Close to the Heel

by Norah McClintock

  I was just about to tell him to buzz off—I figured him for some kind of salesman—when the Major grabbed the phone from me and told me to get back to work.

  My pleasure.

  The Major talked—well, mostly listened—for a few minutes. He said he couldn’t make any promises. He said he had to absorb what he’d just been told. He hung up the phone and sat down on the sofa again but didn’t pick up his newspaper.

  “Who was it?” I asked.

  “He says he’s your grandfather.”

  I laughed. “Pull the other one. I know Grandpère’s voice when I hear it.” One big clue: Grandpère Pierre always spoke French.

  “He says he’s your mother’s father,” the Major said. He got up again, picked up the phone and dialed. A moment later I heard him say, “Mel?”

  Secrets.

  Secrets come out sooner or later. Like when Grandma Mel flew back a few weeks later to talk to the Major and me in person about when she was young and working in an art gallery while she finished her dissertation. In came a handsome (according to her) young (according to her) widower with four daughters and a keen interest in art. They chatted. They clicked. He invited her for coffee, which turned into the longest cup of coffee she ever had. They fell in love. Deeply in love. He started to talk about marriage. Then she got a job offer—in France. He didn’t want to move his daughters so far away when their lives were so settled. Besides, he told her, there were plenty of job opportunities here.

  “I hadn’t even met the daughters yet,” Grandma Mel said. “Frankly, the notion scared me. It wouldn’t be just David and me. It would be David and me and four girls, some of them already young women. I took the job and that was the end of it.”

  Except for one small thing that turned out to be my mother.

  “I never told him,” Grandma Mel said. “It would just have complicated things.”

  It did anyway, because the death notice that the Major had placed in the national newspaper had given my mother’s age and named her mother. David McLean had seen it. He’d figured it out. And now I had a grandfather—one who wanted to make the acquaintance of the grandson he never knew he had, the son of the daughter he never knew he had until it was too late.

  “Sorry, Grandma Mel,” I said. “Not interested.”

  “Sorry, Melanie,” the Major said. “If the boy isn’t interested, que’est-ce que je peux faire? What can I do?”

  End of story?

  No way.

  I started getting into trouble. It was small stuff at first—skipping school, blowing off homework, smart-mouthing teachers. From there it went to explosions of rage, mostly taken out in fights with other guys, which I usually got suspended for. That only gave me more time to get into trouble. I started breaking into people’s houses—I don’t even know why. I did it maybe half a dozen times before I got caught. The Major blew a gasket. And I ran. Where to? To the grandfather I never knew I had and who—let’s face it—I’d been curious about.

  It turned out I liked my grandfather a lot. He was superold, his body was slow, but his mind was as sharp as a tack. I hung out with him for a month before the Major came and dragged me back to, as he put it, “meet the music.” And that’s how I ended up with Worm, Boot, Capone, Jimi and good old Gerard.

  I thumbed through the journal again and made a second attempt to read the faded letter tucked into it. I glanced at my watch and wondered if it was too late to make a phone call. I dug out the phone number the Major had given me and made it anyway.

  I awoke to voices and commotion. I pulled on my jeans, grabbed a sweatshirt and went to the top of the stairs. The old man was being carried out of the house on a stretcher. I put on my sweatshirt and went downstairs. Brynja and Einar followed the stretcher and watched as two attendants slid it into an ambulance. Einar climbed into his SUV.

  Brynja said something to him. They argued until Einar spotted me.

  “Brynja, we went over this last night,” he said in exasperated English. “You can’t do anything. I’m just going to be sitting around waiting for him while they do tests. And someone has to take care of our guest. Make a lunch and take a hike along the stream. Show him around. And stop worrying. I’ll call you as soon as I know anything.”

  Brynja glared at me.

  “He’s your client, not my guest,” she said.

  “I can take care of myself,” I said for what seemed like the zillionth time. I had plans that definitely did not include Brynja.

  “I’m going with you,” Brynja said.

  “You are not.” Einar sounded exasperated.

  The ambulance attendants closed and secured the door and drove off. Einar climbed into his SUV and took off after them.

  Brynja watched until he was out of sight. She held out her hand.

  “Keys,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Give me the keys to the car. I want to go to the hospital.”

  “Your dad said you’re supposed to stay here.”

  “I bet you always do what your father tells you,” she said, a knowing smirk on her face, like she had me all figured out. Nothing bugs me more than people who think they know me when, in fact, they know nothing at all about me.

  “Where I come from, we say please.”

  Her hand remained extended. She did not say please.

  “You said you could look after yourself,” she said. “So do it.”

  “Good idea. See you later.” I headed for the Yaris and slid into the driver’s seat.

  Brynja jumped in beside me before I could lock her out.

  “Where are you going?” she demanded.

  “Reykjavik,” I said, “not that it’s any of your business.”

  “What for?”

  “To meet someone. A friend of my dad’s.”

  “Good. You can drop me at the hospital.” She buckled her seat belt and waited for me to start the car.

