Death & the Viking's Daughter

by Loretta Ross

  “That’s certainly possible,” Death conceded politely, though privately he thought it unlikely.

  “That don’t mean you can’t paint it. Paint’s not that expensive. Just imagine it a color you like.”

  He smiled at her, charmed in spite of himself, but she already had her back to him and was moving away through a doorway that had no door.

  “Come in here and look at the kitchen and dining room. Dining room’s got a lighted built-in china hutch and all the cupboards in the kitchen are real hardwood.”

  Forty-five minutes later, Death and Myrna stood in the side yard looking up at the house. She’d shown him the inside from top to bottom. He’d peeked into the tiny, dusty attic, peered into the crawl space underneath, examined the plumbing and wiring and heating and air conditioning, and walked around the outside of the house checking the stone-and-concrete foundation for stress fractures.

  “What do you do for water?” he asked.

  “Private well.” Myrna indicated a squat structure made of concrete blocks. “Deep well convertible jet pump. You could trade it out for an in-ground pump if you like. I like the above-ground model. It’s easier to work on or replace if something goes wrong, and in-ground pumps have a bad habit of getting hit by lightning.”

  “Really?” Death asked. “Even though they’re way down in the ground?”

  “Because they’re way down in the ground,” Myrna explained. “The wires leading down to them act as a ground. Lightning will follow it right down and blow up your pump. With a jet pump, the pump and all the wiring are on the surface, so it’s not tempting fate that way. With a really deep well, you’d probably need a submersible, but the water table isn’t that far down here. This well only goes down seventy feet or so.”

  Death looked around the yard and his gaze fell on the tombstone. “What about Bob?” he asked whimsically.

  “Oh, he’s not nearly seventy feet down. More like six. Probably more like four, actually.”

  Death laughed. “Do you think he’ll mind having someone new to share the property with?”

  “Oh, he’s never been any trouble. We sacrifice a virgin to him once every seven years and he leaves us right alone.”

  Death shook his head and went on around to the front of the building. He was more winded than he’d care to admit and he helped himself to a seat on the porch steps.

  “I still don’t understand about Bob,” he said. “Someone found a body in the woods and you wanted to bury someone so the coroner’s office just gave him to you?”

  “It isn’t quite as simple as that,” Myrna said. She seated herself beside him. “Deer hunters found him in the woods in 1985. In the fall, during bow season. He was lying at the bottom of a steep slope, covered up with a heavy covering of leaves and dirt. Not like he’d been buried, but just like he died there and got covered up naturally over the years. The only reason they found him was because a big rainstorm had washed a gully down the side of the ravine and his arm bone was sticking out. From the amount of leaves and crap on him, the cops think he’d been there for at least two or three years by that point.”

  “But they tried to find out who he was and what happened to him?”

  “Well, sure. But it ain’t as easy as it sounds.”

  “No, I know it’s not. It just kind of throws me that they let you bury him without knowing who he was.”

  “What were they supposed to do? Leave him in a drawer at the morgue forever?”

  “I guess not.”

  “They didn’t just give up on him,” Myrna said. “It’s still an open case. A cold case, sure. But still. They’ve got his DNA on file and they check it against missing persons, and they even had a guy do a facial reconstruction with his skull to try to see what he looked like.”

  “Now that I’d like to see.”

  “Talk to the sheriff’s department. They still have the original model of his head and they can tell you everything they know about him. Who knows? Maybe you can figure out where he came from. You are a detective, right?”

  “That I am.”

  “And you like the house.” She grinned up at him. “You do, don’t you?”

  He grinned back. “I do. I really do.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “I think I need to talk to my fiancée.”

  “How did the restaurant sale go?” Wren asked.

  “Pretty well, if you don’t count the fist fight.”

  Wren stopped setting the table in Roy and Leona’s big dining room and turned to look through into the kitchen, to where Leona was sliding a roast out of the oven. “Fist fight? Between whom? And why?”

  “A couple of customers. They both wanted the industrial bread mixer. We had to call the police. They ended up pressing charges against each other and both got arrested.”

  “Who bought the mixer?”

  “Another guy entirely. Young man opening a bakery up in the city.”

  Wren shook her head. “People. Honestly.”

  With the Keystone men off attending a bachelor party, Wren and Death had been invited to join Doris and Leona for dinner and a movie. Death now helped Leona transfer the roast to a serving platter, Wren finished setting the table, and they ferried the food from the kitchen to the dining room and sat down to eat. Given their huge family, the Keystones’ dining table was designed for at least a dozen people, even without extra leaves. The four of them clustered around one end, passed the food around, and chatted while they ate.

  “What have you two been up to?” Doris asked. “Is there anything exciting going on? You know us old women like to live vicariously through you.”

  Death and Wren exchanged a glance and a smile.

  “We’re going to make an offer on the Sandburg place,” Wren said. “Wish us luck.”

  “Oh, that’s a beautiful house,” Doris said. “You know there’s a body in the side yard?”

