The Puffin of Death

by Betty Webb

While reading Tahiti Passion I had grown fond of the I-can-do-it-all heroine. What other series had a female archaeologist who could surf a tsunami, escape hands-bound from a deep well, disarm a knife-wielding attacker, and prove that the Vikings had settled Tahiti—all while wearing designer duds? But writers write what they have to, I guess; they were weird that way. Still, I couldn’t help wishing that when all this was over, Elizabeth would change her mind.

  I wasn’t the only person at our table who felt like that.

  “Elizabeth, you can’t dump Jade!” Judy piped up, shrugging off Tab’s arm. “Reading about a can-do woman like her changed me and I’ll bet it changed millions of other women, too.”

  “Millions, my foot,” her mother snarled, slanting narrowed eyes toward her daughter. “Her last book didn’t even make the best-seller list.”

  “Okay, that is it,” Oddi said, taking away Lucinda’s Katla’s Kiss. “You have had enough.” He set the drink down the table, where Ben Talley snatched it up.

  Since I expected an explosion, I was shocked to see Lucinda’s smile. “Oh, you!” she said, snuggling up against Oddi’s chest. The fact that he wrapped his arms around her and gave her a hug shocked me further.

  Judy gazed at them in amazement, then shifted her attention back to Elizabeth. “The Jade books made me realize I didn’t have to rely on someone else to make me feel whole. What will girls like me do without her?”

  Elizabeth didn’t reply.

  Enid Walsh broke the silence. “Judy, you always knew how to do things by yourself. You just didn’t realize it. When we get back to Arizona, I think you should…”

  Her husband cut her off. “You know, I think I’ll switch to a Coke. Anybody else? Ulfur’s right over there.” Perry made a big show of waving his arms to flag down the hotelier, who was just then delivering a batch of Katla’s Kisses to a table near ours.

  “On second thought, I’ll have a Coke, too,” I said. “With lots of ice. It’s pretty hot in here.”

  Elizabeth gave me an odd look. “And here I was thinking it was a bit too chilly.”

  “Just Cokes?” Ulfur said when he reached us. “No more Katla’s Kisses?”

  “We’re drunk enough. Say, what’s this I hear about a fox getting at your chickens?”

  Once again Ulfur related the sad story of his stolen rifle and the subsequent decimation of his chicken coop. While he bemoaned the loss of his egg producers, I wondered what Enid’s advice to Judy would have been if Perry hadn’t cut her off: that she should run away from home and join the Witness Protection Program?

  Not that I’d been bypassed by the Interfering Mommy Department. My own mother was just as bad in that way as Judy’s, although I’d always known that Caro did it out of love, whereas Lucinda…

  Shrugging off Oddi’s embrace, Lucinda reverted to type. “You’ve been working with Inspector Haraldsson, haven’t you, Teddy? Always nosing around, always asking questions. You’re doing his dirty work for him!”

  The table fell silent as the other Geronimos gaped at her, then at me. Ulfur, fearing a looming cat fight, stopped moaning about his deceased fowl and headed back to the bar, his berserker loincloth flapping as he fled.

  I tried to look innocent. “Of course I’m not ‘working’ with Inspector Haraldsson. I’m just a zookeeper, here to pick up a polar bear cub. And a fox and a couple of puffins.”

  “Oh, really? Well, I just happened to Google you on my iPhone and discovered that this isn’t the first time you’ve stuck your nose in other people’s business.” She paused to vent a Katla-like burp, then continued. “Funny how you always seem to turn up wherever we go, and don’t give me that old story about you and Dawn being childhood friends. You never even went to school with her. Your rich mother sent you to one of those prissy private schools in Virginia.”

  That’s the problem with the Internet. Anyone can find out anything. Before she started in on my felonious father, I snapped, “Look, Lucinda, if you…

  I never finished the sentence because one of the tourists huddled by the window suddenly shouted, “Hey, I think it’s over!”

  The song-fest ended at sixty-three bottles of beer on the wall when we all rushed to the window. The mist had cleared and old witch Katla had calmed down. The thick plume of smoke which had caused the earlier panic now only emitted a series of weak puffs.

