In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  “They haven’t sent anyone to investigate. They must figure it was an accident.”

  Ben shook his head. “Nothing makes sense.”

  “When did she come back?”

  “A week ago. She took a bus, then she hitchhiked. I told her don’t hitchhike, but she hitchhiked.”

  “Something could have happened to her if she hitchhiked.”

  “No,” Ben said. “She shut herself in her bedroom. I asked her if anything happened. She got good rides.”

  “Did she apply for a job at the emporium?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. I’ve been really busy. Lots of jobs. She never played her music.”

  “Events,” Tom said, “sometimes have nothing to do with us. It’s just the way things work out.”

  They made a sad sort of trio. If they’d been playing music, it would have been doleful, filled with sadness, a cello and a violin and maybe an oboe. Gimpy Tom, abused Freyja, shattered Ben. Suddenly a painting by Picasso filled Tom’s head, a painting from Picasso’s cubist days, of people all broken into sharp cornered sections.

  Freyja’s back steps were concrete with metal rails on each side. The screen door was aluminum and didn’t quite fit at the bottom. She had put a piece of weather stripping in the corner so the mosquitoes couldn’t sneak in. The siding was white and the trim was blue like the roof. There was a blue-and-white dream catcher in one window. The beads sparkled in the sun.

  Ben heaved himself up with the help of the banister and shambled away.

  Freyja patted the cement where Ben had been sitting. Tom moved there, his shoulder touching hers.

  “Ben just told me Angel was pregnant,” Freyja said. “The autopsy confirmed it.”

  For a moment Tom’s mind went blank, and then he asked, “How long?”

  “Two months. Maybe she missed two periods.”

  “The father?”

  “Ben doesn’t know. He’s in a state of shock.”

  “Boyfriend? Fifteen-year-olds have boyfriends. My GP told me that he’s got twelve-year-olds coming in wanting birth control pills.”

  “She didn’t have a boyfriend here. If she had a boyfriend around Valhalla, everyone would know.”

  “Where was she two months ago?”

  “She’s been living with her mother. I hear things, naturally, but I don’t pry. Unless they’re being home-schooled or taking correspondence, the kids from grade nine up go to school in the city. They come back when school ends in June. They’re here July and August. There’s a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth when they have to go back to school at the beginning of September. Some refuse to go back. Some run away. Some can’t wait to get back. Lots to do in the big city.”

  “Good things? Bad things?”

  “Both. There’s shopping and movies and dances and sports and, and, and... And there are parties in stairwells of parkades with lots of booze and drugs. Depends what you want, I guess. There’s lots of choice in the big city.”

  “I know about the bad things. We kept getting reports about girls going missing.” He remembered the alerts, the easy dismissal, everyone too busy taking care of more important complaints.

  “One of our girls was hitchhiking home,” Freyja said. “Got picked up by a father and a teenage son in a motorhome. Over a week, the father used her to teach his son about sex. She might have been a blow-up plastic doll. She was lucky—when they were returning to the US, they dropped her off with twenty dollars at a gas station. She didn’t end up dead in a ditch.”

  “We’re not very nice.”

  “We?”

  “Men.”

  “Some are. Some aren’t. Are you nice?”

  “I try.” It seemed impossible to continue the conversation, so he said, “You must have planted your garden early.”

  Freyja’s garden was large. The soil was dark and the rows were tidily laid out; she’d used bits of lath to mark the ends of rows, and there were empty seed packets on the sticks. At the far end there were raspberry canes. “You’ve seen the vegetables and fruit at White’s,” she said.

  As they sat there in the dwindling light, he told her about Anna’s garden, about police work, funny things that had happened, the weird and wonderful people that turned up, a bearded man dressed in a nun’s outfit certain that he’d heard a call from God, a woman who went to a store every day and stole a donut, a robber who wore a paper bag over his head with eyeholes, but the bag kept moving around, so he had to lift it up to see and was recognized.

