The Body in the Fjord

“The book says, ‘The Flåm train ride continues to be one of Norway’s most popular tourist attractions,’” a woman with a slightly nasal voice read to her husband.

He was looking out the window at the people still waiting to board in front of the station at Myrdal.

“We’ll be descending from two thousand eight hundred and forty-five feet above sea level to six feet above sea level in only twelve miles. I don’t think I like the sound of it, honey, do you? Isn’t that kind of steep?” She pursed her lips and tugged at his sleeve to get his attention.

He hadn’t been listening—not an uncommon occurrence. But he had caught enough to know what she was talking about. He’d read the book, too.

“I’m sure it’s all very safe. We’re in Norway, for God’s sakes. What could be safer?”

“You’re right. I’m just being an old fussbudget.”

He’d turned to look at her and now he turned back toward the window. He hated it when she pulled at his clothes. Hated it when she used what she thought were cute words, like fussbudget. Who talked like that, for God’s sakes? Her voice kept going—and going.

“Anyway, it says here the train has five separate braking systems. And they couldn’t possibly all fail, or even

if they did, the train would be going so slowly by then, we could jump off.”

The man repressed the impulse to point out to his wife that jumping off the train as it zigzagged down the mountain to the fjord at any speed would be as suicidal as staying on with no brakes, and he merely grunted something that could be taken as either encouragement or discouragement. His wife opted for the former.

“What was I thinking of? This is going to be fun! It says the train passes through twenty tunnels. We won’t be going very fast, though. It takes fifty-three minutes to go down. Fifty-three minutes for twelve miles. But wait—it says it takes forty minutes to go up. Now, that doesn’t make a speck of sense. You’d think going down would be faster, wouldn’t you? It must be a misprint. We can time it, then write to the guidebook people.”

He didn’t reply, continuing to stare out the window.

You could tell the Norwegians from the tourists, because the Norwegians of all ages carried knapsacks. The tourists had bags on wheels, bags with wheels, or bags strapped onto racks with wheels. Wheels were the thing.

He’d been in Norway long enough—this was their last day—to discover Norwegians didn’t all have blond hair and blue eyes, but they did all look healthy. Good posture, too. Those knapsacks. Must be the free health care. Like to see them in the winter, he thought. Dark the whole day. Maybe they didn’t look so healthy then.

The train started with a smooth exhale and they set off down the mountain.

“Get the camcorder, honey. This is fabulous! Besides, we’re coming to that waterfall soon.”

Kjosfossen. A photo opportunity. He got the camera ready. When the train stopped deep inside a tunnel, he dutifully trailed after his wife and the others, going outside through the dark dampness, emerging into daylight farther down the tracks.

The waterfall was everything the book promised. His wife scampered close to the edge, letting the spray from the mountain torrent hit her in the face.

“So good for your complexion! Better than Evian!” she shouted back to him. He felt vaguely embarrassed by the nymphlike antics of this middle-aged woman. He knew for a fact she never sprayed water—French or any other nationality—on her face. Who was she trying to impress? He also knew for a fact it wasn’t him. Just something to say. Always something to say.

A man at his side was following his gaze.

“Kjosfossen. It’s one of our best ones, one of the biggest,” he said.

And it was. Tumbling down from ledge to ledge, crashing against the dark rocks, rocks that in June held pockets of snow, there was nothing delicate about the waterfall. No bridal-veil similes, no maidens in the mist, but roaring, pounding, impenetrable white water. He lowered the camera for a moment, bent down, and threw a twig in. It vanished instantly, engulfed in the powerful swirling foam so rapidly, he could not even be sure he’d seen it go in.

His wife was still capering about on the slippery rocks. Almost all the other passengers had gone back to the train. His new companion did not seem to be in any hurry.

“The water goes into the river at Flåm, then the fjord. The Aurlandsfjord. Good fishing down below. Salmon,” the man said.

The train whistle blew. His wife gave a start, lost her footing, and for one brief moment…

Seconds later, she was grabbing his sleeve. “I could have killed myself!” She was indignant. “The book should have mentioned how dangerous those rocks are.”

They boarded the train and he resumed his post at the window.

The journey ended at Flåm. When they got off the train, he was surprised to see people running from the platform and down the road toward the river. They were all talking at once.

“What’s happening?” his wife cried out. “Ask if anyone speaks English. They all speak English.”

He shook her off, wanting to know himself what was causing this uncharacteristic agitation. Wanting to run with them.

“You stay here with the bags.”

He was not far behind the man he’d been talking to in the tunnel, catching up with him shortly before they reached a knot of people standing on the banks of the river. Several were crying. A few were retching in the grass.

The cause was immediately obvious.

Caught between two rocks was the body of a man—a young man, it appeared. One of the blonds, although his head was so bashed in from his turbulent journey, it was hard to tell. Some blood had turned the pool where he’d come to rest a sickly pink—salmon pink. His right arm had been wrenched back over his head, assuming a position impossible in nature. Most of the clothes had been torn from his body. Incongruously, one foot remained clad in a running shoe, the laces neatly tied.

“It’s a wonder he’s here at all,” the man from the train said. “Usually in these waters, they’re never found.”

The roar of the falls high up the mountain had become the mere babbling of rushing waters emptying into the deep, still fjord. Mesmerized, he watched as the clear current rolled smoothly over the rocks, swept past the grisly impediment, and continued on to the sea. Watched it over and over again.

Never found.

One

“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 Flåm, 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.

“Put these where you can get at them easily—your jacket pocket, whatever—after you land. And be sure to carry fifty dollars or more in Norwegian currency on your person, not in your bag, at all times.”

“Hair spray?” Pix had eyed the other items and they made some sense, although the thought of a situation where she might have to use the gloves to avoid leaving fingerprints was not comforting. But hair spray? Her short, thick dark brown hair fell into place and stayed there.

“Because they’re not about to let you into the country that awards the Nobel Peace Prize, or any other one for that matter, with a can of Mace or pepper spray, so this will have to do. Hope put me onto the brand.” Faith’s

sister, Hope, a real estate appraiser for Citibank, and her husband, Quentin, lived in New York City, where the two sisters had been born and raised. She regularly passed on news to perennially homesick Faith, from what was hot in self-defense to the closing of the Quilted Giraffe, one of their favorite restaurants.

“Here, take this comb. It snaps into the mirror. The hair spray will feel more legitimate then.” Faith knew her friend well.

For a brief moment, Pix found herself wishing Faith was coming, too. She’d never carried a weapon before. Gingerly, she picked up the spray as if it were a live grenade and slipped it into her toiletries bag. She zipped her suitcase shut and set it on the floor. She’d take that sweater out after Faith left. For now, she was ready to go.

It wasn’t going to be a pleasure trip. In fact, all thoughts of any pleasure had been shelved by Marit’s call for help—help in trying to make sense of a nightmare. According to Marit, there was only one way to find Kari and she couldn’t do it. Someone had to pose as a Scandie Sights tourist—as soon as possible.

Someone had to blend in with the group: “The Little Mermaid Meets the Trolls: Copenhagen to Fjord Country.” The Mermaid/Troll tour. The tour where Kari and Erik had last been seen.

Pix leaned back into her seat. It was ten o’clock at night and they were still in Newark. It had already been the flight from hell and they weren’t even in the air. First, the plane from Boston was delayed—something about thunderstorms in New Jersey. One of the legion of dark-suited businesspeople glued to their cell phones had pried himself away to shout to a companion that one of the tanks at the oil refineries near the turnpike had been struck by lightning and that things were totally screwed up. For some reason, they both thought this was hysterically funny.

When the flight finally was announced for boarding, the surge of humanity threatened to engulf them, until Mrs.

Arnold Lyman Rowe whipped out her folding cane and parted the seas. Pix had never seen this cane before, and as they were ushered to the head of the line, Ursula flashed her a triumphant look. “I only use it when I have to,” she whispered. Clearly this was going to be a no-holds-barred trip.

Strongly citing extreme inconvenience, Ursula got them bumped to first class after they arrived at SAS in Newark, where they discovered their flight was at the gate but that the doors were closed. They would be forced to wait several hours for the next flight. She also made them call Marit. By the time they got on the plane, Pix was exhausted. Ursula was, of course, fresh as a daisy and perky to boot. Pix wondered why on earth her mother had thought she would need her daughter’s help. So far, the only thing Pix had done was use one of the meal chits SAS had issued to secure a cup of tea for Ursula. The hamburgers that had been sitting wrapped in foil for many hours and fries from before that had held little appeal for either of them. Well, she could start taking charge now.

“I think the best thing to do is put on these masks and go right to sleep. That way, we’ll be on Norwegian time when we arrive. I’ll tell the steward we don’t want the meal.”

Ursula had been examining the contents of the bag thoughtfully provided to first-class passengers for many hundreds of dollars extra with all the excitement of a child opening a very large birthday present.

“Even toothpaste!” she exclaimed. The Rowe women, besides traveling light, always traveled economy class.

“I’m going to reset my watch now.” Pix adjusted her footrest. They would be able to sleep in these seats, something impossible on every other flight she’d made. Fitting her long, angular frame into an airline seat was like trying to put those springy joke snakes back in the fake mixed-nuts can. Both mother and daughter were tall—and attractive, although Pix had never believed she was, despite a husband given to unrestrained, unlawyerly rhapsodies

about her dark chestnut hair and deep brown eyes. Ursula’s hair was white, a clean white, like new-fallen snow. It too was short, but, unlike Pix’s, it curled slightly. Ursula’s cheekbones had become more pronounced, yet age had not clouded her brown eyes.

