Free Open Grave: A Mystery by Kjell Eriksson Page A

stared at the older woman, tried to see something conciliatory in her facial features, some opening to a different conclusion, a different story. But in the housekeeper’s face there was only the determined look that Birgitta recognized so well. No compromise was possible. It was a stern implacability that Birgitta guessed had been impressed on Agnes during prayer and self-denial since she was a child.
    She held an apple up to her nose to drive away the smell of onion.
    “But there’s nothing to talk about now,” Agnes decided, and resumed her work.
    Birgitta took a bite of the apple.
    “I’m going to make two apple cakes,” Agnes stated with her back turned toward her. “If you want to eat the apples you can go out and pick for yourself.”
    She went over to the refrigerator, took out a package of bones with some meat on them, perhaps pieces of oxtail, and Birgitta understood that Agnes was preparing a stock and that most likely there would be roast fillet with mushroom gravy and fried potatoes with herbs for dinner, a classic in the house.
    Birgitta got up and pulled on the old, cutoff boots that Agnes always had standing by the door and went out. She realized that Agnes was watching her and when she turned her face toward the sky there was a fine drizzle that settled on her face like a cool, refreshing film. She knew that it would irritate Agnes.
    “You’ll catch cold,” was also her immediate comment when Birgitta returned to the kitchen.
    “I wish I could be at the dinner,” she said.
    “I doubt if it will be much fun,” said Agnes.
    “I was mostly thinking about the food.”
    Agnes’s neck twitched.
    “Can’t we eat in the kitchen, the two of us? Like before, when—”
    “I’ll be serving,” said Agnes.
    “You’ll have time for that too.”
    Agnes did not answer but shook her head.
    “I can help you,” said Birgitta, but realized at once that it was the wrong thing to say.
    “Think how that would look.”
    A sudden fury came over her and she caught herself cursing Agnes’s lack of imagination. “Think how that would look,” she silently imitated the ill-tempered comment, but the fury changed just as quickly into a kind of melancholy that affected her more and more often when she visited the house. It seemed as if the uncertainty of her childhood returned even stronger with increasing age, as if the smells in the house, the sight of the heavy furniture and the threadbare carpets brought her back to the unpredictable aspects of her early years, the feeling of constantly moving in a minefield, where a quarrel could detonate at any moment. Freedom had always been outside the house, in the garden or in the old playhouse that some distant relative had cobbled together in the early 1960s, places that neither Bertram nor Dagmar visited.
    Liisa always joked with her, called the Ohler family “the headshrinkers” without ever explaining what she meant, but Birgitta herself had started to think of the family as a clan that wandered around with shrunken skulls, a ridiculous but also anxious image that sometimes came to her.
    “Why did you think I would disappear every time I left the house?”
    “What?”
    The breadth of Agnes’s question, and perhaps the fact that she asked it at all, produced a landslide of emotions inside Birgitta.
    “I guess I was afraid of being alone,” she answered with her eyes directed out the window. Between the branches of the trees and the black-soiled leaves some patches of blue sky were visible.
    “No risk,” said Agnes. “I stayed here. Always.”
    “Do you regret it?”
    “Maybe I was scared too,” said Agnes at last.
    She fetched a pan—it was her firm conviction that stock should always be cooked in an iron pan—dumped in the bones, the oxtail meat and vegetables, salt, whole pepper, bay leaves, poured in a little water and half a bottle of red wine, Portuguese Birgitta noticed, set the pan on the stove, and turned on the heat.
    “There now,” she