Dark and Stormy

by Traci Tyne Hilton

  She didn’t answer.

  We knocked on the Hoffen’s back door, and Megan let us in. She shifted her baby, Geordie, on her hip. “What’s up?”

  “We saw the inspector come in and were hoping we could have a word.” Cadence spoke for us.

  We could see the inspector in the kitchen with a mug of coffee. Dr. Hoffen was seated at the table. They seemed to be in casual, but forlorn, conversation.

  “Sure.” Megan led us into the kitchen. “The girls wanted to see Peter.”

  “What can I do for you?” He had dark shadows under his pale eyes.

  “I found an ax with a lot of blood on it. I left if where I found it, but thought I should come tell you.”

  The inspector— Polisinspektör Peter, I guess, didn’t look surprised. Or alarmed. Or excited. He sipped his coffee. “Where did you find it?”

  “It was in the root cellar, propped against a wall.” Cadence tucked her hands under her arms. It was costing her a lot to give these details, but I still didn’t understand why she thought it implicated Troy.

  “Ja, ja.” He nodded at us, and then sipped his coffee again. “We have seen this ax. It is not blood on the ax. Maybe it looked like it was to you, but it is just pitch.”

  I exhaled. “Pitch?”

  “It is thick and dark, but dry. In the fall somebody used it to chop a live tree, or a tree that had just broken. It is not the murder weapon.” He set his cup down. “But thank you very much for telling us. It is this kind of communication that will help our investigation very much.” His words were kind, and his face was still calm. I almost thought our murder bored him, but maybe he was just worn out from long days of searching the campus.

  “What about the iceblock?” I asked. Did you determine if it was found where the boys put it?”

  “Ja. It was. And as the boy said it broke when he put it there, and the stain has been accounted for. We are looking for another possible weapon.”

  “But are you still having the stain tested? It could be a coincidence that a big spill occurred in the same area as the murder.”

  The inspector gave me a half smile. It almost looked like appreciation. “We are still having it tested.”

  “Well, thank you for your time.” Cadence was breathing easier and inching her way back to the door.

  “Tack så mycket,” I added as I followed her out.

  Once we were far enough away from the Hoffen house, I spoke up again. “But why did you think the ax meant Troy?”

  “The boys were out there, by the well. You saw their flashlights.”

  “But there were four guys searching.”

  “But we confirmed that Troy and Xavier were the ones by the well.”

  “Why leap to the conclusion that Troy was the killer instead of Xavier?”

  Cadence took a deep breath. “Because Xavier wouldn’t have sent a message from my phone.”

  I gave her a long look. Her pause made me think she had another reason. “Is that all?”

  She slowed down but didn’t say anything.

  “Cadence, you’ve got to tell me. If you think there is a real, solid, reason Troy might have done this…”

  “I don’t. I don’t think that at all, only…”

  “Only what?” I admit, I was exasperated and impatient.

  “Surely he’s told the police already. I know it must have come out, but Troy doesn’t have a squeaky clean background.”

  “Okay, but very few people do. What’s the big secret he’s hiding?”

  “It’s not really a secret.” Cadence stopped and sat down on a snowy bench by the front door of the skola. “He shares it when he shares his testimony, but it’s not a daily conversation piece either.”

  I sat down next to her. The bench was damp, but the awning over the porch had kept it relatively free from snow. “Well? Are you going to tell or not?”

  “Troy served time in juvenile detention for assault. More than once.”

  I didn’t respond right away. I knew there was some kind of logical fallacy to jump from “violent youth” to murderous Bible School RA, but I wasn’t sure how to make that case to Cadence.

  Despite her being the person in charge of my social and spiritual well-being while a student at Tillgiven, she looked at me with big, questioning eyes, as though I was the only one who could give her reassurance. “What’s the background on the assault issues?”

  “He was involved in selling drugs, and sometimes that led to situations where he had to fight.” She tucked her fingertips under her legs like she wanted to make herself smaller.

