Lindstrom Alone

by Moss, John

  Those same traits in an adult make him seem interesting, self-reliant, and serious, yes?

  “Actually, it was only the burial that got postponed because of heavy spring rains. The funeral itself went ahead on schedule and it provided me with a chance to observe my father’s other family, which until then had been essentially a myth. I wasn’t impressed.

  “The service was in a cathedral. I had grown up Lutheran, despite Vittorio’s occasional genuflections in the direction of Rome. In death, he was a Catholic. So, inevitably, we knew my mother would haul Sigrid and me off to celebrate a requiem mass for the repose of her despised former husband’s pathetic soul, if only to annoy his widow with our piety. Birgitta enjoyed triumph and irony in equal portions.

  “I actually enjoyed the funeral service. While I had serious doubts about the existence of God or an immortal soul, I’d come to believe in death as an object of supreme interest. This led, eventually, to my becoming a paleoanthropologist.”

  And possibly a serial killer.

  “At this stage, my ongoing inquiries into God’s being as well as my own were of the same high seriousness as the games of Dungeons and Dragons I played with Sigrid. Her room was next to mine. I often heard her chattering on her phone to friends, but she didn’t go out much. The two of us hung around together, listening to music, talking inanely, sometimes just reading.

  “In the evening after the church service, I was lying across my bed with my head hanging over the edge, staring at nothing. I could hear my sister in our shared bathroom and then only the sounds of the house. Suddenly, my dead sister Isabella walked into my line of vision. My God, Harry, can you imagine it? I leapt to my feet and whirled around. If it was a ghost, I wanted to see her for sure, before she faded or fled. But it was Sigrid, dressed absurdly in a Christmas outfit Isabella had worn only once. The black taffeta skirt hung a little limply on her adolescent hips and the full-sleeved white blouse accentuated the slightness of her figure. The red tartan sash gave her a carnivalesque appearance.

  “‘Where’d you get that stuff?’ I demanded. The last time I’d seen those clothes they were splattered in cranberry smoothie. I’d made one as a surprise and tried to hand it to her over her shoulder from behind the sofa. I assumed the entire outfit had been shredded and burnt in the explosion the next day, but Sigrid explained Isabella had dumped it down the laundry chute, even the sash. After the fire, Birgitta sent it out to be cleaned. It was returned immaculate, free-of-charge, and stored in the bottom drawer of Sigrid’s dresser.

  “‘You look silly,’ I told her. I was irritated, as if she were violating my connection with Isabella.

  “‘I look gorgeous,’ she said and then added, closing the discussion, ‘The mass was nice.’

  “‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Because we’re Lutheran it seemed better than it was.’

  “She sat on the edge of the bed and smoothed the taffeta skirt over her legs. She raised her legs straight and seemed to admire her ankles. Then suddenly she jumped to her feet.

  “‘Let’s go for a walk!’ she declared.

  “‘It’s raining,’ I said.

  “‘Not very much.’

  “‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s walk over to Pleasantview Cemetery. The grave is open.’

  “‘What do you mean, open?’ she said.

  “‘They haven’t filled it up yet.’

  “‘Of course not, Vittorio’s not in it.’”

  Empty graves give me the creeps, Harry.

  Harry closed his eyes and massaged his temples. Was that Karen or was it him? He was haunted by the knowledge that her body had never been recovered. Her absence was gnawing, and persistent, like the pain of a phantom limb after amputation.

  After dismemberment would be more appropriate.

  He sat back and gazed into the fiery depths of Bernd’s eyes. I’m debating with myself, he thought. Empty graves are both symbolic and actual, an image of death with no death in sight.

  Bernd was clarifying his relationship with Sigrid. Harry noted his descriptions were more elaborate than in the earlier episodes. He recalled dialogue, he remembered what seemed extraneous details.

  To you, maybe. Not to him. Don’t forget, he’s older with each death.

  But the same age, retelling.