  Confident of their safety, people filed outside to survey the damage.

  “We should be able to see the Ring Road from the next hill over,” Bryndis said. “Ragnar and I are going outside to find out if it’s clear yet. Maybe we can make it back to Reykjavik this afternoon.”

  Eager to remove myself from Lucina’s accusation, however accurate, I followed them out the door, leaving my jacket on the chair.

  I found myself surrounded by a crowd of movie extras and tourists as we tromped down one hill and up the next. The hike wasn’t far, little more than a mile of a fairly easy incline, and after the boozy dining room, the outside air felt refreshing. But when we reached the summit overlooking the Ring Road, we were disappointed. Katla may have quieted, but a cold, thick mist still snaked along the valley floor, obscuring not only the village of Vik but the highway back to Reykjavik as well.

  And as for the “hill” we were on, it looked more like a cliff. Good thing I didn’t suffer from vertigo, because erosion had sheared away the entire western slope, leaving a straight drop of at least two hundred feet down to the flooded Ring Road. The ground beneath our feet being slippery with ice, I backed away from the ledge.

  Bryndis misread my worried expression. “Those are mainly ice particles, mixed with a little ash. As eruptions go, this one is a mere baby.”

  “Or an old witch blowin’ off some steam,” someone cracked, in a thick southern accent.

  I turned to see the director of Berserker! behind me, a Katla’s Kiss tankard in his hand. The ground was no longer moving, but he had trouble standing up straight, which probably had less to do with the volcano than with the four empty tankards he’d left behind at the hotel. Given his condition I doubted any more battle scenes would be filmed today. Not all was lost, however, Next to him hunched a cinematographer, and the camera balanced on his shoulder was whirring away, tracking the mist below.

  “Think we can rent a room for the night?” I asked Bryndis, as we turned away from the summit and started back to the hotel behind a band of Visigoths.

  “Doubtful,” she answered. “But since the hotel is a designated safe place, there will be plenty of pillows and blankets. Ulfur is a good guy and he will do all he can to make us comfortable.”

  Ragnar winked at me. “You can bunk with us, Teddy. Three does not have to be a crowd, if you understand what I am telling you.”

  Bryndis jabbed him in the ribs with her elbow. “Idiot.” But she giggled.

  We were almost halfway back to the hotel when something that sounded like a sonic boom pierced the air. The ground began to shake again, and over a series of following booms, I could hear people screaming. When something—ice chunk? rock?—whizzed by my ear, I dropped to the ground and shielded my head with my hands.

  Katla. The old witch was erupting again.

  It took only seconds to realize that this blast was much stronger than the first. As I lay there cowering, Ragnar tugged at my arm. “Up! Up! We must return to the hotel!”

  Despite the flying ice chunks, I scrambled to my feet. Together the three of us began running down the hill with the rest of the crowd. The ground being uneven and strewn with chunks of lava from older eruptions, we zig-zagged around them, which slowed our progress, and somewhere in all that zagging I lost sight of my friends. I finally spotted them several yards away running next to an astronaut and a couple of screaming tourists, but before I could rejoin them, the forefront of Katla’s wrath reached us, enveloping us in a thick, freezing mist.

  Visibility zero.

&n
bsp; I wasn’t worried about getting lost. There was no ash yet, only suspended ice particles, and I had a good sense of direction. Besides, all I needed to do was follow the screams and I would make it to the hotel safely. Then Katla could spew all the fire and ice she wanted.

  I made good time and continued to keep up with the screaming, when I tripped over an outcropping of ancient lava and fell flat on my face.

  “Ow!” I yelped.

  Before I could get my feet under me, a dark figure rushed out of the mist. Something metallic glittered in its hand.

  “You’re not going anywhere, Teddy,” the killer said.

  Chapter Twenty-four

  “Sorry about this,” Elizabeth St. John said, as she stood above me. “It’s nothing personal. I really quite like you, Teddy, because you remind me of my Jade.”

