“They’ll want to know what information you have. They might be frightened. Honeycutt tried something very stupid last time he was scared. Who knows what he’ll try this time?”
“We should go to the police.”
“That’s in hand, but given that the police think they already have an explanation for Lusk’s death—”
“Jim. He was my friend. Call him Jim.”
“Jim,” I acknowledged. “Given the fact that they think it was a drug-related murder, they’re not going to be eager to dig. The only one I trust to get things going is out of town at the moment. As soon as he returns, you can relax. Until then, you might like to think about going away somewhere. The farther the better. Do you have any jobs abroad waiting?”
“Yes.” Her pupils dilated briefly; a strong reaction to a job. “There’s a foreign glass-making corporation that wants me to set up a sculpture garden for them. I could call them. I’m sure they’d be delighted if I arrived tomorrow. I’d be gone a week or two. Could you get everything sorted in that time?”
Sorted out, tidied up, ended.
A hundred feet below, a siren wailed. People streamed endlessly back and forth in their gerbil tubes. Empty city.
“Aud?”
“Yes, I could get everything sorted.”
She leaned forward, coffee balanced on her knees, and studied me as though I were a hieroglyph. “Why do you do this?”
“It’s a job.”
“You don’t need the money.”
“No.”
“So why?”
“I’m Norwegian.” I didn’t care if she understood or not.
“Are you?” she mused. I had no idea what she meant by that. If she’d read my file, she knew about my mother. She sipped her coffee thoughtfully. “Do you miss it, being a police officer?”
I had no idea where she was going. “No.”
“Always so definite. But if you didn’t miss the APD, why did you take that job with the Dahlonega police? You resigned after thirty-eight days.” Her voice was neutral. “It must have been pretty different from the big city.”
“Not really. The same kind of people thinking the same thing: that the rules don’t apply to them because they’re special.” She seemed to want me to talk. I had seen her vulnerable, now she wanted to see me. “The last man I arrested was beating a lamb. There was a show. A taut, firm body is one of the things judges look for in prize livestock. This man was beating a lamb so its body would swell and feel more firm. I arrested him. The district attorney refused to prosecute. They kept saying to me, ‘Officer Torvingen, Bubba here is a fine, upstanding citizen, and you want to spoil his reputation, for a lamb?’”
“I don’t blame you for resigning if your superiors didn’t back you up.”
“That wasn’t my reason. I had to drive him back to his house, and all the way I was thinking I should have just taken him behind the woodpile and beaten him until he swelled up, nice and firm, then maybe he would learn.”
“And wanting to beat him bothered you?”
“Bothered me? No. It was just that I realized I didn’t want to work for people whose rules got in the way of being effective. I resigned immediately in my head, and then it wasn’t my job anymore to do anything with this man. He was no longer my responsibility. I stopped the car and tossed him out in the middle of the road. I’ve never worked for anyone but myself since.”
“You said you never wanted to work for anyone whose rules got in the way of doing your job. Will you…I mean, if…Will you work with me again?”
“This one’s not finished yet.”
“If I’m out of the country, there’s nothing urgent, is there? So would you?”
“It depends on the job.”
“The glass corporation who want the sculpture garden, they’re in Norway. In Oslo. I’d need someone to translate. And we could take a few days to…” She went on in a rush, “What I mean is, I’ve never seen the country. Perhaps you could show me some of it. Introduce me to some people. You could see your mother.”
“She’s in London.”
“We could stop off on the way, or the way back. Will you come?”
Norway. It had been eleven years. Norway: a solid world against which to lay myself and make a mark that could be examined, could be held up in comparison with who I used to be, before. Norway. And my mother. Perhaps it was time. “Yes,” I said.
It was a cool day for the end of April, in the low eighties, but I drove straight up I-85 with the windows closed and the air-conditioning on because of the ’90 Margaux, duck terrine, boxed sandwiches and assorted delicatessen goodies on the back seat. I put on a CD of Ella Fitzgerald who sang about it being too darned hot.
The first time I’d driven this road to my new apartment in Northwoods Lake Court, Duluth, it had been a lot hotter. The roads had been a lot less crowded. I had never seen a human body fall and spasm and relax its sphincters.
I took the Pleasant Hill Road exit, heading for Duluth. At the top of the ramp was a man holding a WILL WORK FOR FOOD sign. Thirteen years ago I would have stopped for him. I drove past. Ella sang about oysters in Oyster Bay.
I sighed, did a U-turn, parked, walked over to the man. He was wearing black pants, white shirt, and a jacket that was far too big for him. Perhaps once it had fit. His feet stayed in one place, but he couldn’t seem to keep still.
“Hey, there,” I said. His head wobbled as he turned. “I’m on my way to the grocery. What kind of food do you want?”
It took him a while to work out what I was saying, then he smiled. Most of his teeth were missing. I doubted he was even my age. “Yes, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.”
“I’ll spend up to twenty dollars. What kind of food?”
“Just give me the twenty dollars.” It was beginning to get through to him that this wasn’t going the usual way. He started moving from side to side.
“No. Tell me what kind of food you want.”
“Can’t,” he said sullenly. Even in his jacket and the sun, he did not seem to be sweating. I wondered when he had last remembered to have a drink of water. “Can’t point at something that’s not here.”
“I’ll drive you to the store, then.”
“It’s all white person’s food. Can’t eat that. Give me the money.”
“I’ll drive you to any store you want as long as it’s within ten miles. I’ll buy you food. I won’t give you money.”
“I need money!” Three steps one way, three steps the other.
“So you don’t want any food?”
“I want money!” Now he was shambling along the verge, this way and that, in the lolloping, loose-limbed gait of the crack addict.
“If you want food, I can get you food. If you want to go to a shelter, I can drive you. I won’t give you money.”
He started shouting, waving his arms about. I walked back to the car, retrieved a bottle of mineral water from the cooler, and took it back. I put it on the grass two yards from where he stood.
“You should drink this.” I waited until I was sure he’d seen the water, then left. A mile up the road both lanes were clogged with mall traffic and the asphalt under their tires was still streaked red with runoff from last night’s rain. The strip mall developers might rip out trees and gouge the earth flat but it refused to die completely, it just bled its life away, rainfall by rainfall. Ella sang about saying goodbye, and then I was out of the bottleneck and shifting through the gears.
The park appeared suddenly, as it always had. One minute I was doing sixty, the next I was in a small, crunched limestone parking lot shaded by a stand of towering Douglas firs. The engine ticked, birdsong wove through the wood. Nothing had changed in thirteen years.
I carried my basket to the lake, where I could watch the white geese and mallards paddling around. Some were trailed by lines of tiny chicks, cutting wobbly V-shaped wakes behind their parents. I pulled the Margaux cork, picked up an enormous turkey sandwich, and ate my picnic, sunshine warming my face and wine and the grass, making my world smell like French countryside. On the far side of the lake, by a fallen tree trunk, two geese started a honking competition. I poured more wine. The honking competition ended in a flurry of feathers and a swift, sharp arc of water from one to the other that glittered in the sun like a diamond necklace.