Pix reached for the button to summons the steward.

“What are you doing, dear?”

“Calling the steward, so we won’t be disturbed when they serve dinner. We can wear these sleep masks.”

“But I want my dinner. It could be something nice.” Her mother sounded uncharacteristically plaintive.

Pix had heard Faith on the subject of airplane food and thought it unlikely that SAS had whisked a cordon bleu chef aboard especially for this flight.

Ursula persevered. “It will probably be something Scandinavian. You know how much you like salmon. It could be salmon.”

“All right, we’ll have dinner, then go to sleep immediately after.”

Her mother had pulled a menu from the pocket in front of them. “See, smoked salmon to start. Now, you don’t want to miss that.”

Pix was seeing a new side of Ursula: Ursula the traveler. Yes, mother was intrepid, still gardening, living on her own, fiercely independent. She’d asked for a kayak for her eightieth birthday and plied the waters of Maine’s Penobscot Bay with aplomb. In between worrying about her children—Mark, almost twenty; Samantha, a senior in high school; Danny, a seventh grader—all worrisome ages—Pix worried about her mother, despite her self-sufficiency, or maybe because of it. But she knew her, or so she thought. The long wait in Newark Airport had revealed another Ursula: Ursula the outgoing. Pix had spent the time slumped in a tortuous molded plastic seat, trying to read the Fodor’s guide Faith had insisted she bring so she’d know where to eat. Her mother, meanwhile, was making friends, and as they departed for their various destinations, she filled Pix in on the lives of these new ac

quaintances. Ursula’s Christmas card list was growing faster than Pinocchio’s nose.

“I never knew the copper in the Statue of Liberty is Norwegian copper. That interesting man I was just talking to told me all about it when I mentioned where we were going. At the time it was cast, a French company owned the copper mine in Norway and that’s how it happened. I wonder if Marit knows.”

Pix had been amazed. On her own turf, her mother never spoke to strangers and was even known to be reserved with friends. Talk about off the leash.

The plane bumped down the runway and soon they were in the air. Ursula had insisted that Pix take the window seat and was now craning over to see if she could spot the Norsk Lady Liberty in the net of twinkling jewel-like lights spread below, enveloped by darkness as they gained altitude. She leaned back and was soon captivated by the map on the movie screen marked with altitude, speed, mileage, time, and their tiny plane inching along the Eastern Seaboard.

A few bursts of static, then a voice: “This is Einar Magnusson speaking. I am your captain tonight. On behalf of Scandinavian Airlines, I would like to welcome all of you on board and I’m very sorry for the long wait on the runway. I promise to make up the time. You will be in Oslo before you know it!” His voice was cheerful, sincere, contrite. He repeated the announcement in his native tongue, sounding even more cheerful, sincere, and contrite. Pix was vaguely alarmed. Exactly how did Einar propose to make up this time? Her mother’s thoughts were elsewhere.

“Danish. You can always tell. You know what Marit says. They sound like they have a potato in their mouths.”

Pix wasn’t going to touch this one. Dane, Swede, Norwegian, Hindustani—she didn’t care, so long as he got them to Oslo safely. Mother, on the other hand, seemed to have picked up some of Marit’s intense nationalism—the “Forty thousand Swedes ran through the weeds chased

by one Norwegian” kind, or “The only thing the Swedes have that the Norwegians don’t are good neighbors.” Norway had only been independent from Sweden since 1905 and feelings still ran high.

Dinner arrived. The lox—“røketlaks” in Norwegian, Ursula pointed out—was followed by decidedly non-Scandinavian sirloin tips. Pix passed on the mango mousse and turned her light off. She hadn’t had to supervise Danny’s homework, or deal with dinner. She was missing a meeting and Samantha’s senioritis, which veered wildly from counting the days until graduation to tears at leaving. Pix had been able to just leave after all. She wasn’t indispensable. If only it hadn’t been for such a horrible reason.

“Good night, Mother.”

“Good night, Pix. If you wake up, wiggle around or step over me and walk up and down. They say this helps you with jet lag.”

Ursula read a lot, Pix reminded herself, and she wondered what other travel tips awaited her. Before drifting off to sleep, she lifted her mask to check on her mother. Ursula had headphones on and was watching the movie. Pix pulled the mask down. Mother didn’t get to the movies much.

A horrible reason…The steward had given her two blankets and they actually had some heft to them, as opposed to the tissue-paper ones issued to economy class. She pulled one up around her shoulders and tried to let sleep, so close, claim her. Marit would be waiting for them. Marit, a Scandinavian version of Ursula, tall, poised. Pix had a hard time imagining the two stately old ladies as silly little girls, the way they described themselves when they looked at the old pictures.

The Larsens, Marit’s parents, had emigrated to the United States sometime in the early 1900s. They had been intending to join relatives who had settled in Minnesota, but arriving in New York, Mr. Larsen had mistakenly purchased railway tickets for Hampton, New Hampshire, rather than Hampton, Minnesota. A thorough man, he was conscientiously following a map as they traveled, and upon

hearing the names of places that did not appear on his route, he realized his error and got his wife, great with child, off the train in Boston. At this point, Mrs. Larsen had had enough of travel and enough of the United States. Unlike her husband, she did not speak any English and was already longing for herring. They decided to stay put and see how things went. Norwegians tend to be bodies that do not stay in motion once having arrived someplace. The one thing Mrs. Larsen did do was insist that her husband get on a trolley with her and ride until they found a place enough like home so she could tolerate their sojourn in this foreign land. The place turned out to be Aleford, twenty minutes west of Boston. Of course, Aleford no more resembles the rolling green meadows, deep fjords, and towering mountains of the Larsen birthplace than it does the Amazon rain forest, but it did have some birch trees and red barns. That was enough for Mrs. Larsen. After the birth of her first child, Nils, Marit’s older brother, now passed away, along with her only other sibling, Lars, Mrs. Larsen started doing wash for various ladies in Aleford, who promptly became “her ladies.” And her favorite lady was Ursula’s mother, Mrs. Lyman.

The Lymans lived in a sprawling old house with a backyard that sloped down to the Concord River, a branch of which ran through town. Ursula had inherited the house and it was where Pix and her brother, Arnold, had grown up. It seemed as much a part of the family as the people who had inhabited it over the generations. Pix didn’t want to think what would happen to the house after Ursula died. Didn’t want to think about that at all.

The Larsens’ house also backed onto the river, farther downstream. From the pictures, it seemed this generation took to the water the way Pix and her brother had. Ursula and Marit in a canoe, swimming, rowing. But always Ursula and Marit. Both were the only girls in their families and they sought each other’s company on every possible occasion. Marit was such a frequent guest for dinner, she had her own napkin ring.

Mr. Larsen was a carpenter and his business prospered throughout the twenties. Ursula liked to point out all the houses he had built in Aleford and the surrounding towns. “There’s one of Pete’s,” she’d announce as they drove past. Mrs. Larsen stopped doing wash and devoted herself to handwork, inviting her ladies for coffee and cakes. The smell of cardamom, Ursula once told Pix, could still transport her instantly back to the Larsens’ kitchen. Then the Depression hit and people weren’t building houses anymore. Peter Larsen eked out a living repairing stoops and doing other odd jobs. Mrs. Larsen started washing again. But when they finally made the big decision to return home, they told the Lymans that they had never touched their savings—savings securely tucked into the bank in Norway, where their cousin, Olav, worked in Tønsberg. The Larsen boys were grown, married, and on their own, doing as best they could. Marit had recently finished high school. It was time to go.

When that time came, Mrs. Larsen was as sorry to leave as she had been to come, but it was Marit who was the most bereft. She and Ursula swore to remain friends forever, write often, and visit as soon as they had the money. It would be a long time before the first visit, but they wrote constantly. The war years were very hard. Marit lost both her parents. Heart problems, the doctor said, but she knew it was the lack of good food. The Lymans sent packages, many that never arrived. The years after the war ended were lean, too. Pix remembered packing dried fruit and jars of peanut butter for people she’d heard so much about, she felt she knew them. Marit had married shortly before losing her parents. Her daughter, Hanna, was born during the occupation.

Now the Norwegians were the rich ones, with their black gold, the North Sea oil. Ursula had been astonished at the wealth of the country she’d observed during her trip the previous summer. No more food packages, although she wondered how people could afford anything at all, even to eat, with prices so high.

Pix awoke with a start. She had no idea where she was. The steady drone of the jet engines brought her back to reality. Reality? What was that? She was on her way to Norway to join a tour group because her mother’s best friend was certain the key to her granddaughter’s disappearance and the death of her fiancé lay hidden somewhere among the camera-laden, sensibly shod, indefatigable tourists Kari had been shepherding. And if Marit Hansen believed something was true, there was no arguing. The only one Pix knew more stubborn than Marit was Ursula.

“Why don’t you go out and find Marit and I’ll wait for the suitcases,” Pix suggested. Her mother had taken her cane out again. All the better to pass through customs, although a silver-haired grandmother, especially one who had not been to South America several times in the last month, would merit no more than a smiling, passing glance from the Norwegian passport control. It was, Pix reflected, the perfect cover. She also gave a thought to why her mother was posing as an old lady again. What did she have in her hefty purse?

