Dark and Stormy

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Dark and Stormy Page 8

by Traci Tyne Hilton


  She pressed her hand over her mouth and shook her head. Then she straightened herself. “Has anyone called his mother? Gratia is…” She finished her sentence by attempting to stifle a sob. “She is going to be…” She pressed her hand to her mouth again.

  “I’m not sure who has been contacted. The police are here still. Do you want me to get Dr. Hoffen?”

  Her eyes sparked to life. “No, let Steve stay with his little wife. I need to speak to the police. Take me to them.”

  Though she said “take me to them”, she led the way, and I followed. I had a hard time keeping up.

  “How long have you known Rolf?” She was a few paces ahead of me as we booked it to the dorm, so I shouted.

  She stopped, one hand to her side, as though maybe sprinting had been hard on her. “He grew up with my Mats. I’ve known him for twenty-five years. Maybe a little more.” She walked the last few dozen feet to the boys’ dorm, and let herself in.

  I hung back, curious to know what she had to say to the officers.

  Of course, she held the conversation in Swedish.

  Stymied at my first chance to get some real insider information, I hung back and watched the conversation. The uniformed officer Johanna spoke with was not the one in charge. He nodded and said “ja, ja” in response to just about everything that Johanna said.

  Then she said one last thing, fairly impassioned, and with her hands waving in front of her. It sounded something like, “jort med Sam Hill stand” or maybe, “jort med some hall stand.” Obviously she wasn’t talking about Sam Hill, or some hall stand, but it made the officer sort of sit up and take notice, so I did my best to remember the sounds. I’d ask Stina what it meant, if Johanna wasn’t willing to tell me.

  The officer quit saying “ja, ja” and gave Johanna a three minute monologue. Then he took off, looking maybe for his boss.

  Johanna ground her heel into the indoor-outdoor carpet-covered floor, and ground her teeth, too.

  “Is everything okay?” I asked.

  “No. Everything is not okay. Poor Rolf is lying dead on the floor, and nobody wants to hear the truth about the boy.” She slapped her hands together a few times, like she was ready to get to work. “Nobody is perfect, but he was putting himself back together, and was going in a good direction, and somebody, some past associate, has ended his last chance.”

  Ah! A troubled past and bad-news acquaintances. This was a much better line to pursue than the idea that one of our little crew was a murderer. “What did the officer say?”

  “He said only a fool would have been out in last night’s storm, but that he would share the information with the Kriminalinspektör.”

  “He ran off fast to share it.” I lifted my eyebrow, a look I hoped conveyed optimism.

  She nodded, her lips pressed thin. “Yes, he did.” She walked away without another word, back to her fish pickling, or whatever it was she had to do for the Julbord, though I highly doubted even our international guests would want to come to a crime scene to celebrate an anniversary potluck.

  FOURTEEN

  Dani Honeywell

  Things with Gretchen had gone badly. I recognized that, but the solution seemed just out of my reach. I supposed I could apologize for telling what I had promised I wouldn’t tell, but not telling Isaac was like…weird. How could I not tell Isaac what was going on? We were solving a crime together, and in the beginning like this, it was impossible to tell which newsy tidbits we could dismiss out of hand.

  As soon as I saw both Gretchen and Isaac leave his office, I went back in.

  I made a note under Gretchen’s name on the wall that said: M possibly P. I wasn’t sure how to simplify the idea that she was desperate to keep those facts a secret, so I just but a big old circle with a line through it over the words. Then, I stretched her piece of string over to Garret’s name and stapled it down. I was strongly inclined to think that Garret was possibly the father of Gretchen’s possible baby. And if not, he was at least the main cause of her inner turmoil. No one wants to elope in secret with the man of their dreams only to discover that the first boy they meet away from home is even better. I mentioned it before, but I could hardly blame her. That Garret had something going on, some kind of twinkle in his eye that made him hard to ignore.