  “Yeah. We know.”

  “That’s old news,” Leona told her sister-in-law. “Wren and I already discussed that. What else is new? Death, what have you been up to?”

  “I have a new case, up in the city. It’s kind of odd.”

  “What kind of odd? I love odd,” Leona said.

  “That’s why she married Roy,” Doris teased.

  “I’m not denying that.”

  Death grinned at their exchange. “The kind of odd that involves a painting in a museum being replaced by a forgery, but no one knows when or how. And it wasn’t a valuable painting, so no one knows why, either.”

  “Really?” Doris perked up, interested. “What painting? And what museum, if you can tell me?”

  “There was an article about it in the Kansas City paper, so I don’t suppose it’s a secret. The museum is the Warner Museum of Frontier Art, and the painting in question is called the Ring Portrait by an artist named Volkmer.”

  “Oh, I’m familiar with Volkmer,” Doris said immediately. “I don’t know that specific painting, but I know the artist. You’re right, his work isn’t considered that valuable in monetary terms.”

  “Why do you say it like that?” Wren asked. “In monetary terms? Are there other terms?”

  Doris set down her fork and dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. “Volkmer was probably a better artist than he’s given credit for,” she said. “In a time when painting and the arts tended to be seen as lofty and pure and idealistic, he treated his work as a business. He took commissions from anyone who could afford to pay him and he painted the paintings his subjects wanted. Very workmanlike, though he showed flashes of what might have been brilliance from time to time. Critics of the period thought very little of him, but because he painted people the way they wanted to be depicted, a lot of his paintings were highly prized by the subjects. A Volkmer that doesn’t have a high dollar tag attached might still be something that someone was very
sentimental over.”

  “So I should look at who might have wanted the painting for sentimental reasons but didn’t have the legal right to actually own it?” Death asked.

  “That’s what I would do. You know, though, it’s funny … ”

  “What’s funny?” Leona prompted.

  “Well, since we sell artwork sometimes, I always get notices when things have been stolen from museums and private collectors. This is probably the third time this year I’ve heard about something that wasn’t particularly valuable being replaced by a forgery.”

  “Could there be a connection?” Wren wondered. “Maybe someone who’s good at forgery is doing it just because they can.”

  “Do you remember what the other things were?” Death asked.

  “Not off the top of my head, no. But I keep those notices in a special file on my computer. It’s in the cloud, so I should be able to get to it from my phone.” She rose to go get her phone out of her purse.

  “I don’t want to interrupt your dinner,” Death objected.

  “Nonsense. I’m curious myself now.”

  Doris got her phone and sat for several minutes flipping between screens before she glanced up. “Here it is. There were two earlier this year and one from a couple of years ago. I don’t think they could be connected though.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “None of the other three are paintings. One was a thirteenth-

  century clay pot from a peat bog in Belgium.”

  “That wasn’t valuable?” Wren asked.

  “Not terribly. It wasn’t intact, for one thing. It had been glued back together from mostly original fragments, but it was really just broken pottery. Not that the museum wanted to lose it, of course.”

  “What else?”

  “It was discovered missing in July. From the Brandburg House,

  a history museum in Pittsburgh. They digitized their catalog and put a lot of pictures online, and a student in California noticed that the fracture lines on newer pictures of the pot didn’t match the fracture lines on older pictures. In February, a museum at a small, private college in Maryland discovered that a collection of seventeenth-century Prussian coins had been replaced with forgeries. But the one two years ago was the strangest one of all. The strangest one I’ve ever heard of, in fact.”

  “You’re drawing out the suspense deliberately,” Leona said accusingly. “Spill already.”

  “Have you ever heard of an angel crown?” Doris asked. “They’re also known as ‘death crowns.’”

  The others shook their heads.

  “It’s something from back when feather pillows were commonplace. Sometimes people would find a nest or crown-like arrangement of feathers inside a feather pillow. In some places, especially in the south, like Appalachia, the crowns were supposed to mean that the person who’d owned that pillow had gone to heaven. If they were found in the pillow of someone who was still alive, it was seen as a death omen, although some people believed you could defeat the omen if you broke apart the crown.”

  “And someone forged one of these things?” Death asked. “Really?”

  “Apparently. A family named Eichenwald owned an angel crown that had belonged to their great-great-grandmother, the family matriarch, who had been the first to immigrate here from Germany in the 1890s. They lent it to a local history museum, where it was put on display as part of an exhibit on local superstitions. When the museum returned it, one of the kids complained that it didn’t smell the same. They started examining it and it was a fake made from acrylic feathers and sewn together with transparent thread.”

  seven

  Most people were off work on Saturdays and Sundays, which made the weekend the best time for Keystone and Sons to hold auctions. Days off for the company tended to be on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, unless there was a specific reason to hold a sale on those days. So it was that Tuesday morning found Wren in her kitchen, pulling dishes out of the many cabinets and cupboards and trying to decide what to move and what to get rid of. It was ridiculous. If she could pack this much stuff into a little one-bedroom bungalow, what might disappear into the cupboards and closets of the Sandburg place?

