“You are a sick woman,” Serena said.

“Too true. Hey, hello, I need you to look up a birth date for me.” She rattled off her Minnesota shield number and Finn’s name and address. A few seconds later, she scribbled a date on a piece of scratch paper. “Got it, thanks.”

Serena read what Maggie had written. “April 22, 1959. I’ll get the microfiche for the Fargo paper.”

Ten minutes later, they found a birth announcement for Finn Mathisen, sister to Rikke Mathisen, son of parents Nils and Inger. Nils was a feed corn farmer with a large plot of acreage west of the city. Maggie used her index finger to run down the list of Mathisens in the 1972 phone book.

“No Nils listed, but here’s Inger,” she said. “Same address.”

“I think the father died in a car accident when Finn was a kid.”

“So what are you thinking? We go out there?”

Serena nodded. “Right.”

“Who the hell is going to remember them after thirty-five years?”

“Farmers don’t leave home unless it’s feet first or to hand the keys to a banker,” Serena said. “Hopefully, a couple of Finn’s neighbors are still around.”

“Do you have any idea what we’re looking for?” Maggie asked.

“Not a clue, but I bet we’ll know it when we find it. Finn didn’t get screwed up in Duluth. Whatever happened to him, it started right here.”

Fargo was flat. The kind of flat where highways disappeared into the hazy horizon without so much as a bend or an overpass and where only the curve of the earth blocked a view as far as Montana. The kind of flat where Canada would suck in its breath and expel wind across the plains with nothing in the way to slow it down, rocketing walls of black dust, rain, and snow into the city in fierce clouds. The kind of flat where a trickling, muddy stream like the Red River could lazily swell over its banks and drown everything in its path, like a pitcher of water spilling across a table.

Serena and Maggie drove west out of Fargo, passing fields of high corn and sprawling lots of soybeans, barley, and rapeseed. Hot wind and sun beat against the windshield of their rental car. They left the windows open, and as a compromise, they kept the radio off. Every few miles, they passed a car on the two-lane highway, but otherwise, the land was open and lonely. Serena drove. Maggie had a map on her lap.

They turned south off the county road thirty miles outside the city, and three miles later, they turned again onto an unpaved road and kicked up a hurricane of dirt behind them. Half a mile farther, they parked opposite a well-maintained white farmhouse notched into a huge expanse of leafy fields, like a summer photo from a calendar of rural homes. A ten-year-old girl in a sunflower dress chased a Labrador retriever that barked wildly as it galloped toward them. The girl corralled the dog by its collar and gazed at the car and the two women with open curiosity as she pulled it back toward the house.