The Copenhagen Interpretation
by C. E. Powell
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 1
The air is damp when Danny arrives and she realizes, once she’s parked, that she never downgraded the reservation to a room without a king-sized bed. A month ago, there had been plans. A month ago, the roads that she’s just spent the day driving would have ended the way she expected.
Danny has driven north from San Diego before, although never this far in one day. She remembers, right after meeting Matthew, stopping at fruit stands along the California coast and spitting the cherry pits out the window, and she remembers Matthew kneeling on the asphalt in a gas station parking lot, picking the dried pits off the side of the car. She’d just gotten tenure and the threads of her life had still been separate from the threads of Matthew’s.
Now, Matthew watches her from the entrance to the lobby as Danny wheels her suitcase towards him. He’s soft, the way she likes him best, and she wonders how much time she has left to look at him that way.
“You could’ve gone in,” she says, without thinking. It’s a lie.
“I was waiting for you.” The sign over his head says they’re at a resort, but Danny thinks it’s more like a place of asylum. “You forgot to change the room, didn’t you?”
She nods. “Sorry,” she says, although she knows she doesn’t need to anymore. “I kept meaning to call.”
“Don’t apologize to me,” says Matthew. “I’m the one who wanted the bigger bed in the first place.”
The lobby is a standalone building, like each of the cabins on the property, and its roof is sharp like a ski chalet. Matthew slips through the front door as Danny holds it open.
“Huh,” Danny says. There’s no one behind the front desk and, when she turns to speak to Matthew, she finds him standing and staring out the back window, out towards the forest. His hands are clasped behind his back and his legs are spread wide, and Danny is reminded how well she once thought she knew him. How familiar she is with his body and the ways he holds it still.
“How many bodies do you think are out there?” Matthew asks.
“How many bodies?” She pulls her phone out of her pocket just in case, holding it by her mouth as though someone’s on speakerphone. “You mean, how many people are staying here?”
“No, I mean how many people are buried here. Out there, in the trees.”
“Just because it’s a forest doesn’t mean a bunch of people were murdered.”
From behind them, a door opens, and Danny whirls around. A receptionist has emerged from a room behind the front desk, and the nametag on her shirt says Abigail.
“There actually was a murder here once,” says Abigail. “Not here, at the cabins; here in Port Angeles.”
The cabins are only an hour from the city, but Danny thinks they couldn’t feel farther away. She looks at the smudged, blank screen of her phone and puts it back in her pocket.
“Sorry,” says Abigail, after a moment, shrugging one shoulder. She’s young enough that she makes Danny feel old. “You didn’t have to hang up. I just heard what you were saying on the phone.”
“That’s okay,” Danny says, although she’s not that interested in what Abigail’s saying; murder is common in a way that makes it mundane. Most stories are cruel and simple: a person is killed by someone they know, and the world is more ragged for it. But because it seems like the polite thing to do, she asks, “There was a murder?”
Abigail leans forward a little, her eyes widening. “In the eighties,” she says, nodding. “This couple on a ferry from Victoria to Port Angeles.”
“They were killed on the ferry?” That, at least, is unusual. A locked room mystery, instead of a mystery to which the answer might be anywhere.
“Well, no,” Abigail admits. “They were driving down to Seattle, I think, after they got off the ferry. The police found the girl shot in a ditch and the guy strangled under a bridge.” She pauses, like she’s trying to decide if she should keep a secret, and then she adds, “The killer sent their families cards at Christmas.”
She says it with relish, and it makes Danny’s stomach clench. Somewhere, Danny thinks, is someone who knows everything about the last moments of a person’s life, and that knowledge will go with them into the ground.
“Did they solve it?” Danny asks.
“Yeah,” Abigail says. “They did, eventually. A few years ago, I think? With DNA. It was just some random guy.”
“But it wasn’t quite a murder in Port Angeles,” Danny says, unkindly. Someone is trying to tell her a story. Someone is trying to tell her a story by telling her about people who have been dead for decades.
“Not quite,” Abigail says. She chews on her lip and looks down. “Sorry.”
“No,” says Danny, “no, it’s okay. It’s... good. It’s a good story.”
“It gets boring, you know?” Abigail wiggles the mouse to wake up the computer. “Working out here. There’s not much to think about but stories.” The computer whirs to life, and Abigail peers at the screen. “Anyway. What’s the name for your reservation?”
“It should be under ‘Danny,’” says Danny. “Danny Bridgers.”
The only sound in the lobby is the clicking of the mouse wheel as Abigail scrolls down the list of reservations.
“No Danny, sorry,” she says finally. “Could you have booked under another name? I have a party of two checking in today under Danielle—”
“That’s me,” Danny interrupts, before Abigail can finish her sentence. “I mean, that’s my reservation. That’s us.”
Abigail nods and drums her fingers against the faux wood of the desk. One of her acrylics is broken.
“Just the one night?” Abigail asks, handing over a set of keys. “One king-sized bed?”
Danny takes them and clutches them tight in her fist.
“Yep,” she confirms. “One king-sized bed.”
* * *
The wooden gate to the pool is already open, a padlock hanging off the handle, and Danny’s disappointed to find, once she’s slipped through onto the pool deck, that she’s not alone.
