Ellinor’s voice drifted down the hall. Chloe slapped the file closed just before the museum director walked in. “Ah, you’re still here. Any trouble with the machine?”
“None.” Chloe strove for a cheerful, calm, and professional tone. “Thanks for your help. I’ve got to go meet Torstein.” With that, she fled.
She began berating herself before she reached the parking lot. Trembling, she stopped at a stone bench on the hill’s edge and dropped down. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Why had she run away like a frightened rabbit? She hadn’t done anything wrong. Snooping in a file on a colleague’s desk was inappropriate, but hardly a crime. Why hadn’t she just said Hey Ellinor, I wanted to learn more about Jørgen Riis and couldn’t help noticing that some notes in your handwriting included the name that brought me to Norway. The name I shared with you on my first day here. The name that’s the only clue I have about my mother’s birth family. So … what’s up with that?
Rubbing her temples, Chloe gazed over the village and waterway below. Ellinor had been searching for information about Jørgen Riis for many years. Maybe that particular notation had been scribbled long ago, and she truly had forgotten that the name was in there.
Or maybe, for some reason Chloe could not fathom, Ellinor hadn’t wanted to share whatever it was she’d captured in black ink on that page.
Now, having am-scrayed out of Ellinor’s office, it was too late to casually ask a question. At least not without looking more idiotic than she probably already did.
Chloe had no idea what to do.
With a frustrated groan, she leaned back and tipped her face to the sky. Clouds were building, and the gray skies matched her mood. “Mom, you were absolutely right,” she muttered. “I should have learned Norwegian a long time ago.”
After Chloe left for the museum, Roelke found a corner chair in one of the hotel’s deserted parlors. He wanted to organize his thoughts without fear of anyone seeing, but found himself glaring at the wall instead of working the problem. He didn’t want to work the problem. He wanted the Norwegian cops to identify the SOB who’d stolen Chloe’s family heirlooms. He also wanted to beat the SOB senseless.
Chloe blamed herself and had assured him that the theft wasn’t his fault. Roelke’s rational mind accepted that. Still, he was the one who’d urged her to surrender the family treasures to the hotel safe. If he hadn’t, the old textiles would have been with her, safe in her yellow daypack, when they’d evacuated the hotel.
He’d had to listen to Chloe cry herself to sleep. He’d never heard Chloe cry like that before. Not when she’d been on the verge of being fired at Old World Wisconsin. Not when her sister Kari had let her down. Not even when Marit died. Chloe had cried quietly at the funeral, sniffling and wiping her eyes. But last night she’d sobbed, first against his shoulder, later into her pillow.
I never want to hear that sound again, he thought. Never, ever.
So. That meant he had to stop brooding and do whatever he could to help Inspector Naess discover the thief and the killer who’d murdered Klara Evenstad. Maybe they were one and the same. Maybe they weren’t. It didn’t matter, as long as the guilty were identified and arrested.
Roelke blew out a deep breath and pulled his index cards from his pocket. The Problems card was updated first: Someone pulled fire alarm, tossed our room, stole Chloe’s family heirlooms from hotel safe.
Then he updated Ellinor’s card: After saying she couldn’t leave museum, went to Kinsarvik for prearranged meeting with unknown man.
Finally, the Barbara-Eden Kirkevoll card received a new notation: Possibly dropped Klara Evenstad’s silver necklace after Klara’s death. If Barbara-Eden had dropped the silver necklace, she’d catapult to top-suspect status. The idea of her killing her childhood friend and stealing the necklace from the still-warm body was grim … but Roelke had been a cop for way too long to believe even a teenaged girl was incapable of crime.
Roelke had taken advantage of Inspector Naess’s two a.m. visit to describe the churchyard encounter and produce the black velvet bag. “My fiancée is sure that the necklace inside belonged to Klara Evenstad.”
Chloe, who’d been listening in silence, nodded.
Naess slipped the necklace into an evidence bag and filled out a form, presumably verifying what it was and the chain of custody. Then he nodded. “Thank you.” It felt like a dismissal.
