by Various Orca
I wondered why Freyja didn’t leave as well. She would probably be a lot happier in Denmark than she was here.
“Why don’t you tell me what happened?” I asked.
Her gold-brown eyes were rimmed with black smudges as if she hadn’t slept well in days or even weeks.
“Do you really want to know?”
“I do.” I had nothing else going on, and I wanted to know whatever it was that Brynja refused to tell me.
Freyja stroked the cat. She started toward the house.
“Come in,” she said.
I followed her into a small but tidy house and up a narrow flight of stairs to a room at the back. It was filled with the morning sun and was larger than I expected. To one side, there was a small fridge, a few feet of counter, and both an electric kettle and an electric coffee pot. The smell of strong coffee filled the little room.
She asked me to sit. She opened a cupboard and took out a couple of cake tins. She sliced some cake from the first one. From the second, she produced some cookies, which she set on a plate with the cake. She set it on the coffee table in front of the small sofa, poured the coffee and asked me how I liked mine. She handed me my cup and settled into a chair opposite me.
“Baldur used to own a fishing boat,” she said. “A big one. Very modern. When things were going well a few years back, when the boom was on, he decided he wanted to try something different. It was so easy to get loans then, not like today. The banks were practically giving money away.”
A bank giving money away? She had to be kidding!
“What I mean to say is,” she continued, “that it was easy to get a loan and the interest rates were low. So Baldur took out a big loan and used his fishing quota as collateral. He used some of the money to improve the house and to get nice things for me and Rakel. But most of it he used for his big dream. He wanted to build a condominium resort for rich local people and wealthy tourists. It would have a beautiful setting, luxury accommodations, excellent restaurants, entertainment, a casino, all the amenities a person could wish for. It would bring jobs and money into the economy. He had people who were willing to invest in it. He was so happy.”
She passed me the plate of sweets and wasn’t satisfied until I took a cookie. It was dense and buttery.
“They started to build the project—in the Westfjords. And then, just like that, the bubble burst. The economy collapsed. Baldur couldn’t get the money he needed to finish the project. His investors had all gone broke. He couldn’t repay his loan either, so he lost his fishing quota. We owed far more money than we could ever repay. Baldur was desperate, like so many people. But then a miracle happened, and he found some new investors. He thought everything was going to be okay. Then that woman came snooping around.”
“You mean Gudrun?”
“Yes. She was a reporter for one of the newspapers. She started out doing recipes and articles about raising children, that kind of thing. But she was ambitious. The more her husband wanted her to stay home and look after Brynja, the more she wanted to do something important.”
“Important?”
“That’s what she used to say. She wanted to be the kind of reporter who breaks stories and grabs headlines. She got it into her head that Baldur was doing something wrong, and she started to follow him and pester him.”
“What did she think he was doing?”
“She claimed that he was in league with criminals.”
“What kind of criminals?”
“Russian criminals. She said that the people who invested in his project after the crash were financing it with money from drugs and human trafficking. She said they wanted to use the project, the casino especially, to launder money. She even claimed that they were going to use the place to transport drugs from here to other countries. Can you imagine anything so ridiculous? My Baldur would never get involved in anything like that.”
“Did she have any proof?”
“Not that I know of. Not that the newspaper ever printed. Not that it even hinted at. Her editor said that he knew she was working on something, but that he hadn’t assigned it to her and that she didn’t want to say what it was until she had the whole story. You see what she was like? She wanted to make a big splash. She wanted to make a name for herself. Instead, she fell at Barnafoss.”
“Barnafoss?”
“It’s a waterfall not far from here. They found her in the water below. They say from the bruising, she either fell or jumped and then drowned. Then her husband started accusing my Baldur of murder.”
Clearly Einar didn’t think she fell or jumped.
“What did the police say?”
“They investigated and said that it was inconclusive—that her death could have been accidental.”
“Could have been?”
“The manner of death was ruled as Undetermined. She drowned, that’s all.”
“So why did Einar and Brynja think she was murdered?”
“Ah,” she said. She sounded like my history teacher whenever someone asked an unexpectedly relevant question. “At first, they thought it was an accident too. But Einar couldn’t figure out what she was doing at the top of the waterfall. How had she fallen in? He didn’t know what she was working on either—not until Brynja came up with her crazy stories.”
“Crazy stories?”
“Apparently she heard Gudrun talking to Baldur on several occasions. And it’s true. Gudrun talked to him. Baldur never denied it. He said she was asking about the development and how it was going and whether it was true that some famous movie stars were thinking of buying some of the units—that kind of thing. She also found out that Baldur wasn’t home that night. She said she knew her mother was working on a story about him and about the Russians he was working with. She’s the one who started all the talk of murder.”
We were sliding back into the Kingdom of Krazy.
“Why would she do that?”
“Because she was jealous. Because after Baldur sold his fishing quota, he bought my Rakel all the best clothes and all the latest gadgets. Gudrun didn’t make a lot of money as a reporter, and her father is a tour guide. It’s seasonal work at best. Brynja did it to get back at Rakel.”
“Einar is convinced that your husband killed his wife because of something that Brynja said out of jealousy?”
