The Body in the Fjord

“Pix, dear, I have to leave for Norway tomorrow, and I think you'd better come, too. Something rather dreadful has happened and Marit needs us.”

“Norway?” Pix Miller was still breathless from catching the phone, and the name of the country was all she could get out at the moment. Norway—this was considerably farther afield than her mother's usual proposals: lunch at Boston's venerable Chilton Club, bird-watching at the Audubon Sanctuary in Lincoln. Then the rest of what her mother had said hit home and she caught her breath quickly.

“Marit! What's wrong! Is she ill?”

Marit Hansen was one of Ursula Rowe's oldest and dearest friends. They had been girls together, growing up in Aleford, Massachusetts, some eighty years ago. Marit's family had moved back to Norway when Marit was a teenager, but the two friends had always stayed in touch.

“No, Marit's fine, but it appears that Kari's boyfriend, Erik, has been killed in some sort of tragic accident.”

“Oh my God! Poor Kari! How is she taking it? What a thing to have to cope with at her age. You met him last summer, didn't you?”

“Yes. He was a student at the university with Kari. They talked about getting married in a few years, when
they had enough money to buy an apartment.” Ursula Rowe paused as the picture of the happy, carefree couple came to mind. They had taken a picnic to one of the islands near the Hansen's house in Tønsberg, on Norway's east coast. The fjord was filled with boats and the beaches filled with people eagerly storing up the summer sunshine against the long, dark winter. Kari, Marit Hansen's granddaughter, and Erik were a beautiful couple—tall, blue-eyed, blond, so alike as to be brother and sister, except Erik was trying to grow a beard. Kari had teased him about the patchy stubble. Ursula felt very tired. It seemed every time the phone rang, it brought bad news—sickness or another acquaintance gone. She knew she would never get used to it, no matter how often friends reached for the supposedly comforting platitudes, saying that it went with her age or that, in some cases, it had been a “good” death, mercifully painless, quick.

But this death was different. There was nothing good about it. Erik Sørgard was young, barely out of his teens at twenty-one. He had hardly begun his life. All those hopes and dreams. She realized Pix was speaking.

“Mother, are you still there?” It was unusual for Ursula to tune out.

“Sorry, it's all been quite upsetting and I have so much to do to get ready. And you—you'd better call Sam right away. Samantha can keep an eye on Danny, and we shouldn't be gone too long, I hope.”

Ursula had returned to matters at hand, but Pix was confused. Of course Marit would be upset about her granddaughter's fiancé's death, and Ursula's particular brand of care—a combination of stiff upper lip and subtle coddling—was always effective, but to drop everything and rush off to Norway now?

“Can't you give yourself a few days to get ready? Why do you have to go tomorrow? I'm sure Marit would understand, and of course I feel terrible and would like to see Kari especially, but I can't just leave.” Car pools, her part-time job at her friend and neighbor Faith Fairchild's
catering company, plus all the meetings scheduled for this week—the vestry, the food bank's steering committee, the PTA, the…

She heard a heavy sigh come over the wires. Ursula was not given to sighs, or vapors, or any other Victorian modes of self-expression.

“You wouldn't be able to see Kari. That's the whole point. She's missing. Now, wash your hands and come over. We'll talk about it while I pack.”

Pix peeled off one of her gardening gloves and regarded the dirt that always managed to seep through.

“How did you know I was in the garden?” She had to know. Her mother's clairvoyance could be startling.

“You were out of breath and you shopped on Saturday. Tuesday morning's your Friends of the Library day and Friday's the hospital. The children are in school and you work for Faith in the afternoons, so where else would you be running in from?”

Hearing her life reduced to such a prosaic open book was depressing. Pix hung up the phone, promising to be there as soon as possible, and went to wash. She'd been thinning a patch of ribbon grass, planted as a small island for contrast in her border, and now the size of Manhattan and the boroughs, threatening to choke out the delphinium and Shasta daisies completely.

Hands clean, she reached for her car keys, then turned back to the phone and called Faith. Briefly, she related Ursula's totally absurd request and promised to stop by to fill Faith in after she'd left her mother's.

