Echoes From the Dead Read Online Free PDF Page B

guest rooms there, as far as I know. And down in Stenvik we’ve closed up the cottage and the boathouse for the season …”
    “I’ll sort something out,” said Julia quickly, then realized that she didn’t actually know where she was going to stay. She hadn’t even thought about it. “But I can take the car, then?”
    She could sense that her sister was on the point of giving in, and wanted a quick answer before Richard came out to help his wife put off lending her the car.
    “Well…” said Lena. “All right, you can borrow it then. I just need to get a few things.”
    She went over to the car, opened the door, and took out some papers, a pair of sunglasses, and half a bar of Marabou chocolate.
    She walked back to Julia, held out her hand, and let go of the keys. Julia caught them, then Lena handed her something else.
    “Take this too,” she said. “So we can get hold of you. I just got a new one through work.”
    It was a cell phone, a black one. Perhaps not the smallest
    model, but small enough.
    “I don’t know how to use these,” said Julia.
    “It’s easy. There’s a code that you key in first… here.” Lena wrote it down, along with the telephone number, on a piece of paper. “When you make a call, you just key in the whole number, with the area code, and press this green button. There’s a bit of credit left on it; when that’s gone you’ll have to pay yourself.”
    “Okay.” Julia took the phone. “Thanks.”
    “Right… Drive carefully,” said Lena. “Love to Dad.”
    Julia nodded and walked over to the car. She got in, smelled the fragrance of her sister’s perfume, started the engine, and drove off.
    It was already dusk. And as she drove through Hisingen, at
    twenty kilometers below the speed limit, she thought about why she and Lena could never look at each other for more than a few seconds at a time. They’d been close in the pastafter all, Lena was the reason why Julia had moved to Gothenburg once upon a timebut now it was just the opposite. And things had been this bad since that Friday several years earlier when Julia had been inside Lena and Richard’s house for the last time, at a small dinner party without the children, which had ended with Richard putting his wineglass down, getting up from the table, and asking: “Do we have to sit here constantly going over this tedious
    nonsense about things that happened twenty years ago? I’m just wondering. Do we have to?”
    He was angry and slightly drunk and his voice was rough
    despite the fact that Julia had merely mentioned Jens’s disappearance in passing, simply as the reason why she was feeling the way she was.
    Lena’s voice was calm as she looked at Julia, then made the
    comment that had made Julia refuse to accompany her sister to Oland two years later, to help Gerlof move from the cottage in Stenvik to the residential home in Marnas: “He’s never coming back,” Lena had said. “I mean, everybody
    knows that…Jens is dead,Julia. Even you must realize that?”
    Standing up and screaming hysterically at her sister across the dinner table hadn’t helped at all, but Julia had done it anyway.
    Julia got home, parked the car on the street, and went inside to pack. When she had packed clothes for a tenday stay, a few toiletries, and some books (and two bottles of red wine and some pills), she ate a sandwich and drank some water instead of wine.
    Then it was time to go to bed.
    But once in bed she lay staring up into the darkness, unable to sleep. She got up and went into the bathroom, took a prescription pill, and went back to bed.
    A little boy’s shoe. A sandal.
    When she closed her eyes, she could see herself as a young
    mother, putting on Jens’s sandals, and that memory brought with it a black weight that settled on her breast, a heavy uncertainty that made Julia shiver under the covers.
    Jens’s little shoe, after more than twenty years without a single trace of him. After all that searching on Oland, all