Open Grave: A Mystery Read Free Page B

letting anyone in. If she hadn’t been on Gr ä s ö visiting her sister she would have come here and organized the world press.”
    He was rewarded with another laugh. He felt a need to keep his daughter in a good mood, perhaps as apology for not telling the whole truth about the telephone call at dawn.
    “But it was beautifully expressed, that part that you weren’t alone.”
    I was alone, he thought.
    “Do you wonder what Mother would have said?”
    That was a question that the professor found no reason to speculate about.
    “Do you ever miss her?”
    “No.”
    Perhaps he ought to have said something beautiful here too, even if it wasn’t true? He knew that his daughter was of two minds about her mother.
    “Do you suppose they’re excited here at work?” she continued, apparently unperturbed by her father’s abrupt responses. “Angerman called from Milan to congratulate, but I think he was mostly thinking about the company, because he said something to the effect that it was good I kept my maiden name, that it could benefit us in contact with customers, especially in the U.S. He invited me to go along to Boston next week.”
    “Pill-rollers,” said the professor.
    “If they were even that,” said Birgitta with a sigh.
    Under normal circumstances he would have asked what she meant, but he was bothered by his daughter’s unnecessary talk about Dagmar.
    He had not thought about Dagmar at all, not even on a day like this one. During the night’s review of the family tree she did not even show up in his thoughts. She was as if erased; never before had he experienced that so clearly.
    “I’m not going to invite any of her relatives,” he said unexpectedly vehemently.
    “But Daddy! Not even Dorothy?”
    He knew that his daughter kept in contact with Dorothy Wilkins, widow of Dagmar’s brother Henrik, whom he despised but never commented on. He was convinced that Dorothy maintained contact with his daughter solely to keep herself informed about the Ohler clan, primarily the patriarch himself. Now as before he chose to pass over her with silence.
    Birgitta sighed.
    “She’s old,” she said.
    “She stays alive just to get to see me die,” he mumbled. “There is something vulture-like about her.”
    “That’s not true!” his daughter countered. “You can be generous now.”
    I’ll never invite her, he thought, increasingly embittered, and he realized that he had to end the conversation before it got out of hand completely.
    Dorothy was otherwise the one who had followed him the longest of all, from his student days in the 1940s. She was the daughter of one of his father’s friends from youth, who’d come from England to Uppsala in May of 1945, right after the war ended. Perhaps her father had the idea of marrying off his daughter to the young and promising Bertram. The project had failed because no interest ever arose—from him in any event.
    Dorothy went back to England but returned later and was introduced to Dagmar’s brother. They took a liking to each other and she and Henrik got married after only a few months.
    Early a widow and childless she had visited all the family gatherings in the Ohler house as long as Dagmar was alive but after that more and more seldom. Now it must have been ten years since she last visited the house.
    Should he let her return now? Never! Not even a Nobel Prize and a large portion of generosity could get him to change his attitude.
    “No, now I have to rest a little,” he said, an argument his daughter could not oppose, as she often insisted that he ought to take it easier. “I’m going to meet some journalists this afternoon. I have arranged it so there is only one meeting with the press today.”
    “Do you want me to come over?”
    “That’s not at all necessary. I have Agnes. She’s as good as three people. Besides, the meetings will take place at the hospital. I wanted it that way.”
    When they ended the conversation he thought about whether he had