The Body in the Fjord
( Faith Fairchild - 8 )
Katherine Hall Page
This time out, smalltown caterer and minister's wife Faith Fairchild's neighbor, Pix Miller, takes center stage, heading off to Norway to investigate the sudden disappearance of a family friend. Determined to discover the truth, Pix is drawn into a suspenseful world of intrigue, stolen antiques, secret histories, and deadly echoes from Norway's past and the Nazi occupation. Surrounded by the country's breathtaking beauty, the ever-resourceful New Englander perseveres -- until at last she finds herself face-to-face with a remorseless killer...with no way out.
From Library Journal
Caterer Faith Fairchild's part-time employee, Pix Miller, departs for Norway, where a friend has suddenly disappeared. Eighth in a charming series, complete with food talk, stolen antiques, murder?and recipes.
KATHERINE HALL PAGE
The BODY in the FJORD
A FAITH FAIRCHILD MYSTERY
To the Christensens and Malmgrens, past and present, and To my mother, Alice Malmgreen Page, and my aunt, Ruth Malmgreen Samenfeld, with thanks for our voyage “home”—what a time it was!
Look into any man’s heart you please, and you will always find, in every one, at least one black spot which he has to keep concealed.
—HENRJK IBSEN,
Pillars of Society
Prologue
“The book says, ‘The Flåm train ride continues to be one of Norway’s most popular tourist attractions,’” a woman with a slightly nasal voice read to her husband.
He was looking out the window at the people still waiting to board in front of the station at Myrdal.
“We’ll be descending from two thousand eight hundred and forty-five feet above sea level to six feet above sea level in only twelve miles. I don’t think I like the sound of it, honey, do you? Isn’t that kind of steep?” She pursed her lips and tugged at his sleeve to get his attention.
He hadn’t been listening—not an uncommon occurrence. But he had caught enough to know what she was talking about. He’d read the book, too.
“I’m sure it’s all very safe. We’re in Norway, for God’s sakes. What could be safer?”
“You’re right. I’m just being an old fussbudget.”
He’d turned to look at her and now he turned back toward the window. He hated it when she pulled at his clothes. Hated it when she used what she thought were cute words, like fussbudget. Who talked like that, for God’s sakes? Her voice kept going—and going.
“Anyway, it says here the train has five separate braking systems. And they couldn’t possibly all fail, or even
if they did, the train would be going so slowly by then, we could jump off.”
The man repressed the impulse to point out to his wife that jumping off the train as it zigzagged down the mountain to the fjord at any speed would be as suicidal as staying on with no brakes, and he merely grunted something that could be taken as either encouragement or discouragement. His wife opted for the former.
“What was I thinking of? This is going to be fun! It says the train passes through twenty tunnels. We won’t be going very fast, though. It takes fifty-three minutes to go down. Fifty-three minutes for twelve miles. But wait—it says it takes forty minutes to go up. Now, that doesn’t make a speck of sense. You’d think going down would be faster, wouldn’t you? It must be a misprint. We can time it, then write to the guidebook people.”
He didn’t reply, continuing to stare out the window.
You could tell the Norwegians from the tourists, because the Norwegians of all ages carried knapsacks. The tourists had bags on wheels, bags with wheels, or bags strapped onto racks with wheels. Wheels were the thing.
He’d been in Norway long enough—this was their last day—to discover Norwegians didn’t all have blond hair and blue eyes, but they did all look healthy. Good posture, too. Those knapsacks. Must be the free health care. Like to see them in the winter, he thought. Dark the whole day. Maybe they didn’t look so healthy then.
The train started with a smooth exhale and they set off down the mountain.
“Get the camcorder, honey. This is fabulous! Besides, we’re coming to that waterfall soon.”
Kjosfossen. A photo opportunity. He got the camera ready. When the train stopped deep inside a tunnel, he dutifully trailed after his wife and the others, going outside through the dark dampness, emerging into daylight farther down the tracks.
The waterfall was everything the book promised. His wife scampered close to the edge, letting the spray from the mountain torrent hit her in the face.
“So good for your complexion! Better than Evian!” she shouted back to him. He felt vaguely embarrassed by the nymphlike antics of this middle-aged woman. He knew for a fact she never sprayed water—French or any other nationality—on her face. Who was she trying to impress? He also knew for a fact it wasn’t him. Just something to say. Always something to say.
A man at his side was following his gaze.
“Kjosfossen. It’s one of our best ones, one of the biggest,” he said.
And it was. Tumbling down from ledge to ledge, crashing against the dark rocks, rocks that in June held pockets of snow, there was nothing delicate about the waterfall. No bridal-veil similes, no maidens in the mist, but roaring, pounding, impenetrable white water. He lowered the camera for a moment, bent down, and threw a twig in. It vanished instantly, engulfed in the powerful swirling foam so rapidly, he could not even be sure he’d seen it go in.
