Nordic Nights (The Alix Thorssen Mysteries)

by Lise McClendon

  I asked about her brother? “Who—Bjarne? He is her brother?”

  “Not real brother. She meets him, make me angry. She likes to keep me angry.”

  I frowned, remembering dinner at Luca’s, the reception, kissing him in his room. “I was with Bjarne that night. Are you sure?”

  “It was late, midnight. They always meet late. They think no one sees them. But I see.”

  “What did they do?” My voice squeaked; I had to know.

  “Talk, whisper. I never hear them, but I can see.”

  “Then she came back to the hotel?”

  “The two men show up a little before she gets back. That man stays. I thought he was gone, he is so quiet. But she finds him.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I not hear all of it. They talk quiet. Then I hear her unlock the trunk.”

  “The trunk?”

  “Big trunk. Like magicians escape from. She puts her clothes in it.”

  “Why would she unlock it for Glasius?”

  He slumped against the red-and-gold bedspread again. “To give him the runes.”

  I blinked. “Just like that?”

  He nodded. I could see he was crying now, tears staining his jacket sleeves. “She would give away the runes, our runes. They mean nothing to her. I mean nothing to her.”

  I set my hand on his shoulder. “It must have been an—an exchange,” I mused aloud. Now we knew what she wanted more than the runes. And Glasius had that information. “Then what happened?”

  He wiped his eyes against his sleeves. “All these thoughts were in my head, that she didn’t love me, that she loved her brother, that she would throw me away like a piece of garbage, a toy, something she had grown tired of. I went out the door to the hall. Her door was locked. I went back in my room and unlocked the connecting door.”

  I held my breath. His was getting quick as his pulse raced, remembering the hatred—and the love—he felt for Isa that night.

  He raised his head, wet streaks down his cheeks, and stared at the far wall. “I never meant to hurt her. But there was something in my hand. I raised it. He was there, holding the box of runes. Our runes. She never said a word, I remember. Her face had the sweetness of an angel on it. I never meant to hurt him, but he was taking our runes, taking her from me. He fell, and she looked at me like I was a child. A stranger. I took the box from his hands and handed it back to her.”

  His voice choked. He began to sob again, all the spent emotion of the night his world fell apart running down the polyester bedspread. I sat on the edge of the bed, letting my hand slide from his shoulder, letting him cry. Five minutes passed before the connecting door to the next-door room opened, and Danny Bartholomew stepped in.

  He looked as fatigued and satisfied, and yet as sad, as I was. He cocked his head, watching Peter cover his head with his hands and curl into a tighter ball, hoping to disappear, to contract and melt away so that the pain, the guilt, would end.

  I raised my eyebrows to Danny, looking at the headphones with dangling wires he carried in one hand. Danny nodded silently. He had recorded it all. I looked around him, peering into the dimly lit hotel room. Where was the cop?

  The telephone rang, making me jump. I circled the bed and sat down with my back to Peter. “Yeah?”

  “Seen anything?” Maggie whispered.

  “What do you mean? It’s all over.” Behind me Peter rose from the bed and walked to his box of runes, fingering them lovingly. Danny stood in the doorway still, leaning against the frame for support.

  “You mean he’s there?”

  “You must have missed him. Although I don’t see how. There aren’t—”

  I stopped as I heard the oof! sound. Danny falling backward, hands cycling, cords flipping up into his face.

  “Hey!” I said and stood up. Peter’s legs disappeared around the corner of the closet. “Wait!” I threw the phone down on the bed and rounded the closet in time to hear the clicks of the deadbolt. And to see him run out the door, the runes under his arm, the way he had come in.

  “Peter! Julio!” I called in the hallway. “Wait!”

  His long stride had him to the stairway entrance. I ran down the hall and threw open the heavy fire door. As I looked over the railing, the door on the landing below shut with a thud. I could run after him, but for what? I was in socks, it was January, and this was Wyoming. Danny heaved up behind me.

  “He’s gone,” I said.

  Danny gasped for breath, shaking his head. “Not for long.”

  Chapter 22

  Peter “Julio” Black was picked up trudging along Interstate 80 near Rock Springs after being left at a truck stop by a semi driver with a load of cattle. The driver would have taken him to Omaha, but Peter turned out to be a vegetarian. When he found out the cattle were headed for slaughter, he began to walk. A mile along the interstate, crashing through crusty snow, pelted with mud and gravel by passing automobiles, cold and exhausted, he was almost grateful when the Wyoming Highway Patrol spotted his red jacket and took him into custody. Roscoe Penn agreed to take his case pro bono, and I took back everything I ever thought about the Flamboyant One. Roscoe thought Peter had a good chance for a second-degree or manslaughter plea, heat of passion and all that.

