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CHAPTER TEN

February 6, 2019

A battalion of metal army men sprinkle the floor of Magnús’s room, next to the bed. An overturned chest of drawers exposes what used to be her father’s clothes. There are a couple of moth-eaten sweaters, left behind forty years ago. Agnes feels a moment’s gratitude for all the people who have visited this place over the passing years, who have violated her family’s privacy yet still left these relics behind. They’ve allowed her to step inside her father’s childhood bedroom and see something of the boy he was. He used to wear tiny, scratchy sweaters and play with army men.

Standing in the center of her father’s childhood bedroom, Agnes imagines the little boy—so little, from the size of his clothing—trying to cope with the tragic deaths of his mother and baby sister. Experiencing not only the private devastation within his family, but also the public persecution. The suspicions and accusations leveled against his father, the only family he had left. Then, months later, leaving his entire world behind. Forgetting his metal army men. Thinking, perhaps, that he’d come back to get them soon.

Agnes scoops up a flag-bearer figurine and tucks it into the pocket of her jeans.

The anger and the resentment that’s been crawling inside her these past two days drains away, to be replaced with a sudden homesickness. She’d like to tell her father what she’s seen, what she’s understood.

Of course you don’t want me to come here, she might say. Of course you want to leave all of this in the past. I’m sorry for bringing it back to the present.

But this doesn’t stop her from drinking in her father’s bedroom. From scanning every surface in the room, cataloguing every minute detail. She catches a glimpse of ink on the grimy white wall, and she does her best to crouch down to get a better look at the graffiti. Maybe she was wrong, she thinks. People haven’t left her father’s room alone all these years. As she approaches, though, her mounting irritation dissolves into awe. On the wall, half-hidden in shadow, is the name, written out in cramped cursive, Magnús.

Graffiti of a different sort.

The handwriting is so childish, so different from her adult father’s steady hand, that it makes her want to cry. This is an entirely separate person from the man she’d grown up with. Left behind, forty years ago. Keeping her flashlight on it, Agnes takes out her phone and snaps a picture of the graffiti.

She straightens up to standing, overwhelmed, suddenly, by the house. By the ghosts of her family populating these rooms, felt but not seen. She stares out the window. This, too, is uncovered. She supposes Thor boarded up the ground-level ones to ward off unwanted visitors—didn’t work—figuring no one could reach the second floor. Even old and suffering from decades of neglect, Agnes can see through the dirty glass to the magnificent view of the mountain beyond.

She turns to find Ingvar in the doorway, his attention on his phone. He’s tapping out a long message, it seems.

Agnes clears her throat. “Anything else?”

Ingvar takes his time looking up from his phone. “No,” he tells her. “I don’t know the upstairs well. When I was here, I was always downstairs.”

Without another word, Agnes pushes past him, heading straight for the staircase.

Her left leg would give out if she tried to bend it on these stairs, so she takes them one at a time, haltingly, like a child still learning their way around a step. She doesn’t stop moving until she’s outside, gulping at the fresh air. She hears Ingvar slamming the front door shut behind them, but she doesn’t wait for him. She skirts around the back of the house, toward the river.

She doesn’t stop until the river is all she can see. For a brief moment, she doesn’t think she’ll actually stop. Maybe she’ll just keep walking until the frigid water engulfs her, cutting her off completely from the world and her own overwhelming thoughts. But self-preservation, this time, wins out. She’s at the edge, her toes squeezing painfully in her boots. She shoves her hands and Nora’s flashlight in her pockets, and she comes back to herself, slowly.

Ingvar comes up beside her, curious and solicitous, but quiet.

Out from the shadows of the house, Agnes can discern his features more clearly. Blue eyes peek out from beneath heavy, angular eyebrows. Everything on him has been magnified. Big forehead, big cheekbones, big jaw. He’s surprisingly handsome, though she doesn’t know where that thought comes from. It isn’t the features themselves, but the amalgamation of them. The steadiness of his presence. She should be embarrassed for her frank assessment of him, except he’s doing the same to her.

