Close to the Heel

by Norah McClintock

He disappeared into the old man’s room, leaving me alone with Brynja. She filled a mug of coffee and slammed it down so hard in front of me that it sloshed over the brim.

  “Hey!” I ducked back so none would drop onto my jeans. I grabbed a napkin and sopped up the mess on the table.

  “Sorry,” she said without a shred of sincerity. She took her coffee into the back room and sat down at the computer.

  Her father came out of the old man’s room. “If I make some tea for Sigurdur, will you sit with him until Elin comes?” he asked Brynja. I guessed Elin was the nurse.

  “I’m supposed to meet Johanna,” Brynja said. “We have plans.”

  “I’ll stay with him,” I said. “I don’t have any plans except a shower and a little sightseeing.”

  Einar looked at me as if weighing both my offer and my character.

  “It’s really Brynja’s responsibility,” he said, shooting a disapproving look her way.

  “But I already told Johanna,” Brynja said. “She’ll be here any minute to pick me up. And you heard Rennie. He doesn’t have plans.”

  “Really, I don’t mind,” I said again.

  Einar scowled at Brynja.

  “Thank you, Rennie,” he said finally. “I appreciate it.”

  “No problem.”

  I heard car tires crunching over gravel. Brynja gulped down her coffee and dropped her mug into the sink.

  “That’s Johanna,” Brynja said. “She’s going to borrow an outfit and then we’re leaving.” The doorbell rang, an Brynja ran to answer it.

  Einar put the kettle on and tidied the kitchen while he waited for it to boil. He made a cup of tea.

  “You’ll have to wait until it cools a little,” he said. “And you’ll have to help him with it.” He stood in front of the stove for a moment and glanced from me to the old man’s room as if he was having second thoughts about leaving me to care for him.

  “It’s no problem, really,” I said. “I worked at a nursing home for a couple of months last year. I’m used to old people.” I didn’t see any point in mentioning that the work was court ordered, part of my sentence for throwing apples at an old man who threatened to call the cops on me because I had stolen “said apples,” as the judge called them, from the old guy’s tree. The old guy told the judge that I had no respect for my elders. The judge agreed and came up with what he thought would be an appropriate cure.

  At first I hated being around so many super-old people. They smelled funny. They looked and talked funny when they didn’t have their dentures in. They never heard anything you said the first time. They repeated themselves constantly. They were just taking up space. At least, that’s what I had thought at first. The main thing I discovered? Old people can really surprise you. They know stuff you could never in a million years guess they know when all you do is look at them. Like the old guy who’d been a sword swallower in the circus, and another guy who had done one of the first heart transplants in Canada and could still describe it in gory detail.

  “Really, he’ll be fine,” I said. “I won’t do anything stupid.”

  He looked at me a few moments longer.

  “Elin should be here in under an hour,” he said. “I’d stay myself, but I have to deal with the insurance company, thanks to that boy wandering off on his own and breaking his ankle.”

  “No problem. Give me your cell number and I’ll call you if there’s any problem.”

  He liked that idea. I think he thought it showed responsibility. He jotted it down for me and left.

  The old man’s eyes were closed when I took the tea into his room. I didn’t have the heart to wake him, so I set the tea on his bedside table and sat down to wait. The nurse showed up before the old man’s eyes opened. I told her where the family was and got up to leave.

  “Has he eaten anything?” Elin asked.

  “I don’t think so.” I hesitated. “What’s wrong with him?” I asked. “Is it just because he’s old?”

  “You mean his illness?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, he’s ninety-seven,” she said. “He gave up his practice decades ago.” Grandpa’s letter had mentioned that Sigurdur had been a doctor. “But he didn’t give up farming until last year. Everything stopped for him when his granddaughter died.”

  “Brynja had a sister?”

  “Brynja calls Sigurdur afi, but he’s really her great-grandfather.”

  “So his granddaughter was…?”

