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First published in Great Britain in 2018 by Doubleday, an imprint of Transworld Publishers.

Derek B. Miller has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

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About the Author

Derek B. Miller’s acclaimed debut novel, Norwegian by Night, won the CWA John Creasey Award for Best First Novel in 2013. A native of New England, Miller is the director of The Policy Lab and has worked in International Affairs with the UN, governments and think tanks for the past twenty years. His second novel, The Girl in Green, was recently shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Steel Dagger for Best Thriller of the Year in 2017.

THE RIGHT QUESTION

SIGRID ØDEGÅRD’S HANDS rest on the unopened blue folder as she stares out the window of her office. The seal of the Politi is embossed on the front in gold, red and black, meaning that someone decided to break out the good stationery for this one. It displays no author or title but she knows what it contains and she is in no rush to read it. Only two short months ago, in June, the entire city of Oslo, Norway, was trimmed with lilacs. Sigrid’s father had once told her that the early summer flowers were her mother’s favorite, and when the season was at its peak in Hedmark, their farmhouse was filled with them: a bouquet in each bathroom, a vase on the kitchen table. Their errant petals, he said, would drift through the house after her family as they journeyed its hallways stirring them up and scattering them in their wake. This collective movement—this collective memory—however, was thirty-five years ago. Sigrid was five years old when Astrid died. Sigrid wonders, looking out over the park with its August sunbathers and running children, whether those memories are even hers. They might have been given to her by her father. And if the memories are not hers, are they less precious or, perhaps, more?

This, she’s been informed, is the final report and verdict about the events last month that resulted in the shooting deaths of four hostage-takers at a summer cabin near the Swedish border in the village of Glåmlia. She was the commanding officer and had made the decision to utilize the emergency response force—the Beredskapstroppen. Their assault killed three of the perpetrators. Sigrid, herself, killed the fourth.

Conscious of being watched through the glass by the prying eyes of her department, Sigrid flips open the cover but doesn’t read the words. She should have closed the blinds after she’d received the folder from the young cop who’d knocked on her door to deliver it. He was blond and looked worryingly pale despite it being late summer. She’d found his boyish face immediately annoying.

She couldn’t think of a reason why he’d do this but she shook it to make it go away.

During the past month the internal affairs department has been studying the events leading to the shootings in accordance with standard procedure. The report was standard procedure, though, only in the sense of being formalized; it was hardly common. The last time a Norwegian cop had fatally shot anyone was two years ago, in 2006, and before that it had been … forever. A decade? It simply didn’t happen in Norway. Violent crime was very low, murder rarely happened, and when it did it was usually between people who knew each other, and most often between lovers. The man was always to blame.

Their training, at the academy, had been focused on how to deescalate a situation and gain a measure of control over it rather than rush in and encounter it. This is not what happened last month.

It was still the right call, she thought; they had taken a man, woman and child hostage. Under her fingertips, though, was the institutional wisdom of her department on the same topic. It may, or may not, be the same as her own.

They had chosen to deliver the file to her today, on Friday. Without reading it she’d never know whether the decision was sadistic or gracious.

The summer house where the shootings took place was deep in the woods behind a small field. It was a little larger than a standard hytte. It was a place intended for serenity. A hunting lodge. An escape for lovers. A moment after she had sprung from the police car with her colleague Petter, a young man emerged from the cabin—a man she had never seen before—and he ran in her direction.

To her? Toward her? At her? He was in motion, that was all she understood. His motive was opaque. Her fear and his direction, however, were not.

As she watched him she’d half expected him to stop. People usually change their behavior when seeing a police officer. They drive more slowly. They become more aware of their actions. They drop the weapon. They raise their arms.

She saw the carving knife in his hand immediately. It seemed less dangerous than it did incongruous. There they were, in that beautiful season when the natural world was at its most expansive; the moment Norwegians wait for and dream about all through the dark winter so that its arrival is both blessed and wistful for being so short. And there he was, silently running toward her with a knife designed to slice meat.

If she’d delayed he’d have been on top of her. So she shot him. And then she shot him again.