  She had been attending auctions since she was a girl, and working for the Keystones since getting a part-time job helping Leona with the books when she was sixteen. For all those years, Wren had tended to pick up random odds and ends if they took her fancy and the price didn’t climb too high.

  She had a lot of dishes.

  She also had a lot of knickknacks and collectibles. They sat on her windowsills, crowded around the corners of the china hutch, took up space on high shelves, and perched atop the cabinets. Looking around at everything, it was hard not to despair at the sheer amount of work that moving would entail. Even for someone who broke down estates and organized auctions for a living, it was a daunting task.

  Wren sat at the kitchen table, studying the room and noting all the odds and ends that she’d acquired, put on display, and then more or less forgotten. As her eyes roamed over her collection, she noticed a ceramic figurine she hadn’t really looked at in years. It was a little girl playing dress-up. She wore droopy blue jeans, a red shirt, and a bridal veil, and she was holding a fancy gown up in front of herself.

  That’s me, Wren thought. I’ve had it all these years and never knew that before. Oh! I wonder if I have a Death somewhere.

  She rose to fetch the piece and set it aside somewhere safe. As she carried it back to the table, she tipped it up and looked at the bottom. It had someone’s initials—too faded to read now—scratched into the bottom along with the date 7-18-78. It occurred to Wren that this was very near the date when Ingrid Larsen disappeared, and, as she set about sorting and organizing the contents of her kitchen, her thoughts were with the missing girl.

  When lunchtime rolled around, she stopped to make a sandwich. Then she got out her laptop and searched “Ingrid Larsen Missing.” The first thing that came up was a page on the website for the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children. She clicked on it and studied the screen.

  It didn’t give too much information she didn’t already have. There was a basic list of Ingrid’s personal information—her name, date of birth, a physical description, a record of where and when she’d last been seen, and the notation that she’d be nearly sixty now.

  There were also pictures, two of them. The first was a standard school picture, a headshot showing a teenage girl looking straight at the camera and smiling faintly. She wore a scoop-neck blouse in a busy red-orange print, and her long blond hair was parted in the middle and hung down straight to frame a thin, oval face. The second picture was a computer-generated image, age progressed to middle age.

  She looked like a nice girl, Wren thought. She seemed a little sad in the school picture, but that could have been Wren’s own imagination painting emotions onto the picture, since she knew that Ingrid hadn’t been happy that last year.

  Wren clicked back to the search page and scrolled. Ingrid’s family also maintained a website and blog dedicated to searching for her. Wren followed the link and found more pictures.

  The school picture was there, and the age-progressed image. But there were also half a dozen spontaneous snapshots. Ingrid looked happier in these, for the most part: posing with another girl her age, sitting with what was probably her family around a Christmas tree, and smiling next to a display case in a museum. The last picture showed her in the Ren faire costume she’d been wearing when she disappeared.

  The photograph was in color. Ingrid wore a long, off-white shift topped with a voluminous blue overdress. Primitive brooches held keys and pouches and crude tools. Her hair was bound in a braid on top of her head and a circlet held a veil that draped down her back.

  Wren closed the window, signed off on the computer, and closed it gently. Her heart was troubled.

  She couldn’t
be certain, but the clothes Ingrid was wearing when she disappeared looked very much like the blood-stained garments the children had found hidden in the boathouse by the lake.

  Emily Morgan looked up from her sewing as her husband flipped on his turn signal and eased off the road and into a gas station on the highway just outside of East Bledsoe Ferry.

  “We’re stopping now? We’re almost there.”

  “Unless you want to run out of gas in her yard,” Edgar said mildly. “We’re sitting on empty.”

  “I suppose if we must, we must.”

  He swung the pickup/camper combo deftly into the nearest row. “It won’t take but a minute,” he reassured her. “We can just use the pay-

  at-the-pump.”

  Emily made a face. “You know I don’t trust those machines. What if it messes up and takes too much money out? Or doesn’t show that we paid for our gas? Do you want to take a chance on being chased down and arrested for stealing gas?”

  It wasn’t a new argument. Edgar just shook his head.

  “You go on and pump the gas,” Emily said. “I’ll just run in and pay for it.”

  Setting her project down—she was making sheep out of woolly socks—she climbed down from the cab and crossed to the building. There was a line at the register and she stepped to the back of it, looking around at the interior of the business and noting that nothing had really changed in the year she’d been away. Then she turned her attention to the counter and did a double take.

  Eric Farrington was standing at the front of the line with a stunningly beautiful woman and a sweet-faced toddler. Having known Eric all his life, Emily frowned to herself. “That can’t be normal,” she thought. Farrington was a troublemaker, a local jail guard who had his job only because his uncle was the mayor.

  Eric was digging in his wallet and complaining loudly. “I just don’t see why I’m the one who’s always gotta pay for everything.”

  “I’m sorry,” his companion said. “I told you, I’m broke right now.”