  “Are you saying that he got into bad fights in the heat of the moment?”

  “No.”

  “Ah.” I was beginning to understand, I thought. “He was a thug and had to make the calculated decision to punish someone who crossed him?”

  She nodded. “It was definitely more along those lines.”

  “So technically, his background makes him a person who might be responsible for a cold, calculated murder.” I said it quietly, almost to myself.

  Cadence looked away.

  “Cadence…” I pondered her situation. Troy was her only solid peer at the school. They had matching jobs, had been doing them for a couple of years, and had a background of friendship. They had a playful partnership and seemed to lean on each other. They were both at least a few years older than the average student. It wasn’t a far leap to guess that she might have fallen in love with him. “I can see why you are scared, but you are forgetting three things.”

  She cast a quick glance my way. “The first is that Troy is a Christian now. That’s why the drugs and fighting stuff comes up in his testimony. He’s changed. The second is that he is your friend and would not pin a murder on you by using your phone to set up a meeting. The third, and the one the cops will care the most about…he didn’t have a motive to kill Rolf. No one has suggested any reason at all for Troy wanting Rolf dead.”

  She nodded, slowly.

  I leaned back in the bench and looked up at the vintage beadboard above me. “The one motive that we keep coming back to, and trying to pin on someone, is defense of honor. Rolf was a pig and had a way of accosting girls, even in casual conversation. So if a girl had been a victim of one of his spiked drinks, she might have done it. Or someone who cared about her might have done it in her honor. Did you tell the truth earlier? Did Rolf really never try anything with you?”

  Cadence looked relieved. “No. I swear it. Though we went out a few times, he was a good guy. He never had more than one drink, and I didn’t drink at all. And he didn’t try to get me to. He did kiss me once, but it was actually kind of sweet. Not at all pushy or anything. I didn’t feel a spark, so we didn’t see each other again. This, I guess, was during his reformed stage.”

  “So there you go. The one real motive Troy might have had doesn’t exist.”

  Cadence smiled. “You are making a leap about Troy and I, but I appreciate the thought. The good news is, if I really think about it, Troy hasn’t had his heart set on anyone else either. So…maybe he really doesn’t have a motive.”

  I gave her what I hoped looked like an encouraging grin. But if Troy wasn’t in love with Cadence, and she was in love with him, he wasn’t likely to tell her who he was really in love with. Which meant if Rolf had tried some kind of funny business with the wrong girl, then Troy, with his background in cold hard violence, was suddenly one of the most likely suspects after all.

  But I couldn’t go on guesses. I needed evidence. It was definitely time to find the murder weapon.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Isaac Daniels

  I had stayed in the library and prayed for quite a while after Xavier left. I had been giving too much weight to Dr. Hoffen’s commission. I could not in my own power, with my training and skills, catch a murderer. And as a volunteer teacher at this school, it wasn’t really my job.

  I believed completely in the mission of the school, in the goal for the Julbord, and in the general theory that
as an invested Christian, I should do my best to serve God and help wherever needed—including a murder investigation. But I was getting nowhere. Solving this crime was not going to be the thing that redeemed me in the sight of Dr. Hoffen.

  I would have to have a talk with him.

  I didn’t jump to do that, but picked up the book Xavier had set down.

  I was a few pages in when Dani burst through the door.

  She seemed pretty committed to the whole dramatic entrance.

  I put the book down. “What’s up?”

  She sat on the edge of the table across from me. She also seemed committed to sitting on things that weren’t chairs. It sometimes annoyed me. Of course, I was in the middle of a funk over my own uselessness. I reminded myself that Dani was practically feral, raised in the mountains by people who didn’t see any value in any kind of traditional schooling. I shook my head.

  She narrowed her eyes. “What?”

  “Nothing. What did you need?”

  “You just looked at me like I was some kind of specimen. Usually you look at me like you like me.”

