The Lost Village by Camilla Sten (best fiction novels TXT) 📗

me claustrophobic. Even if we fixed the equipment securely in place, I wouldn’t be able to shake the feeling that it was all going to collapse on us as we slept.

The sleeping bags we have are good, at least, so well insulated that the cold air actually feels nice against my cheeks. I normally like to sleep in a cold room under a thick duvet—even in winter I leave the windows open for a breeze—but right now I can’t catch a wink, despite my exhaustion. My excitement sits like a vibration under my skin, keeping me awake.

“Can’t sleep?” asks Tone, her voice cutting through the darkness.

I roll back onto my other side to face her, even though I’d need the night vision of a cat to make out anything but shadow.

“Did I wake you up?” I ask.

“No,” comes her muted reply. “You know me.”

Tone has sleep problems. It was one of the first things I ever learned about her, that first time we met, in an anonymous coffee chain by Odenplan just over two years ago. I’d stood waiting outside, unsure if she would show up and not even clear about what to look out for—her Facebook profile picture was four years old at the time and blurry, too (as far as I know, it still hasn’t changed).

“It’s like I can’t wind down,” I say. “My brain won’t switch off.”

“Maybe you should ask Emmy for some of her whisky,” she says dryly. “That might help.”

I roll my eyes, though I know she can’t see me. “Who hits the bottle as soon as they arrive on a job?”

“From what you’ve told me about her, it doesn’t sound like that should come as a surprise.”

I hear a rustle as she changes position.

“No, I guess not.”

I think for a moment.

“You don’t have anything, do you?” I ask. “No sleeping pills or anything?”

“No,” Tone replies, “I can’t take them. Given … well, you know.”

“Oh,” I say. “No, of course. I’m an idiot. Sorry.”

“It’s OK,” she says, sounding mildly amused. Her words seem to swell in the small space, though they’re hardly more than a whisper. “I don’t expect you to keep track of which pills I can and can’t take.”

“No, but still. I should know.”

We go quiet. I prop myself up to rearrange the thick, folded-up sweater I’m using as a pillow, then lie back down to no noticeable difference.

“Does she know?” Tone asks out of the blue, all trace of laughter gone from her voice.

“Who? Emmy?” I ask.

She doesn’t reply.

“I haven’t told her anything,” I say, as the silence starts to expand. “About anything. All she knows is what’s in the information pack.”

“Didn’t sound like it,” says Tone. “When she was talking about DNA-testing the baby, trying to find her…” She trails off, her voice taut as a violin string.

“I haven’t told her anything,” I repeat. “You asked me not to say anything, so I haven’t.” When she doesn’t reply, I go on:

“Max knows, but he did from the start. And he’s promised not to say anything.”

“How much?” Tone asks, an unexpected edge to her voice.

“What do you mean? He knows your mom’s the Silvertjärn baby—I told him I’d found you before we even met. He asked if you or your mom would like to be involved, and I said I didn’t know but that I didn’t think so.”

“Mom would never do it,” says Tone, as she has done so many times.

“I know,” I say. “I never asked.”

I’ve thought about it, of course. Wanted to. But I never have asked. Tone’s made it clear that her mom has no interest in raking up that part of her past. She doesn’t want to be the Silvertjärn baby, the mystery’s sole survivor, the newborn found crying in the abandoned schoolhouse less than thirty yards from where we’re lying right now.

It was Tone’s mother I found first. What I told the others wasn’t technically a lie: all the information on what happened to the Silvertjärn baby really is classified, impossible to access. I’m not even sure if the documents still exist, and if they do, they’re probably buried deep in some archive.

But Grandma’s letters aren’t.

I didn’t put all of Grandma’s letters in the packs I gave to the others. I’ve kept a few to myself. Among them her correspondence with Albin Jansson.

Jansson was one of the policemen investigating Birgitta Lidman’s murder—and, by extension, the Silvertjärn case. He and Grandma must have met at some point during the investigation, and for a while I wondered if there might have been something more between them—a secret affair, perhaps—but that’s probably wishful thinking on my part. I found six of his letters among her old papers, all of which are professional and to the point. It seems as though Jansson mostly just felt sorry for Grandma and wanted to keep her informed of their progress on the investigation.

And that happened to include the baby.

Grandma must have asked after her, or else Jansson just assumed she would want to know what happened to her, because he mentions her a lot in his letters: that she seemed hale and hearty, and that several hundred families across the country had offered to take her in, even if his personal opinion was that most of them were out after fame. In his fifth letter, he writes that they had found a family who had agreed to keep her identity a secret and “… raise her as one of their own.”

He goes on to give the family’s name: “… a family by the name of Grimelund…”

And the name they had given the child:

“You will be pleased to learn that they have named the girl Hélène.”

Had their surname been Andersson I might never have found Tone. But Hélène Grimelund was unusual enough for me to track down.

It took me sending an unseemly number of emails to Hélène to realize that she was never going to reply. By that point I was close to giving up. My grief over Grandma had started to catch up with me,