The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend (3 page)

When Sara finally managed to get through to her mother, she was no calmer.

‘I don't like this small-town thing, not one bit,' she started. It was a discussion they had had several times before.

Sara rubbed her forehead and lay back down on the bed. The room she was in was small, maybe three by five metres. Apart from the bed, there was an armchair directly beneath the window, a bedside table and a little chest of drawers. That was all. The wallpaper was brightly floral and looked like at least a couple of decades old. The curtains were made from an entirely different floral pattern and were much too short for the window.

‘Small towns are so … boring. You could've gone wherever you wanted.'

It was ironic. Sara's mother was always nagging her to travel, but now that she had finally gone and done it, her mother still wasn't happy.

‘And exposed. Who knows what kind of madmen are hiding there.'

It wasn't clear which was worse, the tediousness or the risk of bumping into one of the many serial killers hiding in every nook and cranny. Her mother's words triggered something in Sara's memory.

‘It's because people get closer to one another there,' she said.

‘Honestly, though, what do you know about people? If you didn't have your nose in a book all the time …'

This was another discussion they had had many times before.

Perhaps it wasn't so strange that her mother saw her elder daughter as a challenge. Her little sister Josefin worked as a trainee lawyer for the district court in Södertälje. Eventually, she would be a solicitor, a socially viable profession carried out in suitably expensive suits. Sara, on the other hand … A
bookshop
. In a suburban shopping centre. That was only marginally better than being an unemployed former bookshop assistant like she was now. And now that she had finally gone abroad? She had chosen to go to a little backwater in the American countryside, to stay with an elderly lady.

Sara didn't normally care that her mother so clearly thought she was boring. After all, her mother had a point. Sara had never done a single thing that was even the slightest bit adventurous. But the constant jabs at Amy had started to get on Sara's nerves even before she had left, and now, with the tragedy of the funeral still fresh in her mind, her patience was wearing thin.

Her mother seemed to sense that she had gone too far, because she quickly added: ‘Oh well, at least you haven't been chopped into pieces.' Her tone was so openly pessimistic that she didn't even need to add a
yet
. ‘What's Amy like then? Is she being good to you?'

‘Amy is …' Sara stopped. ‘She's nice.'

She was. It was just that she was also dead.

Sara crept out of her room and down the dark hallway like a jumpy burglar. Outside her door was a narrow corridor which led first to the bathroom and then to Amy's bedroom, as Caroline had pointed out when she had first shown Sara to the guest room. She walked quickly past, trying to avoid looking at the grimly closed door. She wondered whether anyone would ever open it again. She, for one, had no intention of doing so.

When she reached the stairs, she stopped for a moment to listen, before making her way slowly down.

At each new room, she hesitated and glanced cautiously inside. She didn't really know what she was expecting. A couple of townspeople hiding behind the sofa? Angry relatives in the hallway, accusing her of staying in the house without paying? Amy's ghost in the kitchen? But the house was deserted.

She walked around Amy's home, in and out of the rooms in which she had lived, touching the surfaces Amy had touched. The stillness of the house scared her. Small reminders of routine, of everyday life, surprised her when she was least expecting it.

Someone had left a jar of Nescafé and a gallon of milk for her in the kitchen. There was bread from the day before, and when she opened the fridge she discovered food in abundance, carefully wrapped in plastic and marked with the dish's name and the previous day's date.

She ate the bread plain before creeping up to the bathroom to wash. The shower was ancient, hanging above a little oval-shaped tub. She undressed, folding her night clothes into a neat pile and placing them on the worn old stool opposite the toilet. She hoped they would stay dry there, but neither the drain nor the shower curtain looked particularly trustworthy.

A whining, moaning sound came from the pipes and the water never got any hotter than lukewarm.

This really wasn't how it was meant to be, Sara thought. Her hair was twisted up in a hand towel and she had just unpacked her bags before retreating to the kitchen. So far, she hadn't spent more than twenty minutes anywhere except the guest room in which she had slept. For some reason, it felt safer to keep moving.

