“Oh, heck no,” he interrupts. “This was the next county over. It was their police, not ours. But after the boy died everything erupted here. I can honestly and shamefully say I never paid much attention to these sorts of things, and frankly these student protests can be more about growing up than the subject being protested, but in this case my eyes were really opened to the depth of injustice here and how primitive our institutions are in protecting the vulnerable. Did you know that in the U.S. we don’t even have a database on fatal police shootings? We the people don’t even know how many citizens the government kills—justified or not.”
“Yes, I did know that,” Sigrid says.
“Really?
“I’m a police chief in Norway. There’s a lot of talk about America near the coffee maker.”
“So we’re global news, huh?”
“It’s hard to ignore the moose sitting on your waffle.”
“What?”
“That might not translate.”
“What do you think happened to Lydia?” Sigrid asks.
“I don’t want to speculate. But let’s say . . . she was a childless woman in her forties who loved her nephew very, very much. And a few months later, she died.”
Sigrid writes this down in her notebook and surreptitiously glances at the door to make sure Melinda isn’t lurking in the corner making the same notes she is.
“Who knew Lydia best, Dr. Williamson? Who can help us understand this and find Marcus?”
“On campus? Gloria Dillane. English department. Teaches contemporary American fiction. I heard they had a lively discussion going about psychology versus sociology when it came to understanding people’s motivations. Took the conversation beyond the more static discussion of individualism versus structure. Even I’m sick of that one. Anyway, the students were enthralled. You should talk to her. She’s sad now too. It’s contagious, you know.”
“What is?” Sigrid asked.
“Sadness.”
It’s European
Outside on the quad there is a large maple tree under which Sigrid imagines young American hipsters in earth tones strumming Nick Drake songs to young women in thrift-store clothing who aren’t listening.
This is where she sits with Melinda after they’ve collected lunch from a nearby deli, as the cafeteria is closed for the season.
American sandwiches, Sigrid learns, are four times larger than Norwegian ones and have bread on both the bottoms and the tops. Between the two slabs of starch is enough sliced meat to choke a lion. Sitting on the grass, Sigrid opens the sandwich and evenly distributes the meat onto each piece of bread and then uses her brother’s lock blade to cut each of those in half. She eats one while Melinda devours the entire torpedo.
“Hungry?” she asks.
Melinda shrugs. “It’s lunch.”
If the hipsters with their beards are missing, there is a grunt of young men strolling around in flip-flops and extraordinarily long shorts that droop below their knees. As in the movies, they wear baseball caps and all have surprisingly thick calves and wide shoulders. Given that America is a multiracial society, it is a wonder that so many people are exactly the same shape.
“Why are they all carrying a large bottle with a straw in it?” she asks Melinda.
“To hydrate.”
Sigrid looks up at the blue sky and the cotton clouds. “Is dehydration a special problem here?”
“I couldn’t say.”
Sigrid wraps the remainder of her lunch into its wax paper cocoon, and sips from a bottle of sparkling water before packing it all up. What she needs to do now, and urgently, is create some privacy for herself to look through Marcus’s orange hard drive; finish reading the letters he’d written to her father; better understand both the life and death of Lydia Jones; and learn as much as she can about the Jeffrey Simmons case. Getting rid of Melinda for a few minutes was simple enough. Shaking her completely will not be.
“Why did you become a cop?” Sigrid asks as an opening gambit for a longer play.
“To fight crime.”
“You could have fought cancer,” Sigrid says.
“I think cancer is smarter than me. I stood a better chance of winning a few this way. You?”
“I said the same twenty years ago.”
“Not anymore?”
“I thought I wanted to fight crime. Now that I’m older I realize that it’s injustice that bothers me. Fighting the first one doesn’t always solve for the other,” she says.
“I can’t believe you’re not American,” Melinda says. “You talk better than almost anyone I know.”
“I have a vocabulary for work. Not for other things.”
“What do you mean by that?”
“It means I can talk about police work in English, but I can’t talk about love.”
“Who can?” Melinda says. “Must be so cool to speak a second language. I can’t really imagine it.”
“That’s because you speak English. You’re all terrible at second languages. You, the British, the Australians, the New Zealanders. The Canadians pretend to speak French for national unity, but they’re not good either. Do you share your apartment?” Sigrid asks, as though it is not a non sequitur.
“No. It’s my own. It’s right in town off Main Street by a laundromat. Two bedrooms, one bath, on-street parking. It’s nothing special but it’s in my budget and it’s mine. You know that store called Ikea?”
“Yes.”
“You have that in Europe?”
“It’s European.”
The flip-flop boys with the hydration issues have started tossing an American football back and forth. Sigrid, watching them, can’t understand why the Americans call it football.
“It is?”
“It’s Swedish. You might have noticed the blue and yellow on everything.”
“I thought that was just the color scheme.”
“Those are the colors of the Swedish flag. It’s why they sell frozen meatballs and everything’s in Swedish.”
“Never gave it much thought. And Legos are from Denmark, right?”
“You have two bedrooms?”
“Yup. Mine and yours. We’re roomies now.”
“I’d like to go back and take a nap.”
“Seriously?”
“Central European Time is plus six hours from now. It’s past ten at night and I’ve already had a long day. I need an hour or two of rest before going for another stretch. It’s a smart choice. It doesn’t mean I’m weak.”
“I’m on the clock no matter where we are. So . . . I guess. But while
