Echoes From the Dead (20 page)

she looked as if she enjoyed her job.

“Are you open all year round?” asked Julia as she handed

over the money.

She was surprised that there were still so many people around in Langvik in general and at the harbor hotel in particular, even though it was autumn.

“From November to March we’re only open on weekends,

for conferences,” said the waitress.

She took the money and opened the wallet around her waist

to pick out some onekrona pieces.

“Keep the change,” said Julia; she glanced again out at the

gray water outside the window, then went on: “Another thing

I was wondering… Do you know if there’s anyone here in

Langvik called Lambert? Lambert, and then something ending

inson … Svensson or Nilsson or Karlsson. Is there a Lambert here?”

The waitress looked thoughtful and shook her head.

“Lambert?” she said. “It’s a name you’d remember, but I don’t think I’ve heard it.”

She was too young to know about Langvik’s older residents,

thought Julia. She nodded and got up, but the waitress said suddenly: “Ask Gunnar. Gunnar Ljunger. He’s the one who owns this

hotel. He knows nearly everybody in Langvik.” She turned and pointed. “You go out through the main entrance, then left, then along to the side of the hotel. That’s where the office ishe should be there now.”

Julia thanked her and left the restaurant. She’d drunk ice water with her lunch today; it was starting to become a habit. It was nice to have a clear head as she walked out into the cold air of the hotel parking lot, even if a wineinduced sense of calm might have helped if she was going to see Lambert again …

Lambert Svensson or Nilsson or Karlsson.

Julia ran a hand through her hair and went around the side of the hotel. There was a wooden door with a number of company signs next to it, and the top one said lAngvik conference center. She opened the door and walked into a small reception area with a yellow carpet and big green plastic plants.

It was like walking into an office in the middle of Gothenburg.

Soft music was playing in the background. A young, smartly

dressed woman was sitting at the reception desk, and an equally young man in a white shirt was leaning against it. Both looked at Julia as if she had interrupted an important conversation, but the receptionist was quickest to greet her and smile. Julia said hello back, feeling slightly tense as always when she met new people, and then she asked about Gunnar Ljunger.

“Gunnar?” said the receptionist, looking at the man by her

desk. “Is he back from lunch?”

“He is,” said the man, nodding to Julia. “Come with me and

I’ll show you.”

Julia followed him along a short corridor with a halfopen door at the end. He knocked and pushed it open at the same time.

“Dad?” he said. “You’ve got a visitor.”

“Okay,” said a deep male voice. “Come in.”

The office wasn’t particularly large, but the view over the

beach and the Baltic through the picture window was glorious.

The hotel owner, Gunnar Ljunger, was sitting at the desk; he was a tall man with a gray beard and bushy gray eyebrows, and he was tapping away on a calculator. He was wearing a white shirt with suspenders, and a brown jacket was draped over the back of the chair behind him. On the table next to the calculator was an open copy of OlandsPosten, and Ljunger appeared to be looking through the paper and doing his calculations at the same time.

“Hi,” he said, glancing up at Julia.

“Hi.”

“How can I help?”

Ljunger smiled and carried on tapping numbers into his calculator.

“I’ve

just got one question,” said Julia, stepping into the room.

“I’m looking for Lambert.”

“Lambert?”

“Lambert in Langvik … Lambert Karlsson, I think his

name is.”

“That would be Lambert Nilsson,” said Ljunger. “There’s no

other Lambert here in Langvik.”

“That’s it… Nilsson, that’s his name,” said Julia quickly.

“But Lambert’s dead,” said Ljunger, shaking his head. “He

died five or six years ago.”

“Oh.”

Julia felt a quick stab of disappointment, but she had partly expected that answer. Lambert had looked old back in the seventies, that afternoon all those years ago when he had come chugging along on his moped to find out what had happened to her son.

“His younger brother SvenOlof is still alive, of course,” added Ljunger. “He lives up on the hill, behind the pizzeria; Lambert used to live there too. SvenOlof sells eggs, so look for a house with hens in the yard.”

“Thanks.”

