As of the writing of the article, the women hadn’t been found.
“Sten Klausen,” I muttered, writing down the name. “Let’s do a search on this guy. See what we can find.”
“Way ahead of you, Prof,” James said, already wheeling toward the computer.
“Sten died in jail a month after his capture,” someone said.
I turned to find a young woman wearing reading glasses and a gray cardigan standing in the doorway. She was rigid in a scholarly way, her brunette bun wound so tight it pulled up the skin of her brow. It took me a moment to realize I was looking at James’s crush. She adjusted the stack of books in her arms.
“Asphyxiation,” she added.
“Myr—Myrtle,” James stammered. “I didn’t realize you were working today.”
She ignored him and turned to resume shelving her books.
“Wait,” I called, hurrying to catch up. “How do you know that?”
“It’s my job to know. I’m on the board of the Grimstone County Historical Society.”
“Do you mind if I ask you a few questions, then?”
“And you are…?”
“Everson Croft. I’m working with James here.”
James removed his cowboy hat and ran a hand over his hair. Instead of acknowledging him, Myrtle walked her fingers down a row of call numbers and slotted a book home. “What do you want to know?”
“Do you happen to know whether the victims had blond hair?”
She hesitated for a moment, head tilted. “As a matter of fact, they did.”
James and I exchanged a knowing look. “What else can you tell us about Sten Klausen?” I asked.
“He emigrated with his wife from Denmark. They first settled in Kansas before moving to Grimstone County. They homesteaded on two hundred acres. Sten bought more than four hundred head of steer, but his first winter here was brutal. Lost all but a few dozen. He had to go back to the bank for a loan to replace them. The next winter didn’t go much better, but the bank refused him a third loan. He had a mining claim, but the Great Quake of 1902 probably took care of that. There was speculation the situation drove him to drink. His wife left him and moved back to Kansas. With no marriage prospects, Sten must have become desperate. Probably what led him to abduct those women.”
James gave an impressed chuckle. “That’s a lot of info. Do you have a photographic memory? If so, I’d love to test it. Maybe over dinner one of these nights?”
I shook my head to tell him now wasn’t the time. If Sten had indeed invoked the underworld god I’d encountered, we needed to figure out why. And how. Calling up a pagan god usually required a relic of some kind. One that might have ended up in the hands of an heir.
“Did he have any children?” I asked Myrtle.
“Two sons and a daughter,” she said. “One of the sons died in childhood, and his wife took the remaining two children with her.”
I followed her down the aisle. “Did the surviving children inherit the ranch?”
“No, it was repossessed by the bank and auctioned off.”
“Are there any records of who purchased it?”
“The auctioning bank was Western Frontier, but they failed in the 1930s during the Depression. Their records changed ownership a few times, but thanks to an acquisition I helped spearhead, the records are in storage at the Historical Society.”
“Really?” I said with a little too much excitement.
Myrtle paused long enough in her reshelving to slip me a sidelong smile. I glanced over at James to find him frowning. Wait, was she flirting with me? Maybe there was a feline in there after all.
“Um, is there any way you could check for us?” I asked her. “It would really help.”
“I’m heading over to the Society later. I’ll take a look.” She shelved the final book and produced a pen and square of paper from a clipboard. “Write down your number and I’ll give you a call.”
In one deft move, James stepped around me and took the pen and paper. “Actually, we’re working on this together, so let me go ahead and give you my digits…” When James finished writing, he dangled the paper in front of her and spoke in a teasing voice. “You promise you’ll call as soon as you know something?”
Myrtle’s brow furrowed. Before she could decide we were a couple of d-bags not worth helping, I snatched the paper from James and handed it to her. “We really appreciate this,” I said.
“Both of us do,” James put in. “And that’s my personal number, so if you ever want to, you know—”
He grunted as I elbowed him in the ribs. “Start the search on Sten,” I whispered harshly. He grumbled and scuffed back to the microfilm room. Before Myrtle could turn away, I said, “You mentioned Sten asphyxiated in jail. Did he hang himself with a bed sheet or something?”
A conspiratorial look came over Myrtle’s face. “That’s still as much a question as the women who disappeared. The bailiff locked him up for the night. When he checked on Sten the next morning, the bedding was all over the cell, and Sten was dead. There was bruising around his neck. People assumed a vigilante group had gotten to him—not uncommon in Grimstone County back then—but the bailiff swore up and down no one came that night.”
“So, he just … died,” I said, touching my own recently strangled throat.
“I love a good mystery. Anyway, I’ll let you know what I find out about the auction.”
“I’m especially interested in his personal effects.”
Myrtle gave a final coy smile and walked off quietly in her flats. Good, I thought, that gets another iron in the fire.
I joined James back in the microfilm room. He was consulting a page from the printer while pulling a box of film from a drawer.
“Way to throw a cock-block there, Prof,” he said.
“We’re supposed to be working, remember? Anyway, she’s not interested in you.”
“I told you, it’s a work in progress.”
