TWO

“I swear,” said Deputy Orly Peterson, ostentatiously crossing his heart. “That’s the way it was. I heard it from a Douglas County deputy who was there when they fished him out.”

“There wasn’t anything about that in the official report, or even in the papers,” protested Sheriff Palmer Knutson. “You’d think a story like that would get picked up by the newspapers, at least.”

“Yeah, well, if you had chucked your fishing spear into a body you might have been a little reluctant to brag about it, wouldn’t you?”

“You mean,” the sheriff blinked, “he actually hit him?”

“Yeah, sort of. That’s how they kept the body from drifting any further and could keep him until they got the sheriff down there. I guess it didn’t really hit the body, but the spear caught in the hood of the parka the guy had on.” The deputy smirked. “I can see it now. Somebody asks him, ‘Catch anything today?’ and he says, ‘You bet, I got a hundred-and-seventy-five-pound Norwegian!’”

It was a period of quiet for Fergus Falls and all of Otter Tail County. The Christmas holidays were over and the big Crazy Days sale at the Westridge Mall had come and gone. The Lutheran Brethren School’s Annual World Mission Conference was going to be held soon, but the chances of that inaugurating a wave of crime were not high. In fact, nothing was high. The average high temperature for the month of January in Fergus Falls is eight above zero, and this winter seemed to be below average. Burglaries are always down in January because nobody wants to stand outside jimmying a lock when one’s hands freeze to the doorknob and every bit of minor villainy can be followed up by tracks in the snow. So it was a time to catch up on old cases and read about crime and crime prevention in other less blessed communities. It was a time to consider, and abandon, plans for redecorating the office. And it was a time to listen to Deputy Orly Peterson.

Knutson blinked through his too-round, horn-rimmed glasses. He had selected the frames all by himself, without the help of his esthetically sensitive wife. He thought the frames had made him look wise, something that was always an asset in an elective office.

Ellie, however, had unkindly remarked, “Wise? Yes, I can see that. What, after all, is the symbol of Athens? The symbol of wisdom itself? An owl. The only thing missing is a mouse in your beak.”

The worst thing was, after the seed had been planted in his mind, every time he looked at himself in the mirror he felt like hooting.

Palmer Knutson had long considered himself to be in his middle ages, but had recently accepted that the term “late middle ages” was more appropriate. He preferred a relaxed atmosphere in his office and today he was wearing a heavy woolen, official British Navy-surplus sweater. His daughter, who attended Concordia College, had gone off on a May seminar in London and brought him back this treasured souvenir. It had patches on the shoulders and on the elbows and looked like something James Bond would put on for night duty. The dark blue set off his light blue eyes and his reddish blond hair, blending into gray, and strategically combed to camouflage a receding hair line. Unfortunately, the sweater was rather tight around the middle and tended to accentuate the round bulges hanging over his belt. Palmer lugubriously eyed the stretched fabric at his midsection and regretted the lefse and rommegrot and Christmas cookies that he had so enthusiastically and thoughtlessly consumed.

“You know,” he resumed, after allowing Orly his enjoyment of the concept of fishing for Norwegians, “the annual Sertoma Fishing Derby is coming up on Pebble Lake. That sort of thing could happen to us. Are you prepared to go out and handle something like that without making jokes about it?”

Orly Peterson, who at least looked the part of a deputy, resented the implication. Although his status would have allowed him to do at least some work in plain clothes, he seldom appeared in anything but his spotless and carefully pressed tan and brown uniform. And always, even on a cold day in January when he had nowhere to go but the restroom, he wore his nine-millimeter 92F Beretta strapped to his side. He worked out regularly and had, in the sheriff’s opinion, a disgustingly small amount of body fat on his six-foot frame. Besides, the uniform was the perfect complement to his closely cut brown hair and his soft brown eyes. Knutson had once teased him that he wore his uniform because he thought it would appeal to women. He could tell by the way his deputy blushed that he had made a direct hit. But Orly was offended by Knutson’s newest dig.

“Of course I could handle it! Have I ever given you any reason to think that I couldn’t?”

In truth, Knutson was hard-pressed to remember any incident when that was the case and mumbled a vague apology.

“But what happened there, anyway?” asked Peterson, appropriately forgiving the slight by ignoring the issue. “Did they ever find out how come he fell in the lake in the first place?”

“Funny you should ask,” replied the sheriff, suppressing a grin. “Just after it happened I got a call from Loyal Rue, the Douglas County sheriff. He thought he had a murder on his hands. It seems that when they fished the corpse out of the hole in the ice they were able to identify who it was. They found the poor sap’s fish house only a hundred yards away, and tried to get in, but the door was locked from the inside.”

“I thought that was illegal?”

