Page 52 of The Living and the Dead

“As I expected. The unvarnished truth of a house party. Kids taking pictures of each other chugging drinks. Pissing in the bathtub. Throwing up in the sink, falling down stairs, breaking things. Beer cans, liquor bottles.” She held up a close-up. “Someone who sneezed and wanted the results documented for posterity before he wiped his face.”

Siri raised an eyebrow. “Is that Filip Söderström?”

“It is.” Gerd rolled her eyes. “My God. We sure as hell didn’t act like this when I was a teenager.”

“Of course you did. It’s just that no one had a camera with them to document it.”

Gerd muttered and flipped through the pictures, stopping whenshe came to another of Filip. “I wonder how he’s doing. He’s always been a little sensitive, you might say.”

Siri looked through the photos several times. She saw Mikael and Filip, Jakob, Pierre, Sander and Killian, Alice and Isabelle. Pictures taken early in the evening: a sea of shoes and jackets in the hall. Beer cans and plastic bottles on a table. Drinks being mixed in the kitchen; the digital oven clock in the background: 7:47.

These were followed by more chaotic, blurry shots from later, but none of them, as far as Siri could tell, gave any hint of what was to come. Pictures from upstairs showed Isabelle mixing liquor in some sort of plastic bowl, while the background revealed a picture that had been pulled from the wall and a porcelain bowl that had shattered, likely during Mikael and Jakob’s scuffle. Pictures from the living room showed that Alice had napped on the couch for a while, and out in the hall you could see Sander and Killian approaching the front door, about to leave. The clock on the wall read a few minutes before one.

Gerd and Siri added the photographs to the case materials.

“If anything,” Siri said, “I think the pictures seem to corroborate what they’ve told us. What do you think?”

“I’m afraid I agree,” Gerd said glumly, raising her glass. “But cheers to kids telling the truth to the police once in a while. There is hope.”

Siri raised her glass as well. “But someone isn’t. I’ve tried to make up my mind who I believe, whether Jakob or Killian is the liar here.”

They each took a sip of glögg.

“We should be able to find out, we just have to be a little creative.” Gerd looked at the clock on the wall. “I’d like to take a little field trip.”

Siri put down her glass. “Now?”

“Yes siree.”

39

It was getting hotter in the cabin. They needed so few words, Killian and Felicia, hardly any at all, maybe because there weren’t any words to describe what had befallen them.

That was how Killian thought of it sometimes. It was as if his tongue didn’t know what to do, nor the rest of his body. As if she had poisoned him. He couldn’t tell her so, but that’s what it felt like—she was moving inside him like a foreign substance in his heart, his head, in between his legs. He could feel himself transforming, or splitting. Cleaving. Maybe that’s what love does to you. Cleaves you in two.

She was lying quietly beside him now, and with her eyes closed as if he’d drained her. The lightbulb flickered overhead. With her eyes still closed, she said:

“I might love you, Killian.”

His body went perfectly still and he felt absolutely nothing in his chest, nothing but a peace like unrippled waters.

He would build her a house with his own two hands. A house with a garden. That’s what he dreamed of. It would be a simple house, which pained him, but he would make it work. Even if he had to force the state of everything to fall into line, he would doit.

“Same, about you,” he said.

She opened her eyes. “Have you told him?”

“Not yet.”

“When are you going to? It’s better he hears it from you than finds out some other way.”

“He’s going to leave this summer anyway,” said Killian. “It doesn’t matter.”

Felicia stroked his back. Killian saw shadows on the walls; everything that had happened had struck fear in him. Down to the bone.

“Then you might as well get it over with. It’s better that way. What are you afraid of?”

“Nothing.”