The Body in the Fjord (14 page)

The two young men were making for her table.

“Are you having a good time, Mrs. Miller?” Jan asked. “And your mother? She's okay?”

“Oh, yes, we're both enjoying the trip very much. Mother went up to bed after coffee.”

“Good, good.” Carl beamed. Pix was curious about what they did during the winter. The two guides had come in search of the stewards and the four were conversing rapidly in Norwegian. It must have to do with arrangements for tomorrow. Anders kept nodding and saying,
“
Ja
.” Sonja added a word or two and the four seemed to have finished their business.

“What do you do in the winter?” Pix asked. “I think someone mentioned you and Anders are at the University of Oslo,” she added, addressing Sonja.

“Yes, we are still students. I am studying economics and Anders is in a business course. We want to make a lot of money,” she quipped.

“And you?” Pix asked Carl.

“I work for Scandie Sights all year. We have many tours during the winter—ski holidays, trips to warmer places. We even go to the United States. The Norwegian Farmers Tour.”

Pix assumed he was joking and laughed.

“No, really. In the early spring, we go to Bismarck, Fargo, and places in Minnesota. I must admit, though,” he said ruefully, “I enjoy the summer tours more. The farmers all treat me like a city boy. Well, I am a city boy. I've never worked on a farm in my life. They give me quite a hard time and nothing impresses them. They visit each farm, rub some dirt through their fingers, and shake their heads. The most fun I've ever had on one of these trips was when I took them to the Mall of America. I didn't know what it was and the weather was bad. It was the only thing I could think of to do with them. They weren't interested in the art museum. They were like terrified children—it was so huge—and suddenly I was the big man. They clung to me like glue!”

Pix got the picture, and “Prairie Home Companion” 's Garrison Keillor was ringing in her ears.

“And you, Jan? Do you work for Scandie Sights all year, too?”

“
Nei
. My family is in the oil business, and as soon as summer is over, it's back to the office for me. I live now in Stavanger.”

The band returned; before they started, Pix decided to call it a night—at least close this chapter.

“I think I'll see if the sauna is open,” Pix said, and stood up. Anders, Carl, and Jan stood up also.

“We'll say good night, then,” Jan said. “It should be another good day tomorrow. You'll like the farm.”

Sonja said, “I was telling Mrs. Miller about the pancakes.”

Anders smiled at his girlfriend. “
Ja
, the pancakes.”

The first strains of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight” weem-a-wecked its way into the still of the Norwegian twilight. Looking back over her shoulder, Pix saw that Jan was asking Carol Peterson to dance and Carl was heading toward Helene Feld. She was impressed again with their healthy good looks, albeit a bit disheveled in Jan's case. As usual, they were wearing matching Norwegian sweaters, issued by Scandie Sights, she imagined, and she decided to pick up some in the same patterns for her own children. And maybe Sam. He'd wear it for skiing. Even as she pictured her family Nordicly garbed, she realized she'd always be seeing these two. It would not be an unpleasant reminder. It was nice to be taken care of, instead of always taking care. She sighed and left the room.

The Dahl sisters were sitting in the lobby, drinking coffee, of course. Pix was not surprised, since Norwegians carry an extra gene, the caffeine gene, which means it has absolutely no effect on their ability to go to sleep or on their nerves, whether drunk at one o'clock in the afternoon or one o'clock in the morning. Just looking at the cups of steaming-hot dark brown liquid made her feel jangled—or maybe it was the Coca-Cola. In true Viking fashion, neither woman took cream.

“Isn't it fun!” Erna exclaimed. “They were playing some traditional Norwegian folk tunes earlier—dances we learned when we were little girls.” She was wearing what Pix believed was called “a fascinator” in bygone days—a little wispy chiffon scarf pinned to her curls. Both women had “Norwegian Ladies Club” gold necklaces and large enameled pins. Erna's was a daisy, Louise's an elegant curving emerald green leaf. From the richness of the
enamel's color, Pix assumed they were from David-Andersen,
gullsmed
, the premier jeweler and silversmith in Norway with tantalizing stores throughout the country.

