Page 2

CHAPTER ONE

February 5, 2019

The wind rolls over the rental car in a tidal wave so strong Agnes’s knuckles turn white on the steering wheel. Snow follows in its wake, swirling against the windshield, packing into small piles on the bottom of the wipers’ arc, and she leans forward in her seat, one hand reaching to turn down the volume of the radio, as though that’ll help her see. It’s seven in the morning, but it’s dark enough to be the middle of the night. She’s exhausted from the flights, her body cramped and sore.

The GPS that came with the car tells her it’s a two-hour drive from the Keflavík airport to the old farmhouse, where she’ll be meeting Nora Carver, finally, in person. At the rate she’s going, though, it might be closer to four hours. Except for the few cars skidding past her at speeds she can’t fathom in this weather, she’s alone on the highway.

Agnes has lived in California her entire life, and never the parts that know snow. She can take the turns of the road, the limited visibility, but this snow makes her heart pound in her throat. As do the roundabouts. Every few minutes, it seems, a new oval interrupts the lane, forcing her to slow on the ice, to rub shoulders with the road, and to figure out her next turn. She supposes they’re there to maintain the speed limit or to prevent traffic jams, something like that, but they unnerve her.

She tries to relax into the slick motion of the car, into the tunnel of snow pelting toward her. But she can’t settle. It’s the ache in her joints, her ankle throbbing in time with her too-quick heartbeat, the nausea simmering somewhere in her stomach. Or it’s the fact that she’s actually here, in Iceland. Or, she thinks, it’s the fear of failure.

What will happen to her, if she can’t do this?

Her hand reflexively reaches for her phone, propped up in the cupholder. Her father is the last person she wants to talk to, but he’s also the only person who might pick up if she called. She wishes she could call her grandfather. There’s so much to tell him, so much to ask. Right now, though, all she wants is to hear him say, as he did at the end of every call, I love you.

It’s only as her fingers slide over the glossy screen of her phone, though, that she remembers: it’s still on airplane mode. She can’t afford to roam, and she isn’t sure if her phone connecting to the local network will automatically charge her account. She could hardly manage the flights here, booked at the last minute, at the mercy of whatever force makes a plane ticket cost a month’s rent because you want to fly the next week. Even with Nora arranging her car and her stay, this trip is beyond Agnes’s means. Her medical bills had drained her savings and now she’s down to the dregs of what her grandfather had left to her. Her, and only her. Not a penny to her father.

I love you, Agnes. And you love me, don’t you?

Her hand drifts back to the steering wheel. No one to call. Fourteen hours of travel. Fourteen hours since she’s been online. It’s not that long to be disconnected from the world, but right now, it feels like it’s all she’s known and it’s all she’ll ever know.

Even though she and Emi had officially broken up six months ago, they’ve kept in constant contact. Every other day, Agnes manufactures a reason to text Emi. I saw a new way to kill aphids safely with oils. How’s the garden coming? And then Emi answers. Emi might have been the one to end it, the one to pack up Agnes’s things and carry the boxes one by one out of their apartment and into her father’s home, but whenever Agnes texts, Emi answers. And that, Agnes understands now, is the problem. In the early days of the breakup, Emi’s generosity had felt like a lifeline. Somewhere along the way, though, it had transformed into a noose. And now even that is gone. Agnes doesn’t have service.

She’s alone.

Agnes leans into the car’s movements, following the signs for Reykjavík. Houses appear out of the darkness, aglow with leftover Christmas lights. She imagines the people sleeping inside, waking up, shuffling through the cozy winter morning, seeking coffee. She pictures herself in this car, zipping past their windows like a dragonfly streaking in a slipstream, and for one brief moment, she can actually relax.

The road gradually takes on more lanes. This place could be California. It’s a highway. It’s a group of buildings. How different can they be?

The answer is: very different.