I stood behind him as he loaded a roll into the viewer. The first hit on Sten was before the disappearances and had to do with the formation of a local cattlemen’s association. James centered the viewer on a photo of six men in front of the town livery—officers of the new association dressed in their western best.
My gaze fell to the caption below.
“There,” I said, spotting Sten Klausen’s name. “Second from the right. Can you zoom in?”
James centered the viewer on Sten, adjusting the focus as he expanded the image. The man growing in front of us had pale, staring eyes, a thin nose, and a light-colored beard that hid his mouth. “What’s that he’s wearing?” James asked, edging the viewer down slightly. “A star?”
I squinted at the blurry object hanging over Sten’s chest. I saw where it could be mistaken for a five-pointed star, but the top point was blunt and rounded. I’d seen one of those before.
“It’s a human-shaped idol,” I said. “Some of the Norse cults used them to communicate with gods.”
9
“So, you think someone’s using the same idol?” James asked as he drove us back to his place. He’d taken the top panels off the Jeep, and the afternoon air and sun felt good after the chill of the morning.
“I’m sure of it,” I said. “Sten’s victims were young women, blond, and I’ll look it up as soon as we get inside, but I’m going to go ahead and say they disappeared near full moons. Throw in Sten’s death by strangulation...”
“But wouldn’t that mean he was a victim too?”
“Yeah, of the god’s wrath. Myrtle said he died a month after his incarceration, which would have been the next full moon—when the god was expecting another sacrifice. When Sten didn’t deliver, the god paid him a visit.”
“Did him like the god tried to do you,” James said in understanding. “So which god are we talking about?”
“Based on my encounter, I’m going with a version of Hel, Norse goddess of the underworld.” I thought of the pervasive death smell from when I’d been attacked back at
the station.
“Why her?”
“I’ll consult my books, but if I were to go by the Old Norse literature, I’d say Sten wanted to bring someone back from the dead.”
“Like resurrection?”
“In one of the few myths in which Hel is featured, a group of gods pled with her to restore another god to life. They wanted her to do it quickly. If a god remains dead for too long, they lose most of their faculties, become zombie-like. Anyway, after Sten’s family left him, he may have tried to bring back his lost son, the one Myrtle said died in childhood.”
“Makes sense, but sacrificing blond-haired women on the full moon?”
“It’s horrible, but it would have gotten Hel’s attention. A similar motive could be driving someone now.”
“Son of a bitch,” James said.
I began to nod in agreement before realizing he wasn’t referring to the sacrifices. I followed his squinting gaze to his distant trailer. Smoke rose from it in a black column. It was on fire.
“Annie,” James said, pressing the gas.
The Jeep shook down the dirt drive, bouncing in and out of potholes. We had locked his dog inside when we left. I gripped the overhead bar and aimed my cane at the approaching trailer.
“Cerrare!” I shouted.
White light burst forth, surrounding the fiery building in a glimmering orb. I grunted against the heat as I began to draw the orb down, squeezing out the available oxygen. The flames pushed back. Sweat sprang from my hairline and spilled into my eyes, even with the wind blasting my face. I blinked away the sting while fighting to shrink the orb even further.
At last, the fire died. I held on for several more moments to be sure before releasing the invocation with a gasp.
James slewed to a stop, tires throwing dust over the blackened porch. He leapt from the Jeep and bounded up the porch steps. As he yanked the door open, he shouted an invocation to draw the air from the house. The sudden outpouring of smoke blew his cowboy hat off. He lowered his head and entered, calling his dog’s name: “Annie!”
As I approached the trailer, I felt what remained of James’s wards crackling around the cement foundation—probably the only thing that had prevented his home from being reduced to a smoldering heap. I circled the house to make sure whoever had set the blaze was now gone.
I returned to the front at the same moment James emerged through the door, his dog limp in his arms. “She’s barely breathing,” he said desperately, descending the porch steps.
“Set her down here,” I told him.
James lay Annie gently on the ground. Her eyes were closed, pink tongue hanging from the side of her mouth. The rise and fall of her torso was shallow and hoarse. Touching my cane to Annie’s chest, I began to incant. A gauzy white light grew from the opal end of my cane, enveloping the pit bull. Her body spasmed, and drool ran down her tongue.
“C’mon, girl,” James said, kneeling beside her.
I eased back on the healing energy, watching for a response. Moments later, Annie hacked twice, then released a weak whimper. As the gauzy light dissipated, her eyes opened. She blinked up at me, then craned her neck back enough to lick James’s knee.
“Thank God,” James breathed, rubbing her neck. “You scared me, girl.”
Annie licked him some more, then rested her head back down and closed her eyes. She was going to be all right. Crisis averted, I picked up a brass casing beside my shoe and held it up.
“These are all around the trailer,” I said, “along with sets of large tire tracks.”
James took the 9mm casing and looked it over. “Damned wolves,” he muttered, chucking it away. The automatic gunfire had weakened James’s already weak wards enough for them to torch the trailer. It could have been worse. Of course, it never had to happen in the first place. I’d be a jerk to point that out, though. My partner had nearly lost his dog.