His name was Burim and he was from Kosovo, apparently. His family fled to Norway as refugees from the war in the 1990s. His father had died of health complications after being freed from a Serbian internment camp. The report attributes the death to malnutrition and damage to internal organs likely caused by beatings at the camp. Young Burim, fatherless, had fallen into the wrong crowd in Oslo as he failed to assimilate into Norwegian culture. His immigrant experience and his behavioral patterns in Norway—concluded a forensic psychologist—suggested immaturity rather than malice or ambition. That was who she had killed.

However, the report continued to explain that the legal findings about her own guilt or innocence in the matter were based on a study of the facts of the case, and the circumstances of the encounter between the assailant (him) and the officer on the scene (her). She reads about the events that were in part described through Petter’s own testimony as he had eyewitnessed the shooting from his side of the patrol car.

The report contains a narrative account of the shooting. To Sigrid it reads like historical fiction. It is a story about a woman with her own name but this fictional character is clearly not Sigrid herself because the author of this story wasn’t at the cabin when all this happened. There was no video and other than Petter no witnesses. How could anyone possibly know what she’d really been doing let alone thinking?

On what basis does this bureaucratic reenactment draw its claims and attributions of cause and effect? Who is this writer who drew conclusions about what happened at the moment Sigrid pulled the trigger on her weapon? And who is this forty-year-old Norwegian police officer named “Sigrid Ødegård” who shot the man and instead of rushing over to care for his wounds, ran instead to the eighty-two-year-old American man who had tumbled out of the cabin, his neck slashed with a knife?

The report does not mention the gentle and soft hand of the old man reaching up to touch her face, leaving his own fingerprints in blood on her cheek. It does not mention how she did not see those fingerprints until later that night when she returned to her own apartment in Grønland, alone, and looked in the mirror. Why was that not in the report if this writer knew her so well?

By page twelve it is clear that both Sigrid and her literary doppelgänger have both been exonerated.

Sigrid raises her eyes to see whether any of the junior staff are watching her with the file.

As none of them are looking at her it is clear that, moments earlier, all of them were.

She returns to the report, increasingly attentive to its fictions and assumptions; false premises and confident rhetoric.

And the more she reads past its bureaucratic surface and its misplaced certainty, the more Sigrid can sense a higher firmament of truth. Somewhere, beyond her sight but not her understanding, she can hear a different story; an untold story about a confused Kosovan refugee with no violent record, fleeing from a bad choice rather than making his way toward another. His lethal mistake was not his decision to hurt her but rather running in her direction and not speaking Norwegian well enough to understand the words she had called out twice: “Halt or I will shoot.”

In this story, everything is the same but the meaning of everything is different.

She pictures the events again. The green grass. The red cabin. The blue sky. The running man and his auburn hair. His wide brown eyes.

Sigrid reads on, ever more bothered by the casual ease of the writer. After page twelve, when the verdict is made clear, all other descriptions of the event seem reverse-engineered back to the conclusion. The author is reading into the events whatever is needed so that the findings become better illustrated rather than challenged. It does not seem to be—as best Sigrid can tell—entirely conscious or even deliberate. It is only that the pieces are all easy to explain once the final explanation is provided. In fact, by the end of the report it seems to Sigrid the chief that this fictional Sigrid character was destined to pull the trigger. That it was not only justified but even inevitable.

Not only does the report legally vindicate her, but somehow she is not even considered responsible for the shooting. And there, finally, is the disturbance. Because for the past month she has been tormented over the consequences of her very deliberate and not at all predestined decision.

She was tormented precisely because none of this was inevitable. It was a decision. A decision Sigrid needs to understand and one that can perhaps best be understood by taking apart the definite elements and replacing them with something new—something unexpected.

At her desk, her eyes closed, Sigrid engages in a technique she often uses in her own investigations. She turns summer to winter. She strips out the green grass between the patrol car and the cabin and replaces it with a snowy field. She turns the red summer house into a brown mountain cabin. She fades out the azure sky and replaces it with an iron canopy that presses down from the Arctic.

