Page 19

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

February 7, 2019

óskar leads them to ása’s room. He has a key, he tells them, just as she has one of his, in case they lock themselves out, which has apparently happened quite a few times. “ása isn’t good with details,” he says, pushing the door open.

Lilja will wait her turn in óskar’s room. If it had been Agnes’s decision, she would have interviewed the two students together, getting to know their dynamic and their story as a pair. Singling them out like this makes it feel like an interrogation—which, she supposes, noticing óskar’s snide smirk as he watches her limp up the stairs, it probably is. He’s too hostile to interview.

Then they’re inside the missing woman’s apartment. Evidently, the police haven’t cordoned this room off, either. Suicide or murder, Nora said. It seems like everyone has decided it’s suicide.

ása’s apartment is much more of a home than óskar’s place, with plush pillows, photos on the walls, knickknacks lining the windowsill, and a jumble of chocolate bars on the kitchenette counter. óskar grabs one of the candy bars and asks Nora what she wants from him.

Nora ignores him, taking her time studying the space. There’s ása’s bed, close to the window, then a small table separating the living space from the kitchen. There are again only two places to sit—a swiveling desk chair and a simpler one meant for a dining room table which is currently being used as a clothes rack. Nora directs óskar to position one of the chairs in front of the photo wall.

“I’ll record this interview,” Nora tells him, “both on microphone and on camera. I like to have multiple records, if you don’t mind.”

óskar doesn’t mind. He deposits the clothes on the floor and plops into the seat, staring at Nora, then Agnes, sizing them both up.

Agnes admires Nora for her poise. The lines around her have solidified, like she’s made herself denser. She has two other women in the room with her, just in case, but she doesn’t seem to need them. She doesn’t seem to even remember they’re there. It’s all about óskar.

Suffering now, Agnes seeks out the one other place to sit that isn’t the missing woman’s bed: the edge of the windowsill. There’s a salt lamp in one corner of the windowsill, now off, and a tiny figurine of a rocket ship in the other. Agnes nudges the rocket ship to the side so she can sit. She takes some of the weight off her leg while Nora disassembles her backpack, pulling out a fancy microphone with its own tripod stand. She sets it up in a practiced maneuver, placing it between óskar and her, and tilting the bulbous head toward óskar. With that complete, she digs into the tote bag, unveiling a camcorder, thick and squat and somehow low-tech. She flicks it on and positions it on the table to capture óskar in full. Agnes wonders if Nora’s planning to add visuals to this season. Perhaps turn it into a television series. Or maybe it’s just prudent, when you’re talking to so many people, to have as many fail-safes as possible.

“Einar Pálsson’s granddaughter,” óskar calls, catching Agnes’s attention. “Tell me something. Is he here, too?”

Agnes tries to train her expression to neutral, but she can feel her cheeks heating. “No,” she manages.

“He knows better,” óskar says. “You should have stayed with him.”

“Are you from Bifrost?” Agnes asks, floating somewhere above her body. She’s aware of Hildur’s attention on her. Aware of Nora’s, too, but she doesn’t see them. “Do you have family here?”

“No. I’m from Kópavogur.”

“Then leave me alone,” Agnes tells him. “You have no—”

“Enough,” Nora interrupts. óskar’s grinning, like he has something choice to say. Nora steps closer to Agnes. “Maybe you should wait outside,” she says softly. “Until we’re done?”

“No.” It’s óskar. “Let her stay. Better here where we can watch her, hey?”

Frustration flares, hot and bright, through Agnes’s limbs. She should leave. She has no reason to stay here and listen to this man. But she doesn’t want him to feel like he’s won, like he’s run her out of this room or this town. She resumes her seat at the windowsill, not meeting Nora’s eye. “I’ll stay,” she says.

Nora returns to her own chair with a sigh. “Right,” she says. To óskar, with no preamble: “Tell me about ása. What is your relationship with her like?”

óskar tilts his head, as though he were considering his answer carefully. “Close,” he says. “Like a sibling you can fuck.”

Nora doesn’t flinch. “So you’re together?”

“No,” óskar says. “We’re friends.”

It says a lot about ása, Agnes thinks, that she’d be friends with this person.