“Good,” Faith replied. “This sounds interesting. What could possibly happen in quiet little Norway that would send Ursula rushing off like this, especially with you in tow? Maybe you'd better call before you come—if I'm not here, I'll be at the kitchen. And Pix, your passport hasn't expired again, has it?”

Pix had once made the mistake of revealing this lapse to Faith, who insisted she immediately rectify the situation. “I'd as soon let my driver's license expire! What if some
one offered you a free trip to Paris? You wouldn't be able to go.” Pix had pointed out the extreme unlikelihood of such an event, and when Faith countered with the suggestion that Sam, Pix's husband, might suddenly propose a romantic getaway to, say, Bali, Pix was forced to admit the free Paris trip would be more apt to come up first. But she had renewed her passport, exchanging one hideous picture for another. The guys at Aleford Photo on Aleford's Main Street had managed to catch her grinning like an idiot. She would not be surprised if the next time she did use her passport she was refused entry for security reasons. She certainly looked demented.

She backed out of her driveway and turned left toward her mother's house. Norway, tomorrow! She couldn't possibly go. Just leave?

 

Faith Fairchild sat on the end of her friend's bed, a large four-poster, watching Pix pack what seemed like an extremely insufficient amount of clothing for a transatlantic trip. Maybe enough for an overnight somewhere. She surreptitiously tucked an extra sweater in and wondered if she could convince Pix to take another suitcase. But packing was secondary at the moment.

“All right, start at the beginning. Marit Hansen gets a call from her granddaughter, Kari, last Friday afternoon from the train station in Oslo.”

“Yes. Kari and Erik were working for Scandie Sights this summer. It's one of those tour companies.” Pix's tone carried an air of purity, that of someone who has never indulged in mass travel, preferring to get hopelessly lost on her own. “The tour had a brief stopover at the station in Oslo on its way to the west coast of Norway. They were coming from the airport, because the group started in Copenhagen. Marit says Kari asked her to find her address book and look up the phone number of a friend of Kari's living in Bergen. She gave her grandmother the name of the hotel where the tour would be in Bergen that
night, asking her to phone. She apparently didn't have time to wait while Marit looked for it then.”

“Did she sound anxious or say anything else?”

“Mother didn't know. In any case, when Marit phoned the hotel that night, they said Kari wasn't there and they put her through to one of the tour guides, who was extremely put out. He told her Kari and Erik had eloped, leaving him without anyone to carry the bags, or whatever they were doing.”

“How did he know this?”

“Something about a message from a stationmaster in a place called Voss.”

“But why didn't they tell the tour guide in person? They were with him on the train when it left Oslo, and they must have known that they were going to run off.”

Faith was on the point of packing her own bags. She had managed to solve a number of crimes in between baking soufflés and tending to her family—the Reverend Thomas Fairchild of Aleford's First Parish Church, five-year-old Ben, and almost two-year-old Amy. Sleuthing in foreign countries held a particularly seductive appeal. It wasn't that she didn't think Pix and Ursula, an impressive pair, couldn't handle the situation—well, perhaps not in Faith's own inimitable way—if there even was one. So far, nothing of a criminal nature had emerged in Pix's narrative. Only a tragic one. Still, Faith was feeling left out—and itching to go. She slipped back into the bag some of the undergarments Pix had put to one side. There was nothing worse than having to rinse out unmentionables in a hotel basin and festoon them across the towel bars.

“And Erik's body was discovered when?”

“On Sunday morning in Kjosfossen—at a river in a place called FlÃ¥m, on the west coast. Sam and I were there. It's famous for its steep railway and a beautiful waterfall up in the mountains. The tour had been there on the way to Bergen. At first, everyone assumed Kari must have drowned, too. The police were even suggesting a double suicide, but Marit refuses to believe that.”

“I don't blame her. You don't kill yourselves immediately after announcing you're going to get married. Although don't those Scandinavians have the reputation for being prone to depression? Ibsen, Munch—think of
The Scream.
Those dark days of winter. Trolls.”

