Lindstrom Alone

by Moss, John

  “But if Skadi is going down as a serial killer, she might as well get nailed for killing her mother, as well. Bernd, you had every good reason to despise Birgitta, none to want her alive. She seems to have treated you and Skadi despicably, enough to send you chasing off after old bones and your sister after fresh bodies.”

  “I hadn’t thought of my being a paleoanthropologist as therapy.”

  “Why did you go back to Africa?” Harry asked him. “If you found your experience there so traumatic, why not stay away?”

  A match flared in the darkness behind Hannah. Sverdrup dragged deeply on his cigarette, hunched over, as if waiting for the wrath of his boss. His face appeared on fire as the tobacco embers glowed each time he sucked the smoke deep into his lungs. Hannah Arnason waved the drifting smoke away from her face but ignored him.

  Bernd watched the man smoke, then shifted his attention back to Harry.

  “Mauritania. Searching for atonement of some sort. For what Skadi was doing.”

  “You can’t atone for your sister’s sins. You can’t redeem others.”

  “Jesus did.”

  “And you’re not Jesus. You don’t even believe in Jesus.”

  “Consolation, then. If I couldn’t stop her and I couldn’t make amends by balancing her acts of evil with acts of kindness, I could at least make myself feel better.”

  “You are an honest man,” said Sverdrup, his features sinking into darkness as he took time off from inhaling to speak.

  “Sometimes,” Bernd responded.

  “The sometimes-honest man is more dangerous than the liar,” said Hannah Arnason. “At least when the liar says he’s telling the truth, you know he’s lying. Perhaps your work for women in Africa was to atone for your own sins. Could that be the truth of the matter?”

  “Or he murdered African women as well,” Sverdrup offered, proving his admiration for Bernd was ephemeral, at best.

  “No,” said Harry.

  He was remembering Bernd’s account of the leblouh encampment in the far country, where young girls were force fed to fatten them for prepubescent marriage to old men. Harry had nothing but contempt for cultural norms where men so feared women they coupled with children and kept adult women in virtual bondage. Bernd did not murder women in Africa—he did noble work there at great personal risk.

  Harry could feel Karen balking inside. He knew she shared his sentiments about the pathological fear of women in Western religions, but she was wary of altruism in a man who shielded a serial killer from the law, even when the killer was his sister.

  He might have saved lives, Harry countered.

  Perhaps with the execution of his mother he did.

  “I think it is time, now,” said Hannah Arnason, rising to her feet. She looked even more imposing once she put Sverdrup’s fur hat back on her head, holding the earflaps back to prevent them from impeding communication. “We need to interview Skadi Sviar. There is nothing more to do here.”

  She spoke as if their present location had been crucial to her inquiry. She seemed pleased with the progress they had made.

  Sverdrup and Bernd were first to the door. They pushed on it firmly. It held fast, leaning open just enough along the top edge to admit a sliver of wind that threatened to extinguish the candles. Instinctively, Harry and Hannah closed ranks in front of the table to protect their only source of light and heat. The other two banged on the thick wood.

  So it was Skadi, after all.

  No, Harry, it was snow blowing into the entranceway. Listen, that’s not the sound of a bolted door, it’s frozen along the base. You know about frozen doors.

  Harry relaxed, as if being held prisoner by an act of nature was somehow less deadly than by human volition.

  He stepped closer to the door. Sverdrup and Bernd stood back. The flames behind them wavered timorously from their combined movement. He ran his hands over the old wood, feeling for flaws. Nothing. Oak planks, solid as stone. But the ancient bolts would be weathered. With the butt end of the flashlight he tapped on the bolts that fixed the crosspieces to the horizontal slabs. When the bulb flickered, he switched to a stone from the floor, searching for weaknesses with each tap, listening for the dull thud of rusted iron.

  Sverdrup was suddenly beside him, a shovel in hand. He took over from what Harry was doing and jammed the blade under the head of a bolt. Harry stood back, shining the dull beam of the flashlight on each bolt as the other two men worked them loose. One oak crosspiece fell to the floor, then the other.

