Death Under the Bridge

by Cate Martin

  "I already said I was curious," he said as he watched me work. "Are you going to make me beg?"

  "There's nothing to tell," I said. "I've been wandering around following up nothing but dead ends. I guess it's just a matter for the police."

  "You don't sound like you really believe that, though," he said. "You've got something wiggling in your gut that says otherwise, don't you?"

  "First of all, ew," I said. "But, yeah. I feel like I'm missing something. But without knowing any actual magic, there isn't anything more I can do."

  "Did you try any magic?" he asked. The kettle behind me beeped, and I poured steaming hot water into the two mugs, then set one in front of Loke. "Did you?" he pressed.

  "I tried to try," I said. "I was in Garret Nelsen's apartment. The police had taken everything that was actual evidence, but I was hoping I would see something."

  "How did you try?" he asked.

  "Well, the way my grandmother taught me," I said. "To open up my senses and not think and just notice stuff."

  "And that works?" he asked with a quirk of his eyebrow.

  "Sometimes," I said defensively. "Not today, apparently."

  "You didn't do anything more active, then?" he asked, then sipped at his tea.

  "Like what?" I asked, exasperated. "All I've been learning is sensing things, and I have no idea if I'm even getting any better at it."

  "Nonsense," Loke said. "I heard what you did with the ship."

  "That was just an impulse," I said.

  "That's what I'm telling you," Loke said. "You need to listen less to your grandmother and more to your own little impulses."

  "Where is my grandmother?" I asked, looking towards the door down to the cellar. "She should be here to hear you tell me not to listen to her. She'd just love that."

  "All I'm saying is that, clearly, how your grandmother accesses her power is different than how you do it," Loke said with a shrug.

  "Is that all you're saying?" I asked.

  "She already knows that's true, whether she's said so or not," Loke said. "I bet she's just waiting for you to figure that out on your own."

  "If I'm supposed to figure that out on my own, why are you telling me?"

  "Rule breaker," he said, pointing a thumb back at himself.

  "Yet not a helper," I said and took a sip of tea.

  "I'm helping," he said, sounding hurt.

  "How are you helping?"

  "Well, you're not making it easy," he said with a pout. Then he leaned forward to speak closer to me. "You already know what you wanted to do, but I'm guessing you didn't do it. What was your impulse in Garrett's apartment?"

  "I wanted to clear my mind and sense what the space around me wanted to tell me," I said.

  "That was a thought, not an impulse," Loke said. "What was your there and gone in a flash impulse?"

  I sighed, looking down at my tea. "I wanted to draw. But I didn't have my stuff with me."

  "So draw now," he said.

  "Draw what?" I asked, leaving aside that I still didn't have my stuff with me. "His parents are probably home by now. I can't sneak back in."

  "You're consulting the powers of the universe," Loke said with an eye roll. "You don't have to be in his apartment for that to work."

  "I need to focus on something," I said. He raised both of his eyebrows and waited for me to figure out what he was thinking. He held that position past the point it was clear I wasn't getting it, then past the point where he looked completely ridiculous.

  Then I leaned forward to take another drink of tea and felt the whistle in my pocket grinding against my hip as I pressed up against the counter.

  I pulled it out of my pocket and held it out on my palm, and Loke finally leaned back with a satisfied air.

  "This isn't the whistle from the murder scene," I said. "It's one of dozens from a box in his apartment."

  "I'll refer you back to my previous statement about the powers of the universe," he said. "Ingy, it doesn't matter. You just need a focus."

  "Maybe," I said, but I wasn't convinced.

  "If you feel like you need more power, you could always go back to the fire behind the waterfall," he said. "It's the oldest place here, and the heart of our ancestress Torfa's powers. But personally, I don't think you need the help."

  "Better too much than too little," I said, and drained the last of my tea. "I have to go get my bag with my art stuff. Will you come with me?"

  "To your grandmother's?" he asked.

  "To the fire," I said.