  While I had been hunkered down in the hall after Isaac dismissed me, I had seen Johanna arrive. I was keen to get her take on the Rolf Vaarland murder. Besides, we had extra mouths to feed today, and my job for the winter break was in the kitchen. After a quick assessment of Isaac’s wall, I went back to my day job. We had managed breakfast and lunch without Johanna, but as far as I knew, the Julbord hadn’t been canceled, so there was still plenty of work to do.

  I stomped across the snowy campus to the main building. So far Småland, Sweden didn’t feel as cold as home did, though it did stay dark a good two hours longer in the morning. And I missed my mountains. Most beautiful mountains in the world. Of course, it didn’t much matter who you talked to here at Tillgiven, we all agreed that our home was the most beautiful place on Earth. Even the kid from Detroit.

  I stopped under the awning at the kitchen door to scrape my boots. During the summer and fall, I had been sure that there was no place on Earth like southern Sweden. This place had been my idea of paradise. But the winter weather was too much like home. All the same snow, but darker—and as I had mentioned, none of the glorious Wallowa Mountains.

  Inside, I shrugged my coat off and hung it up by the door. “Johanna, are you okay?”

  Johanna was sitting by the stove on a wooden stool, her forehead resting on her hand. “Ah. Dani. I’m glad you came.” She ran her fingers through her curly hair, and stood up. “We have so much work to do.”

  I put on an oilcloth apron and washed my hands. Despite my claims that it wasn’t as cold as home, the hot water felt good. “You knew Rolf, didn’t you?”

  “Yes, I did.” Johanna sliced through a huge carrot with her chef’s knife, each motion fast and smooth like she was slicing butter.

  “Who would have done a thing like this?” I grabbed a carrot and attempted to copy her maneuver. The first chunk I managed to cut shot across the room.

  Johanna took my knife and my carrot.

  “The polisen will handle it.” Her words were clipped. She chopped my carrot faster than she had done the first.

  “Of course.” I peeked in a cardboard box that was on the prep table. The contents were pink, fleshy, and vaguely familiar. “But I still wonder. It’s just so awful that I can’t stop thinking about it.”

  She passed me my knife back, and three large yellow onions. “Then pray for his family. It is even more awful for them.”

  “Of course.” I could cut onions, so I did, though my eyes burned and watered immediately. “Tell me a little about his family.”

  Johanna let out a long, slow breath. “His mother Gratia is a good friend of mine. And his father as well.” She sniffled. Then lifted handfuls of the…the…I gagged.

  She lifted handfuls of pig feet from the box. Feet. With skin and weird hoofy-toes and everything, but split in half.

  “Did he have any brothers or sisters?” I averted my eyes from the feet.

  “Just a sister who is much older than him. About ten years, I think.” Johanna moved to the pot head—the huge stand-alone boiling pot—which was already full of water and dumped in a bunch of black pepper. “Pass me the carrots.”

  I passed them and sincerely hoped the feet would go into the water next. “Does she live near here?”

  “Nej. She moved back to Germany about five years ago—where her grandparents live.” Johanna came back for the onions. “Who is going to tell poor Karola? This will break her heart.”

  “So Rolf was German?” I wondered if any of the summer staff were secretly German. Gretchen was a German name.

  “Gratia is from Germany, but not Folke. He is from Småland.” She stared at the cutting board covered in onion slices like she didn’t recognize it. “Oh, Dani. What
will poor Gratia and Folke do? I just can’t imagine if this were my Mats.”

  I didn’t have an answer for her. So many families had met in my living room, asking questions like that of my mom and dad after a rescue mission turned to a body recovery. But I was never the one who had to answer the questions. “I’ll be praying for them.”

  Johanna wiped her eyes with a paper towel. “Thank you.” She added the onions and a few more spices to the water and let it work itself up to a boil.

  While Johanna was washing her hands again, Nea showed up. Her face was white except for the spots of pink the cold air put in her cheeks. “I cannot believe this.” She went straight to the sink to wash up. “Who would have done this to Rolf?”