Captain Magnusson had been a man of his word and they were only a half hour late. It was eleven o’clock in the morning, June twelfth. June eleventh had been swallowed up by various airports and the time change. Pix felt only slightly fatigued, but she wished she could tap into Ursula’s energy source. Kelp pills? Ursula swore by them and all the vitamins she took.

The two bags appeared, carry-ons that SAS had still insisted be checked, much to Ursula’s annoyance. “The whole notion of traveling light is to avoid having to check your luggage. Why can’t they understand this? Scandinavians are usually so sensible.’’ Pix pointed out that, judging from the name tags sported by the personnel at Newark Airport, it appeared no one working for SAS had been born anywhere near the Land of the Midnight Sun and let it go at that.

Quickly passing through customs, blushing with guilt at the thought of her hair spray, gloves, and other paraphernalia, Pix pushed open the heavy door leading to Fornebu Airport’s main waiting room and was immediately embraced by Marit. Like most Norwegian women, she was well groomed, her bright white hair waving softly back from her tan face. In the winter, the color was from ski trips; now it was from the beach or the park. She was wearing a navy knitted suit and what Pix always called “the Norwegian Ladies Club necklace”—a heavy chain of gold they wore with everything from ball gowns to bathing suits. She was smiling as she greeted Pix. Pix was not surprised. Norwegians as a whole were not given to letting it all hang out. Erik was dead and Kari was missing—wanted by the police to aid them in their inquiries, as it was delicately put—but you’d never be able to tell from Marit’s demeanor. A Norwegian’s entire family could have been wiped out by a giant meteorite and the first thing he or she would say to a visitor would be, “You must be hungry. How about some coffee and a little cake?” And Marit was doing it now.

“You are so good to come. How was the trip? Are you very tired? Or hungry? And where is Ursula? Surely she has not been stopped by customs.”

“Isn’t she with you?” Pix looked wildly about the waiting room. It wasn’t very big. “She came out ahead while I waited for the bags.”

“Now, now, don’t worry. There’re not so many places she could go. We’ll have her paged.”

Pix had lost her children any number of times, ranging from agitated seconds in the aisles of Aleford’s Stop ’n Save to full terror at the Burlington Mall for five minutes before Danny emerged from beneath a sale rack at Filene’s. But she had never lost her mother.

Marit was speaking to a friendly-looking woman at the SAS information counter. “Yes, of course we have Mrs. Rowe. She’s having some coffee and a little cake with us in the back room. She didn’t see you and we thought she’d be more comfortable here.”

It was the first time Pix had heard Norwegian English in a long time and her ear welcomed the slightly singsong, lilting sound—some of the sentences ending on a questioning note—“Of course we have Mrs. Rowe?”—certain words punctuated by a quick intake of breath for emphasis, almost always with ja or nei. Marit had spoken this way, too, but Pix had been too busy scanning Fornebu for some sign of Ursula to appreciate it. She remembered with a sharp stab what her children had called “Norwegian teen-speak,” Kari’s frequent addition of a giggle or outright laughter at the end of a remark.

Marit had tucked Ursula’s arm through hers and was leading the way out of the airport. She was making determined small talk—about the flight, about the plans to move the airport from Oslo’s center to Gardermoen, north of the city. “We all love Fornebu. It’s so convenient, except it really is too small. You know, we used to call it a ‘cafeteria with a landing strip,’ and it has gotten much bigger, but still the new one will be better. It will be nice to be on the fjord and not see the jumbo jets.” So far, nothing had been said about Kari or Erik.

Pix followed, carrying the bags. She blinked in the bright daylight. Like the airport, the very air seemed scrubbed clean. And the cars—they all looked like new, no dents, no grime. Marit opened hers with an automatic key, apologizing. “It came with it and now I’m so used to it.” Another national trait: no bragging, no self-aggrandizement. The opposite, in fact. During the Olympics, there had been a concerted campaign to get the Norwegians to root actively for their own athletes, passionately as they might feel inside. They had to be reassured that it was quite acceptable and the world wouldn’t think they were a nation of show-offs. Showing off—a Lutheran sin, right up there with adultery, lying, and murder. There was even a Norwegian word for it, jantelaw, which roughly translates as “Now, don’t go thinking you’re better than anyone else.”

It was a short ride to Marit’s apartment. When Marit’s husband, Hans, died, she and Kari, who was a young teenager, had moved to the capital city, using the house in Tønsberg for weekends and during the summer.

Even in the car, Marit avoided the topic on everyone’s mind, but the moment they entered the apartment, it was the time and place. She firmly shut the door, announcing, “You have to get the two-fifty-five train to Voss to meet the tour, and we have a lot to talk about. You will need to take a little rest, too, Ursula?”

Her friend shook her head. “I’m not at all tired, and besides, it’s a long train ride and I can rest then. Why don’t you tell us everything that’s happened since we spoke? Has there been any more news?”

Marit led the way into the living room. The apartment wasn’t large, but it felt spacious because of the plate-glass windows overlooking the Oslofjord. The walls were painted a deep blue-green. The trim was white. Artwork of all sorts hung from floor to ceiling. There was a big stone fireplace and the floors were wood. A handwoven striped rag defined the dining area as separate from the living room. Where there weren’t pictures, there were bookcases crammed with books in several languages. Ursula and Marit sat on the couch, Marit motioning for Pix to sit opposite them in a comfortable-looking leather armchair. The inevitable coffee table, staple of Scandinavian home furnishing, did indeed hold coffee cups and plates.

“I know they feed you all the time on those flights, but you should have a little something. We can eat while we talk.”

Pix jumped up to help Marit, who insisted she stay put, returning almost immediately with the coffee and a platter of open-faced sandwiches, smørbrød. Despite the gravity of the situation, Pix felt a twinge of pleasure when she saw her favorite, the bread hidden by rows of reker, nestled on mayonnaise, a bit of lettuce, a curl of paper-thin lemon on top. Reker were tiny, succulent shrimp, only available this far north. Next to these open-facers, she liked reker best straight from the boats where

they had been caught and cooked. One could buy them by the bag here in Oslo on the wharf in front of city hall and in the fish market in Bergen. It was the essence of being in Norway, strolling along a waterfront, eating fresh shrimp. But she doubted there would be any time for this in the days to come.

“The police call constantly. They keep asking if Kari has gotten in touch with me. I think they are watching the house, too, because they think I might try to hide her.”

Ursula came straight to the point. “But why? How could they possibly believe she is responsible for Erik’s death? Surely it was an accident!”

Marit shrugged. Her face now looked tired and the color faded. “Probably they don’t know what to believe, and the newspapers, television, and radio are full of the story from morning to night. Nothing better to do with their time.” Marit was disgusted. She paused. “They have dredged up the whole business with Hanna and it worries me that Kari, wherever she is, might be seeing it.” Marit had made it absolutely clear to them as they ate that in her mind Kari was alive.

“Oh no, that’s disgraceful!” Pix was indignant. Hanna had been only a few years older than she was. There had been one golden summer when Ursula brought both her children to Norway and they joined the Larsens, their various cousins, and their friends on an island in the middle of the Hardangerfjord. The children all slept in one big room, the attic of an old farmhouse. They were outdoors from dawn to dusk. Pix had worshiped Hanna. Hanna swam like a fish, could climb any tree, and her arrows always hit the target. She told the younger children wonderfully scary tales of the trolls who inhabited the woodlands and came alive at night, pointing out their faces turned to stone by the sun’s first rays in the mountains surrounding the fjord. Yet there was a dark side to Hanna, the night side of the trolls. She was moody and no one was ever sure what would cause her temper to flare. That summer was the first summer her parents became the same

kind of targets she trained her bow and arrow on. Again, she seldom missed.

It grew worse as she got older. Tønsberg seemed hopelessly conventional. It was the sixties and she craved new experiences. Some of them, she found through drugs. Then she met Sven and he became the most powerful addiction of them all. Throughout, her mother and father strove to stay with her, fearing a break, offering her any kind of help, whatever she wanted, trying not to be demanding. They never wavered in their love, even when it was rejected. Across the ocean, Ursula would read Marit’s letters and feel helpless. She went to visit her friend alone and came back visibly upset. “This will not end well,” she told her daughter, who was by then old enough to know what was going on.

Hanna took off with Sven. They went wherever their fancy took them. Marit and Hans received postcards and were grateful for them. Then the cards stopped. Hanna returned home eight months later, pregnant. Sven had abandoned her in Greece when he learned he was about to become a father. Hanna had thought he would marry her. Instead, he found another young girl and left. She was penniless and had to work to save money for a ticket home. She did not want to ask her parents for it. Maybe she wasn’t even sure that was where she was headed.

When Kari was born, at first it seemed that Hanna was happy. She insisted on doing everything to take care of the golden-haired baby, a baby who always smiled, especially when her mother picked her up. It brought the Hansen family together for a brief, very special time, later a time treasured like the salvaged beads of a favorite broken neck-lace—not enough to string, but put away to save forever nonetheless.

Hanna killed herself on Kari’s second birthday. She went deep into the woods, climbed high up into a tall Norwegian spruce, made a noose, and hanged herself. Some hikers found her.

Now all the old accounts were being resurrected. Had the daughter done something similar, convincing her lover to join her? asked the papers. Or was there some aberrant strain in the family that erupted in madness and Kari had pushed Erik to his doom, then killed herself—or run away?

