The Cold Song Read Free

years earlier, in July 2008, everyone had been out searching for Milla. Far and wide, over land and sea, in ditches and trenches, in the sand hills out on the point and all around the forbidding cliffs, in the pile of rubble behind the old school and in the empty, tumbledown houses at the end of Brage Road where grass grew out of the windows and no child was allowed to go. Simen remembered scouring every inch of town, thinking she might just be hiding somewhere waiting to be found, and that maybe if he looked really hard, he’d be the one to find her.
    Everyone had searched for Milla, even the boy known as K.B., the one who was later arrested and charged with her murder, searched for her, and for two years she had lain buried under that tree in the woods, unfound, covered by dirtand grass and moss and twigs and stones until she had almost turned to dirt herself, all except for her skull and bits of bones and her teeth and the long dark hair, which was no longer long and dark, but wispy and withered, as if it had been yanked up out of the ditch, roots and all.
    That summer when she went missing, Simen thought he saw her everywhere: She was the face in the shopwindow, the head bobbing in the waves, the long dark hair of some unknown woman fluttering in the breeze. Once Milla had looked at him and laughed, she had been real, like him, like his bike, but then she was a veil of night and frost that sometimes slipped through him and swept happiness away.
    He never forgot her. In the two years she lay buried, he’d think about her when he couldn’t sleep or when autumn was coming and the air smelled of cordite, damp and withered leaves, but at some point he had stopped looking for her and no longer believed that he would be the one to find her.
    Simen was the youngest of the three boys. The other two were Gunnar and Christian. It was a Saturday at the end of October 2010 and the three friends were spending one last weekend together. The time had come to close down the summer houses for the winter and for their little seaside town a couple of hours south of Oslo to curl in on its own darkness. It was afternoon, not quite five o’clock, the light was already beginning to fade, and the boys had decided to locate and dig up a treasure they had buried some months earlier.
    Gunnar and Christian couldn’t see the point in leaving it in the ground forever. Simen didn’t agree. As far as he wasconcerned that was
exactly
the point—that was what made it treasure. It was concealed from everyone except them and was a thousand times more valuable
in
the ground than
above
the ground. He couldn’t explain why, he just knew that’s how it was.
    But neither Gunnar nor Christian even tried to understand what Simen was talking about. They just thought he was being a fool, they wanted their stuff back,
their
contributions,
their
part of the treasure, they really didn’t give a shit about the treasure as treasure, so eventually Simen said it was fine by him, why didn’t they just go out there in the forest right now and dig it up, he didn’t care.
    The story of the treasure had begun some months earlier, in August 2010, when Gunnar, the eldest of the three friends, suggested that they become blood brothers. The light was warm and red, and everything in that small town was lusher than ever on this particular evening, as things tend to be when summer is almost over. Soon they would be going their separate ways, back to the city where they lived far apart and called other boys their friends.
    Gunnar had taken a deep breath and said, “Mixing blood is a symbol of eternal friendship.”
    The other two boys had balked at this, the thought of slashing the skin of your palm with a piece of glass from a broken Coca-Cola bottle was not something you would want to do, not even in the interest of eternal friendship; and even if you were mainly given to kicking a soccer ball about and using your legs, you did actually need your hands too—Simen triedto