Free Echoes From the Dead by Johan Theorin Page A

and polished brass; another of Gerlof’s mementos of his years at sea.
    The air inside the boathouse was dry. There was only a faint scent of tar, and it would smell even fresher once Julia had pulled up the blinds and opened the small windows. She would be able to live down here without any problems, except for the total isolation.

Presumably
    Ernst Adolfsson over by the quarry was her nearest
    neighbor. Ernst had been driving an old Volvo PV and she
    would have been happy to see it coming along the village road right now, but when she peered out through the window above the compass, nothing was moving out there, only the sparse grass on the ridge in the wind. Even the gulls had disappeared.
    There were two narrow beds in the boathouse. She unpacked
    her bags on one of them: clothes, her toiletry bag, spare shoes, and the bundle of romantic paperback novels she had pushed into the bottom of her bag; she read them in secret. She placed the books on the bedside table.
    On the wall by the door hung a little mirror with a varnished wooden frame, and Julia studied her face in it. She looked wrinkled and tired, but her skin wasn’t quite as gray as it seemed in Gothenburg. The stiff breeze on the island had actually put a little color in her cheeks.
    What should she do now? She’d bought a hot dog that tasted
    of nothing from a little kiosk next to the old people’s home after visiting Gerlof, so she wasn’t hungry.
    Read? No.
    Drink the wine she’d brought with her? No, not yet.
    She decided to do some exploring.
     
    Julia left the boathouse and walked slowly back down to the shore and then southward along by the water. It became easier and easier to walk across the pebbles as she began to regain some of the innate sense of balance she’d had as a little schoolgirl in Stenvik, when she’d spent entire days jumping about down by the sea without even stumbling.
    Diagonally below the boathouse, Grayeye was still there, but it had slowly been drawn closer to the sea by the waves and the winter ice. Grayeye was a narrow, yardlong boulder that resembled a horse’s back. Julia had made it her very own stone once upon a time, and now she patted it briefly as she walked past. It seemed to have sunk down into the ground over the years.
    The mill also seemed smaller. It was the tallest building in Stenvik, the old windmill standing on the edge of the ridge a couple of hundred yards south of the boathouse. But when Julia got there, the rocks were too steep for her to be able to clamber up to it.
    South of the windmill there were several more boathouses, in the inner part of the inlet where Stenvik’s long swimming jetty was placed during the summer. There wasn’t a living soul in sight.
    Julia went up onto the road, northward, past Gerlof’s boathouse.
    She stopped and gazed out over the water, toward the
    mainland. Smaland was just a narrow gray stripe along the horizon.
    There were no ships to be seen.
    She turned so that she could take in the whole of the surrounding area, as if the coastal landscape were a riddle she could solve if she could just find the right clues.
    If what everyone feared had actually happened, if Jens had
    managed to make his way down to the water that day, then he
    would have walked along here in the fog that evening. She could search for traces of him now, but of course that had already been done. She’d searched, the police had searched, everyone in Stenvik had searched.
    She started walking again, and after a few hundred yards she reached the quarry.
    It was closed, of course. Nobody quarried limestone any longer.
    The letters sten ik stone ltd could just be made out on a
    wooden sign by the coast road, its paint flaking and peeling off.
    There was a side track leading toward the alvar, but both the track and the yellowbrown landscape ended abruptly, disappearing into a broad pit in the ground. Julia stepped closer to the edge of the cliff, which plunged straight down to the bottom at a ninety