gets her grandmother, who lives way up north on Svalbard."
He had to laugh.
"She says it was just a cloud of dust," she went on, anxiously.
"She says it was a car," said Sejer. "It's worth a try."
He put his hand on the child's shoulder. "Close your eyes," he said, "and try to picture it. Then draw it as best you can. And not just any old car. You should draw the car that you and Raymond saw."
"I know," she said impatiently.
He ushered Mrs Album out of the kitchen and into the living room so Ragnhild could draw in peace. Mrs Album went over to the window and looked at the blue mountains in the distance. It was a hazy day, and the landscape might have come straight out of an old romantic painting.
"Annie took care of Ragnhild for me lots of times," she said. "And whenever she baby-sat, she did a good job. That was a few years ago now. They would take the bus to town and stay out all day. Ride the train at the market, ride up and down on the escalator and in the lift at the department store, things that Ragnhild liked doing. She had a natural talent with children. She was different. Thoughtful."
Sejer could hear the little girl taking crayons out of the box in the kitchen. "Do you know her sister too? S酶lvi?"
"I know who she is. But she's only her half-sister."
"Oh?"
"Didn't you know that?"
"No, I didn't."
"Everyone knows," she said. "It's not a secret or anything. They're very different. For a while they had difficulties with her father. S酶lvi's father, I mean. He lost his visitation rights, and apparently he's never got over it."
"Why?"
"The usual trouble. Drunk and violent. That's the mother's version, of course, but Ada Holland is hard to take, so I'm not sure how much is true."
"But S酶lvi is over 21 by now, isn't she? And can do what she wants?"
"It's probably too late. I dare say that things have probably gone sour between them. I've been thinking a lot about Ada," she said. "She didn't get her little girl back, the way I did."
"I'm done!" came a shout from the kitchen.
They got up and went in to have a look. Ragnhild was sitting with her head tilted, not looking especially pleased. A grey cloud filled most of the page, and out of the cloud stuck the front end of a car, with headlights and bumper. The bonnet was long, like on a big American car, the bumper was coloured black. It looked as if it had a big grin with no teeth. The headlights were slanted. Chinese eyes, Sejer thought.
"Did it make a lot of noise when it drove past?"
He leaned over the kitchen table and noticed the sweet smell of her chewing gum.
"It was really noisy."
He stared at the drawing. "Could you make me another drawing? If I ask you to draw the headlights on the car? Just the headlights?"
"But they looked just like this!" She pointed to the drawing. "They were slanted."
He nodded, as if to himself. "What about the colour, Ragnhild?"
"Well, it wasn't really grey. But there wasn't much to choose from here," she said precociously, shaking the box of crayons. "It was a colour that doesn't exist."
"What do you mean?"
"Well, I mean a colour that doesn't have a name."
A string of colours swirled through his mind: sienna, petrol, sepia, anthracite.
"Ragnhild," he said, "can you remember if the car had anything on the roof?"
"Antennae?"
"No, something bigger. Raymond thought there was something big on top of the car."
She stared at him, thinking hard. "Yes!" she exclaimed. "A little boat."
"A boat?"
"A little black one."
"I don't know what I would have done without you," Sejer said, smiling, as he flicked his fingers at her antennae.
"Elise," he said, "you have a nice name."
"No one wants to call me that. Everyone calls me Ragnhild."
"But I can call you Elise."
She blushed shyly, put the lid on the box, closed up the notebook, and slid them over to him.
"No, they're yours to keep."
She opened the box at once and went back to drawing.
"One of the rabbits is lying on its side!"
Raymond was standing in the doorway to his father's room, rocking back and forth uneasily.
"Which one?"
"Caesar. The giant Belgian."
"Then you'll have to kill it."
Raymond got so scared that he farted. But the little release didn't make any difference in the stale air of the room.
"But it's breathing so hard!"
"We're not about to feed rabbits that are dying, Raymond. Put it on the chopping block.