Page 98 of The Living and the Dead

Felicia looked at him. “What do you mean?”

“That Killian killed Mikael. For a while I told myself it was him, because it was easier. But really…do you think he did it?”

Felicia’s voice was suddenly weary, like before.

“We went over this so many times. We can’t—does it matter? Like, maybe? Back then, I really didn’t think he did it, but then again, I was so in love with him. The kind of love that only happens when you’re a teenager. I don’t know. If it wasn’t him, then who was it?”

That question had nagged at Sander for so many years now. Who had killed Mikael, if not Killian? He had never found an answer, really, and maybe that was an answer in itself. The only option left was Killian.

Right?

“Jakob came to see me last night,” Sander said.

“Did he?”

“He brought a shirt.”

Felicia listened. When Sander finished his story, he looked at his hands, flexing them as though they were brand-new, or had just been holding some foreign object. Was it going to feel like this every time?

She placed a gentle hand between Sander’s shoulder blades and stroked his back slowly. In that moment, he understood why he’d once fallen so hard for Felicia Grenberg.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said. “Are you going to tell the police?”

“I already did.”

“But, what, you think he also killed Mikael?”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

During their time together, Sander had tried to bring up the topic of Mikael on several occasions. How he’d treated Felicia, the assault. She never wanted to talk about it. But it linked Killian to Mikael, it gave him a motive. And Killian had been driving the car that night; the blood on the steering wheel was his. Sander knew that.

“You know,” Felicia said slowly. “I don’t really blame Mikael either. I mean, for what he did to me. Not anymore. He was only doing what Karl-Henrik did to my mom. That was how he was raised to treat women. It took becoming a mother myself to realize that. Isn’t that strange too? It’s like you become more forgiving when you have your own kids. Killian was the one who realized it, that it all started with Karl-Henrik. Well, and you did too, of course. You were always so clear-sighted when it came to all that.”

Sander didn’t respond, didn’t know what to say.

“But still, I regret…I mean, I never should have let Killian go,” he said, all in the same breath, as though he were both confessing to and denying a serious crime. “That night, when I was at his house. I should have stopped him.”

“Sander, you can’t put that on yourself.”

“I know that. Everyone says so, they always have.”

“Then what’s the matter?”

He opened his mouth but found, to his surprise, that he didn’t know what to say.

72

Killian was dead. Sander had personally witnessed the urn containing his ashes being lowered into the ground. But the soul is a stubborn being, much more so than the body. It can linger for a long time.

Killian’s soul likely did just that, because Sander and Felicia were never really alone on Bolmengatan. Maybe they could have behaved in a different way. Sander knew that; they could have talked about Killian, his life, the kind of person he’d been. That was how folks treated the dead back home in Skavböke, and that was how they remembered Killian’s father, Sten, that summer so many years later. They kept him alive, even though he was gone, by talking about him.

The dead can often help the living in that way. Like an invisible ribbon in the air, they encircle those who are left behind and pull them together. But they can also drive a wedge between the living.

So Sander and Felicia could have tried harder to avoid what happened. Or could they? Maybe it only seemed that way. Sander wasn’t sure.

Maybe, in fact, the way it went was the way it had togo.

He wondered so many times why he couldn’t be happy with Felicia. What he was missing or longed to find. Back home in Skavböke, all he dreamed about was leaving, and, barring that, being anywhere at all with Felicia. The tragedies in Skavböke, not least Killian’s death, had brought them together and, sure, their prospects could have beenbetter. But time healed most wounds, and what couldn’t be healed could be endured.