And across that snow, still holding a knife, and approaching at the same speed, comes the man. But not the same man.

In this version he is Bjørn—not Burim—and he rushes at her through fresh powder snow with the determination of a Viking. Here is a counterfactual world. A new model. A new set of relationships. Here, in this scenario, everything is familiar but estranged. And it is in the blue eyes of that charging man that Sigrid finally finds the question that the report has not thought to ask. The question no one could imagine asking or, perhaps, no one dared.

It is, however, the question she has been looking for. The one that dismantles the institutional presumptions of cause and effect and inevitability. It is the question that calls everything into doubt and makes space for new truths to be known and, ultimately, acted upon:

Would she have shot him twice in the chest—she can now wonder—if he had been a native Norwegian?

A WEIRD PLACE

SIGRID SPENDS SATURDAY binge-watching American TV shows on a streaming service recently introduced to Norway. Her friend Eli insisted she subscribe.

It was easier, she’d reasoned, to pay the seventy kroner a month than to untangle that knot.

Sigrid soon learned that the streaming service had a function that caused the next episode in a television series to begin only fifteen seconds after the conclusion of the previous episode, thereby saving the subscriber the calories that might have been burned pressing the button. This simple function produced a new kind of restive anxiety that seemed to call out for a name.

The dull flicker of the television and the semi-satisfying stories are helpful at first but after watching for six straight hours she starts to ignore the story lines and instead indulge in spells of curiosity.

Why, for example, is overacting preferred in situation comedies but not in dramas?

British actors don’t appear to reflect light off their skins in quite the same glossy manner as American actors do. How can it be that with all the skin colors available in American society, each one comes with the same glossy finish and never matte?

Could it be something they’re eating? Or … not eating? Are Americans naturally glossy or … unnaturally?

The television shows are terribly unrealistic but she is not bothered by this. It is in that space between divine truth and humanity’s fumbled efforts to make sense of it that Sigrid finds comfort in knowing she is not alone.

By eight thirty at night she has reached a broad conclusion about America. It is not an especially sophisticated conclusion, nor does she suspect that it is original, but it is satisfying to think so deeply about something for a long time and finally hit bedrock. It goes like this: “What a weird place.”

On Sunday she wakes to a Scandinavian summer sun that is so intense it threatens to turn her to dust. It is seven a.m. but the sun is high enough in the sky for the day to burn as noon. Sitting up in bed she realizes that her stomach aches from the bag of sour cream and onion potato chips she devoured last night. Neither the stomachache nor the guilt compare to the taste in her mouth that the toothpaste couldn’t defeat.

After a shower and coffee she tries, briefly, to hide inside the television again, but it has lost its magic. Without a sign of rain to encourage further isolation, she finally succumbs to her Norwegianness and accepts that she has to go outdoors.

She and her older brother, Marcus, had regularly been tossed outside by their parents, whatever the weather, based on a deeply held if unspoken Norwegian belief that any child who does not spend at least three hours outdoors every day might actually die.

Without her parents to compel her, or a child of her own for a surrogate, Sigrid forces herself outside. She spends the warmest part of Sunday alone on a small beach called Bygdøy sjøbad wearing an extra-large T-shirt over green bikini bottoms that have mysteriously grown smaller since last summer. The thin straps cut into her hips.

She has brought a book written by an American humorist. It is called When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and she bought it solely for the title. On the beach, leaning against a stone wall, she spends most of her time not reading it but watching small children run along the crescent-shaped bay, finding starfish and small crabs, and holding them up in delight and terror for their parents to see. Her father has been asking whether she wants children. She looks at the expressions of the parents on the beach for an answer.

That night, as Sigrid and her sunburn recline on the cool sofa across from the television, her father calls. It is not scheduled but it is not unexpected.

Sigrid puts the television on mute and watches an American police car with poor handling chase another car with poor handling though an urban environment, endangering the lives of hundreds.

“Because I know you. You wouldn’t have shot a man unless you thought it was necessary.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t have thought it necessary. That’s the part the police department is ignoring.”

