Nordic Nights (The Alix Thorssen Mysteries)
Page 15
“Do you know who that is? You bumped right into him. What did he say? What does he smell like?” Her hands were gripping my arm, her face inches from mine.
“Who?” I looked around her at the group of tourists again. I thought they were tourists. They didn’t look like locals.
“That is—” She strained to control the volume of her hiss. “That is Harrison Ford!”
“Yeah?” I could see him talking to the shrimpy guy. “So it is.” No wonder his voice sounded familiar.
“God, I hope he smiles. I love his smile.” Maggie sank back in her chair, blissed out.
“Is that other guy the one who played the short robot? What was his name? R2D2?”
Maggie stood up, pulled down her cream-colored sweater tight over her not-that-impressive chest, and straightened her jeans. “I’m going to bump into him now.” She stepped around me. “I saw how you did it. Head down like you’re thinking about something important. Then”—she smacked her hands together—“right into him. I’m going to get a good whiff.”
I sat back and took a drink of Teton Ale as Maggie wound through the group on her way to her pseudo bathroom visit. The cowboy and I exchanged looks. He wore a purple silk bandanna wrapped around his Adam’s apple and was draining his third Pabst Blue Ribbon. I wondered if Maggie had gotten any conversation out of him.
She came barreling out of the rest room like a heifer in heat, her head down, hands in her pockets. All the better to get full body contact. She twisted by three tables, avoiding them at the last moment, her long black hair falling over her shoulder. She didn’t slow as she plowed right into one of the New York women, a very pale, emaciated type with black arching eyebrows and blond-streaked hair. The woman yelped. Maggie sprang back, hand over her mouth.
The pale woman was cursing violently. R2D2 was bent over her injured foot, massaging it Maggie’s eyes swung wildly from the damaged foot to Harrison Ford, who stood at the edge of the chaos, smiling wryly. The insurance agent in Maggie bubbled to the surface at last, and she bent down by the woman, now seated in a chair, and apologized. At that the woman began to slap Maggie on the shoulders with both hands and had to be restrained by R2D2. By this time the cowboy and I were laughing so hard we almost fell off our chairs.
“Maggie? Are you all right?” I kneeled down next to her. She sat flat on the floor now, her legs splayed. The floor was thick with mud, beer, peanut shells, and cigarette butts. “Did she hurt you?”
Maggie blinked up at me, and I winked. “Let me help you up.” I grabbed her arm, swung her upright, and slapped her fanny a few times. “Now. Let’s take inventory.” I turned her toward me and did a systems check like I was a doctor or somebody. I ignored the New Yorker, who sat behind me, muttering things like, “Clumsy bitch.”
When we were done with that, Maggie had rallied. She bypassed the irrational one and spoke to R2 D2, who was at her side. “I’m terribly sorry about all this. If you need anything, don’t hesitate to call me.” She stuck out her hand to the little man. He had intelligent eyes and a cynical mouth. Hollywood, I decided. Harrison Ford’s producer or director or somebody.
“My name is Alix Thorssen,” Maggie said, smiling at Harrison, at the woman, at R2D2 as she stepped away. “I’m in the book.”
Chapter 12
Long is a night, longer are two—
how shall I thole three?
Shorter to me a month oft seemed,
than part of this night of pining.
Two hours later we fell out the door into the bitter cold. Our lungs starved for air, our heads stuffed with beer, music ringing in our ears, we tumbled into the Saab Sister. The headlights were two bright spots on the faded red paint of the Stagecoach’s siding. I looked at Maggie, burst out laughing, still hearing her stomp her feet on the dance floor after the cowboy had dipped her backward. She had thrown back her hair and shouted, with apologies to Sheryl Crow: “This ain’t no disco! This ain’t no cowboy country club! This here’s Jackson Hole!”
She chuckled now, put her head against the low seat, and closed her eyes.
“What the hell were you thinking, girl?” I said, not unkindly, for we had already hashed this out over ale and cowboy jitterbug.
