“Don’t touch her!” Elsa exclaims. She can hear how shrill and hysterical she sounds, as though she’s lost all reason. A mad old woman.
When Aina looks back at Elsa, her gaze is blank and dead.
“This is my family now,” she says, and it isn’t Elsa’s Aina speaking, not the Aina who begged, cried, and pleaded for one of the neighbor’s kittens when she was four, not the Aina who huddles up to Elsa so that she can brush her hair, not the Aina who keeps binders of bookmarks under her bed.
She’s a stranger.
The pastor’s hand is still on her head. He looks completely relaxed.
“I take it she has had the child?” the pastor asks Elsa, and she can’t understand his words. Can’t register them.
“Had … h-h-had the…” Elsa stutters, just as Göran once used to do. Her mouth is completely dry.
“Has the witch given birth to her devil-spawn?” he asks again, calmly and quietly. As though enquiring when lunch would be served.
His eyes. Those damned tempest eyes.
They are laughing at her.
“Did you think we didn’t know?” he asks.
She doesn’t understand—doesn’t understand how they could possibly know. They had done everything right. Has somebody told them—Dagny? Ingrid?
Elsa can’t believe that of either of them. She refuses to.
A sound outside the church makes her jump, and she looks around. The sound is familiar, as familiar as her daughters’ voices.
“Ah,” says Pastor Mattias. “They have returned.”
It’s Birgitta, and she’s howling in panic. Elsa can hear it through the church and the closed door.
She whips around. The pastor has stood up, and their faces are level. Something terrible is lurking in the corners of his eyes.
“I’m afraid we can’t let you leave for Stockholm just yet,” he says to Elsa. “Not while you’re so upset. It would be better if you calmed down a little first.”
“You can’t stop me,” she says, trying to find strength once again in her rage. But all she can find is the start of a bottomless fear.
The pastor doesn’t reply. He just smiles. A small, cruel smile.
Fear snatches hold of her, and Elsa feels herself give way to it. She looks at Aina, begs her:
“Aina, don’t do this, don’t let them do this to Birgitta. She’s innocent, she hasn’t done anything wrong. Let us go, please.”
Aina just looks at her. There is no life in her eyes.
And then she smiles. The carbon copy of his little grin.
Elsa flies around and tears open the door, but the Sundin boys are waiting outside. Frank and Gösta, standing silently side by side. They both have the same straggly brown hair and small eyes. Broad shoulders, big hands.
Behind them the congregation is waiting. A sea of staring eyes. Panic floods into Elsa’s pumping blood, merging them all into a single, malevolent mass before her eyes. An impenetrable wall of hate.
She backs into the room, looking around wildly. There’s no other exit in there, only the shell of the girl who had once been her daughter, and the pastor.
One of his hands is resting on the table, where a few stray sheets of paper lie. Elsa’s eyes catch on the top one. It’s a drawing, in crayons. Clumpy figures in different colors. And then spirals, jagged and uneven, running into each other.
The room starts to spin.
Elsa looks up.
“It was you,” she says, but hardly any sound comes out. It’s no more than an exhalation.
“Frank,” the pastor says softly, “Gösta. Would you please take Fru Kullman to the cellar under the parsonage? So that she can calm down.”
All that Elsa can see is little Kristina. Little Kristina and her newborn, cloudy dark-blue eyes.
Will they darken to Birgitta’s bottomless brown? Or will they slowly but surely fade to her father’s light storm-cloud gray?
“It was you,” Elsa says again, and this time it’s audible. But it makes no difference. Rough hands have already locked on her arms, restraining her.
Elsa’s eyes flit across the horde of faces, angels no more. They look like evil spirits, quiet and glaring.
For a second she finds Staffan in the crowd.
Her lips form a mute: “Please.”
He looks down.
She hears Birgitta’s cries grow to a scream outside the church.
Then it cuts off abruptly, and silence is all that’s left.
NOW
I’m still bent forward on the seat when I hear a knock at the door.
I sit up quickly and throw a glance at Tone in the corner. She doesn’t seem to have paid it any notice.
“Come in,” I say.
It’s Robert. He looks around the room and then at me.
“Alice,” he says. He stops in the doorway, a touch too big for it, and I get up and walk over to him.
He herds me out of the room and carefully closes the door behind him.
“What is it?” I ask.
“Max has been gone a really long time,” he says.
“OK,” I say.
“The church is only five minutes away.” The corners of his mouth draw stiff lines that will one day be etched permanently into his cheeks.
“He’s probably just…” I shake my head. Think of the look on Max’s face. The disappointment verging on disgust.
You’re so fucking selfish.
“I think he just wanted to be alone,” I manage to squeeze out. “To process everything. Calm down.”
“Yeah, I guess,” Robert says, but that stressed, anxious look doesn’t shift from his face. “I just thought…”
He shoves his hands deep into his pockets.
“We can go look for him anyway,” I say. “If it’ll make you feel better.”
“Yeah,” he says and nods. A hint of relief. “I just think … it’d be better if we were all here. Together.”
I put my hand on his arm and nod.
“Let’s go get him, then,” I say.
“What do we do with her?” Robert asks, nodding at the door.
“We can … lock the door,” I say, even though the thought of locking Tone up makes my stomach turn. “It’s not like
