Page 82 of The Living and the Dead

“The Empire Strikes Back,as I recall. That new edition, with the special effects.” Jakob kept sipping his beer. “Afterwards I went out to the yard, I don’t know what time it was exactly, but it was right before the landslide. Maybe fifteen minutes before? I was going to put more wood in the stove out in the garage. That’s when I saw someone run past, not too far off. He was coming from over by Söderström’s, you know, along that trail that used to be there. I didn’t think much of it, but a minute or two later, while I was still messing with the woodstove, a dog started barking like mad. Then I heard a boom. A huge boom,deep and muffled, like something had exploded, but what could be exploding in Skavböke, you know? I went to see what it was, but I didn’t get very far before the ground started to feel…I don’t know, it just felt wrong. Do you remember that?”

“No,” Sander said. “But I was indoors. I was sleeping.”

Jakob glanced down and nodded thoughtfully.

“Anyway, I hightailed it inside and ran into my parents in thedoor—they’d heard the boom too and were on their way out to see what was going on.”

“You were okay,” Sander said tentatively, trying to recall a fuzzy memory. “Right? Your house survived?”

“We were lucky. It ended just a couple hundred yards from us.”

Jakob stared at the checkered kitchen floor. It had cost Sander and Olivia fifty thousand kronor to install, all in all, and almost as much to tear up and replace after a water leak six months later. Beneath those tiles they’d found hints of the original flooring, an old beige linoleum identical to what had been in Sander’s student apartment during his year with Felicia.

“Dad ran out to see if he could help, and he was gone for a really long time. So long that I was afraid he wasn’t coming back, that something had happened. Then I ran out, too, after him. I didn’t get far before I tripped over something, I don’t know exactly where.” He took a large piece of fabric from the plastic bag and held it out. “It was this.”

It was a flannel shirt. Dark green with pale yellow and blue stripes, threadbare and old.

Jakob held out the bottom hem of the shirt. It was torn; it looked like something had ripped off a piece or taken a big bite out of the fabric.

“They said Kjell’s dog had something in its mouth, do you remember that? A piece of a green shirt. They thought it belonged to whoever set off the dynamite, that the dog had chased him, tried to catch him or something. It has to be the same shirt.”

“Yes,” Sander said. “It definitely looks that way.”

“I knew it at the time, when I found it.” Jakob rubbed the fabric contemplatively between his thumb and index finger. “He was wearing this, the guy I saw, the one who ran by on the trail. I saw the pale stripes. I could see them even though it was dark.”

“But you don’t have any idea who it was?”

“No, I do,” Jakob said, looking at Sander with concern in his eyes, as though he wished he didn’t have to say more. “I do have an idea.”

63

In time, a truth took shape about the landslide, and it revolved around Sten Persson, Killian’s father. Just about everyone knew he was behind the sudden explosion in the night, and the resulting disaster.

There were also other hypotheses, if that was the right word. One of them had to do with Filip, but Sander had always struggled to believe it, even though he had personally handed that piece of paper over to the cops.

“But Filip was at a party in Årnilt when it happened,” he said to Jakob, who was currently sitting in his wife’s dedicated seat at the kitchen table.

Jakob was still holding the shirt. Now that he’d revealed its existence to his childhood friend, he seemed unsure of what to do next.

“But he couldn’t have been there all night. I saw him.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

“Well, no, not one hundred percent.”

“You think he would have tried to kill his own parents? Why?”

Jakob shrugged.

“Maybe something went wrong, it didn’t go the way he planned. Or maybe he didn’t know they were at home. I tried to ask his dad about it, maybe a year before he died, and I showed him the shirt, but it was no use. The booze ruined Karl-Henrik, he didn’t evenrecognize me. He thought I was some con man who wanted to steal his farm, which he didn’t even own anymore. Totally out of it.”

“So it’s true that he drank himself to death?”

“He had a heart attack. Untreated diabetes, but of course that was because he hit the bottle so hard.”

“Damn.”

“I know.” Jakob shook his head. “A whole family, just wiped out. Well, of course Lillemor is still alive, but, you know…I’m guessing you saw her at the funeral.”