  We heard about Bjarne two days later, in the evening while we huddled at Luca’s house. She had been so kind as to take in Hank and Una, let them have her spare room and a little privacy to lick their wounds and rearrange their thinking about Vikings and the New World. Hank was still upset with me; he could hardly sputter out a word of thanks for rescuing Una. His chance at immortality, the Viking Vindicator, seemed lost forever. I tried to explain that if it was real, as he seemed to think it was, then truth would out. Isa would show it to experts, and he could tell where it was really found. It turned out he had at least some verification: one of the other volunteers on the Fort Union dig, a retired teacher from Kellogg, Idaho, had signed an affidavit that said she had seen the stone a day after it was found. It wasn’t much, but it was something. When I remembered what I’d read about all the trouble the Kensington Stone caused for its finder, the teasing, the finger-pointing, the jokes, I was relieved for Hank. But I didn’t think he’d agree.

  Charlie Frye called about Bjarne that night at Luca’s. The police chief had to apologize for the buffoon he’d placed in the lobby who had let Peter walk right past him while Maggie was in the ladies’ rest room. Charlie was warming up to me again, although he had a few choice words about Danny’s tape and my general arrogance. I was just glad he’d never heard my brother Erik say I had bigger balls than Odin.

  Bjarne was delivered by nameless souls to an emergency room in Bozeman, Montana, with a ragged bullet wound to the thigh. He was delirious with pain when brought in; surgery was necessary. I wondered if he would ever ski again. With information from Bjarne and me, they were on the lookout for the white van, but when it was found a week later in an alley in Las Vegas, the bodyguards and Isa were gone.

  Luca patted my arm as I hung up the phone. “Is everything okay?” Artie stood beside her, emotion flooding his face. He had been frightened off at gunpoint by the bodyguards that day and was still ashamed of not being able to help. His protective hovering now endeared him to me even more.

  I nodded. “Bjarne’s all right. He’s going to be fine.” Except, of course, they would probably miss him at the Olympics. That was his payment for involvement with Isa Mardoll.

  She frowned. “Will they arrest him?”

  “I don’t know. I had to name him in the report about the— abduction, that’s what they’re calling it. The cops don’t understand about the stone. They keep trying to get me to tell them more. Anyway, I felt guilty giving his name.”

  Luca smiled, sadly. “Because he saved you from her. From the guns?”

  I nodded again. And swallowed down a lump in my throat, thinking of Bjarne alone in the hospital. Was she with him? No, she was somewhere planning her grand second act as the finder of the Isa R
unestone. Sister, half sister, lover, whatever she was to him, she had used Bjarne just as she had Peter. As she used everyone.

  The next morning Una sat behind Paolo’s desk in the gallery, sipping coffee. She had come back to finish packing her things; they were going home tomorrow. The sun radiated off windshields of cars parked along the street by the square. Steam rose from hoods and roofs, the sound of cars passing through the slush made long shushing noises. Today was the day the ice sculptures would melt for good. I felt no sadness in that. Reminders of Nordic Nights could be gladly banished from sight.

  Artie and I lifted the first of Glasius’s murals off the wall and maneuvered it into a large wooden crate in the middle of the wood floor. Two customers who had been browsing scuttled out the door.

  “The ambassadors, the Norwegian consulates, went home, did you hear?” I asked. Una and I were still picking at the edges of things, starting over. The embarrassment of revealing feelings had made us awkward.

  “Yes. Nice gentlemen too, very refined.” She sipped her coffee.

  “They want me to take Glasius’s murals back to Oslo.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “How nice for you. You’re going?”

  Artie lowered the lid of the crate into place and went to get a hammer. I crossed my arms and looked at her. “Do you think I should? It would be a long trip away from the gallery.”

  “It would depend on your employees, I guess. Artie seems very able,” she said, awfully polite, as if I were a stranger she was advising.

  “He is,” I agreed. “And he wants me to go.”

  “Then go,” she said.

