by Loretta Ross
“I know we’d be trespassing,” Death said, “but I think we should go take a walk around the Viking settlement. Mr. Larsen wasn’t expecting to leave like he did. He could have left the place unlocked. There might be a fire going or windows left open. Surely they wouldn’t get upset with us if we checked to make sure everything was safe and secure?”
“Do Viking settlements have locks?”
“I don’t know.” He offered her his arm. “Let’s go see.”
The creek at this spot was no more than six feet across. The reenactors had bridged that space by dropping a pair of thick tree trunks across the stream. Four uprights, two at each end, were driven into the bank to anchor the trunks, which had been roughly planed to make them more or less even. The walking surface was formed from rough-hewn planks—they still showed the marks of hand tools—lashed to the crossbeams. In lieu of handrails, heavy ropes were strung from the two uprights.
It looked solid and sturdy and didn’t shift or vibrate under the weight of their joint passage.
“Did you have any luck with the house hunting?” Wren asked as they passed across the stream and followed a worn path through the early autumn trees.
“Not so’s you’d notice. I looked at a beautiful, practically new ranch-style house with massive cracks in the foundation and a ‘fix-
er-upper’ between a railroad track and the feed elevator. Nothing enticing. Did you?”
She hesitated. He waited for her to find her words.
“There was this one house … It’s probably bigger than we need, but—”
“You like it?”
“It feels nice. It’s a kind of country Victorian, on six acres, just a few miles out of town on a dead-end highway.”
“Sounds great.” She was struck by the house, Death could tell, and trying not to push it too hard in case he decided he didn’t like it. But honestly, he was ready to go along with anything that would make her happy.
“There’s a body in the rosebushes,” she ventured.
He looked down at her. “Of course there is.”
“Huh?”
“I wouldn’t expect you to find a house without a body in the rosebushes.”
Wren stopped in the middle of the path, dropped his arm, and let him walk away from her. “Now just what is that supposed to mean?”
Death spared her a brief grin but his attention had been caught by what lay ahead. He nodded to the clearing they were approaching and reached back with his right hand. “Come look. I think we’ve wandered into Iron Age Europe.”
The Viking reenactors’ settlement consisted of half a dozen unpainted wooden buildings grouped around a large stone fire pit and surrounded by a split-rail fence. The largest building sat across the compound from the path and faced it. It was a big rectangle, set with the shorter side toward the fire pit and the long side parallel the lake shore. It looked like a big primitive barn, with no windows, a single door made from planks and fastened on with strips of leather for hinges, and a thatched roof that nearly touched the ground.
To its left was a smaller structure that looked like nothing so much as a life-sized manger from a Christmas nativity scene. It had its own fire pit, complete with bellows, and an anvil placed near the middle of the enclosure. The walls were lined with wooden benches and hung with an assortment of ironmongery.
“They even have a smithy,” Death observed.
“Do you feel like we should whisper?” Wren whispered. “Because I feel like we should whisper.”
Death didn’t whisper but kept his voice down. “Why? Are you afraid the Viking ghosts are going to get you?”
“Well … yeah.”
He chuckled and put his arm around her, drawing her close. “Don’t worry. Viking ghosts won’t bother you. I imagine they know a fierce warrior when they see one.”
“And you’re volunteering to be my big fierce warrior?”
“Actually, I meant you,” he said. “But I suppose it could apply to both of us.”
A gust of wind brought with it a sudden series of loud knocks and bangs and they both jumped and clung together.
“Hello?” Death called. “Anyone here?”
Only silence answered him, and Wren laughed. “Yeah. We’re real fierce. You know what that was?” She pointed to a large tree that overhung the smithy. “The wind knocked down a bunch of black walnuts and they rattled off the side of the smithy.”
He stood a little straighter, squared his shoulders. “I knew that.”
Hand-in-hand they went forth to explore the deserted stronghold. The rail fence had a simple gate, with leather hinges and a loop of rope to hold it closed. It was standing ajar and they slipped through one at a time without touching anything.
Besides the fire pit, the central clearing held several long tables lined with benches. At the edge of the space was a covered well. They stopped to peek inside, then proceeded to the big building.
“This must be the mead hall,” Death said.
There were no windows, only a single door. It was a simple affair, secured with a small board slipped into a pair of wooden brackets. Death lifted it and they peered inside. The interior was dark, lit only by a pale shaft of dim gray light coming down from a smoke hole in the roof. There was another fire pit, more long tables flanked by benches, and shelves on the wall laden with plain ceramic dishes.
There was no sign of fire in the fire pit nor any scent of smoke, so Death refastened the door and they moved on. The smithy and two other simple structures yielded nothing of interest. None of the buildings had windows; all had thatched roofs and handmade furniture. A tiny shed that Death hadn’t seen at first, tucked back in the edge of the trees, proved to be a privy.
He wrinkled his nose. “Have I ever mentioned how much I like the twenty-first century?”
“It does have its charms,” Wren agreed.
A long, tall building on the beach contained the group’s longboat, a vessel Death had heard about from Wren and the Keystones but had never seen himself. It was about twenty yards long, a simple, shallow-keeled boat with a wide bottom. There were oarlocks lined down both sides of the gunwales, and a tall mast, currently bare of its sail, disappeared up into the shadows of the boathouse ceiling.