Unpacking had taken all of thirteen minutes; it was now half past ten and she had nothing at all to do. Outside, the air was already growing oppressive. The smell of dry earth and stifling greenery was coming in through the screen door. It was competing with the smells inside the house, of stuffiness and wood and old carpets.

She sat down on a kitchen chair, looking for some signs of Amy's life, but all she could see were battered cupboard doors and dead potted plants in the window.

This was meant to have been her adventure. She and Amy would have sat there, maybe on these very same chairs, talking about books and the town and the people that Amy had known, and it would have been nice.

‘Amy,' she said, ‘what the hell have you gone and done?'

By the kitchen door, which led out onto the porch, there were two pairs of different-sized rubber boots. The grass was long and yellow from the summer sun, and the vegetable garden had gone wild long ago. There was presumably a whole trove of treasures out there, hidden in the grass, but Sara could only make out two crooked apple trees, a little patch of herbs which had gone to seed, and a couple of enormous tomato plants.

She went inside again and spent an hour spreading her books around the house in an attempt to make it more cosy. But thirteen books wasn't nearly enough to cover all the rooms.

At home, she had almost two thousand books. And three friends if you could count her former colleagues from the bookshop as friends.

She had started working there when she was seventeen, initially only at Christmas, during the annual Swedish national book sale and in the summer holidays, but then she had gone full-time. And that was where she had stayed. Half an hour from where she was born. Her life hadn't been any more exciting than that.

One of the girls from the shop had once claimed that all stories started with someone coming or someone going. No one had ever come to Josephssons Bokhandel for Sara, and absolutely no one had ever come to her little apartment in Haninge either. The only thing that had come were the letters, beautifully handwritten letters. For a while, Sara could have sworn that they brought a piece of Iowa with them, a faint but unmistakable reminder of another, more timeless life, full of adventure and opportunity.

But now that she was finally there, all she could smell was musty wood and old carpets.

‘Pull yourself together, Sara,' she said. Hearing a human voice calmed her down, even if it was her own. The only other sounds she could hear were overgrown branches scratching against a window upstairs, and water pipes which occasionally rattled for no reason.

How could it be possible to have travelled thousands of miles and still be the same person when you arrived? Sara couldn't understand it.

Aside from the fact that she now had thirteen books and zero friends, of course.

‘Pull yourself together,' she said again, but it didn't quite work this time.

Sara assumed that the majority of people who ever thought about her believed she used books to hide away from life.

And maybe it was true. As early as high school, she had realised that few people paid attention to you if you were hidden behind a book. Now and then, she needed to glance up to duck a flying ruler or other object, but they hadn't usually been thrown at her in particular, and she didn't often lose her place in the book. While her classmates had bullied or been bullied, carved meaningless symbols into desks or scrawled on one another's lockers, she had experienced irrepressible passion, death, laughter, foreign lands, days gone by. Others might have found themselves stuck in a tired old high school in Haninge, but she had been a geisha in Japan, walked alongside China's last empress through the claustrophobic, closed-off rooms of the Forbidden City, grown up with Anne and the others in Green Gables, gone through her fair share of murder, and loved and lost over and over again.

Books had been a defensive wall, yes, though that wasn't all. They had protected Sara from the world around her, but they had also turned it into a fuzzy backdrop for the real adventures in her life.

You might have thought that ten years in a bookshop would take some of the magic of books away, but for Sara the opposite was true. Nowadays, she had two memories for every book: the memory of having sold it and the memory of having read it. She had sold countless copies of Terry Pratchett before, only a few years ago, she had given in and read one of them, making the acquaintance of one of the most fantastic, and definitely most reliable, authors living today. She remembered the summer when it felt as though almost all she had sold was Ulla-Carin Lindqvist's memoir
Rowing without Oars
, about her struggle with an incurable disease, and the night three years later when she had finally read it. She remembered that the cover featured a dark silhouette and earthy, muted colours, like a hot evening just after the sun has gone down; that the book was small and short and that everyone who bought it simply had to talk about it. ‘It's her, the news anchor'; ‘the newsreader who died'; ‘she was so good on TV'; talking as though it had somehow broken their hearts that someone from TV could die. Sara knew it was one of those books which moved people even before they started reading it.