  "Oh, no," he said, shaking his head. "That's not the place for me. But I think I've done enough good works for one day."

  "Come on," I said. "You said you were curious."

  "I still am," he said. "But I also have a life."

  "Do you?" I asked. "Because if you have a job, I've never seen you doing it."

  "Maybe I'm doing it right now," he said, then pushed his empty mug across the bar to me. "I'm off. Good luck with communing with the universe. I'm sure I'll hear all about it later."

  And with one last wave and one last diabolical grin, he was gone.

  Chapter 19

  When I got to my grandmother's cabin I ran straight up the stairs to my bedroom to fetch the bag I had never unpacked from the day before. I glanced inside to be sure the sketchbook and pencils were still in there, then ran back down the stairs, but when I went to fetch my walking stick from the bin by the kitchen door, I saw Mjolner curled up on the kitchen table.

  "Get down from there," I said, trying to shoo him away. He lifted his head and opened a solitary eye to give me a suspicious look. "Come on. You know mormor hates it."

  He blinked that one eye slowly, as if acknowledging my words. Then he stood up and arched his back in a stretch, as if driving home the point that he was in no hurry to do as I asked. But finally even he couldn't stall any longer, and he jumped down off the table to slink away towards the cellar door.

  Who was I kidding? He'd be back on the table the minute I stepped outside. But I could at least remind him of the rules he was breaking occasionally.

  I started for the door again, but something was nagging at me. Then Loke's words came back to me, about how I had something wiggling in my gut, and I made a mental ew again.

  And yet, wiggling was kind of how it felt.

  I had thought the kitchen table had caught my attention because Mjolner was sleeping on it, but was that it? Or had that just been a distraction? But there was nothing on it now but the autumn-themed table runner with its needlework of acorns and leaves, and the wooden bowl of apples that were somehow always fresh, crisp and cool despite never being inside her refrigerator.

  It had been a long time since lunch, and I had no idea when I'd have dinner. I grabbed a couple of those apples and stuffed them in my bag.

  And then I saw the troll. He was still laying on his back and staring up at the ceiling, just like I had left him so many hours before. I picked him up as well and set him on the top of my bag. He wouldn't quite fit inside, and it was awkward carrying him under my arm, but the minute I had him in my possession that wiggling feeling quieted down.

  I took the path that circled around the meeting hall, then climbed the main path up to the waterfall.

  Now I had another conundrum. I had seen Loke just let himself in, but was I comfortable doing that?

  No. No, I was not.

  "What Thor is guarding?" I called.

  "Thorbjorn," came the answer almost at once.

  "Thorbjorn!" I cried and ran down the open cave to where he sat by the roaring bonfire. "I thought you were going on patrol?"

  "Thorulv traded places with me," he said. "Are you going up to Villmark alone again?"

  "No, actually, this was my destination," I said. "I wanted to try some magic here where it's strongest."

  "In that case," he said, and turned to fetch another three-legged stool from the corner of the cavern and set it close to the fire, but not too close. "Will you need anything else?" he asked.r />
  "I don't think so," I said. He was being so felicitous. "Is this part of your job?"

  "At the fire, yes," he said. "Although few of us study magic these days."

  "Just my grandmother," I guessed.

  "And, until recently, Halldis," he said, his face giving a little scrunch of distaste. "I hated leaving her alone here, even if that was what was required of me. It always felt wrong. Now I know why."

  "We're safe from her here, right?" I asked.

  "Of course," he said. "She cannot touch this place."

  "Maybe not here, if it's a place of power," I said, "but I feel like she can touch me, sometimes."

  "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "I've been dreaming about her," I said. "But they don't feel like they're just dreams."

  "She touched your mind with her magic," he said. "That sort of thing leaves a mark."

  "So she can see me," I said.

  "I don't know about that," he said quickly. "You might be feeling those things because you were vulnerable to her before. It would be quite natural to be afraid of that happening again." Then he saw the troll resting on the top of my bag. "You're still carrying him around with you?"

