13
113 13 eirik nyland was sitting at a window table in the South of the Border café in Grand Marais, gulping down his second cup of coffee of the morning. He had a dull headache, as he always did whenever he hadn’t had enough sleep, and he’d forgotten the bottle of Excedrin in his hotel room. On the plate in front of him were the remains of an omelet. Across the street was the Grand Marais Liquor Store and Hank’s Hardware. It was seven in the morning on Tuesday, July . Just before five he’d awakened from a dream that he’d had many times before. The details weren’t always exactly the same, but the dream always followed the same general pattern. Eirik’s two daughters , Elsa and Marie, who are eleven and thirteen, respectively, are walking down the road toward the bus stop, and he’s standing in the living room, watching them. He’s home in Asker, and everything is completely normal. The two girls are headed off somewhere together . Sometimes to handball practice. Other times they’re going to visit their grandparents in Drammen. Or they’re going to a movie . This time they are going to band practice. Neither of them has ever played in the school marching band, but in his dream they do. So he is watching them walk to the bus stop, headed to band practice . As he stands there, a car slowly drives past the house, moving in the same direction as the two girls. A slow-moving car always appears in this dream. And always driving in the same direction as Elsa and Marie. Yet each time it comes as a complete surprise to him. He watches the car move slowly past. It’s so quiet that he can Vidar Sundstøl 114 hear dirt and gravel crunching under the tires. The driver looks up at the man in the window. Nyland meets his eye. It doesn’t last more than a couple of seconds. Yet he knows that he has seen this man before. And just as the car has almost caught up with the two girls, he remembers where he knows the man from. He was a suspect in a homicide case, but the police never managed to find enough evidence to charge him. This murder case exists only in the dream, but in that context it is utterly real. It has to do with two girls who disappeared . Later they were found, sexually assaulted and killed. He runs out to warn his daughters. He has no shoes on. In the dream he is always standing in his stocking feet on the road outside their house in Asker, looking toward the bus stop. But the car and the two girls are gone. He never woke up screaming or sweating from this dream. But he had the feeling that something inside of him had been destroyed. This was the only time when Eirik Nyland had the sense that his work wasn’t good for him. Somewhere inside, it was taking its toll, as evidenced by the recurrent dream. On this occasion, as usual, he found it impossible to go back to sleep. He lay in bed for a while, listening to the soothing sound of Lake Superior. He was so far away from Vibeke and the girls. But then he calculated that it was already noon in Norway, so he phoned home to talk to Vibeke. She and the girls were just about to leave for the cabin. He’d forgotten that they were going to Lillesand this week. He also spoke briefly to his daughters. After hearing their voices, he immediately felt better. Once again he felt connected to the normal world. Then he got up, took a shower, and dressed before going down to the lobby to find out if it was possible to have breakfast. But it was still an hour until they started serving. The desk clerk suggested that he try the café in Grand Marais that opened for breakfast at : a.m., so Eirik got into his rental car, a red Subaru Forester, and drove over there. Now he was sitting in the café, annoyed with himself for forgetting the Excedrin back at the hotel. The headache wasn’t letting up, even though it wasn’t really bad yet. If it didn’t go away, he’d have to buy some more painkillers as soon as the drugstore opened...
OR
