Sigrid looks away from him toward the ancient green telephone on the desk as though it might ring. It does not.
“Tell you what I’m going to do,” Irv says. “I’ll follow your lead for seventy-two hours while Frank Allman puts up posters all around the lake and we hope to God Marcus calls in because he wants to avoid getting shot. Now . . .” he says, leaning back against the bars and crossing his legs. “What do you have on your brother that we don’t? You’re too strategic to have given me everything. Please tell me.”
“I don’t know anything for certain yet,” Sigrid says, neglecting to mention the existence of a USB stick named Ferdinand. “But I do have his letters to my father over the past year. I’ve only skimmed them. But I’m hoping they will illuminate something about his relationship with Lydia, at least from his perspective.”
“That will help.”
“The only thing is,” she adds with a smile, “they’re in Norwegian.”
Relevant Irrelevancies
For the remainder of Thursday and much of Friday, Sigrid learns to rely on Melinda, who proves herself to be organized, enthusiastic, and productive. She also follows instructions even though Sigrid has no authority here. At one point Melinda smiles awkwardly at her after completing some tedious but helpful background reading, and Sigrid is forced to ask—again—why she is being smiled at.
“I’ve never had a woman boss before.”
She considers Melinda’s age. “How many bosses have you had?” she asks.
“That isn’t it,” the deputy explains. “There are sixty-two sheriff’s offices in New York State and never, in the three-hundred-year history of New York, has a woman ever held the job of sheriff. There have been some women undersheriffs, though. I find the title awkward.”
Melinda sits at Irv’s desk in the jail cell with strict instructions not to answer his phone. Irv himself has returned to the main room so he can attend to a range of topics he refers to as “his job.” That has left Sigrid alone with Melinda, and she is starting to understand—to a point—how the young woman thinks. She visualizes Melinda’s process as a work of art. One produced by Jackson Pollack: not so much drippy as nonlinear, abstract, and impossible to follow even if you like the results.
“Melinda,” Sigrid now says, sympathetically. “America is in the dark ages. You are not supposed to be excited to work for me. You are not supposed to be pleased that men might someday let you do the same thing as them if you’re both obedient and twice as qualified, which is actually the recipe for a mental breakdown, not a productive life. You need to slip out of this, OK?”
“Snap.”
“What?”
“Snap out of it.”
“It isn’t slip?”
“No.”
Colloquial phrases are not the only lessons Melinda has been teaching her, though. Irv, as it happens, is responsible for more than Sigrid had first assumed. Aside from Melinda and Cory and the others she’s met in the office, the wider force has a total of twenty-six deputy sheriffs, though most of them work elsewhere. There is a drug task force, a recreation patrol unit that patrols the Canadian border, a K9 unit, a sheriff’s emergency response team—much like her own Delta Force back home in Oslo—who are trained in special weapons and tactics, a school resource officer, and Irv’s jurisdiction swells to a not-insignificant population of 100,000 summertime residents.
The sheriff, she’s noticing, commands all this with the easy posture of someone running a children’s football team. His primary attention, however, is this case. Lydia’s death and Marcus’s disappearance matter a great deal. What she wants to know is why.
Exhausted by Melinda and curious about Irv’s commitments, she asks if he’d be willing to come back to the jail cell with her.
His eyebrows rise like those on a retriever, but without an argument he sends Melinda back to her own desk in the main room and rejoins Sigrid.
Across from Irv, Sigrid cups her hands over the headphones to better isolate the sounds and listens to Marcus’s 9-1-1 call over and over again, trying to burrow into it and find a truth that might be hidden in the pauses between the phrases. She listens to the background hum and passing noises. She takes notes on what she hears. But it isn’t working. She was hoping for a quick fix, a decisive piece of evidence that would turn the investigation around, but she knows this kind of magical thinking is for children. Yes, there is the occasional clue, but more often than not, police work is about constructing plausible stories and, in the end, being sufficiently confident of the story constructed to pass it on to the prosecutors, thereby making it their problem.
When she first started listening to the message she had hoped she could build . . . not so much a competing story line but a better argument, an argument rooted in black earth itself. After what seems like a hundred passes through the tape, though, she still has nothing. Nothing to exonerate her brother, nothing to direct her toward another conclusion. So she changes her tactic. Rather than try to find a new solution, perhaps she can falsify the existing one.
Sigrid removes her headphones. Every time she listens to the events she pictures the scene. The building, the street, the woman’s body, Marcus speaking into the phone. She assembles the images from the sounds. Every image is wrong—every color, every angle—because she has never seen this place. Never been there. Never stood where Chuck stood. She is staring deeply into a picture she has created on her own. It is a destructive path, and she removes the headphones and sits back.
“What?” Irv asks.
“Don’t talk to me. I’m thinking.”
Forget the pauses and the noise. Forget the technical end. What about the human side? Why would Marcus confess twice? I did this. I did this. It sounds to Sigrid like a man speaking to himself, not to someone else. Not so much a confession but a self-realization. A statement about causality, the