“If you’re going there, tell SvenOlof from me that it’s even cheaper now to sign up to the city water supply,” said Lunger with a smile. “He’s the only one in the whole of Langvik who still thinks a well of his own is best.”

“Okay,” said Julia.

“Are you staying with us?” asked Ljunger.

“No, but I used to come here to the dances when I was young…

I’m staying over in Stenvik. My name is Julia Davidsson.”

“Related to old Gerlof?”

“I’m his daughter.”

“Really?” said Ljunger. “Give him my best, then. He’s made

several ships in bottles for us, for the restaurant. We’d really like some more.”

“I’ll tell him that.”

“It’s lovely over there in Stenvik, isn’t it?” mused Ljunger.

“Nice and peaceful, with the quarry closed and all those empty cottages.” He smiled. “Of course, we’ve taken a different approach up here … expanding, going for tourism and golf and conferences.

We think it’s the only way to keep the coastal villages in

northern Oland alive.”

Julia nodded, with some hesitation. “It does seem to be working,”

she said.

Should Stenvik have invested in tourism as well? Julia wondered about that as she left the hotel office and walked across the windy parking lot. There was no answer, because by now Langvik was so far ahead they’d never catch up. It would be impossible to build a beach hotel or pizzeria in Stenvik. The village would remain more or less deserted for most of the year, livening up for just a couple of months in the summer when the visitors came, and there was nothing that could be done about it.

She walked past a gas station by the harbor and continued

along the wide village street past the pizzeria.

The street curved inland and up a hill, and now she had the

wind at her back. At the top was a grove of trees and behind it a wall surrounding a yard containing a small whitewashed house and a stone henhouse with its own enclosure.

There was no sign of any hens, but a wooden sign by the gate proclaimed eggs for sale.

Julia opened the gate and walked along a path made of rough

limestone slabs. She passed a water pump painted green, and remembered what Gunnar Ljunger at the beach hotel had said about the city water supply.

The door of the house was closed, but there was a bell. When Julia had pressed it there was silence for a few moments, then a thudding noise. The door opened. An elderly man looked out, thin and wrinkled, with fine, silvery hair combed over his bald pate.

“Afternoon,” he said.

“Afternoon,” said Julia.

“Did you want some eggs?”

The old man appeared to be in the middle of his lunch, because he was still chewing.

Julia nodded. No problem, she could buy some eggs.

“Is your name SvenOlof?” she asked, without the usual unpleasant feeling of tension she got whenever she met someone new.

Perhaps she was beginning to get used to meeting strangers

here on Oland.

“It is indeed,” said the man, clambering into a pair of big black rubber boots standing just inside the door. “How many would you like?”

“Er … six should be fine.”

SvenOlof Nilsson walked out of his home, and just before

he closed the door a cat slunk silently out behind him like a coal black shadow. It didn’t even bother looking at Julia.

“I’ll go and fetch them,” SvenOlof told Julia.

“Fine,” she said, but as he set off toward the little henhouse, she followed him. When he opened the green door and stepped onto the earth floor she stayed on the other side of the threshold where there were no hens, just several trays of white eggs on a small table.

“I’ll just go and get some newlaid ones,” said SvenOlof,

opening a rickety unpainted door at the far end of the room and entering the coop.

The smell of the birds drifted toward Julia and she caught a glimpse of wooden shelves along the walls, but she couldn’t see much; the light in the room wasn’t switched on, and the room was almost pitch black.

“How many hens have you got?” she asked.

“Not so many these days,” said SvenOlof. “Fifty or so … we’ll see how long I can keep them.”

A tentative clucking could be heard from inside the coop.

“I heard Lambert had died,” she said.

“What… Lambert? Yes, he died in ‘87,” said SvenOlof in

the darkness.

She couldn’t understand why he didn’t put the light on, but

perhaps the bulb had died.

“I met Lambert once,” said Julia, “many years ago.”

“Oh yes?” said SvenOlof. “Well, well.”

He didn’t seem particularly interested in hearing a story about his late brother, but Julia had no choice but to continue: “It was over in Stenvik, where I live.”

