Before the Frost Read online

  Linda walked out to the gate.

  “There may be something else,” the old lady said.

  They were now standing on either side of the gate.

  “There was a Norwegian,” she said. “I sometimes go in to Rune’s shop and complain if they’re making too much of a racket on a Sunday. I think Rune is a little afraid of me. He’s the kind of person who never grows out of the respect he had for his teachers. The noise usually stops. But one day he told me about a Norwegian who had just been by to fill up his car and who paid with a thousand-kronor note. Rune isn’t used to bills that big. He said something about the Norwegian owning the house up there.”

  “So I should ask Rune?”

  “Only if you have time on your hands. He’s on vacation in Thailand right now. I don’t even want to think about what he might be getting up to.”

  Linda thought for a moment.

  “A Norwegian. Did he say what he looked like?”

  “No. If I were in your place I would ask the people who most likely handled the sale of the house. That would be the Sparbank real estate division. They have an office in town. They may know.”

  Linda left. She thought that Sara Edén was a person she would like to know more about. She crossed the street, passed a hair salon, and stepped into the tiny Sparbank office. There was only one person inside; he looked up when she came in. Linda asked him her question and the answer came without his having to consult any binders or notes.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We handled the sale of that house. The seller was a Malmö dentist by the name of Sved. He had used the house as a summer retreat for a while but grown tired of it. We advertised the property online and in the Ystad Allehanda. A Norwegian came in and demanded to see the place. I asked one of the Skurup realtors to take care of him. That’s fairly normal, since I run the branch by myself and can’t always take on the extra responsibility for real-estate sales. Two days later the sale was finalized. As far as I recall, the Norwegian paid cash. They’ve got money coming out their ears these days.”

  The last comment revealed his grumbling displeasure at the vibrant Norwegian economy. But Linda was more interested in the Norwegian’s name.

  “I don’t have the papers here, but I can call the Skurup office.”

  A client walked into the branch, an old man who walked with the help of two canes.

  “Please excuse me while I attend to Mr. Alfredsson first,” the man behind the counter said.

  Linda waited impatiently. It took what seemed like an endless amount of time before the old man was finished. Linda held the door open for him. The man behind the counter placed his call, and after about a minute he received an answer that he wrote down on a piece of paper. He finished the conversation and pushed the note over to Linda. She read: Torgeir Langas.

  “It’s possible he spells the last name with a double ‘a,’ that would be Langaas.”

  “What’s his address?”

  “You only asked me for his name.”

  Linda nodded.

  “If you need more information, you can turn to the Skurup office directly. Do you mind my asking why you so urgently need to contact the owner of the house?”

  “I may want to buy it,” Linda said and left.

  She hurried up to the car. Now she had a name. As soon as she opened the car door, she noticed that something was amiss. A receipt that had been on the dashboard was on the floor, a matchbox had been moved. She had left the car unlocked; someone had been in it while she was gone.

  Hardly a thief, she thought. The car radio is still here. But who’s been in the car? Why?

  26

  The first thought that ran through Linda’s head was completely irrational: Mom did this. She’s been rifling through my stuff again like she used to. Linda climbed hesitantly into the car. Another thought ran through her like electric current: a bomb. Something was going to explode and tear her to pieces. But of course there was no bomb. A bird had left a big dropping on the windshield, that was all. Now she noticed that the seat had been pushed back. The person who had been here was taller than she was. So tall he or she had to adjust the seat in order to slip behind the wheel. She sniffed for new scents but couldn’t pick anything out, no aftershave or perfume. She looked everywhere. Something was different about the black plastic cup of loose change that Anna had taped behind the gearshift, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.

  Linda’s thoughts returned to her mother. The game of cat-and-mouse had gone on for most of her childhood. She couldn’t remember the exact moment when she realized that her mother was constantly looking through her things in search of who knows what kind of secrets. Maybe it had started when Linda was eight or nine and noticed when she came home from school that something had changed about her room. At first she had simply thought she must have been wrong. The red cardigan had been lying over the green sweater like that, not the other way around. She had even asked Mona, who had snapped at her. That was when the suspicion had been born and the game of cat-and-mouse started in earnest. She had left traps for Mona among her clothes, toys, and books. But it was as if Mona immediately sensed what was going on. Linda laid increasingly elaborate traps and even noted the exact arrangement of her things in a notebook so that she could catch her mother.

  Linda kept looking around the car. A mom has been here, a mom who may have been either a man or a woman. Snooping in their kids’ stuff is more common than you’d think. Most of my friends had at least one parent who did it. She thought about her dad. He had never looked through her things. Sometimes she had seen him peer in through her half-open door to make sure she was really there. But he never made surreptitious expeditions into her life. That had always been Mona.

  She concentrated on the question of what kind of person had been in the car. Taking the radio would have been a simple way to cover his or her tracks. Then Linda would simply assume there had been a normal break-in and chastise herself for being so lazy she didn’t even lock the car. This is not a particularly cunning mom, she thought.