  I watched her for a moment and thought about ice and cold and winter and the end of it all, spring, when the world had another chance to make it right. “Would you go with me, Mom? “

  Her blue eyes caught mine then she set her coffee cup down on the desk. She looked at the sunlight and the row of drips cascading over the lip of the porch overhang. Her voice was softer when she answered. “I’d love to, Alix, but I can’t leave Hank just now. Not with all he’s been through. And there’s my arm too.”

  I nodded, glad she hadn’t invited Hank along. That was a gamble. “They want me to go next week.” She nodded distractedly. Artie returned with his tools and knelt by the crate. “But there’s something I have to do before I go.”

  “What’s that?”

  Artie began banging away on the nails that held the crate together. I motioned Una back to my office. She sat in my desk chair, while I perched on the extra one.

  She touched the box of runes on my desk, the handcrafted wooden trunk that had been rescued with Peter on 1-80. “What’s this?” She unlatched the trunk; her eyes widened at the intricate silver inlays on the backs of the pieces.

  “The runes from Norway. The ones Glasius wanted. I’m taking them back with me too,” I said. I reached over and shut the box, as if taking a toy away from a child. I knelt down and faced my mother. “Erik has been very worried about you. He called twice yesterday, three times the day before.”

  She stared at me, the corners of her mouth doing a minute twitch. Her silver hair gave her an angelic look, a halo. She turned away and said nothing.

  “Mom,” I whispered, leaning forward, “you have to call him.”

  She looked out the newly replaced plate-glass window at Artie, intent on his work. I got up and pulled the phone over to her. Picking up the heavy old receiver, I dialed the number.

  “It’s ringing.” I held out the receiver. She took it with two hands as if it were a fragile thing, an eggshell, a bird’s nest, a house of cards that might fall apart with the gentlest touch.

  She jerked her chin down and cleared her throat. “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” She wouldn’t look at me. “Is this Willie?”

  I smiled, thinking of my little nephew, his favorite truck and blond mop of hair, his shrieks of delight. The next Thorssen, in a long line of fjord-sailors, searching for the winds that will take them the farthest, earn them Valhalla.

  The journey was all there was, I had decided. The tangled thread of life, extending from mother to daughter, son to grandson. The answers, the end of the thread? I had no answers on this day, and yet it was a good day, an honest day.

  “Willie?” Una said. “This is—” She took a gasping breath. “This is your grandma.”

  She listened for a moment. Her eyes danced toward me. Her lips curled upward. “That’s right. Grandma Una.”

  When she laughed, it sounded like a string of icicles tinkling to the hard ground, the warmth of the sun and a small boy’s aim, shattering their cold, cold heart.

  # # #

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Evidence of Viking explorations in the New World is both indisputable and suspect. Ruins of ancient camps in Newfoundland, a swampy meadow near the village of L’Anse-aux-Meadows, have been verified as dating from around the year AD 1000. But all written Viking evidence has been disbelieved by some scientists even while proven authentic by others. The Vinland Map in the British Museum, an accurate drawing of Viking lands including the coast of North America, and dated AD 1440, has been debunked and, just recently, deemed authentic again by Yale researchers.

  In 1898 a Minnesota farmer discovered a slab of rock covered with runic characters that reportedly proved that Vikings had been bushwhacked by local Indians in the year 1362. The stone became known as the Kensington Runestone and is now on display at a museum in Alexandria, Minnesota. My thanks to the museum for supplying me with information about the runestone. Controversy still swirls around the stone’s authenticity.

  Hoaxes about Viking explorers have a long history on the continent. The Viking Tower in Newport, Rhode Island, once owned by Benedict Arnold, was found to be built no earlier than 1640. In 1952 a drinking horn carved with figures and an inscription found on the shore of Lake Michigan was first thought to be from AD 1317. Later it was revealed to be a tourist trinket from the Reykjavik (Iceland) Museum.

  Did the Vikings sail up the Red River and explore Middle America? Your guess is as good as mine. It’s certainly possible.

  For more information about runes, I suggest the book Runes by R. I. Page, published by the University of California Press in association with the British Museum.

  Most verses heading chapters are from The Poetic Edda, a rich collection of Norse mythology, culture, and verse, attributed to Icelandic scholar Snorri Sturluson (1178-1241) and other chieftains, storytellers, and priests who kept the pagan traditions alive by writing them down. My translation is by Lee M. Hollander, University of Texas Press. Other quotations are from various Welsh, Scottish, and Scandinavian sources of traditional verses and songs.

  Thanks to Kipp, Evan, and Nick, for keeping faith.