Page 81 of The Living and the Dead

“Yes, it’s nice,” said Sander, who had come to meet him at the gate. “We like it here.”

He had left his old life behind in some ways, but even so, Snöstorp was no more than half an hour from Skavböke. The trip took longer than it seemed, though. He who manages to escape his past gets to live twice.

And now this.

Filip is dead.

Sander paused and lowered his gaze to Jakob’s hand. He was holding tight to a plastic bag.

“Would you like anything?”

“Yes, but I guess it should be an NA beer. I’m driving, after all. If you have some? But you go ahead and have something stronger, if you’d rather.”

“Like I said before, that would be fuel for the fire today. I think I have some NA around here somewhere.”

Sander went to the kitchen and found two glass bottles in the door of the fridge; he opened both and handed one to Jakob, who took a big gulp and set his plastic bag on the table.

“Christ, what a day,” he said.

After supper that evening, Jakob and Alice had headed to Oskarström to go grocery shopping on Blåklintsvägen, where once a week he dropped off his horse-racing bets and lost money. Of all the things she tried to love about her husband, Alice liked to say, this was one of the hardest to accept.

No one had ever expected she should need to love him at all, really, but one summer night after graduation, plans changed. A few weeks later, Alice’s period was late. They got married that winter, and Lisa arrived in April. By that point, they had moved into the house over by Öjasjön, an old two-story house with a two-car garage and a piece of land that turned out to be too acidic to cultivate.

Tonight, the road to Oskarström was blocked off with blue-and-white tape, and police kept watch, eyeing the cars that came by, stopping them. In the distance, a glimpse of a white van on the side of the road.

—

Jakob, pensive, turned his bottle in his hands.

“Both of us recognized the van, so when it was our turn to talk to them we told them what we knew. Which wasn’t much, really, just that he’d been at the funeral and was heading off to work. Or at least that’s what he said. I mentioned who had been there, including you, of course. Have they contacted you?”

“Not yet. But sounds like it’s only a matter of time.”

Jakob took a sip.

“So someone killed him,” Sander said, staring at the floor.

“Seemed so, anyway. Who the hell knows. But he did have a rough time of it for a while there. Maybe some old grudge caught up with him.”

“I guess we’ll find out.”

“It’s too bad. He really had straightened himself out. At least, it seemed like he had.”

It was almost ten. The kids must be asleep by now. Even if Sander left this minute, he wouldn’t reach Kivik until long after Olivia went to bed. Even so, he wanted nothing more than to take off, just get in the car andgo.

Sander tried to absorb what Jakob had told him, take in the implications, but it was hard. Everything that had been confined to the past was creeping closer. Filip, beaten to death. Two brothers killed over twenty years apart, brothers he used to know.

His eyes went to the bag on the kitchen table.

“Was there something in the bag?”

“Oh, right.” Jakob put down his bottle and peeked inside the bag, as if to make sure its contents were still inside. “I don’t fucking know, it was so long ago, but I’ve always thought this was strange.”

What Jakob told Sander then wasn’t really strange at all, and didn’t take very long to explain. Even so, for Sander, by the time Jakob was finished, everything had changed.

62

During Christmas of 1999, area teenagers were nearly universally forbidden by their parents from going out, and silence lay over Skavböke like a membrane. Jakob hung out in his room, where he talked to friends on the phone, read old comic books, and watched a movie to distract himself and keep from overthinking things.