They didn’t know what it was they had found. But they knew it wasn’t the treasure. It was the opposite of treasure. Later, when asked to explain to the police and their parents why they had been in the woods, Simen found this hard to do. Why had they started digging in that particular clearing? Under that particular tree? And what exactly had they been looking for? Two years earlier, in July 2008, everyone had been out searching for Milla. Far and wide, over land and sea, in ditches and trenches, in the sand hills out on the point and all around the forbidding cliffs, in the pile of rubble behind the old school and in the empty, tumbledown houses at the end of Brage Road where grass grew out of the windows and no child was allowed to go. Simen remembered scouring every inch of town, thinking she might just be hiding somewhere waiting to be found, and that maybe if he looked really hard, he’d be the one to find her. Everyone had searched for Milla, even the boy known as K.B., the one who was later arrested and charged with her murder, searched for her, and for two years she had lain buried under that tree in the woods, unfound, covered by dirt and grass and moss and twigs and stones until she had almost turned to dirt herself, all except for her skull and bits of bones and her teeth and the long dark hair, which was no longer long and dark, but wispy and withered, as if it had been yanked up out of the ditch, roots and all.
