For Graham.

  —Alex

  For Enio Faini, my beloved uncle.

  —Andrea

  PROLOGUE

  CHARLOTTE JESSEN stood at the kitchen window and watched the sun rise for the last time.

  When the coffee pot finished percolating, she poured two cups and set one on the counter for Tor, when he came in from the fields. If he came in from the fields. Lately he had been spending all his time out there, tending the crop of winter wheat.

  Charlotte spooned sugar into his cup. As she put the canister back in the cupboard, she brushed her fingertips over the new box of rat poison, next to the sugar and the flour in their matching canisters. It would be easy to add a little to his coffee. Not only easy—it would be the right thing to do.

  Just to slow him down a bit; just to give herself an edge.

  But Charlotte couldn’t bring herself to do it. She closed the cupboard and sat down at the kitchen table across from Tor’s cooling cup.

  She sipped her coffee and savored the moment, watching shadows move across the floor as the sun rose higher in the sky. Light slanted through the window and the yellow curtains she had sewn in their first year of marriage. After Tor hung them up, he’d put his arm around her and said, “When the sun comes through them, they’ll match the color of your hair.”

  That had been forty-two years ago. She noticed how dingy and dated those curtains looked now and wondered why she had never thought to replace them.

  Too busy, she thought. There’s never enough time.

  She finished her coffee and was rising from the table to pour a second cup when the door swung open. Tor stood on the stone threshold and stared in at her. He looked confused and maybe angry; it was hard for Charlotte to read his expressions anymore. He had stopped wearing clothes the previous Sunday and had rebelled when Charlotte tried to dress him in his dark suit for church. She had hung the suit in his closet and had known then that their time together was growing short.

  He took a step into the kitchen. His feet and ankles were caked with mud, his shins spattered with a dark substance that Charlotte guessed was blood. Something rippled and bulged under his skin, and she backed away from him, shamed by her fear but unable to help herself.

  “Tor?”

  He looked at her, and she was heartbroken to see that there was no recognition in his eyes.

  She was a stranger to him now.

  “Sit,” she said. “I made coffee.”

  She glanced at the cupboard where the box of rat poison sat, unopened. It was too late for poison. She had waited too long. Tor made a deep, guttural noise and moved toward her. She braced herself against the counter.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said. “I hope you can understand. I wanted a little more time.”

  She felt the warm sun on the back of her neck and thought of her wedding day, and tried to smile at her husband as he threw the table against the wall. It dented the plaster and banged into the side of the refrigerator. Tor picked up one of the wooden chairs and broke it over his knee, slashing open his thigh. He did not bleed or even seem to notice. He tossed the pieces aside and rushed at Charlotte, his bare feet slapping on the clean kitchen floor, leaving a trail of dirt behind him.

  “Goodbye, my love,” Charlotte said. “Please forgive me.”

  • 1 •

  THE DRIVER didn’t get out to help. He popped the trunk and sat while Laura and Juniper Roux fetched their luggage. When they were done he gave them a limp wave through the side window, mumbled something in Danish, and drove away, leaving them alone at the gate of the little yellow farmhouse.

  Laura looked up at it, picking out the window of her childhood bedroom, the ivy-covered trellis her first boyfriend had tried to climb, the sloped copper roof she had sat on while watching bonfires spread along the horizon every autumn.

  It had been more than five years since she had last returned. More than five years since her father’s funeral. Two days since her mother’s.

  “Do you remember this place?” she said.

  “No,” Juniper said. “It looks fake.”

  Laura looked again, trying to see it through her daughter’s eyes. Compact and boxy, bright yellow with white trim. It did look plastic, modular—a child’s playhouse with a picket fence and a covered porch. A gravel driveway circled the house, separating it from fields of wheat on one side and the stubby remains of harvested corn on the other. She could see the curved tin roof of the new barn and the tops of evergreen trees at the edge of the woods that grew wild behind the house.

  She fished in the pocket of her jeans and found the key to the front door. It had been messengered to her in Blue Valley and had now made its way back with them to its origin point, a journey of more than four thousand miles to an island off the coast of Denmark. Laura grabbed the handle of her roller bag and opened the gate.

  “After you,” she said.

  Juniper sighed and led the way through, up the stone path to the porch.

  “How long do we have to stay here?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said. “They already had the funeral, but I imagine there’ll be some kind of memorial service. Who knows? Maybe we’ll want to stay. Maybe we’ll like it here.”

  Juniper rolled her eyes, and hoisted her luggage up the porch steps, waited while Laura fitted the key in the lock and opened the door. Laura had not told her daughter that they weren’t going back. She hadn’t found the words or the right time to say them. But their home in Blue Valley had been listed, and a realtor was handling the sale. Movers were already packing their things to ship to the farm. Laura had no plans to return.

  “It smells like old people in here,” Juniper said.

  Laura sniffed. It smelled like her mother: wood polish and Cristalle and stale coffee. But there was an underlying sourness in the air, something stuffy and sad. It smelled like loneliness, and Laura felt a pang of guilt for staying away so long.

