The Body in the Fjord

station a little early.”

Pix knew what this meant. The Rowes considered being on time being wherever you had to go at least thirty minutes before. If this meant driving around a neighborhood until the doorbell could be rung precisely on the hour, then so be it. It was a trait Marit and her compatriots shared. In Norway, on time meant on time.

The moment the door closed, Pix put everything back in the envelope. It had been frustrating searching the room when she didn’t know the language. The letters and postcards in the box might have revealed something. On impulse, she took the photo of Hanna and Sven out of the envelope. She also removed the one of Kari and Erik from its frame and put both pictures in her wallet, tucked behind her passport. It seemed like something Faith would do. She smoothed the bed, fluffed up the pillows, and hung the picture back on the wall. It looked exactly the way it had before Pix had entered. Faith would have done this, too.

Ursula Rowe was sound asleep. Sitting across the aisle, Pix felt a pang. Her mother looked so vulnerable, her mouth slightly open. With her dark, lively eyes closed, she looked like the old lady she was. Pix had been dozing, too, but fear of drooling in public and troubled dreams had kept her from real sleep.

The sunshine of Oslo had given way to gray skies as they crossed the Hardangervidda. When he punched their tickets, the conductor had cheerfully assured them they would see much nature on the five-and-a-half-hour trip, but Pix was finding the vast empty stretches of landscape bleak and forbidding. It was also unsettling to plunge constantly in and out of the strings of snow tunnels, necessary to keep the line from east to west open during the harsh

winter. The vidda was the site of that horseback trip Marit, Ursula, and a group of Marit’s friends had taken so many years earlier. They had called themselves the “Cartwright sisters.” Bonanza was wildly popular in Norway at the time, as later Dallas proved to be—well before the country became a Dallas itself.

After the horseback trip, Ursula had returned to Aleford, uncharacteristically restless and touchy. She had raved about the wild beauty of the vidda, the lakes, the reindeer. Looking out the window, Pix suddenly understood why her mother might have chafed at Aleford’s tidy village green after this seemingly endless plain high in the mountains, so near to the sky—a sky whose horizon was broken not by trees but only an occasional hut, hytte, once used by herders, now by hikers, or converted to summer houses. Before the train, the paths that crossed and recrossed the vidda were well worn, essential connections between villages on the two coasts. Now the train eliminated the need, but the Norwegians were still walkers, taking pleasure in hiking across the lonely plateau from one isolated hut to another. She was seeing much nature. The conductor had been right. Whoosh. Another tunnel. The light flickered through the slats like a strobe. Pix closed her eyes.

Why did Kari and Erik have their passports? She had to find a moment to ask Marit when they struck up their “new” friendship tomorrow. It was the one thing that suggested they had planned to elope. Get married in Norway, then take off—for olive groves? Or had they simply packed them the way one does all sorts of things—to be prepared—penlites, rubber gloves, hair spray.

They were out of the tunnel. A red-faced young woman was having trouble negotiating a heavily laden food cart through the connecting compartment doors. Two passengers immediately leapt up to help her. Pix didn’t think this would happen on Amtrak. The Norwegian state railway system was clean, too—even the bathroom.

Ursula woke up. “Coffee, don’t you think? And maybe one of those pastries.”

Two coffees and two pastries, wrapped in plastic and tasting like train food everywhere, cost about what dinner at Legal Seafoods in Boston would. If they had opted for Cokes, it would have been dinner at Olives. The exchange rate was terrible and things cost the earth here. She’d have to stop converting to dollars or she might starve.

“We should be there soon.” Ursula moved over to sit next to her daughter. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Pix was about to confess that she was not as taken with the view as Ursula and that perhaps it was her mother’s fond memories coloring her opinions, when the sun broke through the dark clouds. Beams of light, so precise as to suggest the hand of some unseen Bergmanesque director, brought the surface of a lake in the distance to life, the colors of the moss-covered ground appeared, and a flock of birds took flight. A solitary hiker was silhouetted against the glow. It was beautiful.

“We had such a wonderful guide. We all loved him. Dead now, I should imagine. We all thought he was such an old man then, and he was probably only about sixty.”

The loudspeaker announced that Voss was next, and the message was thoughtfully repeated in several languages.

“I think I’ll go make myself tidy,” Ursula said. “We’ll be meeting the group soon.” She eyed Pix’s outfit with approval. It was similar to what she had on herself, except she wore a skirt. Her daughter was wearing navy cotton pants, a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a bright blue cotton cardigan. Pix normally liked to travel in jeans, but she knew her mother did not approve of women Pix’s age wearing what Ursula persisted in calling “dungarees.” It was all right when they were in Maine on Sanpere Island, but not on a trip like this.

“I’ll go after you.” Pix wanted to comb her hair and wash her face, too. The group—she wanted to look her best for them. First impressions…

While she was waiting, she realized that many miles away her family hadn’t even had lunch yet. They’d be out of sync for the duration. She felt suspended in time, as if

she’d been gone from home for days, rather than a day. The trip across the vidda has produced strange sensations of total removal. She reminded herself she was a wife, mother—and daughter. Someone with responsibilities. Someone, a voice inside said, with too many.

What on earth was she doing here?

It wasn’t hard to locate the tour. An extremely tired-looking man with a mop of unruly blond hair and dark- rimmed glasses stood holding a flag with the Scandie Sights logo—a giant pair of binoculars with a snaggletoothed troll in one lens and Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid in the other.

“I’m Pix Miller, and this is my mother, Mrs. Ursula Rowe,” Pix said, noting that her mother had the cane out again.

He put the flag down and checked their names off on the list attached to the clipboard he was holding in his other hand. Pix wondered where the other guide was. Marit had said there were two.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting,” Pix apologized, realizing as soon as she said it that since this was the train the people meeting the tour from Oslo were supposed to take, there was no way they could be late.

Her remark produced a smile. “I’m Jan Ekhart, one of your tour guides. You are on vacation now. You don’t need to worry about things like this. There are still people getting off the train, and we won’t leave for the hotel for fifteen minutes or so. Carl—he’s the other leader—said they would hold dinner for us.”

Pix realized that of course most members of the tour, the ones who had started in Copenhagen, were already at the hotel. She also realized that she was at the station in Voss, the place where Kari and Erik had left the message with the stationmaster about eloping.

“What should we do with our luggage?” she asked Jan, eager to get inside the station.

“You leave it on the cart here”—he pointed off to the side—“and we take care of everything.” That sounded fine to Pix. Ursula’s bag was as compact as her own and she could easily carry both of them, but it would be nice to let someone else do it for the next few days. They had put the Scandie Sights tags on but had failed to find a way to wrap the bright red Scandie luggage straps around their modest bags. The tags would have to do.

“Why don’t you wait here,” Pix told her mother. “There’s a bench by the door and you can keep an eye on Jan so he doesn’t leave without me.”

“What are you going to do?” her mother asked. “Never mind. Just hurry. You can tell me later.”

Pix went inside. It was crowded, but since everything was conveniently translated, she soon found the information booth.

She was about to approach the genial-looking man behind the counter when she realized she didn’t have a plan, or much time. She’d simply have to bluster her way through.

“Excuse me, but isn’t this the place where that poor young man was last seen? You know, the boy who drowned and has been in all the newspapers? They’re saying his girlfriend had something to do with it. She was here, too, right?”

The man looked startled. Maybe he recognized Pix’s attempt at a complete personality change for the phony one it was. Or perhaps it was the southern accent she’d unaccountably found herself assuming.