  “Rolf was not a perfect boy.” Johanna stared at Nea with a challenge in her eyes. What was behind Johanna’s sudden offensive stance?

  “Nej. No one is. But this? No one deserves this.” Nea stepped up to the counter next to me and poked at the feet I was trying to ignore.

  “Neither Rolf nor any other person deserves this death.” Johanna seemed to accept Nea’s statement. But I still wondered. Did Nea have a reason to not wish well for Rolf? Perhaps she had had one of the less than charming run-ins with him that the police had been asking about.

  “Pickled?” Nea asked.

  “Of course.” Johanna murmured. She looked into the pot head which had just started to bubble.

  Pickled. Of course. Because the feet weren’t horrific enough on their own.

  I’m sure there were vegetarians in Sweden, but they didn’t seem to get to have a say in the Julbord menu.

  Nea picked up the feet two-by-two, as though they were an ordinary food item, and carefully added them to the boiling pot. She did it methodically, like she was making a point. Showing us she wasn’t a hot head, wasn’t someone who would sneak out in a storm to smash in a man’s head.

  Or, maybe I was reading too much into her actions. But in either case, I couldn’t imagine her as someone capable of the kind of heated violence Rolf’s killing needed. Maybe, if Nea had a good enough reason, she would plan an untraceable poisoning death, but not this violent murder.

  I let her handle all of the feet. It seemed to be good for her.”

  “We need to let those…simmer….” Johanna said the English word with care, “for about three or four hours. “But now we need to get to work. The polisen are going to want fika soon.”

  Johanna laid trays of cookies. Whether it was for the sake of the police or some other reason, she didn’t skimp. Today’s fika was a full, traditional Swedish coffee break. Three types of cookies joined the brown and white knäcke, bread, fresh baked white bread, and cinnamon rolls to make up the traditional seven types of carbs served at fika. She brewed up coffee and steeped tea, and Nea and I carried everything out to the dining room.

  She was right, we were just in time. The officers, I counted seven of them, began to pile into the dining room looking for a bit of a rest and a hot drink.

  A short man with a gray mustache and white hair sticking out from under a narrow police hat looked at our selection of breads with his brows drawn. “Endast fem fikabröd…”

  Johanna blushed “Nej, nej förlåt.” She nudged me. “Go plate two more cookies. Anything. Polisinspektör Kraft is a very…traditional.”

  I wanted to stay and listen in on what the police had to say about what they had seen and discovered today, but since all I got out of the six word exchange between the inspector and Johanna was “Five, bread, and No, no, sorry” I probably would be wasting my time listening in.

  I dumped some pepparkakor and shortbread on a plate as fast as I could and brought it back in. One more officer had joined the party, and it looked like all of the Tillgiven gang was represented.

  That meant I could quite possibly peruse the crime scene uninterrupted.

  I slipped out through the kitchen unnoticed, as far as I knew, and headed straight for the boys’ dorm.

  The snow around the boys’ dorm was trampled. And the side and front doors were cordoned off with yellow police tape. An officer around my age, or probably older, the blonde Swedish types had baby faces, stood at the door all bundled up—a warm ear-flap kind of cap instead of the very traditional looking police hat the old guy who complained about the fika was wearing.

  “Hej, hej.” I greeted him in the casual Swedish way, with a smile.

  “Hej.” He sniffed, but it was probably from the cold, since he had a friendly enough smile.

  “Can I bring you something? Coffee, maybe.”

  “No, tack.” He pulled his eyebrows together and looked into the distance. Maybe this was his first murder, too.

  “Okay.” I turned, like I was going to walk away again, then turned back. “It’s pretty cold though.”

  “Sure.” The officer was a one word wonder, but he didn’t have much of an accent, so I didn’t think it was a vocabulary issue.

  “Do you get the feeling they are making much progress?”

  He shook his head. “No. I don’t think so.” He let out a long slow breath that was visible in front of his face. “The time of death was basically the middle of the storm last night. Who would come all the way here to kill him?” The question he left unasked was “so which one of you Bible school kids did the deed?” He stared at me with sad eyes. “My grandparents were students here, a long time ago.”