“A myth—not just the trolls but the rest, too. Their suicide rate is no better or worse than any other European country's. Besides, this is summer.” Pix deftly folded a denim wraparound skirt. “And I
know
Kari. She's been here twice—once when she was very young, then two years ago. Remember, I told you about her visit? You were on vacation. She had a bus ticket that let her go anywhere in the country and she ended up here after covering every state except Alaska and Hawaii. She'd had a terrific time and there was nothing depressive about her. The opposite, in fact. Very outgoing.” Pix remembered Kari's account of her travels, from Frito pies in the Woolworth in Santa Fe to Mount Rushmore—“It was so small! In
North by Northwest,
the noses were much larger!” They had laughed until tears ran down their cheeks.

Faith looked askance at the heavy turtleneck Pix was packing. Could it get that cold in Norway in June? Obviously Pix thought so. She continued her line of questioning. “Marit hasn't heard anything from her since the call on Friday?”

“No, and she's desperate. It's possible that Kari and Erik slipped, falling into the river, or one tried to save the other, but that doesn't explain the knapsacks—and of course Marit has no idea why they were quarreling.”

It was this information that had sent Pix home from her mother's to pack after a call to Sam and nine or ten others canceling various obligations.

“Knapsacks? Quarrel?” Pix had told Faith recently that she was so afraid of repeating herself, a dreaded sign of the encroachments age made on memory, that she found she was, instead, forgetting to tell friends and family whole bunches of things. This was obviously one of those times.

“I must have left this part out.” Pix was stuffing socks into the toe of a Bass Weejun. “Anyway, you know Norway is a small country, a little over four million people. The discovery of Erik Sørgard's body has been big news. The police asked anyone who might have seen either Kari or Erik to get in touch with them. So far, no one has reported seeing them, except for the people on the tour, and of those, only one woman saw them after the group boarded the train in Oslo. There weren't enough seats, so Kari and Erik had gone to another car. This woman was looking for the food cart and passed Kari's and Erik's seats. She told the police they were having ‘a vicious argument'—those were her words. Since she doesn't speak Norwegian, she had no idea what it was about.

“Then the knapsacks. One of the clerks in the lost-luggage bureau at the Oslo railway station noted their names on two knapsacks a conductor had turned in late Saturday. One of the clerk's jobs is to transfer names and addresses on items to a master list they keep. When he heard the news, he called the police. He remembered their names, because his last name is Hansen, too—although there are so many Hansens in Norway, I don't know why Kari's name stuck with him.”

Faith ignored the Hansen conundrum. “At least this gives you a place to start. You have to find out how the knapsacks got to Oslo. It's on the east coast, right? And the train was on the west coast? Why weren't Kari and Erik carrying them? And was it a lover's spat or something more? Even if she couldn't understand what they were saying, the woman might remember what their gestures conveyed.”

While appreciating Faith's advice, Pix hadn't finished. As Faith, with the wisdom of someone ten years younger, constantly told her, there was nothing wrong with Pix's memory, and if Pix occasionally had trouble dredging up details like the name of the kid who sat behind her in third grade, it was because her fertile brain was weeding
out useless information to make room for new, more important facts—like these.

“There's more. Everything appeared to be in Erik's sack, but things were missing from Kari's.”

“What kinds of things?”

“According to her grandmother, her passport, driver's license, and money,” Pix said grimly. “The report of the quarrel—and Kari does have a quick temper, which I'm sure the police have managed to find out from someone by now—has caused them to change the bulletin from ‘missing' to ‘wanted for questioning.' The passport is particularly puzzling, because Norwegians don't need one to travel within Scandinavia. Erik had his passport, too. It was still in his knapsack.”

Faith reached for her pocketbook, a large Coach saddlebag, dug down, and added a few things to Pix's suitcase: a penlite with fresh batteries, the ultimate Swiss army knife, a Côte d'Or dark chocolate bar, matches, surgical gloves, skeleton keys, and a small can of hair spray—tools of the trade. She wished she was going more than ever, although Norway, where boiled potatoes accompany most meals and dried cod soaked in lye is the pièce de rèsistance of the groaning Yule board, had never attracted her in the past. Fjords or no fjords. You had to eat.