American by Day

by Derek B. Miller

  “Were you supposed to tell me that?”

  “Irv said it wouldn’t matter what I tell you.”

  “You realize that I’m a section chief and a twenty-year veteran of a police force with one of the highest education levels in the world, right?”

  “Yeah. Irv looked it all up on Wikipedia. He said none of that would matter either.”

  “You both sound a little cocky to me.”

  “The thing about Irv,” Melinda says, “is that he always seems to find the angle on things that no one else has ever thought of before. You should ask him about God sometime. He’s even got that all figured out.”

  It’s Contagious

  The state university campus is as flat as a pond and as green as its students. Sigrid and Melinda roll through the main gate, which proudly announces the name of the school on a black plaque with gold lettering. There is a long road to the primary visitors lot and it is empty. They park close to an old brick building that squats incongruously alongside a massive modern glass and steel structure housing a new science and engineering center.

  It being mid-August, the campus is desolate despite the fine weather. Melinda knows where she is going. She’s been here before.

  “It’s the middle of the summer vacation,” Melinda explains. “I doubt anyone’s even going to be there, but . . . it’s your investigation.” She walks like a cowboy with her thumbs hooked into the black leather of her police belt. They cross between the Frederick Douglass Building of Government and some kind of administrative building. Sigrid notices that all the buildings have names and identities and how the newest and most expensive buildings are for the natural sciences, computer sciences, and career center, whereas the more quaint buildings of neo-Gothic design are for the humanities.

  They cross into an enormous field that Melinda calls a “quad” though Sigrid can’t see how it is a fourth of anything. It is a lovely and inviting manicured lawn, the center of which boasts a flaccid American flag atop a massive white flagpole.

  “It’s worth the visit,” Sigrid says. “What did you ask the last time you came?”

  “We were here because of Dr. Jones,” Melinda explains. “The sheriff wanted us to look past the eyewitness and see what else might come up. He said your brother was the obvious suspect but our job was to understand the relationship between him and the victim.”

  “So you were focused on establishing a motive for Marcus?”

  “Well,” Melinda says, without conviction, “I’m not sure it was that specific. All he said on the way over was that when you see a picture of a running man you can’t know from looking at it whether he’s running toward something or away from something or just going for a jog.”

  “What did you learn about Marcus?” Sigrid asks.

  “That he loved Lydia and he loved working here.”

  “That doesn’t sound like a motive for murder,” Sigrid says.

  “Not right off the bat, no, but the sheriff says that whenever there’s love there’s a universe of possibility.”

  “He’s quite the philosopher, your sheriff.”

  “He used to be a Bible scholar or something back before he became sheriff. Smart, smart guy.”

  When Sigrid signed up for an MA in criminology a lifetime ago, she lived in an apartment in Bislett, in Oslo, with three other friends who split the rent. Most of her classmates were from Oslo and so lived at home with their parents. The University of Oslo is a city university with no campus to speak of, at least from an American point of view. There are clusters of buildings off Ring 2, but the students don’t make it their home in the way they do in American dorms. This place—Sigrid thinks to herself, strolling through the picturesque campus—is a universe unto itself. She can see why Marcus would be seduced by it.

  She imagines the conversation she would have with him:

  You have found a place to hide after all, she would have said to Marcus if he’d been here right now.

  “With girls and sunshine,” he’d reply.

  “And they pay you for this?”

  “Barely. It’s below minimum wage if you run the numbers.”

  “Why do you do it?” she’d want to know.

  “Look around, Sigrid,” he would have said. “The students are hungry. The hunger is everywhere. For knowledge, for companionship, sex, solutions. They even want the complications. They want it all. Everything they haven’t experienced or thought yet. They want it to flood in. And yet for all that hunger and need, they are exactly where they want to be, doing what they want to be doing. They are hungry and satisfied at the same time. It’s an unnatural state of being that is somehow perfectly stable. That sense of impossible balance is what defines the place. Like them, I’d pay to be here if I had to.”