Maggie threw her hands up in the air, held them there, and splayed her fingers outward before dropping them. She never opened her eyes. She had told me inside that she didn’t want them finding out she was in insurance because everybody knows that insurance agents carry big umbrella policies for liability and that makes them lawsuit magnets. Well, sure, I thought. Make me a lawsuit magnet instead.
“They’re not going to sue you, Alix. Didn’t you see her out there trying to dance? She’s just a crybaby. A hundred people saw her dancing after the so-called incident.”
Maggie’s voice fell to a husky whisper. She muttered on for a little bit about Harrison Ford, trying to decide which of his movies was her favorite, confessing she was so glad he finally found the one-armed man. Then I drove her home, found my alley parking spot untouched and unoccupied, and stomped up the back stairs to my empty apartment.
The moon had come up while we danced in the Stagecoach, rising over the valley, lighting up white-spangled fir trees with moonglow. Out the north window of my apartment I could see the edge of the bluff that separated the town from the peaks of the Tetons, sheltering us from the view of grandeur. Why was it that an ugly, hardscrabble mesa covered with sagebrush seemed so beautiful tonight? Snow clung to it in artistic swirls lit by lunar shine. Black dots of sage speckled across it. If I had a view of the Grand Teton out my north window, I would feel truly blessed, maybe the way a movie star feels when everything he ever dreamed of is his for the asking, when money and power bring more privilege than any man needs. But I have an extraordinary view nonetheless. A view it takes special eyes to appreciate. Anyone can appreciate the Grand Teton.
Last year I was dying for a new view. Maybe a little cabin at the base of the mountains, a garden, a dog. Especially a fabulous view, as if having a view made a difference in your life. Maybe it did, I don’t know. But I had my thinking rearranged. Now I think your view comes from inside somewhere, where you plan the kind of person you’ll be and the kind of life you want. Last year, losing someone so close to me, had done that for me.
I put on the old sweats for bed. They were freshly laundered by Una, soft and comfortable, reassuring. Una, in a drug-induced sleep in a sterile hospital bed. Hank, on a lumpy jail mattress with no sheets. Did they give them sheets? Poor Hank.
In bed the moon shone in brightly through the square-facing window. I pulled back the shutters and let it light up the blue-and- white quilt on my bed. I slept in the bed alone, for the first time in over a week I stretched out my arms across the double bed, my feet down to the end of the blankets. The cool sheets against my toes felt grand, the pillows soft and familiar. My own bed, alone.
It shouldn’t feel so good. But it did.
I looked through the cracked door of Una’s hospital room the next morning at ten, a white sack of muffins from the Bunnery under my coat. My body had insisted, because of exhaustion and the comfort of my own bed, that I sleep until nine-fifteen. I had only enough time to shower and grab a coffee to go, along with the muffins. If only those blackened sacks under my eyes proved I’d had a good night’s sleep.
The sun streamed into Una’s windows, a blinding reflection off the white snow that blanketed the town. Past the white lawn, sunlight glared off windshields and chrome in the parking lot. I pushed open the door and poked my head in. “Mom?”
“Yes? Come in, come in,” she called, sounding cheery. She smiled broadly at seeing me, accepted a chocolate-cream-cheese muffin, and sat up as I plumped her pillows. We dispatched the niceties and bit into our muffins. By that time my curiosity about what Hank had squirreled away in the pickup was brimming over. My mother, on the other hand, seemed to have forgotten our conversation completely. Maybe she was half asleep and didn’t remember me calling. Finally, I had to ask.
“What’s happened? What was stolen?”
“Remember last summer, when we went on that archaeological dig at Fort Union?”
I nodded; how could I forget? I saw the slides of that trip just this week.