  “We liked hanging around together,” Bernd was saying. “As Birgitta grew increasingly distant, we learned to depend on each other. We were close in age and shared the same memories. That was an illusion, of course, but an illusion that bound us together in a hostile world. To Sigrid, Giovanna remained serene and ethereal and eternally still, lying beatific in an oak casket with her head on a satin cushion, surrounded by music and flowers. In my mind, she was beauty and horror, inextricably bound. Sigrid envisioned Isabella being forever a stunning young rebel, while in my mind the shattering of her body was inseparable from an explosive moment of ecstasy.

  “So, we trudged through the bleak evening without speaking. A fine drizzle saturated the air. When we reached the cemetery, it spread out before us like a garden of the dead. The landscape had been shaped into small rolling hills with avenues of trees and clusters of shrubbery.”

  Bernd paused, then moved to eloquence by his memories, he continued.

  “Looming out of the earth like so many clutching fingers, innumerable tombstones seemed luminescent, creating their own low-lustre sheen. It was eerie and strangely inviting.

  “We moved through the gloom to the area where weeping or ascending angels were the dominant motif. Towering pines brushed against the soft wet breeze with whispering murmurs, and the occasional dormant oak grasped at the lowering sky. We kept a firm grip on each other until we arrived at the Ghiberti plot.

  “A tarpaulin meant to protect our father’s grave from the elements had slunk low under the weight of the rain pooled between supporting beams. When we stood close to the edge, a gust of wind rippled the water surface. We both gazed in the direction of our sisters’ graves, where the tombstones were modest and stolid and death was reduced in its grandeur from the pathos of angels to terse notations of lifespans inscribed on flat faces of stone.

  “Sigrid leaned into me for warmth. I leaned my head down and breathed the scent of my sister’s warm damp hair. I was younger but in the past year had grown taller. She gazed up at me. I knew we were cast in the same eerie light of the wet city sky. It was like death had washed over us.

  “Unnerved, I broke our embrace.

  “Without a word, we set to work repairing our father’s grave. We dragged the tarpaulin up and over the mounded earth. The pooled water slid off and splashed into the depths. The ends of the two beams plunged into the muck at the bottom. We hauled them this way and that to work them free, then together we dragged them out of the hole and leaned them across the tarp to hold it in place.

  “I was sweating from the effort. She was chilled. I wrapped my arms around her and drew her deep into the warmth of my open coat. She shivered, and we rocked back and forth on the grave’s edge. I could feel her thighs against mine and her breasts burning into my flesh. I felt myself becoming aroused.

  “She leaned a little away and tilted her head up and with both hands drew my head toward hers until our lips touched and our breathing merged. I could feel my body rising against her as she pressed closer. The rocking stopped and a slow gyration of our bodies together filled us with overwhelming sensations of terror and lust.”

  Harry, he’s doing it again. He’s remembering his victim’s memories as well as his own.

  His victims, plural? You accept his mother’s version?

  And you accept his?

  The facts support either.

  Or neither. Listen.

  “Our lips felt swollen and dry and, as we moistened them, our tongues touched and we drew in our breaths in unison, sucking the air and the moisture from each other’s mouths.”

  “Bernd.” Harry felt intrusive, an unhappy voyeur.

  “She turned fully into me, Harry. The night sky whirled and the e
arth quivered and suddenly I exploded and soared and crashed against my trembling sister, and our shared encounter subsided into the tenderness of a long and innocent embrace.

  “I remember I turned away shyly. She remained close by the grave. In a few moments, I knew we would settle back into our separate selves and this would never be talked about, not ever again. Our bond would be secret, its meaning impenetrable, and its strength enduring, for as long as we lived.

  “As I walked away from my father’s grave and away from my sister, I heard a gurgling splash, a roiling of muck, and then silence. She must have kicked a clod of earth into the grave, I thought. Glancing back, I couldn’t distinguish her from the shadows. The sounds of whimpering drew me toward her, then made me stop. I wanted to hold her but I knew she needed more time. With sadness and joy, I turned and walked slowly toward home. She would catch up if she wanted.