  “You’re being exploited.”

  “I know. And yet, look at this late summer day and tell me where else one is supposed to be on this earth?”

  She and Melinda finally arrive at a building that reminds her of the zoological museum in Oslo in the botanical gardens. It houses the Department of Earth Sciences, which includes agriculture and environmental studies—according to a large directory inside the main hall.

  Their footsteps echo as they walk up the stairs.

  “His department head is Dr. Ernie Williamson,” Melinda says.

  “You met him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do people know that you suspect Marcus as having played a role in Lydia’s death?” Sigrid asks.

  “You mean that we think he murdered her?”

  “Yes, that’s my question.”

  “Oh, no. That’s not public. They only know he’s missing.”

  “How would you describe Dr. Williamson?” Sigrid asks.

  “If I used the phrase, ‘straight out of central casting,’ would you know what that means?”

  “No,” Sigrid says.

  “I won’t use it then.”

  Dr. Ernie Williamson is in his late fifties. He’s a white man with straggly hair and glasses that do not fit correctly on his face; their bridge sits too high across his large nose, producing a gap. It is not the sort of eyewear selection a man would make if he’d been accompanied by someone else.

  Sigrid looks to his wedding finger—remembering that the Americans wear it on the left hand, not the Norwegian right. He doesn’t have one, and there is no tan line. His desk, like his glasses, allows for a gap—this one between the skirt of the desk and the floor. Poking out from the slot are black shoes designed for comfort, which signal a loss of interest in human sexuality.

  He waves Sigrid and Melinda into his office with informality and sincerity.

  “Come on in. Come on in. You’re . . . Officer . . . don’t tell me.”

  “Melinda, sir.”

  “Melinda. Nice to see you again. I heard your footsteps in the hall and my first thought was . . . zombies. I mean, who else would be roaming these halls on a day like today? It’s so beautiful out there. So beautiful, there’s nowhere to go but down.”

  “Just us local police, sir,” Melinda confirms. “No zombies. None we noticed, anyway.”

  “Well, come on in. What can I do for you? How are things going with Lydia’s case? We’re all very shook up about it around here.”

  Sigrid watches Melinda move, without hesitation, to the farthest of two chairs across from the professor’s desk, suggesting that she sat there last time. People tend to fall into patterns of that type quite naturally. Melinda sits down while introducing Sigrid: “This is Marcus’s sister, Sigrid. She’s from Norway. When I was here last time we talked about Marcus and Lydia and their relationship. As you may know . . . Marcus is missing. So we’re looking for him. And we’re hoping you can help.”

  Professor Williamson places his hands on the desk. He stretches out his fingers. “Yeah. He’s a quiet one, your brother. Doesn’t surprise me in the least that he’d be looking for some solitude after something like this. Didn’t tell you where he was going, huh?”

  “No, he d
idn’t. Professor,” asks Sigrid, “when Melinda and the sheriff were here last time, what did they ask you? We discussed it of course,” Sigrid lies, “though it’s always helpful to hear it from another perspective.”

  “Well, let me see,” says Dr. Williamson, placing his fingertips together to create a sort of pulsing organ the size of a human heart. “He asked how Marcus and Lydia knew one another, but I didn’t know how they met. As I explained, Professor Jones worked in a completely different department. So I didn’t know her well. She and I were both on the CARE committee—that’s Compliance, Accountability, Risk, and Ethics—which met for two hours a month. We didn’t socialize, though. And with Marcus, though he’s a lovely man and a good teacher, he is only an adjunct, and since I’m head of the department we don’t engage with one another much either. So I wasn’t very helpful.”

  “Anything else you all discussed?” Sigrid asks.

  “The sheriff asked about the subjects Marcus teaches and whether the students like him.”

  “Do they?”

