She paused in the kitchen again. Looked down at the floor and started walking toward the door. Then she walked back and stared at the rug. It was a rag rug. She squatted down for a closer look. The knots on one side had been untied. Every last one. Was it supposed to look like that? She examined the knots on the other side of the rug. A complete row of tiny, white-haired Hottentots. She tried undoing one of the knots. It was tight. She dug her nails in and grimaced. She couldn’t loosen it and felt immediately that her nails would yield before the knot did. Someone with strangely strong fingers and a lot of patience must have worked on the knots. Who would do such a thing? And why? And why on just one side, if you felt the need to do it in the first place?

*

She sat on the front porch, studying the trees while waving one hand about to keep the mosquitoes drawn to her at bay. She picked up her phone and stared at the jumble of icons overlaying Kiruna’s face.

The urge to put her thumb on the local news app passed through her body like a shudder. Whether anyone had found a dead man on the Varanger Peninsula was something she both wanted and didn’t want to know. She thought about what her dad had said, that she would be tainted by the incident, whether she had been involved or not. People would talk about what had really happened and draw their own conclusions and it would never be forgotten.

What had really happened. She didn’t even know herself. Her fragmented recollections were floating out of reach, into a fog where everything seemed uncertain. Part of her wished the fog would persist, part of her didn’t. She worried about what it would be like when it cleared.

*

She had no idea how long she’d been sitting there when she realised the trees were moving in a way they hadn’t been before. A force that made their branches sway wildly was moving through the canopy along an unpredictable trajectory. She looked for the squirrel and soon spotted it. A reddish-brown streak. In mid-air, it turned into a hook that caught on a sprig of needles, setting it rocking.

It’s here, she wrote to Gudrun. Then it struck her she might be mistaken. What if it was another squirrel, an ordinary one? It was certainly possible.