by Jonas Saul
The cappuccino tasted great but cost a fortune. The café charged more for the convenience of being near the picturesque canal.
The sun mostly gone for another day, Anton paid the bill and headed back toward the train, dejected. His shoulders slouched, he walked along with the myriad of people heading this way and that, enjoying their lives, taking in the sights, oblivious to his mission.
A group of seven, four of them blonde girls in their late teens, walked up ahead of him. He listened to their banter about school and friends. At a safe distance, he listened while they discussed one particular person and how crazy that person was for wearing that stupid shirt to class. As the group passed the new Starbucks, three of them split away and said their goodbyes. Two of the blonde girls that looked the closest to Clara continued trudging along toward the train station with their other two companions. At the last street crossing, the foursome split up. Three entered the train station and one blonde girl headed left toward the Aarhus harbor.
Anton followed the girl. He stayed far enough back to not be noticed, but close enough to keep her in sight. He asked himself if he could really do it. How would he do it? With his hands around her throat? With the knife he had brought with him?
He chastised himself for not bringing the small vial of pepper spray he had at home. Pepper spray would incapacitate the victim enough for him to make the proper amount of lunges with the knife. He wasn’t a fighter and didn’t want to encounter too much resistance from his chosen kill.
The girl turned left on a street, checked over her shoulder, and then crossed the street.
Did she see me?
He slowed his pace, but kept her close. A sudden realization flashed into his mind.
I can’t do this.
He couldn’t harm the girl. She had a family waiting for her. A mother, a father. How could he end her life while people waited at home? What kind of monster could do that? Was he so selfish that he would murder someone else’s daughter so that his daughter could live?
He stopped walking. How could the hacker ask this of him?
Before taking his eyes off the girl, he watched as she dropped down a small set of stairs and entered a gaming store.
His prey was gone. Just like that. And with her, his hopes of getting Clara back alive.
But he had to do it. He just had to.
Maybe he could catch the train back to Skanderborg in time for the Burning of the Witch ceremony. It would be dark. Hundreds of people would be milling around, talking, and eating snacks from a local vendor.
There would be targets. They would be close to home.
Why didn’t he think of it before? They always burned the witch on the grass by the lake, just down from the library. It was a perfect place to drag an unconscious teen into the bushes and do the deed. He could be home and chatting with a neighbor before anyone found a body. Linking it to him would be virtually impossible with that kind of alibi.
Anton headed back toward the train station. He needed to be on the next train so he could get back in time to scope out the area, talk with the Skanderborg locals. There had to be a girl who looked just like Clara at the event.
Two blocks from the train station, he checked his watch. The train to Skanderborg would be leaving in four minutes.
He bumped into a young couple as he sprinted for the station.
He even ran through the red light as he crossed the street in front of the station.
A girl named fate waited for him in Skanderborg and he intended to meet her. He had bad news for her.
He had to do it. There could be no turning back, no second thoughts.
But he would stop and pick up his pepper spray canister at the house first.
Then he would do what was required of him.
For Clara. Always for Clara.
Save Clara.
Chapter 22
Aaron waited until past two in the morning before rousing Clara, Benjamin, and Daniel. Alex had stayed awake to mind the door. As far as they could tell, Ansgar had not returned to his room. Every time the elevator doors opened, the people exiting had gone to a different room. Twice the elevator disgorged a waiter bringing food to someone two rooms down.
Their room offered a small coffee maker. Aaron had prepared the water and set it to make two cups for whoever wanted it as he woke them up.
Aaron stood by the overhead light by the door.
“C’mon guys,” he said. “We need to get up and get alert. I want everyone out of this room within half an hour.” He checked the peephole. The corridor was empty. “We’ll be secure in a new room within the hour. We can all get some sleep then.”
Benjamin was the first to get to the coffee. Once he poured himself a cup, he poured another for Daniel.
Clara had the bed to herself. She leaned up on one elbow, still fully clothed, and rubbed sleep out of her eyes.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“Just after two in the morning.”
“Why are we up so early?”
“To move to another hotel.”
“Okay.”
She kicked her legs over the edge of the bed and stood up.
“I call the toilet,” she said and disappeared inside the washroom.
“Did you hear from Sarah?” Daniel asked.
“We know she made the plane here in Toronto. Next stop is Amsterdam where there’s a three-hour layover. After that she flies to Copenhagen and then Billund. I’m sure she’ll contact us when she lands in Amsterdam to let us know she made it safe.”
“Any idea when that is?” Daniel asked. He held the steaming coffee to his lips, eyes closed.
