In Valhalla's Shadows

by W. D. Valgardson

  She picked up the cinnamon bun as if she hadn’t said anything extraordinary and got syrup on her hand. She looked for a napkin and, not seeing one, licked the syrup off her fingers. He got two sheets off a roll of paper towels and handed her one.

  “Albert says there was just you with her. Nobody else in sight. Nobody knows anything much about you. You got kicked out of the Mounties.” He went to protest, but she waved his protest away. “I’m not saying you did it, but that’s what people are saying—he’s young, why’d he get kicked out of the Mounties, what’d he do? You’re a stranger. Strangers do bad things. That makes everything easy, you get my drift?”

  His chest tightened. Slowly, he let his breath out. “My DNA’s on her,” he said. “I had to touch her to see if she might still be alive. You have to do that. It’s hot at night; her body would cool down slowly. Rigor mortis takes time to set in when it’s hot.”

  Sarah studied him over her glass of tea and her face looked large and threatening, the way he thought the faces of the troll wives looked when they were getting ready to eat children.

  “She was cute. There are men who like little girls, you know what I mean?” She saw the dark look on his face and held up her hand with the cinnamon bun in it. “I’m not saying. I’m just warning you. You need to know what people are talking about. If anyone gives you a funny look, you’ll know why. Don’t shoot the messenger.”

  “Bloody gossip,” he said, but he knew she was right. People never wanted to blame uncles and grandfathers and friends for molested children. It unsettled things, made them uncomfortable, forced confrontations, changed relationships. It was safer blaming a stranger. “What should I do?”

  “It’s not what you should do. It’s what you shouldn’t do. Like you shouldn’t ask questions. Don’t go prying into people’s lives. You weren’t born here. You first come here because of Oli’s death, and then you come and his wife dies. Then Angel dies. People think that’s peculiar. You make people nervous, and they won’t want to do business with you.”

  He drummed his right thumb on the table. It was an old habit that used to irritate his mother. He put his hand into his pocket and grasped the piece of broken taillight.

  “What are people so afraid of?”

  “Everything,” Sarah said. The cinnamon bun was thawing, but instead of biting into it she began to unwind it, breaking off small pieces and putting them in her mouth. He did the same, and the cold, sweet pastry felt good. “When you haven’t got much, you’re afraid of everything. A fine for doing some little thing to make a buck and there’s not as much for groceries.”

  “Why would I report anyone?”

  “There’s a rumour that if you report to the cops, you get a piece of the fine.”

  “That’s crazy. Nobody gets a piece of anything.”

  “You’re tied to three deaths.”

  “She probably took something she shouldn’t. People are taking pills laced with fentanyl every day. ”

  “I doubt it. Ben has done his best to keep her away from that sort of thing.”

  “I don’t lust after little girls,” he said, and he nearly added, “Big girls, either,” but that was just the anger, anger at Sarah for bringing the message, anger at Sally, anger at his mother. “I’ve been trying to stay out of it. It’s none of my business. It’s like you said, it’s not my town. It’s not like Ben is a bosom buddy. I never met Angel.” He said it tight voiced, bitter; his perfect retreat was falling apart all around him.

  “What people have got, they’ve got. It’s like a wolf gorging on a moose. It doesn’t mind others helping themselves, but if all it’s got is a bone with a few scraps of meat on it, it won’t let any other animal close.” Sarah was watching him to see if he understood. There was a quietness about her, an ability to sit still and watch, and he wondered if she’d learned that in the bush, waiting hours on end for animals to appear, for storms to end, for ice to freeze or melt.

  He stared at the place in the kitchen ceiling where the plaster had fallen out, let what she said sink in, thought about it and realized he was no different. When Anna had more places than he could clean, he’d had no problem with her giving jobs to other people, but when there weren’t many apartments coming vacant, he didn’t want to share. Those were his apartments to clean, and she always knew she could keep him from asking for a raise by mentioning that others had come by looking for cleaning work. He knew that when he cleaned Anna only paid him a portion of the fee. She kept the rest for herself. Management expenses, she called them. “You gotta get paid to be the boss,” she said.

