What should she say?
Isak could have made a mistake. He’d put his hand on his heart and opened his eyes wide when she asked him for guarantees. There must be more than one person named Aksel Seier. Perhaps not that many, but some at least. Isak might have gotten it wrong. Aksel Seier of Harwich Port had perhaps never lived in Oslo. Maybe he had never been in prison either. Maybe he had been in prison, but didn’t want to be reminded. He might have a family. A wife, children, grandchildren who knew nothing about paterfamilias’s past behind lock and key. It wasn’t fair just to rip open old wounds. It wasn’t fair to Aksel Seier. Yesterday she had smiled at her impulsiveness. Today she realized that this trip to the U.S.-like her search for the truth-was a way of getting away from something. Nothing serious, she quickly reassured herself. It was not about escaping. America was where she felt most herself and that was why she’d come. She was just a bit uncertain about what she needed a break from.
By the time she reached Dennis Port, just over a mile from the address that was tucked in her wallet behind the photo of Kristiane, she had decided to turn around. She could call it a wild goose chase. Alvhild Sofienberg would understand. Johanne couldn’t do any more. She would continue her research without Aksel Seier. His case was not vital to her. She had plenty of other cases to choose from, cases where the people in question lived only a trip on the metro away from the office, or a short flight to Tromsø.
The gearshift made a horrible scraping noise.
She kept on driving.
Maybe she could just take a look at his house. She didn’t need to make contact. As she had come this far, it would be good just to get an impression of where Aksel Seier had gone in life. A house and a garden and maybe a car might tell a story that was worth knowing, having come this far.
Aksel Seier lived at 1 Ocean Avenue.
The house was easy to find. It was small. Like all the other houses around it, it was clad with cedar, gray with age, weathered and typical of the area. The windowsills were blue. On the roof, a weathercock reluctantly faced the wind. A stocky man was struggling with a ladder by the east wall. It wasn’t lunchtime yet, but Johanne felt hungry anyway.
Aksel Seier had to get a new ladder. He needed to get up on the roof. Some rungs were missing from the old ladder and it creaked alarmingly. But he had to get up there. The weathercock kept getting stuck. Aksel was sometimes woken up at night by the wind forcing the stubborn bird around; it screeched when the wind came from the southeast.
“Hi, Aksel. Pretty thing you’ve got there!”
A younger man in a plaid flannel shirt was leaning against the fence, laughing. Aksel nodded briefly at his neighbor and held the pig up in front of him. He tilted his head and shrugged his shoulders.
“Kind of original, I guess. I like it.”
The pig was made of oxidized copper, a slim pig that stood guard over the four crossed arrows that marked out each point of the compass. Aksel Seier had gotten the weather vane in exchange for some colorful net markers. The glass floats had water in them and couldn’t be used, but were still valuable as souvenirs.
“Help me with this ladder, will you?”
Matt Delaware was seriously overweight. Aksel hoped that the younger man would not offer to switch the cock for the pig for him. They finally managed to get the ladder in place.
“I would have helped you, you know. But…”
Matt looked at the ladder. He slapped one of the rungs lightly and pulled his baseball cap around. Aksel grunted. He carefully placed his foot on the first rung. It held. Slowly he climbed to the top. The weathercock was so rusty that it broke when Aksel tried to unscrew it. The fixture was still fine though. The pig was easily tamed by the wind and it took a matter of minutes to adjust the arrows to the points of the compass.
“Awesome,” grinned Matt, staring up at the pig. “Just awesome, you know!”
Aksel mumbled his thanks. Matt put the ladder back in its place. Aksel heard him chuckling long after he was out of sight, around the corner on the way to the O’Connors, who hadn’t opened their house for the summer yet.
Someone had parked on Ocean Avenue. Aksel glanced idly over at the Ford. There was a woman sitting alone inside the car. You weren’t allowed to leave cars here. She would have to use the parking lot on Atlantic Avenue, like all the other visitors. She didn’t come from around here. That was obvious, without him really knowing why. The summer season was hell. City folk everywhere, throwing their money around. They thought that everything was for sale.
“If the price is right,” the real estate agent had said in the spring. “Name your price, Aksel.”
He didn’t want to sell the house. Some Boston bigwig or another would be happy to pay a million dollars for the small house by the beach. A million! Aksel snorted at the thought. The house was small and he barely had enough money to cover more than basic maintenance. He did most of it himself, but the materials cost money, as did plumbers and electricians. This winter he’d had to put in a new water pipe when the old one burst. The pressure had fallen to a dribbling nothing from the kitchen tap and the water board had threatened to take him to court if he didn’t do something immediately. When it was all done and the bill had been paid, there were only fifty-six dollars left in Aksel Seier’s savings account.
A million!
The buyer would just pull the whole thing down. It was the location that was attractive. Waterfront. Private beach with the right to erect a large sign saying No trespassing and Police take notice. Aksel Seier had sent the real estate agent packing and told him to spare himself any more visits. To be sure, he could do with a few hundred dollars every now and then, but only when he earned them himself. Aksel had no idea what he would do with a million.
He put away his tools. The lady in the Taurus was still sitting there, which irritated him. Normally at this time of year he was quite tolerant; he would hardly survive the summer if he weren’t. But this lady was different. He felt she was staring at him. Her car wasn’t parked for the ocean view. It was too far up the road. Too close to the big oak tree that towered over the Piccolas’ house; they would have to do something about it this summer, chop it down, at least saw off some branches. They hung heavy over the roof now and scraped off the shingles. Soon it would start leaking.
The lady in the car was not interested in the ocean. It was him she was interested in. An age-old fear ripped through his body. Aksel Seier caught his breath and turned around abruptly. Then he went in and locked the door, even though it was no later than eleven in the morning.
Aksel Seier was just as Johanne had imagined. Well built and stocky. From a distance it was difficult to tell whether he was clean-shaven, but there was certainly no beard to speak of. It was almost as if she had seen him before. From that first night when she read Alvhild Sofienberg’s papers, she had tried to put together a picture of the old Aksel Seier, thirty-five years after his release. His jacket was threadbare and dark blue. He was wearing heavy boots, even though the outside temperature was more than 68 degrees. His hair was gray and a bit too long, as if he didn’t care about his appearance. Even from a hundred yards away, it was easy to see that he had big hands.
He had looked over in her direction a couple of times. She tried to shrink in the car seat. Even though she was not doing anything illegal, she felt herself blush when he straightened his back and squinted over at her for the second time. If he had really seen what she looked like, it would be embarrassing to approach him later.
She wouldn’t talk to him. She could see that he was content. He had a good life. The house might be small and weathered, but the site would be valuable. There was a small pickup truck in the garden, not very old. A younger man had stopped and chatted with him. The man laughed and waved when he left. Aksel Seier belonged here.