The Cold Song Read Online Free PDF Page A

riding in the wrong direction for what seemed like hours. He was almost absolutely sure that they had been riding in the wrong direction and that this was not the right spot. But if he was wrong and Christian was right, and it turned out that the treasure was buried under this tree, he wondered whether he should put the diamond crucifix back in the blue bowl in the bathroom or keep it, or maybe try to sell it. You could do a lot with seventeen thousand kroner. He pictured his mother looking all over for it, in the house, in the garden, never suspecting him. She had worn her red dress, she had smiled at him and asked him to help her look.
    They dug the shovels into the ground.
    “Just as well the frost hasn’t set in yet,” Christian said. “This would never have worked if it had.”
    “This is definitely the place,” Gunnar said, “you can see that somebody’s been digging here before—”
    “Yeah, but the whole point was that we wouldn’t ever dig it up again,” Simen mumbled, knowing he was right about this.
    “But whose point was that, anyway?” Christian asked.
    “Well, the treasure was your idea,” Simen said.
    “Oh just shut up and dig,” said Gunnar.
    The boys worked in silence. It was pitch-dark now; they took turns digging and holding the flashlight.
    An hour later when, breathless and exhausted, they shone the flashlight down on her, none of them got that it was Milla lying there, at least not right away. The grave looked like a bird’s nest—a big underground nest of twigs and bones and skin and straw and grass and pieces of red fabric—and at first Simen, whose eyes did not take in the entire contents of the grave all at once, thought that was exactly what it was, that what he was looking at were the remains of some giant bird, the only one of its kind, black and surging, hidden from the world, lone and mighty on its heavy dark wings, swooping back and forth along subterranean tunnels, passages, and halls. A great, proud, solitary night bird that had at last come plummeting down, leaving only a few signs that it had ever existed—and he was not shaken out of this state until Gunnar, who was holding the flashlight, started screaming.
    “Oh, Christ, it’s a body.”
    Gunnar’s face was green and not just from the ghostly beams of the flashlight.
    Christian said, “Look at the hair, it’s not grass, it’s hair.” Then he threw up.
    Two years had passed since Milla disappeared and even back then Simen and his bike were as one, that was how he thought of himself, as a boy on wheels, a bike with a body, a heart, and a tongue, and if his parents had let him, he would have taken his bike to bed with him when, much against his will, he was told to go to sleep. From early morning he was out, zooming and skidding and swerving up and down the narrow dirt tracks around the white-painted church or screeched to a halt at the very end of the wooden jetties alongside the ferry wharf, inside the long breakwater; his handlebars flashed in the sunlight and he breathed in the sharp reek of shrimp shells and fish ends from the two fishermen who hadn’t yet called it quits and chosen some other line of work.
    On the evening she disappeared—July 15, 2008—there had been a shower of rain, the mist had thickened around him, and the roads were black and damp and looked as though they might yawn open at any minute and swallow him. Simen’s parents allowed him to go out on his bike alone in the evening—as long as he stayed near the house. He was cold, but he didn’t want to go home. His mother and father were fighting constantly and they couldn’t stop, not even when he yelled, “Stop it! Please don’t fight anymore!”
    At the top of the winding road known as the Bend (but which everyone thought ought to be called
the Bends
because of the many twists and turns and which Simen knew took about a thousand and one steps to climb), that coiled like a rippling band up the slope from the town center, sat the