  She didn’t get any further. There was no conclusion to be drawn, no answer as to who and why. She readjusted the front seat, got out, and looked around. A man walked by in the blinding sun. I saw his back and thought it was Anna’s father. Linda shook her head in irritation. Anna had just been imagining things when she said she saw her father in the street. Maybe her acute disappointment was what made her take off for a few days. She had done that before—taken a trip without advance warning. But Zeba had said she always let at least one person know where she was going.

  Who did she tell this time? Linda wondered.

  She walked back over the gravel yard in front of the church, glancing up at some pigeons circling the bell tower, and then continued down to the house. A man named Torgeir Langaas bought the house, she thought. He paid cash.

  She walked around to the back of the house, looking thoughtfully but absentmindedly at the stone furniture. There were several black and red currant bushes. She picked a few strands of berries and ate them. Her memories of Mona returned. Linda didn’t think she had snooped out of sheer curiosity; rather, it seemed that she had been motivated by fear. Why had she been so afraid? Was she afraid I wasn’t who she thought I was? A nine-year-old can play roles and have her secrets, but hardly of a magnitude that requires continuous snooping in order to truly understand her, especially if she is your own child.

  Open warfare had only broken out when Mona started reading Linda’s diary. Linda had been thirteen by then and had been hiding her diary behind a loose panel at the back of a closet. At first she had thought it was safe there, but one day she realized that her mother had found her secret hiding spot. The diary had been pushed back a few centimeters too far. She could still remember the rage she had experienced. That time she really hated her mother.

  There was an epilogue to that memory. Linda had decided to set another trap for her mother. This time she simply wrote a message on the first blank page in the diary statin
g that she knew her mother was reading it, that she was snooping in all her things. She put the diary back in its hiding place and started walking to school. About halfway there she slowed down and decided to cut class, since she knew she would not be able to concentrate anyway. She spent the day wandering around in the shops downtown. When she came home she broke out in a cold sweat, but her mother greeted her as if nothing had happened. Late that evening after they had all gone to bed Linda got out of bed, took out the diary, and saw that her mother had written—without apology or explanation—“I won’t read it anymore, I promise.”

  Linda picked a few more berries. We never talked about it, she thought. I think she stopped snooping altogether after that, but I could never be sure. Maybe she got better at covering her tracks, maybe I stopped caring as much. But we never talked about it.

  The real estate agent’s name was Ture Magnusson and he was in the middle of a transaction involving the sale of a house in Trunnerup to a retired German couple. Linda skimmed through a folder of houses for sale while she waited. Ture Magnusson spoke German very badly. Finally he got up and walked over to her. He smiled.

  “They want a moment alone,” he said and introduced himself. “These things tend to take time. What can I do for you?”

  Linda gave him her story without playing the policewoman this time. Ture Magnusson nodded before she was even finished. He seemed to remember the deal without having to look it up.

  “That house was indeed bought by a Norwegian,” he said. “A pleasant sort, very quick to make up his mind. He was what you would call an ideal client, paid in cash, no hesitation, no second thoughts.”

  “How can I get in touch with him? I’m interested in the house.”

  Ture Magnusson leaned back and seemed to take stock of her. His chair creaked as he pushed onto the back legs of the chair and balanced up against the wall.

  “To be perfectly honest, he paid too much for that house. I shouldn’t tell you that, but it’s true. I can show you at least three other places in much better condition, in more beautiful surroundings going for less.”

  “This is the house I want. I’d like to at least ask the owner if he would consider selling.”

  “Of course. I understand. ‘Torgeir Langaas was his name,’” Ture Magnusson said, singing the last sentence. He had a good voice. He went into the next room and soon reappeared with an opened folder.

  “Torgeir Langaas,” he read. “He spells his last name with a double ‘a’ at the end. He was born somewhere called Baerum, forty-three years old.”

  “Where in Norway does he live?”

  “Nowhere. He lives in Copenhagen.”

  Ture Magnusson put the folder down in front of her so she could see. Nedergade 12.

  “What sort of man would you say he was?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  “I want to know if there’s any point in looking him up, in your opinion.”

  Ture Magnusson leaned back up against the wall.

  “It was clear from the moment I laid eyes on him that Torgeir Langaas meant business. He was very courteous. He had already picked out the house he wanted. We drove out there together and inspected the property; he didn’t ask any questions. When we returned he pulled the cash out of his shoulder bag. I don’t think that’s ever happened to me except on one other occasion. The other was when one of our young tennis stars came with a suitcase full of bank notes and bought a large estate in West Vemmenhög. He’s never been there since, as far as I know.”

  Linda wrote down Langaas’s address in Copenhagen and prepared to leave.

  “Come to think of it, there was something else I noticed about him.”

  “What was it?”

  Ture Magnusson shook his head slowly.

  “It wasn’t anything remarkable, just that he turned around a lot, as if he were afraid of running into someone he knew. He also excused himself a number of times, and when he returned from the bathroom the last time, his eyes were glazed over.”

