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were places she had only driven past for years. For her mother and father there had been only Stenvik every summer, and the holiday cottage they had built there at the end of the 1940smany years before the tourists had discovered the village.
    Autumn, winter, and spring in Borgholm, but the summer had
    always been Stenvik for Julia. Before she went up to Marnas to see Gerlof, she wanted to see the village again. There were bad memories up there, but many good ones too. The memory of long, hot summer days.
    She saw the yellow sign from some distance away: Stenvik 1, and beneath it the word campsite crossed out with black tape. She braked and turned onto the village road, away from the alvar and down toward the sound.
    After five hundred yards the first little cluster of summer cottages appeared; they were all closed up, with white blinds pulled down at the windows. Then the kiosk, where the villagers gathered in summer. Its front had been cleared of notices and adverts and pennants, and there were shutters at its windows. Next to the kiosk was a sign pointing south toward the campsite and a mini golf course. The campsite was run by a friend of Gerlof’s, she remembered.
    The road led toward the water, curved to the right along the rocky ridge above the shore, and led northward, where more closedup cottages lined the eastern side of the road. On the other side was the shore, covered in stones and pebbles; small waves ruffled the surface of the water out in the sound.
    Julia drove slowly past the old windmill, standing up above
    the water on its sturdy wooden base. The mill had stood there abandoned for as long as Julia could remember, but now it had turned gray and lost almost all of its red color, and all that remained of its sails was a cross of cracked wooden slats.
    About a hundred yards past the windmill lay the Davidsson
    family’s boathouse. It looked well cared for, with red wooden walls, white windows, and tarblack roof. Someone had painted it recently. Lena and Richard?
     
    Julia had a picture in her memory of Gerlof, sitting there
    mending his long nets on a stool in front of the boathouse in the summer, while she and Lena and their cousins ran about on the shore down below, the sharp smell of tar in their nostrils.
    But Gerlof had been down at the boathouse cleaning his
    flounder nets. That day.
    Now there was no one at the boathouse. Dry grass quivered
    in the wind. A wooden skiff, painted green, lay on its side in the grass beside the houseit was Gerlof’s old boat, and its hull was so dried out that Julia could see strips of daylight between the upper planks.
    She switched off the engine, but didn’t get out of the car.
    Neither her shoes nor her clothes were suitable for the Oland autumn wind; besides, she could see an iron bar with a large padlock across the boathouse door. The blinds were pulled right down inside the small windows, as they were in the cottages in the rest of the village.
    Stenvik was empty. Scenery, it was all just scenery for a summer theater. A gloomy play, at least as far as Julia was concerned.
    Okay. She would go and look at Gerlof’s house, the holiday
    cottage. Gerlof had built it himself on land the family had
    owned for years. She started the car and drove along the village road, which forked up ahead. She took the righthand road, inland.
    There were groves of lowgrowing trees here, protecting the
    few houses that were occupied over the winter, but all the trees were leaning slightly away from the shore, bowed by the constant wind.
    In a large garden stood a tall, yellow wooden house which
    looked as if it were about to fall to pieces behind the tall bushes.
    The paint was flaking off the walls, and the roof tiles were cracked and covered in moss. Julia couldn’t remember who it had belonged to, but had no recollection of the place ever having looked smart and well cared for.
    Among the trees a narrow track led off the road, a strip of
    kneehigh yellow grass growing down the