“You made a choice, not a mistake, in a situation where any reasonable person would have experienced danger. You’re free to return to work?”

On Monday morning Sigrid reports to the office convinced that her hair still smells like her compatriots’ oversexed flesh, their barbecued pork, and the tropical suntan lotion that no one needs this far north. As she enters the building she nods to the smokers by the door, their faces turned toward the sun like so many sunflowers past their prime.

Inside, the light is weaker and the air colder. She passes through the halls of the building that make the days bleed into each other by design. In uniform, she seats herself outside her commanding officer’s door. At precisely 9:15, and on schedule, he opens it and waves her in.

Sigrid stands to adjust her tie but does not step forward into his office. She wants to avoid signaling that this might be a long conversation. “I’m taking leave,” she says immediately.

“You don’t have to,” her CO says, standing with his hand on the door lever. “You’re cleared. The report was definitive. You rescued the hostages and took out a criminal network. You might even be up for a medal.”

He nods as though he understands something, though Sigrid can’t imagine what that might be. “There’s counseling,” he says.

HOME

SHE DRIVES NORTH to Hedmark with one suitcase. There is traffic on the E6 as she leaves the city, but it thins out and she settles into the drive, following signs for Trondheim.

The farther one travels by car from Oslo into what Sigrid thinks of as Norway—Oslo not being a part of it—there are fewer speed cameras. She always feels that as the speed cameras disappear so too does the state and its central control. Her breathing becomes freer, the air a little sweeter, and the tension in her shoulders releases. When she watches American Westerns she wonders if this was how they felt with their horses, six-shooters, and the view of the horizon.

Her father likes to insist that the cameras are not really speed cameras at all but part of a complex troll-detection grid set up around Norway’s most populated areas. From the bar atop the SAS Radisson in the center of Oslo, where she has on occasion had a drink, this theory might seem preposterous, but out here, on the highway, there is no denying that the farther she leaves the city behind, the more she feels the essence of the woods, the weight of the shadows, and the flow of a million small waterfalls that spill from cracks in the plunging fjords.

When traveling south into Roman Europe on vacation, Sigrid feels antiquity. But as she journeys north into Norway’s forests, what she feels is ancientness.

There were never any trolls in the woods behind the house in 1973 when she was five and Marcus eleven. There was, however, a graveyard by the small church adjacent to their property. That is where their mother, Astrid Ødegård, was buried that year. Sigrid can only remember the four of them as a perfect family. Her earliest memories are of two enormous horses at the farmhouse, three stuffed animals she used to play with—a blue dragon, a pink one, and a panda bear—and her parents sitting in the living room reading at night by a fire. She can smell kanelboller.

The memories are mismatched, separated by time, and unlikely to be reliable. Sigrid has never tried to concoct a story to connect them or question what feels most authentic about them. What is important, she has always believed, is how the memories make her feel. And they make her feel happy. The heart is one of the few places where facts and truth may be separable.

When her mother died, though, that happiness ended. The family broke apart. Marcus was angry at his father for his mother’s death and became—in Sigrid’s view—irrationally unwavering in his certainty that it was Morten’s fault and then, later, his own. Neither made sense to her. The consequence of Marcus’s anger was that their daily life—getting him off to school, doing his homework, managing their activities, surviving the intensity of weekends—became impossible.

And yet, this is not how she remembers her brother. Her enduring memory, her enduring feelings, are of how much she loved him. How much fun he was. How they were inseparable. How she would abuse him and make him cry and he would take it because there was no meanness to him, no revenge, no cruelty.

Morten explained to Sigrid, much later, that the year after Astrid died proved to him that Marcus was not going to forgive and was not going to heal unless a new approach was taken. Morten was devastated by his inability to turn the situation around while grieving for his wife and trying to be a support to little Sigrid. Morten ultimately succumbed to the recommendations of doctors and extended family that life would be better for everyone if Marcus moved in with Astrid’s sister Ingeborg, who lived in a village by the Hardangerfjorden and ran an apple farm with her husband, Jakob. They were childless, loved Marcus very much, and were desperate to help.

