outer corners of his eyes had a slight downturn.
“Wow,” exclaimed Sanna, looking Rebecka up and down. “You look fantastic. It’s really strange, because it’s only a pair of jeans and a sweater, and it looks as if you’ve just pulled any old thing out of the wardrobe. But it’s just so obvious it’s top-quality stuff.
“Sorry,” she went on, her hand covering an embarrassed smile. “I wasn’t supposed to comment on your appearance.”
“Like I said, I just wanted to see how you were,” said Curt to Sanna.
He pushed the coffee mug away slightly to indicate that he was about to leave.
“I’m fine,” replied Sanna. “Well, I say fine… but Rebecka has been an enormous support to me. If she hadn’t come up here and gone with me to the police station, I don’t know if I could have done it.”
Her hand flew out and lightly brushed Rebecka’s arm.
Rebecka saw the muscles under the skin around Curt’s mouth stiffen. He pushed back his chair to stand up.
Well done, Sanna, thought Rebecka. Tell him how nicely dressed I am. What a support I’ve been. And touch me just to make sure he understands how close we are to each other. So you’ve put some distance between you and him, and the only one he’s angry with is me. Like the pawn placed in front of a threatened queen on the chessboard. But I’m not your damned chaperone. The pawn is handing in her resignation.
She quickly placed her hand on Curt’s back.
“No, you stay there,” she said. “Keep Sanna company. She can find some bread and something to put on it and you can both have some breakfast. I’ve got to go down to the car to fetch my cell phone and laptop. I’ll sit downstairs, make a few calls and send some e-mails.”
Sanna followed her with an inscrutable gaze as she went into the hall to put on her heavy boots. They were wet, but she was only going the short distance to the car. She could hear Sanna and Curt talking quietly at the kitchen table.
“You look tired,” said Sanna.
“I’ve been up all night praying in the church,” replied Curt. “We’ve started a chain of prayer, so there’s somebody praying all the time. You ought to go. Put yourself down just for half an hour. Thomas Soderberg has been asking about you.”
“But you didn’t tell him where I was, did you?”
“No, of course not. But you really shouldn’t stay away from the church now, you should find your refuge in it. And you ought to go home.”
Sanna sighed. “I just don’t know who I can rely on anymore. So you mustn’t tell anybody where I am.”
“I won’t. And if there’s anyone you can rely on, Sanna, it’s me.”
Rebecka appeared in the doorway just in time to see Curt’s hands working their way across the table to find Sanna’s.
“My keys,” said Rebecka. “Both my car keys and the key to the house are missing. I must have dropped them in the snow when I was playing with Virku.”
Rebecka, Sanna and Curt hunted for the keys in the snow with their torches. It hadn’t started to get light yet, and the cones of light swept across the garden, the snowdrifts and the footprints left in the deep snow.
“This is just hopeless,” sighed Sanna, burrowing aimlessly where she was standing. “Keys can sink really deep if the snow isn’t packed.”
Virku went to stand beside Sanna and starting digging like something possessed. She found a twig and shot off with it.
“And you can’t trust that one either,” said Sanna, gazing after Virku, who had been swallowed up by the darkness within a couple of meters. “She might have picked them up in her mouth and carried them off, if she couldn’t find anything else interesting.”
'You and Curt might as well go back inside with the dog,' said Rebecka, trying to hide her annoyance. 'The girls might wake up, and soon I won’t know which tracks are mine and which are yours.'
Her feet were icy cold and damp.
“No, I don’t want to go in,” whined Sanna. “I want to help you find your keys. We’ll find them. They’ve got to be here somewhere.”
Curt was the only one who seemed to be in a good mood. It was as if the darkness gave him some protection against his shyness. And the exercise and the fresh air had made him wake up.
“It was just unbelievable last night!” he told Sanna excitedly. “God was just reminding me of His power all the time. I was completely filled by Him. You should go to the church, Sanna. When I prayed, I could feel His strength pouring over me. I could speak fluently in tongues.
“You might like to pray that I find my keys,” muttered Rebecka.
“It was just as if He was burning some of the words from the Bible into my eyes with a laser,” Curt went on. “So that I would pass them on. Isaiah 43:19: ‘Behold, I will do a new thing; now it shall spring forth; shall ye not know it? I will even make a way in the wilderness, rivers in the desert.’ ”
“You could pray yourself that you find your keys,” said Sanna to Rebecka.
Rebecka laughed. It sounded more like a snort.
“Or Isaiah 48:6,” droned Curt. “ ‘Thou hast heard, see all this; and will ye not declare it? I have showed thee new things from this time, even hidden things, and thou didst not know them.’ ”
Sanna straightened up and shone her torch straight into Rebecka’s eyes.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asked in a serious voice. “Why don’t you pray for your keys yourself?”
Rebecka raised her hand against the blinding light.
“Stop it!” she said.
“And I think God showed me every single place in the New Testament where it says you can’t pour new wine into old bottles,” said Curt to Virku, who was now standing at his feet and appeared to be the only one listening to him. “Because then they crack. And everywhere it says you can’t mend an old garment with a piece of new cloth, because then the new cloth rips along with the old, and the tear is worse.”
“If you want us to pray to find your keys, we’ll do it,” said Sanna, without shifting the light from Rebecka’s face. “But don’t you stand there and pretend God would listen to my prayers and Curt’s more than yours. Don’t trample the blood of Jesus under your feet.”
“Pack it in, I said,” hissed Rebecka, pointing her torch at Sanna’s face.
Curt fell silent and looked at them both.
“Curt,” asked Rebecka, staring straight into the dazzling beam of Sanna’s torch, “do you believe God listens equally to everyone’s prayers?”
“Of course,” he said, “there is never anything wrong with His hearing, but there can be obstacles in the way of His will being done, and obstacles in the way of prayers being answered.”
“What if you don’t live according to His will, for example. Surely God can’t work in your life in the same way then?”
“Exactly.”
“But then that’s just some kind of doctrine,” exclaimed Sanna in despair. “Where’s the grace in that? And God Himself, what do you imagine He thinks of that kind of read-the-Bible-say-your-prayers-for-an-hour-a-day-and- you’ll-have-successful-faith doctrine? I pray and read the Bible when I long for Him. That’s how I’d want to be loved. Why should God be any different? And all this about living according to His will. Surely that should be one of our goals in life. Not a way of winning the star prize for effective praying.”
Curt didn’t answer.
“Sorry, Sanna,” said Rebecka eventually, lowering her torch. “I don’t want to fight about Christian faith. Not with you, at any rate.”
“Because you know I’ll win,” said Sanna with a smile in her voice, and lowered her torch as well.
They stood in silence for a moment, looking at the pools of light on the snow.
“This business with the keys is going to drive me mad,” said Rebecka eventually. “Stupid dog! It’s all your fault!”