Well, there’s nothing to stop me from thinking, Roelke thought now. He spent the next half hour shuffling the cards, considering, brooding … without even the spark of a new idea. He didn’t have enough information to connect the many different problems and suspicions in any meaningful way.
When Chloe joined him, her expression suggested a new calamity. “What’s wrong?”
She took a seat and leaned close. “I was working in Ellinor’s office, and I looked inside a folder of notes about this famous fiddler she’s researching. It was all in Norwegian, of course, but on one page I saw the name Amalie Sveinsdatter.”
“You did?” That had not been on his list of possibilities. “What did Ellinor say about that?”
Chloe massaged her temples. “I didn’t ask her.”
“You didn’t ask her?”
“I panicked! I had no business looking in that folder, so when I heard Ellinor coming down the hall I kind of … bolted.”
Not the best choice of action, he thought, but managed not to say so. “And now it will be even more awkward to ask her about it.”
“Exactly! I can’t ask her now.”
He beat a staccato rhythm with his pen against the arm of his chair.
After a moment she pressed her hand over his. “Stop it. That chair’s an antique.”
That response was so Chloe that he felt a teensy bit better. “I think you’re making too much of it. Ask Ellinor about what you saw, and you’ll both probably end up having a good laugh.”
She nibbled her lower lip. “Nobody likes a snoop. And the fact that I ran out instead of confessing just makes it worse.”
“But you’ll drive yourself crazy with wondering if you don’t find out why Amalie’s name was in her file,” he observed. That did not sound good. Not for her, and honestly, not for him either.
She planted elbows on her knees and her face in her palms. “I don’t know.”
Roelke remembered Ellinor’s surreptitious trip to Kinsarvik. “Maybe you’re right,” he admitted. “There’s something’s hinky about Ellinor.”
Chloe felt better for confiding her folly in Roelke, but she still wasn’t sure what to do about it. First things first, she thought with a sigh. After grabbing and gobbling a quick cheese sandwich with Roelke, it was time to meet Torstein.
She spotted him at a picnic table near the ferry dock, staring over the fjord. He somehow looked thinner, his features already whittled down by grief. During their first meeting Torstein had bubbled with enthusiasm and energy, but now he was oddly still. At the performance he’d been charming, drawing the audience into the music that brought him joy. Now he seemed like a brittle husk, emptied of everything meaningful.
“Hey,” she called softly as she approached.
“Oh!” He jumped. “Sorry.”
“No need to be.” She settled on the bench across from him, trying to banish a sudden mental movie linking him with Sonja. “Torstein, I didn’t know Klara well, but … I’m just so, so sorry.”
His eyes welled with tears. “Who would do such a thing? Who?”
“I don’t know,” Chloe said helplessly. “I can’t imagine.”
He nodded dully, sniffed hard, set his shoulders. “Anyway, thanks for meeting me here. I see Klara everywhere I look. I’m not ready to go back into the museum or hotel yet.”
“Is there something I can do to be helpful?”
Torstein made an obvious effort to focus. “First, tell me about your visit yesterday.”
&nb
sp; “It went very well.” Chloe summarized what she’d learned from Bestemor. “I was able to transcribe the interview this morning.” She handed him the pages. “Oh—and I almost forgot. Roelke and I, and you, have been invited to a dance on Saturday at a place called Tollef’s Danseplass—”
“We have?” Torstein’s eyes flashed with a hint of his old energy. “Are you serious? I’ve been wanting to get there forever. Ellinor has too. It’s invitation only, primarily just a social event for the locals. You must have made a good impression.”
Chloe shrugged, pleased but a bit bemused. “I’m glad it worked out. I’m sure no one will mind if Ellinor comes too.”
“I’ll ask her. And I’ll try to pull myself together,” Torstein added, almost to himself. “I might not get another chance.”
Chloe wasn’t surprised that the prospect of the community dance roused Torstein from his grief. Dancing was transportive and healing and, for a folklorist, endlessly fascinating. Besides, sitting alone and brooding wouldn’t help him. “Let’s touch base Saturday morning, all right?”