“Good night. See you in the morning,” Pix said. “I'm going to relax in the sauna and then head off to bed.” And break into a closet on board our Viking fjord cruiser. It was hard to resist a perverse temptation to blurt it out and watch their faces.

“Sleep well. Won't it be fun to visit the farm tomorrow? And the weather is supposed to continue to be fine,” Louise said.

Pix thought she'd heard enough about this farm virtually to replace the visit, but she agreed cheerfully.

“We may get some rain tonight, but we'll be asleep,” Erna said happily. “It's all turning out perfectly.”

Pix thought of her mission. Maybe for them.

 

Pix got towels at the desk and followed the arrow down the stairs. Soon she was pushing the sauna's solid wooden door open. The force of the heat and the steam took her breath away for an instant, but she slowly exhaled for what seemed like a long time and sat down on the lowest level of the benches. It felt wonderful.

The sole other occupant stood up, girded his towel securely about his loins, and strode down from the top level. He nodded in passing and left. It was their captain, Nils Hagen. His dark beard and hair had been glistening. She wondered if he'd gone to shower and would be back, although he didn't seem the chatty type.

Her thoughts turned to Marit's revelation about Hanna's birth but did not linger long. It was Kari who was insistently occupying center stage. Sonja's words kept echoing in Pix's mind: “Kari liked to tease the boys.” The Scandie Sights steward hadn't known the English word for it, yet Pix was pretty sure it was the same. A tease was a tease. A very different view of Kari from the one Pix held, but then, how well did Pix really know the young woman? Pix remembered Kari as a delightful, happy child, then
later, a delightful, happy teenager. Their contact had always been during the summer, vacation time, when judgment tends toward the benign.

Yes, the older Kari had had strong opinions and did fly off the handle a couple of times, but all teenagers did. Pix could not recall Kari acting provocatively with any of the boys around, but then, there weren't too many eligible ones. Kari had been content to fit into their life, complete with much younger children and much older adults. There had been no mistaking Sonja's antipathy, though. Her preference for Erik was clear. They had worked together the summer before—without Anders. Had Sonja fallen for Erik? Was it the jealousy dance?

Or was the older Kari, undeniably a beauty, something more than a flirt? And what had this led to? It was not the sort of thing a grandmother picked up on. Pix realized that she had been so caught up in the tour and its multiple personalities that she had been losing sight of the two most important personalities of all—Kari and Erik. The key to finding out what had happened just might lie in figuring out who the young people actually were—or, in Kari's case, she reminded herself vehemently, she hoped still was.

Wide-awake, with a troubled mind, there was no danger of falling asleep in the sauna this time. She got up, filled the dipper from the bucket, both made of pine, and flung the water on the rocks. She almost wished there was a snowbank to jump into and someone to flail her lightly with birch branches, all die-hard sauna practices. She would have to content herself with the deeply satisfying hissing sound the water made and the equally satisfying sense that all her impurities were draining out with her sweat.

Captain Hansen had a dark beard. The man on Jennifer's balcony at Stalheim had had a dark beard. The man driving the car so swiftly away from the Stalheim Hotel just after she had overheard the argument on her walk—he had a dark beard, too. But many Norwegians had beards, light
and dark. Sven had had a beard, or maybe still did. Sven, Kari's father. He would be in his early or mid-fifties. Pix returned to her thoughts about Kari, about where she could be. Kari had definitely wanted to find her mother's family. Had she picked up some clue about them on the trip, or one relating to her father? Was that where she was? Depressed, confused by Erik's death, whether she witnessed it or not—for, if she was still alive and in Norway, she couldn't have escaped the news of it—had she gone in search of her past? Her mother's past? Her father's? Were some newly found relatives even now sheltering her? Hiding her? Kari again. Pix wished she had a better idea who Kari was. Now, were Samantha missing, God forbid, Pix could put herself in her daughter's shoes—not that they'd fit exactly. There are vast uncharted areas in every child's life, as unknown to a parent as Amelia Earhart's crash site. But Kari's shoes…Pix didn't even know the brand.