  “You came in here like something was urgent.”

  “Yup. But if I’ve suddenly sprouted horns, please let me know.”

  “Of course.” I tried to smile. She really was cute, and it’s not like my school background was much more traditional than hers.

  “We need to go find the murder weapon. The way I see it, if I have been observing correctly, the police created a grid of the campus and each searched a quadrant. It’s an effective method when the area is large, but not the most effective in the world and likely was hampered by their lack of knowledge of student habits.”

  “You think we can do better?”

  “I think we’ve narrowed down the suspects to Troy, Xavier, and Bel since they are the ones with no alibi. Their motives are iffy, but no one else had opportunity. We know Troy, Xavier, and Bel better than the cops do, and can do a pretty good job of guessing what they would have done if one of them had been the killer.”

  Though I was technically on the edge of resigning from my post, her enthusiasm was enthralling. Her cheeks were pink, her eyes shining. She was poised on the table’s edge like she was ready to dive, all of her muscles tense. I could resign from the investigation, such as it was, after this one last thing.

  “So shall we go alphabetical?”

  “Sure. We can start with Bel. You say one of the splitting mauls is missing. Those are kind of like big axes, right?”

  “Sure.”

  “So even though she’s not particularly athletic, it would swing with enough weight to cause the damage I saw. A cracked skull. He was knocked out and either the injury killed him or staying the night comatose in a below-freezing building did.”

  “I agree. Anyone of us could have swung it hard enough to kill in those circumstances.”

  “So say she decided he needed to die. She went around behind the huset where she knows her brother has been chopping wood. She drags the weapon along behind her until she runs into Rolf. She swings the maul and down he goes.”

  “But what does he do?” I couldn’t picture Rolf just…standing there, waiting for Bel to knock him in the head.’

  “Oh, I don’t know. But let’s not worry about that for now. Let’s think of what Bel would have done next.”

  She could ask me not to worry about it, but I couldn’t picture the scene. Rolf had a wiry strength. He could have disarmed Bel before she got the maul up, much less brought it back down on his head. “Think she’s a runner?”

  “If he had been killed by the woodpile, then I’d say she'd have done it and run, but he was in the dorm, so she had to bring the splitting maul to him, then kill him. I think she would have been methodical about the maul after that.”

  “Then she went out the front door, since the side one was locked, and walked along the trees to keep mostly hidden, until she found a good spot to get rid of the maul.”

  “That’s what I thought. And that’s how I ran into the frozen bras. There wasn’t anything in the trees along the drive.”

  “If Bel had a plan, then she had a plan for where she wanted to drop the weapon, and it wouldn’t have been a chance thing. She would have enjoyed making some kind of point.” I thought for a moment. “She’d have dumped it in the well, I bet.”

  “The cops dragged the well already.” Dani swung her legs like a kid. “However, I think you are on the right track. For our Bel scenario, we need to check every place on campus that has religious or historic significance.”

  “I know the history and layout of all that pretty well. I can take the Bel investigation.”

  She nodded. “Cool. But I want to come. I think this is better done together.”

  “So that’s Bel. What about Troy?”

  “I had a long talk with Cadence.”

  “And?”

  “If Troy did it, it wasn’t an act of passion either. If he overpowered Rolf, which he could have, and smashed him in the noggin, then he also had a plan in place for the weapon.”

  “Troy knows the campus better than most of us. The boys’ dorm is his domain, and he’s done tons of maintenance on this place.”

  “What paths does he normally take?” Dani asked. “When he goes from one job to the next, how does he do it?”

  “Okay…” I was getting into this. Dani made it seem like a puzzle or a logic game. Something that we really could think our way through to the answer. I liked it. “He always takes the shortest path someplace. Usually the gravel paths and not the driveway. The shortest path from the huset, where he got the weapon, to the dorm is the gravel path and across the driveway. If he searched for Rolf by going behind the huset to get a maul and then walked to the dorm, what would he do next?”