“Something happened,” she continued, “at that dig that was quite unexpected.” She sat back on her pillows, her hands still in her lap. “I was really bored with it all, the digging with a teaspoon, the tiny squares marked off with string. At first it’s exciting, but then it is so tedious they have to get a new batch of volunteers every week, or they’d all be batty. It was Friday, our last day, except Hank wanted to stay over and help on Saturday. I had plans to go see Marquis what’s-his-name’s house on the Missouri River, Teddy Roosevelt’s friend? Anyway, Hank was digging away with one of the archaeologists from the National Park. I wandered off.
“I walked about a half mile down the river. You know where Fort Union is, where the Yellowstone and the Missouri come together? In North Dakota but in spitting distance of the Montana line.”
I nodded, hoping this story was going somewhere.
“Anyway, I’m walking along, enjoying the sunshine, minding my own business. I sat down under an old cottonwood tree, very shady, nice. I see that there are lots of interesting rocks, flat and round or square. I’d been looking for some rocks as we traveled around, for my patio and my garden. We always picked up a few.
“I found this one that was very smooth and seemed perfect. It was stuck half in the ground. So I walked back, and on Hank’s break I took him back there. We dug it out of the ground and turned it over. Hank saw it first.” Una opened her eyes. “Sometimes I wish I’d never found that rock.”
“What was on it?”
“That writing. Runes, like we were talking about. Old Norse lettering.”
“Runes? Carved on the rock?”
“That’s right. At first I thought it was just scratches, weeds, roots, worm tracks or something. But Hank was right. They were letters, carved into the stone. It was a slab, like the Ten Commandments.”
I frowned at my coffee. “Did he have it translated?”
“Partially. He thinks it’s authentic.”
“Authentic what?”
Una looked away, out the window, squinting into the light. “He thinks it’s from the Viking days.”
I blinked up at her, uncomprehending. “What?”
Una pressed her lips together and nodded, now looking me in the eye. She didn’t believe it either, but she wouldn’t say anything against Hank. Not now while he’s in a heap of trouble.
“I see,” I muttered. “Viking-era runestone. Uh-huh.” I sipped my coffee. “Does it have a date on it?”
“Of sorts. They didn’t use exactly the same calendar, he says. He says he needs more experts to look at it. But ones he can trust not to blab about it prematurely.”
“And verify that it is what he thinks it is,” I added. “That makes sense.” For Hank that was right up there on top of the sense-o-meter. “What makes him think it’s that old? We’re talking about a thousand years ago, give or take a century.”
“It mentions King Magnus. Hank says it was King Magnus who sent out the expedition that ended up carving the rock found at Kensington.”
“In Minnesota? That big stone?” She nodded. Hank had been talking about the Kensington Stone so much for the last year, I was even starting to believe in it. “What else does it say?”
“Not much. Hank thinks it was written by the last survivors of that party. Maybe they were captured by Indians. That’s what Hank thinks.”
“How big is it?”
Una raised her broken arm and the good one, about twelve inches apart. “About eight inches wide, an inch or two thick. Not big, really. Not much room for a long inscription.”
I stood up and stared out at the blinding morning. My head immediately felt like it had been skewered. A Viking runestone, for Pete’s sake. And yet a man was dead, a man was accused of murder, and my mother had been run down by a truck.
“Did Glasius know about this stone?” I asked.
Una nodded. “Hank told him that afternoon. He showed him the stone, and Glasius was able to read some of it, not much. Some of it was faint, hardly readable at all.”
“Who else knew?”
“No one,” Una said, her eyes wide. “He told no one.”
“What about experts?”
“Oh, yes, two experts. One he sent a letter to. He lives in Sweden. The other one is a professor in Wisconsin who studies Old Norse.”
“What did they say?”
“We still haven’t heard from the man in Sweden. At a museum, he is. The professor was very excited. He thinks it proves that the Kensington Stone is real. With all the new information about the Kensington, this really confirms that Vikings were here first.”
I sat down again, crumpled up my muffin cup, and threw it in the trash. “That’s important to Hank, isn’t it? Proving that the Vikings were first.”
