Close to the Heel

by Norah McClintock

  “Yeah. You can tell me why names here are so messed up. How can you tell who belongs to what family?” It would never have occurred to me that Gudrun Njalsdottir was married to Einar Magnusson and that their daughter was Brynja Einarsdottir.

  He laughed. “It takes getting used to, I’m sure. Both ways.” When I looked puzzled, he said, “People who move here have to get used to it. So do people who move away—they have to adopt a new name system too.”

  “An easier one,” I said.

  He raised an eyebrow. “Not all women in North America change their names to their husbands’ when they marry. Sometimes they use two names.”

  He had a point. But my mom hadn’t been one of those women—because the Major wasn’t the kind of guy to entertain such a notion.

  I thanked him and left.

  I walked back to my car and sat behind the wheel trying to decide what to do next. I could head back to the house and take a closer look at that turf hut. Or—I glanced at my watch; it was still early—I could drop by the hospital and see what was what with the old man. There was no chance that Brynja was going to want to come back with me. She had already made that clear. On the other hand, there was every chance that Einar would ask me to take her home.

  I decided to head back to the house. Alone.

  I pulled out of my parking spot and retraced my route out of the city. I’m good at navigating. I have a good memory. The Major knows it too, which is one of the (many) things about me that drive him crazy. He’s always at me with, “Why is it that you can remember every engine part and exactly where it goes or all the words to those god-awful songs you listen to, but you can’t remember who won the War of 1812 or how to find the circumference of a circle?” Quick answer: because some things matter and some things don’t. Care to guess which is which?

  I parked my car and headed across the lawn to the turf hut.

  As I reached out to pull open the solid wooden door, I noticed that an arc of ground in front of it had been scraped clean of grass from the door being opened and closed. I tugged on the door. It didn’t give. I thought it must be secured in some way, but I didn’t see a lock. I pulled again, harder this time. It opened.

  I slipped inside.

  The hut seemed even smaller inside than it had looked from the outside. It was no more than 8 feet wide and maybe 10 feet deep. The ceiling was low; there wasn’t enough headroom for me to stand up straight. There was no light inside, either, other than what came in through the door. But this had to be where the old man was pointing. There was something in here that he wanted to show me, and judging from what he had said and the fact that he’d called me by my grandfather’s name, it had to have something to do with my grandfather and the woman in his journal. The old man knew who she was. He’d been stunned to see her face. He desperately wanted me to keep it secret from Brynja and her father. He knew about something bad that had happened, and he’d wanted to tell my grandfather—maybe because he thought it was his last chance.

  Old tools and implements—farm implements of some kind, I guessed—leaned against one wall. Ropes hung from the beams in the ceiling. Tangles of wooden blocks—they looked like they’d been made out of driftwood—dangled like bunches of bananas from another beam. Against the other wall were wooden buckets, rusty iron wheels, some more scrap iron and a little stack of what looked like carved bowls with lids on them. I picked one up and lifted the lid to look inside.

  “It’s an eating bowl,” someone behind me said, startling me so badly that I dropped the bowl onto the packed earth floor. I spun around and saw Tryggvi in the doorway, bent over so that he could look inside. “I didn’t intend to startle you,” he said. “Einar asked me to drop by and pick up a few things for Sigurdur. They want to keep him in the hospital for a few days.” He glanced around. “What are you doing in here?”

  “Just looking around.” My heart was just starting to slow to its normal pace. “So is he okay?”

  “Sigurdur? I don’t know.” He bent and picked up the wooden bowl and lid that I had dropped. “This is from the old days,” he said. “My afi—you know what that is, afi?”

  “Grandfather,” I said.

  He seemed pleased. “My afi used to tell me stories about what it was like when he was young. He said they broke their backs farming all summer, and then they went to sea to fish all winter. If they were lucky, they made it back.”

  I thought about Gudrun’s father, who had died at sea.

