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him. He looked just like he did in the picture I have. And my mother once said he had a habit of first looking up before he said anything. I saw him make that exact gesture when he was standing on the sidewalk on the other side of the window. When he left all those years ago he had long hair and thick black-rimmed glasses; he doesn’t look like that now. His hair is much shorter and his glasses are the kind without frames around the lenses.
    â€œI called you because I needed to talk to someone about it. I thought I would go nuts otherwise. It was him, it was my father. And it wasn’t just that I recognized him; he stopped on the sidewalk outside because he had recognized me.”
    Anna spoke with total conviction. Linda tried to remember what she had learned about eyewitness accounts—about the rate of accuracy in their reconstructions of events and the potential for embellishment. She also thought about what they had been taught about giving descriptions at the academy, and the computer exercises they had done. One assignment consisted of aging their own faces by twenty years. Linda had seen how she started looking more and more like her father, even a little like her grandfather. Our ancestors survive somewhere in our faces, she thought. If you look like your mother as a child, you end up as your father when you age. When you no longer recognize your face it’s because an unknown ancestor has taken up residence for a while.
    Linda found it hard to accept the idea that Anna had actually seen her father. He would hardly have recognized the grown woman his little girl had become, unless he had been secretly following her development all these years. Linda quickly thought through what she knew about the mysterious Erik Westin. Anna’s parents had been very young when she was born. They had both grown up in big cities but been beguiled by the seventies’ environmental movement—the so-called green wave—and had ended up in a collective out in the isolated countryside of SmÃ¥land. Linda had a vague memory that Erik Westin was handy, that he specialized in making orthopedic sandals. But she had also heard Henrietta describe him as impossible, a hashish-smoking loser whose sole objective in life was to do as little as possible and who had no idea what it meant to take responsibility for a child. But what had made
him leave? He had left no letter, nor any signs of extensive preparations. The police had looked for him at first, but there had never been any indication of crime and they eventually shelved the case.
    Nonetheless, Westin’s disappearance must have been carefully choreographed. He had taken his passport and what little money he had—most of it left over from selling their car, which had actually belonged to Henrietta. She was the only one with an income at the time, working as a night guard at a local hospital.
    Erik Westin was there one day and gone the next. He had left on unannounced trips before, so Henrietta waited two weeks before contacting the police.
    Linda also recalled that her own father had been involved in the subsequent investigation. There had been little to go on, since Westin had no record—no previous arrests or convictions, nor any history of mental illness, for that matter. A few months before he disappeared he had undergone a complete physical and been given a clean bill of health, aside from a little anemia.
    Linda knew from police statistics that most missing persons eventually turn up again. Of those who didn’t, the majority were suicides. Only a few were the victims of crime, buried in unknown places or decomposing at the bottom of a lake with weights attached to them.
    â€œHave you told your mom?”
    â€œNot yet.”
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œI don’t know. I suppose I’m still in shock.”
    â€œI’d say you’re still not fully convinced it was him.”
    Anna looked at her with pleading eyes.
    â€œI know it