  “Albert was there before me. He told me he’d already done one circuit. Does he groom kids?”

  “Groom kids,” she repeated, thinking about it. “He’s never been married. Kids sometimes go to watch him carve. Sometimes he’ll carve a toy for them.”

  “Treats? Candy? Cold goat’s milk?”

  Sarah laughed out loud. “He thinks goat’s milk is the cure for everything. He makes cheese out of it. Drinks it every day. Sometimes the kids will drink it to be polite. I never heard that any of them like it. You think he’s a pervert?”

  “I came here to get away from this crap,” he said, and he felt pursued, as if all the eyes of the people he’d seen in alleyways, in Dumpsters, under old blankets and plastic sheets sleeping in doorways, were watching him, waiting to see what he would do to their packsack, their grocery carts full of garbage bags holding their worldly possessions, their dogs, dogs as unkempt as their owners, watching him, knowing his secrets, secrets even he didn’t know about himself.

  Sarah gave a tight smile. “Did you now? You thought it would be better here? Karla won’t sell the kids booze, so they sniff gas. People want stuff, they find it. People sell beer out of the trunk of their car. It pays for gas and their own booze. You got something against people showing initiative? It’s all about taxes. The government doesn’t care if you drink yourself to death, just so they get the taxes. Did you ever think about that? You weren’t a law enforcer; you were a tax collector.”

  “You’ve got a lot of opinions,” he said, and his voice was colder than he intended. Her words hurt because he knew there was some truth in what she was saying.

  “I’ve watched a lot of crap that goes on. Selective enforcement. You know about that?”

  He gave a quick nod. He’d seen a lot of it too. If you were Aboriginal and a pain in the ass, you might end up outside the city in the middle of winter without your boots. You didn’t even have to be Aboriginal. Just an annoyance who couldn’t afford to hire a high-priced lawyer. You could end up in a wagon with a street person known to be violent and by the time you got to the station, have the shit beat out of you. There was ass-kissing for the people from good neighbourhoods and ass-kicking for the others. He shoved the thought away and said, “There’s an old crib there. Do you think anyone could use it?”

  “It probably isn’t legal anymore. Besides, no one would want it. Bad luck. Their baby dying and all that. One last thing,” she said as she got up to leave. “Keep your pecker in your pants. Don’t make any more enemies. The local boys don’t like the competition.”

  He wondered if she had anyone in particular in mind, and after she left, he wished he’d asked.

   Chapter 12

  Beginning

  From where he stood on the north side of the harbour, he could see the full crescent of the beach that swept to a broken rocky point more than a mile and a half away. At times, the shore was like a string that held together a necklace of brightly coloured tents, but this morning there was just a small red tent, then nothing until almost the end of the beach, where there was a cluster of vans and tents of various sizes and colours. Many of the locals were unsure of him, suspicious, and he thought it would be a good day to see if Angel had gone north, drawn by the fires and the presence of other young people.

  Except for a few clouds that looked
like small white islands, there was clear blue sky to the horizon. The sun was hot. He walked north on the sand. As he walked, he breathed deeply, slowly in and out. No purposeful striding, no rushing, no being angry. It scared people, made them uptight, uncommunicative.

  Two young guys with wild hair were sitting outside the first tent, nothing on but shorts and strings of beads around their necks, each with a bad case of sunburn, pieces of white skin on their arms and backs. They were getting an early start on the beer they’d lined up in the water at the edge of the shore. They had aluminum and canvas loungers with hoods that could be raised to fend off the sun.

  “Hey,” the blond one said. He’d been reading a paperback. He put it down on his stomach.

  “Hey,” Tom replied and dragged over a piece of driftwood to sit on. They’d made a fire pit by piling beach stones in a circle. There was grey ash and charred wood in it. They were using a cast-off shelf from a refrigerator as a grill.