“Oh yes,” said SvenOlof.

Julia took a step over the threshold toward him, into the darkness.

The air felt dusty and stale. She could hear the hens moving nervously along the walls, but couldn’t see if they were freerange or in cages.

“My mother Ella phoned Lambert,” she said, “because we

needed… we needed help looking for someone who had disappeared.

He’d been gone for three days, there was no trace

of him anywhere. That was when Ella started talking about

Lambert… She said Lambert could find things. He was well known for it, Ella said.”

“Ella Davidsson?” said SvenOlof.

“Yes. She phoned and Lambert came over from Langvik on

an old moped the very next day.”

“Yes, he liked to help out,” said SvenOlof, who by now was

just a shadow in the coop. His quiet voice could barely be heard over the muted clucking of the hens. “Lambert found things. He would dream about them, then he would find them. He found water for people too, with a divining rod made of hazel. They often appreciated it.”

Julia nodded. “He had his own pillow with him when he came

to us,” she said. “He wanted to sleep injens’s room, withjens’s things around him. And we let him.”

“Yes, that’s what he did,” said SvenOlof. “He saw things in

dreams. People who’d drowned and things that had disappeared.

And future events, things that were going to happen. Lambert dreamed about the day of his own death for several weeks. He said it would happen in bed in his own room, halfpast two in the morning, and that his heart would stop and the ambulance wouldn’t get there in time. And that’s exactly what happened, on the very day he’d said. And the ambulance didn’t make it in time.”

“But did it always work?” said Julia. “Was he always right?”

“Not always,” replied SvenOlof. “Sometimes he didn’t dream

about anything. Or he didn’t remember his dream … That’s the way it is sometimes, I suppose. And he never got any names, everybody in his dreams was nameless.”

“But when he saw something?” said Julia. “Was he always

right then?”

“Almost always. People trusted him.”

Julia took a couple of steps forward. She had to tell him.

“I hadn’t slept for three days by that night when your brother turned up on his moped,” she said quietly. “But I couldn’t sleep that night either. I lay awake listening to him getting into the little bed injens’s room. I could hear the springs squeaking when he moved. Then it went quiet, but I still couldn’t get to sleep … When he got up at seven the next morning, I was sitting in the kitchen waiting for him.”

The hens clucked uneasily around her, but there was no comment from SvenOlof.

“Lambert had dreamed about my son,” she went on. “I could

see it in his face when he came into the kitchen with his pillow under his arm. He looked at me, and when I asked him he said it was true, he’d dreamed about Jens. He looked so sad … I’m sure he was intending to tell me more, but I just couldn’t cope with hearing it. I struck him and screamed at him to get out. My father Gerlof went out with him to the gate where his moped was, and I stood there in the kitchen sobbing and listening to him drive away.” She paused and sighed. “That was the only time I met Lambert. Unfortunately.”

The henhouse fell silent. Even the hens had settled down.

“That boy …” said SvenOlof in the darkness. “Was it that terrible tragedy… ? The little boy who disappeared in Stenvik?”

“That was my son Jens,” said Julia, longing desperately for a glass of wine. “He’s still missing.”

SvenOlof didn’t answer.

“I’d really like to know … Did Lambert ever talk about what he dreamed that night?”

“There’s five eggs here,” said a voice from the darkness. “I can’t find any more.”

Julia realized SvenOlof had no intention of answering any

questions.

She breathed out, a deep, heavy sigh.

“I have nothing,” she said to herself. “I have nothing.”

Her eyes had gradually begun to grow accustomed to the

darkness, and she could see SvenOlof standing motionless in the middle of the coop looking at her, clutching five eggs to his chest.

“Your brother must have said something, SvenOlof,” she

said. “At some point he must have said something to you about what he dreamed that night. Did he?”

SvenOlof coughed. “He only spoke about the boy once.”

It was Julia’s turn to be silent now. She was holding her

breath.

“He’d read an article in OlandsPosten,’” said SvenOlof. “It

must have been five years after it happened. We were reading it at breakfast. But there was nothing new in the paper.”