This Land is no Stranger Sarah Hollister (best biographies to read .txt) 📖

“From my experience as a cop, I’d say innocence is more a matter of luck rather than virtue.”

“Luck and a good lawyer,” Hammar agreed, laughing. He indicated the village below them. “Shall we go amongst them, Detective Brand?”

The faded, storm-filtered light on the mountainside turned to murk as they descended into the valley. Brand was distracted for a moment by the stark reality of the surroundings. She realized they were about to enter the home territory of people that had, directly or indirectly, figured into her family’s destiny in tragic ways.

Just as that thought occurred to her, the ancient woods closed in on both sides of the little two-lane road. They entered a tree-lined vault that felt almost subterranean. Huge pines soared upward to become an overhead tangle of interlocking branches. Downed tree trunks the size of tanker trucks studded the dense undergrowth.

The forest would have blocked all sunlight, had there been any left. The winter storm they had first noticed back in the churchyard had now moved in. A heavy sky lowered on this part of Sweden, stone-black and impenetrable. The looming clouds above mirrored the dark of the woods below.

Brand peered out the side window of the Saab. She had heard about such a landscape but had never really encountered it. Here was the great, deep, enduring Swedish forest, a sacred realm that supposedly lodged itself near to the heart of the national soul.

“The forest primeval,” she murmured.

“What was that?” Hammar asked.

“Nothing,” Brand said. “I was just noticing that this is all old-growth woodland around here.”

“Urskog,” Hammar said. “What you call virgin forest. Never logged.”

“Beautiful,” Brand said, but she didn’t mean it. What she meant instead was terrible, alien, suffocating.

Without thinking, Brand moved her foot off the Saab’s accelerator to ease on the brakes. Encountering the arboreal landscape slowed them as surely as if they had driven into a patch of mud. Even the air inside the car seemed to have gone dense.

Turning to examine the brushy understory on the passenger side, she noticed the snow was marked by what looked like human footprints. Either that, or clumps of snow falling from the immense trees had dotted the forest floor below.

Brand thought later that her brief turn of head made all the difference. Had she been looking forward, she probably would not have hit the young child.

21.

The boy sprang from the woods on the driver’s side of the Saab. He ran slantwise into the road. Brand glimpsed him out of the corner of her eye. She thought at first that it might be some woodland animal. She didn’t have time to react.

The hollow thud of the child’s body hitting the Saab’s front quarter-panel felt like a punch to Brand’s gut. He rolled onto the sloped hood and slammed against the windshield with a dull crack. Instinctively, Brand jammed on the brakes. Her body lurched forward and her chin grazed the steering wheel.

For an instant the boy’s face and Brand’s were inches from each other. He had entered into an odd crouch, like an Olympic gymnast, his arms out as if searching for balance. But the force of impact broke his precarious pose. The little body seemed to bounce upward into the sky and disappear.

The Saab’s brakes dragged to the left. Beneath its snow-glazed surface, the roadway was scattered with fine gravel. The car entered into a greasy five-meter skid. It wound up skewed toward the opposite, uphill shoulder of the road.

Hammar had also been thrust forward by the abrupt stop. His nose clipped the unpadded dashboard, not sharply, but hard enough. When he rocked backwards blood spurted from both nostrils.

Brand found herself caught in a tangled seat belt. She couldn’t get her breath. She wanted to cry out. She wanted to ask Hammar if he was all right, wanted to sit still for a moment and gather her wits. Her thoughts were overwhelmed by the unreality of what had just happened.

“Oh, fucking hell,” she said.

Having trouble operating the unfamiliar door handle of the Saab, finally freeing herself from the stubborn seat belt, Brand staggered out onto the snowy surface of the road. Hammar had already managed to emerge from the car.

“What was that?” Brand said. Hammar exclaimed, “Var är han?” at the same time.

The broken boy had vanished. He was a phantasm. A vague imprint of his head left behind a spider-web crack in the ancient Saab’s windshield. That seemed to be the only sign he really existed. Then Brand saw a single cheap plastic boot lying in front of the car.

“Vilket jävla sätt,” Hammar hissed. In the crisis he had unconsciously switched over to Swedish. He had said either “where is it?” or “what happened?” Brand didn’t know which.

She and Hammar had both left their car doors completely open. The modern, retrofitted key alarm Hammar had installed in the Saab dinged solemnly. Other than that, all was silent.

To the left, the road sloped away into a shallow, snow-filled gully. Brand first saw a thin brown arm. She had a terrible thought that the boy’s body had somehow come apart. The arm lay twenty feet away. Could he really have been thrown that far?

“He’s here,” Brand said. To her ears, her own voice sounded cold, emotionless.

Hammar and Brand moved across the road to the ditch. Beneath the Saab’s annoying robotic ding-ding-ding something else sounded, the voice of a bird, a small animal.

“Oh, oh, oh,” it said.

In the knee-deep snow by the roadside sprawled a young boy. He wore not enough clothes for the weather, a pair of flimsy pants and a hoodie. He looked twelve years old. The body landed in a crumpled, abnormal posture, a single thin arm extended backward. The match to the boot on the road hung off the boy’s right foot.

“Följ med!” Hammar spoke with panicked urgency. Come along!

They both stepped off the road to reach the child. He’s not dead, Brand thought. If he’s moaning that means he’s alive.

“Oh, oh, oh.”

Brand’s