Free The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin Page A

in yellow. When the magazine
Beautiful Homes had
done a feature about it the previous year, it had been white.
    Joakim turned to look over at the wooden gate and the gravel path leading to the Apple House.
    His thoughts turned involuntarily to Ethel. Almost a year had passed, but he could still remember her calling out.
    Beside the fence a narrow track led through a grove of trees. No one had seen Ethel walking down the track that evening, but it was the shortest route down to the water.
    He started to walk up to the house, and looked up at the white façade. The luster was still there, and he remembered all those long brushstrokes when he had gone over it with linseed oil two summers ago.
    He unlocked the door, opened it up, and walked in. When he had closed the door behind him, he stopped again.
    He had cleaned up over the last few weeks in preparation for the move, and the floors still looked free of dust. All the furniture, rugs, and pictures from the hallway and the rooms were gone—but the memories remained. There were so many of them. For more than three years he and Katrine had put their souls into this house.
    You could have heard a pin drop in the rooms around Joakim, but inside his head he could hear all the hammering and sawing. He took off his shoes and moved into the hallway, where a faint smell of cleaning fluid still hung in the air.
    He wandered through the rooms, perhaps for the very last time. Upstairs he stopped in the doorway of one of the two guest bedrooms for a few seconds. A small room, with just one window. Plain white wallpaper and an empty floor. Ethel had slept here when she was living with them.
    Some of their things were still down in the cellar, those there hadn’t been room for on the moving van. Joakim went down the narrow, steep staircase and started gathering them together: an armchair, a few chairs, a couple of mattresses, a small ladder, and a dusty birdcage—a souvenir of William the budgerigar, who had died several years ago. They hadn’t managed to finish cleaning properly down here, but one of their vacuum cleaners was still there. He plugged it in and quickly vacuumed the painted cement floor, then wiped down the cupboards and ledges.
    The house was empty and clean.
    Then he collected up the cleaning equipment—the vacuumcleaner, buckets, cleaning fluid and cloths—and placed them at the foot of the cellar stairs.
    In the carpentry workshop on the left, many of his spare tools were still hanging. Joakim started packing them into a cardboard box. Hammers, files, pliers, drills, squares, screwdrivers. Modern screwdrivers might be better, but they weren’t as solid as the old-fashioned ones.
    Brushes, handsaws, spirit level, folding rule …
    Joakim was holding a plane in his hand when he suddenly heard the front door opening on the floor above. He straightened up and listened.
    “Hello?” came a woman’s voice. “Kim?”
    It was Katrine, and she sounded anxious. He heard her close the front door behind her and walk into the hallway.
    “Down here!” he shouted. “In the cellar!”
    He listened, but there was no reply.
    He took a step toward the cellar stairs, still listening. When everything remained deathly silent up above, he quickly went upstairs, realizing at the same time how improbable it was that he would see Katrine standing there in the hallway.
    And of course she wasn’t there. The hallway was just as empty as when he had come into the house half an hour before. And the front door was closed.
    He went over and tried the handle. It was unlocked.
    “Hello?” he shouted into the house.
    No reply.
    Joakim spent the next ten minutes going through the entire house, room by room—despite the fact that he knew he wasn’t going to find Katrine anywhere. It was impossible, she was still on Öland.
    Why would she have taken her car and driven after him all the way to Stockholm, without even calling him first?
    He’d misheard. He must have misheard.
    Joakim looked at