Astrid had died of cancer. When Sigrid became a police officer she checked the death certificate and even asked for the medical records. She had not been suspicious, but her access to the files made them impossible to avoid. They were as expected and exactly as her father had explained. What was not in those records but was true nevertheless was that her parents had loved each other. She learned this from the stories of neighbors and the comforting words of family and friends whose memories never conflicted. Her feelings, she knew, were not a lie. Her memories were youthful and incomplete but they were not wrong. So why Marcus blamed Morten and himself for Astrid’s death was never clear, even though she asked, and even pressed him, as they grew up.

The family would reunite on holidays and vacations, but Marcus never reconciled with Morten. Not entirely. Sigrid, however, adored her father, and so the difference in her brother’s stance toward him resulted in an emotional breakwater that kept the strongest emotions—good ones and bad—from reaching either of them. She tried, as they grew, to replenish what they had had, but she and her brother had irreconcilable feelings about their childhoods. It was a hard foundation for an adult relationship.

When Marcus moved out Sigrid had her father mostly to herself from the age of six to eighteen, when she left for the university. And until recently, she has mostly had him to herself in her adulthood, as he never remarried and she never married at all. They keep each other company. Not that he was alone. He also had his library, of course. After Astrid died he filled the void of words unspoken with the new silence of books unread.

He built the library in the dining room after Marcus moved out. The urban hip would say he “repurposed” the room but Morten would have scoffed at the inaccuracy, as the room evidently hadn’t been serving any purpose at all.

Morten lucked upon a small municipal library in Elverum that was refurbishing and therefore dispensing with their gorgeous oak bookshelves at a very reasonable take-them-away-please price. He paid a few young men in town a fair wage to collect the shelves and directed the boys to place the units so they covered all walls but the windows. There was enough space remaining to place two of the long shelves in the center of the room, thereby creating “stacks” around a long table between them, which he and Sigrid used for studying. They spent as much time in there, together, as they did in the adjacent kitchen.

It was, perhaps, an affectation, but her father had placed a bronze-finished green banker’s lamp on the table; it warmed that already darkened wood and pushed away the hurried, the ephemeral, and the radical notions that come from direct sunlight. When Sigrid moved out and went to the Big City to study at the police academy, Morten placed an easy chair in the corner of the room too, which was as good for the nap as for the read itself. This room became his primary sanctuary.

She had argued with him, many times, to be more social, but he scoffed at her, saying that she didn’t understand the term. Time alone, he explained, need not be wasted or lonely. Yes, there are men who turn inward and reclusive when their wife dies and children move off. Depression and alcoholism are common. Norway is not alone in this regard, he said, though it has perfected the art.

“We’re only a three-hour drive away from each other in a country that is twenty-five hundred kilometers long,” he’d said to her. “Marcus is only five hours away. This is nothing. And although you have moved out, you haven’t really moved away. We talk almost every day. I’m not lonely. And if I become lonely …” he’d said, “I’ll get a pet.”

For the twenty intervening years Sigrid kept herself convinced that her father was happy enough. Now, unhappy herself, her optics have changed. She cannot tell whether she is seeing him more clearly through this new understanding or whether she’s projecting her feelings onto him. Either way, she has no place being a police investigator right now.

Early evening, Sigrid rolls her car across the packed earth of the farm’s driveway. The last time she was home the hills were covered in snow between her front yard and the Arctic. Now everything is green. The sun is still high. Night will not properly come. Dusk, at this time of year, only merges with the dawn.

Sigrid heaves the suitcase from the car and trudges across the driveway, dragging it into the hall. She parks it by the empty umbrella stand with its upturned mouth gaping like a carp’s.

Her father is in the kitchen and he does not interrupt his task to welcome her. He is adjusting a hinge on the back door that opens to the barnyard with its tractor and the few remaining animals. He is on his knees, which rest on a neatly folded towel. He wears a flannel shirt and old jeans with the washed patina that young people covet. His pharmacy-bought reading glasses perch on the end of his nose and he studies the hinge as if it’s an ancient text.