  “He told me about these too.” He turned the bowl around in his hands. “In the old days, people used these bowls instead of plates. Everyone would get a bowl of food in the morning. The lid was supposed to keep it warm during the cold winter days. What was in the bowl was your ration. You ate it throughout the day, and when it was finished, that was it. You had to wait until the next day.” He dropped the lid on top and handed it back to me. “People back in America would think they were starving to death if all they got was a bowl of food this size to eat every day, isn’t that right?”

  I supposed it was.

  “And those there?” He pointed to the pieces of wood strung with rope and hanging in bunches from the rafter. “Those are loom weights. Back then, almost all the clothes were made from wool. Everyone had sheep. Everyone knitted. The women spun the sheep’s wool to make yarn and thread. The men—like my afi—spun horsehair. It made good strong rope.”

  He looked around at the other stuff in the shed.

  “Well, I’d better get going,” he said. He ducked out of the shed and then stood in the doorway, waiting for me.

  I peered around again. Maybe there was something in here that meant something to the old man, but I sure couldn’t see what. I glanced at Tryggvi. He was waiting for me to emerge. I decided to come back later.

  Just as we left the shed, a Lexus SUV pulled up beside what I assumed was Tryggvi’s personal vehicle, and Karl got out. He was dressed in civilian clothes.

  “Yo, boss!” he shouted.

  Tryggvi glanced at him in annoyance.

  “They said you were out here. A guy named Oli showed up at the station an hour ago,” Karl said as he came toward us. “Says he has some information about that rash of tourist break-ins.”

  “Someone else will have to talk to him. It’s my day off and I’m busy,” Tryggvi said.

  Karl shrugged. “Okay. But he says if you’re not there in the next thirty minutes, he’s walking and you can figure it out on your own. Now, I don’t know about you, but all that negative publicity we got this summer sure didn’t make the local merchants happy, to say nothing of the town council. And heaven knows what they’re thinking of us in Reykjavik…”

  Tryggvi’s annoyance deepened into a scowl as he thought this over.

  “I need you to run an errand for me then,” he said brusquely. He told Karl what Sigurdur needed, and with another glance at me, he strode to his car and drove away. Karl continued on toward the house. I trotted after him, digging in my pocket for my key to the house. But he didn’t need it. He tipped back a big rock near the front steps and pulled out a key to unlock the door.

  “I’m going get the old man’s things from his room,” he said.

  “No problem.”

  I flopped down on the couch in the living room to wait. Karl appeared ten minutes later with a small suitcase.

  “Hey, I have an idea,” he said. “Why don’t we run into the city? I’ll drop this stuff off for Einar and show you around. What do you say?”

  “Actually, I was planning to hang around here, maybe do a little reading.” I nodded at the book on the coffee table that I had begun and abandoned.

  “Aw, come on,” he said. “It’s my day off. And I don’t get to spend a lot of time with folks from back home.”

  “I’m from Canada,” I reminded him.

  “Same thing. Hey, have you tried the hot dogs here yet?”

  “No, but—”

  “You gotta try them. Icelandic hot dogs are famous. Bill Clinton loved them.”
r />   Yeah, well, Bill Clinton loved Big Macs too. And a lot of other things that weren’t necessarily good for him or his career.

  “Come on. I insist.” He was grinning like a kid. “I’ll take you to see the original geyser. And Gullfoss—the Golden Waterfall. My treat.”

  “Well—”

  “You got plenty of time to read later. I need a break and for once I’d like to be able to talk to someone who understands ballpark franks, the Dodgers, the Knicks and the Giants—and by Giants I don’t mean those crazy invisible people that lived under rocks either.”

  I said yes only because he kept pestering me the way I used to pester the Major when I was a little kid and didn’t understand the concept of Immoveable Force.

  We got in the Lexus SUV.

  “Nice ride,” I said. “Cops must do okay over here.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Everything over here is expensive. Apart from sheep and fish, they have to ship everything in. But after the big bust, there were a lot of people with cars they still owed money on, so I picked this baby up for a song. And I take good care of her. That’s the Icelandic granddad in me. You take good care of your things and they’ll take good care of you. Mind if I put on some music?”