Aaron checked his watch. “About four more hours. She lands in Amsterdam our time just after six in the morning. She should be in Billund by ten at night. Either she’ll get a hotel or a ride to Skanderborg, which will get her to her final destination by—”
“Eleven, maybe twelve,” Clara broke in as she stepped from the bathroom. “Billund’s about an hour’s drive to Skanderborg. Nice drive, really.”
“Thanks,” Aaron said. “Coffee?”
She shook her head.
“Good, because there’s none left.”
“Tea?”
“In the next room. That okay?”
Clara cocked her head to the side and yawned. When her mouth closed, she blinked heavily, then said, “Sure. It’s okay.”
Aaron was grateful how well she had adjusted to spending the night in a hotel room with four men she had just met yesterday. It probably had a lot to do with how Sarah was around them, not to mention how Sarah was the one who took on Ansgar singlehandedly to get Clara away from him.
“Finish the coffees, guys. Gather our things. We leave in ten.”
Murmured acknowledgments circled the room as Aaron moved to the window to watch the parking lot below. It had been over an hour since the last of the large passenger jets stopped landing and taking off at the airport on the other side of the highway.
The streets were empty, with only the random car passing by. It was quiet outside, three hours before the sun would rise on another day.
He turned from the window and saw Alex at the peephole in the door.
“We cool?” he asked.
Alex looked over his shoulder and nodded, then turned back to the door.
Five minutes later, with Clara’s things packed and the men ready, Aaron’s cell phone chimed.
“Sarah?” Daniel asked.
Aaron grabbed it and thumbed the screen. A message from Parkman.
Everyone safe?
Aaron typed back that they were.
Good. Sarah’s off?
Aaron told him that she was.
Send my love to everyone. I’m doing what Vivian’s letter told me to do. Don’t understand it, but following it to a tee.
Aaron knew better than to ask what Parkman’s task was. He just typed Good Luck and turned off his phone.
“Parkman’s doing his thing. We need to do ours.” He wrapped h
is hand around the doorknob. “Everyone ready?”
The three men and one woman standing in a semi-circle around him nodded.
“Let’s roll.”
Aaron opened the door and as a group they left the safety of their hotel room.
Chapter 23
Parkman had landed in Denmark the day before and was still fighting jet lag. The small café in the library in the center of Skanderborg had very good coffee but at a steep price. He wasn’t used to Danish prices.
His business as a licensed private investigator hadn’t gotten off its feet yet. A few clients had come and gone. With Sarah in his life, he just didn’t have the time. This trip to Denmark had cost him a large chunk of his savings, something he would have to find a way to recoup in the coming years by keeping a job.
For now he was comfortable, having saved and invested his income from the police department all those years ago. In time, he would need a source of income if he intended to continue flying around the world for Sarah.
He sipped his coffee and watched the people around him mingle and chat. Tonight was Denmark’s Midsummer celebration. He was here just as Vivian had asked him to be. He knew Sarah had been instructed to come to Denmark as well, but he had no idea where she was or why she was here.
What was important was doing what Vivian instructed to the best of his ability based on what her letter said. Or based on what he interpreted her letter was meant to say.
The letter had been labeled to Park Man. His address was simply stated as Santa Rosa. No street number, no name. Unlike the other letters, which had addresses.
Parkman had to admit that that scared him a little. If Vivian didn’t see much for his life, his future, was he on a death mission?
Inside the envelope, all it told him to do was take a break. Go to Copenhagen, Denmark. Stay one night. Enjoy the sights, the food. Then rent a car and drive to Skanderborg for the Midsummer event. Stay one or two nights. Be a tourist. Eat out, sleep in. Then fly home. That was what Sarah needed. Vivian said she couldn’t see more.
On the bottom of the page where Vivian wrote her message to Parkman, she had added a couple of lines saying that she was regretful regarding his role. Maybe it was something about him being a cop. Maybe she wasn’t allowed to see forward to what he needed to do because it would change too much in the future.
Whatever the reason, Vivian implored him to take the vacation time, then go back home.
Vivian’s trepidation and hesitant tone in the letter scared him to the core. Even though Vivian’s letter to Sarah told her to come to this very city, and the letter to Caleb, Sarah’s father, told him to arrange the flights, Vivian declared Parkman’s role as unclear.
“Great,” he had said to Caleb. “I finally get to talk to Vivian like Sarah does, I finally get a premonition, and all it says is take a vacation. What am I supposed to do with that?”
Caleb had patted his shoulder and made him another cup of tea.
“Do exactly as the letter states. You have no idea why my daughter saw your presence in Skanderborg as important. But what is important is that she saw you in Skanderborg. So go. Figure it out. But go.”
