Cursed

I still cannot tell, three years after that strange spring, what it was that happened in the small town where I am sheriff. But perhaps you are wiser than me. If I tell you the story, perhaps you can explain it to me. Ole Tonnesen was found hanging from his grain silo on a Sunday morning in early April. He was a 37-year-old farmer who had inherited his farm a few years earlier. He left behind a wife, who had recently begun preparations for their copper wedding anniversary, and three daughters between four and eleven years old. "I do not understand," said his wife, Henriette Tonnesen, again and again to her girlfriends who gathered to comfort her in the hard times. "We had a good marriage; he was looking forward to the party. He did not seem depressed." Nevertheless, the forensics experts were quick to declare the patriarch of the family dead by his own hand. Suicide, in other words. His death was the first, but unfortunately not the last, in a series of events that occurred in the small town in the forthcoming months. I only began to suspect that something was afoot about a week later when Merete Keldsen was found at the pier with a rope around her throat, a stone at the end of the rope.