The mysterious Hotakainen family

-I don't get it. If these Hotakainen people are abducting anyone who comes near their island, why don't you just stop buying their stuff and selling things to them?
The Finnish shopkeeper gave Emil a resigned look:
-It is illegal to do anything like this based on suspicion alone. A few investigators and mages were brought in over the years, and none of them have found any kind of incriminating evidence. Onni knows it, and I suspect he's quite harsh towards the kid if he returns without something he was asked to buy or obviously got cheated during a sale or a purchase. The weapon merchant's daughter refused to do business with him once. His response was to throw a length of his family's wool cloth on one of the displays, grab a box of ammo and run away with it. She couldn't go after him for theft because the cloth he threw on the display was enough to pay for the box. But if you don't pull that kind of trick, that kid is the easiest customer ever. He doesn't even try to haggle. If the price is much higher or much lower than last time, he asks the reason so he can tell it to Onni. And since the kid looks really scared of him, nobody wants Onni to show up and have to explain themselves to him directly.
-Has anyone actually seen this Onni? And does "the kid" have a name?
-Onni was already six when the family started acting strange. Before that, his parents had taken him to the market a few times, so some of us knew his face. But the kid isn't as keen on disclosing his name as he was, so we keep calling him that despite the fact that he's getting kind of old for it.

The shopkeeper had already given Emil the whole story about the Hotakainen family "acting strange". The grandmother had given birth to twin boys of an unknown father in her youth. While her sons were growing up, she had made herself quite the reputation as a magical healer. Twenty-one years ago, little after the second of the twins had gotten married, all members of the family, except for the grandmother, had stopped coming to the market from one week to the next. Thirteen years ago, the grandmother had started coming with "the kid", who had been six at the time. Eleven years ago, one evening, smoke had come from the small island on which the family was living with no neighbors. Some kind of magic barrier had kept anyone from getting close to their farmstead. By the next morning, whatever had been happening had been taken care of. "The kid" had come to the market, alone. The house catching fire and said fire having been put out of had been the only information he had offered spontaneously. Everything else, including the death toll, people had had to goad out of him by asking him direct and specific questions. There had been many questions he had just plain refused to answer, claiming people didn't need to know. He next asked to buy supplies to help repair the buildings and rebuild the family's flock of sheep. After that, he became the only member of the family to ever come to the market, like his grandmother before him. The merchants, however, had noticed something odd from talking to each other. From what they had figured out, "the kid" was the only child of the second twin to get married. His aunt, Onni's mother, had been starting to show a baby bump before stopping to come to the market, lining up with the fact that he had mentioned having a slightly older female cousin. The death toll of the night the fire had happened had consisted of the grandmother and both sets of parents. However, each time an item had a "one per person living in the home" purchase recommendation, "the kid" always got four. The first time it happened, the merchant selling the item had asked if there was a fourth still-living family member that they didn't know about, only to get the confirmation that they family now consisted only of himself, Onni, and Onni's younger sister. All the other times, "the kid" had remained mute when asked who he needed the fourth item for. There were a bunch of theories about who that fourth person was. Emil asking why nobody had simply gone to the island to find out for themselves had been what had prompted the shopkeeper to tell him about the family's possible abduction of people getting too close to their home. One of the theories about that fourth person was that it was never the same fourth person for very long.

The shopkeeper spoke again:
-I've heard stories about you and your two friends. I'm more than willing to believe those that claim that the three of you actually treasure your lives, and that you consider your real job to find some kind of nice story to tell Icelanders who refuse to believe how hard things are outside of their allegedly god-blessed country. If I were you, I'd choose now to stop pretending to be looking for people who were probably eaten by trolls or beasts twenty years ago. Pity that they were expecting a baby, but such things are of no importance to hungry monsters looking for their next meal.
Emil couldn't help pointing out the flaw in the man's reasoning:
-Excuse me, but the people we're looking for weren't immune and the woman's pregnancy was crippling her so much that they weren't able going to be able to go back to Iceland before she had the baby. Why in the world would they go anywhere outside a safe area on their own?
-And why in the world would someone wait twenty damn years to hire someone to investigate their disappearance?
-Their foster children couldn't afford it at the time, and a few snags in each of their lives kept them from saving much money. The oldest brother got a promotion to captain a few months ago, and they were finally able to save enough money between them.
-Given this family's likely activities, it's still best that the three of you leave as soon as possible. They tend to prefer people from out of town for some reason, so they may end up making the three of you come to them even if you decide against going to see them on your own.
Emil had to resign himself:
-An entire family isolating themselves on their own island for two decades, rumors that people getting to close to it disappear… Sigrun is definitely going to want to check the place out, now.
Before he could offer an explanation to the shopkeeper's inquisitive look, Emil noticed Kitty was nibbling at some of the smoked fish on display. He quickly purchased the piece, claimed that the others were waiting for him, grabbed Kitty, and ran. He could already hear Sigrun making a jab about how they were going to be dining on the cat's leftovers yet again. At least, this time, Kitty hadn't picked an expensive fish, of which the shopkeeper couldn't cut a smaller, more affordable piece without noticing the missing chunk.