  So he wasn’t much older than me, it would seem. “I can’t imagine what happened.” I leaned against the post that held up the awning.

  The young officer looked away from me. He could imagine something, it seemed.

  Something to do with one of the four Tillgiven men who were out “looking” for Rolf in the middle of the storm.

  I decided not to play dumb. “The only trouble is that the guys who were out in the storm last night were together. Or, at least in pairs. So you’d have to have two men who hated him enough to kill him, and at least one of them had only met him once, so he’s out.” I was glad that one was Isaac, but I wasn’t happy that the other three guys may have had some reason. “And that would mean the guy who was with Isaac is out. Which leaves the other two, but…”

  The officer nodded. “But you want to say that it can’t be them, because you can’t imagine it would ever have been them” He shrugged. “We have no evidence yet. Nothing to say one of them did it, and nothing to imply one of them would want to. We have nothing.”

  “Not even the murder weapon?” I wasn’t going to be able to get in to the crime scene like I wanted to, but…if the murder weapon was MIA, I could totally hunt for that while everyone else was tucked away having their warm and cozy fika.

  He shrugged. “They haven’t said anything to me about it.”

  I blew on my fingers. “It’s awful sad.” I paused, wanting to get away, but trying to think of how to end the conversation naturally. “If you change your mind about coffee…”

  “Tack.” He kept a professional closed-off expression on his face, dismissive enough of me that I felt totally fine with leaving, so I did.

  But I didn’t want to go off half-cocked. Obviously the cops had been looking for the thing that smashed Rolf’s head in. I just had to think of the place to look in that they wouldn’t have gotten to yet.

  Seemed to me they would check the building the body was in, the snowbanks all around it. Possibly the woods that were close by, since the weapon might have just been tossed that direction. I shaded my eyes and scanned the area around the boys' dorm. The sky was clear and the afternoon sun hit the snowy landscape with a blinding glare. The officers had probably checked the shed with the collapsed roof. In the distance I spotted the old well. Surely they would drag the well, if they could.

  I went behind the dorm so I could think without the officer watching me.

  The four guys didn’t see either Rolf or his killer enter or leave the dorm. That was largely because of the dark and stormy night, but there was also a chance that the deed had been done before the guys went out
. But if it hadn’t been done before, and the killer had noticed the six men out with their flashlights, he would have wanted to leave the direction that offered him the most privacy, and possibly have taken his weapon with him—at least for part of the trip out.

  I had seen the flashlights out by the well, so if my scenario was right, the killer hadn’t gone that way. I turned toward the Hoffen’s house which sat at the entrance to the long, curved driveway into campus. Megan had been keeping an eye out for Rolf—as worried as the rest of us were—since she hadn’t seen anything, the killer probably didn’t go that way.

  Isaac and Nick had been at their rooms in the huset, so the killer hadn’t gone that way, either.

  I spun in a circle again.

  The woods behind the dorm led to farmland, fenced by low stone walls. The killer may have headed that way, but in the storm…

  I sucked in a sharp breath.

  That stupid storm.

  We may be looking for a weapon and another body. If the killer had tried to sneak out through the woods, he may well have gotten lost and froze to death.

  I didn’t want to go on a body-recovery mission—the police could handle that possibility. I had to think of another option. If the killer wanted to get out, not be seen, but get safely back to his own home, he would have had to take the darkest, but shortest path to the road.

  The side door of the boys’ dorm, where Rolf was found, faced the back windows of the Hoffen’s house, but was far enough away, Megan wouldn’t have seen much through the storm. If the killer had gone out that door, he could have stuck by the hedges, and crossed the driveway at the curve to take a path through the treed area between the skola and the road.

  Maybe.

  At least, that’s what I would have done if it was dark, stormy, and I was in a hurry.

  So that’s the path I took now, my eye on the hedges themselves thinking whatever the weapon was it might have been ditched in the shadows.

 

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