“Sounds good.” The spark of interest flickered out. “Listen, Chloe, I’m very sorry that … that this happened while you’re here. It’s not fair to you, but I’m just not able to face fieldwork and interviews right now.”
“Don’t worry about that. And if there’s anything else I can help with, I’m glad to.”
“Thanks,” he said. “But honestly, nobody can help me now.”
The trip to Voss took about an hour and a half—less time than Chloe would have guessed. After taking a ferry to Kvanndal, Ellinor drove with easy confidence. Despite steady rain, she not only navigated the narrow lanes with ease, but passed slower cars with aplomb. Roelke would be appalled, Chloe thought, pressing her foot against an imaginary brake pedal as the older woman careened around a delivery van just as a truck appeared in the oncoming lane. Ellinor veered calmly back to her side of the road with at least a foot to spare.
Any thought of broaching the awkward topic of finding Amalie’s name in Ellinor’s file disappeared. This was obviously not the right time.
Chloe was still in one piece when they arrived in Voss, a small city beside a glittering lake between the Sognefjord and Hardangerfjord. “You’ll have to come back when you have more time and see the church,” Ellinor said as she took a hairpin turn and began climbing the steep hill rising behind the town. “Olav Tryggvason, King of Norway from 995 to 1000, imposed Christianity on his Norse subjects. By force, if necessary. There’s a beautiful stone church near the lake that was built in 1277, which replaced an earlier wood structure, which supposedly replaced some type of so-called heathen gathering spot.”
Americans don’t know the meaning of “old,” Chloe reflected. When she thought about genealogy, about finding her mother’s ancestors, her imagination generally quit a few generations back. But her roots disappeared into time much longer ago.
Ten minutes later they passed a sign welcoming them to the Voss Folkemuseum. Ellinor parked in a small lot behind a cluster of old buildings. “Mølstertunet,” she said, waving a hand toward the log structures. “The Mølster Farmstead. In the old days, the dwelling houses, animal barns, storehouses, and other functional buildings were arranged around a farmyard. What I love about this place is that all of the buildings were preserved right where they’d been erected. The oldest is from the 1500s, and the last residents moved out in 1927.”
“Will there be time for a tour?” Chloe asked hopefully. They’d come for a meeting, but seriously, she could not imagine driving away without at least a quick look.
“Maybe.” Ellinor turned toward a modern building. “Come on. Let’s go find my colleague.”
Soon they were seated at a table in the small reception/ticket/gift shop area with Ellinor’s counterpart, a gray-haired man with half-glasses perched on his nose. A plump young woman in period clothing produced cups of steaming coffee. “Takk,” Chloe said gratefully. At least she knew how to say thanks in Norwegian.
Ellinor explained the reason for Chloe’s visit to Norway. “Voss has been a gathering place for centuries,” the man told her. “Dancers and fiddlers met here. Fiddle makers brought their instruments here to sell. Unlike fiddlers in the isolated valleys and hills near Utne, fiddle players here interacted with musicians from other regions. Ellinor and I are working to understand how that interaction affected Voss fiddlers, and how the relative lack of interaction affected fiddlers and dancers in more remote areas.”
“And in Wisconsin, we’re hoping to document how some of those tunes and dances evolved in the New World.” Chloe pulled her notebook and pen from her yellow daypack.
They spent over an hour discussing local musicians, exhibit themes, and special events. Chloe scribbled copious notes, confident that both the content and the interpretive ideas being discussed would be relevant to the exhibit and programming being planned back home in Stoughton.
It was good to see Ellinor forget the murder investigation she’d left behind. She grew animated, sometimes breaking into Norwegian if she wasn’t able to process English quickly enough. She’d brought photographs and accession information about a few artifacts that might support the Voss Folkemuseum’s efforts. “And here’s the prize,” Ellinor said, pushing a black-and-white photo across the table. “This is the fiddle attributed to Jørgen Riis.”
