“Are there problems?” Abel asked. He’d taken Micha’s little hand. “Problems in class?”

“No, that’s not it, it’s just … Micha told me her mother has gone on a trip, and it seems to be such a long trip … is it true she’s away, traveling?”

“Yes,” Abel said. “Yes, that’s true.”

“And who looks after Micha?”

“Santa Claus,” Abel growled and helped Micha onto the carrier of his bike. Mrs. Milowicz was still staring after them when they left the schoolyard, her face puzzled.

“How can she understand?” Anna asked. “You’re being unreasonable. I mean, it’s not her fault, is it? She hasn’t done anything wrong … she’s just a teacher and she’s worried.”

“She’s too curious,” said Abel. “Maybe she put the social worker onto us. Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. Ketow after all. By the way, we’re still waiting for the next social worker to turn up. It looks like no one’s taken over Marinke’s cases yet … who knows, we might get lucky and they won’t remember us until after the thirteenth of March.”

Anna had hoped that Magnus and Linda would be late, like they were last Friday, but Fridays weren’t regular days in the house of blue air, and both of them were already home. She had warned them, of course, because of the laundry. She wondered if that was the reason they were there. They both said they’d just happened to finish work early. Naturally.

Anna saw Abel flinch as he hung his jacket on the coatrack in the hall and heard Magnus’s voice from the first floor. He flinched like a frightened dog. Anna put a hand on his arm. “Stay,” she said, as she would to a dog, and felt stupid. She thought of the dog that belonged to Bertil’s family, in the backseat of the Volvo, the dog that bore an uncanny resemblance to the animal in the fairy tale. She could still hear his whining in the snowstorm.

“How nice to have visitors,” Linda said. “I thought we could have lunch together …”

Abel was sitting at the table like an animal ready to jump up and run. Everything he said was distilled, ice-cold politeness, and Anna was close to kicking him under the table, but she didn’t. Micha had no trouble with the situation. She told Linda everything about her school and the friend she’d visited on Wednesday … that they’d built an igloo together … that she wanted a dog when she got older, or actually, a dog and a white horse. The horse had to stand in the middle of a garden full of apple trees, of course.

“Yes, I agree,” Linda said. “That’s where white horses belong.”

Toward the end of their lunch, Abel was sitting in his chair, a little calmer, and his eyes had stopped darting around the living room as if it were a trap he had to escape.

“And now it’s probably best if you just throw your clothes into the machine,” Linda said, “and I’ll see to it that they get cleaned and folded. I think I’ve already been introduced to one of your sweatshirts …”

“Then Linda has a lot to do for her university classes,” Magnus said, throwing a glance at Linda. “And I’m very busy with a mountain of patient files.”

Anna had to keep herself from grinning. But listen you will, she thought, oh, you will, despite all your efforts to melt into the background. Well, go ahead and listen …

“We got something important, too,” Micha said. “We’re going to hear the next part of a certain fairy tale …”

Anna led the two of them up to her room. All you could see from the window now was a strange and distant memory of the garden. The roses had completely disappeared under the snow, and a single lonely robin was waiting for Magnus on top of the birdhouse.

They sat on the floor with their backs against the big bookshelf, watching the snowflakes gently floating down from the sky outside, and Abel said, “Let’s see … the fairy tale … In the fairy tale, the little queen and her crew are just now starting to walk over the ice. The ice is smooth and wide, lying beneath the snow like a secret thought. But at the shore of the murderer’s island, the waves have piled the ice floes on top of each other. The secret thought had broken into big splinters, interlinking with each other and forming strange figures you couldn’t take apart, couldn’t sort, like a puzzle or a riddle.”

He put one arm around Micha and then, after a moment’s hesitation, one around Anna, and, although it was quite uncomfortable, Anna left the arm there. “It was difficult to walk over the ice. They kept slipping, losing their balance, falling, standing up again, walking on. When the ship had shrunk to the size of a child’s toy behind them and then become nothing more than a tiny green spot, they stopped again and looked through the binoculars, one after another. It had started to snow.

“‘Aren’t those our pursuers over there?’ the asking man asked.

“‘Under the beeches, where the anemones bloom in spring,’ the answering man answered, and the rose girl had the distinct feeling she’d heard that answer before. Possibly, she thought, the pool of answers was limited. There are fewer answers in the world than questions, and if you ask me now why that is so, I must tell you that there is no answer to that question.’

“The little queen saw their pursuers had reached the green ship. The black ship was also stuck in the ice, and now the fat diamond eater and the two haters were on foot as well. But there was another person with them, a young woman who had pulled her blond hair back in a very serious, grave way … like a teacher. She was wearing teacher’s glasses.

“‘Who’s that?’ the little queen wanted to know and held the binoculars down to the golden eyes of the dog.

“‘That’s the gem cutter,’ the dog answered. ‘Do you see the tools sticking out of her coat pocket? Take good care, little queen; the gem cutter, too, wants to own your diamond heart. She wants to grind and polish and form it after her own ideas. But if she manages to do that, you won’t recognize your own heart …’

“‘Look! There!’ the little queen exclaimed. ‘They are climbing aboard our ship! Do they think we’re still there?’

“But shortly after that, from the deck of the green ship, a colorful balloon drifted up into the cold air. A gondola hung beneath it, a gondola designed only for emergencies, and in the gondola, sat the two haters and the diamond eater.

“‘They’re fleeing!’ the little queen said and started to dance in the snow, jumping up and down happily. ‘They’re afraid of the endless ice! Look, the wind is blowing them away from us! They gave up! I guess they will return to their own islands!’

“‘They will,’ the lighthouse keeper said gravely, ‘and I can tell you why. They don’t think we’ll make it. They think the diamond is lost anyway, lost in the eternal ice of this story. There’s only one person who believes that the diamond will survive. One single person who is not aboard the gondola.’

“‘The cutter,’ whispered the rose girl.

“The silver-gray dog nodded. ‘She will keep following us,’ he said. ‘We should hurry.’

“That was when the rose girl remembered something. She reached into her backpack and took out a pair of skates. And then another pair and another pair … the whole backpack had been full of skates.

“Only there weren’t any skates for the blind white cat. ‘And all the better,’ said the cat. ‘Cats are not made for ice-skating. It’s much too undignified. Who’s going to carry me?’

“The asking man asked the answering man if he would like to take turns carrying the cat, and the answering man answered: ‘In the box on top of the bathroom cupboard.’ Another answer, the rose girl thought, that she had heard already.

“So they started skating, and the gently falling snow covered their traces. The silver-gray dog was running next to them, on foot. When he had tried to skate, his four legs had gotten into such confusion that he almost couldn’t sort them out again. And any way, he preferred being a tragic character as opposed to a comic one.