  Freyja was laughing at his goofy stories when a Dodge Ram on outsized wheels came racing down the lane and cut across the backyard. Its windows were down and men were leaning out, yelling and waving their arms. The emergency lights were flashing. Tom jumped up just as one of the passengers threw a partially full beer bottle at the house. The bottle shattered on the bottom step, and the truck turned wide and disappeared around the house. They listened to it race away.

  “What the hell?” Tom said.

  “Siggi and friends,” Freyja said. “If they get wound up enough, they’ll do crazy things. They wreck trucks regularly.”

  Freyja went into the house and came back with a cardboard soft drink box. Together, they picked up broken glass. When they had that done, they went to the backyard. The tires had made deep indentations through the corner rows of lettuce and onions.

  “It’s okay,” Freyja said. “I’ll water them in the morning. Most of them will come back up. It could have been worse.”

  “You shouldn’t have to put up with this.”

  “What would you suggest I do? Call the RCMP? When there are problems here, we have to fix them ourselves.”

  “Will they come back?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t think so. Not tonight, if that’s what you mean.”

  “Are you afraid?”

  “I try not to be. I tell myself that they’ll go away one of these days. They don’t usually have long attention spans. Siggi’s father used to beat up his mother and he believes that’s the way relationships are supposed to work.”

  “Domestic disputes?”

  Her laugh was short and brittle, and she looked at him as if he were a stranger. “That’s what your colleagues called it. A trip to the hospital, cracked ribs, fourteen stitches in my scalp. They didn’t want to get involved. That man-and-woman thing.”

  “Here? In your house?”

  “His house. It was his house. Even after we got married, I told him it was his house. I didn’t want half of anything. I’ve taken care of myself all my life.”

  He reached over and pushed back her hair. He’d seen the beginning of a scar just past her hairline. The scar ran back for three inches. “I jerked out of the way. Otherwise it would have been my cheek and my eye. You and I could have had matching scars.”

  “Get a job somewhere else.”

  “No,” she said, and the way she said it, he knew she had thought about it, over and over, and deep inside had decided to give no quarter. “I have friends here who look out for me. He’d find me and I’d have no friends to help me. It’s not just about the house anymore. He says if a boyfriend moves in with me, into his house—” she paused, then said, “his house, he’ll kill me.”

  “Let him have the house. No house is worth dying for.”

  “It wouldn’t do any good, don’t you see? In his eyes I belong to him. He owns me. Like the truck, the house, his hunting rifle, his dog, his beer. He owns me. I can move, but he’d find me, and I can’t live like that, every day going to work, every day coming home, every night going to sleep. Here, everyone knows who did it if anything happens to me. He might figure that if I’m living among strangers, no one would know who killed me.”

  He realized that her hands were shaking. She took a deep breath and let it out through pursed lips. The light had faded and they were sitting in semi-darkness. Nearby there were frogs croaking. The air was soft, still warm from the day, but the oppressive heat had gone, and as they sat in silence, a slight breeze sprang up from
the lake.

  “Why didn’t Ben come for supper earlier?”

  “Johnny Armstrong was shooting his mouth off again, saying maybe you had something to do with Angel’s death. You know what people are like. They haven’t got much to do, so they gossip.” The injustice of the accusation was like acid, and it found old pathways of guilt from all the implied but never spoken accusations of his father, who, even though he was not particularly religious, believed that everyone was born in sin.

  She didn’t say anything to absolve him of his guilt, so he got up. “I hope they don’t come back,” he said. “Your ex sounds like bad news. But you aren’t going to make it better by having a murderer of a young girl hanging around your house at night.”

  “I didn’t mean that,” she said, but it was too late. If he stayed, he was afraid he would sweep everything on the table onto the floor, he would tip over the table; once his anger started, he lost control. He felt panic and wanted to get away before it took over. It wasn’t directed at Freyja. It was a rage that burst out, like a volcano. The shrink had said, “When it happens, exhaust yourself, go to the gym, pump iron, walk, walk all night and all day if necessary. Let it exhaust itself. Don’t go to bars looking for a fight. Eventually, it will wear itself out.”

