The Cruel Stars of the Night
grandmother had died a few years before Laura was born. Her grandfather, who shortly thereafter moved to Tierp, she rarely saw. Perhaps sometimes in conjunction with a birthday. He did not come when she graduated from grammar school and did not even send a greeting when she graduated from the university. Then he died as abruptly as her grandmother. Laura attended his funeral alone. Her father did not have the time, he said, but Laura knew he had never liked his reserved father-in-law. There had been many people in Örbyhus Church. She recognized a few faces. She spoke to Mårten Jonsson, who had been married to Alice’s sister Agnes, and his three sons. It looked as if Lars-Erik, one of the cousins, wanted to say something to her but the others’ disapproving attitude held him back.
    After Agnes had died, only thirty-one years old, contact between the Hindersten and Jonsson families had become much less frequent.
    Laura knew who a couple of the other funeral guests were, but most of them were unknown, men as taciturn as her grandfather, buttoned into suits that were too tight, women who spoke quietly but without ceasing in her mother’s dialect, with turns of phrase that Laura had not heard in years.
    She cried at his graveside. The people from Örbyhus, from Skyttorp and Tierp, shot glances at her but did not say a kind or comforting word. Many speeches were given in her grandfather’s honor but they did not say anything to the woman from the city, the grandchild who only turned up to the funeral.
    Laura was ashamed of her tears. She wanted to scream out over the churchyard that, in fact, she had liked her grandfather and she grieved for him, but she knew they wouldn’t believe her. Her words were meaningless in Örbyhus.
    She was starting to get cold but could not make herself go on. The unwelcoming and damp garden, that at this time of the year only breathed death, was her church. She was struck by the thought that she wanted to be buried here. Without ceremony and speeches, simply lowered into the ground and shoveled over.
    Suddenly her thoughts turned to warmth, mild winds, and a life far from Uppsala. They sometimes turned up, these thoughts. She had never visited a country other than Italy and then always with her father but nonetheless she had a vision of a little hotel by the sea. A place where it was always warm, that had a sun-drenched harbor with a little restaurant that she was in the habit of patronizing, where she was known and welcome.
    She had once told Stig about her daydream. At first he laughed but then he became serious, looked at her, and said something about there being other lives. One only had to take the opportunity, and he said those possibilities were open to Laura, free as she was.
    Sometimes Stig figured in this daydream, in that idyllic hotel where it seemed so easy to live, but she never talked about it. She thought that if she told him about her fantasy she could get him to dream in similar ways.
    “I’m tired of hotels,” was all he said.
    As the director of marketing he traveled a great deal and complained loudly about the boredom when he was forced to travel to promote the company abroad.
    Laura was awakened from her thoughts by the women who had apparently finished smoking and were on their way back into the greenhouse again. She walked back and got into the chilled car. She could leave the country, drive out on the E-4 and go south. She was free, as Stig had pointed out, now more than ever before. Instead she took the Norby Road to the Castle, turned right toward the Academic Hospital, down the hill next to the hospital, and passed the swan pond. Since she had bought her car this was her new route to work. She looked at the clock on the wall of the toll house, as she had started doing. From here it was eight minutes to the office.

Seven
    She walked in the door with a smile, nodded to Ann-Charlotte, entered in the code, and took the elevator to her division. Barbro looked up from

Similar Books

Death at Dawn

Caro Peacock

Agent Angus

K. L. Denman

Winning Streak

Katie Kenyhercz

Liar's Key

Carla Neggers

Sottopassaggio

Nick Alexander

The President's Angel

Sophy Burnham