She cocked her head. “Sure, it is.” Frowning, she continued: “But not so important he would lie or put Glasius in danger or—”
“Or what?”
“Or kill Glasius. He would not kill someone over that stone. I know him, Alix. He wouldn’t.”
“I know that, Mom.”
She checked me out. “All right.”
“But somebody did. And somebody seems to have run you down after stealing this rock carving. Have you named it? Or do we just call it The Rock?”
“Hank calls it the Viking Vindicator, but that’s too long, don’t you think?” I smiled. She added, “So I call it the Union Rock.”
“That’s good. Nice and short,” I said.
She settled back in the pillows, pleased. “I thought so.”
“How about Union Rune-ion?” She looked at me, puzzled. “Just kidding. What’s the name of this professor?”
“Breda. Harvey Breda, University of Wisconsin. Are you going to call him?” Una said brightly. The effect of the stone was to make people eager and alert, if nothing else.
“Should I?”
“Oh, yes. By all means. He can tell you all about it, Alix.”
I held the door open, one last muffin in the sack. Una didn’t want it, too tempting, she said. I asked, “Have you talked to Hank? About the accident, I mean.”
Una cast down her eyes. Her hair looked freshly shampooed, fluffy and coiffed. For an injured person she looked damn good. “No, I should have called him, but I didn’t want him to worry. He will be worried when I don’t come see him today. They want to keep me one more night. Now they want more X rays of my ankle.”
“Do they think it’s broken?”
“I’m not sure. You know doctors. They never tell you what you really want to know.”
“I’ll go see Hank. Okay?”
Una nodded, smiling at me gratefully. “Tell him I love him, will you?”
I left Una tripping through the usual Sunday television fare, fishing shows, talking heads, infomercials, right-wing fundamentalists. Whoever her doctor was, I wanted to kiss him. Keeping Una another day was a stroke of genius. I could see us now, hobbling up and down the steep, narrow steps to my apartment. Knowing she was well cared for and resting easy meant a lot to me.
Going to see Hank again, though, did not ring my chimes. And I certainly wasn’t going to convey my mother’s love. Part of me flipped, twisting, as she said she loved him I had never heard her say that. It was unusual for Una to express love in such an offhand manner. She rarely, for instance, told me she loved me. Maybe I should get myself arrested.
I drove home, made a pot of coffee, and put in a call to Professor Harvey Breda at the University of Wisconsin. He was ice fishing, his wife sai
d, but would call back this evening if he could. I explained a little about who I was, without giving out too much information about Hank. Then I called Erik. My brother would be sleeping late, but he had a two-year-old at home. Willie answered, after some knocking of the phone to the floor: “Hello?”
“It’s Aunt Alix, Willie. How are you?”
Silence. He didn’t remember me from last summer. That was probably good, since I was practically catatonic when he was here.
“Willie?”
“Huh?”
“Is your Daddy there?”
“Sleepin’.”
“Can you wake him up? I have to talk to him.”
Clunk. Phone falls to the floor again. Patter of little feet. Minutes pass. Then more minutes. I consider hanging up.
“Hello? Yeah. Who’s this?”
“Erik, it’s your sis. Did I wake you?” I grinned.
“No, you didn’t wake me. I’m still asleep, can’t you tell?”
“Got any good jokes for me?”
He groaned. “Too early, X. You wouldn’t believe how hard it is to round up a hundred octogenarians and get their clubs and rides and dinners sorted out. I have a killer headache.” He cleared his throat and rustled bed sheets. “What’s happening? What time is it? Where am I?”
“It’s past ten. Listen, Erik, Mom’s in the hospital. Nothing serious, just a broken arm and a twisted ankle.”
“Shit, did she fall?”
“She got sideswiped by a pickup truck.” He cursed a few times to show he cared. I continued: “Do you know anything about Vikings in the New World? You know, before Columbus?”
“Well, sure. They were here. There are foundations of buildings in Newfoundland, with nails and stuff from the Old World.”