The Body in the Fjord Read Free

Erik’s body was discovered when?”
    â€œOn Sunday morning in Kjosfossen—at a river in a place called FlÃ¥m, 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.”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œA 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?”
    â€œNo, 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.
    â€œKnapsacks? 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.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œThen 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