  “Had he been crying?”

  “No, I would almost say he seemed high.”

  “Alcohol?”

  “I would have smelled that on his breath. I guess he could have been drinking vodka.”

  Linda tried to think of something else to ask.

  “But respectful, pleasant,” Magnusson said again. “Perhaps he’ll sell you the house. Who knows?”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He had a normal-looking face. What I remember most about him is his eyes, not simply because they were glazed over but because there was something disturbing about them. Some people would perhaps even have found his look menacing.”

  “And yet his manner struck you as pleasant?”

  “Oh, very. An ideal client, as I said. I bought myself a very nice bottle of wine that evening. Just to celebrate such an easy day’s work.”

  Linda left the real-estate office. This is another step on the way, she thought. I can go to Copenhagen and find this Torgeir Langaas. I don’t know exactly why—perhaps it helps to diminish my anxieties. I’m treating this as if Anna simply decided to go away without remembering to mention it to me.

  Linda drove toward Malmö. Just before the turnoff to Jägersro and the Öresund Bridge she decided to make an unexpected visit. She pulled up outside the house in Limhamn, parked, and walked in through the gate. A car was pulled into the driveway. She stopped herself as she was about to ring the doorbell; why, she couldn’t say. Instead she walked around to the back of the house to the glassed-in porch. The garden was well-tended. The gravel path was even raked. The door to the porch was slightly ajar. She pushed it open farther and listened. It was quiet, but she was sure that someone was home. These people spent far too much time locking doors and checking their alarm system. She walked into the living room, looking at the painting over the sofa. It was a picture she had often looked at as a child, fascinated and disturbed by the brown bear shot through with flames and about to explode. She still found it disturbing. Her dad had won it in a lottery and given it to her mother as a birthday present.

  Linda heard a noise in the kitchen and walked to the door. Her “hello” stuck in her throat. Mona was standing at the kitchen counter. She was naked and drinking vodka straight from the bottle.

  27

  Afterward Linda would think that it had been like staring at an image from her past. An image that reached beyond the reality of her mother standing there naked with a bottle of vodka, to something else, an impression, a memory she only managed to grasp when she drew a deep breath. She had experienced the same thing herself once.

  She had been only fourteen years old, in the midst of those terrible teenage years when nothing seems possible or comprehensible, but where everything is also straightforward, easy to see through. All parts of the body vibrate with a new hunger. It had happened during a brief period in her life when not only her father but even her mother disappeared off to work all day, having pulled herself out of an unfulfilling stay-at-home existence to work for a shipping company. This finally enabled Linda to be alone for a few hours after school, or to bring friends home with her. She was happy.

  That was the time Torbjörn came into her life. He was her first real boyfriend, one whom Linda imagined looked much like Clint Eastwood would have looked at fifteen. Torbjörn Rackestad was half-Danish, a quarter Swedish, and a quarter Native American, a fact that not only gave him a beautiful face but a tinge of exoticism.

  It was with him that Linda started a serious investigation into all that went under the rubric of love. They were slowly approaching the moment of truth, although Linda equivocated. One day, when they were sprawled half-naked on her bed, the door opened. It was Mona. She had had a fight with her boss and left work early. Linda still broke out into a sweat when she remembered the shock she had felt. At the time she had started laughing hysterically. Since she had buried her face in her hands she didn’t know exactly how Torbjörn had reacted, but he must have pulled his clothes on and left the ap
artment soon afterward.

  Mona hadn’t lingered in the doorway. She had simply shot her a look that Linda could never quite describe. There had been everything in that look from despair to a kind of smug triumph in finally having her worst fears about her daughter’s nature confirmed. When Linda eventually went out into the living room, they had had a shouting match. Linda could still recall Mona’s repeated war cry: I don’t give a shit what you do as long as you don’t get pregnant. Linda could also hear echoes of her own shouts—their sound, not the words. She remembered the embarrassment, the fury, and the sense of humiliation.

  All these thoughts ran through her head as she stared at the nude older woman by the refrigerator. It also occurred to her that she hadn’t seen her mother naked since she was a little girl. Mona had gained a lot of weight, the extra flesh spilling out in unappealing bulges. Linda’s face registered disgust, a brief unconscious expression but distinct enough for Mona to see it and snap out of her initial shock. She slammed the bottle down on the counter and pulled the refrigerator door open as a kind of shield for her body. Linda couldn’t help giggling at the sight of her mother’s head sticking up over the door.

  “What do you mean by sneaking in like this? Why can’t you ring the doorbell?”

  “I wanted to surprise you.”

  “But you can’t just barge into a person’s house!”

  “How else would I find out that my mother spends her days getting pissed?”

  Mona slammed the refrigerator door shut.

  “I am not a drunk!” she screamed.

  “You were swigging vodka straight from the bottle, Mom.”

  “It’s water. I chill it before I drink it.”

  They both lunged for the bottle at the same time, Mona to hide the truth, Linda to uncover it. Linda got there first and sniffed it.