“None of this is true, Marit. You know that.” Ursula was polishing off a smørbrød with a kind of ground meat patty and fried onions. “Stop reading the papers and don’t turn on the radio or TV. If there’s anything you have to know, the police or someone will tell you. Besides, you’ll be meeting us on the tour soon.”

“I know, but I just wanted to tell you what’s been going on.” Marit pursed her mouth. “It makes people feel better if they think others are worse off.”

Pix had never heard Marit speak so pessimistically. She thought of the questions she and Faith had raised. Now was the time to ask them. When they met Marit at the hotels the tour would be stopping at, they would supposedly be meeting for the first time and striking up a casual acquaintance. The tour. Marit’s call to Ursula had been a plea for Ursula to pose as a tourist, but the two women had quickly decided Pix would be useful. “You’ll be the hund,” Marit had told Pix earlier. “The dog—you know, like for the blind. You will be our hund, since we are now such old women and can’t do everything we once did.” Pix wasn’t sure how she felt about her new role, but it was true that, while in terrific shape, Marit and Ursula just might not be able to do things like the trip by horseback they’d taken across the vast Hardangervidda some thirty years ago.

The Mermaid/Troll tour. It reminded Pix of her first question—actually, two questions.

She had wondered from the beginning why Marit was adamant they join the tour to investigate, eliminating all other possibilities.

“You seem so sure that whatever has happened is linked to the tour. I know it was where they were last seen, but couldn’t the explanation for all this lie somewhere else? A situation with a friend, someone they know

at the university?” Pix was trying to ask her question delicately, avoiding words like drugs. She added, “Or a senseless attack by a stranger?”

“I thought of those things—of everything. I have told myself enough stories for many novels.” Marit sounded bleak. “I think I have spoken to everyone Kari ever knew, gone through her address book, reached friends of friends. Nothing. Everyone seemed genuinely puzzled about where she might be and what could have happened to Erik. The only thing left is the tour.

“Erik’s parents have believed from the beginning that it was suicide after a quarrel, and they blame Kari. They are very religious people and Erik seemed rebellious to them, although it was only normal growing-up behavior. Now, perhaps they feel he has been punished. I cannot pretend to understand, only grieve for them. They won’t talk to me any longer. But I don’t agree. I knew Erik and I’m sure he wouldn’t have taken his life. Kari and Erik were very happy together. As for a stranger, we do not have many of these random crimes in Norway, although I suppose it could have occurred. But why? They weren’t robbed. No, the tour is the only hope, and I have such a strong feeling about it. Almost as if Kari herself is telling me what to do.”

She stopped, her lips set in a firm line. Pix knew there had never been any doubt about going on the tour. She’d just had to ask. This settled, or unsettled, the next question followed.

“Isn’t it going to seem odd for us to be joining the tour so near to the end? Wouldn’t we have waited for the next one? What did you say when you made the reservations?”

“Remember, Erik worked for this company last year, so I know a lot about it. Apparently, the most popular part is the fjord cruise. If there’s room, they let people sign up just for those four days. You can leave either from Bergen or Oslo and meet the rest at Voss. You won’t be the only ones, I’m sure.”

“Also, can you tell us exactly what Kari said when she called Friday night?”

Marit closed her eyes for a moment, then opened them and recited from memory, a memory she had obviously been over many times. “She said the tour was going well. No rain—they’d had rain with the first one and everyone complained. I asked her where she was and she told me she was about to get on the train to Bergen. She was in the main train station, Oslo S, not the smaller one at the National Theater. She said, ‘I don’t have much time, Bestemor, and I’d like you to do a favor for me.’ ‘Anything,’ I told her. ‘Could you go into the top middle drawer of my desk, get my address book, and give me Annelise Christensen’s phone number? No, wait—they’re boarding and I have to go. There isn’t time. Call me with it tonight. The tour is staying at the Augustin Hotel; you know it.’ I said no problem and that I’d talk with her later. ‘How is Erik?’ I asked, and she said, ‘He’s fine, but there’s something else…. I can’t talk now. I’ll tell you tonight.’ She hung up without even saying good-bye. At the time, I thought the train must have started to move, but now I think maybe someone came along, someone she didn’t want overhearing what she was about to say.”

Pix nodded. “Two more things. Did she say anything about eloping? And who is Annelise Christensen?”

“I’ve told you everything she said as exactly as I can remember. And if she had planned to elope, I know she would have said something. But she never would have eloped. It was always her dream to get married in the domkirken in Tønsberg where she had been christened and confirmed. Erik, too. They spoke of it when you were here, Ursula, and we went to that concert there.”

“Yes, I remember. Kari was joking about how often she had been a bridesmaid lately. And you were reminiscing about your own wedding there during the war, wearing your grandmother’s dress and drinking the toast with some sort of raw alcohol mixed with orange soda your father concocted.”

“And Annelise?” Pix persisted.

“She was at school with Kari and now she lives and works in Bergen. She hasn’t been there very long, and you know how it is for us on the east coast. We cannot get used to the rain—and if you are not from Bergen, you are really an outsider to many people there. You know they always say Bergen, not Norway, when someone asks them where they’re from. I think Kari wanted to see how Annelise was doing—if she’d found friends.”

“Why couldn’t she just look her name up in the telephone book when she got there, or ask information? Why would she call you for it?”

“There are not so many names in Norway and there are as many Hansens as Christensens, I’m sure. That’s why we put our professions as part of our names so often. Without Annelise’s address, Kari would have had to call many A. Christensens, and she wouldn’t want to bother people.”

Heaven forbid, Pix thought. Bothering people was another sin in this very polite society.

“I phoned Annelise after I spoke to Carl, the tour guide. I thought maybe Kari had been in touch with her some way, but she hadn’t heard from Kari and was as surprised as I was that they had eloped. When the news of Erik’s death came, she called right away. She, too, is worried about Kari, of course, and if she hears anything at all, she said she would let me know at once.”

Pix nodded.

“I think you’re looking a little peaked, dear,” Ursula said to her daughter. “I’m sure Marit wouldn’t mind if you took a short nap before we leave for the station.”

Pix was about to protest that, like her mother, she could sleep on the long train ride, but she closed her mouth when she felt the meaningful glance from Ursula hit her full force in the face. Her mother wanted to be alone with her old friend. To comfort, console…plot?

“You can lie down in Kari’s room. I’ll show you.” Marit led the way out of the living room and down the

narrow hall. “The bathroom is just here.” She nodded at a closed door marked with the traditional heart.

Kari’s room also overlooked the bustling Oslofjord, and the thin muslin curtains let in the sunlight. Pix noted the heavy roller shades, necessary at this time of year, when the sky could still be bright at midnight. The walls of the room were covered with blue-flowered wallpaper that Pix recognized as Laura Ashley. Kari was something of an Anglophile after working as an au pair outside London one summer. Bracelets and necklaces hung from an assortment of wooden pegs. A bookshelf held childhood books, in addition to her university texts. She was studying to be an occupational therapist. The shelves also held a piggy bank, photo albums, and a funny-looking troll. There was a full stereo system, stacks of cassettes and CDs, and headphones—presumably for Marit’s sake. The antique pine bed was covered with a dyne, the down-filled comforter that served as bedding in Scandinavia, its crisp white cover changed, instead of a top sheet. Two fluffy pillows were at the head, and for a brief moment, Pix thought she might crawl in and pull the comforter over her head for a few minutes of blissful unconsciousness. But she didn’t like to sleep in the daytime. It made her groggy, cranky—and she had a lot to think about after talking to Marit.

Most important, though, was the realization that here she was in Kari’s room. What would Faith do in a similar situation? She’d snoop, of course. Pix felt fully justified in opening any and all drawers if it would give her a clue to where Kari might be and what could have happened. Kari’s small chest of drawers was covered with framed photographs, makeup, a silver comb and brush set. Pix picked up a photo of Erik and Kari. They were wearing their student caps. Erik, twenty-one—only a year older than Pix’s own son. The thought stabbed her and she put the photograph down.

She walked over to a print on the wall. It wasn’t by an artist she recognized—Munch or Kittelsen. It was of a small country house with trees, flowers, and animals, done

in a naïve folk-art style. Very charming. She couldn’t read the artist’s signature, so she took it down to get a closer look. Marianne Arneberg. Moving to replace it, Pix realized that something was taped to the back.

It was an envelope.

She lifted the flap and removed the contents. There wasn’t much: a few letters, some photographs. One picture tumbled to the floor. It was of Kari—Kari arm in arm with a very handsome dark-haired man.

Kari with someone other than Erik.

Two

But she was wrong. It wasn’t Kari. It was Hanna.

The resemblance was remarkable. Mother and daughter looked almost identical. But the clothes were the giveaway. Hanna was wearing a long flowered dress, the kind love children made in the sixties from their Indian-print bedspreads. She had beads around her neck, as did the man in bell-bottom jeans. On the back, only one word was writ-ten—the name Sven—and no date. The couple was standing in front of a Volkswagen Beetle parked alongside an olive grove. Olives did not grow in Norway. Not much of anything grew in Norway, where only 3 percent of the land was arable. It must have been taken in Italy, or France, some other place far from home. The two were smiling. Pix searched her memory for an image of Hanna. She had never seen her at this age. She had never seen her smiling so happily.

Pix felt relieved. The fleeting notion that Kari—with a secret love other than Erik—might not be who she seemed had made Pix feel unsteady. She knew she was on unfamiliar turf, but that this turf might suddenly suck her down into some sort of underground even more complicated than what was presently before her eyes was frightening. She reminded herself that Kari and Erik were students, good

students, in love, planning for the future. Honest, loyal to each other.