  “Brynja’s mother.”

  “Gudrun?”

  She nodded. “He was heartbroken after what happened to her. She drowned, just like her father. It happened just over a year ago—in fact, I think it was a year ago on Sunday.” The day I had arrived in Iceland. The day that woman had harassed Brynja at the gas station. That day, of all days.

  “Gudrun’s father drowned too?” Talk about a hard-luck family!

  “Yes, but not the same way as Gudrun. Njal was a fisherman. It’s a tough job at the best of times. He went out one day and never came back. Sigrid, Gudrun’s mother, was already very ill. Cancer. Gudrun was just a little thing when she died. I think she was five. Sigurdur raised her. He doted on her. Sigrid was his only daughter. Gudrun was his only granddaughter. Now there’s just Brynja.”

  A trembling voice called from the bed. Elin smiled.

  “It seems my patient is awake. Excuse me.”

  I headed upstairs to have a shower. As I peeled off my clothes, I decided I would take a ride into Reykjavik later and poke around. It was the biggest city in Iceland. There had to be something going on. Or maybe I could do a little sightseeing on my own. I was thinking over my options when I got into the shower. I reached for the shampoo and cursed silently. I’d left it in my room.

  I opened the shower door, leaving the water running, grabbed a towel, and hot-footed it back to my room.

  I don’t know who was more startled: me, at finding someone going through my things—again—or the would-be thief who was bent over the open drawers of the dresser in my room and who clearly hadn’t expected to be interrupted while the shower was still running.

  TEN

  “Find what you’re looking for this time?” I asked, even though I could see that she was lifting the journal out of my bag.

  To her credit—well, sort of—she didn’t try to hide it.

  “What is this?” She held it up and looked at me the way a queen would look at some lowly subject she was about to order beheaded.

  “What would your grandfather say if he found out you were snooping where you don’t belong?”

  “What would he say if he found out you betrayed his trust and told me about this journal?”

  “We’ll never know, because that’s not going to happen. Hearing about your little thieving expedition, however…”

  “He won’t believe you.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that,” I said. She looked sure too.

  “My afi knows that I would never betray a trust,” she said.

  She was nervy, I’ll give her that. There she was, doing what she wasn’t supposed to be doing and telling me that the old man would never believe it.

  “You’re a piece of work,” I said. “You act all sweet and innocent around your grandfather, and then you go behind his back and snoop into something when he’s already made it clear he doesn’t consider it any of your business.”

  “And I suppose it’s your business?” Her tone was one-hundred-percent pure distilled snottiness.

  “Someone made it my business.” Oh. “That’s what bugs you, isn’t it? It’s not about who it is. It’s about me knowing something that you don’t. It’s driving you crazy.”

  “If you say anything to my grandfather, I’ll tell him that you told me. He’ll never believe you. Never.”

  Whatever, I told myself. This family’s problems were not my problems.

  So how come I was so angry? How come all I wanted to do was get even with her? How come that’s exactly what I set out to do after she collected
Johanna from her room and left—and after I watched them drive away?

  I shoved the journal in the glove compartment of the Yaris and headed for the grocery store near the gas station. When I didn’t see the woman who had accosted me on my second day in the country, I described her to the closest cashier.

  “Oh,” said the brassy blond. “You must mean Freyja.”

  “The same Freyja who’s been trying to find her husband?”

  “That’s what they say. I don’t know her very well. She’s only been working here for a couple of weeks, and she keeps to herself. But someone said that her husband ran off with a co-worker or a lover or something and that Freyja hasn’t been right in the head since.”

  “Is she working today?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you know where I can find her?”

  “She rents a room from Halbjorn—he has the blue house at the end of town. I guess she would be there on her day off.”

  Freyja was there, all right. She was coming around the side of the house with a calico cat in her arms.