  “Oh, yes, very much. He really talks the students through the differences between conservation and preservation. He has a good theoretical understanding of the places versus spaces distinction and—because he’s a foreigner—he can make very interesting comparisons with his native Norway. I don’t see how any of this will help you find him, though.”

  The office walls are lined with textbooks and photographs of plants and stretches of land that must mean something, because Sigrid can tell they are not art. Despite not being to her taste, it is a nicer place to work than her office in Oslo. His office has a door and—unlike her own office door back in Oslo—has no windows out to a central room filled with young police officers and their irksome optimism.

  “Do you know where he went during his time off?” Sigrid asks.

  “I know he liked the outdoors. We didn’t talk about such things much. He was . . . as I mentioned . . . an adjunct.”

  “Adjuncts are people too, aren’t they?” Sigrid asks.

  “You should get that onto a T-shirt.”

  “Is the department secretary here?” Sigrid asks, hoping that—by now—she has proved to Melinda that Professor Williamson is absolutely useless and knows nothing.

  “Mrs. Perlmutter? Yes. She’s always here.”

  “Melinda,” says Sigrid, turning to her. “Would you mind getting a copy of the curriculum Marcus is teaching and also a list of his students? It might help.”

  “You mean . . . now?”

  “Yes.”

  Sigrid sits up farther in her chair, hoping to communicate certainty, authority, and a touch of urgency. Melinda is about to say something when Sigrid adds, “We’ll be right here.”

  Melinda looks at her two elders, who look back at her, and she chooses the path of least resistance by shaking off her doubts and fulfilling the task assigned to her.

  With Melinda out of the room and, more to the point, out of earshot, Sigrid fishes for the knowledge she really wants: “Any favorite spots? Places he’d take his classes?” she presses.

  Places he might be right now? she doesn’t ask.

  “Well,” says Dr. Williamson, leaning back in his chair. It creaks like a graveyard gate and he doesn’t seem to notice. “He takes his class to the Adirondack state park, of course. They go twice a semester for obvious reasons.”

  “What obvious reasons?”

  “It’s why we’re here,” the professor says, leaning far enough back into his chair that Sigrid wonders how close it might be to flipping right over. “It’s why we teach these courses at this school. Adirondack is special because it’s a state preserve, but a little over half of it is privately owned, which is unique. And I use that word correctly. For this reason, it’s been called one of the greatest experiments in conservation in the industrialized world. If you’re interested in sustainability and the relationship between man and nature, this is the experiment you want to be watching. And we live right next to it.”

  “How big is the park?”

  “Over six million acres.”

  “What’s an acre?”

  “Let me put it this way. It’s more than twenty-four thousand square kilometers in area. By way of comparison, that’s a bit smaller than Albania and a bit bigger than Israel. It has ten thousand lakes and fifty thousand kilometers of rivers and streams. A man could get lost in there.”

  “Where was Marcus’s favorite spot in the Adirondacks?”

  “That’s easy. The Saranac Lake Islands is where they’d always go. For those who stayed for the weekend field trip he’d bring them hiking up Redfield.”

  “Do you think Marcus went there?” Sigrid asks.

  “If he did, and he doesn’t want you to find him, you won’t. It’s impossible.”

  “I see.”

  “All that grief,” Professor Williamson adds. He kicks off his shoes for some reason and wiggles his black cotton toes from beneath the desk. Sigrid resists sitting back farther, but the temptation is real. “Lydia dying. That little boy getting shot like that. So much tragedy for that poor family. I remember when it happened. Marcus was upset too. He knew Jeffrey also.”

  “What little boy?”

  “Lydia’s nephew. Jeffrey. Jeffrey Simmons?”

  “I don’t know about this.”

