Elise had read the page at least five times, but it was in English, so she didn’t understand all of it. Foreign languages had never been her strong suit. Julie had inherited Ivar’s talent with languages and could read English easily. Elise tried over and over to make some sense of this page, searching for some explanation, as if it might tell her where Julie had been taken. Sandman. It seemed to be about dreams and sleep. That much she had figured out.
She put it down and sighed.
Then the phone rang. She picked up and listened for several moments without saying a word. Then she hung up. Her hands were shaking. But this was a different kind of shaking from what she’d experienced over the past few days. She ran to the bedroom where Ivar was sleeping and threw herself onto the bed.
“Good Lord, Elise, calm down,” said her husband, putting his arms around her. He thought she needed to be consoled again.
She looked at him in the light that streamed through the open bedroom door. He was still in pain, but now she could set his mind at rest.
First she needed to take a deep breath. Then a few more. She wanted to be totally calm when she said the words.
“They’ve found her,” she told him at last. “Julie is being taken to the hospital right now. They say she is suffering from hypothermia. But she’s going to be all right.”
He turned over so he could switch on the light.
Then they sat there, staring at each other. Her hands were still shaking.
We’re going to get her back, she thought.
Nothing will be the same as before.
Odd Singsaker woke up in a hospital bed when his phone rang.
It was his son, Lars.
This time he needed to take the call. He couldn’t spare him from everything. No doubt Lars had read the news reports about the recent events and was worried.
“Hi,” Singsaker merely said.
“Hi, Pappa. How are you doing?”
“Well, all these stitches hurt like hell. But I’ll survive.”
“You’re tough for an old guy.”
Singsaker was relieved. This was a new tone of voice from his son. Or rather, it was the new way they’d started communicating after the christening in the fall, when his second grandchild was baptized. At the time, he’d been staying with his son’s family in their cramped apartment in Torshov with Felicia. For the first time in his life he’d discovered that his son had a sense of humor. At least that’s one thing I’ve taught him, he thought. But then he’d realized that Felicia was the one who’d done it—she’d brought father and son closer without either of them noticing.
“I’ve been trying to call you for a while,” said Lars.
“I’ve been really busy with this damned case.”
“But not so busy on the home front?”
Singsaker gave a start. How did Lars know? Whom had he been talking to?
“What do you mean by that?” he asked. Now he heard a voice in the background: “Did you get hold of him? Is he okay?”
Then Lars said, “There’s somebody here who wants to talk to you.”
Singsaker sat up in bed, silently holding the phone to his ear. Had he heard correctly? Was it really her voice he’d just heard?
“Odd, how are you?” she said then.
“Felicia? Are you at Lars’s place?”
“I didn’t know where else to go. There aren’t really a lot of places for me to stay in this country.”
“I thought you went back to the States.”
“I almost did,” she told him.
“What are you going to do now?”
“I want to come home,” she said.
“Do you mean here, to Trondheim?”
“Yes.”
Singsaker closed his eyes. There was a faint rushing sound in his head.
“Then I guess it’s your turn to visit me in the hospital,” he said, thinking about the week he’d kept vigil over Felicia in the fall. Her injuries had been far more serious than his. If he was lucky, this time they’d let him go home in a few days.
“I’ll come and see you every day until you’re well,” she said.
“So you’re not mad at me anymore?” he asked.
“No,” she said. “I was never mad at you.”
A few seconds after he put down the phone, it rang again. It was Lars, and he spoke in a low voice.
“Did you forget something?” asked Singsaker.
“I wanted to say something when Felicia wasn’t in the room,” he replied.
“What’s that?”
“She was in really bad shape when she got here. She just lay on the sofa for almost twenty-four hours before she managed to pull herself together. You need to take care of her, Pappa.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I will.”
Then he turned off his phone and went to sleep.
He was lying on his back when Felicia came into the room. A nurse who bore a striking resemblance to Siri Holm had just tended to his wound, this time leaving off the bandages.
The stitches were red and itchy.
Felicia came over to him. He noticed the sweet smell of alcohol and sweat as she leaned over to kiss his forehead. Neither of them said a word. She bent down and kissed the first stitch, letting her lips linger there for a while. She was breathing slowly, easily. When she raised her lips, the stitch was gone and the edges of the top part of the wound had grown together.
She did the same thing with the next stitch.