“She wasn’t in there,” she says. “ása.”

“Ow-sa,” he corrects her. Again.

She ignores it. “You said in case she was running away,” she says, unsure how to phrase the question without it sounding like an accusation.

“They say she was very drunk and probably left on her own. Maybe not. Maybe she—” Ingvar stops, unable to voice the rest. “This would seem like a safe place to hide, if you were upset or in trouble.”

“But it’s not?”

“The weather changes here. Rain wind snow. You cannot predict it. We haven’t been above freezing for weeks. That house can’t protect you. In this cold, even in there, you can lose consciousness from hypothermia. And then you’re not waking up.”

A shiver rattles her body. She tries to imagine staying outside longer than a few minutes at a time. How long has ása been missing? Four days?

Agnes can’t think about it.

“Did you play with my father out here?” she asks, instead.

“No,” he says. “I liked to be inside.”

“Where it’s warm,” she agrees. “I don’t blame you.”

Ingvar rewards her with a smile. She catches a glimpse of the man as he is when he’s comfortable. Or rather, when she’s comfortable with him. When he isn’t a possible threat, but a man kind enough to wake up early to search for a missing woman in the cold, dark morning.

“Even in summer,” he says, turning away to survey the river, “I didn’t like it out here. I still don’t.”

“Why? It’s so pretty. Like—” She points to the mountain just beyond, the sharp details of its snowy pores.

He seems to consider the question seriously and in his hesitation, she realizes her mistake. Ingvar is the one who found the bodies, nearly forty years ago to the day. Of course he wouldn’t like this place.

“I have always felt,” he says slowly, “that there was nothing good waiting for me here.”

There’s an icy fingertip on her ear. Agnes flinches at the touch and discovers only snow. All at once, without warning, without a trickle, the air around them fills with snowflakes. She supposes it’s what Ingvar’s talking about, how changeable the weather is. She paws at her jacket, flipping the hood up, and screws her eyes shut, the wet snow seeking out her unprotected skin.

“You should get inside,” Ingvar tells her. He doesn’t seem to mind the snow. He’s probably used to it. He’s probably wearing more than a couple of pairs of thin ankle socks in his boots.

“Where’s your home?” she asks.

He gestures behind them. “Up on that hill, across the road.”

“Is it a long walk?”

“I drove.”

She hadn’t seen his car. He must have parked on the side of the road and wandered in. The driveway most likely has disappeared over the past four decades from lack of use. “What time should I come by?” she asks. “To meet your mom?”

“It’s hard to plan,” Ingvar tells her. He produces his phone from his jacket pocket and passes it to her. “My mother’s moods are like the weather. Unpredictable.”

Agnes enters her number into his contacts, her fingers clumsy and numb. “Let me know.” She hands the phone back and shoves her fists in her pockets. Then she asks, because it’s been waiting for her, this question, since she learned who he was, “Where did you find them? Marie and the baby, I mean.”

If it surprises Ingvar that she doesn’t know this information, he doesn’t let it show. He swings his arm to point beyond Thor’s house. “In the lava fields less than a kilometer north of the new house.”

He doesn’t elaborate, and Agnes likes him for it. He’s allowing space, she thinks, for their shared feelings. She imagines the little boy, trudging through this endless snow, cold and wet and scared. Stumbling, then, over the corpses of his beloved teacher and her baby. Agnes stares into those bright blue eyes, and wonders if he’s thinking the same thing: how much trauma like that must shape you. How that shock must live inside you, for the rest of your life.

Finally, when her fingers and toes ache so much she’s worried about frostbite, Agnes asks him the other question that has been at the tip of her tongue the entire morning, the entire trip, and frankly, this past year. “Do you think my grandfather killed them?”

There’s no hesitation, no softening the blow. Just that unrelenting stare and that voice, unflinching.

“Yes,” Ingvar says. “I do.”