Wolf Winter by Cecilia Ekbäck Read Free Book Online Page B

brown bear on his hind legs, his paws in the air.
    Her eyes leapt: barn, field, woodshed. Where was her mother? Where was Dorotea?
    Before she found her wits, the bear fell down on all fours and lumbered away.
    Frederika ran to the field. The sun was hot on the crown of her head. The space between the straight pine trunks in the forest was empty, and she went more slowly. By the barn she ran into a spider web and had to stop to brush her face with her fingers to remove it. And then, from inside the woodshed, something so unusual: her father chuckling. Through a slit between two wood planks she saw him embrace her mother. She hesitated and then tiptoed backward. She wanted this moment for her father. And anyway, the danger was gone.
    But later, at night, she thought about what she’d seen. She didn’t know what it meant, but one thing was clear: her mother was wrong. In some way Eriksson’s death had to do with all of them.
    And they had not found him. He had found them.

“Has everything been done?” The priest slapped the back of a psalm book protruding from the low bookshelf by the entrance to the church hall.
    “It’s ready,” the verger said. Underneath his straight fringe, the thick, lifted brows gave his face a startled look that always managed to worry the priest, even though by now he knew the verger was unflappable.
    “The silver is clean?”
    “Of course.”
    “You’ll make sure the graveyard and the church green remain clear.”
    “Yes.”
    “No trade, no drinking.”
    “No.”
    The priest took one final look. The gold on the pulpit gleamed. There were new tallow candles in the holders underneath the cross. He sniffed the air. No odor from the cadavers under the floor. Good. Even if you’d grown up with the smell, you never got used to it.
    “And there will be no ringing of the bell,” he said.
    “No ringing of the bell.”
    The priest took the stairs up to the second floor two steps at a time. The stairway curved to the right. Pale wood shone through the dark brown paint on the places where people trod the most. There were no candles in the stairwell, and a dark corner loomed at the far end of each step. The church was already old. The once-black roof had oxidized and turned green. Nothing he could do about that—not without funds, not without a favorable King. And the church bell. Built during his short tenure, but what a problem. Three times already he’d sent for the bell-founder at the coast to come and rectifythe issue. The first time the bell-founder came he had the verger ring the bell for a whole morning as he stood underneath the tower, his hands elevated and facing outward, his head bent—an image of a portly Jesus Christ in their empty square—to then declare the timbre of the bell “pleasant.”
    “It’s not,” the priest had said.
    The heavy man had nodded until his head almost reached his chest. “What is the problem?” he asked.
    “I don’t know. The ringing is awful. Bleating. Not elegant.”
    The bell-founder kept on nodding.
    “It’s broken,” the priest said. “That’s it. Broken.”
    Then the bell-founder had taken his horse and disappeared for two days. On the third day he returned and declared that he had listened to the bell from all over the region, and its sound was harmonious and whole.
    But the bell jarred and jarred with the priest, and he sent for the bell-founder again. This time the founder spent time in the bell tower. He chipped away at the metal with a chisel. But the first Sunday after the bell-founder had left, it sounded the same.
    The priest sent a message again, but the messenger returned, saying maybe it wasn’t the bell that was the problem, but something else. Something perhaps to do with the priest.
    In the room on the second floor the Church Books were laid out on his desk. Two rapid steps, then he pinched the fall of the green velvet curtain so it fell straight. A glimpse of his own face in the window: drawn cheeks, sharp nose. Then,