“You forgot your guitar,” she’ll say to him when she finds him.
“I know,” he’ll answer.
“The one I bought for you.”
The clouds create the illusion of mountains but in fact the land around her is flat. Should the weather turn, the rain will fall hard and flood the field. There is a heaviness now. Night rain always feels intimate to her; a chance to be washed by a secret. The sound against the clay tiles on the roof. The drip into the gutter. The soft stream of water outside the window, the rivulets dancing black on the ceiling surrounded by the yellow glow of the streetlamp. Night rain feels to Sigrid like a vestige from when the world was new and there were no people here and the planet had only itself; its own cycles and rhythms and changes, going on and on for a billion years without witnesses or someone to put those experiences into words.
She sits there watching the clouds, waiting for them to break open so the moon—half full—might appear and take her back to her farm with her father and maybe farther back in time to when her family was whole and everything felt complete. But the moon does not come, nor does the rain, and instead a heavy light breaks through the darkness and a truck drives up the road the way she first came. Instead of moving on, though, the truck slows until it blocks the view of everything that was in front of her and finally rolls to a crunching halt.
The window drops on the driver’s side and from the shadow of that space comes a talking elbow:
“This is one depressing spot you’ve selected for yourself.”
“You’re a shit,” Sigrid says to Sheriff Irving Wylie.
“I know it.”
Sigrid doesn’t move and Irv juts his elbow out the window. “The bus out here doesn’t run until five in the morning. It’s . . .”—Irv checks his watch—“. . . not even one. What were you planning to do here for four hours?”
“I was going to read a book.”
“It’s darker than a witch’s soul out here.”
“Not all my plans work out.”
“Neither do mine. But I’m on a roll tonight.”
Sigrid does not move or reply, and Irv shakes his head. “Want to get some coffee?”
Irv sees that Sigrid does not understand him. “There’s a diner up the road near Malone. Coffee’s on the menu.”
“It’s one in the morning.”
“It’s open twenty-four/seven. They keep the coffee flowing like it’s coffee. You don’t have twenty-four-hour diners in Norway?”
Sigrid still does not move.
“Don’t be like that,” he says.
“I don’t see how we can work together, Sheriff.”
“That’s funny, because I don’t see how we can avoid it, Chief.”
Irv turns on his hazard lights and opens the door but does not step out. Instead he swings his legs around and rests his elbows on his knees. “Here’s how I figure it, Sigrid. You probably have a good sense of where your brother is. You figured that out in twenty-four hours, whereas we came up with bupkis after two weeks. So . . . well done. But now we know too. Saranac Lake. Or thereabouts. How, you wonder? I instructed Melinda to give you some space at the university to ask your own questions and then we circled back and called the professor afterward to get him to snitch on you. It was pretty sneaky of me, but I told you that I have faith in your love for your brother, and clearly it wasn’t misplaced. What happens now, Chief Sigrid, is we get you a nice Monte Cristo sandwich with local maple syrup to warm you up, and together we find a way to bring him in all nice and easy. Otherwise, the local sheriff isn’t going to have any choice but to call in SWAT or an emergency response team to surround Saranac Lake—where there are families on vacation with children—and we hope to God your brother didn’t bring a rifle with the intention of living off the fat of the land so he could stay away from ATM machines and their little cameras. Does he know how to shoot?”
“He’s not violent and he doesn’t care for guns. The crime you accused him of doesn’t even involve a gun.”
“But he grew up on a farm. I don’t know anyone who grew up on a farm who can’t shoot a rifle at least. Maybe it isn’t true, but it will be a perception shared by SWAT. So it comes down to this: It’s you and me working together, or it’s SWAT in full crazy mode. Because there are pressures on me you don’t understand, and I need to get to Marcus before our little world up here catches fire. It really is more flammable than it looks.”
Godless Communists in American Diners
The diner is called Diner if it is called anything at all. In Sigrid’s eyes, it is the kind of place where nothing good was ever intended to happen and probably won’t. It is set back from the road and buffered by an asphalt parking lot. The façade is fake stone painted white and the roof is rimmed with a white fence that almost but does not entirely fail to hide a giant air-conditioning unit mounted beside an angular sheet-metal chimney. Walking in, Sigrid sees four solitary patrons staring blankly through the large windows at the road, beyond the parking lot from which they came and will later go again—their pasts and futures looking identical from their perches on red Naugahyde.
The patrons are male and the wait staff not. The men sit on stools all wearing beige or blue trousers. Thick belts peek out from shirttails floating above bulging waists. They hunch over food that is making them sicker and older but tastes familiar and comforting and reminds them of happier times when they were not here.
Sigrid and Irv take seats in a booth—their own unique piece of