Up to a couple years ago, Sigrun and Mikkel had actually been swindlers of sorts. Some Icelanders just plain refused to believe that their travelling loved ones had most likely been eaten by trolls or beasts, and were willing to pay a lot of money to find out what had "really" happened. Sigrun and Mikkel offered their "services" to those among them who wouldn't or couldn't leave their home for one reason or another. To make it look like they actually did what they had been paid for, they would actually travel to the last place the missing person had most likely been and exchange a few words with locals who could have seen them at the time. They did have a few rules, however. One was that they never knowingly swindled anyone into poverty. Another was to be good guests wherever they ended up being sent, and offer their help if it turned out to be needed. That gave them a good reputation and kept customers coming. A couple years ago, the "missing" person had turned out to be alive and well, having decided to settle in their travel destination. The loss of contact had been entirely due to lousy handwriting and a backcountry postal worker reading it incorrectly, resulting in the letters to the sender's family in Iceland piling up in a basket somewhere quite far away from their actual destination. That occurrence had made the news all over the Known World, and caught a then-seventeen Emil's attention. He hadn't been the only one to want join Sigrun and Mikkel in their ventures. He had stood out by keeping up with enough of the "trials" that Sigrun had set up to scare the applicants away that she and Mikkel had decided that the only way to get rid of him would be to take him with them on an actual job. Then that if the first one hadn't done the trick, the second probably would. After the third had ended, he'd been offered an actual contract. Before he actually signed, they admitted that those three jobs had been the first that they had seriously investigated. Finding a still-living person where they had expected to find yet another imprudent grossling victim had been rewarding in ways they hadn't expected. They now wanted to actually find out all they could about the missing people for themselves, and not just their clients. And if it did turn out to be yet another grossling victim, it would at least give them the material to make the story they told their client better than it would have been before their first successful job.

Emil came back to Sigrun and Mikkel as they were setting up camp, and asked them what they had found out. Mikkel could speak Finnish, but Sigrun couldn't, so they had parted ways to be able to speak to more people. Mikkel had heard of the Hotakainen family from the very woman who had been running the boarding house in which the couple they were looking for had stayed twenty years ago. According to her, for the first ten years of the Hotakainen family's isolation, her guests would disappear quite regularly. The couple the three of them were looking for may have even been the first to be subject to the phenomenon. They would go out for a walk and not come back. But those disappearances had stopped after the fire on the Hotakainen's island. Little after the fire, signs asking people to not disembark had been set up on the island. People now avoided the island part out of respect for the signs, part because warning shots had actually been fired to people disregarding them, part because of the strange disappearances that had actually happened before the fire.
-Then that's settled, we're going there tomorrow morning.
Neither Mikkel nor Emil had to actually utter the word "what?". Giving Sigrun the usual look sufficed.
-Everything points to those kids not actually wanting to harm anyone. Meanwhile, we're looking for people who disappeared right around the time members of that family may or may not have been abducting people. We make sure they understand we're not with the army, we tell them the names, we show them the photo, and if they really seem to have no idea who we're talking about, we leave. Simple.
As usual, Mikkel pointed out the obvious:
-Provided that we actually get to the point where we can have a formal discussion with them, what do you plan on doing if they give any sign of knowing something but refusing to share it with us? Our purpose is to find out what happened to missing people, and good story to bring back if we can't. Not to become missing people ourselves.
Sigrun waved her hand in Mikkel's general direction:
-We'll cross that bridge when we get to it. The first step will be to see if it's actually possible to stay on that island more than a few minutes without getting shot to death. Better brush up on those talking skills, you two.
That sounded like a good idea. Some of the merchants Emil had spoken to had used words whose meanings he could only guess, so he decided to pull his Swedish-Finnish dictionary out to make sure he had guessed correctly and avoid any future embarrassment. After looking through his stuff twice, and emptying the contents of both his bags, he had to admit defeat: he had actually managed to forget the dictionary in Reykjavik. He remembered seeing a bookseller at the market, and the market's hours at its entrance. If he hurried, he could get there before it closed.

The bookseller turned out to still be open, and to have a cheap Finnish-Swedish dictionary. Considering they were not exactly in the central part of Saimaa, Emil decided to not be too picky. Right after he took his money, the bookseller addressed a young man around Emil's age who had started looking at the merchandise during the transaction:
-Ah, it's been a while. How much do you have left over this time?
The new customer was a young man with grey-blue eyes and ash-blonde chin-length hair, a little taller than Emil himself, but much thinner and with sharper angles in his facial features. He was wearing a white long-sleeved hooded sweater, pants of the same color, and light brown gloves that happened to match the shirt he was wearing under his sweater. He handed a length of undyed wool cloth to the bookseller, who examined it before picking up a handful of smaller books and inviting him to pick one. Emil noticed one of the books seemed to be the Icelandic equivalent of the dictionary he had just purchased for himself. It ended up being the one chosen by the thin young man, which Emil found kind of odd. A language-to-language dictionary wasn't exactly something one brought on a whim with spare bartering currency as far as he knew. Emil and the bookseller were apparently like-minded:
-It may be a good idea that you pick something else. I only really put that one in here for the sake of actually showing you everything you can buy. If that family of yours won't even leave their island, it's quite unlikely that any of you will ever run into someone who speaks Icelandic.