The door opened, but it wasn't Captain Hagen. It was an elderly Japanese gentleman wearing underwear that revealed nothing and carrying a towel. He gasped and tottered to the bench, looking at Pix, looking at the door, then looking at Pix again. For a while, he did nothing but breathe heavily and make some small throat-clearing noises.

After a moment, he started to speak to her in Japanese. She nodded and smiled, yet that only seemed to increase his agitation. Finally, she picked out some English words—
sorry
and
Japanese
. At last, a sentence. “I am so sorry. I am Japanese. From Tokyo.” Obviously he had not expected to see a woman in the sauna. But what about the geisha tradition? Pix supposed that was very different and she was a far cry from it, swaddled in one of Kvikne's towels. Maybe it was her height. If they were standing, she'd tower over him.

“It's all right.” She nodded and smiled some more. “No problem. It's the custom here.”

That produced another torrent of Japanese; then he said
in English, “I go ticky-tocky, ticky-tocky,” accompanied by a fluttering hand gesture over his heart.

Suddenly, she was afraid the heat was too much for the poor man and he had, in fact, been trying to tell her all this time that he was having a heart attack. He repeated the gesture and she asked, “Are you all right?” realizing she had fallen victim to the American disease of believing you can be understood in any language if you just speak English slowly and distinctly enough in a loud voice.

She stood up, which seemed to alarm him even more, so she promptly sat down again.

After some minutes filled with grunts of diminishing intensity,
he
stood up, obviously quite all right. He repeated the “ticky-tocky” routine, bowed several dozen times, and left. Pix laughed until she thought she'd pee, except she'd oozed so much sweat, there wasn't any. Time to take a shower.

She stood up and went to the door. The temperature was 60C, she noted, 140F. She pulled. Nothing happened. She pulled again. Somehow, the steam must have caused the wood to swell and stick. She put both hands on the handle and pulled with all her might. The door didn't budge.

Now, don't panic, she told herself. This is ridiculous. She banged on it several times but doubted she could be heard. When she'd come in, she'd noticed how thick it was—and there was no window. She pulled at it again. Her towel slipped off.

Now she did begin to panic. How could the door have gotten stuck? The hotel would obviously have had to be very careful about the construction of its sauna and it would be checked from time to time. More than that, since this was Scandinavia.

She wrapped her towel around herself again. It made her feel less vulnerable. Had it been her imagination? She tried the door once again. This time, she was able to see into the crack between the door and the frame.

See into it and realize it was locked.

 

Locked? Locked!

She sat down on the bench, feeling slightly stunned. She could be in here for a very long time. It was almost 10:30 when she'd gone to her room, taken her watch off, leaving it there with her earrings and a gold chain she'd been wearing. By now, it was certainly well past 11:30. It had taken time to find the sauna; then she'd luxuriated in a long shower. It had had those jets that squirted you from all sides. Then there was her nonadventure with the gentleman from Tokyo. What with the merriment in the lounge and other nocturnal activities offered officially and unofficially on the hotel premises, unless someone had an impulse for late-night sweating, she was stuck until morning. If her mother did knock at Pix's door, she'd assume her daughter was taking a walk or kicking up her heels with the French ladies and she would go to bed. It would be breakfast time before Ursula and Marit missed her.

The feeling of panic set in again—and increased. What would sitting in so much heat do to her? Could she dehydrate? Pass out? There was only a small amount of water in the bucket. She'd planned to refill it when she went to take a shower. Should she drink it?

She went over to the bucket and stuck her finger in the water. It was hot and somehow the prospect of swallowing it made her feel queasy. The smell of the wood, so fragrant before, was also beginning to turn her stomach as she finally faced the question smack in front of her.

Who locked the door?

Was it routine? She hadn't seen any signs stating hours of operation, and like the midnight sun, she imagined the sauna never set, either. In any case, hotel workers would surely have been instructed to see whether the sauna was occupied before locking up. She had been sitting in the middle of the bench, clearly visible to anyone opening the door, as the Japanese gentleman had discovered.