“I’m almost afraid to ask,” I said. “But how’s the inside?”
“Not too terrible. Looks like most of the damage is to the exterior.”
James ordered Annie to stay as he and I climbed the front steps. I eyed the charred porch and melted siding dubiously, but when we stepped inside, it was actually in fair condition. The fire had only begun to curl under the eaves, streaking parts of the ceiling black. As James struggled to open windows, I expelled the lingering smoke with a force invocation.
“Hopefully, Santana made his point,” James said, “and he’ll be cool with settling up now.”
“Hopefully,” I agreed, though with much less confidence than James. The last thing we needed was another confrontation with that bunch. We had a god of the undead to find and destroy.
In the living room, I hefted my suitcase onto the pullout couch and selected several thick tomes. In one, I checked the moon cycles back in 1902 and compared them with the dates in my notepad. Sure enough, the first disappearance had occurred two days before the full moon and the second was on the full moon itself.
Sten’s death a month later would have coincided with a third full moon.
I told James this as I stacked the remaining books on his table. He was filling Annie’s water dish at the kitchen sink.
“So, what are you looking for now?” he asked.
“A few things. First, any info I can find on the idol and bracelet. Second, how to protect us from Hel, should she attack again. And third, how to banish her back to her realm for good.”
“Can we do that?” James asked. “I mean, she sounds like a pretty major god.”
“She is and she isn’t. Mythology uses one name for gods like Hel, but there are actually many variations of them, depending on the cult that worships them. The collective belief in a god creates the template. Specific rites performed over time shape the gods into individual beings.”
“And you’re saying there’s one version of Hel that has a taste for young blondes on the full moon.”
“Exactly.”
“How do you figure out which one that is, though?”
“That’s going to be a challenge given the extent of Norse mythology and beliefs. But what Myrtle told us narrows it down some. Sten Klausen was Danish. I’ll start by looking at the cults in Denmark.”
James walked past me with the water bowl. “If it’s all right, I’m gonna nurse Annie some more and work on getting the wards back up. Should probably bury another batch of Claymores too.”
I wasn’t overly enthused at the prospect of him handling explosives a mere few feet from me, but wanting a solid hour or two of concentration, I said, “Good idea,” and opened the first book.
“How’s it going, Prof?”
I didn’t realize how dark it had gotten until James snapped on the light. Remarkably, the trailer’s electricity still worked. I squinted at the open tomes spread over the table, then peered down at the notes I’d jotted into my legal pad. “Not as well as I’d hoped,” I grumbled.
“Why? What’s wrong?” He took the chair across from me. Annie padded under the table and licked one of my shoes before laying down. Being in the pit bull’s good graces, while nice, did little to console my frustration.
“I’ve read up on all the cult practices for Hel in that region, but damned if I can find anything about the gold bracelet. Idols, sure. There’s plenty about those, as well as details on human sacrifice and full-moon offerings. But nothing about bracelets—or even blondes, for that matter.”
“Maybe the cult was secret,” James suggested.
“Maybe, but that still leaves us shooting blind.”
“There’s nothing you can take from the other practices?”
I consulted my notes as James stood and made his way to the fridge. He returned with a couple of beers, cracking their caps and placing one of the bottles in front of me. I broke my own no-drinking rule and took a swallow. I needed something to ease the brain strain.
“Well, in every case, destroying the idol will destroy the god,” I said.
James nodded. “There you go.”
> “And the protective circles across cults are pretty similar, salt being the most common medium.”
James nodded some more in encouragement.
“But though some of the rites involve adorning the soon-to-be-sacrificed in jewelry,” I said, “there’s nothing about bracelets. I didn’t even find anything resembling the symbol Carla drew for us.”
“Still,” James said, “two for three ain’t bad. We’ll deal with the bracelet thing when we come to it.”
“If we come to it,” I said. “Look, the ads were a great idea—I’m not saying they weren’t—but what are the chances of the next victim, one, coming across the ad, and two, actually picking up a phone and—?”
The theme song to The Good, the Bad and the Ugly whistled from James’s pants. He pulled his phone from his back pocket. After checking the number, he shrugged as if to say it wasn’t in his contacts and raised the phone to his ear.
“Hello?”
Maybe this was Myrtle calling us back with information on who had purchased Sten’s ranch at auction. But when he spoke again, his voice took on a velvety texture.
“Why, yes, it is,” he said. “Can you describe the bracelet?”
I stood slowly, hands clasped together, not wanting to get my hopes up. There were probably more than a few women in Grimstone County desperate enough to respond to a personal ad that had nothing to do with them.
James snapped his fingers at me and nodded.
It’s her, he mouthed.
10
“There she is,” James said.
He had backed the Jeep into a space facing the front of the diner, and I craned my neck forward to see better. An elderly couple sat at a booth beside the plate-glass window, picking at their late dinners while a couple of trucker types hunched over the counter. A waitress with graying hair refilled their coffee.
Grimstone: A Croft and Wesson Adventure Page 7