  The upright boards held fast. They were bolted on the outside as well, Harry thought. Damn bloody hell.

  But when they hammered on the door again with their fists, it sounded different. The candle flames guttered. In the blackness that engulfed them, they could see small cracks of light from the moonlit snow. In removing the bolts, they had broken the ice seal along the base of the door. In gradual increments, they pushed the door open so that Sverdrup, the smallest of them, could slip through after removing his coat. Hannah came forward and handed him his gloves and fur hat. Bernd passed his coat through, then the shovel, and the other man hammered and scraped outside until the passage was widened.

  Setting the flashlight down, Harry dug Horatio Sverdrup’s wallet out of his pocket and handed it to Bernd to give to Sverdrup. It seemed time to give the man back his identity, if not all of his money. Bernd shrugged, and took it with him as he squeezed out into the open.

  Hannah turned to retrieve her own thin gloves from the table. Harry held the edge of her sleeve to guide her back. Suddenly, they heard the terrible unmistakable clang of metal on bone, followed immediately by blackness as the door slammed solidly into its frame. Harry lunged against it, but it was braced from the outside.

  “Horatio!” Hannah called in a strong but tremulous voice, suggesting strength under duress that Harry found heroic, if futile. “Poor man,” she murmured, letting her voice drop.

  “He’s not dead,” said Harry with surprising conviction. “Bernd just wants to get back to the house before we do.”

  “I hope you’re right,” she said, speaking into the darkness. “I’m sure you are. Sverdrup will last until his lungs congeal, and then he will die. Not today.”

  The subject of her constable’s mortality then seemed to have been swept from her mind. “You’ve developed a bond with this unusual Bernd Ghiberti,” she observed. “You seem to know him quite well. So tell me, is he a cold-blooded psychopath? Or is he the victim of his family’s misfortune? It is a very interesting family, yes?”

  Interesting!

  Not now, Karen, give her some room.

  Killer and victim aren’t mutually exclusive.

  “We will see,” said Hannah, seeming to agree with Karen.

  “Meanwhile we sit and wait,” said Harry. He retrieved the flashlight, but it had burnt out or the bulb had blown. “Do we have any matches?”

  “Constable Sverdrup took them.”

  They eased their way to the crates and sat down, side by side for the warmth and reassurance. Harry felt certain it would not be long before Horatio Sverdrup regained consciousness. But just in case, he dug Sverdrup’s grungy gritty chocolate bar from his pocket, and stripping away the wrapping as best he could, he offered Hannah a larger half, which she accepted without comment. In the dark it seemed quite palatable; even the unidentifiable furry textures were reassuring.

  “If he has killed at all, perhaps he had no alternative.” Harry was thinking of Birgitta’s smashed cranium.

  “There is always an alternative to murder.”

  “Think how much he has sacrificed.”

  “Do you also feel sorry for Skadi?”

  Harry didn’t respond. He stared into the darkness that had swallowed them whole. Only their voices and thoughts remained. And the intimations of body warmth hovering in the air between them.

  “Harry,” she said, tentatively.

  “Yes.” He was wary.

  What was it about Hannah Arnason? She was enthra
lling, and not just because she was beautiful. She enchanted the way a femme fatale in early film noir was enchanting; she was seductive, intriguing, unpredictable, dangerous.

  Don’t forget intelligent. You always were a sucker for intelligent women, Bogie. She’s devastatingly clever, and she carries herself like a goddess.

  She makes the most of it, here among mortals.

  Don’t forget she’s got Sverdrup, Harry. She doesn’t need you.

  Harry turned toward where the warmth in the darkness told him Hannah’s face would be and spoke in a quiet voice, “Hannah, you are an unusual woman. I hope we get out of this alive, but if we don’t—”

  “No, Harry,” she interrupted. “We do not have sex before we die.”

  Caught you off guard, didn’t she?

  “I was just going to give you a compliment,” he responded sheepishly.

  “So, you are such a good lover!”

  “No, that’s not what I mean.” He could feel the contours of the air between them.