  “Walking out the gates and down the long street through the rain-drenched chill, I could not hear her fingers clawing at the frozen earth as she drew a suffocating slurry down on top of her in the bottom of the grave. I could not hear her final fleeting thoughts as her love flickered warmly and faded and everything ceased. I could not feel the beginning of loneliness that will stay with me until the moment I die.”

  20 FIRE AND ICE

  WISPS OF SMOKE ESCAPING THROUGH CRACKS IN THE pot-bellied stove had accumulated into a grey vapour. Harry’s eyes were watering. His nostrils were seared and his lips were parched. Harry inscribed the story in his mind, not exactly as Bernd had told it, but as he had received it. He recorded, edited, modified, clarified, and intercut with fragments of the earlier report to create from the raw materials of Bernd’s confession a disturbing narrative that he felt to the quick.

  He had listened attentively even when Bernd’s mind wandered into the past and lost him there and he lapsed into moments of silence, trying to get his emotional bearings. Harry knew he had never before attempted or dared to put the deaths of his sisters into a coherent account. Nor had he ever revealed such intimate details, even to himself.

  “So that’s it, Harry,” said the man opposite. “Should take me a lifetime of Our Fathers and Hail Marys.” He stopped. “The last time I was in a church was for my father’s requiem mass. Do you know the Lord’s Prayer?”

  “And my Hail Marys.”

  “You’re not Catholic?”

  “God, no. I was a philosopher. Had to know arcane chants and rituals. The history of ideas follows a giddy line.”

  “Give me a Hail Mary, Professor Lindstrom.”

  At first Harry thought Bernd was joking with an unlikely football allusion, but he was serious. Harry leaned back against the cardboard tacked to the wall behind him. The other man leaned forward. Harry began:

  Hail Mary, full of grace,

  The Lord is with Thee,

  Blessed art thou among women,

  Blessed is the fruit of Thy womb, Jesus.

  It made him uneasy, reciting a prayer so laden with meaning that he found utterly meaningless. He had no doubt that God had fled from the world. He was less certain about the nature of his own presence in the world God left behind.

  Holy Mary, Mother of God,

  Pray for us sinners

  Now and in the hour of our death.

  Amen.

  “Amen, yes. Thank you.”

  “Why?”

  “Because you are my confessor, Harry.”

  Witness, perhaps, but confessor? Confession was supposed to lead to absolution.

  Absolve yourself, Harry. Start closer to home.

  Karen had slipped back into his mind.

  I’ve never been away. I’ve been listening. The nuances are intriguing.

  They are. The same story could provide a sound basis for deviant behaviour, shaping the pathology of a serial killer, or a horrific account of innocence lost, suffering and shame endured.

  Harry had grown to like this man. Candour and pathos were conceivably instruments of a malevolent mind, but there was much in Bernd’s narrative that he connected with. The man had offered a story of growing sexual awareness from childhood into adolescence not unlike the experience of most boys as they struggle toward maturity. But Bernd’s journey was marked by crisis at every stage. Beauty and death were inextricably linked; pleasure and death were inseparable; the connection between affection and death was inexorable.

  And from the sidelines, his mother tormented him with insidious accusations and taunting judgments. Perhaps Bernd had killed no one.

  He admitted to killing his mother.

  No, he just didn’t deny it.

  Too much sympathy, Harry. You’re this guy’s prisoner.

  Harry wasn’t sure about that.

  The thickest smoke layer had expanded down from the rafters and was becoming unbearable.

  “Bernd,” he asked, “did you kill your mother?”

  Bernd answered with what seemed almost a benign silence.

  “Did you kill the Mexican girl?” Harry said. “Your au pair.”

  “No.”

  “Did you push Rose Ahluwalia from the bridge into the Don Valley.”

  “No.”

  Harry was inclined to believe him.

  “Did you murder the Icelandic girl?”

  “Which one? The girl in the maze or the girl in the crevasse?”

  Harry grimaced. “Either of them?”

  Bernd Ghiberti stood up and smoke swirled around him. He seemed to be listening to something. Harry heard it too. A scraping behind him and a banging on the wall outside. He felt a brief series of thumps against his back. The wind must have caught the yellow dory that had been upturned against the shed and sent it skidding away.

