Clive poured himself a large whisky, and by large I mean half a pint.
“Drink, Sophie?” he said.
I shook my head. He was acting a little unhinged.
“I’ll pour you one anyway,” he said, pouring me my own half-pint. “We all need a drink after what happened today. Even the babies.” He looked up. “I’m kidding.”
I sat down beside Maren. She was trembling and openly smoking in the kitchen, which I’d never seen her do, but after what happened with Dag I could well understand.
“Are you all right?” I said. She nodded but didn’t meet my eye.
“Is Dag going to be OK?” I asked in a mousy voice.
Clive rested his hands on the back of the chair, still too agitated to sit down. He gave a faint nod. “He made it through surgery. But I’d say he’s light-years from OK.”
The chaos of the afternoon had sent an electrical charge through the house and through the woods. First the shouting, then everyone running in and out of the house. I came downstairs to find blood all over the kitchen floor. Then the helicopter came. Amidst all of this I’d been unable to prevent Gaia from seeing the blood smeared across the floor. I mopped it up and tried to convince her it was paint, but she still caught wind of Dag being taken to the hospital. She had met Dag. Apparently he had taught her a couple of tricks and she had a soft spot for him, as had Aurelia. Gaia was devastated to know he was injured and I had to lie to her and say he was fine, that it was just a cut.
Even though I hadn’t witnessed the accident I couldn’t stop shaking. I learned from Clive that Dag had had an accident with the drill. He had momentarily taken his hands off the handle and the thing had shot upward, hitting his head and knocking him into the air. The force was equivalent to being slammed by a small car. But apparently no one knew why the drill had done that. It had all kinds of safety devices to stop it from moving, and Clive had had a heated discussion down the phone with someone about faulty equipment.
“I’m suing, do you hear me?” he’d shouted, loud enough to be heard all the way in Oslo. “Suing!”
For my part, I couldn’t stop thinking about what Maren had said about Mother Nature warning Tom. He should have taken the hint. But he didn’t, and Aurelia died. I wouldn’t say I’m ordinarily the sort of person who goes in for curses and folklore, but given that I’d recently seen someone floating in the air with holes for eyes before vanishing into thin air, the boundaries of my disbelief were being somewhat permeated. It seemed that here, in this house, anything was possible.
* * *
—
Tom came home the next day. He looked like a desert prophet, his clothes still covered in bloodstains, his hair dirty, and his breath foul.
“You should go to bed,” I heard Maren tell him, but he shook his head.
“It’s almost Christmas,” he said, as if that explained why he couldn’t go to bed.
He knocked on the door of my bedroom a while later, still bloodstained and filthy, and asked if he could have a word. I eyed the spot where I’d hidden the diary—beneath a loose floorboard—and said of course. The girls were asleep by this point and I’d been chipping away at my novel. Alexa was still being held hostage in the house in the woods but had discovered an ingenious way of digging an escape route without anyone noticing.
“I’m taking the girls away for Christmas,” he said in a hoarse voice. “Oslo. Then a ferry to the Arctic Circle. Would you like to come?”
I nodded. I was thinking that I would need to come more than anything else, given how incapable he looked right then of caring for two small children. And there was the small matter of the contents of the diary, and the fact that I needed to protect the girls.
“Great,” he said. A flicker of a smile. “We leave in two days.”
* * *
—
The girls were excited, or at least Gaia was, and as ever Coco copied Gaia’s excitement, clapping her hands and shouting “Slo! Slo! Ya-ya!”
Clive and Derry had decided to spend Christmas with friends in Ålesund. Maren said she would stay at Granhus, which I thought was kind of sad, and also scary—not only would she be spending Christmas alone, but she