  “Fine,” I said. “But you have to promise not to tell your dad. Tell him you hitchhiked or something.”

  “He’d kill me if he thought I did that.”

  “So tell him one of your friends took you.”

  She thought it over. A faint smile appeared on her face.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  THIRTEEN

  Brynja complained that I drove too slowly and wasn’t nearly aggressive enough passing the cars ahead of me. In response, I slowed down even more and refused to pass anything. Brynja fumed in the passenger seat next to me, but there was nothing she could do.

  When we finally reached Reykjavik, she gave me directions to the hospital. I was glad when I could finally pull over and let her out.

  “Do you want me to pick you up later?” I asked.

  “No, I’ll go back with my dad.”

  She slammed the door. Fine with me.

  I drove around until I found one of the tourist information centers that seemed to dot the country. I parked my car, waited in line until a Jonina look-alike finished with a German tourist, and asked for directions to the nearest newspaper office. It turned out to be a twenty-minute walk. I left my car where it was and set off on foot.

  Reykjavik—or at least the part of it I was in—was a densely inhabited city. There were no huge high-rises or skyscrapers. But neither were there huge yards. Most of the houses I passed opened right onto the sidewalk, and they were all jammed together. If they had yards, they were hidden in the back somewhere. A lot of their exteriors were brightly colored corrugated iron—green, red, dark blue, yellow—that was supposed to stand up well to the corrosive salt air.

  The main thing I noticed as I strolled through the city was the quiet. There were cars on the street, but unlike every other city I had ever visited, there was no underlying roar of traffic. There were people on the street too, but there was no aural wallpaper of voices. There were also no sirens, no rumbling buses, no screaming kids, no dogs barking—in fact, very few dogs at all. There were a lot of cats though. And because most buildings were no more than
stories high, it was easy to locate the taller newspaper building. Once I’d sighted it, all I had to do was keep walking toward it.

  I told the receptionist I had an appointment with Geir. She picked up a phone and spoke to someone. Eventually a man appeared. He smiled, shook my hand and asked how his nephew Jakob was.

  “He’s doing great,” I said.

  “Is he married yet?”

  Married? Jake? That would be the day! I shook my head, and Jake’s uncle sighed.

  “Well, what can I do for you?” he asked.

  “I’m trying to find out about a woman.” He waited expectantly for details, but I didn’t know what else to say except, “She had something to do with rescuing my grandfather.” I told him about the plane crash back during the war, and he nodded.

  “I heard about that it was big news. The Americans at the base sent out a search party. There was only one survivor. That was your grandfather?”

  I nodded.

  He glanced at the receptionist and then led me through a doorway and into what looked like a conference room. We sat.

  “This woman you mentioned,” he said. “You say she saved your grandfather?”

  “He seemed to think so.”

  Geir frowned. “I don’t remember hearing anything about that. My father was a reporter. He never mentioned a woman.”

  I told him about the letter my grandfather had written and the journal he had left me. “I want to find out who she was,” I said. “But I’m not sure how to go about it.”

  “Well, I suppose the place to start is the newspaper from that time.”

  “Can I go through them?”

  He smiled. “Do you read Icelandic?” When I shook my head, he said, “I suppose I can look for you. What do you know about her?”

  “Not much.” In fact, almost nothing. I pulled the journal from my pocket and showed it to him. “She looked like this.”

  He studied her face. “I suppose that’s a start,” he said. “You’ll have to give me a little time. Can you give me a phone number where I can reach you?”

  I gave him my cell number.

  “May I make a copy of one of these sketches?”

  I nodded. He disappeared for a moment and then returned with the journal and a copy of one of the pages.

  “I’ll let you know if I find anything.” He started to guide me to the door again.

  “Um, Mr. Geir…”

  “Just Geir. We don’t use last names the way you Canadians do.”

  “Right. I was wondering, did you know a reporter named Gudrun?”

  “Gudrun Njalsdottir?”

  No last names, but second names.

  “Yeah.”

  “I worked rather closely with her. May I know why you ask?”

  I shrugged. What was I supposed to say—I’m asking because I’m nosy?

  “I heard about her—that she jumped off a waterfall, that she fell accidentally, that she was pushed.” Name a version and I’d heard it. It was true—that’s what I heard. “I was wondering which it was.”

  He sighed. “I believe the police finally settled on Undetermined.” He peered at me again. “And you ask because—?”

  “Because Gudrun’s grandfather and my grandfather were friends.”

  He smiled. “Your grandfather, the Canadian Air Force pilot.”

  “Yes.”

  “How is Sigurdur?”

  “He’s in the hospital for tests. I think his family is worried about him.”

  “I’m sorry to hear it. Yes, I knew Gudrun very well. As I said, I worked closely with her.”

  “And what do you think happened to her? Do you think she jumped?”