  "I feel like there's something I'm missing with him," I said. "I wanted to try sketching him, to see if that gets anything flowing in my mind."

  "And you wanted to do that here," Thorbjorn said with a little nod. "I see. Well, I was about to do my rounds through the deeper caves, so you'll be alone here with the flames. Best of luck."

  "Thanks," I said, setting the troll on the ground beside me so that the fire would not be behind him when I drew him. I felt a wave of vertigo when I looked at him now. The feeling that the wood was alive and capable of motion was amplified by the dancing flames that cast him in a patchwork of light and shadow. It was hypnotic. I immediately reached for my thickest pencil and started marking out his form in large, dark lines.

  I never heard or sensed Thorbjorn leaving that cavern. From the moment I started drawing, there was nothing but the troll in front of me and the feel of paper and graphite under my fingers.

  I had drawn hundreds of trolls before, but this one was different than the others. There was kindness in his eyes, and a jaunty sense of style in how he wore his mushroom hat. The muscles of his arms and legs were still hard cords, but he seemed more like a farmer and less like a fighter than the trolls I had drawn before. I could imagine him wandering through the woods, gathering mushrooms and berries to eat, visiting friends, always carefully staying out of the light of the sun, which would turn him to stone at the barest touch...

  A scuttle of sound pulled me out of my flow state. The sudden transition was so startling it set my heart racing, and I swiveled my head, looking into all the shadowy places around me to find the source of my sudden sense of alarm.

  "It's just me," Thorbjorn said, holding up his hands. He was sitting on his stool, and I knew as I looked at him that he had been sitting there quietly for some time, and I had been tuning him out, lost in my drawing.

  "Sorry," I said. "I was caught up."

  "Did you learn anything?" he asked.

  I sighed. "I don't think so. I think I was just telling myself troll stories while I drew," I said. "I do that a lot. Everything I draw, no matter how small in the scale of the larger illustration, has its own back story."

  "But you were using magic now," he said.

  "I was going to," I said. "I'm not sure I remembered after I got started drawing. I sort of got swept up."

  "That doesn't mean you weren't using magic. What does your drawing tell you?" he asked.

  I looked down at the sketch. "Nothing," I said. "There are no runes or patterns here that I can see. I mean, it's a great drawing of a troll. But that's all."

  Thorbjorn got up from his stool to take a closer look at my work. "It is at least that," he said. "Perhaps you should try drawing the mark on the bottom of his boot. That was added later. Perhaps that is the real clue."

  I nodded and turned my sketchbook to a blank page before tipping the troll over. I traced out the swooping lines of the logo, going over and over the shapes. They felt like the wind and the water of Lake Superior, especially as I had known them the day before when the moon and my grandmother's magic had exerted their maximum influence on the waves. But when I was done, there was nothing more there.

  "No help?" Thorbjorn guessed when I stopped drawing with a sigh.

  "No help," I said. "There's just one thing left to try, and I'm not optimistic."

  "Why not?" he asked.

  "Well, I'm pretty sure that the logo carved in the bottom of this troll was done by hand. But this?" I took the whistle out of my pocket and set it on a little rise in the ground. "This was mass produced. And even the logo looks like it was designed by a team. No individuality to it at all."

  "But you brought it up here for a purpose," Thorbjorn said.

  "There was one like it buried in the creek bank near where the murder happened," I said. "But this isn't the same one. This one was in a box, untouched since it left the factory until I picked it up."

  "You brought it for a reason," he said. "You won't know what it means until you try. Do you want me to leave?"

  "No, you can stay," I said, flipping to yet another blank page in my sketchbook. "I really don't think anything is going to happen. Today is just not my day."

  Then I touched the tip of my pencil to the pad, and it was like an electric shock passed through my whole body. I went rigid, and my brain was full of fireworks, and I lost all sense of the world around me.

  But I could feel myself drawing like mad.

  Chapter 20

  I don't know how long I was in that fugue state. But when I came out of it the page under my blackened fingers was all heavy, dark lines, overlapping again and again. I could barely make out the shape of the whistle at all. It was like something a kid possessed by a malign spirit would draw.