Parkman glanced down at the letter in his hand that night, an hour after Sarah had gone to bed in the guest room, a couple of shots of whiskey under her belt.
“I’ll go. I just don’t like not knowing what I’m walking into.”
“Isn’t that the way it always is?” Caleb asked from the other side of the kitchen.
“No, it’s not. When I’m working with Sarah, Vivian’s always there, in Sarah’s head. Now she isn’t. Sarah said it herself. Vivian has abandoned her. We’re all walking into this blind. Unless these vague letters are meant as our guidance into the fray. If so, then we’re all in trouble.”
Parkman drank from his cup again, thinking back to that night. What he wouldn’t do to learn what this was all about. And the thought of missing a cue, screwing something up and learning later that Sarah was hurt or worse, killed, would destroy him. She was supposed to be in town later that night. He was already there and other than himself, only Sarah’s parents knew about his presence in Skanderborg.
Whatever the reason, it had to be for Sarah, but how was he supposed to find her?
The coffee cup was almost empty. He drew the last bit into his open mouth, set the napkin inside the cup, and got up from his chair. Outside the café’s windows, people gathered around a five-foot stack of twigs and prepared to burn what looked like a Halloween witch attached to a thick branch on top of the twigs.
Parkman fumbled with a toothpick, tossed it into the corner of his mouth, nodded at the girl behind the café’s counter and left through the side door. He descended the cement stairs moving toward the water. At the bottom, he turned to the right and joined the Danes as they gathered around, beer and hotdogs in hand, to watch the burning.
Maybe Sarah was already here. Once they hooked up, he would have more clarity as to why a young girl wrote him a letter almost twenty-five years ago.
If it wasn’t for Sarah, he wouldn’t be here. No one would perform the tasks Vivian set out for them if they didn’t know Sarah. Without Sarah, the letters would have been disregarded and seen as the rantings of a schizophrenic, or worse.
He meandered through the crowds until he reached one of the vendors where he bought a beer. It was supposed to be his holiday, so he would drink and be merry and enjoy what the Danes had to offer before he flew home.
One thing he considered was that maybe having him over here was to avoid his untimely death back home. If Vivian saw him killed in Santa Rosa this week, maybe she just sent him to Skanderborg because that’s where Sarah was going.
He slipped the toothpick to the other side of his mouth, drank some of the beer, and moved to the edge of the crowd as someone fired up the brush under the Halloween witch. Surveying as many people as he could, careful not to miss anything out of place or weird, he concluded the Danes were a happy bunch after all.
As he drank more of his beer, he kept an eye on everyone, looking for furtive movements, people that didn’t belong or were acting out of place. Everywhere he looked, people were talking and laughing, playing Frisbee, tossing a ball back and forth, and talking to each other. One group of teens played a small radio a bit too loud, but it didn’t seem to bother anyone else. Probably because the songs they played were from Lukas Graham’s new album. With Lukas Graham doing so well abroad, Parkman could see why the Danes loved him.
Out on the lake, several small boats had anchored close to shore to watch the enormous bonfire. Parkman idly wondered if people had brought marshmallows.
An hour and two beers later, the sun had dropped and the fire was losing some of its power. People began dispersing, moving toward the parking area by the library, others heading up to the street to walk home.
Parkman had taken a spot on the grass on the side of a small hill where he had watched everyone, taking it all in. He hadn’t seen Sarah and as far as he was concerned, nothing looked out of place.
“Is this a waste of time?” he whispered under his breath.
When he got to his feet, he stumbled a moment, wondering how the beer could have that much effect on him.
Since the event was winding down, maybe he would grab one more beer before the vendor closed up, then nurse it on the way back to his hotel. Just like Vegas, walking down the street with open alcohol wasn’t a problem in Denmark. Doing it made him feel like a rebel because he had toed the line so much his entire life.
Beer in hand, he moved toward the library and leaned against the outer wall to keep an eye on the stragglers as they left the event. Five more minutes and he would retire to his hotel. No sign of Sarah and nothing amiss left Parkman in a bored state.
The teens with the small radio were dispersing. He counted eleven in total. Seven guys, four girls. Most of them moved toward the parking lot. Two girls started his way. When they passed him immersed in a Danish conversation, none of what they said made sense. Th
e Danish language was a mystery to him. He had nailed the word for thank you—Tak—but that was it.
The girls disappeared at the base of the stairs. They turned behind the building to walk the length of the shore by the lake. Two more people went that way, a man and a woman. Then a tall man in a thick coat, hands in his pockets, followed them.
Parkman didn’t like the man in the thick coat. Something about the expression on his face. He seemed angry, or simply distraught. But at what? The Burning of the Witch had been a success. And that coat looked too thick for the temperature.