  He peered at me. “Frankly? No. I know what people said. And I knew that Einar wasn’t happy about her working, especially when she left the women’s pages of the newspaper and started to do regular reporting. The hours were unpredictable. She wasn’t always home when he wanted her there. Gudrun lacked confidence when she started working here. She was so timid, afraid to ask questions. I used to say that she was like a beautiful flower without fertilizer. The work was the fertilizer. It made her bloom. She thrived on it. And then she wanted more. She wanted bigger stories, meatier stories. Something that she hoped would prove to the bosses that she could handle the tough stuff.”

  “Like the story she was researching when she died?” I said.

  “Ah. Baldur and the Russians.”

  “You know about it?” Freyja told me that the newspaper’s editor had denied any knowledge of what she’d been working on.

  “I found out after she died,” Geir said. “Einar told me. He knew about the story. I think he was the only person who did. Like I said, she was keeping it to herself until she broke it. She worked that story day and night, researching the Russians—well, as best as one could. It’s not that easy to get information on what goes on in that country. But she was dogged. Is that the right word? Dogged?”

  “Determined, you mean?”

  “Very determined. She had half a dozen notebooks filled with notes. She never left them at the office, she was so paranoid.”

  “Paranoid?”

  “She didn’t want anyone here finding out what she was doing. I think she was afraid someone more experienced would take the story away from her. She wrote her notes in French.”

  He must have seen the puzzled look on my face.

  “A lot of Icelanders speak more than one language besides Icelandic. Most speak Danish because of the historic link with Denmark and because many were educated at universities in Denmark. And a lot of people speak English these days as well. Then maybe some German or some other language. Gudrun was fluent in French. When she wanted to make sure that no one was looking over her shoulder, she wrote in French. I think she was also worried that the Russians had informers, but I don’t know how realistic that was.”

  “So you don’t know what she wrote?”

  “I don’t know French.”

  “I do,” I said.

  He looked interested.

  “These notebooks she had—did the police look at them?”

  “The whole half-dozen,” he said. “I handed them over myself. But they must not have found anything helpful because nothing came of it. And there was nothing that showed that she had been pushed—or that she’d jumped for that matter. The place where she died, it’s all water and rock.”

  “I’ve been there.”

  “Then you know. Her car was found nearby, but there were no other tire tracks that they were able to find. No fingerprints. No trace that anyone else had been there with her that night.”

  “There’s not much around there,” I said. What an understatement. There was nothing at all around there. “What do you think she was doing at those falls in the middle of the night?”

  “That’s where the suicide theory comes in,” Geir said. “What indeed would she have been doing there? She might have gone there to meet someone, but that was never proved. Or she might have gone there for some other reason.”

  “Like, to jump. Or to look at the falls and then slip.”

  “You sound as convinced as I am,” he said with a wry smile.

  “What do you think happened?” I asked.

  “Her family thinks she was murdered. They think she went there to meet Baldur and that he pushed her over the falls to stop her from writing her story.”

  “I heard he wasn’t home that night.”

  Geir gave me an odd look. “You know quite a lot about the story.”

  “Like I said, my grandfather and her grandfather were friends.”

  “Baldur was not home that night. He says he was down by the ocean, thinking. It’s well known that he often went down to the water to think. No one saw him, of course. But, again, there was nothing at all to tie him to Barnafoss, and the police didn’t turn up anything in Gudrun’s notes that would have given him a motive to kill her.”

  “But you think he did it?”

  “I think someone did. The likely person
is Baldur. If Gudrun was right about him, he certainly had a motive. He had no alibi. The police had him in custody for a while. It’s just his luck that they couldn’t prove he had anything to do with what happened that night. They had to let him go.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know what they were doing. With so few murders here, they can’t have much homicide experience.” Tryggvi had told me that.

  “The officer in charge, an Andersson, I think, was trained in America.”

  “Was he trained by the FBI?” I asked.

  Geir nodded. “That sounds right. He seemed to know what he was doing.”

  Right, to distinguish him from all the other cops named Tryggvi. I didn’t get it. These Icelanders kept saying they didn’t have last names like the rest of the world, but when you asked about someone, the way I’d asked Tryggvi about Gudrun, they used a second name to make sure I understood who they were talking about. It was nuts.

  “What about the fact that Baldur disappeared almost immediately. Didn’t that make anyone suspicious?”

  “It made me suspicious,” he said. “It made Einar suspicious. Sigurdur too. No one knows where Baldur went. No one has heard from him. Not even his wife.”

  “She thinks he’s dead.”

  “She may be right.”

  “She thinks Einar killed him.”

  “I know. She used to call me all the time to get me to work on a story about him. But Einar was at home that night. Sigurdur took an oath. If you ask me, it’s the Russians who are responsible. They don’t like people poking their noses into their affairs. And they don’t like business partners who give people an excuse to poke around in their affairs.”

  “What happened to the project they were investing in with Baldur?” I asked.

  “It stopped for a while. But I hear it’s gearing up again. Somehow, don’t ask me how, the Russians have money to invest when no one else does. You can only imagine where it came from.” He glanced at his watch. “You must excuse me. If I find out anything about your mystery woman, I will call you. If there’s anything else—”