“Do you think they’ve put it away for the winter?” Wren asked. “I’ve never seen it up close before. I thought it would have a dragon on the prow. I’m a little disappointed.”
“We’ll have to dock them a few points for style,” Death agreed.
They closed the door and refastened it. There was only one building left, a small structure no more than eight feet by ten that sat with its back to the lake and its door standing open. Wren stuck her head in.
“Well, that’s an anachronism,” she said.
Just inside the door was a tall workbench with a three-legged stool beside it. Even in the dim light, a splash of purple shone on the bench.
“Did Vikings have spiral notebooks?” Death asked.
“Or ballpoint pens?” Wren agreed, nodding to the pen beside it. “It must be important for him to bring it here. He wasn’t even wearing his medic alert bracelet.”
The notebook was open, lying face-down on the bench, and Wren picked it up and turned it over.
Sweetest, softest, fleeting
Songbird, long I sought thee …
“He was writing about his daughter!” Wren realized. “I shouldn’t be reading this,” she said guiltily, laying it back down the way she’d found it.
They closed the door behind themselves and headed back toward the path through the woods.
“Boy, it’s a good thing we came over here and closed that door. Otherwise someone might come along and go wandering around their encampment while he’s gone.”
“You mean like we did,” Death said.
“Right. But without our pure motives and good intent
ions.”
“Of course.”
They walked together in silence for a few moments.
“It’s really sad,” Wren said suddenly.
“The old man writing poems about his daughter?”
“She’s been gone for all these years and still he comes out here where he feels close to her and sits all alone in that dark little room remembering.”
“That’s understandable.” They’d reached the middle of the bridge now. Death stopped and gently turned Wren to face him, tipping her head up so he could look down into her eyes. “Don’t ever get lost. I’d miss you forever.”
Her eyes went soft and sentimental. She reached one hand up to cup his cheek and stood on tiptoe. He leaned down, closing his eyes as they drew together. He could feel the heat of her, and the gentle puff of her warm breath on his cheek, when his phone vibrated in his jacket pocket and his brother’s ringtone killed the mood.
He kissed her quickly before answering. She was laughing at him as she walked ahead of him off the bridge and back into the twenty-
first century. Death put his phone on speaker.
“Hey, what’s up? Everything okay?”
“Looks like the old man’s going to be okay,” Randy said. “I asked him if I could let everyone know and he said that’d be all right. I think he’s touched that so many people were worried about him.”
“That’s great! Do you know what happened? Or can you tell me?”
“Low blood sugar, probably. I get the feeling he hadn’t eaten today. And he hit his head when he fell. That’s not why he thinks he passed out, though.” The younger Bogart’s voice held a tantalizing tone that suggested he was holding back on something.
Death decided to play along with his brother. “Okay, why does he think he passed out?”
“He said he was in shock. He said he was just crossing the bridge to go to his car and get something for lunch when he looked up at the window in the sail loft of the yacht club’s boathouse, and he saw her.”
“Her? Stop playing mysterious, Randy. Who’s ‘her’?”
“His daughter’s ghost.”
three
“Our best bet, don’t you think, is to sort all this silverware into sets and sell it that way?”
Death had left to see a man about a case and Wren and Leona Keystone were in the yacht club’s enormous industrial kitchen sorting the contents for auction.
“Dishes, too,” Leona agreed. “And I know just the people for a job like that.” The Keystone matriarch stepped to the nearest door—a simple, uncamouflaged service entrance—and blew three sharp blasts on a police whistle she wore on a chain around her neck.
“You’ve got kids here?” Wren asked, curious. It was a weekday and normally they’d be in school this time of day.
“Just my fourth graders,” Leona said. “It’s a teachers’ work day. Didn’t you see them during all the excitement?”
“I guess I didn’t notice. I—”
“Only had eyes for your young man?” the older woman teased. “I can understand that. If I were a few years younger, I might have eyes for your young man myself.”
“Hey now!”
The door burst open and nine-year-old cousins Matthew and Mercy Keystone charged in. At first glance they did not look like cousins. Matthew was fair and freckled, with red-gold hair and cornflower blue eyes. Mercy was a mixed-race child, a beautiful little girl with dark skin and eyes and shining black curls. But they were built alike, both long
and lean and tall for their ages. And both were quick and bright, though Mercy tended more toward being clever, whereas Matthew tended more toward getting into mischief.
“You called us, Grandma?” Mercy asked.
“I didn’t do it,” Matthew said immediately. “And if I did, she made me.”
“Park your bottoms on a couple of chairs. I’ve got a job for you.” Leona set them up at the table with gray plastic bus tubs full of assorted silverware and a box of thick rubber bands and explained what she wanted them to do. “Just put four knives, four forks, and four spoons in a bundle and put a rubber band around it.”
“What if there’s leftovers?”
“We’ll figure that out when we get there.”
Wren and Leona set up at the other end of the table with a mountain of china, a simple white pattern with a blue band around the rim, and the four of them set to work. This was the drudge part of preparing for an auction—sorting and organizing mundane things into manageable lots.