Nora’s skeptical. “Comparing your relationship to incest… that isn’t exactly how I would describe my relationship to my friends. Even my closest friend.”

óskar spreads his hands. He’s enjoying himself. “You need a better social life.”

“Do you have any siblings?”

“No.”

“So what compels you to describe your relationship this way? Why not say ‘friends with benefits’?”

óskar sighs. “It was a joke. Okay? We’re friends. We fuck. Who cares?”

“Speaking of family,” Nora says, “ása’s been missing for days now, and her parents aren’t here. They’re still in Seyeisfjoreur, across the country.” It’s clear from óskar’s expression that Nora has butchered the pronunciation, but he doesn’t correct her and Nora doesn’t let it slow her down. “Do you know why that is?”

“That’s obvious.”

Nora gestures for him to elaborate.

“They don’t love her.”

“Did ása say that?” Nora persists. “They don’t love her?”

“No.”

“So how do you know?”

“Some things are understood. Not everything has to be said. ása doesn’t want to talk about her family. She doesn’t want to talk about her feelings. That’s not what defines her. Her parents aren’t here. They don’t care.”

Nora changes tack. “Why aren’t you in a relationship with her?”

“She’s taken.”

“By who?”

“She never said.”

“You don’t know?” Nora is incredulous.

This gets a grimace. A sore spot.

Nora doesn’t press too hard on it. “Do you have any guesses?”

“She grew up with all those brothers and sisters,” he says. “She knows how to keep a secret, when she wants to.”

“Why aren’t those siblings here?”

óskar lifts his hands in an exasperated gesture. “I told you. They aren’t close. And she is the oldest. Most can’t travel all the way here on their own to see her.”

“Walk me through the night,” Nora says, pivoting again. “The party. Whose idea was it to go?”

óskar looks to Hildur. It seems to be a question for her.

“Everyone in town knows,” Hildur says. “It isn’t a secret. I told them to go.”

“You told who?” Nora asks. This appears to be new information to her, and Agnes is insulted on her behalf. Isn’t Hildur supposed to be her friend? Why hadn’t she told Nora about the party? She’d said she’d had to crash it, that she hadn’t known about it until it was already happening, right outside her door.

“I told ása,” Hildur says, “and óskar. I heard them talking about the party, outside my office. ása said she was busy. All I said was that it’s Saturday, she’s young, she should enjoy herself.”

“Right,” Nora says. She turns back to óskar. “So walk me through the night.”

“ása brought a bottle of vodka to my place. Lilja came after.”

“At what time?”

“Ahh, around nine.”

“Was it just you three the whole time?”

“Yes. I have told this to the police, if you want the interview from them.”

“I’d rather hear it directly from you,” Nora says, flashing her teeth in a smile that doesn’t reach her eyes. “ása brought a bottle of vodka to your room at nine and you, what? Stay there? Pre-game? Or do you head straight to the house?”

“We drank. We played music. I’m in a band. I play the guitar and I sing. ása sings, too—not for the band, but when she’s drunk, she sings. We drove there in my car. We got to the party sometime after midnight, I don’t know when. We were there for hours. You saw. Then ása tells Lilja she has to piss. She doesn’t come back. Now we’re here.”

“When did you notice she hadn’t come back?”

“I don’t know. It was a party. I wasn’t looking at the time.”

“What did you do when you noticed she hadn’t come back?”

“The place was crowded. I forgot to look for her until I was ready to go. I thought she might have gotten a ride home. She wasn’t having fun.”

“Why not?”

“She doesn’t like crowds,” óskar says, clearly bored now. “She wasn’t feeling well. She doesn’t like being in the Murder House. Choose one. Or go talk to the police.”

Nora ignores him. “Would she really leave without telling you?”

He doesn’t have an answer for that.

“What about when you and Lilja left?” Nora continues. “You drove in together, and now suddenly one of the three is nowhere to be found. What did you do?”

Agnes searches the man’s face for guilt. For the what ifs. What if he had looked for her sooner? What if he could have protected her? There isn’t anything except his usual smirk.

“Lilja came home with me,” óskar says finally. “I thought ása left with her boyfriend.”

“You think he was at the party? Wouldn’t you have seen her with him?”