  “I watched the lights during the search. I know that there were flashlights over by the kyrka. He might have gone from the door, to the kyrka and then to the woods behind. Something far from the murder, but close enough to get back to the girls’ dorm in a reasonable time.”

  “And not get lost in the storm himself. We can’t forget that the killer was navigating in bad conditions.”

  “Right. So for Troy, we search the woods behind the kyrka.”

  “Where else did you notice flashlights?”

  “Nowhere as suggestive as that, but I might try and sketch out a map in a minute. Let’s move on to Xavier.”

  “If he was the one who went behind the huset to get a splitting maul, he would have taken the most furtive path to the Rolf.”

  “Why do you say that?” Dani asked.

  “I can’t put my finger on it, exactly. But he comes across as likely to be a killer as I do. He’s serious, yes, but that doesn’t make a person a killer. He’s also hardworking. Whenever I see him at all, he’s doing something useful. So he’s either a seriously good actor, making us think he is the model Christian man, or he didn’t do it. If he did do it, he is playing a long con, and that would make him a furtive figure.”

  “I can follow that. So I say that he snuck around the long way from the woodpile to the dorm, did the deed, and then took the weapon to the farthest point possible while still being able to get back to the dorm in a timely manner.”

  “He had a flashlight too. I think you need to make that map.”

  Dani grabbed a piece of scratch paper from the table and a pen from her pocket. She sketched a very shaky map of the school and added stars where she remembered seeing lights. “Let’s take the campus suspect-by-suspect, alphabetical again, taking where I saw lights into consideration while we follow the guy’s most likely path.”

  “Works for me.” I led the way out of the dorm. “Since the most historically significant place on campus is the well, and it has already been thoroughly searched, we’ll go to the second most important place.”

  Dani slipped her hand into mind. “And where is that?”

  “The old bathhouses.”

  She scooted closer to me. “I didn’t know Tillgiven had old
bathhouses.”

  Her hair smelled like peaches. A scent, if Dani were ever to go out of my life, I would forever associate with her. It made me smile. “No? You didn’t? That’s probably because you know them as the sports sheds.”

  There were a dozen outbuildings on the Tillgiven campus. Most of them from its days as a Victorian health spa, when Europeans traveled to take the waters from the mineral rich well. It was only natural that the spa also have Scandinavian steam rooms and bathhouses and things like that. Two buildings on the edge of campus, between the woods and the huset, used to house boilers and large wooden tubs—one hot bath for the men and one for the women. Now they held the Tillgiven soccer teams’ equipment and the canoes and hiking stuff we used on adventure weekends.

  The buildings were locked, but I had the key.

  Then again, Bel wouldn’t have.

  “Before I unlock anything, let’s look around the buildings and for any way that Bel might have been able to break in.”

  “Yes, sir!” Dani saluted and then searched.

  We found nothing.

  I unlocked the buildings. I had been in charge of keeping them organized this fall, and, as far as I could tell, nothing was out of place.

  “What’s the third most historically significant place on campus?” Dani asked as she shut the door.

  “The kyrka. It has been the chapel here since the day the place opened.”

  “But it seems so obvious…and I’m sure I saw the police checking it.”

  “Me too. That’s why we went to the bathhouses first.”

  But we went to the one room chapel anyway and found nothing.

  “Let’s follow Troy’s path now.” Dani said.

  “Good idea. I think we’ve exhausted Bel’s options.” And my interest in Bel as a suspect. She just couldn’t have taken down Rolf.

  “Right. So Troy is the practical, straightforward type, taking the shortest path. He wants to get rid of his weapon. According to my map, he would have been near the well or the kyrka when I saw the flashlight, but we didn’t find anything in either place—and neither did the police. Which also eliminates this as a place Xavier could have dropped it. Not that we are getting to Xavier yet. We are on Troy.”