Before the Frost Read Free

of Bornholm when she was a little girl. For Linda there was more than this episode at stake; it was as if by reclaiming this memory she was on the verge of gaining access to a much larger part of her early life. She had been six, maybe seven years old, and both Mona and her father had been there. The idiotic argument had started over whether or not it had been windy that day. Her father claimed she had been seasick and thrown up all over his jacket. But Linda remembered the sea as blue and perfectly calm. They had only ever taken this one trip to Bornholm, so it couldn’t have been a matter of mixing up several trips. Her mother had never liked boat rides and her father was surprised she had agreed to this one.
    That evening, after the argument, Linda had had trouble falling asleep. She was due to start working at the Ystad police station in two months. She had graduated from the police academy in
Stockholm and had actually wanted to start working right away, but here she had nothing to do all summer, and her father couldn’t keep her company, since he had used up most of his vacation time in May. That was when he thought he had bought a house and would need extra time for moving. He had the house under contract; it was in Svarte, just south of the highway, right next to the sea. But then the buyer changed her mind at the last minute. Perhaps it was because she couldn’t stand entrusting her carefully tended roses and rhododendron bushes to a man who only talked about where he was going to put the kennel—when he finally bought a dog. She broke the contract, and her father’s agent suggested he ask for compensation, but he chose not to. The whole episode was already over in his mind.
    He kept looking for houses that cold and windy summer, but they were all either too expensive or just not the house he had been dreaming of all those years in the apartment on Mariagatan. He kept the apartment and asked himself if he was ever really going to move. When Linda graduated from the police academy, he drove up to Stockholm and helped her move her things to Ystad. She had arranged to rent an apartment starting in September. Until then she could have her old room back.
    They started getting on each other’s nerves almost immediately. Linda was impatient to start working and accused her father of not pulling strings hard enough at the station to get her a temporary position. But he said he had taken the matter up with Chief Lisa Holgersson. She would gladly have welcomed the extra manpower, but there was no room in the budget for more staff. Linda would not be able to start until the tenth of September, however much they might have wanted her to start earlier.
    Linda spent the intervening time reacquainting herself with two old school friends. One day she ran into Zeba, or “Zebra,” as they used to call her. She had dyed her black hair red and also cut it short, so Linda had not recognized her at first. Zeba’s family came from Iran, and she and Linda had been in the same class until junior high. When they ran into each other on the street this July, Zeba was pushing a toddler in a stroller. They had stopped at a café and had coffee.
    Zeba told her that she had trained as a bartender but that her
pregnancy had put a stop to her work plans. The father was Marcus. Linda remembered him—the Marcus who loved exotic fruit and who had started his own plant nursery in Ystad at the age of nineteen. The relationship had ended quickly, but the child remained a fact. Zeba and Linda chatted for a long time, until the toddler started screaming so loudly and insistently that they had to leave. But they had kept in touch since that chance meeting, and Linda noticed that she felt less impatient with the hiatus in her life whenever she managed to build these bridges between her present and the past that she had known here.
    As she was on her way home to Mariagatan after her meeting with Zeba, it suddenly started