She scrolls through her latest email exchange with Nora. The last email is nothing more than Nora's directions to the house in Bifröst, in case the GPS fails her, and warnings about the icy roads. The weather changes fast—and I mean fast. It can be sunny on one side of the road and snowing like a blizzard on the other. Then, a final word of thanks, before Agnes boarded her plane: It's an honor to share this place with you. I want you to know how much I appreciate what you're doing here...speaking with me.
Agnes Glin, granddaughter to Einar Pálsson, the suspected murderer in one of Iceland's most notorious unsolved crimes. The first one in the family to break the forty-year silence. The first one in the family to advocate, publicly, for Einar's innocence. Nora Carver has been falling all over herself to make Agnes comfortable. She knows, as they both know, that Agnes could have chosen anyone.
Agnes chose Nora mostly because of the timing, but she'd been impressed by her reputation. As Einar Pálsson's granddaughter, Agnes has spent her life avoiding the true crime genre. She prefers audio books, neo-noir detective novels, popcorn action thrillers, anything fictional and completely removed from her life. But she'd heard about Nora's podcast, The End, as had everyone else in the past year. Nora Carver, a different kind of true crime podcaster. One who has actually solved a cold case. Or, as Nora demurred in an interview with Rachel Maddow, contributed to a solve.
That had been the last season of The End, the investigation into the unsolved murder of Adriana Lopez, a twelve-year-old girl found near a playground in Modesto, California, in 1974. Agnes hadn't listened to that season, nor had she followed the case too closely—her grandfather was dying, and she'd had no time for anything else—but she knows enough. With Nora's help, they'd finally pinpointed the murderer. A police officer who had been caught in another, more recent murder of another young girl outside of Stockton, California. He'd never been a suspect, not until Nora found him in some lost paperwork.
When Agnes's father had received the email from Nora a month ago, notifying him of her plans to dedicate her next series to "the Frozen Madonna case," it fractured Agnes's already-tenuous balance with him.
He had recited Nora's email to Agnes, standing over her bed and reading from his phone as though he were a minister in his pulpit raging against the sins of the devil, rather than a reclusive engineer. You don't have to be on the record, not if you're not comfortable with it. But you could fill in the blanks, color in the details of your mother's life. Your sister's, too, tragically short as it was. The minister's eyes, startling her.
What are you going to do? Agnes had asked, even though she'd known the answer. She asked because that type of emotion requires an outlet. A storm cloud needs to burst with lightning.
I will tell her no. Her father's shaking hands. I will sue her. She's turning our family into a spectacle.
Since Agnes had moved back home, she hadn't experienced her father's anger. She'd expected it, though. She'd needed so much from him. Moving her bedroom from the second floor to the first, so she wouldn't have to contend with the stairs. Helping her to step over the tub, into and out of the shower. She'd waited for the outburst, the exasperation of a man carrying both his own and his daughter's dead weight, but instead he'd borne it all in the same manner he'd raised her. Stoically.
To her surprise, the anger didn't come last week, either, when Agnes told her father she'd reached out to Nora herself. That she'd learned the podcast host would be visiting Iceland—and not just visiting, but exploring the ruins of her grandfather's farmhouse, her father's childhood home—to record her series. To interview those who still live there, who till remember what had happened to her grandmother and her aunt. And that Agnes would be joining her. She would be interviewed, as well.
She'd braced herself for the bolts of lightning. The shouting. But her father had borne that, too, stoically.
The fight had come when she'd left for the airport. Maybe Magnús hadn't believed she'd actually go. Maybe he hadn't even heard her, too lost in the haze of his own inaccessible thoughts, when she'd told him her plans.
Despite her father's rage and disappointment, Agnes is proud of herself. She's doing the right thing. The hospital-appointed psychologist, Dr. Lee, had told her to find something constructive in her life, after her injury. Humans need to build. To create. That emptiness you feel is the lack of something to strive toward.
This isn't a hobby, like painting or knitting, as Dr. Lee had suggested. This is something greater. It hits Agnes now, the reality of what she's doing. What she's hoping to do. This is a chance at redemption for her family. Her father doesn't understand it yet. But he will.
She stares down at her phone. Along with the last email, Nora sent the demo she's already recorded, a teaser trailer she's created for the series. Agnes knows she ought to listen to it. She ought to be able to discuss the case using Nora's language, to steel herself for all the details she's successfully avoided all these years. She knows the Wikipedia article. She knows what her father has shared with her—very little—over the years. But there's so much more out there, waiting for her. Archives of blogs and photos. Books. Theories and gory details and photographs.
The Frozen Madonna and Child.
Agnes tells herself to put in her headphones. Hit play. Get it over with.