  She remembered the house as being much larger, the front room big enough to hold a ball, the dark staircase winding endlessly up the north wall, the twin arches that led into the kitchen and her father’s old study like the entrances to massive caves. Looking around now, she realized a small dinner party would crowd the place.

  She went to a window and flung it open, inviting the October air inside. Behind her, Juniper bumped her suitcase up the stairs and Laura turned to watch as her daughter disappeared from sight, the wheels on her bag growling on the hardwood overhead.

  “I get the big room,” Juniper called down.

  Laura shook her head and went to the bottom of the staircase.

  “That’s your grandmother’s room,” she said.

  “So?” Juniper said, her voice faraway and muffled by thick walls and heavy air. “She’s not using it, is she?”

  Laura opened her mouth to reply, then thought better of it and crossed under the arch that led to the kitchen. Juniper had not been the same since the accident, and Laura wanted to spend some time alone with her daughter. She hoped time would make a difference.

  The kitchen was small and tidy, with a round table in the corner. Three people might fit around it if they kept their elbows in close. Yellow curtains hung over the window, and copper pots hung from hooks over the fat round stove. The glass-fronted cabinets held neat rows of cups and plates, and a sturdy knife block held an assortment of blades.

  Laura opened and closed drawers until she found her mother’s utensils neatly organized in a plastic tray. She gathered up the steak knives from a slot and laid them on a dish towel along with a pair of kitchen shears, then emptied the knife block and rolled the towel up.

  Laura threw the bolt on the back door and stepped outside onto the weathered stone patio. The house sat on a slight rise and she could see the neighboring fields of peas and corn and winter wheat that stretched in every direction to the horizon. Nothing had changed in the years since she left. She’d been so anxious to escape the farm community and attend university in America. She had packed a single bag and vowed never to return—but of course she had returned. For a funeral or two, for a school reunion, and for a holiday with Jacob to show him around the village where she was born. Her feelings for the place had softened over time. It’s okay to leave and come back, she thought. The heart really does become fonder.

  She glanced at the corrugated tin barn and, beyond it, the tree line, dark and lush with vines growing through the underbrush, choking the old-growth spruce and the Douglas firs. If she walked around the side of the house, she knew she would be able to see past the crops to the outskirts of Godhavn.

  She put a hand to her throat and sighed. Everything was so big and so small at the same time. She missed her husband, and she missed her daughter’s smile. She hoped the fresh air, the community of Godhavn, and the surrounding farms would help draw Juniper out of her shell.

  Laura found a depression in the dirt next to the house and wedged the towel in as far as she could, then covered it with a pile of dead leaves. She would have to do a better job of burying the knives before the leaves blew away, but it would do until morning. There was a big circle of charred earth in front of the barn. The ground there might be softer; it might be easier to dig a hole.

  Returning to the kitchen, she paused at the threshold and looked down. Muddy footprints. Laura had not noticed them in the gloom, but the sun slanting through the open door delineated the curved shapes of two feet leading farther into the house. She followed the prints, but they faded as they crossed under the arch.

  She used another dish towel to wipe the floor, then washed her hands at the sink and wheeled her suitcase to the stairs, pulling it behind her to the second story. There were three bedrooms, a tiny bathroom, and a walk-in linen closet with a chain lock on the outside of the door. Laura couldn’t remember the chain being there before. She pulled it across its track and swung the door open, letting it dangle and rattle against the doorjamb. A moth fluttered out and brushed against her cheek. It settled on the wall across from her, two black spots on its gray wings like eyes, watching her.

  Inside, the closet was cramped, the walls covered with floor-to-ceiling shelves stacked with towels and washcloths, sheets and pillowcases. The floor crackled under her feet and Laura realized she was standing on a thick blanket of powdery moth carcasses. Empty cocoons were webbed up in the corners where the shelves met the ceiling. She pulled a towel from the shelf in front of her and long strands of webbing followed it like gooey cheese. She dropped the towel and backed out of the closet, shutting the door and pulling the chain back along its track.

  Her skin crawled with imagined insects. The moth still clung to the wall and she took a swipe at it. It flew away to the ceiling and spread its wings again, its black eye markings staring down at her.

  Laura left her bag and walked down to her mother’s old room at the end of the hall. The door was closed, and she knocked before entering. Juniper was lying on the queen-sized bed, squinting at her phone. She looked up at Laura and tossed her phone away. It bounced twice on the mattress and fell to the floor.

  “No Wi-Fi here,” Juniper said. “We’re for real in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Maybe we can figure something out,” Laura said. She picked up Juniper’s phone and sat on the edge of the bed. “There must be some way to connect.”

  “How soon can we go home?”

  Laura shrugged. “Let’s see how it goes, okay?”

  “What do people do around here?”

  “We can ask when we go into town.”

  “But you used to live here, right? What did you do for fun?”

  “I don’t know. Bonfires and parties and hiking in the woods.”

  “I lied about being the outdoor type,” Juniper said.

  Laura smiled. Juniper was quoting the Lemonheads, one of Jacob’s favorite bands. She was surprised to discover the reference didn’t make her feel sad. She closed her eyes and took a breath that was redolent of Charlotte’s perfume and powder. She was five years old again, with Charlotte’s slender arms wrapped around her, protecting her. The room felt safe and solid, free from grief or loss or doubt.