“I’m using a lubricant to loosen the joint because it squeaks, but I’ve applied too much, and one of the defining characteristics of lubricant is its ability to attract grit, which creates friction, which creates the very problem I’m trying to solve, and that makes the entire process too ironic to tolerate. It’s this sort of thing, at a grander scale, that will eventually cause the universe to collapse back in on itself.”

“How about a napkin?” Sigrid says, and collects one from the kitchen table and hands it to her father.

Sigrid removes a bottle of Farris mineral water from her bag. She unscrews the blue top and pulls heavily. Her father scowls. “We have the finest water on the earth flowing through the taps. Why are you paying for that?”

“It came with water of its own. I wasn’t going to dump it out on principle.”

“What did you bring me?” he asks, rolling off his knees and joining her at the table. He rests a hand casually across his knee and for a moment he looks younger and strong.

Sigrid takes two cans of pale ale from the refrigerator and pours them into glasses while her father places dark bread, cheese, and sausage on the table.

Sigrid looks at the distant hills across the farmland, their tops shorn by time as with everything old. She had forgotten how good silence can sound in the company of others.

“It’s good to be home,” she says as she takes her place at the table across from her father. “I feel like I could stay forever.”

“That’s too bad,” her father says, after taking a long pull on his beer, “because you can’t.”

Sigrid does not understand the joke but laughs anyway. “Why would I do that?”

QUE SERA, SERA

THE BEER IS not enough, so her father places a bottle of aquavit on the table between two small decorative glasses that have served the same purpose for a century.

“He’s in America teaching a couple of university courses as an adjunct on conservation or something. You’ve been corresponding.”

Letter writing is an old-fashioned and obsolete form of communication they both prefer, he explains. Letters on paper are penned deliberately and read without interruption. Also, there is a timeless pleasure in walking to the mailbox in anticipation. The Romans did this, he says.

“I didn’t like something in the tone of his last letter,” Morten says. “And they stopped coming after that.”

“That’s the mail for you,” Sigrid says, pouring them each another drink. “I’m assuming you’ve called him.”

“His last letter was sent a week ago,” says Morten. “I received it only three days later. I called immediately. No answer on his home phone and his mobile has been disconnected. I called the university but he doesn’t teach during the summer, so they don’t know anything. I tried the hospitals, too. Nothing.”

“You’re a father concerned for his son. You provide his name and address and last working number. You explain where he might go and …”

Sigrid and her father are close, but long speeches and discussions are typically rare. The simple pleasure of company has served as a worthy substitute for the words not spoken. Sometimes, though, words help.

“That’s wishful thinking, pappa. You’ve been saying that since he moved in with Aunt Ingeborg.”

Morten stands and leaves the room, returning soon after with a bundle of letters. He removes them from a shoebox that bears the name of a company long since out of business.

Her father places the small stack of white envelopes with their exotic American stamps in the center of the table. There are scenic vistas, national park scenes, famous citizens, and ducks.

“Ducks are universal,” says Morten, untying the bundle. He takes the letter from the bottom of the pile and the letter from the top and places them on the table, facing Sigrid. Side by side they are identical aside from the stamps themselves and the dates they were franked by the U.S. Postal Service. They have the same addresses, to and from. The same handwriting.

“Seven months ago he wrote to me. I was surprised. I was worried when I found it in my mailbox. I assumed—I feared—it would contain startling news of some kind.”

“Everything a parent worries about. An injury. A financial crisis. An unwanted pregnancy or child. A wanted one that something happened to. I came in and read the letter and I was indeed startled, but only because of how unexpected it was. He seemed happy. He had taken the position at the university—this ‘adjunct’ position you mentioned—and even though it lacked prestige or payment and any other obvious career path, he was putting that old master’s degree to use, as well as some thirty years of professional experience in agriculture. There was little personal in the letter, per se, nothing emotional, nothing too confessional, but it opened the door for casual conversation. And there was a mention of a woman’s presence in his life. Lydia. He didn’t say much. Only mentioned weekend trips to interesting spots. He shared some vivid memories of hiking and rock climbing. Nothing personal, though. Nothing about her. Nevertheless. It was a letter written by a fully living person. I was … delighted.”