That name knocked Chloe from her note-taking. And what did Jørgen Riis have to do with Amalie Sveinsdatter? she demanded silently. All right, that was it. She was definitely going to ask Ellinor about the name on the way home. Traffic be damned.
As the meeting wound down, Ellinor glanced at her watch. “We should leave in about half an hour, but Chloe was hoping for a quick tour of the farmstead …?”
“Of course,” the man said. He beckoned to the young woman who’d served them coffee.
The guide pulled on a heavy sweater, and Chloe zipped back into her hooded jacket. “Meet me back here,” Ellinor said.
The guide slogged across the muddy lane. “Let’s start in the barn. We’ll be out of the rain and we can see the whole farmyard from there.” She headed toward a large barn with side bays for hay and grain, and a central drive-through/threshing floor. “There have probably been two families farming here since before the Black Death in the thirteen hundreds. They shared a yard but maintained their own homes …”
Chloe tried to listen, she really did, but on this cloudy day the deserted old homes and cowsheds and storage houses—their logs weathered almost gray, with roofs of slate or turf—seemed especially evocative. She followed the guide into the barn … and dual emotions hit her like a boxer’s punch.
Raindrops drummed against the roof and pelted the earth. The young woman’s voice grew distant.
Focus, Chloe ordered herself, but the palpable rage and joy lingering in the barn were too strong to ignore. She pressed one hand over her rib cage, trying to subdue a buzzing in her chest. Mist blurred her vision. And from a distance, she heard a hardingfele’s irresistible call …
Twenty-One
Britta—April 1888
“Britta?” Erik called. “Stop dawdling.”
“I’ve never been to Voss before,” Britta reminded her brother. Erik knew the town, a frequent gathering place for fiddlers, quite well. Dances like the one they were attending that evening attracted talented musicians from the Hardanger region and beyond.
Her brother folded his arms. “You can see the sights another time.” He’d stepped from the walkway to avoid being jostled by pedestrians in the village center’s narrow street. A railroad line had connected Voss with Bergen in 1883, bringing trade and tourists. “I need to get to Mølstertunet and get my name on the list to play. If too many fiddlers come, I won’t get a chance.”
Britta sighed. She’d never been this far from home. She wanted to visit the town’s famous stone church. There had been a Christian church on this s
pot for hundreds of years, but in ancient times, the old religion had been practiced here too. Both traditions are part of me, Britta thought, remembering what she’d heard about her great-great-grandmother Gudrun.
But Erik was clearly out of patience. “And there’s a competition for best original tune, you know. The prize is ten kroner!”
An enormous sum for them. “All right. Let’s go.”
They made their way to a footpath tracking up a steep hill. “How many fiddlers will be there?” she asked, holding her skirt up with one hand and a basket piled with thick Hardanger lefse in the other.
“Hard to know,” Erik said over his shoulder. “A dozen, maybe more. You’ll be able to dance all night.”
As enticing as that sounded, dancing wasn’t what had compelled Britta to accompany him. Leaving their own farm overnight was no small thing. But when Erik had first spoken of the trip, she’d sensed shadows gathering. “I’m coming too,” she’d announced. Now that they were on the road, her sense of foreboding had only grown.
Erik paused to look back over the village and lake below. “Even if I don’t win, with luck I’ll attract new business. I can’t earn a living unless I move beyond our own area.”
“And what about Høiegård? Mother wanted us to—”
“It’s a miserable patch of barren ground.” Erik scowled. “There is nothing for us there. You should leave that place. Maybe go find work in Bergen.”
And wouldn’t that be convenient for you, Britta thought crossly. If she went to the city, Erik would be free of all responsibility—to her, to the farm. Before leaving for Voss they had shoveled cow dung over the soil to hasten the final thaw. There was much more to do before they could plant: breaking clods with hoes, tossing frost-shoved stones from the fields, raking more manure into the earth. And soon it would be time for her to take their animals to the seter. Erik was older than her and, by law, the man of the house. But Høiegård was theirs.
Fiddling with Fate Page 18