“What is it?”

“This picture …” Gerda said without taking her eyes off the screen. “It wasn’t taken yesterday.”

“What do you mean?” Heloise leaned toward her.

“See this right there …” She pointed to a little pink square in a window at the bottom of the picture, the same window Lulu had just waved good-night from. “That was a night-light Christian bought for Lulu on a business trip to Paris just after she was born. Don’t you remember? It looked like the Arc de Triomphe and it was so beautiful, but then it fell—”

“—out the window and broke.” Heloise finished Gerda’s sentence for her.

“Exactly.” Gerda nodded and held the phone up. “Heloise, this picture is at least five years old.”

CHAPTER

16

THE BUTTER WAS still out when Schäfer walked into the kitchen after his morning shower. He had forgotten to put it back in the fridge when he had responded to an insistent rumbling in his gut with a midnight snack consisting of a generously buttered cinnamon bagel, which he had eaten standing at the kitchen sink in the dark.

“Oh, for crying out loud,” he snapped hoarsely, and stuck his nose down to sniff the butter. It had gotten soft overnight and smelled sour.

He opened the cupboard door under the sink and tossed the package in the trash.

“What are you barking about in there, babe?” Connie asked sleepily as she walked into the room.

After twenty-eight years in Denmark, her Danish still had an exotic lilt to it that made Schäfer’s ears tingle with delight. She was wearing a white bathrobe and a pair of slippers, and her makeup-free face was shiny and jet black, like the volcanic sand beaches of the Caribbean island she had been born on, Saint Lucia.

“The butter was left out all night, and now it’s ruined,” he said, irritated.

“It was left out?”

“Yes. Don’t we have any more?”

“Try looking in the fridge. Why was it out?”

Schäfer pretended not to hear her question and opened the door to the refrigerator. He clattered around noisily, clinking jars of jam and pickles and homemade marmalade to find an extra container of butter.

“Aha!” he exclaimed, a little too excitedly, holding his discovery triumphantly up in the air.

“Didn’t your doctor say that you should cut down on your butter consumption?” Connie eyed him reproachfully.

“No, and if he had, he wouldn’t be my doctor anymore.”

Connie shook her head. Then she happened to think of something.

“Did you remember to renew your passport?” she asked.

“Yes,” Schäfer replied. “I did actually almost remember to do that. That’s the very first thing I’m planning to do at some point today.”