On a bleak afternoon on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, she had experienced a stark, crossing-the-line moment with her pill habit. It was finals week for local high school students. Brand knew the little privileged brats would be well supplied with meds for their study sessions. She braced a half dozen teens on Columbus Avenue, cleaned out their backpacks for baggies of Addy, then sent them on their way with a kick in the pants.
Standing there in the weak winter sunshine, counting her confiscated beans, she spilled a few onto the sidewalk. Instantly she was on her knees scrambling to scoop them up. As her knuckles scraped the cold concrete, Brand suddenly stopped, realizing it was all too much. Tears welled in her eyes. Lately she had been reduced to three modes of being: drunk, tweaked, or weeping. Job troubles exacerbated her pill habit, and vice versa. She was spiraling down, but she couldn’t stop.
One final development had sent her flying out of Newark to Sweden, hurtling over the Atlantic Ocean in the dark. As she parked her suspended ass in her lonely Murray Hill apartment, feeling shell shocked amid the smoking ruins of her life, her cell phone rang. The number displayed indicated a foreign caller. Aware of various phone scams that were proliferating, she told herself not to answer. She would never know why she did.
The voice came through in Swedish. The caller sounded older than old. The words didn’t belong on a telephone, but on a wax cylinder. The voice of god, provided god was a woman. It spoke a cadence of syllables that Brand didn’t understand.
“Du måste komma hit. Jag har en hemlighet som du måste se.”
The tone was hoarse and insistent. Foreign on the one hand and somehow naggingly familiar on the other. Brand puzzled out what she could. Du måste komma hit. “You have to come here.” Hemlighet? What was that? “Something at home?”
“I’m sorry, um, I don’t speak…”
The person on the other end of the line stammered in frustration. “Kom hit!” she rasped, then, in accented English, a command: “Come here!”
The line went dead. Brand tried to figure it out. What had just happened? The phone was still in her hand when it rang again.
Another, different voice, a little sunnier. “Hello, is this Veronika Brand?” Brand had been hearing an ancient oak tree. Now here was the breeze whistling through the leaves.
The second voice was that of her second cousin, Sanna Dalgren. Veronika knew her. The two had met briefly a single time, over coffee during a tourist visit Sanna had made to New York City. Brand had cut short the meeting, pleading work pressures, but in truth had felt unnerved by her foreign cousin’s unflinching gaze. Since then she had been included in Sanna’s pointless family emails, all in Swedish which Brand had little interest in translating. She left the communications mostly unanswered, and vaguely considered blocking them.
Sanna identified the person Brand had heard initially as the clan’s matriarch, Elin Dalgren. The sister of Brand’s grandfather, the woman would soon turn ninety-five years old. Sanna informed Brand that Elin Dalgren wanted especially to invite the American detective to her upcoming birthday celebration.
“You’ve never met,” Sanna said.
“No,” Brand responded. “I didn’t quite get the Swedish. It sounded as though it were something like an emergency.”
Her cousin gave a musical laugh. “Oh, no, nothing like that. Mamma said she had some family secrets to tell you. Probably cake recipes.”
Sanna Dalgren told Brand Elin’s ninety-fifth birthday would be the occasion of a family reunion. “We would love to invite you over here to meet your Swedish relatives.”
Just when New York City had turned radioactive on her, the phone call from her relatives offered Brand an escape. She didn’t really want to go. What she wanted to do was lock the door of her Manhattan apartment, climb into bed and pull the covers over her head. When she gazed into her immediate future, she saw disciplinary hearings, cold shoulders in the precinct house, perhaps media coverage, public disgrace.
She didn’t really believe any of the powerfully connected cops she had gone up against would have the stones to move against her physically. But the possibility couldn’t be discounted entirely. Walking the streets of Manhattan, she found herself checking her back. In the past few weeks a faint whiff of danger had marked her days. Her enemies were high up in the NYPD hierarchy. They could sink her.
The situation was untenable. Brand felt uncertain whether her Swedish escapade was a flying to or a fleeing from. She couldn’t shake the suspicion she was attempting a geographical cure for her professional difficulties. But she also continued to hear the urgency in an old woman’s voice, a summons that sounded as though it came from the edge of the grave.
So, Sweden. At 9:30 in the morning local time, on the day after she had left New York, the Scandinavian Airlines plane swung into its glide path. Brand heard somewhere that air travelers came in three types, window seats for dreamers, aisle seats for achievers, middle seats for the passive and hapless. Though she had an aisle seat for the flight, she felt misplaced. She didn’t know where she fit. Out on the wing, perhaps?
Through the windows opposite appeared glimpses of the landscape below, not the expected winter wonderland but a dour countryside of sullen, February gray. Sunlight seemed to be having some difficulty punching through to the earth.
The cabin lights came on and everywhere around her the dead awakened. Brand experienced the moment of landing as a snapping back into a real-world ho-hum perspective after the magic of flight.
The plane taxied to the gate. Her fellow passengers listened for the chime and watched for the seatbelt light
