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

“Frans’s people will check for known associates, specifically females,” Junior said.

“You know, let me make a call on that,” Karl said, getting up and leaving the room, phone in hand. As he went out, an attendant brought a man in a wheelchair into the room.

“Look who’s here,” Lovisa Voss said, rising to her feet.

In the chair sat an elderly individual, a slack-jawed and fumbling figure whose body had totally broken down with age. Only the eyes of the senior Loke Voss, sharp and burning, showed the man he had been in youth.

“Hello, pappa,” Junior called out.

The rest of the clan rose to their feet along with Junior, welcoming the old man to the gathering.

“We were just settling some business,” Junior said. “But we’re finished now. Would you like to join us here by the fire?”

His children and grandchildren gathered in a line, dutifully shaking the hand the Voss clan patriarch kept extended. Junior ordered up a cup of hot water brought to his father, then fussed with his blankets. Someone moved him closer to the warmth of the fire.

“Business,” the elder Loke mumbled, his voice reduced to a hoarse whisper. “What business?”

Karl came back into the room and topped the old man’s bony head with a kiss. Then he turned to the others.

“I have some bad news,” he said. “Krister Hammar has lately been seen in the company of a woman named Veronika Brand, in the country from America, from New York City. They were both on the scene at the Ljusdal manor house. I’m afraid she’s a detective in the NYPD.”

“So?” Vilgot commented. “Could mean nothing. I doubt if she’s here in an official capacity, or we would have heard something.”

“Well, now we have heard something,” Junior said. “I’d say their presence here in Västvall was a message.”

“Whatever could the woman want?” Lovisa asked.

The old man in the wheelchair struggled to rise. He shrugged off his attendant and ignored Karl’s efforts to stop him. There was a fire in his pale eyes that impressed everyone in the room.

“They come to our village?” Loke Voss exclaimed. “Here? To our home?”

“Settle down, settle down,” Karl said.

“I won’t settle down! You allow them to trespass on our turf?”

“Pappa…” Junior said, trying to soothe him.

“Don’t ‘pappa’ me!” The old man’s spittle flew. “I want them stopped! Stopped! Stopped dead if you have to!”

“Please, pappa,” Junior said. “This woman may be a policewoman from America, a detective.”

Loke swept his arm wide as if clearing away all arguments. “I don’t care! Did I raise you for nothing? Are you a Voss? Are you a man?”

As if his own words had choked him, he stopped, haggard and breathing hard.

“Here’s the real kicker, and pappa, you’ll want to hear this,” Karl said, laying his hand on the elder Loke Voss’s shoulder. “I’m not certain, but I believe that Veronika Brand is the granddaughter of your old Nordic Light nemesis, Gustav Dalgren.”

“What? What?” Karl’s words immediately deflated the old man’s anger. He appeared confused and elderly again.

As suddenly as he had risen out of it, Loke slumped back into his wheelchair, drained and helpless. It was one of the younger generation who spoke up, and a female one at that, the fierce grandchild whose name meant “wolf.”

“We’ll take care of her, farfar,” Ylva assured her grandfather. “Please don’t trouble yourself any further.”

26.

“So here’s what I imagine police detective work is like,” began a woman named Rakel, one of a dozen people gathered at Aino Lehtonen’s home in Stockholm. The dinner party supposedly honored the presence of Veronika Brand in Sweden.

“The detective resembles a person in a room with one of the most complicated Ikea projects ever…” Rakel continued.

“The Hemnes day bed!” called out her companion, Arvid. “Our man put one of those together, and it took him three days.”

“No, the Besta!” someone else put in. “That’s wall mounted storage, famously fiendish.”

After escaping the harrowing events in the blizzard at Västvall, Brand and Hammar still felt shell-shocked. It was as if they had been abruptly transported light years away from the urskog and its terrors. The table of polished birch at which they sat was almost as long as a bowling alley. The guests were gregarious and well-spoken. Lehtonen and her wife Ebba hosted the evening. The young photographer’s spouse appeared a little older and even more chillingly fashionable than Lehtonen was.

There was general chatter. The guests spoke over each other, laughing and slapping the table in enthusiasm. Their Swedish mixed easily with English, which was impeccable. The wine had been flowing generously all evening, mostly red, which turned everyone’s teeth purple.

Brand’s post-traumatic stress, a hangover from the visit to Västvall, rendered the elegant evening more than a little unreal. It was hard for her to read the tone of people’s talk. Were those present serious or poking fun at themselves?

Rakel spoke again. She was a formidable woman who wore over-large eyeglass frames, orange to match the color of her lipstick. “Detective work must be like assembling an Ikea project, but the parts are all mixed up together. There’s no instruction sheet and no tools provided.”

“And the room is totally dark,” someone else at the table put in.

“Then, when you are finished,” Rakel said, “you must present your work to be judged by a jury, with a defense lawyer standing by all the while trying to kick apart your pieces.”

Some laughter from the assembled guests, and a smattering of half-hearted applause.

“Perhaps Detective Brand sees her job as not quite so frivolous as furniture assembly,” Hammar suggested gently.

“No, no,” Brand said. “The comparison is very clever.”

Arvid produced yet another bottle of French Bordeaux. “I’ve heard it said that the prevalence of Ikea products has increased the worldwide average IQ by a few fractional percentage points, as when the Rubik’s Cube came out.”

“Chimpanzees in captivity must be given puzzles to solve in order to stay mentally healthy,” Rakel said.

The conversation became languid and less focused. After the dinner of magnificent wild salmon poached in Riesling wine, fresh