  “Do I know you?” the dark-haired one asked. He’d been working on a crossword puzzle.

  “I live over there,” Tom said, pointing back toward the trees obscuring his house. “I’m friends with Ben, the guy who has a freight business. You know him?”

  They both shook their heads.

  He held out the picture of Angel. They both leaned forward to look at it. “This is his granddaughter. Have you seen her around lately?”

  “Cute,” the blond said. “Nope.”

  His dark-haired partner shook his head.

  “She died in an accident a couple of days ago.”

  “Is that what the cops were about?”

  Tom nodded.

  “Bad stuff,” the blond kid said. “What happened?”

  “Don’t know. I thought maybe she’d had too much of something.”

  “Not here,” the dark-haired one said. He kept peeling off bits of skin as they talked. “We’re into beer. Light beer, dark beer, German beer, Mexican beer.”

  “You a cop?” the blond one asked.

  “No. Just a friend of Ben’s. She was his granddaughter.”

  The blond kid sat up, reached over to Tom, took the picture, studied it. Shook his head.

  “You don’t go to the store for stuff, flirt with the girls working there, chat them up?”

  They looked at each other, shook their heads. “We’re not exactly welcome there. We don’t spend enough money. The owner doesn’t want us hanging around. You know, no shirt, no shoes, no service, no long hair. We might offend the big spenders on the yachts.” The blond kid sounded annoyed. “The locals aren’t exactly friendly.” He said it with a sense of injustice, still expecting people to judge him by his innate values instead of the way he looked or how much money he had.

  The dark-haired kid took the picture, studied it. “I’m not sure, but maybe I saw her on the beach one night. Hard to tell. It’s dark, a campfire. People around the fire; people behind. People in the shadows. Not here. Down there. The Volkswagen and the other vans. Maybe. Maybe not. Don’t say I said so. We don’t want any trouble.”

  Tom thanked him. The kid could just as easily have said nothing, played dumb, dismissed Angel as none of his concern. Instead, he had listened to what Tom said and, despite not wanting to be involved, offered what he could. It was more than many would have done.

  They weren’t very old, Tom thought. Maybe nineteen or twenty. Still a bit scrawny. Young enough to sleep in a tent, wash in the lake, drink beer for breakfast, hope to get laid, mostly just hang out and talk about the world’s injustices and how they’d make films or write great novels. Their old Ford pickup was parked in the scrub behind the beach. He envied them, wished he’d had a time in his life like that.

  He started down the beach. The water was so still that the line where it met the sand might have been painted in place. There were freshwater clamshells lying on the limestone. Most of them were shattered by the waves that had cast them against the rocky beach. The inside of the shells shimmered with a translucent purple light. The beach was twenty or so feet wide. Mixed forest started at the edge of the high-water mark. Tamarack, moose maple, spruce, high bush cranberry, Saskatoon, the occasional white birch. Below that, the waves had scoured the limestone beach clean.

  Behind the beach were crumbling limestone cliffs, no more than two or three feet in places. In other places the cliffs were ten or twelve feet high. Their surface was weathered away, so the layers of limestone were uneven. Grass and bushes grew in places where soil had gathered in the cracks above the reach of the waves.

  As he picked his way over the broken limestone slabs that had fallen from the cliffs, dragonflies—some golden, others large blue—flitted around him. Anna had called the blue ones darning needles. The light reflecting from their bodies turned them to lapis lazuli and gold. Here and there, a few red dragonflies darted about. He’d seldom seen dragonflies in the city, except over Anna’s rooftop garden. Or where buildings had been torn down long enough ago for flowering weeds to have grown up through and over the rubble. He thought the dragonflies were beautiful and held out his hand, hoping that one would land there so that he could hold it close to his face to study its intricate design.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a movement on the broken front of the cliff and went to look. There were garter snakes sunning themselves. He’d been told about garter snake dens in the crevices and holes of the rocks, where in dark subterranean lairs they gathered in winter in great balls, hibernating on the edge of life and death as they waited for the sun’s return. The garter snakes had yellow stripes along their sides. Many were small, but others were at least three feet long. Some were stretched out on the sun-hot rock, but others were coiled, and as Tom moved closer they could feel the vibrations in the rock, and he could see their heads immediately rise up. One snatched a blue dragonfly out of the air.