  Slowly, very slowly, I turned over to face her. If I remained on my stomach, she could stab me in the back and I would have no defense, but facing her…

  “Thanks for the compliment, Liz, but unlike Jade I don’t know how to hotwire a van. That’s what you did the night you drove from your hotel at Reykjavik to Stykkishólmur to murder poor Dawn, isn’t it? Hotwired someone else’s car to keep the extra miles from showing up on your rental’s GPS system? That’s why you were so adamant that Inspector Haraldsson check it, right?”

  Keep her talking, keep her talking.

  Keep her talking and maybe that old witch Katla will blow again and bean her on the head with a block of ice. In case that miracle didn’t happen, I wound my fingers around an uncomfortable chunk of lava poking into the back of my thigh. It reminded me of that old saying, “Never bring a knife to a gunfight,” except I’d be bringing a rock to a knife fight.

  Elizabeth gave me a congenial smile which, considering the circumstances, appeared terrifying. “You’re as smart as Jade, too. Yes, I was going to hotwire a car, even if I had to crack a steering column to do it.” She gave me a sly look. “Damn critics call my books ‘escapist reading.’ They don’t realize how much research goes into them. For Tahiti Passion I actually bought an old junker to practice hotwiring on so I could write one measly little scene. I was all set to do the same thing in Reykjavik when I remembered seeing the night concierge tuck the keys to her Suzuki underneath the sun visor. They’re pretty casual about locking things up here in Iceland. Low crime rate, and all.” She actually laughed.

  If I lived through this, I was going to have a talk with that concierge.

  “But why, Elizabeth? Why kill your husband in the first place? And then Dawn?” I already knew the reasons, of course, but if I had to act dumb to keep her talking, I would play the village idiot.

  “You’ve never been married, have you, Teddy?” She shifted that long steak knife, making the blade horizontal. Somewhere along the line, she’d researched knife thrusts.

  Keep her talking. Keep her talking.

  “Actually, I have been married, but my husband left me for another woman. Same thing Simon was going to do to you, too, right? Leave you for Dawn?” I knew better, but hoped she’d feel the need to set me straight. Murderers hated being misunderstood.

  “Don’t be silly. Simon would never have left me for Dawn. Just like he never would have left me for Adele or any of the others. We had an understanding, remember?”

  “Then it was all about the Powerball money?” I knew better than that, too.

  Her disconcerting smile faded. “Arizona’s a community-property state, just like California. I got half the haul. All of it now, not that I care. But I’m surprised at you, Teddy. I thought you were smarter than that. Then again, you kind of gave yourself away back at the hotel when you wouldn’t let me get you a Coke. Afraid I’d poison you, right?”

  It’s hard to shrug while you’re lying on your back on top of a centuries-old slab of lava but I did my best. “Something like that. But if it wasn’t all about the Powerball money, why’d you kill your husband?” I knew very well why she had, of course, but I was stalling.

  She made an exasperated sound. “You are dense. Oh, well. To be blunt, since that’s what you seem to require, I killed him out of a sense of honor.”

  Exactly.

  It would be next to impossible to spring straight up from my prone position, but the second she made a move, a roll to the side would momentarily put me out of harm’s way. That would give me time to shift to my knees, raise the rock and do what I could. Whatever happened, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

  Still playing dumb, still playing for time, I said, “Honor? I don’t understand.”

  That exasperated sound again. “I really, really overestimated your intelligence! Apparently I have to spell it out for you, so here it is, then, in language you can understand. Winning the Powerball changed everything. Before, I was the breadwinner and I did it in style. Simon was satisfied with that, or at least I thought so. But then, a couple of years ago, my book sales began to fall off, and it made him edgy. As a CPA, he knew better than anyone that fewer book sales meant smaller royalties. Did you see how few people showed up for my Reykjavik signing? That was a nothing crowd compared to what I used to draw.”

  Were those tears of grief in her eyes? Or were they a reaction to the dense ice-and-ash cloud floating by as Katla burbled and burped?

  “Then my publisher dropped me, and we had to take out a second mortgage. We had to sell…We had to sell….”

  She coughed as an even thicker cloud swirled by. Unfortunately, her discomfort didn’t make her lower the knife.