  “We will wait,” she said. “Possibly perhaps we will have sex. But only if we are not rescued.”

  Who decides when it’s time?

  She’s not serious.

  But Hannah Arnason was warming to the subject.

  “I would like to have sex in the burial mound of our ancestors. That would be interesting. Very ironic.”

  You’re two of a kind, Harry.

  He heard a rustling in the dark. Suddenly a small-screen vision of the planet Earth burst into light, casting a glow on their faces. Instantly recognizable, entirely unexpected, and very disconcerting.

  “My lovely iPhone will not make calls in our burial chamber.”

  “Root cellar,” Harry clarified.

  “Perhaps it is the same. And if Mr. Sverdrup is dead, then his cell phone will not work either. So then, perhaps, if you would like, we will have sexual relations before we join him. It would be interesting.”

  Just ignore me, Harry. Pretend I’m not here.

  25 THE DANGEROUS EDGE OF THINGS

  THE iPHONE SCREEN CAST AN EERIE SHEEN OVER THE rough walls of their prison, bleeding the colour from their faces, their clothes, and the rocks, wood beams, and rubble that surrounded them. If putrescence were a colour, this would be it. Then suddenly the screen burst into crackling flames.

  “That’s better,” she said, laughing like a child.

  Bright flames and no heat. That’s one app too many.

  But Harry liked it; he enjoyed the whimsy. He admired the defiance. This woman who stood six foot four in heels could play like a girl. Surrounded by death and in danger of dying herself, she could laugh. He liked her, and Harry Lindstrom did not like a lot of people, particularly after he got to know them.

  The Stockholm Syndrome, Harry!

  He was enthralled by Hannah Arnason but he was appalled by her as well. She had abducted him, stood back while he was abused by her henchman, and she hung him out as bait, but in spite of the contradictory impulses, he felt an unmistakable connection.

  Lust, Harry.

  No. What he felt was a curious kinship, as if they had been through similar experiences long before their worlds collided.

  “You must have a story,” he said. He wanted to know her.

  “I have many.” A heaviness in her voice displaced the brief interlude of their casual intimacy with something indefinable but much darker. She snapped off the iPhone to save the battery and the darkness engulfed them. “I’m sure you have many yourself. Perhaps you will tell me some time about you.”

  “Only one,” he said. “There’s only one story for each of us.”

  “Just one? How can that be?”

  “I had a great aunt, a long time ago, and no one knew her but me. Everyone was afraid of her because she was old and very severe. But I always knew she had been young before she was old, and I guessed she had been bitterly disappointed in love. No one else would have dared to ask her, but I did and she told me. Between the wars she had been engaged to a doctor, and his housekeeper became pregnant. The doctor and the housekeeper moved away. My Aunt Beth never told anyone else but that one story shaped her whole life.”

  “It is not good to get close to people, Harry. Nothing good comes of it. I have my stories, too. Someday, perhaps, I will talk to you about me. But not here.” She warmed as she talked, despite the cool message. “Do you know anyone who has not experienced tragedy? Sorrow? Only the very young and the very foolish. For us, Harry, it is enough to know that we have. The details are not important.”

  Curiously, Harry felt closer to this strange and beautiful woman than he had been to anyone since the accident in Algonquin Park.

  “Have you ever read Howards End?” he asked into the darkness.

  “When I was at Lund University, yes, perhaps.”

  Don’t you love that, Harry? Perhaps. That’s how I felt about most of the novels I knew, back then. I’m never sure whether I actually read them, but we talked about them as if we had. The great ones, anyway.

  “‘Only connect.’” Harry quoted, as much to Karen and himself as to Hannah.

  “‘Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,’” said Hannah, continuing the quotation.

  “‘Live in fragments no longer,’” said Harry, leaving out the bit about love. “It’s a good novel. E.M. Forster went to a college near mine at Cambridge. I suppose they all are, really. I was at Trinity. He was at King’s. Perhaps that’s where he learned to sum up the good and desperate life so succinctly, a bit like a prayer.”

  “Do you feel like praying, Harry?”