  “Excuse me,” I said, smiling in what I hoped was a non-threatening way. “Freyja?” It felt funny calling her by her first name, but when I’d asked the cashier for her last name, she’d said simply, “Her name is Freyja.” Brynja hadn’t been kidding. People really did call each other by their first names.

  Freyja froze when she saw me.

  “Remember me from the gas station?” I said. “I was with Brynja. I’m Rennie.”

  She looked over my shoulder as if she expected to see Brynja or maybe the cops. When they didn’t appear, she still looked tense.

  “I wanted to ask you about your husband,” I said.

  “Baldur? You want to ask me about Baldur? Did someone send you? Is this a trick?”

  “No one sent me.” I stepped closer and tried to pet the cat. It hissed at me. I backed off. “You asked me to talk to Brynja about him. Why? What do you think she knows?”

  “She knows where he is. They both know.”

  “So why won’t they tell you?”

  “Because they have hatred in their hearts, and it has turned them evil.”

  I stared at her. She spoke calmly enough, but there was a bite to her voice. I wondered if Brynja was right: this woman was crazy.

  The sky overhead was lead gray, and a whipping wind had come up since I’d left the house. I shivered inside my jacket.

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “They think he killed Gudrun, and they think I know it.”

  “Why do they think that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. All I know is that he didn’t do it. My Baldur would never kill anyone.”

  “Mrs…uh…Freyja, I don’t understand. Why would anyone think your husband killed Gudrun?”

  “They blame him for what happened. After she died, he used to stand outside our house and shout that Baldur was a murderer.” He? Did she mean Einar? “He told everyone who would listen that Baldur killed his wife. He said he wasn’t going to let Baldur get away with it. And Brynja—she…”

  “She what?”

  “Brynja was in the same class as my daughter. She made Rakel’s life miserable until she couldn’t stand it anymore. She’s living with her aunt and uncle and going to school in Denmark. She says she never wants to come home again.”

  I wondered why Freyja didn’t leave as well. She would probably be a lot happier in Denmark than she was here.

  “Why don’t you tell me what happened?” I asked.

  Her gold-brown eyes were rimmed with black smudges as if she hadn’t slept well in days or even weeks.

  “Do you really want to know?”

  “I do.” I had nothing else going on, and I wanted to know whatever it was that Brynja refused to tell me.

  Freyja stroked the cat. She started toward the house.

  “Come in,” she said.

  I followed her into a small but tidy house and up a narrow flight of stairs to a room at the back. It was filled with the morning sun and was larger than I expected. To one side, there was a small fridge, a few feet of counter, and both an electric kettle and an electric coffee pot. The smell of strong coffee filled the little room.

  She asked me to sit. She opened a cupboard and took out a couple of cake tins. She sliced some cake from the first one. From the second, she produced some cookies, which she set on a plate with the cake. She set it on the coffee table in front of the small sofa, poured the coffee and asked me how I liked mine. She handed me my cup and settled into a chair opposite me.

  “Baldur used to own a fishing boat,” she said. “A big one. Very modern. When things were going well a few years back, when the boom was on, he decided he wanted to try something different. It was so easy to get loans then, not like today. The banks were practically giving money away.”

  A bank giving money away? She had to be kidding!

  “What I mean to say is,” she continued, “that it was easy to get a loan and the interest rates were low. So Baldur took out a big loan and used his fishing quota as collateral. He used some of the money to improve the house and to get nice things for me and Rakel. But most of it he used for his big dream. He wanted to build a condominium resort for rich local people and wealthy tourists. It would have a beautiful setting, luxury accommodations, excellent restaurants, entertainment, a casino, all the amenities a person could wish for. It would bring jobs and money into the economy. He had people who were willing to invest in it. He was so happy.”

  She passed me the plate of sweets and wasn’t satisfied until I took a cookie. It was dense and buttery.

