Why do you do this? Julia had asked, and I didn’t know. I would be better off working as some kind of park ranger or planting trees, and instead I had agreed to accompany Julia to Oslo. I was going to go on and find out more—the identities of those men, who they worked for, why they carried knives—when really I could not care less. What did it matter? They had no idea who I was and all Julia had to do to be safe was stay out of the way for a few weeks while Denneny and maybe the DEA sorted out the whole mess. But I’m Norwegian I had told Julia, and Norwegians were supposed to tidy away what they had disarranged, finish what they started.
And Are you? she had asked. In Oslo, perhaps I could find out.
I put the remains of the picnic in the trunk and had to search a minute or two before I found the head of the trail. It was laid with mulched bark weathered by sun and rain to a crumbly punk, soft enough for bare feet.
Under the trees it was another country, with sounds and scents from another age. The air was rich and still. If you stood quietly, you could imagine the trees were breathing, the soft sigh of ancient forest. But this wasn’t an old wood. Through the thick foliage of mature birch and yellow poplar, the sun was bright on the fresh new green of sycamore saplings and young birches. The flash of thrush wings stitched bronze-black threads between tree trunks. A busy clutch of finches twittered, green-patched heads turning this way and that, while somewhere over my head a cardinal fluted.
Such small birds for a such a big sound. I had a sudden vision of yellow beak opening to show startling red and pink throat and tongue, feathers swelling as the tiny creature tried to fill the world with song, tried hard enough to shatter its fragile, hollow bones, and all it was singing was, This is my tree, my tree, my tree. Keep away or I’ll break your wings.
A twitch of movement up the bark of a white pine: a lizard with a blue belly and tiny glittering eyes that would not have looked out of place as a jewelled pin on a woman’s evening coat. It skittered around the other side of the trunk.
The trail dipped. To the right the ground was boggy. Swamp oak loomed over reeds and a stand of yellow iris. Damselflies hummed in and out of the shade like tiny titanium helicopters. Some bird flashed through and snipped a couple out of the air. Beauty and innocence never saved anything.
Just past the dog violets on the right, on a crumbling log, sat a salamander: five inches long and fire-engine red with black speckles. I watched it sunning itself for five minutes before something I couldn’t see or hear startled it. It moved so fast it seemed to disappear. Perhaps thirteen years ago there had been salamanders in the woods on the northeast side of the apartment complex at Northwoods Lake Court. I hadn’t been there long enough to find out.
The trail was just over a mile. It came out above the lake, less than a hundred yards from where I had picnicked. Full circle.
Northwoods Lake, the first place I had lived in this country, was less than a mile up the road, but no friends, no family had ever seen it. It was only two minutes’ drive; perhaps it was time to make the journey, go back, find out for myself what I had missed. But perhaps they would have cut down all the trees by now, drained the ornamental lake and leveled the brushy slopes to squeeze in a few more units. Perhaps I would find that my memory had played tricks on me. Perhaps I would find I had not lost a wonderland, that I was who I was not because I had killed someone but because that’s just the way I was born. I had never talked to anyone of what had happened there. Not even to my mother. No doubt the consulate had apprised her of events, but we had never spoken of it.
I stood by the lake for a long time, through the full heat of afternoon, through a light shower of rain whose big drops felt unrealistically light, as though they were hollow. I stood while the mall traffic turned to rush-hour traffic, until the sun started to bloody the horizon. That’s when a blue heron glided in over the lake. With head tucked back on the long neck and legs dangling, it looked impossibly prehistoric, a pterodactyl with feathers. It alighted on the dead limb of a white oak hanging over the water, where it immediately assumed the pose of a Japanese painting: a single vivid brushstroke, stark against the gold and orange of the sky. It edged forward a little and turned its head this way and that, watching the lake intently. It stood nearly four feet high; its beak—a dead-looking thing of yellowed ivory—must have been ten inches long. Its plumage was slate blue with a powdery pinkish undercast, the topknot of four or five head feathers—like a silly chapeau—almost white. After a while it gave a little skip and a jump and hauled itself back into the air in a clutter of legs. With a couple of powerful wing beats it was gliding once again, sure and silent. Its shadow rippled over the darkening water and it headed southwest towards the city, the opposite direction from Northwoods Lake Court.
I watched it awhile, then drove back towards the interstate. The water bottle lay broken open on the road. There was no sign of the man or his board.
A fax from Benny waited for me at home: no matches on the blood type or fingerprints found at Honeycutt’s house from local files. It would take several days to run them against the FBI’s enormous file but the preliminary results were interesting: professionals who were not yet known to local law enforcement. Interesting but ultimately uninformative.
I called Denneny’s voice mail again. “Brian, my client and I are leaving the country for a week or two. We leave the day after tomorrow, arriving Oslo on the first of May, and will be back midmonth, depending.” Depending on a lot of things. “You might be interested in the reported burglary at Honeycutt’s house last night.”
He should have everything taken care of by the time we got back.
I called my mother, who stayed up all hours. I talked to her secretary. It was a new one. “This is Aud Torvingen. Her daughter. Can you tell me what her schedule is like later this week? No, no, I’m in America. I’m…No, no, I’m Her Excellency’s daughter. Yes. Aud. I’m flying into London the day after tomorrow, from America. I want to find out when Her Excellency will be free so I can perhaps arrange an overnight stay before completing my journey to Oslo. No, no, I’m not in London now.” I switched to Norwegian. After two sentences she let me know that Her Excellency was in fact fully booked for the next ten days. “Then will you tell her to please call me?” I gave her the number, then repeated it just to be sure. “Tell her…tell her that I hope she can rearrange her appointments. That if she can’t, I’ll be passing back that way a week or two later and will be happy to fit in with her schedule. But I do want to see her. Please make that clear. Say I particularly asked to talk to her properly. Yes. Properly.”
Properly. We had never really talked to each other after I was nine years old. She had been busy and I had been resentful. I had grown up independent, and then she had not known how to find her way back to me. I wasn’t even sure she wanted to, or what she might find if she did.
The nights were getting hotter. The dogwood blossom was gone, azaleas in full bloom, and the air cupped my cheek as softly as a woman’s hand. I strolled through Little Five Points, careful not to swing my left arm too much and pull the healing cut over my ribs. The tables outside cafés and bars were full. Four different sets of street musicians competed with traffic and the ecstatic shirring of crickets and tree frogs. One woman on six-foot stilts was trying to play the harmonica. As I crossed the street, some man with sideburns and an apron was waving frantically at Stiltwoman. No doubt he was trying to point out the power lines that ran quite low near his bar. I stepped into the orange glow of Borealis.