Without a word, she worked her way down until they had all disappeared, along with the wound on his thigh. Then she straightened up and looked at him with that wise and melancholy expression that she had occasionally. It was a look that could sometimes, briefly, convince him that melancholia was the only healthy approach to life.
“Sleep well, my dear,” she said, kissing him on the forehead once more.
Then he woke from the dream.
He was alone. Felicia wasn’t there. He looked at his watch and saw that it was a little past ten in the morning. A whole day and night had passed since they’d last spoken. This was the first time he’d slept soundly since that phone call.
He’d been waiting. Three times he’d talked to Lars on the phone. His son told him that Felicia had booked herself a ticket on the three o’clock plane yesterday afternoon. So why hadn’t she come to the hospital yet?
He decided to call Siri.
“Hi, Odd. Happy birthday!” she said. “I thought you’d give me the chance to call you. That’s usually how it works on someone’s birthday, you know.”
“Shit. Is today my birthday?” he said, suddenly confused.
“Must be your memory playing tricks on you again.” She laughed. “Isn’t Felicia there with you?”
He’d spoken to Siri last night and told her that Felicia was coming back.
“That’s why I’m calling,” he said. “I haven’t seen her, and she’s not answering her phone. I was wondering if you could drop by the apartment and see if she’s there.”
Siri assured him that she’d be happy to do that during her lunch hour.
At 11:55 she called him from outside his apartment on Kirkegata. The door was locked, the windows were dark, and there was no sign of Felicia Stone.
He sighed.
“I’m sure she’ll turn up,” said Siri. “She probably decided to spend an extra day in Oslo.”
They both knew that sounded very unlikely.
He thanked Siri for her help.
After he put down the phone, someone knocked on the door and a nurse came into his room.
“There’s a young man here who’d like to speak with you,” she said.
Behind her, Singsaker could see Fredrik Alm in the doorway. The nurse left as the boy came into the room. For a moment he stood there, not sure what to do. Then he reached into his pocket and took out a black notebook. Singsaker recognized it at once.
“Where did you get that?” he asked as Fredrik handed it to him.
“At school. It was in the Lost and Found box, and when I saw your name on it, I thought I should bring it over. I guess you must have left it behind when you came to talk to us. I also wanted to thank you—for rescuing Julie.”
Singsaker felt a pang of guilt.
We should have caught the guy sooner, he thought. It was my fault.
“How’s she doing?” Singsaker asked.
“Not so good. She’s glad to be alive, of course. But she says that she can’t sleep at night.”
“What about the baby?”
“We don’t know yet,” said Fredrik. “She doesn’t want to talk about it. She says she needs time to think things over.”
“Tell her I said hello. And you take care of yourself.”
Fredrik Alm nodded, turned around, and headed for the door.
“And Fredrik,” said Singsaker before the boy left. “Thanks for the notebook. I was really wondering what happened to it.”
After Fredrik left, he paged through his notes. He felt sorry for the boy. How could he give Julie what she needed? Could anyone do that? And then there was the baby. Difficult decisions had to be made, and Fredrik would have very little say about them. No matter what the outcome, he was going to have a tough time of it. He was much too young to be a father, but who could stand to lose a child, no matter what age he was?
Singsaker kept looking through his notebook. The last pages contained his notes from the interviews at school. He tormented himself by reading the very precise description that Fredrik had given him of the house where Julie had talked to a man who was shoveling snow—the house that turned out to belong to the murderer, the place where he had held both Silje Rolfsen and Julie captive. Again he told himself that there’d been no reason to believe that the man shoveling snow was of any importance to the case. It was just a tip. Something that had to be checked out when they had time. But no one had done that. There was no getting around the fact that he was the one who had forgotten all about it.
Finally Singsaker turned back to the page where he’d written some passages about Felicia and himself. It was from the night before this whole horrible case had begun, which felt like ages ago, or like something he’d imagined in some awful dream. They’d eaten dinner and then made love twice. Something told him that it might have been the last time he could demonstrate that sort of prowess. At his age it was quickly becoming a physiological impossibility.
He chuckled to himself and lay back on the pillows.
One day passed and then another. Felicia didn’t show up. Finally he had to accept that she wasn’t coming. Several times he picked up the phone, thinking that he’d call her father in Virginia. But he didn’t. He wasn’t ready to confirm what he feared and perhaps already knew. He didn’t think he was strong enough to handle the truth.