She looked at the letters and the other photos. More pictures of Hanna. Hanna and a baby, Hanna and a toddler—Hanna and Kari.

The letters were written in a childish hand, the script rounded. Pix could recognize only a few of the Norwegian words. “Kjære Mor og Far”—mor meant “mother”; “grandmother” was bestemor, your best mother, an appellation Ursula heartily applauded. Far meant “father.” “Dear Mother and Father.” The letters were signed “Hanna.” Hanna writing to her parents from some early trips with friends or her school? She’d drawn a little horse in the margin of one, a garland of roses in another.

Why weren’t these pictures framed and on Kari’s bureau with the rest, the letters in the big antique wooden box, ornately painted, that Pix had discovered held postcards and other letters? She thought a moment. There had been some photographs on the mantel in the living room, their silver frames well polished, like everything else in the apartment—Marit and Hans’s wedding picture, Kari’s graduation photo, Hans’s and one of Marit’s parents. But none of Hanna. Marit didn’t seem the type to be ashamed of her daughter’s suicide. Was it too painful to be reminded of what might have been? Or something else? Whatever it was, Kari had kept these links to her mother hidden. Pix imagined her sitting on the bed, reading the letters, looking at the faces, wondering. Long ago, a two-year-old would have asked many questions. Where did Mor go? When will she be back? How had her grandparents answered them? And Far? What about him?

There was a gentle knock on the door and Pix jumped a mile. “Pix, are you awake? We have to get ready to leave soon.”

Marit pushed the door open a crack. Pix shoved the envelope under the pillows. She was glad she was sitting on the bed and she hoped Marit wouldn’t notice the picture

was off the wall. She answered quickly. “I’ll just wash up and be right with you.”

“Fine. You don’t need to hurry too much. I have your tickets, but Ursula thinks it would be better to get to the station a little early.”

Pix knew what this meant. The Rowes considered being on time being wherever you had to go at least thirty minutes before. If this meant driving around a neighborhood until the doorbell could be rung precisely on the hour, then so be it. It was a trait Marit and her compatriots shared. In Norway, on time meant on time.

The moment the door closed, Pix put everything back in the envelope. It had been frustrating searching the room when she didn’t know the language. The letters and postcards in the box might have revealed something. On impulse, she took the photo of Hanna and Sven out of the envelope. She also removed the one of Kari and Erik from its frame and put both pictures in her wallet, tucked behind her passport. It seemed like something Faith would do. She smoothed the bed, fluffed up the pillows, and hung the picture back on the wall. It looked exactly the way it had before Pix had entered. Faith would have done this, too.

Ursula Rowe was sound asleep. Sitting across the aisle, Pix felt a pang. Her mother looked so vulnerable, her mouth slightly open. With her dark, lively eyes closed, she looked like the old lady she was. Pix had been dozing, too, but fear of drooling in public and troubled dreams had kept her from real sleep.

The sunshine of Oslo had given way to gray skies as they crossed the Hardangervidda. When he punched their tickets, the conductor had cheerfully assured them they would see much nature on the five-and-a-half-hour trip, but Pix was finding the vast empty stretches of landscape bleak and forbidding. It was also unsettling to plunge constantly in and out of the strings of snow tunnels, necessary to keep the line from east to west open during the harsh

winter. The vidda was the site of that horseback trip Marit, Ursula, and a group of Marit’s friends had taken so many years earlier. They had called themselves the “Cartwright sisters.” Bonanza was wildly popular in Norway at the time, as later Dallas proved to be—well before the country became a Dallas itself.

After the horseback trip, Ursula had returned to Aleford, uncharacteristically restless and touchy. She had raved about the wild beauty of the vidda, the lakes, the reindeer. Looking out the window, Pix suddenly understood why her mother might have chafed at Aleford’s tidy village green after this seemingly endless plain high in the mountains, so near to the sky—a sky whose horizon was broken not by trees but only an occasional hut, hytte, once used by herders, now by hikers, or converted to summer houses. Before the train, the paths that crossed and recrossed the vidda were well worn, essential connections between villages on the two coasts. Now the train eliminated the need, but the Norwegians were still walkers, taking pleasure in hiking across the lonely plateau from one isolated hut to another. She was seeing much nature. The conductor had been right. Whoosh. Another tunnel. The light flickered through the slats like a strobe. Pix closed her eyes.

Why did Kari and Erik have their passports? She had to find a moment to ask Marit when they struck up their “new” friendship tomorrow. It was the one thing that suggested they had planned to elope. Get married in Norway, then take off—for olive groves? Or had they simply packed them the way one does all sorts of things—to be prepared—penlites, rubber gloves, hair spray.

They were out of the tunnel. A red-faced young woman was having trouble negotiating a heavily laden food cart through the connecting compartment doors. Two passengers immediately leapt up to help her. Pix didn’t think this would happen on Amtrak. The Norwegian state railway system was clean, too—even the bathroom.

Ursula woke up. “Coffee, don’t you think? And maybe one of those pastries.”

Two coffees and two pastries, wrapped in plastic and tasting like train food everywhere, cost about what dinner at Legal Seafoods in Boston would. If they had opted for Cokes, it would have been dinner at Olives. The exchange rate was terrible and things cost the earth here. She’d have to stop converting to dollars or she might starve.

“We should be there soon.” Ursula moved over to sit next to her daughter. “Isn’t it beautiful?” Pix was about to confess that she was not as taken with the view as Ursula and that perhaps it was her mother’s fond memories coloring her opinions, when the sun broke through the dark clouds. Beams of light, so precise as to suggest the hand of some unseen Bergmanesque director, brought the surface of a lake in the distance to life, the colors of the moss-covered ground appeared, and a flock of birds took flight. A solitary hiker was silhouetted against the glow. It was beautiful.

“We had such a wonderful guide. We all loved him. Dead now, I should imagine. We all thought he was such an old man then, and he was probably only about sixty.”

The loudspeaker announced that Voss was next, and the message was thoughtfully repeated in several languages.

“I think I’ll go make myself tidy,” Ursula said. “We’ll be meeting the group soon.” She eyed Pix’s outfit with approval. It was similar to what she had on herself, except she wore a skirt. Her daughter was wearing navy cotton pants, a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and a bright blue cotton cardigan. Pix normally liked to travel in jeans, but she knew her mother did not approve of women Pix’s age wearing what Ursula persisted in calling “dungarees.” It was all right when they were in Maine on Sanpere Island, but not on a trip like this.

“I’ll go after you.” Pix wanted to comb her hair and wash her face, too. The group—she wanted to look her best for them. First impressions…

While she was waiting, she realized that many miles away her family hadn’t even had lunch yet. They’d be out of sync for the duration. She felt suspended in time, as if

she’d been gone from home for days, rather than a day. The trip across the vidda has produced strange sensations of total removal. She reminded herself she was a wife, mother—and daughter. Someone with responsibilities. Someone, a voice inside said, with too many.

What on earth was she doing here?

It wasn’t hard to locate the tour. An extremely tired-looking man with a mop of unruly blond hair and dark-rimmed glasses stood holding a flag with the Scandie Sights logo—a giant pair of binoculars with a snaggletoothed troll in one lens and Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Mermaid in the other.

“I’m Pix Miller, and this is my mother, Mrs. Ursula Rowe,” Pix said, noting that her mother had the cane out again.

He put the flag down and checked their names off on the list attached to the clipboard he was holding in his other hand. Pix wondered where the other guide was. Marit had said there were two.

“I hope we haven’t kept you waiting,” Pix apologized, realizing as soon as she said it that since this was the train the people meeting the tour from Oslo were supposed to take, there was no way they could be late.

Her remark produced a smile. “I’m Jan Ekhart, one of your tour guides. You are on vacation now. You don’t need to worry about things like this. There are still people getting off the train, and we won’t leave for the hotel for fifteen minutes or so. Carl—he’s the other leader—said they would hold dinner for us.”

Pix realized that of course most members of the tour, the ones who had started in Copenhagen, were already at the hotel. She also realized that she was at the station in Voss, the place where Kari and Erik had left the message with the stationmaster about eloping.

“What should we do with our luggage?” she asked Jan, eager to get inside the station.

“You leave it on the cart here”—he pointed off to the side—“and we take care of everything.” That sounded fine to Pix. Ursula’s bag was as compact as her own and she could easily carry both of them, but it would be nice to let someone else do it for the next few days. They had put the Scandie Sights tags on but had failed to find a way to wrap the bright red Scandie luggage straps around their modest bags. The tags would have to do.

“Why don’t you wait here,” Pix told her mother. “There’s a bench by the door and you can keep an eye on Jan so he doesn’t leave without me.”

“What are you going to do?” her mother asked. “Never mind. Just hurry. You can tell me later.”

Pix went inside. It was crowded, but since everything was conveniently translated, she soon found the information booth.

She was about to approach the genial-looking man behind the counter when she realized she didn’t have a plan, or much time. She’d simply have to bluster her way through.

“Excuse me, but isn’t this the place where that poor young man was last seen? You know, the boy who drowned and has been in all the newspapers? They’re saying his girlfriend had something to do with it. She was here, too, right?”

The man looked startled. Maybe he recognized Pix’s attempt at a complete personality change for the phony one it was. Or perhaps it was the southern accent she’d unaccountably found herself assuming.

“Seen? No, no one saw them here.”