“It is. You’re not even supposed to have locks on the inside. But he did, and for reasons best known to himself he had locked the door. Well, anyway, they bring the victim back and the county coroner finds a deep bruise on the side of his head. So Rue decides maybe someone whacked him with a blunt instrument and he thinks he’s got himself a locked-room murder. I mean, he even suggested a frog man in a wet suit had popped out of the fishing hole and done him in.”

Peterson leaned forward and Knutson could spot the “Oh, I wish we could get a case like that” look in his eyes. He commented before the deputy had a chance to voice his envy. “You know how everybody in Alexandria is sort of jealous of us in everything?” the sheriff continued, revealing a deeply felt and widely held Fergus Falls attitude. “Well, I guess since we had that Gherkin murder last year Rue has always felt that he has to keep up. He said he wanted to consult with me. Well, what was I supposed to tell him? All I could do was assure him that it wasn’t the same murderer. Anyway, before that went any further they discovered that their victim had been overcome by carbon monoxide gas. The fool had built a little fire in his stove and had not checked the chimney, which was filled up with snow. He just fell asleep and toppled into the hole, and in the process had bumped his head. Rue called me back later to tell me about it, but I never heard about the spear.”

“Yeah, well, that’s how they got him out. Can you imagine? You’re sitting in a dark fish house with a spear in one hand and a bottle of bourbon in the other. You see something in the hole and you strike! You pull in the line and what do you have? A Norwegian! That reminds me …”

Knutson winced. It looked like Peterson was about to tell another Norwegian joke. It wasn’t that Palmer didn’t like Norwegian jokes, but he only liked them when they were told by a fellow Norwegian. Peterson was a Swede, and a supercilious one at that. “Or is it a redundancy to call a Swede supercilious?” Knutson thought as he prepared for the worst.

“So there’s this big construction project in Minneapolis, see. And there’s a German and an Italian and Ole working up on the forty-ninth floor. And it’s lunch break, see, and the German opens his lunch box and cries, ‘Ach du Lieber! Sauerkraut again! If I get sauerkraut in my lunch one more time I’m going to walk off the top of this here building.’ And then the Italian opens up his lunch bucket and he yells out ‘Mama Mia! It’sa spaghetti again! If I see spaghetti one more time ina my luncha box I’ma gonna jump offa the topa thisa building.’ And sure enough, Ole, he opens up his box and says, ‘Uffda! Lefse! Lefse again. If I get lefse in my lunch one more time I tink I’m going to yump off dis building.’

“So the next day, of course, the German opens up his lunch box and says ‘Ach du Lieber’ when he sees the sauerkraut and walks off the top of the building, and he falls all the way down and he gets killed. And sure enough, the Italian opens his lunch, sees the spaghetti. ‘Mama Mia,’ he says and off he goes. Then Ole, he opens up his lunch and sure enough, there’s the lefse, so he says ‘Uffda’ and off he goes.”

Peterson sat back while Knutson tried but failed to see the point of the story. After an overlong pause, Peterson continued, “Then they had to have a funeral, you know.”

“Yah, go on,” the sheriff patiently replied.

“Well, everybody was crying and stuff and the German widow was just inconsolable. ‘Why didn’t he tell me he didn’t want sauerkraut?’ she asked. ‘I thought he loved it. For twenty-three years he loved it!’ ‘I know just what you mean,’ said the Italian woman. ‘I gave my husband spaghetti every day for nineteen years because he told everyone what a wonderful wife I was to give him his spaghetti every day.’ Well, then, they both looked over at Lena. She looked back at them and said, ‘Don’t look at me! Ole always packed his own lunch!’”

By the time he finished the punch line, Orly was laughing hard at his own joke. Palmer, however, pushed up his glasses with his knuckle and said, “But if all three of them jumped down and died, how did the widows know the reason for their suicide?”

Orly stared at him for fifteen seconds and finally said, “Apparently there were more men than just those three on the 49th floor. Men who were infinitely satisfied with their noon repast and did not feel the need to commit suicide. More than likely these men, who of course had tried to prevent the suicides to the best of their citizen responsibility but who had failed in this endeavor, and who had shamefacedly admitted their inability to prevent the collective deaths, had reported the circumstances to the local law enforcement agencies who had referred them to individual trauma counselors. Geez!” The deputy shook his head and returned to his own office.

“That’s a funny joke,” Palmer thought. “I gotta tell that to Ellie when I get home.” The sheriff smiled as he anticipated his wife’s rich and deep giggle. But over the course of the next minute, the smile faded and a furrow spread across his brow. Did the Douglas County sheriff really envy Knutson for his opportunity to solve a murder? No one, he thought, could ever willingly want to deal with the sadness, suspicion, and horror that murder called forth.

“No,” he said to himself, “that was the first murder in Otter Tail County in several decades. We’ll probably get through several more before we have another one. By then, who knows? Maybe Orly will be the sheriff.”

As Knutson smiled at the thought of Orly as the county “man of the law,” passions and circumstances moved inexorably to prove his prediction to be very wrong.