  “Of course. I always feel like praying. Sometimes I pray for God to exist.”

  The silence between them was audible. The slight rustling of their clothing, the hush of their breath, shaped the darkness. She flicked on the fire app. Harry caught a brief glimpse of his silver wedding band before she clicked it off again. He turned the band with his thumb. It felt warm and cool at the same time. He thought he could hear Karen smile.

  We live on the dangerous edge of things, Harry.

  He wanted to object but he knew she was right. Only when he was grappling with death was he truly engaged.

  Harry, turn away from death. It’s too easy an out. Do an inventory: you’re on the verge of hypothermia, your toes are hurting like hell, your cracked ribs ache, your knuckles are bruised, your lacerated wrist is throbbing, your arm is hurting, your face has been scorched raw, there’s a suppurating cut on your forehead. You’ve had a concussion. What more do you need to remind you you’re fully alive? And you’re trapped in here with an uncommonly fine-looking woman whose name is a palindrome—which may, or may not, have symbolic significance.

  I feel pain, therefore I am.

  Descartes as an antidote to death! Forget the pain; try thinking, Harry. Try thought.

  As a gesture to prove his vitality, seeking common ground, he asked Hannah what philosophers she had studied at university.

  “The usual,” she said. “The Greeks, the Germans—I remember liking Schopenhauer. Oneness with nature, I could appreciate that, nothingness in nature, not so much. I wasn’t born to be an ascetic. But as a Swede, I liked the sublime; his notion that nature is awesome, the more beautiful, the more terrifying.”

  She could be describing herself.

  “And Kierkegaard, I liked his thinking—God exceeds our grasp. Just not his conclusions, they seemed desperate. What about Nietzsche?” she asked. “You must have liked him?”

  Why is she speaking in the past tense, Harry?

  “There’s no escaping Nietzsche,” he said.

  “You know about the graffiti, God is Dead (signed) Nietzsche?”

  “Nietzsche is dead (signed) God. Yeah, it was scrawled on the walls in my college washrooms.”

  “Mine too.”

  “It’s a very Nietzschean joke.”

  “There’s no escaping Kafka either, is there?”

  “That’s what makes him so Kafkaesque,” said Harry.<
br />
  “There’s something reassuring about shared awareness of mortality.”

  “Yes,” said Harry, “there is.”

  He waited for a cheerful diatribe from Karen about Schopenhauer’s pessimism, Nietzsche’s gloom, Kafka’s paranoia, German fatalism, one of her manic, ill-informed, inspired, provocative judgments. None came. Then Hannah spoke into the darkness, “Harry, the fingernails?”

  Suddenly, they were back in the real world with its indefinable limits.

  “They were Skadi’s signature,” she continued. “But why? You understand this family better than anyone.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  False modesty, Harry.

  “I see the nail business as a grisly attempt to connect,” he explained. “Love and deep hatred, virtually indistinguishable. I think Birgitta tormented Skadi for being alive when her legitimate daughters were dead. She loved her, I’m sure, but despised her. And Skadi loved and despised her mother. She desperately wanted to punish Birgitta for the abject loneliness of her childhood, and she needed to make her suffer for her cruelty to Bernd. But mostly, I think, Skadi was pathologically jealous of her dead sisters, enough to murder their surrogates. Blue-eyed blondes.”

  “The girl in Hagaparken had brown eyes.”

  “The exception that proves the rule. Even killers make mistakes.”

  “And why the nails in the first place?”

  “That had to be the one image of her sisters that most stuck in Skadi’s mind: the black soil under Sigrid’s nails when she tried to claw her way out of her father’s grave.”

  “How could she know that, Harry? How could she imagine it?”

  “Just proves how wicked Birgitta really was, telling Skadi the horrific particulars of her sisters’ deaths. Each detail was the lash of a whip, inscribed like a scar in a little girl’s mind.”

  “Some of the nails were garish.”

  “No, just more appropriate to southern complexions. Skadi travelled to Italy and Athens, but death in a warm climate didn’t suit her— however, she did it, if not by exposure.”

  “I can’t imagine her being violent.”