Read Online Open Grave: A Mystery by Kjell Eriksson - Free Book Online Page A

set out a few traps every fall.”
    Birgitta observed her wide-eyed.
    “I’ve been doing that all these years,” Agnes added.
    “Have you talked with Daddy?”
    “About what?”
    “The mice.”
    “I didn’t know you were so afraid of—”
    “I’m not afraid! Don’t you understand? People are coming here now, journalists and others, from all over the world, and you’re walking around with a rat trap. And tonight Daddy’s colleagues are coming here. I’m sure they’ll be sitting in here after dinner.”
    Agnes looked at Birgitta with an expression that did not express any of what she felt inside, but possibly Birgitta sensed Agnes’s fatigue, a fatigue that perhaps unconsciously let the contempt be glimpsed from behind the mask she had polished for half a century.
    “I know what you’re thinking!”
    Agnes turned away.
    “You think I’m stuck-up and impertinent.”
    “Not at all,” said Agnes with her back toward Birgitta.
    “Look at me!”
    “I have a few things to do,” said Agnes, but then turned around slowly, as if the movement were associated with an awful pain.
    “You believe—”
    “Believing you can do in church,” said Agnes, but fell silent out of pure astonishment at her own reply.
    Birgitta was staring at her.
    “I must say”—this was one of Bertram’s stock phrases that his daughter had inherited—“this prize has certainly stirred things up properly.”
    “It’s been stirred up a long time,” Agnes mumbled.
    “What do you mean?”
    Agnes walked over to one of the windows that looked out from the back of the house.
    “Palm é r planted the apple tree outside here the same week I came to the house. It was a cold October, I remember the steam from his mouth.”
    Agnes’s voice was raspy, as if it hadn’t been used in a long time, and she cleared her throat before she continued.
    “I was standing right here, it’s like it was yesterday. He was out there and I was inside here where it was warm. I remember that I wanted to call him into the kitchen for coffee, but that sort of thing was not done. I didn’t know my place and the cook was not gracious either. Your grandfather and grandmother were still alive then, your father had a position at Academic Hospital and I … I didn’t know…”
    “What didn’t you know?”
    Birgitta had joined her at the window and also observed the tree, heavy with fruit. All that was heard was the sound of the rain striking against the window.
    “How life would turn out.”
    “Who knows that when you’re young?”
    Agnes did not reply. Her eyes rested intently on the shiny fruit that rocked in the wind and was rinsed by the rain.
    “I think I’ll make an apple cake,” she said at last.
    “Do you regret taking a position here?”
    Agnes cast a quick glance at Birgitta.
    “Regret or not, I was sent here as a replacement for my sister.”
    Agnes made an almost imperceptible movement with her head and left the window, taking quick steps toward the door. With her hand on the doorknob she turned around to say something, but remained standing without a word.
    “Are you not feeling well?”
    “I should see about the food for dinner,” Agnes replied, leaving the room and carefully closing the door behind her.
    *   *   *
    Perhaps it was the rain that made Birgitta von Ohler linger a long while by the window, the way you stay standing by a fire or in front of a fireplace, staring into the flames. Now it was the steady lashing against the windowpane and the stubborn, almost aggressive sound of the drops against the windowsill that captivated her.
    She had come to the house to help Agnes with the preparations for dinner. It was obviously at Bertram’s initiative, because when she showed up Agnes acted completely uncomprehending and unusually brusque, refusing all assistance in the kitchen.
    Agnes’s reaction was perhaps understandable but nonetheless Birgitta became lost in a gloomy state that corresponded well with the weather. The