Chapters (3)
In Arvidsjaur they stopped at the filling station and drank coffee with Kippen. He had finally been able to take down the poster of Lina, although he hadn’t gone to the trouble of cleaning away the dirty frame that had built up around it. Lelle could still picture her smiling face as he walked past. Kippen wasn’t one to dwell on past sadness. He preferred instead to fill the silence with tales of moose hunting and hockey matches and other things that were not so sensitive. Meja ate an ice cream, despite the cold.
‘I’d like to shoot a moose,’ she said, unexpectedly.
Kippen chuckled and clapped Lelle on the shoulder with his massive hand. ‘Looks like you’ll have to teach your daughter to hunt, Lelle.’
It was an innocent slip that led to a lengthy silence.
She’s not my daughter. My daughter is dead.
It was on the tip of Lelle’s tongue, but then he saw the worried look on Meja’s face and the ice cream running down over her wrist.
‘I’ll teach her all I know,’ he said. ‘Even if that isn’t much.’
On the way home he let her take the wheel, even though she didn’t have a licence and dusk had begun to fall over the Silver Road. He knew it like the palm of his hand. He shut his eyes, but still saw it winding ahead of him, stretching out and carving its way like meltwater across the ground, creating a link between people, for good or bad, and eventually running into the sea and disappearing. If it hadn’t been for the breathing beside him he would probably have been overwhelmed by the old despair. But now he realized he would no longer need to journey endlessly.
The search was over.
Read on for an extract from Stina Jackson’s