This is her first time out of the country, and she’s struck, horribly, by a burning self-hatred. She’s wasted twenty-seven years patrolling the same highways, absorbing the same colors, the same smells. So much time in one place. What did that get her?

It’s not that she hasn’t dreamt of traveling. She had long imagined herself in Iceland, coming here with her grandfather. She’d searched out language courses online, but never committed, because she knew that to learn a language, you need to have someone to speak it with, and neither her grandfather nor her father would ever speak it with her. She’s settled for listening to the music that comes from there. Here. She’s watched the movies. She’s fantasized.

But in all the fantasies, it never actually occurred to her that she could just get on a plane and come here. Not until Nora Carver.

Agnes should have come here years ago, before Emi and her grandfather broke her heart. She was a lighter person back then, aimless in a nice way. Not self-destructive. She’d been gainfully employed, coding software for big tech, living with friends, visiting her grandfather every Sunday for either a swim or a long chat in his garden, and she was open to the world. Which is how she met Emi and how she didn’t realize how much of herself she’d given to those she loved, not until she’d lost them.

She’s supposed to go straight from the airport to Bifrost, to Nora. That had been the plan. But she flicks on her blinker and makes a slow, deliberate turn into the city center.

Now that she’s finally here, she’s going to see this place on her own terms. Nora can wait.

Signs lead her downtown. She takes turns at random until she’s curling around the outskirts of the city, tracing the line of the water to one side, the rise of the city’s low buildings to the other. She marvels at the black water, the hint of a mountain just across the way. Warm yellow streetlamps guide her along the unfamiliar roads. She veers away from the water, into the city proper, the streets narrowing. She passes closed shops, dark storefronts. A few figures, fighting the early morning chill. She drives the wrong way down a one-way street, to the astonishment of a car that is, as far as she can tell, two spotlights. She rolls down her window to apologize and receives an ear splitting honk in response. By some miracle, she finds a parking spot on a residential street. And then it takes a monumental effort to get out of the car. Her back creaks and protests, her knee and ankle screaming in collective pain.

Sitting in one set position for the past fourteen hours has sent her back to the early days of her recovery, when her worldview had contracted down to her left leg, and only her left leg. The cold envelops her in a tight, frigid embrace, despite the layers of shirts, a hoodie, and a windbreaker. Her sneakers slide on the snow and ice, her ankle locking up in protest, and she stops in the first open café she sees.

The warmth of the room hits her like a solid wall. The barista, a young woman with too-short bangs and an eyebrow piercing, nods at Agnes, but she doesn’t speak. She simply moves about the enormous coffee machine, operating it with an unhurried ease that Agnes admires.

The counter offers an assortment of wrapped chocolates, jars of jam, and bags of coffee beans. Agnes draws a finger over a package of black licorice. Her grandfather’s favorite indulgence. Every Sunday, up to the end, featured a bag of this candy, usually thrown onto the table between them. She hasn’t eaten any in a year.

Agnes nudges the package forward on the counter to buy it. Her grandfather would want her to. He would’ve already opened the bag and swallowed a handful.

The barista acknowledges it, Agnes assumes, but continues with her work, unrushed. Agnes turns her attention to the rest of the display. To her left is a corkboard, piled high with what she assumes are the usual offerings at a café bulletin board. Guitar lessons, rooms to rent, flyers to see someone’s band play next week.

What catches her by surprise, though, is the photo at the center. A young woman’s face stares back at her, her expression bursting with pleasure. There’s a cascade of white-blond hair, the flash of a smile, the hint of some shared happiness with the photographer. The surprise comes in stages. First, because at a glance this woman could be Agnes. The hair, the thin eyes. But then the borders of the photograph settle into place. The words, in English, MISSING . And PLEASE HELP.

Agnes leans in to read the text underneath but almost immediately flinches away.

Bifrost.

A student at Bifrost, is what it reads.

Maybe there are two towns named Bifrost. Except there’s the university. Agnes thinks of her grandfather, and Nora Carver. It’s too much of a coincidence. She finds the barista staring at her, so she orders a coffee and an egg sandwich, trying to ignore the dread settling in her empty stomach.