“But I thought the papers said something about Voss. This is Voss, isn’t it?” she said with the unsure air of a tourist about to find out she might have joined the wrong group and should be in Stockholm instead.

“Yes, this is Voss,” he told her patiently. Then, aware that she wasn’t going to leave until she’d heard some detail about the sad case that she could use to impress her friends back home, he added, “They left a message here saying they were running away together to get married.”

“How on earth could they leave a message if no one saw them?” Pix asked plaintively. Could this possibly work?

It did. “We got the message by phone. They were already someplace on the road.”

Pix feigned excitement, which wasn’t hard. Her first actual clue!

“And were you the one who spoke to the girl? What’s her name? Karen? Something like that.”

For a moment, the man seemed to succumb to Pix’s blandishments. He would be quoted someplace in the United States. He wondered if she lived near Minnesota and knew his cousin. “It wasn’t Kari—that’s her name. It was the man, Erik. He just told me to write the message down for the Scandie Sights tour guides who would be arriving by bus to take the train to Bergen.”

“I never dreamed that things like this could happen in Norway.” Pix as Blanche DuBois continued: “It’s such a calm and happy place. People are so kind.”

“Sad things can happen anywhere,” he told her solemnly. He was so nice, Pix felt a twinge of guilt as she thanked him, said good-bye, and raced for the door. She didn’t want to miss the bus. Or dinner.

Pix felt like a new girl. It was true that others had joined the tour at Voss, but the group that had been traveling together since the beginning was the in group, the popular kids. It wasn’t that they excluded the latecomers—just the opposite. As Pix and Ursula walked into the dining room at Fleischer’s Hotel and headed for the tables with the Scandie Sights cards, they were immediately urged by several people to join them. The veterans exuded an all-knowing air that became even more apparent as the meal progressed. Advice ran rampant. It was a table of six.

“Velkommen. That’s ‘welcome’ in Norwegian,” a plump woman with tightly permed curls said. “I’m Erna Dahl and this is my sister, Louise. Twins, although you’d never guess! We’re from Virginia. What about you?”

Ursula extended her hand across the table. “How nice to meet you. I’m Ursula Rowe and this is my daughter, Pix Miller. We’re from Massachusetts.”

“Oh, I just love Boston!” the woman seated next to Pix exclaimed. “We’re the Bradys—no relation to the Bunch—Marge and Don.” The introduction was so pat, Pix knew it had been repeated hundreds, maybe even thousands of times.

“Pix—is that a particularly New England name?” asked Louise Dahl. You would never guess the Dahls were twins. Unlike her sister, she was thin and her hair was straight and fine, falling slightly below her ears in what had been a bad cut and was getting worse as it grew out. The women appeared to be in their mid-forties.

Ursula gave her daughter a little pat on the hand. Think of Marit, it said. Think of Kari. You don’t get information if you don’t give, and this is no time to be standoffish, however much you dislike hearing this story in particular over and over again.

“No, it’s a nickname that stuck. Pix was the tiniest little girl when she was born. We called her our ‘little pixie.’ That became Pix, and most people don’t even know her given name, Myrtle—I am very partial to the ground cover; it has such lovely purple flowers.”

Pix flashed a game smile at the table. “Of course, I didn’t stay a pixie for too long, but by then, even I was so used to the name, we couldn’t imagine changing it.” She did leave out two facts—that Pix was definitely the lesser of two evils and that when she suddenly shot up to her adult height of five eleven in junior high school, she desperately wished her family could leave town and start over in a new place where she would be known as Jane.

“I hope you like fish,” Don Brady said. “I’m about to start sprouting gills.” Again, the Bradys seemed to have a set repertoire of remarks. His wife’s smile was a bit thin-lipped.

“I’m very fond of fish, and it should be done well here. This is a famous old hotel,” Ursula commented.

Her mistake was apparent in the looks the others gave one another. How come she knows so much? This upstart. Ursula quickly made amends. Pix and she had decided not to reveal their intimate knowledge of the country, all the better to find things out, and she’d slipped up. Hastily she added, “At least that’s what it says in the brochure. I’m sure the guides and other staff have been giving you more details.”

Peace reigned.

“It is a famous old hotel and it’s still run by the same family, fourth generation. All these old hotels were built before World War One for the German and English who came here to fish and hunt,” Marge reported. Pix noted the large tote bag beside Marge’s chair, filled with guidebooks. The woman could lead the tour herself, hands down. But at the moment, Pix wasn’t interested in the hotel’s history. She was concerned with more recent events, and Ursula had given her an opening.

“How has the Scandie staff been? Someone on the train told us there had been a problem. A guide left or something like that?”

A waitress was bringing the first course, a Jarlsberg cheese tartlet, she told them.

Pix wasn’t sure whether the silence that had fallen was due to the desire for food at this fashionably late dinner hour or uneasiness. Erna Dahl answered her question.

“The staff has been wonderful, especially Carl and Jan, the guides. They can’t do enough for you and they are so informative.”

“They don’t talk too much, though,” her sister pointed out. “I couldn’t stand the type of tour where someone is constantly urging you to look at something, keeping up a stream of meaningless chatter.” She took a bite of her tartlet. Pix was sure she gave her sister a look that had more to do with the subject Pix had raised than the flakiness of the crust. Erna sighed and her curls quivered slightly.

“We did have two staff members who left the tour and it made things a little awkward in Bergen.”

“No one to carry the bags,” grumbled Don Brady. “Irresponsible kids.”

“They were running off together, eloping,” Erna continued. “But something must have happened on the way. The boy—his name was Erik—drowned. A terrible accident.”

Pix had no trouble voicing authentic concern. “How horrible! The poor girl!”

“Well, we don’t really know how she’s taking it,” Marge said brightly. “She didn’t come back, as you might expect, and we have two darlings now, Anders and Sonja. They’re over there at the staff table.”

Kari’s and Erik’s replacements were also blue-eyed, blond, and about the same age. Pix imagined that many of the people on the tour might have trouble telling them apart from Kari and Erik. Generic Nordics.

“When did all this happen?” Pix persisted. “It must have put a damper on the trip.”

“We don’t have any dampers on Scandie Sights tours,” announced a pleasant voice speaking English with the slightly British accent many Norwegians have, which with the lilt makes the clipped speech sound like a whole new dialect. “I’m Carl Bjørnson, and you must be Mrs. Rowe and Mrs. Miller.” He flashed a grin at Jan, who was by his side. “I must admit, I had some coaching. Welcome to the tour.” He stretched out his hand.

“Is everything all right? Enjoying your dinner?” Jan asked. He still looked tired, yet some sort of liquid refreshment had bolstered his spirits. His voice was hearty and his cheeks flushed. His hair had been combed, but now the back of his shirt was untucked. He reminded Pix of her youngest child, Danny, almost thirteen, who could never seem to keep everything in place or clean all at once. If his shirt was tucked in, then a shoelace was untied. Hair combed, his hands would be dirty.

Carl was a head taller than Jan and would look younger longer, Pix instantly decided. Both men appeared to be in their mid- to late twenties, though Jan had already developed love handles that would no doubt continue to grow as his hair receded. Carl was lean, his eyes standard-issue blue, but his hair wasn’t blond. Instead, dark curls covered his head, curls that even the close cut he sported couldn’t quite tame. It gave him a slightly Mediterranean air, Norway by way of Barcelona. Definitely nice to look at.

He handed Pix and Ursula some sheets of paper. “This is our itinerary and we’ll confirm all the times as we go along. No one has missed the bus, train, or boat yet.” He sounded relieved. “The other page is a list of your fellow travelers and where they’re from.” He handed this single sheet to the rest of the table. “At the bottom, we’ve added the people who just joined us. Now everyone can get to know one another!”

Exactly, thought Pix, and thank you, Scandie Sights, for making my job a little easier. She was not interested in the new arrivals, since they wouldn’t have been on the tour when Kari and Erik were with it. She’d need to find some way to figure out where the list divided, since the alphabetizing seemed erratic. Voluble Marge “Information, Please” Brady was the place to start.

Pix turned to her. “I wonder how many of us joined for the fjord cruise.” It was enough.

“Oh, that’s easy.” Marge picked up her list. “Let’s see. Oscar Melling is at the end of our list—I mean the group that started in Copenhagen.” Clearly, Marge was sensitive to issues of exclusion. “That makes fifteen who joined at Voss.”

“It seems like an extremely congenial group,” Ursula said. “I’m sure we’re going to have a lovely time together.”

Mother paving the way for future conversation. Pix nodded in agreement—and approval.

“Yes, it has been a good bunch,” Don agreed. Then, as a ruddy-faced elderly man strode by, he modified his

statement. “Of course, you always have a rotten apple or two.”

“Oh honey, not rotten! That’s not the right word for Oscar!” She appeared embarrassed by her husband’s bluntness.

Louise Dahl quickly began talking about the weather. “Only one day of rain in Bergen. And even that didn’t last long.”

Marge jumped in, a veritable geyser of facts, “Bergen’s on the coast. You know if you measured it in a direct line, it would be about two thousand miles long, but it’s really over twelve thousand five hundred with all the ins and outs. Plus, there are a hundred and fifty thousand islets offshore that protect the coast and make a kind of passageway for ships. The route was called the North Way—get it, Norway?”

They got it. Pix made a mental note to get Marge alone and find out more about Oscar. She scanned the list next to her plate—Oscar Melling, New Jersey. No town listed. Meanwhile, she held up her end by contributing a few meteorological comments of her own. How did people live in rainy places? Seattle was another, and so on.