  Farther down the beach was a driftwood lean-to and the cluster of vehicles the dark-haired kid had pointed out. Most beach campers were couples, or maybe two couples, but this was a larger group than usual. It looked organized, and he wondered if they were part of the Odin group he had heard mentioned. Modern-day Vikings, Asatru maybe, people who believed in the ancient gods. But then he remembered that the movement was started in Iceland in the 1970s and dismissed the idea, because he’d been told there were permanent buildings and the local sect had lived just outside Valhalla since the 1930s. This looked more like a group of drifters and grifters, more like modern-day gypsies.

  As he got closer, a woman in a blue shift saw him. She studied him for a moment, then bent over to speak into the lean-to. Heads popped out and people gathered to stand and watch him approach. By the time he reached them, he had a welcoming committee of ten adults. A couple of small kids were running around naked. He hoped they had sunblock on their sensitive parts.

  A man with a beard and dark dreadlocks down past his shoulders took the lead. The dreadlocks were threaded with brightly coloured beads, and a seagull’s feather was fitted over his left ear. He was tall and thin, wore half-frame glasses, a multicoloured vest and loose white pants that stopped at his knees.

  “Is there something we can help you with?” he asked. Although his voice was soft and offered assistance, his eyes were hard and wary.

  Tom played it straight. He’d dealt with groups like this before. They were a community; they’d support each other. Everyone outside their little group was the enemy. They lived by their own rules. It was in their expressionless faces, the way they looked him over. He gave them his name, asked the leader his name and managed to get that it was Jason, no last name. Today, Tom thought, it was Jason, tomorrow Robert or Barney or Zacharias.

  He showed them Angel’s picture. “I’m looking for anyone who has seen her lately.” Jason took it, studied it, handed the picture to the woman standing beside him. The picture made the rounds. Everyone glanced at it and said nothing, but the eyes of a couple of people b
etrayed them. Their eyes opened wider, and they glanced at whoever was beside them before turning their faces into masks once again.

  “She’s not here,” Jason said.

  “I know that,” Tom answered. “She’s dead.”

  “Cop?”

  “Friend of the family.”

  “Cop.”

  “Used to be. This is personal. I’m friends with her grandfather. She was living with him. She wanted to be a musician. Liked playing, singing. I heard you guys have a bonfire in the evening and sit around and play and sing. She’d have liked that.”

  “Accident?”

  “Probably.”

  “When?”

  “Two mornings ago.”

  Jason shook his head. “She wasn’t here two nights ago.”

  “She’d been?”

  “I don’t remember her.” Jason half turned and looked at everyone, but they all remained stone faced. They didn’t want any trouble. He hoped he hadn’t spooked them. They might just up and leave. There was nothing to stop them. They’d scatter here and there—God knows where. California, Montreal, Mexico. Picking fruit in the Okanagan, selling crafts at fairs. There were dream catchers hanging in the window of one of the vans and prisms in another. A rainbow of light lay over the limestone. One of the little boys peed on the beach.

  “She was a good kid.”

  “That’s all?” Jason asked.

  Tom shrugged. “Yes. Her grandfather asked me if I could find out what happened, where she’d been. It helps to know. Anyway, thanks. Knowing she wasn’t with the two guys in the tent closer to the village and knowing she wasn’t here helps shut off this direction.”

  “You going to live here?”

  “Yeah. Retired. Bad leg.” He knew they’d have seen his limp as he’d come up the beach. “I had a young woman come to the house to sell me some fresh vegetables. I think she said she was from Odin. Are you Odin?”