She had carried more piles of Dan Brown novels from the storeroom than she could bear to think about, sold the Harry Potter series in at least three different paperback editions, and seen the remarkable Swedish crime wave emerge, grow and continue for evermore. She hadn't really noticed Camilla Läckberg's arrival, but she had discovered her in paperback. That was how it often was with Sara.

She must have sold tens of thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of books, but it was pointless trying to keep count. If she had ever considered her future during those years, she would probably have assumed that she would grow old in the bookshop, that she would gradually become greyer and dustier than the unsold books in the little storeroom, calmly selling paper and ballpoint refills for all eternity, before retiring on a pension consisting mostly of the books which she had, over the years, bought with her staff discount.

But Josephssons Bokhandel had closed, she had found herself unemployed, and now here she was, all alone in the USA.

When a car pulled into the driveway, she was almost grateful for the distraction. The minister from the funeral climbed out, and as he walked towards the house, she tried out three different smiles in the mirror in the hallway.

‘Just be normal, Sara,' she said to her reflection, but the woman staring wide-eyed back at her looked, tragically, like a petrified mouse wearing a turban. She had been walking around the house for over an hour and completely forgotten to take the towel off her hair. She threw it into a cupboard, tried to comb her hair with her fingers and went out onto the porch to greet the minister.

Your smile, Sara
, she reminded herself.

The minister looked as nervous as she felt. His white clerical collar should have been enough to give him a certain dignity, but it was ruined by his thin hair, which refused to lie flat, and his cheap orange quilted jacket which looked like it had been bought on sale in the eighties.

‘Amy's death has been a real blow to the town,' he said. He stood in front of the porch with one foot on the first step, as though he couldn't decide whether he was going to come up or leave again. ‘A real hard blow.'

‘Yes,' she said. ‘How … how did she die?'

Perhaps it was inappropriate of her to ask, but she realised she really did want to know. The minister mumbled something about ‘illness'. Not an accident, then. But it still must have been sudden, her death. As little as three weeks ago, Sara had sent Amy all the details of her trip and hadn't heard anything other than the plan that she would be met in Hope.

She wondered whether she should offer him a coffee. What exactly were the rules of hospitality when you were a non-paying guest in a dead woman's house?

‘I don't really know where I should be going,' she said.

‘Going?' The minister looked, if possible, even more nervous. He took his foot from the step. ‘But you're staying here, aren't you?' When that had no effect on her, he added: ‘Everyone loved Amy, you know. It's nice for us to see that her house isn't standing empty and abandoned. Do you need anything, by the way? You've got food?'

‘Enough for several weeks, probably.' She told herself this didn't mean she had agreed to stay, it was just that at that precise moment she wasn't sure what other choice she had. She doubted that the minister would agree to drive her somewhere else, and besides, she had no idea where that might be.

‘Good, good. And anything else? You'll probably need a car?'

‘I don't have a driver's licence.'

He gave a start. ‘Ah, OK. Hmm, yes … I'll have to talk to Caroline about that.' He seemed relieved to have made a decision, and said goodbye before Sara had the chance to decide whether she should have asked him if he wanted a coffee.

She still hadn't solved the coffee question when her next visitor arrived. This time, it didn't matter.

Mrs Jennifer – ‘Call me Jen' – Hobson was an American housewife worthy of the vice president's office. She had perfectly styled dark hair which seemed almost to be an entity in itself, and the slightly manic smile of someone who spends too much time with small children. She marched straight into the kitchen, and put the coffeemaker on.