The rest of the meal was uneventful: poached cod, boiled potatoes, apple cake. Because of the lateness of the hour, there was no evening program planned, although, Jan announced, the bar would stay open. He also urged a walk by the shores of Lake Vangsvatnet.

“And tomorrow, we don’t bother you too early. No wake-up calls.” A few people clapped. Pix hadn’t thought about this aspect of the tour. “You have a nice breakfast, explore the village”—his v was a w—“and we’ll leave for Stalheim at eleven o’clock.”

Ursula and Pix said good night to the Dahls and the Bradys.

“Bed, yes?” Pix didn’t know whether it was the time difference finally catching up with her or the situation she found herself in, but extreme fatigue had arrived.

“Yes, but first why don’t you come to my room? We need to talk.”

Pix had assumed she and her mother would be bunking down together. Yankee thrift would seem to preclude the hefty supplement for a room of one’s own, but her mother had declared, “I like my own bath, dear. You’ll be fine.”

Marit had supplied them with a flask. “It’s scandalous what they charge for a drink at the hotels,” she’d said.

Ursula poured some scotch and the two sat by the window.

“Maybe we should make some notes,” she suggested.

Pix shook her head. “Nothing written down. We aren’t going to be handling our own bags, and even if we keep notes in our pocketbooks, it’s a bit chancy.”

“All right, then, what have we learned?”

“Not much,” Pix said dismally. Her head was spinning. She really was tired and slightly disoriented. It was five o’clock in the afternoon eastern standard time and soon it would be tomorrow here.

“I thought the man at the station told you something,” Ursula said. Pix had whispered words to that effect as they boarded the bus for the hotel.

“Yes, but I’m not sure where it fits in. No one saw Kari or Erik at Voss. They—or rather, Erik—phoned the station with the message that they were eloping.”

“So they could have been anywhere.”

“Yes. From what Marit said, the last place anyone actually saw either of them was on the train from Oslo to Flåm.”

“I’ve taken it dozens of times,” Ursula said. “It stops at an enormous waterfall, Kjosfossen, so people can take pictures. Kari and Erik would have gotten off the train then, wouldn’t they, to make sure the tour group got back on again?”

“I remember Kjosfossen, too. Given that Erik was found in the river below, the waterfall would have been the most likely place for him to have fallen in, or whatever.”

“Whatever,” said her mother. Neither woman liked the other possible scenario, involving his fiancée and a mighty push.

“They weren’t on the bus from Flåm to Aurland. Carl, the guide who spoke to Marit, was very specific about that.” Ursula tipped her glass back and finished her drink.

“So Kari may have gotten off at Flåm and taken another train or met someone there.” Pix had practically memorized the Scandie Sights Mermaid/Troll brochure on the train from Oslo. This particular tour, once having reached Norway, tried to give its members the quintessential Viking experience, which meant plenty of fjords, folk museums, salmon, and the Flåm railway. They took it down the mountain, changed to a bus for the short ride to Aurland, where their fjord cruiser was waiting at the dock, took a ride up the Aurlandsfjord, an arm of the spectacular Sognefjord, then got on a bus to Voss and the train to Bergen for several days. Now they were back to fjord country again for a perfect finish.

Ursula stood up, opened her window to let in the cool night air, and closed the shades against the daylight.

“We have a lot to do tomorrow. We’d better divide up and talk to as many people as we can. I thought that man at dinner tonight seemed a little ill at ease, but it could have been his wife—all those plans.”

Marge Brady had told them that since her husband’s retirement, they were working their way down her own personal list of the wonders of the world. They’d already “done” the pyramids, the Rock of Gibraltar, the châteaux of the Loire, the Great Wall of China, and gondolas in Venice. Fjords had been next, to be followed by Mount Kilimanjaro. Pix only just prevented herself from suggesting Marge send her list in to the Letterman show.

Pix kissed her mother good night. It was all she could do to keep from crawling fully clothed under the dyne mounded on the bed in front of her. She hoped she could make it across the hall.

“Good night, dear. Sleep well.” Her mother kissed her back and shut the door.

In bed, teeth brushed—the scotch would produce extremely unpleasant morning mouth—Pix had just enough mental energy for a nagging fear. Erik never made it to Flåm. Had Kari?

Was she dreaming or was she still on the train? Pix sat up in bed, confused. And what was that knocking sound? She looked at the clock. It was 2:00 A.M. and the knocking was at her door.

Mother! She ran to open it. What could be wrong?

But it wasn’t her mother. It was a woman about her own age, but with radically different taste in night wear. Pix’s was

L. L. Bean, while the woman’s was straight from the pages of Victoria’s Secret.

“A man just tried to get from the balcony into my room and I can’t make the phone work!” She was wide-eyed with fright.

Pix dashed to her own phone, the woman following closely. “I’m in the next room, one oh five. I thought Norway was supposed to be safe for women traveling alone!”

“But he didn’t get in, right?” Pix asked as she waited for the front desk to answer.

“No. I screamed and he started to climb back over. I didn’t wait to see if he made it.”

The front desk finally answered. Scarcely had Pix hung up when they heard the sound of running footsteps in the hall, voices, and, after a few moments, a knock on the door.

“Can you tell me what happened?” asked the young security guard standing outside in the hall. He looked like one of the Viking gods—tall, broad shoulders, fair hair, and deep blue eyes. For a fleeting moment, Pix wished she had opted for other than a granny gown. The woman from next door didn’t have to worry.

“I was sound asleep.” The damsel in distress stepped forward, earnestly beginning her tale. “I’m not sure what woke me, but the room felt stuffy and I got up to open a

window. When I moved the curtain, I saw a man standing on the balcony. I screamed and he turned around, putting his leg up to climb out, I suppose. I was at the phone by then, but it wasn’t working, so I came here.”

The security guard said something into the walkie-talkie he was carrying. “Can you describe him?”

“He was tall, dark hair, a beard, and his clothes were dark. I couldn’t tell how old he was. He was carrying some sort of bag. He’d thrown it to the balcony floor.”

Carl and Jan appeared in the doorway, summoned by the hotel.

“Miss Olsen, are you all right?” Carl asked. “What happened?”

She went through it again.

Jan shook his head. “These rooms are quite low to the ground and apparently someone thought he could get into the hotel this way. Maybe he thought the room was empty.”

“Or maybe he thought you had something worth stealing,” Carl said soberly. “But you had locked your balcony door, yes?”

“Yes, of course, and as for anything worth stealing—the most valuable thing I have is a Sony Walkman for jogging, and if that’s what he wanted, he’d have been welcome to it, so long as he didn’t do anything worse!”

The guard hastened to reassure her. “Crimes against individuals are very, very rare here.”

The walkie-talkie sputtered and he put it to his ear.

“I’m afraid whoever he was, he’s disappeared, but we will still be searching the grounds—and the hotel. He may have gotten in someplace else. Will you be all right in your room for the rest of the night?”

Pix looked at the other bed in her room. The poor woman. “You can stay here if you feel uneasy about going back into yours,” she offered. “I know I would.”

The woman gave her a grateful look. “Thank you. I would appreciate that.”

Everyone cleared out and Pix went to secure the door.

Her mother had apparently slept through the whole thing. She opened the door again and took a step into the hall, debating whether to check on Ursula, which would mean waking her up. She watched Jan and Carl go into their rooms, on the other side of Miss Olsen’s. They were close by. It made her feel safe. She was sure Mother was fine. Besides, there weren’t any balconies on that side.

Inside the room, Miss Olsen was already in bed. There was quite a bit of gray mixed with her light brown hair, but she was very attractive. All that jogging had definitely paid off. She was slim and her complexion glowed, even at this hour.

“I’m Jennifer Olsen, by the way. Not a very good way to meet.”

“No. I’m Pix Miller. I’m on the tour with my mother, Ursula Rowe. Are you sure you’re all right? I have some scotch. Would you like some?”

Jennifer didn’t seem to be too shaken up now, merely sleepy, but a little scotch never hurt.

“No thank you. I’m fine. It was unpleasant, but I knew he couldn’t get in, and now it’s the destruction of my ideal Norway that’s upsetting me. You know, the perfect place to live, where you are taken care of from cradle to grave, everyone is honest, and everything is clean.”

“I think the WATCH OUT FOR PICKPOCKETS sign in the train station reminded me Norwegians are like everyone else—good, bad, and in between.” Pix didn’t mention Erik and Kari. Not yet, anyway. Having Jennifer Olsen as a roommate for the night created an instant bond. Pix would wait and ask her questions in the morning, though. Now all she wanted was to go to sleep.

Pix rolled over and pulled the down comforter up to her chin. The other bed was empty. Damn! she thought. She’d missed a golden opportunity to find out more about Jennifer Olsen and what Miss Olsen thought about the tour. She looked at the clock. It was past eight. In her family, anything past 6:30 meant you were ill or incredibly deca

dent. Fortunately, Pix had married a man who set her straight on early rising, but she was traveling with her mother at the moment. She jumped out of bed, skipped a shower, threw on some clothes, and went across the hall. Her mother opened the door, fully dressed, and, from the strong scent of Neutrogena lotion that filled the air, fully showered.

“You must have been very tired, dear,” she said in a nottoo-accusatory voice. “Shall we have breakfast?”