  “They started to build the project—in the Westfjords. And then, just like that, the bubble burst. The economy collapsed. Baldur couldn’t get the money he needed to finish the project. His investors had all gone broke. He couldn’t repay his loan either, so he lost his fishing quota. We owed far more money than we could ever repay. Baldur was desperate, like so many people. But then a miracle happened, and he found some new investors. He thought everything was going to be okay. Then that woman came snooping around.”

  “You mean Gudrun?”

  “Yes. She was a reporter for one of the newspapers. She started out doing recipes and articles about raising children, that kind of thing. But she was ambitious. The more her husband wanted her to stay home and look after Brynja, the more she wanted to do something important.”

  “Important?”

  “That’s what she used to say. She wanted to be the kind of reporter who breaks stories and grabs headlines. She got it into her head that Baldur was doing something wrong, and she started to follow him and pester him.”

  “What did she think he was doing?”

  “She claimed that he was in league with criminals.”

  “What kind of criminals?”

  “Russian criminals. She said that the people who invested in his project after the crash were financing it with money from drugs and human trafficking. She said they wanted to use the project, the casino especially, to launder money. She even claimed that they were going to use the place to transport drugs from here to other countries. Can you imagine anything so ridiculous? My Baldur would never get involved in anything like that.”

  “Did she have any proof?”

  “Not that I know of. Not that the newspaper ever printed. Not that it even hinted at. Her editor said that he knew she was working on something, but that he hadn’t assigned it to her and that she didn’t want to say what it was until she had the whole story. You see what she was like? She wanted to make a big splash. She wanted to make a name for herself. Instead, she fell at Barnafoss.”

  “Barnafoss?”

  “It’s a waterfall not far from here. They found her in the water below. They say from the bruising, she either fell or jumped and then drowned. Then her husband started accusing my Baldur of murder.”

  Clearly Einar didn’t think she fell or jumped.

  “What did the police say?”

  “They
investigated and said that it was inconclusive—that her death could have been accidental.”

  “Could have been?”

  “The manner of death was ruled as Undetermined. She drowned, that’s all.”

  “So why did Einar and Brynja think she was murdered?”

  “Ah,” she said. She sounded like my history teacher whenever someone asked an unexpectedly relevant question. “At first, they thought it was an accident too. But Einar couldn’t figure out what she was doing at the top of the waterfall. How had she fallen in? He didn’t know what she was working on either—not until Brynja came up with her crazy stories.”

  “Crazy stories?”

  “Apparently she heard Gudrun talking to Baldur on several occasions. And it’s true. Gudrun talked to him. Baldur never denied it. He said she was asking about the development and how it was going and whether it was true that some famous movie stars were thinking of buying some of the units—that kind of thing. She also found out that Baldur wasn’t home that night. She said she knew her mother was working on a story about him and about the Russians he was working with. She’s the one who started all the talk of murder.”

  We were sliding back into the Kingdom of Krazy.

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because she was jealous. Because after Baldur sold his fishing quota, he bought my Rakel all the best clothes and all the latest gadgets. Gudrun didn’t make a lot of money as a reporter, and her father is a tour guide. It’s seasonal work at best. Brynja did it to get back at Rakel.”

  “Einar is convinced that your husband killed his wife because of something that Brynja said out of jealousy?”

  Freyja looked deadly serious as she nodded. “She claims she heard her mother talking to someone before she left the house that night. She says her mother told whoever it was that she was going to confront Baldur with proof and that she was going to tape-record the conversation.”

  “What kind of proof ?”

  “I don’t know. The police didn’t find anything—no proof of anything, no tape recording, nothing like that.”

  I took a sip of coffee. I’m no Sherlock Holmes, but it sure sounded to me like Einar and Brynja had a case. They knew Gudrun was going to meet someone that night. They knew it had to do with the story she was working on. And they knew, because of what Brynja had heard, that Gudrun was going to try to get something incriminating out of Baldur. If I’d been playing ball with the Russian mob, or whatever, and someone was going to expose me, I know what I would have been tempted to do.