  I said I didn’t and instantly regretted it. It turned out Karl was a major Rush fan. Talk about your golden oldies! Geddy Lee was older than my dad. But then the Rolling Stones were still rocking it out, and Mick and Keith were older than Grandma Mel.

  Karl shouted over Geddy’s shrieks all the way into Reykjavik, telling me about the old days in Iceland and the boom days and then the crash. From the way he talked, I guessed none of it had affected him. But that’s the way it goes, right? Back home and in the States, the worse things get for regular people, the more prisons they build and the bigger and better armed the police get. Makes sense, right? You cut back recreation programs for kids, make sure the best they can hope for in life is to bag burgers or stand at registers cashing through cut-rate goods from China, and then you act all surprised when they take whatever cash they have, get zoned out of their heads and get themselves into trouble. Gotta get tough on that youth crime. Gotta crack down on the little hooligans.

  “What about kids here?” I asked.

  “What about them?”

  “You have a youth crime problem in Iceland?”

  He laughed. “Everybody’s got a youth crime problem. But what the kids get up to here isn’t half as bad—heck, it’s not even a quarter as bad—as what I used to see back in the Bronx.”

  I bet.

  “You want to come up?” he asked when he finally pulled up in front of the hospital.

  “Nah.”

  “Right,” he said with a grin. “You’re afraid Einar’ll chew your head off for aiding and abetting, huh?” When I looked surprised, he said, “Brynja ratted you out.” He got out of the car and swung the little suitcase out of the backseat. “Back in a flash.”

  It took longer than a flash.

  And he didn’t come back alone. Einar and Brynja were with him.

  I braced myself.

  It wasn’t Einar who was angry. It was Brynja. And she was angry with me, which I didn’t understand until Einar had shoveled her into the backseat and then stepped away from the car to have a chat with Karl.

  “What are you doing here?” she hissed at me.

  “As soon as he knew you were here, he made me leave. I have to go with you and Karl and see the sights. I’ve already seen all the sights. I’ve seen them to death.”

  Gee, I really hated to be the one to break the news to her, but I said, “Karl would have showed up anyway. Your dad called your uncle and asked him to bring stuff for your grandfather. He had to go to work, so Karl’s pinch-hitting for him.” She frowned, and I had to explain what I meant. “Your dad probably would have got your uncle to drive you back. No offense, but he doesn’t seem like a guy with a high tolerance for people disobeying his orders.” And I should know. I lived with the Major.

  The look she gave me said, If it was legal, I’d kill you. Or at least punch you good and hard someplace good and sensitive.

  Karl got back behind the wheel.

  “Okay,” he said jovially. “Who wants a hot dog?”

  Guess who did. And who didn’t.

  FOURTEEN

  I’ll say one thing for Karl—he loved his grandfather’s country. After we hit the hot dog stand that Bill Clinton made famous, and had a pretty good hot dog, he took us to Hallgrims Church in the middle of Reykjavik, despite a lot of sighs of disgust and eye-rolling from Brynja. You can see the place from just about anywhere in the city. I’d been wondering what the heck it was. The place took forty years to build—and I’m not talking about medieval construction. It was started in 1945. And it’s weird-looking, kind of like a volcano that’s morphing into a spaceship. But it wasn’t so much the church that Karl was pumped about. It was the view from the steeple. From nearly 250 feet above the ground you could see the whole of Reykjavik, and the ocean and countryside beyond—while you froze to death from the wind that whistled through the open windows.

  From there we went to Thingvellir, where the original settlers met every year for the oldest continuously running parliament in the world. I was expecting some big spectacular buildings, but there were none. The old-timers met in summer and the whole thing was held outdoors. We also went to Geysir, where the word geyser comes from. Geysir, which he pronounced GAY-seer, used to shoot boiling hot water 30 feet in the air regularly for hundred and hundreds of years. It doesn’t anymore. Talk about a letdown. But right near it there’s another geyser that spouts every five minutes. It’s actually pretty cool. As advertised, we also hit Gullfoss—Golden Waterfall. It’s no Niagara Falls, but it’s all right.