  He went to the garage and let himself in. Ben had brought and piled up the last of Tom’s belongings. There was a set of weights. In the dim light of the single bulb that hung down from the ceiling, he did reps until he was soaked in sweat, until he couldn’t lift weights anymore. At this moment, he missed the city, missed the lanes and alleyways where he had sometimes walked all night, walked until the city street lamps turned off.

  When he went into his house, he drank water from the tap until he couldn’t hold any more, then had a shower. When he was drying himself off, mosquitoes were filling the bathroom and he wondered if he’d left a window open. The windows were all closed, but when he went into the porch and turned on the lamp, he saw that his screens had been slashed. What a way for an evening to end, he thought. Son of a bitch, son of a bitch, son of a bitch. Whoever had done it hadn’t missed a single screen, and the mosquitoes had come out in full force the last few days, large grey mosquitoes and little black ones, the little black ones’ bite sharp and painful, leaving itchy lumps. He remembered what Sarah had said about the local boys not liking competition and he wondered who thought he was competing for Freyja—or Karla. He remembered Mindi Miner’s warning.

  He found a roll of duct tape, taped up the screens, and then got undressed. Angry as he was, he couldn’t just let his clothes lie on the table or the floor. He carefully hung everything up, folding his socks together. He spent an hour killing the little buggers as they landed on him looking for blood.

   Chapter 21

  A Storm

  The next morning he was opening a package of cedar shingles when he saw Freyja coming from the direction of the dock. She was wearing a halter top, shorts and sandals, and a large straw hat with frayed ends. She was swinging a white plastic bag. Anyone watching her would have thought she didn’t have a care in the world. She saw him and changed her path. “No vinarterta,” she said. “I can’t compete with Sarah.” She held up the bag. “A fresh pickerel from Ingvar. He even cleaned and scaled it for me.”

  “There’s more to life than dessert,” Tom answered.

  “Really?” she said. “I wouldn’t expect to hear that from you.” It was her usual teasing, but the sparkle wasn’t in it. She added, more seriously, “You didn’t need to go away angry last night.”

  “Sometimes, when I can’t deal with things that stir up a lot of feelings, I have to leave. I’m better than I was, but I know when I need time out. When that happens, I haven’t got time to go into a lengthy explanation. I came back here and lifted weights until I couldn’t do it anymore.”

  “I don’t think you had anything to do with Angel’s death. Sarah doesn’t. I don’t think Mrs. White does either.” She put the emphasis on the Mrs. “Ben still isn’t sure. Her death makes no sense to him.” She lifted her sunglasses onto her forehead and stood pensively, one foot flat on the ground, the other raised with just her toes pressed against the dirt. Usually, she exuded confidence, but now, waiting for him to reply, she seemed uncertain.

  “There’s a storm coming,” he said, pointing to the sky. There was a thunderhead to the northeast. It rose up in a threatening peak, but the sun still blazed in a kind of fury, like an angry god, making it seem like nothing could interfere with the light that flooded everything, making it impossible to look upon the white limestones scattered about. It all seemed so far away from them, the thunderhead far to the north and sun so high above, that their lives could not be touched.

  But Freyja, having experience of these things, studied the black, tumultuous clouds and said, “I’d better be on my way.”

  He would have taken that moment to apologize, that brief moment when she was going to turn and flee to the safety of her house, that moment between light and dark, to explain that he was sorry for being bad-tempered, that it was stress and heat and worry about his kids, and the injustice of being wrongly accused and his inexplicable past, but just then Ben swung his truck beside them. He turned off the motor and climbed down.

  “I’ve got a load for you,” he said. “There’s drywall. We’d better get it under cover.” And Tom, aware of the ritual of delivery and receipt, of unloading goods together, felt uncertain of what he should or should not do.

