Norwegian by Night (32 page)

Sheldon nods for both of them.

‘Right. Here we go.' He stops, looks down the road, and starts to count.

‘Ten.'

Paul stops and looks at him.

‘Nine.'

Nothing happens.

‘Eight.'

A bird poos directly in front of Sheldon, which makes Paul laugh, but Sheldon raises a finger and says, ‘Concentrate.'

‘Seven.'

The cool breeze blows off the river, accompanied by a chilling cloud that makes Sheldon close his eyes just for a moment and blissfully forget the world.

‘Six.'

Nothing.

‘Five.'

Sheldon sticks his thumb out higher and with more confidence.

‘Four.'

He closes his eyes and concentrates. Really focuses his mental energies. On what, he's not entirely sure. He tries to imagine the Swedish women's volleyball team slowing down and asking directions to heaven. He is partly sure that Bill has placed this vision in his mind.

‘Three.'

A nap would be very welcome now. Who is going to explain to the boy that his mother is dead? How much longer should he wait until going to the police?

‘Two.'

Is there any way the killer could know about the summer house? He must be missing something.
Am I missing something?

‘One and a half.'

Will they try for another baby? Or is this it? The end of days for the family?

‘One.'

And then, if not on cue, at least on time, a pick-up truck filled with five hunters and their rifles comes around the bend and slows down.

There is a scruffy man in his early forties wearing a T-shirt who hangs out the passenger-side window as the truck comes to a halt. In a friendly tone, he says something to Sheldon in Norwegian. Paul — it seems — is almost about to speak when Sheldon takes the pencils from his mouth and says expansively and in English, ‘Boy, am I glad to see you boys. My grandson and I broke down a few kilometres back. We're trying to get to a cabin outside Kongsvinger. You couldn't give us a lift, could you?'

The man is just about to speak when Sheldon rubs a handkerchief across his forehead and says, ‘Yes, indeed. Some nice cold beers, some chilled white wine, and a big pile of pork. That's what I could use this afternoon. In fact, I have to go to the Wine Monopoly in town before going out to the cabin. I couldn't interest you boys in a little barbecue before you go back in the forest to shoot bunnies, could I? Speaking of which, I don't see any game in the truck. Didn't you kill anything?'

A large one in the back sort of slumps a little and turns sullen. His friend across the bench pokes a finger at him. ‘Tormod missed.'

Tormod nods. ‘I missed.'

‘Poor Tormod. Better luck next time. So how about it?'

Today is the fourth day. The event took place, and they had fled. They had bedded down at the hotel, made for the water, slept in the blue house by the fjord, forded the land by tractor and raft, and then made camp down at Jackson's Island. Now they were up again and, hopefully, on the final stretch.

That's a good amount of time to be on the run with a boy. Any moment now, the tumblers could fall into place in Paul's mind, and the enormity of what he has experienced could swell his soul. If he started to encounter the past now, he could become inconsolable. Once that happened, what could Sheldon do? Paul would go from being his companion to his hostage. And that is not what friends do.

Hitchhiking was dangerous. But strategy changes with circumstance. And now was the time to catch a ride and hope that the police have made some progress in catching the killer.

Sheldon sits as comfortably as he can on someone's duffle bag in the back of the Ford F150 as it glides along the well-trimmed road by the tiny lakes and ponds that pop in and out of view. The hills undulate as they round each bend. The road twists and meanders, and then straightens again for long stretches past farmland and forest. Sheldon pulls the scent of cut grass and pine trees into his lungs.

‘I should have spent more time outside,' he says to the young man in the hunting vest sitting beside Tormod.

When Sheldon had first moved here last month, Lars had told him that the Norwegian mountains form a continuous chain across the sea to Scotland, Ireland, and the American Appalachians that run directly through the Berkshires of Massachusetts. They run across the seas and oceans from when the world was one piece and the continents lived together. The land was called Pangaea.

Sheldon didn't know if it was true, but he smiled at Lars for his kindness.

Now he is sitting next to a young man named Mads. Mads is having the devil's time trying to light a cigarette in the back of the truck. Sheldon watches as he tenaciously burns through some eight or ten matches before sitting bolt upright and looking around wide-eyed for some reservoir of patience.

Sheldon smiles to himself and then snaps his finger to get Mads' attention. Then he points to a spot in the centre of the truck directly behind the cabin.

‘Sit there.'

‘Why?'

‘The air flows over the cabin, and at this speed it creates a vacuum behind it. There's no turbulence in there. You can light up like you're in the kitchen.'

Mads is perhaps twenty-three or twenty-four, though these fair-skinned kids can be a bit older than they look. He's a little more slight than the other four men, and has a hapless charm that Sheldon finds endearing. He is the kind of boy who could grow into a malcontent or else a leader of men, depending on the winds and fortune.

Mads looks at the spot in the trunk and then skirts over there and sits. He strikes the match, and smiles as it gently flickers before the orange point singes the tobacco and white paper.

‘Cool,' says Mads. ‘How'd you know that? You an engineer?

With the warm breeze blowing around him, Donny locks his blue eyes on Mads with the affected tone of a hilltop sage. ‘I used to design search-and-rescue aircraft for the Canadian Mounties, 1961 through 1979. You ever hear of the wreck of the
Edmund Fitzgerald
?'

‘No.'