On Singsaker’s last day in the hospital, Dr. Nordraak unexpectedly came in to remind him that he’d missed his follow-up appointment, which was understandable, given the recent events. So they scheduled a new appointment. As Nordraak was about to leave, Singsaker decided to ask him something.
“I’m sure you’ve read about the case I was working on when all this happened, right?”
“Of course. Everybody’s heard about it.”
“What’s your professional opinion, as a psychiatrist? What goes on in the mind of a murderer like Røed?”
Nordraak looked at him as he straightened his silk tie. The tie had a pattern of little blue elephants, but strangely enough it looked quite stylish on him.
“My professional opinion?” he said, hesitating. “It’s not really much different from what was reported in all the newspapers. And you, as an experienced police officer, have probably reached the same conclusion as I have. Røed was most likely suffering from a severe personality disorder. That’s a constant and, many would say, incurable mental defect. We’re talking about a lack of empathy, grandiose ideas, no sense of boundaries in terms of his behavior, and the inability to control his impulses. But it also seems likely that at some point he entered a psychotic state that not only reinforced his difficult personality but also made his thoughts bizarre and incomprehensible. As a doctor, I would say that he was probably always a difficult person, with a potential for violent and criminal behavior, but that it was only during a brief period that he was actually ill in a pathological sense.”
“But how would you explain how, after he kidnapped his first victim, Røed continued to function at his job? When I talked to him right after the murder, he seemed perfectly lucid. He was extraordinarily cunning in the way he led me toward Høybråten, who he knew had his own dark secrets. And he dropped a few remarks that diverted attention away from himself, such as the fact that the music box had been modified by an amateur. The man was a professional curator, after all.”
“It’s impossible to say anything for sure about Røed’s state of mind now that he’s dead and we’re unable to observe him. But it’s not uncommon for psychoses to come and go. That’s what happens with so-called bipolar patients, for example. But as I said, we can’t really speculate.”
“Could the absence of dreams lead to psychosis?”
“Yes, in a sense. It’s not necessarily the lack of dreams but rather long periods without sleep that can lead to serious psychotic states. As far as Røed is concerned, it’s really a question of which came first—the chicken or the egg? Insomnia could just as well have been a symptom of his condition, rather than the root cause of it. Many psychotic patients struggle with sleep. If he seemed lucid when you talked to him, he may have slept well the night before and was experiencing a milder form of his illness.”
“But not many insomniacs kill innocent people,” remarked Singsaker drily.
Nordraak paused for a few moments before answering.
“You’re right about that, Singsaker. You’re right. But you asked me for my professional assessment of Røed, not my personal opinion.”
“And what’s your personal opinion?”
“I think that what it said in the newspapers about the lullaby and the fact that he might have kidnapped the women to help him sleep is only part of the picture. I think he cut out Silje Rolfsen’s larynx because to his ears it wasn’t functioning the way it should. He enjoyed killing. That’s my theory, Singsaker. Violence was the only way he could quiet the turmoil inside of him. Murderers like Røed kill primarily because they personally gain something from the violence and because of the sense of power it gives them. The man was an evil bastard. And we’re never going to find any scientific explanation for evil.”
“A monster?” said Singsaker.
Nordraak thought for a moment.
“No, a human being. Unfortunately, a human being.”
Then he wrote down the new appointment time for Singsaker and left the room.
Several hours later, Singsaker was discharged from the hospital.
“Felicia vanished. Can anyone say how? Like the bird from its cage, like the ice in the spring, like love when it’s wounded, like a trip without return.” Luckily Singsaker hadn’t noticed the music playing as he sat in the restaurant the following day. Siri Holm sat across from him, and she couldn’t help hearing the tune. What an awful coincidence, she thought.
It was cold outside, and a draft was coming in the windows. Singsaker was wearing a wool sweater, but he was still freezing. He’d been to Mona Gran’s funeral earlier in the day. Her partner had wanted a civilian funeral with no police uniforms, but there was still a huge crowd. All the pews in the church had been filled.
That’s how it always is when young people die, thought Singsaker.
Again he felt the weight of the guilt that he couldn’t rationalize away. If his memory had been functioning the way it should, she might still be alive. It was because of such thoughts that he couldn’t concentrate on what Siri was saying. But he could tell she was trying to cheer him up.