  By the time we’d done all that, it was getting late. Karl drove Brynja and me back to the house. Einar’s car was in the driveway, and he came to the door to greet us and to ask Karl if he wanted to stay for dinner. Karl said thanks but, believe it or not, he had a date. I don’t know why that was supposed to be hard to believe—he was a nice enough guy and I guess he wasn’t all that bad-looking.

  Einar called us into the kitchen and got Brynja to set the table. He’d made chicken and rice with a side of canned peas. It was okay. Actually, since all I’d had to eat all day was a hot dog, it was better than okay. I polished off two helpings.

  Einar leaned back in his chair and got down to business.

  “I know we were supposed to leave tomorrow,” he said. “But we won’t have the test results until Monday.”

  Aw, man! I could see where this was going.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “If you can just recommend someone else who can take me…”

  “I was hoping you would wait so that I can do it. It would mean a lot to Sigurdur.”

  “I know but…I really appreciate everything you’ve done for me. It’s been great. But I was kind of hoping to get this done sooner rather than later.” Not to mention I didn’t think I could handle four or five more days with Brynja. “I could even go by myself if you point me in the right direction.” I figured in a country as treeless as this, how hard could it be? No matter where you were, you could see for miles in any direction.

  “It wouldn’t be safe for you to go alone. The roads are bad, there’s not much around and the weather is unpredictable. You need a guide and a proper vehicle. You also need to take precautions.”

  Really? He hadn’t been out in the middle of absolutely nowhere with Worm. If I could survive that, I could survive anything.

  “If I get another guide, it’ll be one less thing for you to worry about.”

  “Let him go with someone else, Dad,” Brynja said. “We need to look after Afi.”

  Einar nodded reluctantly. “I’ll make some calls tomorrow,” he said. “I’ll let you know.”

  I was so grateful that I insisted on cleaning up the kitchen. I did a great job too. It would have passed any white-glove test the Major threw at me. I had just finished when m
y cell phone rang. It was Geir.

  “I found something,” he said, “but I don’t know if it’s what you were looking for.”

  I glanced at Brynja, who had stationed herself at her father’s computer, and walked out of the room. The living room was empty, so I took the call there.

  “There was a woman who was found frozen to death in the interior, near Askja.”

  Askja. That was near where I was supposed to take the journal.

  “When?” I asked. I heard paper rustling.

  “She was found in 1944.”

  1944? That was too late.

  “But,” Geir said, “she had been missing for two years.”

  “Since 1942. Does it say what happened?”

  “No. Only that she was found. That was near where your grandfather’s plane crashed, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes.” It was also near where he had woken up and found Sigurdur taking care of him. It was where he had seen a red scarf that Sigurdur said he must have imagined.

  “She may have been lost,” Geir said, “although I can’t imagine what she would have been doing out there in the first place. It seems more likely that she just decided to walk out into the storm…”

  “What do you mean? Why would anyone do that?”

  “I mean that she may have walked out with no intention of coming back.”

  Oh.

  “Did you find out anything else?” I asked.

  “Her name—Kerstin Torsdottir. Age twenty-three. She was reported missing by a friend in Reykjavik, where she was living at the time. The friend is deceased—I checked. But here’s something. Before she moved to Reykjavik, she worked for a doctor near Borgarnes.”

  Near Borgarnes? Maybe he was still alive. Or…?

  “Do you have his name?”

  “Well, this is where it gets funny.”

  “Funny?”

  “His name is Sigurdur.”

  “Sigurdur?”

  “Gudrun’s grandfather. I don’t remember Gudrun ever mentioning Kerstin, but then I can’t see why she would. It was all a long time before she was born.”