“I’ve been on the phone with Howard,” Irv says, changing the subject. He puts his feet up, locks his fingers on top of his head, and prepares to deliver a message that Sigrid can anticipate because she’d given this speech before after talking with politicians.
“That tall drink of a man has just placed my nuts in a vise. Do you know what a vise is?” he asks. “It squeezes things to hold them in place, unless you just use it for the squeezing property itself. I find myself in the awkward position of all the white people wanting us to throw your brother in jail for killing the black woman and all the black people wanting us to leave her case alone and let the woman rest in peace. The universe has turned inside out, but the consistent part is that whatever I do, I will make lots and lots of people angry at me. I hate this case.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Huh? Oh, I’m just here to complain. I know perfectly well what I’m going to do.”
“Which is . . . what?” she asks.
“I am personally going to make it my job to ensure that we send the right souls to heaven and not the wrong ones. How about that for a day’s work?”
“How about we just solve the case with the facts and let justice have its day?”
“Isn’t that what I just said?”
“No.”
“I thought it was.”
There is an unfamiliar and high-pitched tweeting noise that interrupts their conversation. It sounds as though a small bird is trapped inside the jail with them.
Irv and Sigrid both look around trying to find the source.
“I think it’s coming from your bag. Is that your phone?” Irv asks.
“That’s not what my phone sounds like.”
“Maybe it’s the other phone.”
“What other phone?”
“The phone you bought explicitly to receive calls from Marcus, Chief Inspector.”
“Oh . . . right,” says Sigrid, digging into her bag to find the Samsung. She locates the green button.
“Hello?”
“You shouldn’t have come, Sigrid.”
A Night at the Opera
On his rock, staring at the darkening lake, Marcus is uncertain whether it is good to hear his sister’s voice. It complicates matters, but he does not regret placing the call. He is obligated through love to send her back to Norway where she belongs.
“Marcus,” she says, “pappa said you were missing. I came to find you.”
“You didn’t need to,” he says to her.
They speak Norwegian. It is a cloak that unites them as it secludes and protects.
“There is a manhunt for you. The police think you pushed Lydia out a window. There’s an eyewitness who obviously doesn’t know what he witnessed. I know you didn’t do it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know who you are. Circumstances challenge us. They don’t change us. I also found your computer files. I know about Lydia’s depression,” Sigrid says. “I spoke with her parents. Her mother fears, but won’t admit, that she committed suicide. They believe it’s a mortal sin and subject to damnation. But they’re stuck because if they continue to deny it, they force the case to remain open. The police are looking for a killer who doesn’t exist.”
“They’re looking for me.”
“Which is not the same thing. But that’s changing,” says Sigrid. “There’s a local journalist—of a type—named Roger Mandel who has linked your disappearance and the APB to Lydia’s death. The sheriff has been avoiding any public connection between you and Lydia, but that’s now unsustainable. The good news,” says Sigrid, “is that Irving—the sheriff—isn’t convinced you did it. He’s decent and reasonable—in an unstable American sort of way—but he needs convincing. We know about Jeffrey and how much it pained Lydia. I really need you to explain to them that it was a suicide, how you tried to stop her, and having failed, you foolishly but understandably ran away. I’m sorry for you, Marcus. I really am. So let me come get you. We’ll sort this all out and then we should go home. Pappa could use your help. I think everyone needs a rest. Me too.”
“I heard you killed someone,” he says to her.
“Yes, I did.”
“Me too,” he says, and hangs up.
Irv is opening the photo album on his laptop as Sigrid speaks to Marcus in that Elvish language of theirs. He flips to the picture of her he’d taken earlier.
“Bastards,” he says, loud enough to be sure someone hears it.
Neither Sigrid nor Melinda looks up.
“Bastards!” he says louder.
Sigrid, on the telephone, looks at him the way his ex-wife used to look at him, which is similar to the way his mother used to look at him when she knew he wanted attention. And women in bars, too. They looked at him like that. A lot of women looked at him like that, come to think of it.
No one pays attention to Irv, so he looks more closely at the morning photo of Sigrid.
OK, he knew it wasn’t the most flattering picture when he sent it to Frank Allman and—sure—it was a kind of ribbing between cops, especially ones trying to get to know each other better on a case. It wasn’t really that bad, though. If her nose had been that shiny, her eyes that sinister . . . well . . . he would have noticed and not sent it.
Irv compares the photo he took to the one presented.
No, Irv thought, she looked OK. Even then. Her neck was still regal and sloped elegantly into her shoulders. It was even more obvious in the picture because he could look more closely.
“See?” he says to Sigrid when she hangs up the phone. He holds up the unaltered image. “It wasn’t that bad. They manipulated it. You can kill anyone you want. You get even one woman on that jury and they’ll never convict.”
She doesn’t smile at him.
“What?” he asks.
Sigrid looks down at the phone on her lap.
“Come on. What?” Irv says.
“It
