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.
‘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
‘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
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.
By 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
‘He’s still in custody?’ she asks.
‘Your assailant? Yes. Still here.’
‘Is he the killer?’