His wife was still capering about on the slippery rocks. Almost all the other passengers had gone back to the train. His new companion did not seem to be in any hurry.
“The water goes into the river at Flåm, then the fjord. The Aurlandsfjord. Good fishing down below. Salmon,” the man said.
The train whistle blew. His wife gave a start, lost her footing, and for one brief moment…
Seconds later, she was grabbing his sleeve. “I could have killed myself!” She was indignant. “The book should have mentioned how dangerous those rocks are.”
They boarded the train and he resumed his post at the window.
The journey ended at Flåm. When they got off the train, he was surprised to see people running from the platform and down the road toward the river. They were all talking at once.
“What’s happening?” his wife cried out. “Ask if anyone speaks English. They all speak English.”
He shook her off, wanting to know himself what was causing this uncharacteristic agitation. Wanting to run with them.
“You stay here with the bags.”
He was not far behind the man he’d been talking to in the tunnel, catching up with him shortly before they reached a knot of people standing on the banks of the river. Several were crying. A few were retching in the grass.
The cause was immediately obvious.
Caught between two rocks was the body of a man—a young man, it appeared. One of the blonds, although his head was so bashed in from his turbulent journey, it was hard to tell. Some blood had turned the pool where he’d come to rest a sickly pink—salmon pink. His right arm had been wrenched back over his head, assuming a position impossible in nature. Most of the clothes had been torn from his body. Incongruously, one foot remained clad in a running shoe, the laces neatly tied.
“It’s a wonder he’s here at all,” the man from the train said. “Usually in these waters, they’re never found.”
The roar of the falls high up the mountain had become the mere babbling of rushing waters emptying into the deep, still fjord. Mesmerized, he watched as the clear current rolled smoothly over the rocks, swept past the grisly impediment, and continued on to the sea. Watched it over
and over again.
Never found.
One
“Pix, dear, I have to leave for Norway tomorrow, and I think you’d better come, too. Something rather dreadful has happened and Marit needs us.”
“Norway?” Pix Miller was still breathless from catching the phone, and the name of the country was all she could get out at the moment. Norway—this was considerably farther afield than her mother’s usual proposals: lunch at Boston’s venerable Chilton Club, bird-watching at the Audubon Sanctuary in Lincoln. Then the rest of what her mother had said hit home and she caught her breath quickly.
“Marit! What’s wrong! Is she ill?”
Marit Hansen was one of Ursula Rowe’s oldest and dearest friends. They had been girls together, growing up in Aleford, Massachusetts, some eighty years ago. Marit’s family had moved back to Norway when Marit was a teenager, but the two friends had always stayed in touch.
“No, Marit’s fine, but it appears that Kari’s boyfriend, Erik, has been killed in some sort of tragic accident.”
“Oh my God! Poor Kari! How is she taking it? What a thing to have to cope with at her age. You met him last summer, didn’t you?”
“Yes. He was a student at the university with Kari. They talked about getting married in a few years, when
they had enough money to buy an apartment.” Ursula Rowe paused as the picture of the happy, carefree couple came to mind. They had taken a picnic to one of the islands near the Hansen’s house in Tønsberg, on Norway’s east coast. The fjord was filled with boats and the beaches filled with people eagerly storing up the summer sunshine against the long, dark winter. Kari, Marit Hansen’s granddaughter, and Erik were a beautiful couple—tall, blue-eyed, blond, so alike as to be brother and sister, except Erik was trying to grow a beard. Kari had teased him about the patchy stubble. Ursula felt very tired. It seemed every time the phone rang, it brought bad news—sickness or another acquaintance gone. She knew she would never get used to it, no matter how often friends reached for the supposedly comforting platitudes, saying that it went with her age or that, in some cases, it had been a “good” death, mercifully painless, quick.
But this death was different. There was nothing good about it. Erik Sørgard was young, barely out of his teens at twenty-one. He had hardly begun his life. All those hopes and dreams. She realized Pix was speaking.
“Mother, are you still there?” It was unusual for Ursula to tune out.
“Sorry, it’s all been quite upsetting and I have so much to do to get ready. And you—you’d better call Sam right away. Samantha can keep an eye on Danny, and we shouldn’t be gone too long, I hope.”
Ursula had returned to matters at hand, but Pix was confused. Of course Marit would be upset about her granddaughter’s fiancé’s death, and Ursula’s particular brand of care—a combination of stiff upper lip and subtle coddling—was always effective, but to drop everything and rush off to Norway now?
“Can’t you give yourself a few days to get ready? Why do you have to go tomorrow? I’m sure Marit would understand, and of course I feel terrible and would like to see Kari especially, but I can’t just leave.” Car pools, her part-time job at her friend and neighbor Faith Fairchild’s
catering company, plus all the meetings scheduled for this week—the vestry, the food bank’s steering committee, the PTA, the…
She heard a heavy sigh come over the wires. Ursula was not given to sighs, or vapors, or any other Victorian modes of self-expression.