Pix started to apologize, then remembered how many exhausting things she’d done in the last twenty-four hours, like fly across the ocean, travel across the vidda, and provide refuge in the middle of the night. She told her mother all about Jennifer as they went to the dining room.

“Do you think this man could have any possible connection to Erik’s death and Kari’s disappearance?” Ursula asked.

“Not really, but something out of the ordinary has already happened on this tour and we need to keep track of any other unusual events.”

There is nothing quite like a Norwegian breakfast—the smørgåsbord laden with everything Pix liked to eat best: fruit compotes and pitchers of heavy cream; a cheese board; homemade breads and rolls; knakkebrød, thick, crisp whole-wheat crackers; flatbrød, paper-thin crackers; wienerbrød, Danish pastries; hot and cold cereals; a platter of gravlaks, fresh-cured salmon and smoked salmon; lever-postei, a kind of liver pâté; bowls of boiled eggs, hard and soft; sliced meats; and herring. Herring in cream sauce, herring in mustard sauce, herring in dill sauce, herring with onions and peppercorns. Herring, the “silver of the sea.” The Norwegians largely survived on herring during the German occupation, drying, pickling, smoking, frying, and boiling it. Pix watched as an elderly group, speaking Norwegian, piled their plates high. One would have thought this generation would never want to see a herring again, but the opposite was true. They must feel grateful, she thought. Herring do run in cycles, returning

each winter like clockwork for years—during which time, an old law stated, no lawsuits may be conducted, and everyone should fish—then the fish inexplicably disappear for twenty or thirty years. The group was laughing heartily. The herring hadn’t deserted them and they were alive.

A young waitress was making heart-shaped waffles, vafler, and the smell was intoxicating. Norwegians eat vafler with coffee and other cakes in the afternoon and thought the introduction of them to the breakfast menu—for the tour-ists—very funny. Pix noticed a tiny bottle of maple syrup. She didn’t care when she ate them, but she would stick to the traditional way—a little butter and raspberry preserves.

Their plates laden, Ursula and Pix looked about the room for the Scandie Sights flags. Most of the tables were filled, but they spotted places at a table for four. Two women of a certain age were already there, chatting away. Every once in a while, one would nibble a corner of a pastry or take a sip of coffee.

“May we join you?” Pix asked.

“Yes,” said one. “I’m afraid my English is very poor, but please come.” She was French. As Pix searched her mind for the remnants of Madame Durand’s earnest efforts, grades seven through twelve, Ursula fluently introduced herself and her tongue-tied daughter, then proceeded to elicit the following information. The women lived outside Paris, were cousins, and took a trip together every year to break the routine. “We escape our husbands,” the woman who had spoken before added in English for Pix’s benefit. Her name was Sophie and Valerie was her cousine. “C’est bizarre, le petit déjeuner norvégien,” Valerie contributed to the conversation, fork poised above a fish cake. Pix had never thought of these splendid repasts as bizarre, but if one was used to a croissant and café au lait, this spread would definitely appear strange.

Carl strolled by. He and Jan wore matching Norwegian sweaters each day, it seemed. Jan’s had a few pulls, but

Carl’s looked like new. Maybe he hadn’t worked for the tour

group that long. Maybe he was neater.

“How is everything, ladies?”

Mouths full, they all nodded. Pix found her voice first. “Do you know anything more about what happened last night?”

Carl gave a worried glance at the Frenchwomen. Obviously, Jennifer Olsen’s adventure was not being posted with the day’s events.

“No, nothing. But all’s well that ends well,” he said brightly and moved on.

One of your staff dead, one missing, and an intruder in the night. Pix did not think that all was well.

She tuned back in to the table conversation. Mother must have been listening to her French tapes again while she rode her Exercycle, Pix thought.

“They knew the tour would be in English, but they didn’t think they needed to understand everything. It’s all nature, and who needs words for that?” Ursula laughed. The cousins were smiling agreement. From what Pix knew of the French, she was sure the two believed that compared to their own history, art, and culture, the Norwegians were savages, so if they missed what year a particular stave church was built in, it would be no great loss.

After a second cup of coffee, Pix left her mother to her new friends and went back to the room to shower. But first she stepped out onto her own balcony. The door was equipped with a heavy drape to keep the light out, and since it had been partially drawn, she hadn’t realized the balcony was there. It was furnished with two chairs and a small table. Pix peered over the edge. It was an easy climb up or down to the ground—or to Jennifer’s room. The balconies were joined together. Tour groups were easy targets for thieves, even in Norway, and Pix was inclined to think that was all there was to it.

Feeling greatly refreshed by the shower, Pix got her things together, placing her bag outside the door as they had been instructed. Her mother’s was already out and

there was no answer to her knock. She decided to go down to the lobby and see if Ursula was there or if she might have decided to take a walk.

A bright voice greeted her as she entered the elevator. “I see you’re another of the Scandie Sights group.”

“Why yes, I am.” Pix wondered how the woman knew.

“I saw you last night. Is that your mother with you? I told my husband it must be. You’re like two peas in a pod. I’m Carol Peterson, from Duluth. In Minnesota. My husband, Roy, is with me and my son, Roy junior, and his new bride, Lynette. Lynette’s not Norwegian, probably not a drop of Scandinavian blood in her body, but we love her anyway, and she wanted to take her honeymoon here to get to know our roots just as much as Roy junior did.”

The elevator doors opened. They stepped out into the lobby and Carol finally came up for a breath. Pix knew she was expected to make a comment, and the one running through her head—something like wouldn’t Lynette have rather had root canal work than come to Norway with her in-laws on her honeymoon—was not appropriate. She settled for a straightforward introduction.

“I’m Pix Miller, and yes, I am traveling with my mother, Ursula Rowe. We’re from Aleford, Massachusetts.”

“Massachusetts, now that is a coincidence. Roy was there for a convention in 1985. It was in Boston. That’s the capital, right?”

“Yes, it is.”

“I watch Jeopardy! a lot. I know all the state capitals. Everyone tells me I ought to go on, but I’d be too nervous, and besides, I don’t think it’s fair. Those buzzer things don’t always seem to work right to me.”

“Have you been with the tour since Copenhagen?” Pix was pretty sure she hadn’t seen the name Peterson among the new arrivals, and the woman was a gift, a veritable font of information.

“Oh, yes, and it’s been a dream come true. We’re going to Kristiansand at the end of the tour. I have some cousins there I’ve never met. We wanted to stay in a hotel, but they just wouldn’t hear of it.”

Pix interrupted. It was close to 10:30 and she didn’t want another chance to slip by. The buses would board at eleven.

“One of the people at our table last night was telling us about some trouble. That one of the staff drowned. It must have been horrible.”

“Well, we didn’t see him drown”—Carol Peterson was clearly of the “out of sight, out of mind” school—“and none of us really knew him.” She paused, but Pix was sure she’d go on. There was empty air to fill. “The young people who took their place are much, much better. More efficient and, believe me, much nicer.” She punctuated the last comment with an extremely knowing look.

“Them? I thought it was just one person.”

“He had this girlfriend. She was working on the tour, too. They slipped off to get married, which, I told Lynette, was very irresponsible, because if you elope, you’re always sorry later. No gown and no presents. Oh, maybe a few, but nothing good.”

“So, you thought it was irresponsible of them?” Pix tried to get her back on track, prying her away from place settings and a lifetime supply of Tupperware.

“Of course it was! To leave us all in the lurch like that. Why, Jan and Carl couldn’t manage all the bags, and we got delayed while they tried to find out what happened to them, so we missed dinner in Bergen the first night!”

Pix tried to appear sympathetic, but it was hard. Very hard.

“You said the new people are nicer?”

“The boy was all right, although he seemed a little moody. I think when you’re working on a tour like this, you should at least try to look cheerful. But the girl was a witch, if you know what I mean.” Another look.

Pix did know and she was glad her mother wasn’t there. All restraint might have vanished and Ursula could very well have clocked Carol Peterson one.

“Oh dear. It sounds as if you had a problem with her.”

“I’ll say I did. First off, we had this poky little room in the hotel in Copenhagen—the staff hands out the keys—and she wouldn’t change it.”

“Maybe all the keys had been given out,” Pix said before she could stop herself. She wanted information and that meant not interrupting the silly woman’s tirade, and certainly not sympathizing with Kari. “Although,” she added quickly, “they can usually do something.”

“Exactly!” Carol said triumphantly. “We did get switched, but I had to go over her head, and after that she really had it in for me. Every time I asked her to do something, she either took her sweet time or pretended not to hear me. She knew what I’d said, too, because she heard me telling Carl and Jan about her. I thought they should know—for the good of the tour.”

The greater good, Pix thought dismally. Lord preserve us from all the things large and small resulting from this particular rationalization. She asked another question.

“How did you hear that the boy had drowned?”

“Jan told everyone and the police came. We were in Bergen. They wanted to know if anyone had seen anything. The girl has disappeared—or her body hasn’t turned up yet. I think they had a fight and she pushed him in, then realized what she’d done and jumped after him. We know they’d been fighting. Helene Feld saw them when she went to get something to eat.”

Bingo. Now Pix knew who had been the last to see them. She felt a warm—but brief—rush of gratitude toward Carol Peterson.

“There you are, dear.” It was Ursula. Pix made the introductions, heard again what a small world it was, Roy senior having been to Boston in 1985, and vowed to stand back until she saw which bus the Peterson clan boarded.

Carol was the type who asked questions. Lots of questions.