  "Ingrid?" Thorbjorn asked softly, as if not sure if he should disturb me.

  "I'm okay," I told him, brushing sweat-soaked hair off my cheek, then realizing belatedly I had probably just left a streak of graphite all over my face.

  "Something happened?" he guessed. He was looking at me with a mixture of awe and fear. But surely that had to be fear for me. Thorbjorn wasn't afraid of anything, least of all me.

  "I didn't think anything would, but I guess it did," I said. "Wow. Imagine if I had tried that on the whistle I wanted to draw. The one that had actually been at the murder scene." I shivered.

  "What did you see?" he asked.

  "Just now? Nothing. I wasn't even in my head for all this," I said, looking down at my drawing again. "But I think I see something now. Yes, look. The whole thing is a jagged mess at first glance, but now that I'm not trying to see the whistle, I see rune forms everywhere. Do you see them?"

  Thorbjorn got up from his stool to look over my shoulder at the drawing. In the flickering firelight it looked like the lines were moving on the page, but whereas with Solvi's carvings this sense of movement was always part of the charm, in my own drawing I found it a bit nauseating. Like I was getting seasick from looking at it.

  "Yes, I do see something," he said, reaching past me to point at a part of the drawing without quite touching it. "Something secret. A matter of trade."

  "Between partners," I said, pointing to another form. But then I sighed. "But we already knew about that. Garrett did have a secret business partner. They were making these whistles to promote their new business. But we talked to Kyle this afternoon, and I really don't think he did it."

  "Kyle?" Thorbjorn asked, looking down at me now instead of the drawing.

  "Oh, I forgot to mention," I said. I gave him a brief rundown of the trip to Grand Marais, about the new business and about poor Kyle left alone with all the debts.

  "He was angry?" Thorbjorn asked.

  "Annoyed, more," I said. "I don't think he was killing angry. I didn't get the sense he was hiding anything from us."
>
  "If you believe he is not the murderer after meeting him, that is good enough for me," Thorbjorn said. "But he must be involved somehow. Look, what do you make of this?" He pointed to a place on the opposite side of the page, closer to the mouthpiece of the whistle and away from the logo.

  "There's a lot of overlap," I said, squinting at the shapes. "What do you see?"

  "They're overlapping because they're bind runes," he said. "There's no way to tell now which you drew and in what order, although we could rule some runes out if their shapes aren't there. What do you see?"

  "I'm seeing runes of creation," I said. "Over and over. But creation must mean Solvi, and Solvi had an alibi."

  Thorbjorn settled back onto his own stool and tugged at his beard as he mulled it over. "We didn't verify his alibi. The other part could mean him as well. He was a secret business partner as much as this Kyle fellow. No one in Villmark knew Solvi was meeting with Garrett, and no one in Runde who knew of Villmark was aware of their relationship either."

  "I think you're right," I said, running my fingertip over the rune shape that referred to a secret partner. "Solvi makes more sense than Kyle. But his alibi?"

  Thorbjorn was stroking his beard again, but paused to give me a long look. "I don't remember seeing him. Do you remember seeing him?"

  "No, but I left early," I said. "And you were... quite distracted. You were the center of attention, the last place Solvi would be. Maybe we should find Roarr and ask him. Actually, I have a couple of other questions for Roarr about another matter."

  "It would be easier to find your grandmother and ask her," Thorbjorn said.

  "Yes," I said and closed my sketchbook to slide it back into my bag. But the minute I stood up, I had a sudden memory that washed over me so vividly I fell back onto the stool.

  "Ingrid?"

  "Hold on," I said, keeping my eyes scrunched tightly shut. "I'm remembering something."

  "From when we were kids?" he asked, hope bright in his voice.

  "No, sorry," I said. "Last night." I pressed a hand to my head as I ran the memory through my mind again, like a film clip of a newsworthy event. "We don't need to talk to my grandmother."