  “We have a little time before we’re supposed to go into town,” she said. “Help me find the washing machine. I want to get a load of towels started.”

  • 2 •

  THEY LOCATED the washing machine behind a door in the kitchen. Juniper helped her mother carry towels and bedding downstairs. They shook out the husks of dead moths and picked off the webbing and poured more detergent into the machine than the directions indicated. Laura lugged a bucket of water back upstairs to the linen closet and they scrubbed the empty shelves. Juniper found a broom and dustpan and swept up the tiny carcasses from the floor while the moth on the ceiling watched her work. She turned the broom around and took a swipe at the moth, but only managed to smudge the white ceiling.

  When the machine was done Laura hung the wet towels on a line in the yard, then they locked the front door and walked into town.

  Godhavn was half a mile away, across a rutted dirt path that cut through fields of wheat. The sun was high in the west, and the blue sky was cloudless. They could smell the sea, but tall rows of wheat blocked their view of the water. Unseen insects sang to one another and a distant farmer waved at them from the high seat of his tractor. Juniper waved back, then stuck her hands in her pockets, embarrassed. She was wearing memory foam sandals and denim overalls, rolled up at the ankles. She meant the overalls to be vaguely ironic, some sort of commentary on the endless farmland around them. A grasshopper jumped across the path and Juniper recoiled. She felt itchy, as if something was burrowing under her skin.

  There was a small scarecrow up ahead of them. It swayed from side to side in the light breeze, boneless, mimicking the top-heavy stalks of wheat on either side. When they drew closer to it, the scarecrow moved its head and looked directly at them. Laura realized it was a boy, maybe nine or ten years old, with straw-colored hair and pale skin. He smiled at them, then stepped to one side and disappeared into the rows. They watched both sides of the path and hurried a little faster. There had been something unnatural in the way the boy moved, and when he smiled at them the breeze had seemed colder.

  After ten minutes the crops ended, and the path widened into a paved road that led into town. Once they had passed a handful of small outbuildings Godhavn seemed to sprout up around them, two- and three-story buildings crowded close together, all red and yellow and orange brick, peaked roofs with spires and weathervanes and ivy snaking along rain gutters. There was a narrow alley between two of the buildings, and they could see a small marina, boats bobbing up and down on the water, bumping against rubber tires lashed against the dock.

  They peeked into the window of a cafe and saw two long tables surrounded by old women eating pastries. The next building housed a general store, cramped shelves piled with canned goods arranged in no discernible order.

  “We’ll need to stop on the way back and pick up some staples for the house,” Laura said.

  “Is there a pub here?” Juniper said. “What’s the drinking age?”

  Laura ignored her and they walked on until they reached an office wedged between a butcher shop and a bakery. A wooden sign hung from two hooks above the front door. KASPAR HENRIKSEN. No job title or description, just a name. Everyone in town knew everyone else, and Kaspar Henriksen didn’t need to advertise his occupation.

  Laura pushed the door open without knocking and waved Juniper inside, where pale blue walls were scuffed along the baseboards, and mildew stains smothered the ceiling like lily pads. The hardwood floor was uneven, dark gaps between the planks forming a toothy grin. A massive, unmanned desk sat in the far corner. As they creaked across the front room, a door opened in the back wall and a mop of silver hair emerged, followed by a small, nervous man in a tweed suit several sizes too large for him. He rushed forward, leading with his head, and stuck out a pudgy hand. Laura took it, and he clasped her palm in both of his.

  “God eftermiddag,” he said. “You must be Charlotte Jessen’s daughter. Laura, yes? So good of you to make the trip.”

  Laura extricated her hand from his grip. “Thank you,” she said.

  He cleared his throat and glanced at the empty desk in the corner. “Apologies. Agnes is away again. Got to let the employees out every so often or they turn on you, yes?”

  “I suppose so,” Laura said.

  “Oh,” he said, “I forgot to introduce myself. I think perhaps you know that I am Kaspar Henriksen, your mother’s lawyer. And I feel like I know you already, the way Charlotte talked about you. I wonder, do you still speak Danish?”

  “I do, but it’s been a long time. And Juniper doesn’t, so we would prefer English, if you don’t mind.”

  “And what is Juniper?”

  “Juniper is my daughter,” Laura said.

  “Enchanté,” Juniper said.

  Laura frowned at her and Juniper raised her eyebrows and mouthed “what” silently.

  “Daughter, you say,” Henriksen said. He squinted again at Juniper. “Ah. Æblet falder ikke langt fra stammen. Yes, yes. And where is your father, little girl?”

  The sudden reminder of Jacob struck Juniper like a fist. “Go to hell, old man,” she said.

  Henriksen’s eyes opened wide.

  “Juniper!” Laura said. “I’m very sorry, Mr. Henriksen. There was… my husband was in an accident. We’re still trying to deal with it.”

  “Ah,” he said. “I didn’t mean to cause you pain.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Juniper said. “Sorry.”

  “It’s quite all right.”

  “I have your letter,” Laura said. “You indicated there were some things we needed to go over?”

 

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11