Morten places his right hand, with his wedding ring, on top of the stack of letters.

“I suppose,” he says, “I wanted it to remain between Marcus and me for a while. I wasn’t trying to keep it a secret from you. I just felt …”—he stops for a moment to consider what feelings he might have had—“… that you and I have had so much time together, alone, that perhaps I owed it to Marcus to do something apart. Just the two of us.”

As close as she and her father had become, there was little joy in the house. Intimacy and love, she learned, did not coincide necessarily with happiness or pleasure. The absence of her mother created a strangeness to the world, as if the palette of the sky had inexplicably shifted and the mind never became fully accepting of that new condition. Her father was not a successful guide, and together they treated what was lost as though it had merely been misplaced—as if, on some off-chance, Astrid might return. It did not startle Sigrid, as a little girl, to learn that her mother died as much as it baffled her that her mother would continue to be dead each morning and repeatedly not return.

“I’ll need to read these,” Sigrid says, reaching over and patting the stack of letters.

The sun is finally behind the western hills. Though the sky is still blue, the kitchen grows darker and much colder. Morten stands and closes the window above the sink. He lights four candles on the kitchen table.

“I bought you a ticket. Even put a tour book in your room. Read the letters on the plane.”

“I’m not going to fly to another continent without a valid and considered reason. We have not, by any stretch, exhausted our options from here.”

“Two possibilities,” Morten says. “He’s fine. Like when this was sent. In which case, you have visited your brother after years apart and you rejoice in each other’s company while you use the opportunity to talk through the fact, my daughter, that you recently killed a man, only to have another die in your arms moments later.”

“A reunion is long past due. Your circumstances alone warrant this. But if, by chance,” says Morten, shifting the second letter forward and pulling the first back, “he needs your help, which is the other possibility, you’ll be there to help him. There is no downside. It is the right thing to do. And it’s all better than you moping around the farm.”

“And wonderful. It’s both. Or so I’m told. I’ve never been. They’re having an election in under three months where they might vote a black man into the White House. Go be a part of history. Your plane leaves tomorrow. Icelandair to Montreal. You’ll pass through customs and then take a small plane to a town called—unimaginatively—Watertown. I figure you can rent a car from there or take the bus to your final destination. You don’t need a visa from Norway. You can stay for three months as a visitor. Go. Have an adventure.”

“Adventures are mostly about the people,” he conceded. “You should know that his letters took a dark turn about two months ago. Something happened. He didn’t mention what. I tried to draw him out further but he wasn’t forthcoming with details. I suspected that his romance ended harshly, and perhaps on her terms. I don’t know what I did wrong that both of my children should be in their forties and not have a spouse and children.”

“Women think they can wait forever these days. It’s an illusion. You know the rate of miscarriages after the age of …”

“I’m not waiting for anything, pappa. I’m living my life, which will be what it will be.”

Morten empties the glass of aquavit and Sigrid reaches to fill it again, but he covers the glass with his palm.

“Five weeks ago you were hit on the head by a criminal who popped out of a closet. How’s your head?”

“I watched a film recently about a farmer who trained a pig to be a sheepdog. There was a duck in the film. He was very funny.”

Sigrid leaves her father alone at the table shortly afterward. She kisses him on the forehead and wishes him a good night as he packs a Danish pipe with Cavendish tobacco and disappears into a cloud of aromatic smoke. Sigrid retires to her room with Marcus’s letters and the intention of trying to take seriously the idea of traveling to the United States of America on a plane leaving tomorrow for an adventure to reunite with her brother in order to please her father.

The suitcase from Oslo contains only one nightgown, and she slips into it and then under the soft white bed sheets that protect her from the itchy but warm woolen blanket on top. Under the reassuring weight of the blanket she switches on the reading lamp to her right and opens Marcus’s final letter.

