Page 13

CHAPTER TWELVE

February 6, 2019

The town’s few streets line the highway. The truck ahead signals a left turn off the main road, and Agnes follows. The truck pulls up to a stop in the middle of the street. Agnes stops, too. Looks around. They’re in front of a row of residential buildings. Something that looks like a school. Perhaps the primary school where her grandmother worked. Nothing like a university campus.

The truck door opens, and Nora hops out, jogging to the car and speaking before Agnes has the presence of mind to roll down her window.

“… where I’ll leave you,” Nora’s saying.

“What?”

“The campus is a few blocks away,” Nora says. “So this is where I’ll break away. Okay?”

“Right.”

“It’s not that I don’t want you seeing it,” Nora says, reading Agnes’s every objection in that one word. “I’m actually protecting you, believe it or not. There’s someone there who wants to interview you more than I do, which is saying something.”

“The police?” Agnes huffs out a laugh. “Nora, I think I’ll be okay. I have a pretty strong alibi.”

Nora’s sigh is visible in the icy air. “No, it’s Hildur. My local source? She wrote a book about your family, and when I told her that you were coming… she practically tore me apart begging for details. She’s on campus most days, and I just know you’ll run into her when I’m not there and you’ll give her everything you’re supposed to give me.” The look on her face is so baldly desperate, Agnes feels herself relenting.

“I’ll stay away,” she promises. She would like to see where her grandfather had worked, but it’s been forty years, and he was practically run out of town by an angry mob. There’s not going to be a tribute to him on campus. She can live without seeing it for a day.

“Call me if you need anything,” Nora says. “And don’t stray too far, okay? For all we know, there’s a killer on the loose.”

“I’ll keep the door locked,” Agnes assures her.

Satisfied, Nora trots back to the truck. The engine comes back to life and she’s off, driving straight to the end of the road and disappearing on another left turn.

Agnes should probably have told Nora that she can’t call her if she’s not connected to Wi-Fi. But it doesn’t feel urgent. She isn’t going to need help. She’s here to take a quick look around town and then she’ll find her way to Ingvar’s, with or without an invitation. She nudges the car to the side of the road and parks. She could drive through town and be done in five minutes, but that’s no way to experience a place. Even if there might be a killer on the loose.

Bundling herself into her jacket, Agnes stands by her car, uncertain of where to go. There’s the primary school across the street. Snow-covered swings hang frozen in its playground. The building itself is modern, with fresh paint and long, low windows that allow her a picture-perfect glimpse of many small, round faces. Agnes doesn’t quite believe that this is the same building where her grandmother worked, forty years ago. Besides, what is there for her to see, if it were? She didn’t know her grandmother.

She feels a jolt of shame. She hasn’t thought much about the murdered women. Marie and Baby Agnes. She’s only thought of her grandfather, proving his innocence, and secretly, her father, proving him wrong. She’s prioritized the men, the ones who survived. The ones she knew and loved.

The grandfather who taught her how to swim in the Pacific, who listened to her work through her complicated feelings, the ones she couldn’t understand herself, not without help. She’d come out to her father first, at twelve years old, in a terrified, random burst at the dinner table. It was a problem she couldn’t find a solution for, and that’s what Magnús was good at, solutions. She couldn’t stop thinking about her friend, Claire. Claire kept talking about boys and Agnes, well, Agnes didn’t give a shit about boys. Dad, she’d said, I think I’m a lesbian.

Her father’s solution had come quick. You’re too young to be a lesbian.

She hadn’t known how to respond to that, so that’s where that conversation ended.

He’d been right, in his own way. There had been more girls. But there had also, eventually, been boys.

She finally told her grandfather when she was sixteen, on one of their Sundays, when she couldn’t hide the truth any longer. He hadn’t known what “bisexual” meant. After she’d explained, he’d grabbed her hand in a tight grip.

Great, he’d said. But if you want my advice, only date women. Men are animals. He’d made a sound of disgust that had her laughing.