“Did you have any luck with the house hunting this morning?” Leona asked.
“Well … maybe.” Wren shifted a little. “I saw one place. It’s bigger than we were looking for, and really, it’s nicer than I’d thought we could get. But I think we could swing it, if Death likes it. And I’d really like to give him a nice home. He deserves the best I can give him.”
Leona smiled down at the stack of plates she was taping together with packing tape. “So do you, dear.”
Wren shrugged and blushed, smiling a little.
“So tell me about it. Where is it? Would I know it?”
“It’s out at the end of CC, just before it ends at the lake. A lady named Myrna Sandburg lives there now.”
“Oh, yes! The old Duvall place. That was back before you were born though. That is a nice house.” She stacked a couple of more sets of plates. “There’s a body buried in the rosebushes, you know.”
“A body?” Matthew perked up. “What kind of body?”
“A dead one, presumably,” Wren told him dryly.
“It was a man who died in the woods sometime in the eighties, probably,” Leona explained. “They never found out who he was so the Sandburgs took his body to lay him to rest on their property.”
“That’s cool!” Matthew said. “Can we get a dead guy and bury him in our yard?”
“I’m gonna say no to that one.”
“Do you think the house is haunted then?” Mercy asked.
“Well, I don’t know,” Wren said. “I guess if we do move in there, we’ll find out.” She leaned forward over the table and lowered her voice conspiratorially. “Do you know where there is supposed to be a ghost, though?”
“No! Where?”
“Right out there in that little building down by the lake. The old boathouse? The old man on the bridge told Randy that the reason he passed out was because he saw a ghost in the window of the sail loft.”
The two children went suddenly still, their gazes skittering away. Leona’s grandma-radar went off.
“What did you do?” she demanded.
“Nothing!” Matthew replied. “Nothing at all!”
But Mercy’s lower lip was trembling and her dark eyes were wide and filling with tears. “We didn’t mean any harm,” she whispered.
By the time Death hit downtown Kansas City, the worst of the noon rush hour had passed. He found a space in a parking garage next to Barnes and Noble and strolled across Country Club Plaza to the Mercer building, a classy, thirty-plus-story office block with an expensive restaurant on the ground floor and a street musician out front using an amplifier that probably could have qualified as a sonic weapon.
The elevator let him off on the eighteenth floor, into an elegant reception area with plush gold carpeting, dark, cherrywood furniture, and oriental red-and-gold wallpaper. It occurred to him that the last time he’d been in a building this nice he’d been in Afghanistan and it had been on fire.
The receptionist was a small, spare woman in her mid-sixties, with a cap of silver hair and the dark eyes and strong features of a Native American. She looked up at his approach and he stopped in front her of desk with a smile.
“Death Bogart to see Mr. Appelbaum?” He did not offer her his card because he didn’t actually know why he was there, and he didn’t know if she was aware, or should be made aware, that he wa
s a private investigator. That question was quickly resolved when she touched an intercom button and said, “Frank, your young detective is here.”
“Oh, good. Send him in.”
The woman smiled at Death and directed him toward a door off to his left, with a marbled glass light and a bronze nameplate. He thanked her and went to meet his newest prospective client.
Frank Appelbaum was a portly middle-aged man who wore his white hair in a conservative crew cut. His eyes were bright and blue, and when he came around his desk to meet Death his handshake was firm but not fierce.
“Mr. Bogart. I’ve heard good things about you. It’s a pleasure to meet you.
“The pleasure is mine, sir.”
The office was large. A pair of windows looked out over downtown Kansas City and let in plenty of gray light from the overcast day, but the room still had a crowded, cozy feeling. It felt like how Death imagined the study in an old British manor house would feel. The color scheme here had switched from red and gold to blue and gold. Dark wood bookshelves crowded with old volumes and art objects almost hid the royal blue wallpaper, and the carpet was a rich indigo.
Appelbaum directed Death’s attention to the side of the room, where a large easel held a life-sized painting of a woman. She was dressed in an elaborate gown and armor. A conical helmet capped her head. A spear and shield completed the outfit and she stood with her chin raised, looking defiantly at the viewer.
“Do you appreciate art, Mr. Bogart?”
“That’s a broad topic. I like some art. This is a nice piece.”
“Thank you. The subject in this portrait is my great-great-
grandmother. She was a minor opera singer in the first decade of the twentieth century. More well-known in her own time than in ours, I’m afraid. Fame rarely lasts, I think.”
“That can be a good thing.” Death studied the picture, wondering if this was going somewhere or if they were simply making small talk. Perhaps Appelbaum needed time to work up to the subject at hand.
“Her name was Miriam Appelbaum, but she used the stage name Mimi Blossom. She performed mostly at small venues in the Midwest. There was a time when almost every little town had an opera house, before opera gave way to vaudeville and that in turn gave way to the cinema. She did have one period of brilliant success, though, when she traveled across Europe with a company performing Wagner. Her greatest triumph was as Brynhildr in the Ring Cycle. They appeared before the heads of state,” Appelbaum announced pompously, then half laughed at himself and lifted one shoulder.