was. When summer came I hired three experienced woodsmen who did the entire
search over again with dogs. They combed every square foot of the island. By that
time I had begun to think that someone must have killed her. So they also searched
for a grave. They worked at it for three months. We found not the slightest vestige
of the girl. It was as if she had dissolved into thin air.”
“I can think of a number of possibilities,” Blomkvist ventured.
“Let’s hear them.”
“She could have drowned, accidentally or on purpose. This is an island, and water
can hide most things.”
“True, but the probability isn’t great. Consider the following: if Harriet met with an
accident and drowned, logically it must have occurred somewhere in the
immediate vicinity of the village. Remember that the excitement on the bridge was
the most sensational thing that had happened here on Hedeby Island in several
decades. It was not a time when a sixteen-year-old girl with a normal sense of
curiosity would decide to go for a walk to the other side of the island.
“But more important,” he said, “there’s not much of a current here, and the winds at
that time of year were out of the north or northeast. If anything falls into the water,
it comes up somewhere along the beach on the mainland, and over there it’s built
up almost everywhere. Don’t think that we didn’t consider this. We dragged almost
all the spots where she could conceivably have gone down to the water. I also
hired young men from a scuba-diving club here in Hedestad. They spent the rest of
the season combing the bottom of the sound and along the beaches...I’m
convinced she’s not in the water; if she had been we would have found her.”
“But could she not have met with an accident somewhere else? The bridge was
blocked, of course, but it’s a short distance over to the mainland. She could have
swum or rowed across.”
“It was late September and the water was so cold that Harriet would hardly have
set off to go swimming in the midst of all the commotion. But if she suddenly got
the idea to swim to the mainland, she would have been seen and drawn a lot of
attention. There were dozens of eyes on the bridge, and on the mainland side there
were two or three hundred people along the water watching the scene.”
“A rowing boat?”