  “In the house,” Tom said. He was keeping nearly everything stacked in the living room. Away from the weather and from people who might see an item they could use and take it. Sarah had warned him of this, saying that no one would deliberately steal, but noticing a thing they needed, they might take it home for their own use and, if confronted, would be confused, would apologize profusely and offer to return it or replace it but would likely forget. She thought it was a habit left over from times when they were all related, all family, all in need. “Valhalla people are good people,” Sarah had said, “but lock up things you don’t want to go astray.”

  The three of them stood together in the brilliant sunlight as the thunderhead raced toward them. On the dock, a woman in a yellow bikini was hurriedly gathering up a foam mattress and an umbrella. On the boats tied to the finger docks, the owners were testing their moorings.

  At the emporium, Karla and two waitresses were taking down the umbrellas and stacking the chairs tight against the building.

  They should have been moving the construction materials off the truck into the house, but there was unfinished business that couldn’t be put off. It was evident in the way they were standing. They formed a slightly askew triangle, with Tom and Freyja facing each other, angled toward Ben, and Ben, though close, by himself, facing the two of them.

  “Ben,” Freyja said. She grabbed the sleeve of his shirt to make him stand and listen. Her voice was intense, low, not much more than an insistent whisper. “People gossip. You know that. They say terrible things. They’ve said terrible things about you. About me. About everybody. That doesn’t make them true.”

  Ben shifted uncomfortably. He could have been a student once again, being made to stand and listen to a teacher lecture him, and his face pulled together as he waited for a reprimand. And Freyja, being a teacher, could not help but demand that he listen to reason, that he see what was before him, that he look at the evidence and agree with her.

  “Ben,” she continued insistently. “We’ve been friends a long time. If I thought that Tom had anything to do with Angel dying, do you think I’d invite him into my house?”

  Ben had on a duck-billed baseball cap as a shield against the sun. He took it off and used his thumb to wipe the sweat off the inside. He put the cap back on. Instead of his usual work shirt, he was wearing a T-shirt that didn’t reach his belt. A slash of his stomach showed.

  “Derk says he’s no friend of ours. You ever known the cops to do us any favours?” He had a stubborn look about him, the posture
of a person who found it difficult, if not impossible, to change his mind.

  “Mindi Miner used to work in the mine. He doesn’t anymore. He’s not a miner now. Tom used to be a Mountie. Not anymore. It was just his job.”

  “Going to storm,” Ben said. The three of them turned to the north and the growing, rising thunderhead, masses of clouds behind it, clear blue sky in front. “You can smell it.” As they watched, jagged lightning bolts drove down into the lake in the distance and sheet lightning flashed among the clouds.

  They could hear the thunder rumbling in the distance. Nearby, the sun still held dominion, people shouted to each other on the dock, squealing children jumped into the lake. The day was bright, the sky pale blue, the water barely rippling. Day fishermen were coming into the harbour, though, their outboards shut off and the boats sliding silently through the water. A car backed up with a trailer, and the driver revved his motor more than necessary.

  Ben ducked his head sharply, looked sideways at Tom and said, “We’d better get this stuff inside.”

  “Ben, don’t listen to gossip. Be fair to Tom.” With that, Freyja hurried away before the storm could hit, and Tom and Ben carried everything into the house, set it down in the living room, then headed back outside. As they reached Ben’s truck, Tom made out a cheque.

  “Angel,” Tom said. “I never had a chance to meet her. I’d like to have heard her sing.”

  “We loved her,” Ben said, as he took the cheque and studied it before he folded it and put it into his pocket. “Me and my Betty. We wanted her. We’d have adopted her. Wanda wouldn’t let us. I heard you got kids. You gotta know what that’s like when you love your kids. You make them a promise, you gotta keep it. I promised her I wouldn’t drink. She promised me she wouldn’t. They were telling lies about her right away, right away. They said she must have been drunk. There was no liquor in her blood.”