She chooses a table on the other side of the café, far away from the missing student’s smiling face. Next to the fogged-up window, she watches her fingers transform from a troubling white to an even more troubling pink. She’ll buy herself a winter jacket before she leaves Reykjavík. She peers down at her frozen, muddy sneakers. And maybe some boots. She’ll ask the woman working here for advice on where to go. For now, though, she signs into the café’s Wi-Fi, grateful to return to the internet.

No word from Emi.

Nothing from her father.

Nothing in her email inbox except junk.

She took a leave of absence from her job nearly a year ago, and formally quit soon after. Wi-Fi or no, it doesn’t matter. She’s alone.

She stares out the window to the dark street. It’s empty except for a few silhouettes of people walking by, skittering like shadows. A drift of car headlights. Agnes has been holding onto ghosts. The ghost of her relationship with Emi, the ghost of her grandfather superimposed onto her father. What would happen if she let them go? Who would she be?

She scrolls through her latest email exchange with Nora. The last email is nothing more than Nora’s directions to the house in Bifrost, in case the GPS fails her, and warnings about the icy roads. The weather changes fast—and I mean fast. It can be sunny on one side of the road and snowing like a blizzard on the other. Then, a final word of thanks, before Agnes boarded her plane: It’s an honor to share this place with you. I want you to know how much I appreciate what you’re doing here… speaking with me.

Agnes Glin, granddaughter to Einar Pálsson, the suspected murderer in one of Iceland’s most notorious unsolved crimes. The first one in the family to break the forty-year silence. The first one in the family to advocate, publicly, for Einar’s innocence. Nora Carver has been falling all over herself to make Agnes comfortable. She knows, as they both know, that Agnes could have chosen anyone.

Agnes chose Nora mostly because of the timing, but she’d been impressed by her reputation. As Einar Pálsson’s granddaughter, Agnes has spent her life avoiding the true crime genre. She prefers audiobooks, neo-noir detective novels, popcorn action thrillers, anything fictional and completely removed from her life. But she’d heard about Nora’s podcast, The End, as had everyone else in the past year. Nora Carver, a different kind of true crime podcaster. One who has actually solved a cold case. Or, as Nora demurred in an interview with Rachel Maddow, contributed to a solve.

That had been the last season of The End, the investigation into the unsolved murder of Adriana Lopez, a twelve-year-old girl found near a playground in Modesto, California, in 1974. Agnes hadn’t listened to that season, nor had she followed the case too closely—her grandfather was dying, and she’d had no time for anything else—but she knows enough. With Nora’s help, they’d finally pinpointed the murderer. A police officer who had been caught in another, more recent murder of another young girl outside of Stockton, California. He’d never been a suspect, not until Nora found him in some lost paperwork.

When Agnes’s father had received the email from Nora a month ago, notifying him of her plans to dedicate her next series to “the Frozen Madonna case,” it fractured Agnes’s already-tenuous balance with him.

He had recited Nora’s email to Agnes, standing over her bed and reading from his phone as though he were a minister in his pulpit raging against the sins of the devil, rather than a reclusive engineer. You don’t have to be on the record, not if you’re not comfortable with it. But you could fill in the blanks, color in the details of your mother’s life. Your sister’s, too, tragically short as it was. The minister’s eyes, startling her.

What are you going to do? Agnes had asked, even though she’d known the answer. She asked because that type of emotion requires an outlet. A storm cloud needs to burst with lightning.

I will tell her no. Her father’s shaking hands. I will sue her. She’s turning our family into a spectacle .

Since Agnes had moved back home, she hadn’t experienced her father’s anger. She’d expected it, though. She’d needed so much from him. Moving her bedroom from the second floor to the first, so she wouldn’t have to contend with the stairs. Helping her to step over the tub, into and out of the shower. She’d waited for the outburst, the exasperation of a man carrying both his own and his daughter’s dead weight, but instead he’d borne it all in the same manner he’d raised her. Stoically.

