. Petter was a couple of years older than Annika; she had been afraid of him when she was little.
Farther along was the manor house where Hjalmar Pettersson, the church pastor, lived with his hypocritical wife Elsa. Hjalmar had once condemned Annika’s mother in public after her divorce.
On the farm over by the edge of the forest lived Karin and Anders Bergström and their three young children. She and Karin had been classmates; Anders was well known in the area for being bone idle.
He can’t even be bothered to put on a condom, thought Annika as she passed the yard, toys strewn all over the place.
Ingela Jönsson, known as the Sperm Bucket because she was such a slag, lived in a small cottage she had inherited from her mother. It looked silent, dark, and empty. Annika glared at it; her boyfriend had been one of those carrying on with the Sperm Bucket.
Around the corner lived Axelsson, the farmer, with his five children who always smelt of the farmyard. Annika used to babysit for them sometimes when she was in high school.
One of these people stole Old Gustav’s wood, Annika thought.
She sighed and turned off towards Lyckebo.
The early morning Christmas service at the church in Floda began at six o’clock. Annika and her grandmother were already there at twenty to. The Axelssons stomped in with almost all of their children, and there sat arrogant Hjalmar and his Elsa, and Asta and Folke Nykander, but not their son. Åke and Inga Karlsson arrived just after the bell began to ring; Åke looked as if he had a hangover.
Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 01/01/11 Page 12