  “Do you have any idea what it’s like to be famous, Teddy? To see your books on the New York Times best-seller list? To have people stop you on the street and say how much they love your work and ask for your autograph? Then, almost overnight have your books drop out of sight, the accolades stop, your sales plummet, and suddenly you’re a nobody? It’s humiliating!”

  Getting ready. Getting ready.

  “When Simon won that damned Powerball I thought we’d revert back to normal, that everything would be all right. And that’s how it was at first, but then he started drinking and grew those awful sideburns and conducted his affairs right out in the open instead of with his usual discretion, and then…and then…”

  A slight tilt of the knife. Almost time.

  “And then, right after we arrived in Iceland, he told me he was sick of being my go-fer and living in my shadow and that because of the Powerball he didn’t have to do that anymore. Now he had the chance to go out and do his own thing. Do his own thing! He actually used that old canard! He said he was going to divorce me as soon as we got back to Arizona.” Her eyes hardened. “You understand, don’t you, Teddy? I couldn’t allow anyone—especially the man I had supported for so many years—to humiliate me like that. Where was his sense of honor?”

  “Yes, Elizabeth, I understand now. But what about Dawn? Why kill her?” I’d already figured that out, too, but I needed more time.

  “She was blackmailing me, that’s why! For some reason she’d gotten out of bed early that morning, just in time to see me take Ulfur’s rifle off the back porch, where he’d left it after taking pot shots at some fox. I didn’t know about that until the rest of them went to Stykkishólmur, and she called me and said she wanted a million dollars or she’d tell that horrible inspector what she saw. A million dollars! Can you believe it? Well, I know enough about blackmail—there was a blackmailer in Nairobi Passion—to know that it never ends. I told her okay, that although I didn’t have that kind of money on me now, of course, I could give her a down payment, then pay her the rest when we got back to the States. We agreed to meet on the causeway at midnight. We met, all right. I had the Suzuki’s tire iron, and…Well, it’s obvious what I did.”

  Eyes wild, she stopped for breath, then continued. “But here’s the weird thing. I miss Dawn almost as much as I miss Simon! Isn’t that strange? Despite everything, I loved that girl. She was
the daughter I never had.” She raised her knife hand to brush away a particularly annoying tear on her cheek…

  Now!

  I rolled off the lava onto a pocket of grass and lurched to my knees as she came at me.

  Felt the knife slash along my shoulder.

  Raised the rock…

  And bashed the bitch in the head.

  Chapter Twenty-five

  While I had been lying on my bed of lava, Katla kept spewing, and the ash in the air was thickening to a dangerous level. Even though Elizabeth had tried to kill me, I didn’t want the unconscious woman to die, so I turned her onto her stomach, then took off my I BRAKE FOR REDHEADS tee-shirt. I placed it loosely around her head to keep off the worst of the ash. The downside was that I was freezing, but the upside was that I’d worn my best bra, a lacy pink Guia La Bruna knock-off held together by a safety pin.

  Then I left Elizabeth to the temporary mercies of Katla and plunged along the hillside toward the hotel for help. At least, I think that’s the direction I was traveling in. Due to the fallout, I couldn’t see five feet in front of me. The siren at Vik, which had fallen silent while Katla was getting her second wind, shrilled again, but in the fog it blended with the roar of the volcano to create one huge wall of sound. For all I knew, I was running straight for the cliff above the Atlantic. Or just as dangerous, I could be closing in on the sheer drop-off above the Ring Road.

  But I kept running, because there was nothing else I could do.

  Blood loss or not, I had to keep moving, otherwise both of us might die—Elizabeth from slow asphyxiation, me from bleeding out.

  The ground seemed to be levelling off, which meant that I had reached the deep valley between the two hills. Or maybe I’d run cross-wise, and was in the valley at the bottom of Katla’s slope, a terrifying thought. I stopped, trying once again to get a sense of direction. It didn’t help that my brain felt as sludgy as the ground beneath my feet.

  I turned right.

  Suddenly a flash of white and black rose up in front of me. It came so close I could see a yellow, red, and blue-black beak, feel the brush of a dusky underwing. A puffin! The bird flew out of my sight for a moment, then veered back through the fog toward me. It appeared to be having trouble navigating though the dense fog, too.