“You wouldn’t be able to see Kari. That’s the whole point. She’s missing. Now, wash your hands and come over. We’ll talk about it while I pack.”
Pix peeled off one of her gardening gloves and regarded the dirt that always managed to seep through.
“How did you know I was in the garden?” She had to know. Her mother’s clairvoyance could be startling.
“You were out of breath and you shopped on Saturday. Tuesday morning’s your Friends of the Library day and Friday’s the hospital. The children are in school and you work for Faith in the afternoons, so where else would you be running in from?”
Hearing her life reduced to such a prosaic open book was depressing. Pix hung up the phone, promising to be there as soon as possible, and went to wash. She’d been thinning a patch of ribbon grass, planted as a small island for contrast in her border, and now the size of Manhattan and the boroughs, threatening to choke out the delphinium and Shasta daisies completely.
Hands clean, she reached for her car keys, then turned back to the phone and called Faith. Briefly, she related Ursula’s totally absurd request and promised to stop by to fill Faith in after she’d left her mother’s.
“Good,” Faith replied. “This sounds interesting. What could possibly happen in quiet little Norway that would send Ursula rushing off like this, especially with you in tow? Maybe you’d better call before you come—if I’m not here, I’ll be at the kitchen. And Pix, your passport hasn’t expired again, has it?”
Pix had once made the mistake of revealing this lapse to Faith, who insisted she immediately rectify the situation. “I’d as soon let my driver’s license expire! What if some
one offered you a free trip to Paris? You wouldn’t be able to go.” Pix had pointed out the extreme unlikelihood of such an event, and when Faith countered with the suggestion that Sam, Pix’s husband, might suddenly propose a romantic getaway to, say, Bali, Pix was forced to admit the free Paris trip would be more apt to come up first. But she had renewed her passport, exchanging one hideous picture for another. The guys at Aleford Photo on Aleford’s Main Street had managed to catch her grinning like an idiot. She would not be surprised if the next time she did use her passport she was refused entry for security reasons. She certainly looked demented.
She backed out of her driveway and turned left toward her mother’s house. Norway, tomorrow! She couldn’t possibly go. Just leave?
Faith Fairchild sat on the end of her friend’s bed, a large four-poster, watching Pix pack what seemed like an extremely insufficient amount of clothing for a transatlantic trip. Maybe enough for an overnight somewhere. She surreptitiously tucked an extra sweater in and wondered if she could convince Pix to take another suitcase. But packing was secondary at the moment.
“All right, start at the beginning. Marit Hansen gets a call from her granddaughter, Kari, last Friday afternoon from the train station in Oslo.”
“Yes. Kari and Erik were working for Scandie Sights this summer. It’s one of those tour companies.” Pix’s tone carried an air of purity, that of someone who has never indulged in mass travel, preferring to get hopelessly lost on her own. “The tour had a brief stopover at the station in Oslo on its way to the west coast of Norway. They were coming from the airport, because the group started in Copenhagen. Marit says Kari asked her to find her address book and look up the phone number of a friend of Kari’s living in Bergen. She gave her grandmother the name of the hotel where the tour would be in Bergen that
night, asking her to phone. She apparently didn’t have time
to wait while Marit looked for it then.”
“Did she sound anxious or say anything else?”
“Mother didn’t know. In any case, when Marit phoned the hotel that night, they said Kari wasn’t there and they put her through to one of the tour guides, who was extremely put out. He told her Kari and Erik had eloped, leaving him without anyone to carry the bags, or whatever they were doing.”
“How did he know this?”
“Something about a message from a stationmaster in a place called Voss.”
“But why didn’t they tell the tour guide in person? They were with him on the train when it left Oslo, and they must have known that they were going to run off.”
Faith was on the point of packing her own bags. She had managed to solve a number of crimes in between baking soufflés and tending to her family—the Reverend Thomas Fairchild of Aleford’s First Parish Church, five-year-old Ben, and almost two-year-old Amy. Sleuthing in fore
ign countries held a particularly seductive appeal. It wasn’t that she didn’t think Pix and Ursula, an impressive pair, couldn’t handle the situation—well, perhaps not in Faith’s own inimitable way—if there even was one. So far, nothing of a criminal nature had emerged in Pix’s narrative. Only a tragic one. Still, Faith was feeling left out—and itching to go. She slipped back into the bag some of the undergarments Pix had put to one side. There was nothing worse than having to rinse out unmentionables in a hotel basin and festoon them across the towel bars.
“And Erik’s body was discovered when?”
“On Sunday morning in Kjosfossen—at a river in a place called Flåm, 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.”
“I 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.”
“A 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.
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