  “Oh, aside from the presidential election, that’s the biggest news around here. Lydia’s nephew was shot by the police. He was twelve years old and was playing in his front yard with some other boys. The police mistook his cap gun for a real one and . . . they killed him. We had protests on campus against police violence, there were sit-ins demanding answers, we’ve had guest lecturers coming in to discuss race and racism and the politics of . . . Well, anyway. I don’t want to intellectualize that tragedy. I didn’t see Lydia after it happened. She stopped attending CARE, though I did see Marcus, and he was profoundly changed.”

  “Did that happen in this jurisdiction? Was Sheriff Wylie involved in—”

  “Oh, heck no,” he interrupts. “This was the next county over. It was their police, not ours. But after the boy died everything erupted here. I can honestly and shamefully say I never paid much attention to these sorts of things, and frankly these student protests can be more about growing up than the subject being protested, but in this case my eyes were really opened to the depth of injustice here and how primitive our institutions are in protecting the vulnerable. Did you know that in the U.S. we don’t even have a database on fatal police shootings? We the people don’t even know how many citizens the government kills—justified or not.”

  “Yes, I did know that,” Sigrid says.

  “Really?

  “I’m a police chief in Norway. There’s a lot of talk about America near the coffee maker.”

  “So we’re global news, huh?”

  “It’s hard to ignore the moose sitting on your waffle.”

  “What?”

  “That might not translate.”

  “What do you think happened to Lydia?” Sigrid asks.

  “I don’t want to speculate. But let’s say . . . she was a childless woman in her forties who loved her nephew very, very much. And a few months later, she died.”

  Sigrid writes this down in her notebook and surreptitiously glances at the door to make sure Melinda isn’t lurking in the corner making the same notes she is.

  “Who knew Lydia best, Dr. Williamson? Who can help us understand this and find Marcus?”

  “On campus? Gloria Dillane. English department. Teaches contemporary American fiction. I heard they had a lively discussion going about psychology versus sociology when it came to understanding people’s motivations. Took the conversation beyond the more static discussion of individualism versus structure. Even I’m sick of that one. Anyway, the students were enthralled. You should talk to her. She’s sad now too. It’s contagious, you know.”

  “What is?” Sigrid asked.

  “Sadness.”

  It’s European

  Outsi
de on the quad there is a large maple tree under which Sigrid imagines young American hipsters in earth tones strumming Nick Drake songs to young women in thrift-store clothing who aren’t listening.

  This is where she sits with Melinda after they’ve collected lunch from a nearby deli, as the cafeteria is closed for the season.

  American sandwiches, Sigrid learns, are four times larger than Norwegian ones and have bread on both the bottoms and the tops. Between the two slabs of starch is enough sliced meat to choke a lion. Sitting on the grass, Sigrid opens the sandwich and evenly distributes the meat onto each piece of bread and then uses her brother’s lock blade to cut each of those in half. She eats one while Melinda devours the entire torpedo.

  “Hungry?” she asks.

  Melinda shrugs. “It’s lunch.”

  If the hipsters with their beards are missing, there is a grunt of young men strolling around in flip-flops and extraordinarily long shorts that droop below their knees. As in the movies, they wear baseball caps and all have surprisingly thick calves and wide shoulders. Given that America is a multiracial society, it is a wonder that so many people are exactly the same shape.

  “Why are they all carrying a large bottle with a straw in it?” she asks Melinda.

  “To hydrate.”

  Sigrid looks up at the blue sky and the cotton clouds. “Is dehydration a special problem here?”

  “I couldn’t say.”

  Sigrid wraps the remainder of her lunch into its wax paper cocoon, and sips from a bottle of sparkling water before packing it all up. What she needs to do now, and urgently, is create some privacy for herself to look through Marcus’s orange hard drive; finish reading the letters he’d written to her father; better understand both the life and death of Lydia Jones; and learn as much as she can about the Jeffrey Simmons case. Getting rid of Melinda for a few minutes was simple enough. Shaking her completely will not be.

  “Why did you become a cop?” Sigrid asks as an opening gambit for a longer play.

  “To fight crime.”

  “You could have fought cancer,” Sigrid says.