It is typed—not handwritten. It looks as if it has actually been produced on a mechanical typewriter. She runs her fingers across the back of the page and feels the subtle embossing produced by the type hammer striking the page.

The paper is American-sized, eight and a half by eleven inches, rather than the nearly universal A4, which runs a bit narrower. She’s read a piece in Aftenposten about how America is one of three countries left in the world retaining imperial measures rather than adopting the metric system. The other two are Liberia and Myanmar.

Dear pappa,

It happened again. You told me the first time that I didn’t understand. That I misunderstood everything. Well, I’m a grown man now and it happened a second time and this time I understand it all too well. And more than that. It has forced me to see it all with a line of sight unobstructed by the years and the events and the decisions in between. What I now understand is that it was my fault. It was also yours but you, I forgive.

Your son,

Marcus.

SIDE EFFECTS

SIGRID FLIES OUT of Oslo’s Gardermoen Airport on an Icelandair Boeing 757. Her father had upgraded her to “Saga Class,” either generously or because he couldn’t resist the term.

Traveling internationally is still fresh and she admits to herself a certain excitement when boarding the plane and turning toward the left—the business class—when being handed the headphones. The steward, very handsome, smiles at her for her good fortune and good taste at paying for a wider seat.

She has attended a few European conferences that have aimed to link academics with policymakers on matters of organized crime, cross-border cooperation, interagency workforce guidelines, new findings on smuggling routes, and the confusing overlap between criminal and terrorist activity. Three trips to Brussels. One to Geneva. But rather than exchanging ideas, the academic and policy practitioners were more likely to exchange fluids. Little was produced by such events aside from bastard children, misunderstandings, and heartbreak, so she stopped going when she had the choice.

More interesting and applicable to her job is Norway’s 1,600-kilometer border with Sweden, which has made smuggling and illegal immigration more of a problem since Norway joined the Schengen Agreement in 2001. That agreement opened the borders for freer movement of goods and people. It also created new undercover opportunities in Sweden in cooperation with the police in Gothenburg and Stockholm. She liked her Swedish police colleagues, aside from their stuffiness, and working undercover helped her rise more quickly in the ranks. But there were no planes in those jobs.

The first flight is only a few hours. There would have been enough time for a movie, but she opts for music and reverie. She chooses classical; a selection from the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who are playing something by Vivaldi. It is a solid choice as background noise to blot out the engines.

Norway disappears below her and exposes proof that there is a wider world. It looks like fresh air outside but it is separated from her by layers of plastic.

The latte-colored seat beside her is empty, and she stretches out by filling it with the correspondence between her father and brother, a bottle of water, the in-flight magazine, and that book by David Sedaris she’d failed to even start reading on the beach. It was one of two books she’d brought along. As the sun breaks through the clouds she feels momentarily hip and up to date. She opens to the copyright page. The cover art, she learns, is called Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette and is an oil on canvas piece by Van Gogh, sheltered in Amsterdam. Sigrid is no expert on these things, but the style seems to have more in common with Elvis on black velvet than The Starry Night.

The only reason she’d been at a bookstore at all was because Eli had insisted she start reading again. This was after Eli’s victory with the television streaming service, and—strangely—she didn’t find the two contradictory at all.

“You want me to start reading again because I don’t have a cat?” Sigrid quipped.

She returns the book to her bag for a second time because the author’s chipper tone disrupts her angst about finding Marcus.

The second book—insisted upon by Eli—is about yet another alcoholic male cop with a secret past unable to get along with authority. For no logical reason, though, he’s taking point against a serial killer in a Nordic country with one of the lowest crime rates in the history of the world. The murders are so ghastly, they should have made global headlines but instead only rattle the tranquility of a small town from which no one ever moves away or thinks to worry.

AMERICAN BY DAY

Derek B. Miller

CONTENTS

About the Author

AUGUST 2008

THE RIGHT QUESTION

A WEIRD PLACE

HOME

QUE SERA, SERA

SIDE EFFECTS