Slinging her carry-on over her shoulder, Brand exited the plane. The Arlanda terminal seemed almost eerily empty of people. She reunited with her duffel bag at baggage claim, then proceeded to customs. Brand was well aware her baggage contained items of contraband that could land her into trouble. That included a baggie of evidence-room Adderall she had filched in New York. She would just have to bull her way through. In the face of authority she prided herself on maintaining an absolute, dead-eyed calm. Approaching customs she could have been hooked up to a heart-rate monitor without seeing a blip.
A uniformed agent motioned Brand over. The woman had curly brown hair and to Brand’s eyes looked vaguely un-Swedish.
“Could you please remove your head covering?” the agent asked in perfect English.
Brand took off her black knit watch cap. She offered the agent both her U.S. passport and her NYPD badge wallet.
“Just the passport,” the agent directed. But the move had its effect. Brand thought she detected a glimmer of respect in the young woman’s eyes. “You’re a police officer?”
“A detective, yes,” Brand said.
“How long is your stay in Sweden?” she asked.
“A week.” A white lie. Her plans were open-ended. Brand didn’t know how long she’d be in the country.
“The reason for your visit? You’re not on a criminal case, are you?”
“No, no,” Brand said. “A family reunion.”
The agent broke her official manner to smile broadly. “You have relatives here? Where will you be staying?”
“Um, I don’t know how to say it exactly. Härjedalen? I think it’s a county or, they call it a kommun? Somewhere named Jämtland, I think? I can get the address.”
The agent gave a negative shake of her head. “It is also called a landskap,” she said helpfully. The agent released the strap on the duffel bag and lifted the first few items from their tightly packed home. The agent’s non-committal glance inside went no further and the depths of Brand’s duffel remained unsearched.
“Ask your family why in the world they scheduled a get-together in Sweden in February,” the agent said, releasing the duffel back to Brand with a smile. “Enjoy your visit.”
The halls of the Arlanda terminal were filled with large mirrors. Brand caught a view of herself in one of them. She winced at how much of a stereotypical New Yorker she appeared: black sweatshirt, black jeans, black boots. As if there were no other color in the universe. She had recently chopped her blonde hair short, and wondered if she made for an ominous figure. The Grim Reaper. She almost laughed. All she lacked was a scythe.
Cored out as Brand was, her journey wasn’t over. She had a six-hour car trip ahead of her. Lukas Dalgren, one of Brand’s countless second cousins, had arranged to pick her up at Arlanda. He and his family would immediately bring Brand to the clan’s homestead in western Sweden, near the border to Norway. In the flurry of emails prior to the trip, she had pleaded to be allowed a stopover at a hotel, for a day of rest or even two, to give herself a chance to decompress. The dates wouldn’t make sense if that was the plan, she was told.
“You will sleep on the drive,” Sanna Dalgren informed Brand in an email message. Brand had immediately regretted agreeing to come to Elin Dalgren’s birthday celebration. Her arrival became an event. A “homecoming,” Sanna termed it.
Marshaled by her cousin, the extended Dalgren clan had started bustling around, organizing, planning, scheduling. Brand came to understand she was more well-known among them than they were to her. She was a New York City police detective. Like on television.
“We told her you are coming from America in honor of her birthday,” Sanna wrote to Brand in an email. “We know you don’t want to disappoint her. Your visit is something mamma lives for.”
The whole concept of cousinage left Brand a bit cold. She never saw herself as much of a family type of girl. She wasn’t even a Dalgren. She was a Brand. There were issues between herself and her own mother, Marta, who had been born a Dalgren, and with her maternal grandparents, Klara and Gustav. Hints of estrangement between branches of the family, unspoken but real, hovered in the background.
As directed, Brand was to meet cousin Lukas outside the terminal. They would coordinate via text exchanges. But as soon as she emerged from the terminal she realized the plan would not come off. Her phone refused to recognize the Stockholm cell networks offered to it. No signal, no texts, no calls.
Secretly she felt relieved. She would check into a hotel, get a good night’s sleep, pick up her family responsibilities tomorrow. Rent a car, drive herself.
The airport’s public address system had been periodically spitting out unrecognizable phrases in Swedish. She heard her own name pronounced in clear unaccented English.
“Veronika Brand, please meet your party in the passenger pick-up area. Veronika Brand, please meet your party in the passenger pick-up area.”
Brand found herself standing among other milling travelers in, yes, the passenger pick-up area. But where was Lukas?
A few traffic lanes away a young male stood with a phone cocked to his ear. His head was shaved clean. The two of them caught each other’s eye at the same instant. Lukas Dalgren put his cellphone in his pocket. He raised a hand in greeting.
“Hallå, Veronika,” he called out. He wore an expensive mid-length brown cashmere overcoat and narrow, elegantly cut trousers. He stood beside a midnight silver Tesla sedan.
Brand crossed to him, slipping slightly on the frozen roadway of the air terminal. Her cousin moved forward.
“Black ice, Veronika,” he said. “Be careful. Your shoes are wrong.”
My shoes are wrong? Brand wore flat-soled slouch boots.
“You need some more like mine.” The man’s footwear featured deep,
