She heard a beckoning whistle. It was Gerd, who had been inspecting the area around the Volvo, where work had abruptly stopped. Now she was crouching to examine something in the snow.
“What is it?”
More prints.
“Aren’t these another set?” Gerd said. “They’re different from the two we found up there. The sole is wrong. These came from someone else.”
Siri leaned down to get a closer look. “Yes. They’re different.”
Size 39, maybe 40. Not a boot. Some kind of athletic shoe. But the print wasn’t very clear; they couldn’t make out the brand.
“And look at this,” Gerd said. “From here you have a perfect view of the scene—both the road he’s coming down and the crash itself.”
She stood up, her knees creaking, and gazed across the village. More reporters were arriving. They parked their cars and got out. A band of black birds shot into the milky-white sky.
“Somewhere,” Gerd said, “we have a witness.”
18
Growing up here, the people were as much a given as the roads and the paths, the old stone walls and the houses. Everything around you had always been there and would always remain. There was endless daylight, innumerable black nights, never-ending bus rides to and from Oskarström. When the bills were paid new ones came around, just like summers did. Animals died; new ones were born. Summers came and went. Winters, too, and Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, New Year’s, January, February, all the months of the year, and then it was Christmas Eve again; they had tons of Christmas Eves, Christmas Eves to the end of eternity, moments that would never stop coming around again. Therewasno end, and it was impossible for anyone or anything to cease to exist one day, to be erased from this life.
Then death took Mikael, and everything changed.
The first time Sander tried to comprehend that Mikael no longer existed, the thought dissolved like smoke in the air before him. It didn’t work. Mikael could be dead while life here went on just like always? No, he couldn’t. His locker was still there in the hallway at school, his bike was there. If Sander went to his house he would see all of Mikael’s clothes and shoes, his desk. Theybelongedto him. Of course he was still around.
When they were little, Mikael played forward for Sennans IFsoccer team, and these days he and Sander were the two top students in their year at Kattegat. Mikael was tall and slim, but he had broad shoulders, the body of a swimmer, and an angular face with gentle, pale-blue eyes.
To celebrate Mikael’s birthday when they were younger, all the friends would gather around a long table in the yard behind his big house, under a line of colorful umbrellas to block the sun. They drank soda and ate hamburgers, played games on the lawn. One of the best games was “sniper.” Mikael’s dad, Karl-Henrik, would line up the empty soda cans on sawhorses, count the right number of paces, and place the air gun on a piece of plywood. The championship could begin, and when it was all over, they selected a winner, who would enjoy the eternal honor of victory, and, for one year, possession of the Söderström Shooting Trophy. Karl-Henrik himself had made it: it was a large cup carved from wood, to which he had attached a heavy marble base. The winner got to hoist it over his head and, perhaps even better, have the first pick of ice cream. During the championship, Mikael’s mother set up a whole dessert buffet in a shady corner of the yard.
Mikael was one of the first to start driving a moped and an EPA tractor; he snuck the occasional cigarette but nothing harder, and he liked to party, but not too much. He was justMikael,and everyone liked him. It was hard to imagine that he had any secrets, especially the kind that could kill you.
That evening, on the national news, everyone watched the prime minister call for a summit following a meeting of the NATO countries’ foreign ministers in Brussels. A healthcare scandal in Malmö, a big strike notice at a sawmill in northern Sweden. Then, before anyone could prepare themselves, the viewers were tossed into Skavböke, here, home, and the whole village saw its own reflection in a dark pool.
Words and images described something unfamiliar—different people, a place that wasn’t like theirs but gloomier and colder. A camera panned across Kjell Östholm’s field and across the Söderströmland before the segment showed images of the blue-and-white police tape fluttering ominously in the foreground. And beyond it, the police themselves.
It felt as though all of them were suddenly extras in a movie, and despite the gravity of the situation, Sander couldn’t help but feel important, as though he were onstage in a play. Overnight, someone in Skavböke had become a killer.
“They were here, filming?” Sander’s mother looked almost affronted from her spot on the sofa, as though this were an inappropriate intrusion. “When did that happen?”
She sought protection in Erik’s arms.
Sander was reminded of the riddle Isidor Enoksson had once presented to them during a school field trip to the chapel. Sander, Killian, and the others were only little then, maybe eight or nine. The riddle was short, and in the form of a question: When the boy jumped off the bridge, where washe?
After a long silence, Killian replied: “In the air.”
But Sander shook his head. “By the time you’re in the air, you’ve already jumped. You have to be somewhere else before that. Right?”
The old priest nodded.
“But that means he has to be standing on the bridge,” Killian said. “Or the railing.”
“No,” Isidor said. “That’s where he isbeforehe jumps.”
Slowly, the implication of the riddle became clear. But the answer didn’t. It seemed to reveal a truth about life around them: some things you saw might not have a name. Some things here in the world were both evident and impossible, perfectly obvious yet incomprehensible at the same time.
That was where Mikael was now. In the riddle about the boy on the bridge.
19