  As Bernd began moving toward the double door at the seaward end of the shed, Harry heard a thud of wood on wood coming from outside. Bernd rattled the door. Someone had dropped the lock bar into the upright slots.

  Harry remained seated. Bernd toured the interior perimeter of the shed, banging on walls that echoed with disheartening resilience. The chopping block had dried and he wrenched the broken axe free. He surveyed the interior again, then he flung the axe into a wall. The old boards were thick, dry, and weathered like iron. The rusted head of the axe careened through the thick air and landed at Harry’s feet. Bernd dropped the broken handle onto the plank floor in disgust.

  Harry opened the stove and using the broken axe handle he spread the embers out, but that only increased the smoke, so he pushed them all to the centre and they burnt in a fiery pile, forcing the heat to draw the smoke up the chimney.

  Both men sat down where they had been, Harry on the bench, leaning against the exterior wall, and Bernd on the crate.

  “Surprised?” said Harry.

  “It must be Inspector Arnason and Constable Sverdrup. Which begs the question, why lock us in?”

  “You mean ‘invites the question.’ Begs means beggars, it means to avoid the question.”

  For God’s sake, Harry! This is no time for pedantry. Let’s get out of this God-forsaken inferno.

  But Harry was in no hurry.

  “What about Skadi,” he said. “Could it be her?”

  “Locking us in? God, no. Why? It makes no sense.”

  Does anything ever make sense? When you get up too close, things fall apart. When you spin out too far in the widening gyre, things fall apart.

  Shades of Yeats. Who’s the pedant, now?

  Harry wanted to use their incarceration to his best advantage. He said, “Let’s suppose your mother set up her own execution.”

  “Yes.”

  “To make a case, not against me but against you!”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “She had already offered you up as a serial killer.”

  “Which I’m not, but go on. I’m listening.”

  “Let’s suppose that’s what she was doing. She needed more than circumstantial evidence. She offered herself as habeas corpus, in its original meaning—’the court shall have the body
.’ So, she invited Arnason and Sverdrup to witness her death. She used Skadi to lure you to the ruins of St. Clemens with murder in mind—”

  “How could she be so sure I’d kill her, Harry?”

  “That’s something between you and your mother and Skadi that I haven’t quite figured out. You were prepared to do it, though. You told me as much.”

  Bernd seemed more amused than apprehensive. Harry’s explanation had too many gaps to be credible. He wiped away smoke from the corners of his eyes.

  “Of course,” Harry admitted, “she did her damnedest to push me into being implicated, as well. Insurance, I suppose. And here we are. The police have the corpse as material evidence.”

  “And Inspector Arnason has us.”

  “Or Skadi.”

  “I didn’t tell Skadi that Birgitta is dead. And she wouldn’t hurt me, Harry. You, maybe, but not me.”

  Bernd coughed on smoke inhalation, and his eyes watered until tears slid down his cheeks, gathering at the stubbled creases at the sides of his mouth.

  “Bernd, did you kill Birgitta?”

  The other man smiled enigmatically. “There’s killing and there’s killing.”

  “Yeah,” said Harry. “And there’s blaming and there’s framing. If that is Hannah Arnason out there, she thinks she’s locked up a killer.”

  “Perhaps. But which one of us, Harry?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t care.”

  “Faulty syllogism, Harry.”

  “Hers, not mine.”

  “If it isn’t you, it must be me.”

  “Yeah,” said Harry. He was distracted by the smell of gasoline. Both men sniffed the air and shock registered on their faces simultaneously. Together, they rushed to the leeward end of the shanty where the fumes were seeping through from outside.

  “This is not good,” said Harry. He placed the palm of his hand on the wall above the workbench and moved it around until he found a hot spot and recoiled. The cardboard turned a charred brown as they watched. Fissures began to form on the surface and then a few delicate flames popped up like tiny flares, and suddenly, with a whoosh, the entire wall burst into a sheet of fire.