There’s no answer.

“Why keep her boyfriend a secret?” Nora persists.

“ása doesn’t like to talk about her feelings,” óskar says. “She is private. I respect her privacy.”

“So you just left without her. Without even checking for her.”

“Do you assume the worst when your friends don’t answer their phones?” óskar counters.

“You called her?”

“Yes.”

“Is there anything you didn’t tell the police?” Nora asks, and Agnes feels a thrill of something like giddiness run through her. The phone. Finally.

“Like what?” óskar asks. “That I murdered ása and hid her body in the lava fields like she’s the new Frozen Madonna?” He smirks at Agnes.

Nora doesn’t take the bait. And, to Agnes’s disappointment, she doesn’t pursue the point further. Instead she asks, “How did you know about this boyfriend if she was so good at keeping secrets?”

óskar’s smile dies. “She would disappear.”

“What do you mean?”

“Her car,” he says. “We park in the lot outside the building. Her car would be gone for days. This is a big open space. The highway can take you anywhere. No one would know where you’re going, if you leave at the right times. Which ása did. And she’d come back a little different each time. Sweeter. And sad, like she missed whoever it was.”

“Could she have been visiting her family?”

“They are on the other side of the country. I thought maybe she met someone in Reykjavík.”

“How often would she disappear?”

“Not much at first, then a lot more.”

“When did that start?”

“Since midsummer.”

“So—six months? A bit more?”

A shrug.

“Is it possible that this is what’s happened now? She’s gone off with her boyfriend?”

“Her car is still here.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No, then.”

“But this mystery man could have been at the party,” Nora insists. “You said it yourself. Who do you think he is?”

óskar doesn’t answer. He doesn’t even blink.

“What do you think has happened to your friend, óskar?”

The veil of óskar’s bravado shifts, visibly. Beneath it, he’s frightened. Or, that’s wrong. Agnes struggles to identify the emotion.

Nora presses on. “What makes you think this isn’t the boyfriend? You said you thought she left the party with this guy, but now you’re saying she isn’t with him. She could be in Reykjavík with him, but you don’t think so. Where is she? What makes you think this is something else?”

When óskar says, “I just do,” Agnes understands. It’s not fear he’s feeling. It’s grief.

He thinks his friend is dead.

Or maybe he even knows that she is.

“This doesn’t make sense to me,” Nora says. “She didn’t have her car with her. You drove her there. She’d been drinking since nine o’clock and was likely too drunk to go anywhere on foot—not that there is anywhere to go, really, from there. It tracks that either she’d call her boyfriend to come get her or he was at the party and able to leave with her. Don’t you agree? Unless she didn’t have her phone with her? Unless she wasn’t with her boyfriend? Or unless she didn’t leave alone?”

óskar looks his age. Young and tired and out of his depth.

“óskar,” Nora says. “You love her. That’s obvious. You love her and you look out for her. You have a spare key to her apartment, you call her a sibling you can fuck. You watch her, you know enough to know that she has a secret boyfriend—someone she’s likely keeping secret from you, because you love her. Isn’t that right? I saw you at the party. I saw you with her. You watched her in the room. You wouldn’t have lost track of her, not for that many hours. And you certainly wouldn’t not check in with her after the party. She wasn’t reported missing until Monday night, so, what, you didn’t try to see her for a full two days? What are you not telling me?”

“Lilja was right,” óskar says, coming to standing. “This is a waste of time.”

“Wait,” Nora says. She stands, too. “I’m not trying to accuse you of anything. I’m just trying to understand. You must be worried sick for her. Aren’t you? Thinking that she’s with her boyfriend would be so much more comforting than thinking she’s somewhere out in the cold, or worse. But you don’t think that. Why is that?”

Something within him collapses. “Stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop talking to me like I’m lying.”

“Then tell me the truth.”

óskar’s eyes, Agnes notices with a start, are bloodshot. “You want the truth?” he asks her, his rough voice now guttural. “ása’s dead.”

“What?” It’s Hildur. She looks stricken.

óskar doesn’t look away from Nora. “ása was diagnosed a year ago. Bipolar. She stopped taking her medication a couple of weeks ago. She was depressed. She went into the snow on purpose. She had a death wish.”