‘Good. Lake Gitche Gumee. Or at least that's what the Chippewa called it. It was November, and the gales were blowing. Ship was loaded with 26,000 tons of iron ore, more than the good ship weighed empty. A hurricane-force west wind came in, and the ship was in peril. Then … then there's something about Wisconsin and Cleveland I can't remember. So we came in by air from Whitefish Bay, but the hurricane gales were slashing, and it was freezing rain. If the
Fitzgerald
could have put fifteen more miles behind her, we could have saved those twenty men. But it wasn't meant to be. No sir, it wasn't meant to be.'

Mads nods and takes a pull off his cigarette. He sits silently after that.

Sheldon rubs his hands together. He isn't cold, but circulation at his age isn't always dependant on temperature. Seating position alone is enough to make anything go numb. Anything that still had feeling to begin with.

‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald' was a song by someone named Gordon Lightfoot. It was playing incessantly on the radio in August 1976, a month after Rhea showed up. The same four chords went round and round in a mournful, monotonous, drunken hymn. A cargo ship had, in fact, sunk on Lake Superior in 1975, killing twenty-nine men. The song made number two in the charts a year later. Meanwhile, 50,000 American soldiers died in the jungle, including his son and Eli Johnson, and Sheldon couldn't find a bumper sticker on the streets of New York during the bicentennial remembering them.

But that goddamned song played on and on as the teenagers wept.

After being struck on the head yesterday, Sigrid had allowed the medics to examine her, but otherwise refused, refused, refused to go to the hospital. Instead, she vomited in the police station's bathroom, cleaned herself up, and — once she found it — sat behind her desk with feigned dignity.

She slept in the office as a compromise with the medics so that she could remain under some supervision, in case she needed emergency aid. The station was busy all night, and someone was assigned at each shift to look in on her.

Today, Sheldon and Paul have been on the road for several hours before Sigrid finally sits up on her sofa to a large, shapeless mass in front of her making cloying, guttural sounds, both off-putting and strangely insistent.

As through a sea of molasses, Sigrid wades to her desk, where she takes a piece of salty liquorice from the drawer and pops it into her mouth.

With each heartbeat, she is being slammed in the back of the head by a semi driven by a persistent old woman who will take
no
further lessons.

‘He's still in custody?' she asks.

‘Your assailant? Yes. Still here.'

‘Is he the killer?'

‘We don't think so.'

‘In that case, can I just smash him over the head with a fire extinguisher?'

‘Unfortunately, no,' the shapeless mass answers in a voice much like Petter's.

‘We didn't shoot him in some struggle, did we?'

‘Again, unfortunately, no.'

‘We should interrogate him.'

‘We should open the box.'

‘What box?'

‘The pink box. The one on your desk. That you think belongs to the dead woman.'

‘Yes. That's a good idea. I can use my gun. Where's my gun?'

‘No,' says the someone, who is evidently Petter. ‘We want to use the key. We don't just want to open the box. We want to know whether it belonged to the woman. So we want to use her key.'

‘Right. And if the key fits the lock on the box, it'll establish the connection between the key, the box, and the woman.'

‘That's the idea.'

‘And it might explain something about the murder.'

‘Yes, it might. We're hoping it will give us the legal grounds to arrest the father.'

‘Legal.'

‘We're upholding the law.'

‘Which is how we fight crime.'

Petter smiles. ‘You're feeling better.'

‘Burn after reading.'

‘No, we don't want to burn anything.'

‘George Clooney shot Brad Pitt in
Burn after Reading
. In a closet. I knew that guy was wrong.'

‘He probably didn't see that one.'

Changing the subject: ‘Norwegian law isn't good enough. Not for this case.'

‘What do you mean?'

‘Between throbs last night, I was looking at their records. None of them, not one, is in the Schengen database.'

‘Not so surprising. If there's no criminal record …'

‘Well, see, that's the thing about war crimes. No able-or-functioning courts in a war-torn country means no trials and no convictions, and so no record in the SIS, which means almost no grounds for rejecting their immigrant status. The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia was supposed to fill some of that gap, but it's a big, big gap.'

‘There are many things to fix in the world. Can we open the box now?'

‘What box?'

‘Here's the key.'

Petter hands her a very small silver key. It is less than two centimetres long, with a small tooth that splits into two. It is extremely rudimentary, designed to do little more than deter siblings and parents. The lock is intended to hold off the perpetrator just long enough for him to be arrested by his own sense of guilt.

Sigrid takes the key.

‘The problem is that all the things that aren't fixed allow the flotsam and jetsam of Europe to flow into our little Norwegian boat here. The politicians are so excited about uniting Europe that they set the little boat to sea before its hull was patched up and ready for the voyage. And that means the water just starts coming in and we sink before we set off. And we sink because of the unfounded optimism of a bunch of people we elected to office and don't get rid of, and don't educate, and don't hold accountable, who make feel-good policies that in the end wash all the problems up onto the deck as we sink. And the ones who have to bail them out are us. The cops. Want to know what's wrong with Norway? Ask us. We know.'

‘That's very lucid of you. Can we please open the box?'

Sigrid holds up the key and moves it towards the lock on the box.

‘It's awfully small.'

‘I'll do it.'

Petter takes the key and rotates the box around so it faces him. He places it in the lock, looks up at Sigrid, and then twists it.

It opens.

‘OK, then.'

Petter flips open the lid and looks in.

‘What are those?' he asks.

Sigrid isn't sure.

She opens the drawer of her desk, and takes out a pair of latex gloves. She puts them on, and takes out the contents of the box.