Better to light a candle than curse the darkness, and there was a stub of one on a windowsill. Brand lit it and placed the wavering flame near the head of the bed. She climbed aboard, covering herself with Hammar’s bloody parka.
Exhausted, battered by the beating she had just taken at the hands of the Voss madwoman, she still could not sleep.
The musty smell that had engulfed her now summoned up memories of another hovel, a wreck of a place in the woods of upstate New York that the family always referred to as “the deer shack,” since it was only used in the fall hunting season. As a child she abhorred everything about it, the filth, the air of abandonment and disuse, the carcasses of white tails strung up on poplar trees outside.
She much preferred the farm. In memory, her childhood was forever sunlit. She spent winter holidays as well as summers there, while her mother took the opportunity for serious solitary drinking back in Queens. But in Brand’s mind Jamestown was never snowy, always green and golden. She was allowed to roam free, an incredible blessing unavailable to a small child in New York City.
Brand pictured herself in a sea of waist-high grasses, harvesting daisies, black-eyed Susans, and Indian paintbrushes to bring home to the farmhouse of her grandparents. Somewhere in the background, a crew baled hay in the fields, black-and-white Holsteins lowed in the meadow, and all was right in the world.
The image was a lie. She picked flowers not out of childhood innocence but in a desperate attempt to salve the emotional wounds that afflicted Klara and Gustav Dalgren and her great-aunt Alice. Her painstakingly gathered bouquets did no good.
Even as a young child, Brand recognized that something was not right with the household. Dark currents ran under the surface. Gustav drank. There were nights when she heard him rage in the downstairs kitchen, crashing and yelling until Brand found herself sobbing with fear.
Now lying awake in a Swedish fäbod halfway around the world in Härjedalen, a word she could barely pronounce, she tried to sweep those memories away and replace them with more pleasant ones. She recalled a late summer day when oppressive heat lured Klara, Alice and her into the farm’s woodlot. A spring pooled amid a stand of sugar maples. The older women stripped down to their linens and sank down as far as they could in the cool water. Only their heads remained visible, floating disembodied. They both wore looks of contentment.
Brand, twelve years old and shamefully shy of her body, crouched on the bank. The voices of Klara and Alice drifted on the hot summer breeze, going from Swedish to English to a confusing combination of both.
The two women never entirely got the hang of America or the English language—they would have reacted with puzzlement about what “got the hang of” meant. They used a characteristic mmm and awww to show they were paying attention, the sound like a murmur. Walter was ‘Valter’, win was ‘vin’, wine was ‘vine’, and no z sound existed at all, only s.
Why had her aunt and grandparents come to America, Brand asked her mother, if they loved Sweden so much? Marta Brand never answered directly, simply passed on to other subjects. She had put a firm distance between herself and the old country ways of her mother and aunt. Marta was a good-time American girl, too busy living it up in the present to bother with the past.
The Jamestown farm was cursed. Even an idyllic memory like that of the afternoon at the spring could turn sour. The two sisters emerged from the water and walked slowly back toward the farmhouse. Their underclothes dried only gradually in the humid August air. Their hair remained damp. They carried their dresses bundled in their arms. Twelve-year-old Brand wanted the two adults to get dressed already. She worried about them being seen.
Alice began chattering about swimming as kids in a lake in Sweden, frigid even in summer. She spoke about Gustav being with her and Klara, as well as a person called by a name that sounded to Veronika like “Low-keh.”
“How handsome he was, wasn’t he, Klara? And what an eye Loke had for the ladies!”
Brand remembered her grandmother reacting not at all, remaining stone-faced.
“And a special eye he had for you,” Alice added teasingly.
Klara turned and slapped her sister hard. Brand had seen Klara chasten Alice before, sometimes with words, sometimes with a gentle cuff, but never anything as sharp as that slap.
The candle flickered in the tiny shack where Brand was squatting. She reached into the inner pocket of her parka for the photograph she had retrieved from Elin’s deserted room. The group of four happy teenagers and one younger child stared out at her from Sweden at the dawn of the 1930s.
Flipping the fragile photograph over, she could barely see, in the flickering candlelight of the mildewed fäbod, the neat, spidery writing. The hand was not of her grandmother Klara, but of Alice.
Five names: Elin, Alice, Klara, Gustav Dalgren, Loke. Loke Voss.
Yes, here was the Voss family elder, Brand thought, the boy with the troubled expression in his face. He remained in the shadows to the right of the others, looking longingly over at Klara.
Loke. Accused of igniting the Nordic Light fire, he had never been held publicly accountable for the arson or deaths. Smoke from those flames drifted across the Atlantic and hung over the Jamestown farmhouse like a pall.
Brand realized she had been destined to come to Sweden all along. Her whole life fed into this moment. She was somehow meant to confront Loke Voss for the crimes of the past. But her target seemed to recede each day she spent in the country. Her ancestors loomed accusingly in her mind. What are you doing