The two women sitting side-by-side at the pool’s edge turn when they hear Danny approach. They’re both wearing dark sweatshirts and jeans, one of them with a hood up to cover her ears and the other with a long messy ponytail hanging down her back, and they’re both dangling their feet over the concrete lip of the pool, even though the water is covered for winter.
“Hey,” says Danny. “Sorry. Didn’t think anyone would be here.”
“It’s okay,” says the woman on the left. She doesn’t sound like it’s okay. “We didn’t either.”
“I’m Danny,” says Danny, because she feels she should.
“Ellie,” says the woman on the right, with the ponytail. “And this is Zoe.”
Ellie’s right leg is stretched out in front of her, her heel resting on the blue plastic pool cover, and the water laps in at the cover’s edges. Danny imagines being trapped underneath it. Imagines drowning two feet from solid ground.
“Do you mind?” Danny asks, gesturing to the empty lounge chair next to them, and Zoe shakes her head, watching Danny with the tension of an animal that never wanted to be seen. Danny sits down and opens her book, trying to pretend she’s on vacation.
“It’s cold for lounging,” says Zoe. She’s not wrong. It’s December, the light already sinking behind the trees, and a heavy fog gathering at the tops of the firs and the artful rips in the knees of Danny’s jeans do nothing to keep out the chill.
“I don’t mind,” lies Danny. “It’s nice.”
“You on a national parks tour or something?” asks Ellie.
Danny shakes her head. “My husband’s parents live in Victoria,” she says. “I’m taking the Christmas holiday to drive up for a visit.” When neither Ellie nor Zoe return to their private conversation, Danny asks, “What about you?”
“We’re from Portland,” offers Ellie. “We’re going to Canada, too.”
“Did you see the news earlier?” asks Zoe, suddenly. The question is so unexpected that Ellie raises one eyebrow in Zoe’s direction.
“No,” Danny says eventually. “I was driving all day.”
“We saw it on local TV at the coffee shop earlier,” says Zoe. “Down the road a mile. They said a hiker died in the forest.”
“No one said that,” Ellie says. “There was a news report about a backpacker who went missing, that’s all. She was doing some big hike in Olympic National Park and never made it to her campsite.” Ellie reaches out and puts a hand on Zoe’s shoulder. The two of them look close in age but the gentle way Ellie touches Zoe reminds Danny of a mother and child.
“People go missing on trails all the time,” Ellie goes on. “She probably just got lost, and they’re looking for her. There’s no body, Zoe. There’s no crime.”
“I didn’t say there was a crime,” Zoe says, stubbornly. “And she probably is dead.”
Ellie shoots Danny a look of apology, but Danny suspects Zoe is right. How long can someone last out here, low on food and water, in the cold? She imagines the backpacker’s family — parents, maybe, a partner, a sister — and hopes, for their sake, that there’s a crime and a body both. That they don’t spend the weeks and months and years of their lives wondering if they were abandoned by someone who never cared enough to come home.
“Well, just don’t go hiking,” Ellie says to Danny, forcing a smile, “and you’ll be fine.”
“I hate hiking,” Danny says. She tries to laugh but it comes out wrong. “Lucky me.”
Zoe finds Danny’s eyes with her own, and they stare at each other for a long moment before Zoe and Ellie turn back towards one another. When they speak it’s too quiet to hear.
Danny only makes it an hour at the pool before her hands are too cold to turn the pages of her book. She says goodbye to Ellie and Zoe — Ellie waves back at her, and Zoe just stares — and she’s halfway back to the cabin when her phone vibrates in her pocket. It’s Mallorie.
“Tell me you didn’t go,” says Mallorie, when Danny picks up. “Tell me you just forgot to call me back because you were sad.”
“I went,” says Danny. “My reservations were still good.”
Mallorie doesn’t sigh, exactly, but she lets out all her breath in one go. “What are you going to do when you get there, then?”
“Does it matter?” Danny slows her wandering. She doesn’t want to have this conversation in the cabin, with Matthew on the bed in the same jeans he’s been wearing for days. “I have to know.”
“You don’t, though,” Mallorie says. “He made his choice. Isn’t that enough?” When Danny doesn’t answer, she adds, “He doesn’t deserve this much effort.”
Danny wants to explain that Matthew made a choice for both of them and that it wasn’t a choice she’d agreed to. She wants to explain that wherever Matthew is in the world, he will never be far from her, either; she wants to explain that she can feel him growing inside her like a tumor, like the healthy tissue of her very self is giving way to his intrusive, uncontrollable spread.
“No,” she says instead, “but I do.”
Mallorie is silent for what seems like a very long time. Danny wonders if Mallorie is in her apartment, the one she and Danny used to share before Danny got married. She wonders if it’s sunny in San Diego, if Mallorie is sitting at the kitchen table she and Danny bought at a thrift store and brought home strapped to the roof of Mallorie’s car. She wonders if Mallorie, in her position, would have realized long ago that some absences can’t be chased down.
“I get it,” Mallorie says, eventually.
“Do you?”
“Absolutely not,” Mallorie admits. She actually sighs this time. “But I get that I don’t get it.”
Danny reaches the cabin. The light’s still on and the window is a hazy, incandescent gold.
“Good enough,” she says.
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by C. E. Powell
