Free Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin

the old days.”
    “You mean … several people?” said Julia. “Did several people do it, then?”
    Gerlof looked at the sandal.
    “There are certain people here on Oland I want to talk to,” he told her. “I believe they know things.”
    Once again he hadn’t given Julia a straight answer. She was beginning to grow tired of it, and really just wanted to leave, but she was here nowand she’d brought cakes.
    I’ll stay, Jens, she thought. For a few days. For your sake.
    “Is it possible to get some coffee around here?” she asked.
    “It usually is,” said Gerlof.
    “Then we can have coffee and cakes,” said Julia, and despite the fact that she thought she sounded unpleasantly like her older sister, always planning ahead, she asked, “Where am I going to stay tonight? Any suggestions?”
    Gerlof reached slowly toward the desk. He pulled out a little drawer and felt around inside. There was a rattling sound, and he took out a bunch of keys.
    “Here,” he said, handing them to her. “Sleep in the boathouse tonight… There’s electricity in there now.”
    “But I can’t…”
    Julia stood by the bed looking at Gerlof. He seemed to have planned everything that was happening.
    “Isn’t it full of fishing nets and that sort of thing?” she asked.
    “Floats and stones and tins of tar?”
    “All gone, I don’t fish anymore,” answered Gerlof. “Nobody fishes in Stenvik.”
    Julia took the keys. “You could hardly get in there before, there was so much stuff,” she said. “I remember …”
    “It’s all been cleaned up,” said Gerlof. “Your sister’s made it really nice in there.”
    “Am I supposed to sleep in Stenvik?” she said. “All on my own?”
    “The village isn’t empty. It just seems that way.”
     
    Half an hour after taking her leave of Gerlof, Julia was back in Stenvik, standing down by the dark water. The sky was just as cloudy as it had been in the morning, and full of shadows. It was almost twilight, and Julia longed for a glass of red wineand another one to follow it. Wine, or a pill.
    It was the waves’ fault. The waves were washing peacefully over the pebbles along the shoreline this evening, but when there was a storm they could be six feet high, hurtling in toward the shore with a long drawnout thunderous roar. They could carry anything with them from the bottom of the soundwreckage, dead fish, or fragments of bone.
    Julia didn’t want to look too closely at what might be lying there among the pebbles on the shore. She had never gone swimming in Stenvik again after that day.
    She turned around and looked at the little boathouse. It looked small and lonely, up above the shore.
    So close to you, Jens.
    Julia didn’t know why she’d accepted the keys from her father and gone along with the idea of sleeping there, but it would probably be all right for one night. She’d never been particularly afraid of the dark, and she was used to being alone. One or maybe two days, that would be okay. Then she’d go back home.
    A final blast of cold air swept in from the sound and pushed her into the darkness as she undid the padlock on the white door of the boathouse.
    When the door closed behind her, the howling of the autumn wind was abruptly cut off. Everything was silent within the boathouse.
     
    She put on the main overhead light and stood there just inside the door.
    Gerlof had been right. The boathouse wasn’t the way she remembered it at all.
    This was no longer a fisherman’s working environment, full of stinking nets and broken floats and yellowing copies of OlandsPosten piled up on the floor. Since Julia had last seen it, her sister had completely renovated the boathouse and decorated it as a little holiday cottage, with polished wooden panels on the walls and a varnished pine floor. There was a small refrigerator, an electric heater, and a hotplate by the window facing the shore. On a table beneath the window facing inland stood a big ship’s compass made of bronze