Freyja looked deadly serious as she nodded. “She claims she heard her mother talking to someone before she left the house that night. She says her mother told whoever it was that she was going to confront Baldur with proof and that she was going to tape-record the conversation.”
“What kind of proof ?”
“I don’t know. The police didn’t find anything—no proof of anything, no tape recording, nothing like that.”
I took a sip of coffee. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but it sure sounded to me like Einar and Brynja had a case. They knew Gudrun was going to meet someone that night. They knew it had to do with the story she was working on. And they knew, because of what Brynja had heard, that Gudrun was going to try to get something incriminating out of Baldur. If I’d been playing ball with the Russian mob, or whatever, and someone was going to expose me, I know what I would have been tempted to do.
“Maybe she met someone there,” Freyja said. “Maybe that person really did push her and that’s why she died. But it wasn’t Baldur. He would never do anything like that.”
I hated to ask, but I had to. “Do you know where your husband was that night?”
She didn’t try to avoid my eyes when she answered. “No. But when he came home late, everything was normal. I was married to him for nineteen years. Do you think I wouldn’t know if my husband had killed someone? Do you think I wouldn’t notice that something was wrong?”
I had no idea.
“Baldur was upset with all these accusations. Who wouldn’t be? The police came several times to question him. People were talking. They said the most hateful things—how much he’d changed since he’d sold his quota, how he was throwing money aro
und, how he liked to hobnob with wealthy foreigners. He was hurt and angry when he heard that. And he saw how upset Rakel was when she came home from school. Then he disappeared.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, he called me one day to say that he would be late coming home because he had errands to run, and that was the last I heard of him.”
“He didn’t come home?”
“He didn’t come home. He didn’t call again. He disappeared. His car was found behind a warehouse down at the port.”
“Did you contact the police?”
She nodded grimly. “They looked for him. They contacted all his friends and business associates. No one had heard from him since. They checked ships’ manifests. They checked with the airlines.
There was no record of him leaving the country.”
“He just vanished into thin air?”
“The rumors started to fly again. It wouldn’t surprise me if Einar started them. Everyone was saying that maybe it was true that Gudrun was on to something. Maybe Baldur was no better than a criminal, and maybe his criminal friends smuggled him out of the country on a boat. Other people, people I thought were my friends, said maybe he had decided to leave me for someone younger, one of the girls from the clubs where he used to meet the Russians to do business. But Baldur wasn’t like that. He was a good man. He just wanted something better for his family.”
And now for the big question.
“What do you think happened to him, Freyja?”
“I think he’s dead. I think Einar killed him.”
ELEVEN
I didn’t know what to say. I mean, what do you say when someone tells you that your host, the man your life was going to depend on in a few days, murdered someone?
I finished my coffee—fast. When she pressed me to talk to Einar and Brynja, I suggested she go to the police.
“The police!” She snorted. “Tryggvi knew my Baldur when they were boys. But he thinks I can’t see the truth about him, that I’m crazy. They all do. But I’m not. I’m not.” She got so worked up that she spilled her coffee.
I stood up and thanked her. I didn’t know what else to say. I just knew I wanted to get out of there.
She followed me down the stairs, even though I told her she didn’t have to bother and that I could see myself out. The whole time, she kept telling me that she wasn’t crazy and that it was Einar who was the killer, not her husband. I was glad when I was finally out the door. And don’t you know it, I had just stepped out onto the street when a familiar-looking SUV slid by.
Einar.
He frowned at me as he sailed by.
I pulled away from Freyja’s house with no destination in mind. Mostly I just wanted to put as much distance as possible between her and me. She could say she wasn’t crazy until she was blue in the face, but that didn’t make it so. I mean, if her husband had been murdered, the cops would know about it. They wouldn’t treat her as if she was delusional. And, really, if old Baldur had been doing business with so-called Russian businessmen who were really Russian gangsters, well, call me crazy, but wasn’t it far more likely that they were the ones who had bumped him off, not some Icelandic tour guide? After all, according to Tryggvi, people didn’t kill people in Iceland very often. I knew that handguns were illegal here. Icelandic cops didn’t even carry them. And, anyway, look at the facts. Baldur had taken out a huge loan. Everything had gone bust—there’d been a massive economic meltdown that had started in the States and spread from there. Whole countries were going bankrupt. I have no idea what people do when they’ve lost everything. But I was willing to bet that some of them took a flier—ran from it all, put their miserable pasts behind them and made a fresh start somewhere else. Why was it so hard to believe that Baldur had done that?
I did a U-turn and headed back to the tourist information center. It was open but nearly deserted. The girl at the counter, who was gazing blankly out the window when I walked in, immediately brightened.
“How can I help you?” she asked. She was blond and blue-eyed, like most Icelanders I had met. She was also gorgeous, with a nice body and full pink lips. She looked about my age.
“I’d like directions to a place called Barnafoss,” I said, stumbling over the word. I was pretty sure that was what Freyja had called it. “It’s a waterfall. It’s supposed to be somewhere near here.”
The girl notched up her already bright smile.