“This police log makes for really exciting reading,” she said. “It was written by a police chief named Nils Bayer, who worked in Trondheim for a number of years, starting in 1762. This particular entry was written in 1767, about Jon Blund, and it’s almost like reading fiction. It turns out that this Jon Blund was a Swedish ballad singer who arrived in Trondheim and was then killed. After Blund’s death, Bayer found his notebook, and one of the ballads included was ‘The Golden Peace.’ It doesn’t say anything specific, but I’m guessing Bayer was the one who went to Winding to have it printed.”
“Does that mean that Nils Bayer is the closest we’re going to get to this ancestor that Felicia was looking for?”
“Yes, although I imagine that Røed made up the part about the ancestor. But this Bayer was a really odd guy. I’ve gone through the archives and discovered that he actually emigrated from Trondheim to America in 1776, almost ten years after the ballad was printed.”
“So you’ve solved the case for Felicia,” said Singsaker.
“The case that wasn’t a case,” Siri replied, correcting him. They both knew now that the e-mail address that was used to contact Felicia had been opened in the name of Grälmakar Löfberg and could be traced back to Jonas Røed’s PC at the Ringve Museum. But no one had been able to figure out why Røed had contacted her about doing this genealogical search. It was assumed that he’d been obsessed with everything that had to do with the pseudonym Jon Blund and that he’d seized the opportunity to find out more information about him.
“It’ll still take a lot of digging to find out more about Bayer,” Siri went on. “The only thing I know is that he was Danish and he’d worked as a police officer in Copenhagen. I was thinking of reading through the entire police logbook. Bayer really seems to have had his finger in a lot of different pies during his time in Trondheim, and it looks like he associated with plenty of powerful people. There’s enough material for several crime novels here.”
“Maybe you should write them,” said Singsaker, smiling for the first time since they’d started talking. “You’re so interested in mysteries, after all.”
“No, I’m a reader, not an author,” she said. “By the way, I’m excited that the police made public the letter that was in the wall at Ringve. Can you give me a hint as to what it says? Who was this Jon Blund exactly? Does it mention anything about him in the letter, like the rumors say?”
“I haven’t read it,” he said.
Then their food arrived. Fish soup. Neither of them had ordered wine.
Singsaker waited until they’d finished eating. Then he told her what he’d decided.
“I’m going to ask for a leave of absence.”
Siri looked at him, but she didn’t seem the least bit surprised.
“I can’t take it anymore. And I’m not functioning the way I should.”
“You’re planning to go and find her, aren’t you?”
“The thought did cross my mind.”
“And do you realize that you might not like what you find?”
“I still need to look for her. We had something going, the two of us.”
“I know you did.”
“It can’t just end this way.”
“How long are you going to be on sick leave?”
“With this thigh wound? A few weeks. With this head? At least a year if I talk to the right doctors. But I’m not going to take sick leave. I’ve already talked to Brattberg. She’s giving me time off without pay. I have money. And to be honest, I’m tired of being sick.”
Afterward, he went home and straight to bed. He knew that if he just lay there long enough and wrestled with his thoughts hard enough, he’d be able to handle it. And when that happened, when sleep finally took him, he knew what he was going to dream about: her.
They had to meet again. Anything else seemed impossible.
Elise Edvardsen was awakened by a door slamming. She went out to the front hall and looked outside. Had Julie gone out in the middle of the night and left the door open to slam in the wind?
No, there were no footprints in the snow outside.
She closed the door and turned to go back to bed. But outside the bedroom she stopped, aware of the anxiety that hadn’t left her even after their daughter returned home. In fact, it almost seemed worse now.
Then she moved down the hallway just as she’d done on that first terrible morning when her whole world had been turned upside down. She opened the door to her daughter’s room with the same paralyzing feeling that she’d had on that day.
But now she saw Julie’s head resting on her pillow. Maybe she was asleep. Maybe she was just pretending to be asleep.
Elise Edvardsen breathed a sigh of relief, even though she knew the reprieve was only temporary. Her worries would come back as soon as she crawled into her own bed and lay down next to her husband. That was how her nights were now, after Julie had come back to them. She would lie awake more than she slept. She had the worst thoughts about what her daughter must have endured, and it would take her most of each morning to put these images out of her mind.
Strangely enough, she thought all this worrying might have made her stronger. Better able to tackle the difficulties that lay ahead. But she wasn’t sure. She wasn’t sure about anything.