Sohlberg’s law firm offers him indefinite use of the house for Sohlberg to have all the time and space to decompress. Sohlberg has always wanted to visit the popular summer vacation spot and pretty fishing village in Vestfold County about 65 miles south of Oslo. He spends days just watching the sailboats and the fishing boats from the lovely southwest side of the mouth of the Oslofjord. At night he watches panoramic lightning from immense thunderstorms that roll in from the North Sea over the Strait of Skagerrak.
His grief worsens. A guilty conscience consumes him for not having asked Karoline to check her ropes and knots. On the third night he takes his uncle’s double-barrel shotgun out of the car and loads the shells. His plan: walk down to the dock with the loaded shotgun when no one is around and end his pain and reunite with Karoline.
Unfortunately a knock on the door at midnight. Then more loud pounding.
“Hello,” yells Matthias Otterstad. “Wake up Sohlberg. . I know you’re in there. I’m here to keep you company. Open up will you! I brought a ton of food with me.”
Sohlberg’s plans remain inactive until his son dies. A guilty conscience again. This time for not having spent enough time with his son or for that matter with his wife. Again a loaded gun and plans interrupted by an unexpected visitor — Chief Homicide Detective Alec Mikesell of the combined Salt Lake City Police and Salt Lake County Sheriff Task Force in Utah.
Fru Sohlberg calls her husband out of his painful reverie: “Sohlberg where are you?”
Sohlberg takes the stairs up to his wife and says, “Just checking out stuff.”
“What stuff?”
“Oh. . just looking at some of the operas that I bought my parents many years ago.”
“Anything interesting?”
“Actually yes. Wagner. Tristan and Isolde.”
“Why that one?”
“I don’t know. . I picked it at random but it seems appropriate.”
“How so?”
“How love sometimes leads to insanity.”
“Are you thinking of the missing boy. . Karl Haugen?”
“Ja. Of course. . what else?”
“You need to rest for this investigation. Please come to sleep.”
“I can’t with this midnight sun. I have a lot to think about.”
Nothing. Absolutely nothing surprises him any more. After eight years she has exhausted any surprise left in him. He certainly won’t be surprised if she doesn’t break down in a torture session and tell him what he wants and needs to hear. The only surprise will be how she reacts to the torture and how she reacts when she realizes that he will exterminate her.
Will she scream?
Will she cry?
Will she beg for mercy?
If she begs for mercy he will remind her that she gave him none. Therefore all that she can expect is justice. Ja that’s all she can expect. And that’s all she deserves.
“What a waste,” he says softly to himself as he mows the lawn with a manual or push reel mower which she forced him to use because she’s very worried about climate change and carbon emissions.
The grass clippings fly off the sharp blades just like the many illusions that he had about her and their love and their marriage. Together eight years and married half that time. And the mystery of her true nature only keeps getting stronger. She is unfathomable. She is unknowable.
He almost laughs when he thinks of how much he will enjoy shoving her lifeless body into a special barrel that he brought from his workplace a few months ago. The barrel is specially designed to hold acids and it is marked ‘CORROSIVE” and he shivers with ecstasy at the thought of how greatly he will enjoy pouring acid on her lifeless body and how after 6 hours in an acid bath she will become nothing but a pink fluid to be taken to a chemical recycling plant. He giggles when he thinks of her tombstone — a barrel marked CORROSIVE.
He starts laughing and laughing when he realizes that finally something in her miserable and toxic life of lies is true: CORROSIVE.
Ja that’s her!
His shoulders shake as he laughs and laughs and thinks of her winding up as a acidic gob of pink nothingness. Ja. She will be truly unfathomable
The barrel. He’s glad to have snuck one out of his employer’s factory during a long holiday weekend when no one was looking or paying close attention. He’s already begun stealing two bottles of acid at the time from the factory’s nearby warehouse. No one notices since they literally use thousands of gallons of acid every week. When a man plans the end and when a man works on the end phase of a project then everything else falls into place all the way back to the beginning of the project.
Is her acid grave a case of the end justifying the means?
He laughs at his hilarious observation.
An hour later he is raking the dead grass clippings off the lawn and she is watching him from their deck in the backyard. She is tanning topless. He waves at her and blows her a kiss. She barely smiles as if she’s a stunning celebrity bored by her beauty and the fawning idiots who worship her.
How did she first trick me?
What was her hook and bait?
What lies did she use to catch me?
His mind searches the earliest memories that he has of her. He goes over these memories and he’s sickened by the realization that he’s been played like a violin by a virtuoso.
He decides that when he tortures her he will cut off one of her fingers for every big lie she ever told him. That means he’ll have to start lopping off her toes soon after finishing the ten amputations on her hands.
He realizes that with all of her many many lies he’ll quickly run out of fingers and toes to chop and slice off.
Should I instead cut each finger and toe one little piece at a time at the different joints?
That would certainly increase his quality time with her.
The first big lie. For that whopper he has to cut off her right thumb.
“You’re adopted? So am I.”
Was that also her first hook into him?
“I was born in the Ostlandet the East Country. My mother came from a wealthy family. She was forced by her family to give me up for adoption.”
Her coming from a wealthy family background lowered his natural resistance to sleeping with someone who was vulgar and tacky and worked as an assistant manager at the McDonald’s where he went once a week for a milkshake. Everyone at his company especially the senior managers and their wives would have been embarrassed to see him with a woman who wore garish makeup that startled and gaudy-colored polyester clothes that revealed too much. She chewed bubble gum loudly and all day long even while eating a meal or making love or sitting on the toilet.
Her mother later corrected her daughter’s misinformation:
“Born to a wealthy family? No. The social worker told us her mother turned tricks just to get a bottle of vodka. Sometimes just for a smoke and a beer. Wealthy family? Nonsense. She’s making things up. . as always. Oh well. I should’ve put a stop to that when I caught her telling her teachers and friends that she was one of the King’s illegitimate children.”
“Why didn’t you stop her from lying?”
“I just didn’t want to affect her self-esteem. You know what psychologists say about parents ruining a child’s self-esteem. . ”
He said nothing although he wanted to say, “What do these dumb psychologists say about you pathologically
