Death of a Nightingale

The bus stop sign cleared the snowdrift by only about a meter and a half, and the wind still whipped more snow across the open fields. They had called and shouted all the way down here, without result. Nina searched her pocket for her cell phone but then remembered that she had given it to Søren. Her left arm ached steadily, a deep but not especially insistent note of pain, like a soft bass line somewhere beneath the main theme: the fear of what had happened to Rina.

“Do you have a cell phone I can borrow?” she asked. “This isn’t going to work; we need dogs.”

Anna shook her head. Here was a woman who understood how to dress for the weather, thought Nina. A bright red ski suit covered her from head to toe and made her look like an overgrown kindergarten child on an excursion.

“I have one somewhere, but I rarely use it. I don’t even think it’s charged. We’d better go back to the house. Then you can call from there.”

Why aren’t they already here? thought Nina. Chains of men with Alsatians, lights, search teams? Sending one policeman to look around couldn’t exactly be called a search.

And she felt almost certain that this was the place they needed to search for Rina. There were probably just two places in Denmark that could have activated Rina’s homing pigeon instinct. One was the Coal-House Camp, the other was here. And it wasn’t the Coal-House Camp that Rina had tried to call.

They turned around and walked back toward the house. Anna moved at a steady clip, and in spite of legs that were somewhat longer and younger, Nina had to quicken her pace to keep up. At first it was nice to have the wind hit her other cheek for a change, but it wasn’t long before that cheek was just as numb as the one that had been frozen on the way out. When they were almost all the way back to the farm, a large, brindled dog came running toward them.

“There you are!” said Anna sharply.

The dog didn’t pay any attention to the cool greeting. It jumped around, shaking its head so its ears flopped, and wagging its entire rear. When Anna didn’t pay it much attention, it thrust its pinkish-brown nose into Nina’s hand, so that her glove was soon covered by a fine glaze of dog drool.

That was when she discovered that it had something in its mouth. At first she thought it was a mouse, and in a way it was—a stuffed toy mouse with oversized ears, eyes and feet.

It was the Diddl mouse that had been attached to the zipper on Rina’s backpack.

“MY HUSBAND TRAINED her,” said Anna. “She never really bothered to listen to me.”

“We have to try,” Nina insisted. “What is her name?”

“Maxi.”

Maxi had exchanged the Diddl mouse for a dog biscuit, but Anna still didn’t show any sign of encouraging the dog to search, and Nina’s experience with that kind of thing was limited to having seen cadaver dogs work. She attached the leash to its collar and then held the drool-covered toy mouse in front of the dog’s nose.

“Search,” she said as authoritatively as she could. “Maxi, search!”

The dog looked up at her, and she thought it looked as if it was grinning foolishly.

Something occurred to her then. “We should be able to see where it came from. It must have found the toy somewhere.”

“The snow is already covering the tracks,” said Anna.

“Yes, we have to hurry.” She remembered that she was, in fact, dealing with an elderly woman. “You don’t need to come,” she said. “If I can just borrow Maxi.”

“You don’t know your way around here,” said Anna. “We can’t have you getting lost too.”

THEY HAD WALKED perhaps four to five hundred meters in the deep snow—about as exhausting as wading in seawater at mid-thigh height—when Maxi finally seemed to understand what the exercise was all about and set off with a tug that almost dislocated Nina’s one functioning arm.

“She’s got a scent!”

“Yes,” said Anna. “Let her get on with it. Hold the leash tightly, but go with her as quickly as you can. Run if you can.”

The flashlight’s cone of light danced across the snow. Shrubbery and saplings were bent low under the heavy snow, and once in a while Nina’s foot caught on a branch or a stone she couldn’t see. A fence blocked the way on the left—that must be the edge of the golf course. This was neither woodlands nor a real field, but a scruffy sort of in-between-ness, like the meager plantings the municipality tried to establish on highway embankments and the like. Nina had to halt the dog for a moment while she climbed over a partially fallen barbed-wire fence, then on they went through the drifts. Her jeans were ridiculously unsuitable for this, and the snow worked its way up her pant legs and melted down into her socks and boots.

Suddenly Maxi gave a high-pitched, sharp bark and threw itself forward with so much power that the leash slid between Nina’s gloved and frozen fingers. She managed to keep her flashlight on the dog long enough to see it disappear into one end of something that looked like a scrapped railroad car.

She ran as quickly as she could.

The first thing the light illuminated inside the car was a tea table.

A cardboard box covered in a flowered tablecloth, four unmatched cups and a teapot without a lid. Napkins had been set out, and three cookies were neatly arranged on each of the napkins. The cups had been filled with a red liquid that didn’t quite look like tea. Juice, maybe. Only one cup appeared to have been drunk from.

“Rina?”

Nina listened anxiously. No one answered, but she could hear the familiar sound of Rina’s asthmatic breathing. She moved the flashlight around and saw in dancing glimpses that the freight car’s raw wooden walls were covered by cutouts from magazines, photographs, plastic flowers, pale green glow-in-the-dark stars and planets of the same kind that Ida had once been briefly infatuated with, posters of large-eyed animals and long-legged pop starlets, but most of all photographs and ads and newspaper cutouts with one thing in common: they all showed fathers with their children, fathers who pushed strollers, father who held the reins of ponies in amusement parks, fathers who pushed swings, played, built, swam or just smiled and laughed with happy daughters. A secret den, thought Nina. A Father Temple.

“Rina!”

She was lying curled up under a pile of old blankets and towels in the corner farthest from the heavy sliding door she probably had not had the strength to shut completely. Her eyes were closed, her lips pale and wax-like, and beneath her eyebrows was the reddish-brown pinpoint bruising her asthma attack had given her, dark freckles against the almost blue-white skin.

Maxi barked once more and then began to eat the cookies.

Nina pulled her gloves off and placed her fingers against Rina’s neck. The difference between her own cold fingers and Rina’s skin didn’t feel as significant as she had feared it might.

“Rina! Rina, wake up. Look at me.”

She pinched Rina’s earlobe. No reaction whatsoever.

“Oh, the poor little thing.” Anna had appeared in the door. “What’s wrong with her? Is she very weak?”

“She is unconscious,” Nina said but couldn’t see why.

“It must be the cold.”

“Possibly.” There was no doubt that Rina was colder than was good for her, but there was no stiffness in the muscles, no sign of the confusion that sometimes made hypothermia victims act paradoxically by, for example, beginning to take off their clothes.

Then there was a sudden exclamation from Anna. “Oh, no. What has she done?”

“What?”

Anna held up a pill bottle in a red ski mitt that matched her suit. Nina shone her flashlight in her direction but couldn’t see what it was.

“These are mine,” said Anna. “How did she get a hold of them?”

“Give them to me!”

Anna handed them over. Nina grabbed them and finally was able to decipher the writing on the damp, half-dissolved label.

“Diazepam,” she said. “How many were in the bottle?”

Anna’s wide eyes glittered in the glow of the flashlight. “It was almost full,” she said.