To her surprise, the anger didn’t come last week, either, when Agnes told her father she’d reached out to Nora herself. That she’d learned the podcast host would be visiting Iceland—and not just visiting, but exploring the ruins of her grandfather’s farmhouse, her father’s childhood home—to record her series. To interview those who still live there, who still remember what had happened to her grandmother and her aunt. And that Agnes would be joining her. She would be interviewed, as well.

She’d braced herself for the bolts of lightning. The shouting. But her father had borne that, too, stoically.

The fight had come when she’d left for the airport. Maybe Magnús hadn’t believed she’d actually go. Maybe he hadn’t even heard her, too lost in the haze of his own inaccessible thoughts, when she’d told him her plans.

Despite her father’s rage and disappointment, Agnes is proud of herself. She’s doing the right thing. The hospital-appointed psychologist, Dr. Lee, had told her to find something constructive in her life, after her injury. Humans need to build. To create. That emptiness you feel is the lack of something to strive toward.

This isn’t a hobby, like painting or knitting, as Dr. Lee had suggested. This is something greater. It hits Agnes now, the reality of what she’s doing. What she’s hoping to do. This is a chance at redemption for her family. Her father doesn’t understand it yet. But he will.

She stares down at her phone. Along with the last email, Nora sent the demo she’s already recorded, a teaser trailer she’s created for the series. Agnes knows she ought to listen to it. She ought to be able to discuss the case using Nora’s language, to steel herself for all the details she’s successfully avoided all these years. She knows the Wikipedia article. She knows what her father has shared with her—very little—over the years. But there’s so much more out there, waiting for her. Archives of blogs and photos. Books. Theories and gory details and photographs.

The Frozen Madonna and Child.

Agnes tells herself to put in her headphones. Hit play. Get it over with.

She can’t.

There is no before, her grandfather had said. She’d known not to ask about his late wife and daughter, but if she’d asked any question about his childhood, or his life in Iceland, that was always the answer. My life began when you were born.

She’s kept her grandfather’s silence, and she’s respected his privacy. Now she’s violating both. Einar, the murderer who went free. Einar, the man who raised her with more affection than her father ever had. Which of these two men was he?

I love you, Agnes. And you love me, don’t you?

Her fingers tap at her phone screen, scrolling away from Nora’s demo. She sends a note to her father. I’m here, she texts. In Reykjavík. Will be getting there later today. She deliberates. For just a moment, she can hear her grandfather’s voice, the soft gravel of his English. Then she adds, Love you.

It’s close to midnight in Berkeley. Her father’s awake. He’s never gone to sleep earlier than three a.m., and even then, he’s always somehow online. As a kid, Agnes used to wander into his bedroom whenever she couldn’t sleep. She’d inherited his insomnia, just as she’d inherited his square shoulders, his white-blond hair. She’d find her father propped up in bed, glasses reflecting the light of a computer, a cell phone, or a reading light over a book. In her earliest memories, her mother had been there, too, sleeping like a stone on the other side of the bed. After the divorce, after her mother had moved to Maine with her new husband, it was just Agnes and her father. Those stolen moments in the liminal haze of night, those were the times when she felt closest to her stoic father. Agnes and Magnús, he’d say, smoothing her hair, his attention mostly focused on his book or his email, two sides of the same coin.

There’s no response.

He’s awake and he’s not letting her in.

She doesn’t text Emi.

For the first month after her injury, Agnes had been convinced she’d actually died and remained dead. The feeling has since faded over the past year, but it comes back to her in flashes. It washes over her, here in the café in Reykjavík, the tingle of weightlessness, of a secret, the wave lifting her and throwing her around. Nothing can touch her. Nothing can wound. She’s above it all.

She drinks three coffees and eats her breakfast. Finally, she puts in her headphones. She presses play.