Night Rounds

Prologue

“YOU’RE ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN this was the nurse you saw last night?” Superintendent Sven Andersson frowned down at the thin woman sitting at the desk. Her lips were pressed tight shut, and she’d shrunk back into her loose-knit poncho.

“Yes, I am!”

With a resigned sigh, the superintendent turned back into the hallway. Holding a yellowed black-and-white photograph between his right thumb and index finger, he paced the room, pausing deliberately before each window. Finally he stopped in front of a particular one, checking the view against the photo. The foggy gray February morning had softened the edges of everything outside, but he could tell that the photo had been taken from this very spot.

A newly planted birch was barely visible on the left-hand side of the photo. As he peered through the transom window, he found himself looking directly into the crown of a full-grown tree.

He walked ponderously back to the woman at her desk. He hesitated, then loudly cleared his throat. “Well, Nurse Siv, you can certainly understand my difficulty here.”

Her ash-gray face turned toward him. “It was that nurse I saw.”

“Oh, for …!” He swallowed the curse. “The woman in this photo has been dead for fifty years!”

“I know. But it was her!”