She’d tried again with her father after that, on one of the rare occasions when the three of them were together. Christmas Eve. She’d needed her grandfather beside her to work up the courage to tell her father.

That’s none of my business, Magnús had said.

Einar hadn’t left Agnes room to respond. He’d exploded in Icelandic. The two of them argued, back and forth, in their shared secret language, with Einar concluding, in English, You have no idea how lucky you are to have a daughter like her.

Her father’s eyes on her. Agnes can still remember the look on his face. So distant, like he was staring at her through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Then, finally, he’d apologized.

Magnús had met Emi once, on the day she’d helped move Agnes back into his home. They’d exchanged a polite hello, nothing more.

Agnes walks up the street, careful to avoid the ice that’s grown on the concrete like moss. It’s not that her father cared about her sexuality, one way or another. His discomfort with his daughter is not bigotry; it’s his innate myopia. His inability to connect with someone else on their terms.

At the intersection, the apartment buildings give way to a row of shops. A café, a convenience store, what looks to be a thrift shop. Each storefront window has been stamped with a row of papers.

Agnes crosses the road to confirm her suspicions. The storefronts all display the same missing poster she saw in that café in Reykjavík. MISSING PLEASE HELP. The smiling face of the probably-dead woman. Ow-sa, not Ass-a. Agnes finds herself in front of the café window, transfixed by the photograph. The beaming face, the white-blond hair so much like her own. Suicide, murder, kidnapping. Drunken mistake. Whatever has happened to ása, it isn’t pleasant. Agnes hopes that, for her sake, it was fast. She fell asleep in the snow and froze, unaware.

A touch on her arm gives Agnes a tremendous jolt, her heart leaping into her throat at the man’s voice. Calling her by name. She yanks her arm out of the grip and turns, protesting, but the man is already apologizing.

“Oh, no,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

Ingvar, the boy who found the bodies, the man from the farmhouse. He’s different in daylight—or in what passes for daylight here. More real, somehow. The blue eyes, set deep, glitter. Now she sees the shape of his stomach through his heavy sweater. The drooping slope of his shoulders. He’s more of a person, and less of a dream.

“I thought you saw me,” he’s saying. In the clarity of day, out from the shadow of the farmhouse, there’s more humor in him, a shy smile. He points to the window. “I waved.”

She follows the gesture, through the glass to the busy café. There are eyes staring back at her, white faces and empty curiosity. Agnes hadn’t noticed. But this doesn’t shock her. Emi used to accuse her of having extreme tunnel vision, of seeing only what she wanted to. These jokes started out teasing. By the end of the relationship, though, they’d become yet another reason to break it off.

“Sorry,” Agnes says. “I was checking out the poster.”

“Yes,” Ingvar says. “She is everywhere.” The good humor drains from his expression. “But apparently also nowhere.”

“Do you know her?” He seems to be taking this woman’s disappearance hard, searching for her early in the morning, losing all happiness at the sight of her missing poster.

“No,” Ingvar says, and it’s a complete sentence. “Where is Nora?”

“Talking to the police,” Agnes says. “I’m on my own for the time being. I was going to look around town and then stop by your place, if that’s still okay.” A gust of wind picks her hair up and away from her face, exposing the back of her neck to the cold. “To meet Júlía.”

“Yul-ya,” he corrects her again. “Have you seen the view?”

Agnes takes in the small town. “This?”

He flashes her a smile, his teeth so white against his dark beard. “No. Come with me.” He stows a small wax paper bag into his jacket pocket, explaining that it’s a treat for his mother.

Agnes follows Ingvar down the street, trying to picture him as a small child. She can see big cheeks and big round eyes. Not much different from now. Forty years probably hasn’t changed him much. But still, the image throws her off. The man beside her is forty-six. Only three years younger than her father. But they seem remarkably different. Her father feels older to her, of course. With Ingvar, maybe it’s the fact that she thinks of him as the boy who found the bodies. He’s infantilized, because he’s been immortalized in that moment from his childhood.