“Where the children fell in and died,” she said.
For a country with a supposedly low murder rate, an awful lot of people seemed to die terrible deaths.
“Barnafoss,” she said sweetly. “It means Children’s Waterfall. It got its name from two boys who lived at Hraunsas, a farm near there. One day their parents left the two boys at home while they went to church. But the boys had nothing to do, so they decided to follow their parents—”
I was guessing they must have been bored out of their skulls if the only thing they could think of to do was follow their parents to church. But that’s just me.
“They took a shortcut,” she said. “There used to be a stone bridge over the waterfall.”
“Used to be?”
Her smile was dazzling.
“The boys got dizzy crossing the stone bridge. They fell into the water and drowned. When their mother found out what had happened, she put a spell on the bridge. A little while after that, there was an earthquake and the bridge collapsed.” She reached under the counter and pulled out a map of the area. “It’s a popular tourist attraction,” she said. Whatever turns your crank, I guess. “Now…” She drew a red line on the map to show me how to get from the tourist center to the falls.
“It’s easy to get to,” she said. “It’s very close.”
“I heard a woman drowned there a year ago,” I said.
“Yes, that’s true.”
“Does that happen often—people falling over the falls?”
“Hardly ever.” She paused. “Although sometimes a tourist gets a little too close to the edge and slips, even though they are told to be careful. But as far as I know, none of them have drowned.”
“What do you think happened to the woman who drowned?” I asked. “Did she get too close to the edge? Or do you think it had something to do with the spell that woman put on the bridge? Am I going to be in danger if I go up there?”
There was that megawatt smile again.
“If you are careful, you should be fine. The area is clearly marked and there are chains that keep people from going too close.”
Chains? “Are they new?”
“New?”
“Did they put them up after that woman drowned?”
“No. They’ve been there for a long time.”
“So what happened to her? Was she some crazy tourist who hopped over the chain to take a picture or something?” Yeah, I knew she wasn’t. But I wanted to know what she knew.
“She was a reporter,” the girl said. “She lived near here.”
“Did she have some kind of medical condition? Did she faint or something?”
The girl leaned across the counter and dropped her voice, even though we were the only two people in the place.
“I heard she jumped.”
“Suicide?”
“That’s what I heard. She was having some troubles in her marriage, and she killed herself.”
“Boy, I didn’t hear that. Someone just mentioned that a woman had drowned. I thought it must have been an accident.”
“It wasn’t ruled an accident. They called it Undetermined. I heard that’s because the family—the husband—talked the police and the coroner into ruling it that way because he wanted to spare the woman’s grandfather the grief of knowing that his only granddaughter took her own life. It’s a family that has had a lot of tragedies.”
So I’d heard.
“At first the husband claimed that his wife had been murdered. It was quite a scandal around here. But I heard the police weren’t able to find any evidence. T
hat’s why they ruled the death undetermined. The daughter was in my school. I didn’t know her well—she was a year behind me.”
“What does she think happened to her mother?”
“Murder.” She shook her head. “She claimed her mother was murdered. She talked about it all the time. She even accused another girl’s father of being the murderer. It was awful. In the end, she had some kind of breakdown and left school. She hasn’t gone back. The girl whose father she accused was so upset that she moved to Denmark.”
“And what about you? What do you think happened?”
She shrugged. “Suicide. Definitely suicide. I’d kill myself if I was married to a man like Einar.”
“Oh?”
She glanced around again and dropped her voice even lower.
“He wanted her to stay home all day and cook and clean. He didn’t want her to work for that newspaper. Me—I have plans for my life. I’m going to study fashion design. I’m going to have a career. I’m not going to stay in this miserable country for the rest of my life, and I’m certainly not going to dedicate my life to cooking and cleaning for a man—especially not a tour guide.”
I picked up the map.
“Thanks for your help,” I said.
“Don’t cross the chain markers and you’ll be fine.” She flashed me another smile. “My name is Jonina, by the way.” She made it sound like the prettiest name in the world. “I get off at seven this evening. In case you decide you want something a little more exciting to do.”
I thanked her again. She really was a knockout. She could have been a model, never mind fashion designer.
Jonina was right. Barnafoss wasn’t far. When I got there, a bunch of tourists were trekking from it to their tour bus. The only vehicle around was a Jeep with a pretty girl at the wheel talking into a cell phone. I got out of the car and started for the falls. There was a clear path and guide chains everywhere, presumably to keep tourists away from the edge of the falls and the river.
I stopped at a large display board to read about the falls—it said pretty much what Jonina had told me. The trail branched in a couple of directions to allow different vantage points of the falls. I followed the one that led to the highest point. The terrain was rocky—all terrain in Iceland seemed to be rocky, but when I got up high enough, it changed from rough footing to enormous swirls, as if someone had poured liquid rock all over the ground and it had suddenly cooled. I’d never seen anything like it. I kept climbing, looking down at the rock all the way. When I got to where the chain was at the top, I stepped over it and kept going, drawn now by the head of the falls. I think that’s why I didn’t notice the figure at the very top, right near the edge of the rock overlooking the water, until it was too late.