Agnes asks, without thought, “Do you have kids?” They’d be a bit younger than her.

This startles him. “No. Do you?”

“No,” she says with a laugh. She’s about to say I’m too young, but that’s not true, at least not in the case of her family. Marie had Magnús before twenty. Magnús had her when he was not much older.

“Okay,” Ingvar says.

Agnes struggles to keep up with his long stride. Each step is a debt owed to her body, unable to be repaid.

“This,” he tells her, “is the main road of town.” He points out the shops she’d already noticed. The school. Most of the town is housing, it seems, with a couple of hotels.

“No grocery store?”

“Not here,” he says. “In Borgarnes.”

“With the police station.” He looks surprised. “Nora,” she explains.

He nods. “She says you are here to talk about your grandfather. She says you were very close.” At this, she catches an odd expression on his face. A darting look, like he’s suddenly noticing what a freak she is, to be very close to a murderer. “But you don’t speak Icelandic.”

“Right on all counts,” Agnes says. She doesn’t elaborate. Instead, she asks, “What do you think happened to this woman? Ow-sa?”

Ingvar doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even seem to hear her. They just keep walking forward, through the parking lot at the end of the road, crowded with cars. Ingvar tells her he’ll show her the town from up high. At the end of the lot, there’s a sudden rise of a hill. From a distance, it looks like a steep incline, but to Agnes’s relief, as they ap proach, the slope flattens. Agnes steps off the trusted concrete and into the snow, following Ingvar’s lead.

She’s forgotten her question when Ingvar finally deigns to answer. “I don’t know,” he says. “But it was no accident.”

“How do you mean?” Agnes is out of breath, her ankle locking up and making her toes squeeze into a bear claw. She’ll be damned, though, if she lets herself admit she’s in pain.

“We would have found her,” Ingvar says. “If she had made a mistake, she wouldn’t have gotten far on her own.”

At the top of the ridge, they stop. The wind tears at their hair, scraping at their clothing. Agnes turns in a circle, surveying the town, the tight cluster of buildings, the highway she drove in on.

“There’s the university,” Ingvar tells her, unnecessarily. He has to raise his voice to be heard over the pitch of the wind.

The university is another ecosystem all on its own, attached to the town by one spare road. There’s this brief glimmer of civilization, the campus and the town, and then there’s the expanse of snow hemming them in.

Agnes finds a modicum of shelter next to the big man. “Is that it?” she shouts.

In answer, he just points beyond them, away from town.

There are bodies dotting the static white landscape. Widespread groups of figures, all wearing the same reflective gear that catches flickers of the wan sunlight, pacing out slowly into the fields. Calling out in hoarse sounds that the wind carries back to them.

ása.

They’ve found the search party.

“Why are they going so far?” Agnes asks.

Ingvar hunkers down, so he doesn’t have to raise his voice. “They are looking for ása.”

“No, I know that,” she says, exasperated. “But the farmhouse is way over there. This is nowhere near it.”

“Ah.” The dancing blue eyes. There’s a measure of humor again, but the smile on his face is bitter. “Because we don’t think it’s an accident. Someone may have taken her.”

“Taken her all the way out here?” Agnes asks, incredulous, even though she knows, deep down, this makes sense. Her grandmother’s body, too, had been found far away from home. The town remembers.

“There’s the crater.” Ingvar gestures with one arm into the distance, toward the horizon. There are endless rolling hills. He seems to be indicating the biggest hill, separate from the others. “The Grábrók Crater,” he tells her, as though that name will mean anything to her. “Many people hike into it. She may have been taken there.”

Agnes considers the lone hill, desolate in winter. She stares back up at Ingvar, using his bulk to protect her from the wind. “My grandfather wasn’t a killer,” she tells him.

Ingvar doesn’t reply. His jaw is set tight against the cold.

The wind presses at their backs, escorting them away from the search party, away from the present, into the past. With an awkward maneuver, Ingvar pats Agnes on the shoulder. “Let’s go see if my mother’s awake.”